"No slogans, no jargon, no unexamined assumptions, no party line"

The Euston Moment by Alan Johnston

Two years ago a 3,000-word political statement, the Euston manifesto, argued that much of the left had suffered a theoretical collapse and a collapse of sensibility. In the words of Nick Cohen's bestseller, the left had "lost its way". We called for a realignment of progressive politics.

By reducing the complexity of the post-cold war world to a single great contest in which "imperialism" or "empire" faced "anti-imperialism" or "the resistance", parts of the left had transformed themselves into a reactionary post-left that took its enemy's enemy for its friend. We were "all Hizbullah now"as the placards had it. Listen to John Rees, a leader of the Stop the War Coalition and Respect:

"Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein."

America was the global oppressor and Bush was the "No 1 terrorist". Anyone shooting at Americans became, by that act, the resistance to empire. A collapse of sensibility followed. The reductionism in the theory licensed habits of mind and structures of feeling well-known among the older fellow travellers of Stalinism - apologia, denial, grossly simplifying tendencies of thought, moral relativism.

The consequence was profound political disorientation. Tony Benn sat in front of the mass murderer, Saddam Hussein, and asked him, "I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?" Days later Benn was less kind to an Iraqi oppositionist, spitting the words "CIA stooge!"

The Euston manifesto was a warning cry. Post-leftists, we said, were living in what Paul Berman called "foggy zones of half-believed beliefs, freed of any responsibility to subject any given opinion to the simplest of common-sense tests".

What were these half-believed beliefs?

A demented "anti-zionism". Paul Berman observed:

"During the last two or three years, large publics in western Europe and even in the United States have taken up the view that, if extremist political movements have swept across large swaths of the Muslim world, and if Ba'athists and radical Islamists have slaughtered literally millions of people during these last years, and then have ended up at war with the United States, Israel and its crimes must ultimately be to blame. And if America has been drawn into war in Iraq, it is because President Bush's second-level foreign policy advisers include a few Jews (though all of his top level advisers are Protestants), and these second-level figures have manipulated everyone else to the bidding of Ariel Sharon."

Anti-Americanism. A lunatic book like Thierry Meyssan's Le 11 Septembre 2001, l'Effroyable Imposture (translated into English as 9/11: The Big Lie) - was given respectful attention in Le Monde Diplomatique and sold 200,000 copies in France within one month of publication. The dinner party talk was that America "had it coming". Anti-Americanism was becoming a "self-sustaining hatred" as Andre Glucksmann puts it, akin to the other grand hatreds - of women and of Jews.

Occidentalism and self-hatred. Whatever "they" do, it is "our" fault. We are the great satan and they are "the resistance", so the worse their atrocity (decapitating aid workers, blowing up wedding parties, marketplaces, and mosques of the "wrong" sort, slaughtering election workers, assassinating elected MPs, hanging homosexuals, torturing trade unionists, flying airliners into buildings, using the mentally ill as suicide bombers, denying the Holocaust, threatening to "wipe Israel off the face of the Earth", killing those who would teach girls, that sort of thing) the more starkly was revealed the depths of ... our sin! Agency and moral responsibility lay with the west, so "they" could not really be held responsible. ("They" could not really come into focus at all.)

Albert Camus warned that a love of freedom and progress can become "weirdly inseparable from a morbid obsession with murder and suicide". In the foggy zone of the post-left there is a new ease with violence. The urbane intellectual shouts "Victory to the Resistance!" The affluent middle-class anti-globalisation protestors chant "Martyrs not Murderers". And John Pilger tells us we "can't be choosy".

Careless moral equivalencing that rots the ability to judge. Listen to leftwinger Ellen Willis. "Central to Bush's outlook is a Christian fundamentalism as hostile to liberalism as Sayyid Qutb". As hostile? Even the usually excellent Martin Bright has argued that '[Paul] Berman's description of a paranoid 'people of God' convinced of its own righteousness, prepared to kill its enemies and sacrifice its own in pursuit of a realm of pure truth might just as easily apply to the United States as to its Ba'athist and Islamist foes." Just as easily?

Along this road madness lay. The Euston manifesto set up a checkpoint and offered some alternative signposts.

It is vitally important for the future of progressive politics that people of liberal, egalitarian and internationalist outlook should now speak clearly. We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic "anti-imperialism" and/or hostility to the current US administration. The values and goals which properly make up that agenda - the values of democracy, human rights, the continuing battle against unjustified privilege and power, solidarity with peoples fighting against tyranny and oppression - are what most enduringly define the shape of any left worth belonging to.

And, like Roy in Bladerunner, for a short while Euston burned so very very brightly. But we had no staff or money and we never really sought such things. For Euston was a political moment, not a political movement. (If you speak post-structuralese, Euston was a "plateau" I suppose.) Those who wanted (or feared) "Euston branches" and "Euston policy papers" were disappointed (or relieved).

To boot, we lacked the doctrinal agreement to become a group. The manifesto was agnostic on which economic system to support, was oddly silent about Europe, and none of the authors could honestly say the environment was at the heart of our concerns. We had not even shared a common view on the war (despite the New Statesman's deliberate mis-framing of us as "the pro-war left").

But the Euston Manifesto did encourage progressives to speak up for their core values against the reactionary left. As Will Hutton predicted, Euston acted as a goad to map a new direction in foreign policy - a progressive democratic internationalism set against both a hubristic neo-conservatism and a reactionary "anti-imperialist" left. David Miliband's recent speech on the democratic imperative set out a post-Blair not an anti-Blair foreign policy. If Euston helped to create the political space for that speech to be given then it was all worth it.

The intellectual and campaigning energies that created the manifesto continue to pulse. Go online and look at normblog, Harry's Place, Engage, Labour Friends of Iraq, Democratiya, and the work of all the contributing online journals, blogs, signatories, journalists and activists. Consider the success of Nick Cohen's book What's Left. Watch the Channel 5 documentary No Excuses for Terror, or the Euston-organised parliamentary seminars on humanitarian interventionism and the terror threat, or the Engage rally against the academic boycott.

The dogged work of organising solidarity with the democrats in Iraq is continued by Labour Friends of Iraq. Engage still fights antisemitism. Eric Lee's cyber-campaigns for global labour rights grow more influential. Philip Spencer is forging links between Unite Against Terror and the French anti-terrorism group, MPCT, part of an international network of citizen responses to Islamist terror. International links proliferate.

The writings of Eustonians continue to pour out. Paul Berman's study of Tariq Ramadan, David Zarnett's ongoing, meticulous critique of the work of Edward Said, Marko Attila Hoare's careful mapping of the Balkan conflicts and the maladies of the left, Andrei Markovits's acclaimed study of anti-Americanism, David Hirsh's brilliant monograph (pdf) Antizionism and AntiSemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections, Brian Brivati on genocide and intervention, Norman Geras on the deficits of international law, and much more.

At the online political journal Democratiya, many Eustonians now gather. A new book, Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews, has just been published by the Foreign Policy Centre. It carries a preface by the Eustonian political philosopher and Dissent co-editor Michael Walzer. What he writes about Democratiya was true of the Euston moment too:

Two commitments give shape to the Democratiya project. The first is to defend and promote a left politics that is liberal, democratic, egalitarian, and internationalist. Those four adjectives should routinely characterise left politics, but we all know that they don't. The second commitment is to defend and promote a form of political argument that is nuanced, probing, and concrete, principled but open to disagreement: no slogans, no jargon, no unexamined assumptions, no party line.