Terry Glavin is writing about the manifesto in the Globe and Mail (subscription required). Here's a big chunk of of what he has to say:
It began as a conversation among friends in O'Neill's, a London pub just across from the British Library on Euston Road, a short walk from the Euston tube station. They were journalists, academics, activists and students, all markedly leftish in their views, and they decided to write down some ideas they had been kicking around. The result was published in the New Statesman weekly magazine on April [1]7. Within days, the "Euston manifesto" had attracted the strangely favourable attention of some infamous American neo-conservatives, a rousing chorus of cheers from certain semi-repentant Marxists, and an enthusiastic but typically nuanced congratulation from polemicist Christopher Hitchens. It was also drawing a great deal of vitriol from self-proclaimed anti-war activists.What followed was a tidal wave of praise and rubbishing, in roughly equal parts. It roared through hundreds of Internet web logs and rumbled on through the pages of The Guardian, The Hindu, The American Spectator, and Blueprint, the magazine of the U.S. Democratic Leadership Council. The last time I typed "Euston manifesto" into Google's search engine, there were close to 300,000 responses. The really odd thing is that it's mainly just a reiteration of certain basic principles that have always united democratic socialists, progressives and liberals - I happily added my own name to its signatures, which now number close to 1,800. So why the astonishing firestorm? Why such a worldwide rumpus?
One of its authors, Shalom Lappin, a 55-year-old linguistics professor at the University of London, says it's because the document deliberately draws attention to deep, worldwide fault lines that run across the broad political spectrum of the liberal left. These are ruptures, rarely acknowledged in the press, that are buckling the tectonics of the entire liberal realm. The manifesto rejects terrorism of any kind, for any reason. It affirms the importance of historical truth, stands squarely for free speech and universal human rights, for the emancipation of women and for workers' rights, and calls for a tough internationalism that puts the dignity of the citizen before the sovereignty of the nation-state. It also acknowledges that the United States is a great democracy. On those grounds, the manifesto calls for a "fresh political alignment" of the socialist left with egalitarian liberals and genuine democrats, of all stripes, specifically "drawing a line" against leftists "for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic anti-imperialism." (See the full text at http://eustonmanifesto.org.)
Prof. Lappin, a Canadian who happily describes himself as "a Toronto boy, born and raised," concedes that he experienced a certain frisson signing on to the American-friendly bits. And, indeed, it is the manifesto's assertion that the United States is not irredeemably bankrupt that has provoked some of the most vituperative and venomous reactions. "Some of the response has been absolutely toxic," Prof. Lappin says... [I]t's the so-called anti-war left that has been especially furious about it all. Why? "Because they've sold out the values of the liberal left," Prof. Lappin says, "and they don't like to be reminded of their betrayal." He says he means not just the general trajectory of the left over the past 30 years or so, from an unambiguous working-class politics to the fuzziness of postmodernist relativism and "identity" politics. He also means specifically the "socialism of fools" in which it ends up - a dead end where avowed liberals blindly sympathize with "anti-imperialist" tyrants, and ostensible socialists openly collaborate with theocratic fascists...
In Canada... the Socialist Workers Party's affiliates are successfully framing the issue for the left. They provide the key co-ordinators for the Canadian Peace Alliance, the War Resisters Support Campaign and other such groups. All this suggests that the line-drawing work the Euston Manifesto describes holds particular relevance for Canada, where debates about war, national security, civil rights, immigration and relations with the United States are posing increasingly divisive, litmus-test questions. Jack Layton's New Democratic Party is vacillating in its support for Canada's military presence in Afghanistan, while much of the party's activist base straddles precisely the line the Euston manifesto proposes to draw between the traditional left and the pseudo-left. The Liberal Party, after pioneering the United Nations' "responsibility to protect" doctrine, which is specifically singled out for support in the Euston Manifesto, is in the throes of reconstruction. Leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff is gingerly staking out a clearly "Eustonian" position - unapologetically of the centre-left, for social justice and a robust internationalism.
Interestingly, the manifesto's main authors came from opposing camps on the question of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. (Prof Lappin was against it.) But they ended up united, mainly around the conviction that after the bombs started falling on Baghdad three years ago, what the left should have done was mount an all-out campaign of solidarity and material support for Iraq's democrats, trade unionists, progressives and feminists. Instead, in the main, the Anglo-American left retreated into a cul-de-sac of narcissism and self-righteousness...
The decision to sign the Euston Manifesto was pretty easy for me, when I considered the company I would be obliged to keep. In the manifesto's authors and in its signatures, I recognized a pretty trustworthy crowd. There is Norm Geras, Marxist scholar and emeritus professor at Manchester University; left-wing Independent columnist Nick Cohen; Paul Berman, author of Power and the Idealists; Marc Cooper of the venerable U.S. magazine The Nation; Francis Wheen, a foremost authority on Karl Marx; historian Marko Attila Hoare; poet George Szirtes; Wellesley professor and Journal of Human Rights editor Thomas Cushman; Dissent editor Michael Walzer; and on and on.
The Canadian list made the decision even easier. Its signatures show a healthy cross-section of academics, writers and activists. They include anthropologist Nadia Khouri, Toronto student activist Nav Purewal, Ontario gay-rights leader Jim Monk, Concordia University social-work professor Amiel Pariser, McGill sociology professor Axelvan den Berg, Jack Cunningham of the Inuvik library board, Vancouver punk-rock writer/blogger Simon Harvey, University of Toronto philosophy professor Paul Franks, and many others. Ms. Khouri was unequivocal about her reasons for signing: "The radical left's negative reaction to the whole question of humanitarian intervention, their tolerance for post-colonial tyrants and hereditary dictators, their sick 'root cause' explanations of terrorist butcheries of innocent civilians, their pathological anti-Americanism. I'm also stunned at the Western feminists' betrayal of their oppressed sisters in Muslim countries."
But will the Euston Manifesto change anything? McGill's Axel van den Berg says he thinks so. He considers the manifesto a kind of "revolt," and, at the very least, he says, "a strong reassertion of some universal perspective is very encouraging." The University of Toronto's Paul Franks is convinced the manifesto's authors are on to something: "It hit a nerve," Prof. Franks says. "This is a conflict. It's a conflict over identity and tradition, and there are people who do not want to be put into a position where they have to defend these principles." He had no qualms about those principles, his obligation to defend them, or which side he was on. So he signed. "Besides," he says, "it's just good to know there are some kindred spirits out there."