Questions like aging population in developed countries, permanently low birthrates or immigration are well known from newspaper articles at least what the headlines concerned. The study attempts to examine these questions in scientific way and also to show the immigration and integration policies of the most concerned European countries. In Europe, national cultural identity is traditionally strong and many are afraid that a more open immigration policy will make welfare systems financially collapsing. The labour market in the US is open, and it seems, that the "American Dream" attracts more immigrants but the US – in European sense – never was a "welfare state". Nevertheless, the US model still has lessons for Europe if it wants to save its welfare systems.

This issue of Eszmélet addresses two main topics. The first seeks (and hopefully finds) answers by our authors to the question raised by the editors "Why the political left is sick in East Europe?" It can be seen from the some dozen contributions that the ‘sickness' has three main reasons: there is no movement behind system critical thinking; the political left is captured in all countries in this region by ‘neo-liberalised' socialist or social democratic parties – still maintaining their names – but actually being bourgeois institutions; the system critical left is sailing between Scylla of neo-liberalism and Charybdis of sectarian inner circles. Is there any ‘third way'?

The second topic is of economic questions: first of all the critique of the neo-liberal dead-end of development confronting it with the living tradition of Polanyi, Keynes, Galbraith and Hodgson. Two articles review – with different critical attitudes – the memoirs of János Kornai the emblematic figure of Hungarian neo-liberalism. An article links the theoretical performance of Milton Friedman with the dictatorship of Pinochet. A study examines the general questions of migration concluding that the EU should at least partially maintain its welfare achievements instead of following the US way of migration policy.

Table of contents

1. Szalai Erzsébet, Kunfi Frigyes, Kállai R. Gábor, Szerdahelyi István, Z. Karvalics László, Mark Pittaway, Agárdi Péter, Tamás Pál, Krausz Tamás, Artner Annamária, Harsányi Iván : Why is the left in East and Central Europe sick?
2. Eric J. Hobsbawm : A child in Vienna – Excerpt from the autobiography of the historian who is 90
3. Walden Bello : Globalisation in retreat
4. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Carlos Mallorquín : Geoffrey M. Hodgson and institutional economics – Interview by Carlos Mallorquín
5. Greg Grandin : Milton Friedman and the economics of empire – The road from serfdom
6. James K. Galbraith : Mission: Control. Why can’t economists admit that corporations serve themselves, not the market?
7. Kari Polanyi-Lewitt : Keynes and Polanyi: the 1920s and the 1990s
8. Tütő László : Remarks on János Kornai’s article ”What the change of system means?”
9. Andor László : Dilemmas and contradictions – Additives to the political economy of cold war apropos on the autobiography of János Kornai
10. Szarka Klára : A new US moral lesson story but now on bad capitalists – On John Perkins: Confessions of an economic hit man
11. BAL-Zöldek : Declaration on locating the NATO radar on Peak Tubes
12. Richard de Zoysa : Immigration to Europe and the US – a joint problem or a separate way for the US?

What is the reason for the lack of an anti-capitalist left in Hungary and in fact overall in East and Central Europe? What are the objective and subjective factors, the historical-ideological or maybe psychological reasons that lead to this situation? Why is it possible, that strong leftwing anti-capitalist movements and organisations exist in Germany, France and also elsewhere but not in Hungary? Why in South America the populist – or so called – anti-capitalist left could gain the power while even the names of these movements are hardly known in Hungary? What can replace the communist and social democratic movements? Maybe we have to trust in their revival? And what can we do until then?

What we still now about the time we lived in asks Hobsbawm in his autobiography, partly asking himself and partly the public, drawing attention to all self-confident not-knowing. "Who is this Trotsky anyhow?" illustrates him the not-knowing of that time. "He is only a young Jew called Bronstein," was the answer in cosmopolitan Vienna hanging on its past after its Empire has collapsed.

It seems that globalisation heralded in the early 90s has lost its power by now. The article analyses the underlying reasons – the fight of capital groups, the reinforcement of national economy frameworks and the resistance against globalisation. According to the author, "from today's vantage point, globalization appears to have been not a new, higher phase in the development of capitalism but a response to the underlying structural crisis of this [capitalist] system of production."