Hannes Hofbauer: Osterweiterung. Vom Drang nach Osten zur peripheren EU-Integration. Wien, Promedia Verlag 2003

The author analyzes the political power structures in the United States and on the international level. He believes that the events in Seattle and Geneva in 2001 have proven: people are capable of creating history without any specific preparation and find new possibilities for political struggle.

The trinity of oil, terrorism an liberal political liberalisationprovides several meanings to the war againts Iraq. The liberal perspective unites these three lines in one and claims that although war is not a decent thing but at least it removes one bloody dictator. In the historical-critical view, however, the picture is incomplete. The war agains Iraq can be understood as the spreading the exhausted "values" of the US civilisation in the frame of a "recolonisation" that aims to integrate the peripheric and semi-peripheric parts of the world into the coming global order.

In Hungary, a selective educational system has evolved and seems to have stabilized, which is incapable of providing social equality even on the lowest level. The factors, which have pushed the quality of mass education "upwards", such as technology constraint, raison d'état, and labour movement, have disappeared. If it represents the fundamental values of public education (liberty, democracy and solidarity), is there a chance for progressive pedagogy to meet the political left again?