Die Grünen and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This paper discusses the German Greens' recent policy on Israel and Palestine, from the beginning of the first red-green federal government to the present. It looks at Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's diplomatic role in the Middle East, and the Greens' current very mild policy with regards to Israel, especially when compared to earlier Green attitudes to the region. This is explained with reference to both the continuing relevance of German history to German foreign policy, and the constraints that participation in the federal coalition - and supplying Germany's Foreign Minister - place on the Greens. The influence of history and power on the German Greens is further illustrated by a comparison of German Green attitudes to Israel with the US Greens' much more critical position.

Conflicting obligations: Pufendorf, Leibniz and Barbeyrac on civil authority

Barbeyrac's republication of and commentary on Leibniz' attack on Pufendorf's natural-law doctrine is often seen as symptomatic of the failure of all three early moderns to solve a particular moral-philosophical problem: that of the relationship between civil authority and morality. Making use of the first English translation of Barbeyrac's work, this article departs from the usual view by arguing that here we are confronted by three conflicting constructions of civil obligation, arising not from the common intellectual terrain of moral philosophy, but from divergent religious and political cultures. If this approach makes the three constructions less susceptible to theoretical reconciliation, then it opens them to a more revealing historical investigation, in terms of the particular religious and political circumstances in which they arose, and which they were designed to address. The result is that these early modern struggles over the nature of civil obligation confront us again as unfinished historical business.