Millennial Dreams

What are the implications for culture and politics of the current fashion for talking about globalization? This study of capitalism in the industrialized North demystifies much of the cant that surrounds this discourse, and offers searching analyses of a series of cultural phenomena that have emerged in Germany, Britain and the United States during the 1990s. Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of globalization, Smith then makes a study of these three North-Atlantic capitalist societies on the eve of the millennium. In Germany, he looks at the impact of unification, in particular on the licence to loot the former East Germany that is the "Treuhand". Turning to Britain, he describes the serried legacies of Thatcherism, including the movement of resistance against the poll tax that ended her 12-year reign. Finally, the book describes the mediatization of US culture that reached its apogee during the Gulf War, and is now visible everywhere in the corporate hyping of the Internet and the Worldwide Web. Paul Smith is the author of "Discerning the Subject" and "Clint Eastwood".