Daniel Singer

Europe Correspondent

Daniel Singer, for many years The Nation's Paris-based Europe correspondent, was born on September 26, 1926, in Warsaw, was educated in France, Switzerland and England and died on December 2, 2000, in Paris.

He was a contributor to The Economist, The New Statesman and the Tribune and appeared as a commentator on NPR, "Monitor Radio" and the BBC, as well as Canadian and Australian broadcasting. (These credits are for his English-language work; he was also fluent in French, Polish, Russian and Italian.)

He was the author of Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Hill & Wang, 1970), The Road to Gdansk (Monthly Review Press, 1981), Is Socialism Doomed?: The Meaning of Mitterrand (Oxford, 1988) and Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly Review Press, 1999).

A specialist on the Western European left as well as the former Communist nations, Singer ranged across the Continent in his dispatches to The Nation. Singer sharply critiqued Western-imposed economic "shock therapy" in the former Eastern Bloc and US support for Boris Yeltsin, sounded early warnings about the re-emergence of Fascist politics into the Italian mainstream, and, across the Mediterranean, reported on an Algeria sliding into civil war.

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation was founded in 2000 to honor original essays that help further socialist ideas in the tradition of Daniel Singer.

 

Yeltsin, the Lame-Duck Czar Yeltsin, the Lame-Duck Czar

Six months after the storming of Russia's Parliament, Boris Yeltsin and his backers, domestic and foreign, must have second thoughts about the wisdom of the coup that climaxed in...

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen

Letter From Europe

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

How Many Masses Is Poland Worth? How Many Masses Is Poland Worth?

"Oh God," Heinrich Heine wrote, "how big is your zoo!" This sentence kept popping into my head in June as I read the dispatches of my journalistic colleagues on Pope John Paul II...

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

Top Down or Bottom Up? Top Down or Bottom Up?

It is a pleasure to watch, on both sides of the Atlantic, the professional prophets of "evil empire" now forced to perform their "agonizing reappraisals."

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

To Market To Market

Performing political acrobatics on the edge of the economic precipice, the Poles are also showing how very far it is possible to go in Eastern Europe in the era of Gorbachev.

Jan 2, 1998 / Daniel Singer

The Perils of Perestroika The Perils of Perestroika

Is Mikhail Gorbachev, for all his vast presidential powers and commanding leadership of the Communist Party, merely to be a transitional ruler of the Soviet Union? If so, a tra...

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

Fast Forward Fast Forward

The sorcerer's apprentices could not even stage a coup.

Jan 2, 1998 / Daniel Singer

Something Rotten in the Kingdom Something Rotten in the Kingdom

When in London, if you have some time to spare, go east to the Isle of Dogs to visit what was to have been Europe's biggest office-plus-housing project.

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

A Deserter From Death A Deserter From Death

One of the first signs of old age, I'm told, is when a young woman offers you her seat on a bus (and the next stage, presumably, is when you accept it).

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

France, Racism and the Left France, Racism and the Left

Paris

Jan 2, 1998 / Feature / Daniel Singer

x