>Rob, we are not going to resolve this with a tete a tete with you on some
>sort of vacation with unlimited amounts of time and a Mac. I will shortly
>be late for work if I proof read this. [I am]
Not on a vacation, mate. I just don't sleep - lotsa marking to do and one hundred thousand different words to be thought up and put in order by September. You can understand how seductive a chat list can get at such times. I even vacuumed the shed yesterday!
>We actually share a great deal of common ground in our range of analysis
>and our preferred responses. Could you focus on the major lines of
>demarcation more precisely.
I dare say those lines of demarcation seem to be in different places, and of different natures, to different people. And, beyond the nightmare we're discussing just now, yeah, we do have important stuff in common. I recognise that.
And by 'functionalist integrationism' I just meant a body of thought, rooted in functionalism and blind to the contradictory dynamics that characterise systemic transformation, that predicts smooth transition to ever greater scales on the grounds of, I guess, how much sense this would make - 'bigger is better' as it manifests in the academy - Haas is a salient recent advocate for this line of thinking. Very one-sided stuff, anyway. Europe is in the process of finding all this out - again.
>I will not think you are a hostile element as a result.
I have my hostile fits, but no-one on LBO excites them - I've decided I find Americans rather entertaining to be around (there's definitely something strange about them, and that's all to the good if you're from Canberra - where nobody seems at all likely to be strange - unless, I suppose, you're American - Ozzies are still a lot more like Poms than they are like Yanks, I think).
Srebrenica got me hostile. And NATO certainly does.
The two positions are, as everybody here seems to agree, in no way mutually exclusive.
Back to the essays ...
Thanks for forwarding the post. Rob.