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.
He came, he threatened, but he didn't conquer. The French Riviera will not be the first important region in Europe to be ruled by neofascists.
Today the cobblestones of Paris's Latin Quarter are covered with asphalt.
Is Europe, like Britain, swinging to the right?
Whatever the answer, the State Department
need not be haunted, for the time being, by the
ghost of Eurocommunism.
Readers may recall the shocked grief and revulsion of Alyosha Karamazov as he discovered
that the corpse of his saintly master, Father
Zossima, was stinking.
In August 1980 the Gdansk shipyard workers astonished the world by winning the right to set up a genuinely independent labor union.
"What has happened to your 'socialist' France?
Is it going the way of all social-democratic
flesh?"
The French socialist saga makes awkward reading for left-wingers. It has a wistful air of déjà vu.


