World Affairs
Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct–Dec 1998)

Letter from the Executive Editor

By Harish Kapur

 

International controversy surrounds human rights. Nations cannot agree completely on what it stands for. While all accept the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, proclaimed fifty years ago on December 9 in Paris, many think that it needs to be augmented through the incorporation of non-western values, hitherto ignored by the founding fathers.

We therefore thought it appropriate to devote a part of this issue to pay tribute to the Universal Declaration, and to remind ourselves that differences do exist among nations regarding the normative goals that should guide us on human rights.

The other contributions in the issue are diverse. While selecting the articles we took a conical approach. At the macro level, we look at the configuration of international forces after the cold war. What, we ask ourselves, is going to be the shape of things to come, and what is going to be the architecture of the new international system? Different scenarios have been evoked to analyse the emerging system.

With its opulence in energy resources, Central Asia has become a source of considerable attraction. Indeed, it is being increasingly projected onto the international scene. Nations are vying with each other about who should extract the region’s resources, and how they should be transported to reach the markets. Undoubdtedly this is a nettlesome problem that has yet to be resolved.

While in some previous issues, the journal looked at the major powers competing with each other for control, in this issue we concentrate on Pakistan — a contiguous neighbour which has shown considerable interest in Central Asia. The article pertaining to the emigration of professionally talented, young Asians to greener pastures focuses, not on how this phenomena makes the home countries poorer, but on how it enriches the adopted country, and what its longterm ramifications could be on the political and ethnical landscape of the developed world.

The focus of the review essay is Europe, not so much on its process of integration as on the status of literature that is emerging on the subject. Now that the European Union is all set to make the monetary leap, we have attempted to investigate how scholars perceive integration, and what are the issues uppermost in their minds.

Geneva
Harish Kapur
December, 1998