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The World Today
February, 1998
Several remarkable constitutional and political developments took place in 1997 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and in the ‘other realms and territories’ over which Elizabeth II reigns. Some of the Queen’s remaining territories are small, and far from seeking independence in this Decade of Decolonisation, prefer more protection rather than less.
Robert Aldrich is Associate Professor of Economic History at Sydney University.
John Connell is is Associate Professor of Geography, also at Sydney University.
Their joint work, The Last Colonies, is about to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Amidst the almost daily reports of collapsing chaebol, gangster dominated keiretsu and Asian banks with less liquidity than Manhattan during prohibition, it is curious that until recently dominant orthodoxy considered East Asian miracle growth and the 'open regional' order it facilitated the basis for a 'post modern' world. What, we might wonder, happened to the uniquely Asian values that sustained the model and what impact will the spectre of financial meltdown have on the regional order ? Does it entail an increased emphasis on Asian bonding and 'multi-level regionalism' or something far more uncertain and unstable?
David Martin Jones is of the Department of Government, University of Tasmania, will be a Visiting Fellow at King's College London from September 1998. Dr Jones' book, Political Development in Pacific Asia (Cambridge: Polity Press 1997) develops some of the issues considered here.
Asia's financial crisis coincides with this year's fiftieth anniversary of the multilateral trading system. Trade policy and open markets are crucial to avoiding deeper distress worldwide. The global economic system for the information age must answer global needs - a challenge as great as that faced by the founders of the system a century ago.
Renato Ruggiero is Director-General of the World Trade Organisation.
The nations of Asia and Europe will gather in London in April for their second summit. Their relationship is weaker than ties with the global superpower but at stake are crucial issues touching on world security.
Admiral Sir James Eberle is Executive Director of the Japan 2000 project at Chatham House.
India, often described as the world's largest democracy, goes to the polls in four phases over three weeks in February and March. But the end of one hung parliament is almost certain to lead to another as the country learns to live with coalitions.
Bhabani Sen Gupta, Director of the Centre for Studies in Global Change in Delhi, was briefly special advisor to Prime Minister I.K. Gujral.
After years - or even decades - during which the basic elements of the Greek-Turkish conflict barely changed, a series of domestic political, economic, and strategic factors are coming together to inject a new - and potentially dangerous - dynamic into eastern Mediterranean geopolitics.
Philip H. Gordon is a Senior Fellow and Editor of Survival at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London. The ideas in this article were first presented at a conference at Harvard University sponsored by the Kokkalis Program in Southeast European Studies.
This is the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But, as the new High Commissioner points out, the record on human rights hardly gives cause for celebration. Learning lessons from the failures, the challenge now is to create a culture throughout the UN where human rights drive decision making.
Mary Robinson is the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Until 1997 she was President of Ireland.
Washington's concerns about failed states such as Yugoslavia apparently do not apply in the Western Hemisphere, where another state is rapidly breaking apart. Colombia, hailed as a democracy throughout the Cold War, is dissolving before our eyes. Curiously, the United States is ignoring this disintegration even though its ramifications for the hemisphere will be at least as important as Yugoslavia has been for Europe.
Cynthia Watson is Associate Dean of the National War College, Washington.
Book Reviews
Ken Wiwa reviews The Open Sore of a Continent by Wole Soyinka.