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Topics in this
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May 1, 2009
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Russia,
Eastern Europe and the Balkans
RUSSIA AND THE WEST. Eugene Rumer and
Angela Stent, Survival, April–May 2009, pp. 91-104.
"The August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia has shown that
building a more productive relationship with Russia will be
impossible without closer coordination between America and Europe.
The war also demonstrated that the US commitment to Europe is still
a critical component of European security and cohesion. As the
Allies embark on the search for a reinvigorated Russia policy, they
will have to rethink the premises of earlier policies. They will
also have to confront head-on the differences between the way much
of Europe views Russia and how it is perceived in Washington. If
they cannot resolve these differences, or at least agree to disagree
on some issues, it will be difficult to craft an effective and
unified Western policy. Moreover, they will also have to respond
with care to the mixed signals emanating from Moscow."
READ MORE
IS THERE A KEY? Nadia Diuk.
Journal of Democracy, April 2009, pp. 56-60. "Western
experts, analysts, and policy makers always seem to be looking for
the 'key' that will explain Russian political behavior and provide
insights into future Russian actions in the international arena.
Certainly, the exercise of trying to discern what the Russian
national interest might be is a good place to start, but the problem
is that Russians themselves share no consensus on what their
national interest is; in fact, the concept of 'national interest' is
still alien to the majority of Russia’s citizens."
READ MORE
THE EU CAN IGNORE EASTERN EUROPE AT ITS OWN PERIL. Katinka
Barysch, Yale Global, April 17, 2009,
var. pages. "At the G-20 meeting and
subsequent media commentaries, focus has been on the travails of the
European Union. But Eastern Europe is often lost sight of in the
expression of cautious optimism about the EU economy weathering the
storm. The former Soviet bloc countries, cautions the author,
Katinka Barysch, are still at risk from the financial crisis with
serious negative consequences for the West."
READ MORE
SERBIA'S CHOICE. Elizabeth Pond, Survival, April–May 2009, pp.
123–136. "Elections in Serbia in 2008 produced the first clearly
pro-European government there since the murder of Prime Minister Zoran Djindic in 2003. The odd-couple coalition of Djindjic's
Democratic Party and the remnants of Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist
Party puts high priority on attaining EU membership. It rejects
Kosovo's declaration of independence of February 2008, but it has
renounced any use of force to restore Serbian sovereignty over
Kosovo. The new Serbian government finally allowed the EU
rule-of-law teams that are advising independent Kosovo to deploy in
Serb-majority northern Kosovo in December 2008 and is working with
them to squeeze out old ultranationalist party bosses and smugglers.
Its actions suggest a fallback of seeking de facto partition of
northern Kosovo from Albanian-majority heartland Kosovo. Belgrade is
barred from EU membership until find finds and arrests Ratko Mladic,
commander of Serb troops at the Srebrenica massacre of almost 8,000
unarmed Bosniak men and boys in 1995."
READ MORE
US POLICY TOWARD KOSOVO: SOWING THE WIND IN THE BALKANS, REAPING THE
WHIRLWIND IN THE CAUCASUS. Doug Bandow, Mediterranean Quarterly,
Winter 2009, pp. 15-30. "For the past decade, the United
States has been promoting national transformation in the Balkans. In
pushing the independence of Kosovo, Washington policy makers
apparently believed that Serbia would acquiesce, most nations would
recognize the newest independent state, and Russia would accept
America's decision. None of these assumptions came to pass.
Unfortunately, the war in the Caucasus was an inadvertent
consequence of US policy in the Balkans. The West acted contrary to
international law, violated the sovereignty of another state, and
carelessly sacrificed the interests of neighboring states. The point
is not that Russia acted correctly or legitimately in Georgia but
that American policy makers must learn that actions have
consequences, even actions by the US government. They need look no
further than from Kosovo to Georgia."
READ MORE
KOSOVO: INDEPENDENCE AND TUTELAGE.
Oisín Tansey,
Journal of Democracy, April 2009,
pp. 153-166.
"In February 2008, Kosovo broke away from Serbia and
declared its independence. But to what extent is it making progress
toward its goals of sovereignty and democracy?"
READ MORE
Talking About States
STATE
CAPITALISM COMES OF AGE. Ian Bremmer, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2009,
var pages. "Across the United States, Europe, and
much of the rest of the developed world, the recent wave of state
interventionism is meant to lessen the pain of the current global
recession and restore ailing economies to health. For the most part,
the governments of developed countries do not intend to manage these
economies indefinitely. However, an opposing intention lies behind
similar interventions in the developing world: there the state's
heavy hand in the economy is signaling a strategic rejection of
free-market doctrine."
READ MORE
THE POWER OF STATELESSNESS. Jakub Grygiel,
Policy Review,
April & May 2009, var. pages. "Most political groups in modern history have wanted to build and
control a state. Whether movements of self-determination in the 19th
century, of decolonization in the post–World War II decades, or
political parties advocating separatism in several Western states in
the 1990s (e.g., Italy and Quebec) — all aimed at one thing: to have
a separate state that they could call their own. The means they
employed to achieve this end ranged from terrorism and guerilla
warfare to political pressure and electoral campaigns, but the
ultimate goal was the same — creation of its own state."
READ MORE
STATELESS
PEOPLE, VIOLENT STATES.
Bill Berkeley, World Policy Journal, Spring 2009, pp. 3–15.
"But statelessness is not just a human rights concern. There are
potentially huge-scale
and long-term security concerns as well. Stateless peoples,
abandoned by the world
and bereft of hope, sometimes take matters into their own hands,
contributing to some of the world’s worst armed conflicts of recent
decades."
READ MORE
Democratization
HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE. Samuel P.
Huntington,
Political Science Quarterly, Spring 2009, pp. 31-69.
"Samuel P. Huntington describes the diverse political
processes through which thirty-five countries moved from
authoritarianism toward democracy and derives guidelines from these
experiences for future 'democratizers'."
READ MORE
THE CONSEQUENCES OF DEMOCRATIZATION. Giovanni Carbone, Journal of Democracy, April
2009, pp. 123-137. "For the past few decades, scholars have
been focusing on the causes of democratization. It is now time to
devote systematic attention to analyzing the costs and benefits that
democracy brings."
READ MORE
THE SOCIAL MARKET ROOTS OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE.
Michael James
Mousseau,
International Security, Spring 2009, pp. 52–86. "Democracy does not cause peace among nations. Rather, domestic
conditions cause both democracy and peace. In contract-intensive
economies, individuals learn to respect the choices of others and
value equal application of the law. They demand liberal democracy at
home and perceive it in their interest to respect the rights of
nations and international law abroad. The consequences involve more
than just peace: the contract-intensive democracies are in natural
alliance against any actor—state or nonstate—that seeks to challenge
Westphalian law and order. Because China and Russia lack
contractualist economies, the economic divide will define great
power politics in the coming decade. To address the challenges posed
by China and Russia, preserve the Westphalian order, and secure
their citizens from terrorism, the contract-intensive powers should
focus their efforts on supporting global economic opportunity,
rather than on promoting democracy."
READ MORE
MARKET RULES:
THE INCIDENTAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEMOCRATIC COMPATIBILITY AND
INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE. Horace A and Stephen D. Bartilow Voss,
International Studies
Quarterly, March 2009, pp. 103-124.
"Democracies trade more with other democracies than they
trade with closed political systems, but why they do so is unclear.
We present a 'gravity equation' that disentangles foreign policy
from country-specific influences on trade by adding explanatory
variables to control for traits of both the mass public and the
domestic political system. We apply the resulting model to a data
set covering 50 years (1948-1997) and 72 countries. The estimated
effect of joint democracy, which appears in the absence of the
country-specific variables, drops out when these control variables
are added to eliminate omitted variable bias. Democracies do not
trade together any more than they would incidentally given the usual
social, economic, and political influences on commercial activity,
calling into question explanations for their mutual trade activity
that rely on foreign-policy favoritism or institutional
compatibility."
READ MORE
Climate Change
COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE: WHY FRAMES
MATTER FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT.
Matthew C Nisbet, Environment, Mar/Apr 2009, pp. 12-23.
"Despite scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of
climate change, the U.S. public remains polarized or, in some cases,
perplexed on the issue. Fragmented sources of communication, which
stress different dimensions of climate change over others, as well
as personal perceptions and biases, explain much of the confusion.
Reframing global warming to emphasize its immediate effects and
relevancy will lead to a better public understanding of it -- and
ideally collective action on -- climate change."
READ MORE
THE COST OF CLIMATE REGULATION FOR AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDS. Bryan Buckley
and
Sergey V. Mityakov, The Marshall Institute, March 2009, var.
pages. "In this paper we summarize various estimates of the costs of
mitigation of adverse impact of the climate change via
cap-and-trade. We find that the differences in the estimated impacts
on gross domestic product (GDP), consumption, employment, and
gasoline, electricity and natural gas prices are mainly driven by
the following factors: the timeframe of new technology development,
growth potential of existing clean sources of energy, availability
of offsets (domestic, and international), and banking of allowances.
However, our main finding is that even for more optimistic
estimates, the mitigation costs are likely to amount to as much as 1
percent drop in consumption starting today and going into the
future, which, as we argue, constitutes an enormous impact on social
welfare. Thus, it is important to carefully assess the costs of
global warming to see whether they justify such drastic measures."
READ MORE.
ALGAE'S POWERFUL FUTURE.
Robert McIntyre, The Futurist, Mar/Apr 2009, pp. 25-31.
"Lowly, single-celled microalgae may eventually be used to make large
quantities of biodiesel, ethanol, and even hydrogen. At a small DOE
plant in New Mexico, researchers produced up to 50 grams of algae
per square meter per day, using native algae species that naturally
took over the ponds. This might be enough to yield 6,800 gallons of
oil per acre if sustained for a year. Today, the capital costs of
establishing an acre of algae ponds (mixed by motorized paddle
wheels) are still much higher than those for conventional oil crops
producing biodiesel or for corn crops producing ethanol. But algae
ponds require only a fraction of the land area. That's a critical
advantage at a time when widespread biofuel production bears part of
the blame for tropical deforestation and food shortages in
developing countries. Biodiesel from algae is lead-free, almost
sulfur-free, biodegradable, and can run any modern diesel engine."
READ MORE
HIGH-SPEED TRAINS: DOES THE UNITED
STATES NEED SUPERTRAINS? Thomas J. Billitteri, The CQ
Researcher,
May 1, 2009, pp. 397-420. "The Obama administration has designated $8 billion in stimulus funds
for high-speed passenger rail, buoying hopes that supertrains will
operate throughout the American landscape as they do in Europe and
Asia. The money, most likely to be divided among multiple corridors,
won't buy a single fast-rail system. But supporters say it will help
traditional trains run faster and pay for planning to make true
high-speed rail networks a reality. Washington's support signals a
transformation in federal policy that has long favored highway and
air travel, experts say. Some argue that money should be focused
first on building true high-speed service in the busy Northeast
Corridor. But supporters in the Midwest, Florida, California and
elsewhere are expected to vie for a portion of the rail funds. So
far, California appears furthest ahead in planning for fast rail,
aided by a $9.95 billion bond issue. But critics say the plan's
benefits are exaggerated."
READ MORE
Immigration
MUSLIM ELITES AND IDEOLOGIES IN PORTUGAL AND SPAIN. Andrew C Gould,
West European Politics, January 2009, pp. 55-76. "This article
reports the results of interviews with Muslim leaders in Portugal
and Spain. The main finding of the article is that key Muslim
leaders and principal Islamic organisations are seeking to spread
views about how Islam and western democracy ought to thrive
together. The political belief systems of Muslim leaders reveal a
diverse set of influences, including universalist syntheses of Islam
with liberalism, as some claim to find in the work of Tariq Ramadan,
but also anti-modernist political Islamism and notable figures such
as Hassan Al Banna, Yusef Al Qaradawi, and Ali Shariati. The
research finds that the views of Muslim elites are shaped by the
national political context, especially partisan polarisation vs.
consensus over the political regulation of religion, and the
cultural and educational resources within Muslim communities. The
large majority of European citizens from Muslim descent share core
European values, but they are not spreading their views on the
religious market of ideas as such. This leaves that field rather
open to people with a more radical vision."
READ MORE
CRIMINALIZING "IMMIGRANT" YOUTH IN FRANCE. Susan Terrio,
Georgetown
Journal of International Affairs, Winter 2009, pp. 91-100.
"Juvenile
delinquency and urban violence have been charged public policy
issues in France since the 1980s. Terrio describes the shift in
French juvenile law and practice from less prevention and
rehabilitation to more individual accountability and punishment. He
also provides a short history of modern juvenile law and then
explores the debates among academics, practitioners, and security
analysts who came to view the 'new' delinquents as less amenable to
rehabilitation and integration with French society, based on their
economic marginality and cultural difference."
READ MORE
THE RACE TO ATTRACT MOBILE TALENT. Ronald Skeldon,
Current History,
April 2009, pp. 154-159. “Migrations of skilled workers have
traditionally been seen as a gain for the destination and a loss for
the originating country. . . . Recent research, however, has thrown
a question mark at such an easy conclusion."
READ MORE
PERSPECTIVE: THE MENACE IN EUROPE'S MIDST. Robert Leiken,
Current
History, April 2009, pp. 186-188. "As the children of
Europe's Muslim migrants encounter downward mobility, intelligence
officials warn that the chief terrorist threat to America today
resides in . . . Britain."
READ MORE
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