It is wrong to say that Barack Obama rejects the democracy tradition in American foreign policy. His record, appointments and first-year budget requests show that democratization is not being jettisoned as a US goal. To varying extents, the president and his foreign policy principals are liberal internationalists. However there has been a stark rhetorical break from the Bush era.
The China-Google cyberconflict adds to the debate on the position of China in the world system, & creates insecurities about the ambitions, capabilities and hidden desires of the ‘next hegemon’. It brings together in one discussion a complex matrix of debates: global politics and world-system theorizing, global political economy and many more.
Secularism has long been the language of most public servants and many scholars in the Western world, enabling both groups to work and live as though religions were irrelevant to their respective fields. This perspective has meant that religious phenomena have been ignored or reduced to other categories such as civil society, humanitarianism or as part of a definition of “civilization.”
In 1993 Ghana initiated the partial liberalisation of its most significant economic export, cocoa beans. Having resisted World Bank pressure to liberalise fully, the Cocoa Marketing Board retained its monopoly on exports through the Cocoa Marketing Company. It thus sustained its farm-to-port quality control system of every sack and its authority to determine the terms of trade
Three recent publications provide a fresh perspective of the developments which resulted in the decline of British influence in the Gulf, and the subsequent rise of the US.
The decision by the United Nations to partition Palestine in 1947 was a major watershed in Middle Eastern history. Not only did it lead to the creation of the state of Israel, a Zionist aim since the eighteenth century, but it set in stone a conflict which still to this day remains unresolved.Although the decision aimed to appease both Jews and Arabs, who laid differing ideological claims to the same territory and, as James L. Ilsley stated, was the ‘best of four unattractive and difficult alternatives,’ it failed.
Certain dates in European history are taken to be the significant historical events which changed the course of the continent forever. 1648, and the Treaties of Westphalia; 1815, the Concert of Europe; 1945 the end of the Second World War and 1989, the fall of Communism – these are the events that are attributed to the makeup of modern Europe. But what of the years 1957, 1992, and 2009?
Scholars do not agree on the causes of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933, popularly known as the Holodomar (“murder by hunger”). Recent research suggests Stalin used “food as a weapon” to subdue Ukrainian national movements. This analysis poses significant challenges to the existing larger body of famine scholarship.
President Woodrow Wilson, the only person to be elected to the presidency with a PhD in Political Science, left an undeniable mark on US history and world affairs. War can shape the values of a nation. I believe the American Civil War war influenced President Wilson as a young boy to such an extent, that it changed world history.
There is much discussion between those who believe the EU should remain a wholly civilian (soft) power and those who argue that it should develop a military (hard) dimension. There is also a lively debate between those who seek to develop an autonomous military identity (Europeanists) and those who see Europe’s military future in NATO (Atlanticists). But does the EU need an army?
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