During the 1970’s, Spain and Portugal made the political transition from corporatism to democracy. Spain is often viewed as the paradigm case for the transition to democracy model. If Spain’s experience was the generalizable case for the transition to democracy, wouldn’t Portugal’s path to democracy be similar because of the two nations’ similarities? Both countries shared a common geographical setting, history, religion, and corporatist dictatorships. However, markably different factors caused the political changes, producing different government and social structures in each society. Spain and Portugal may have similarities, but these factors cloud the very different processes that occurred in each country’s transition to democracy, bringing the appearance of correlation when in fact there is little.
This essay argues that, for the English School, war is an essential component of international relations that is regulated by “norms”. Prominent English School thinkers believe that war should be waged with reference to morality and justice (with rules formulated to that effect) and that the purpose and existence of war is as an instrument of international society used to enforce international justice.
The international system, comprised as it is of a society of sovereign states, necessarily stands as a barrier to universal morality. The ideal of cosmopolitanism, envisioning humanity as a singular and unified moral community, is impossible in a world where the primary political unit is the state.
In short, a similar emphasis on power, the contingency of truth, and reflexivity of scientific communities lead to a shared skeptical view of unidirectional ‘progress’ in science.
Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961, steered the organisation through a period which saw it develop as a peacekeeper in a mould that would set the agenda for decades to come, particularly via the publication of the “Summary Study” in 1958, which established the foundations of classical peacekeeping.
Whilst separated by great distances in time, geography and culture, both Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz can be seen to have developed a rather similar outlook on strategy and the application of force. Whilst both are mutually complementary, Clausewitz has the better overall work on strategy. One would do well to read both On War and The Art of War before becoming a statesman
Web 2.0 is not a passive instrument simply imparting information but has become a new means of communication, revolutionising the social interactions of individuals.
Victory in Vietnam required support from the indigenous population: this the US failed to understand, and instead separated its military strategy from the political reality.
The political thought of John Gray offers an unflinching vision of the world, a world divided by refractory ways of life, stressed by the looming conflicts over natural resources and scorched by irreversible patterns of global warming. Gray’s vision of the world is none too cheerful, and prescribed throughout his numerous analyses of today’s most pressing problems is a sobering dose of realism. Gray has repeatedly emphasized that many of our greatest problems are incurable and that the best we can hope to achieve is to minimise their symptoms
The necessities of statecraft require some level of secrecy. Reagan abused this and the results were the Iran-Contra scandal. No President has used the office of the Executive in a more regal, imperial and ordained manner than Ronald Reagan. His use and abuse of the institution to pursue his own ideological doctrine raises the fundamental questionn of whether the concept of democracy is a viable one at all.
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