Вступительный письменный экзамен по английскому языку. Учебные материалы, методические указания и рекомендации. Пособие для абитуриентов

contemporary world politics has witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the question of human rights and their place in the state-system. It may be said that whereas the innovation of the seventeenth-century world politics was the creation of a society of states, the revolution of the twentieth century is the creation of a prototype world society in which individuals have equal standing with states and where states themselves acknowledge that issues connected with the fundamental rights of human beings are as legitimate a part of foreign policy concerns as the more traditional preoccupations with peace, security and economic well-being. This process was formally heralded by the establishment in 1946 of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and on 10 December 1948 (which was designated Human Rights Day) the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was unopposed, although South Africa, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet bloc abstained. The Commission worked on two covenants designed to give substance to the general declaration: the first was on economic, social and cultural rights and the second on civil and political rights. The first was passed by the General Assembly in 1966 (although it did not become operative until ten years later) but the second covenant has had a much more difficult ride and the investigatory Committee established has constantly run up against recalcitrant governments insisting on the overriding principle of states’ rights (Israel, for example, refused to cooperate with its investigations into possible violations in occupied territories after the Six-Day War). Thus, the international system has clearly laid down a code of established human rights and attempted to create judicial machinery which can investigate infringements but the problem of enforcement remains a thorny one. States can, and do, ignore them. Yet as a statement of principle, and perhaps of positive world morality, these proposals clearly have an effect on world public opinion and the standard they set is used as a yardstick to measure, and also beat, states which consistently fail to comply. Rhodesia and South Africa, the Soviet Union and China have borne this brunt most often in recent times.

On a regional level, as distinct from the international, provision for human rights implementation has been more successful. The European Convention on Human Rights (1953) sought not only to delineate these rights but also enforce them. A commission and a court of human rights has been established to which individuals can bring action against their own governments. In the American continents there are similar developments. The American Convention on Human Rights (1978) created a commission and a court which again contained provision for individuals to present grievances. In Africa the Banjul Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981) is somewhat weaker than its European and American counterparts, mainly perhaps due to the different African conceptions of human rights — a conception which stresses the rights

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of collectivities and groupings (‘peoples’) rather than individual rights as such. In all these incidences, whether provision for enforcement is present or not the power of public opinion is an important sanction in the conflict between individuals and the sometimes overbearing power of the state. Other regional innovations have not been as successful as those in Europe or the United States. The 1975 Helsinki Accords, which included provision for human rights, has not so far made much headway in the Soviet bloc partly because Helsinki is not legally binding on its signatories. The Arab Commission on Human Rights (1969), too, has made little progress mainly because in Islam the rights of the community come before the rights of the individual; for Muslims duty to God, from whom all human beings emanate, is logically prior to obligations to individuals.

Of the non-governmental institutions concerned with this issue Amnesty International (founded in Britain in 1961) stand out. This group actively specializes in seeking to obtain freedom for prisoners of conscience and has been instrumental in campaigning for the rights of thousands of unfortunates on a world-wide basis. Other specialist organizations in this field are the Minority Rights Group, the AntiSlavery Society and the International Committee of the Red Cross — all of which are concerned with specific aspects of individual rights.

Clearly, although the twentieth century has seen a greater movement towards acceptance of human rights as an integral part of world politics than at any other time, there is a great deal of debate as to where the emphasis should be placed. In the West the right of individuals to be free from the interference of others is paramount, whereas in the East economic and social rights took precedence over civil and political rights. Liberty in socialist states was expressed primarily in social and economic terms: in liberal states it is largely a civil and political affair. Therein perhaps lies an important dimension of the tension between the two systems, and because of its emphasis on economic development rather that the legal protection of civil liberties the Third World tends to prefer the socialist view. After all, subsistence and basic needs are often a more immediate and pressing concern than constitutional niceties and protective legal procedures. Whatever ideological differences can be delineated, though, no one doubts that the human rights issue has altered, probably for ever, the classical conception of international relations.

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Population

Population has always been recognized as an important capability of actors in systems of macropolitics. With the development of the state as the dominant actor, population became part of the resource base of states. Analysts influenced in particular by geopolitics have tended to

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see a large population (large at least in relation to putative adversaries) as an important facet of national power profiles. In the military-secu- rity context population was important because it provided manpower, while fiscal implications of having a people whom one could tax to pay for war was not lost on ruling elites. Economically population became increasingly important with the advent of industrialization. The proportion of the population available for economic activity became a crucial factor in production.

The advent of industrialization — which occurred first in Britain — seems to be positively correlated with the growth of population in systems that can be identified as industrial societies. Indeed one of the most persistent features of modernization has been the ‘demographic revolution’. What appears to happen is that, as societies modernize, public health facilities are improved and their impact is felt immediately in the mortality rate. Birth rates (which are traditionally high in pre-modern societies) remain constant and population increased as a result of the differential between fertility and mortality. Statistically this appears to have been the case in the last two centuries. From 1000 to 1750 world population increased by approximately 14 per cent per century, but since the mid-eighteenth century world population change has been more rapid. Indeed in the twentieth century world population grew from 1,65 billion to 5 billion between 1900 and 1980. Once a society has reached a certain level of economic development, population increases start to tail off. In this latter case it is birth rates that show the downward adjustment. Explanations for population stabilization are multi-causal, but while birth control methods are a necessary factor, they are not sufficient. Sufficiency is more dependent upon socioeconomic factors than medical techniques. Since these modern societies are generally characterized by improvements in the status of women, it may be that the greatest contribution to reductions in fertility lie in this direction in the long run. Having children is now only part of the women’s life cycle in these societies.

Population change is thus endemic. Differences occur over the rate of change not over the reality of it. Three factors affect population change within societies: the aforementioned birth and death rates and, in addition, migration. Not only will these factors influence the size of the population over time, but they will affect the numbers within specific age cohorts (under 18 and over 65 and so on). Thus an ‘ageing’ population (where the over-65 cohort is increasing relative to younger ones) will present quite different wealth/welfare challenges from a ‘youthful’ population (where the under-18 cohort is relatively large). Population profiles within the AICs tend towards the former typology, while profiles within the Third World tend towards the latter.

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Population changes can have important implications in multi-eth- nic societies. Differential adjustments in the three factors cited above can alter ethnic distribution. The political implications of these trends can be significant if power-sharing arrangements do not or cannot reflect population relativities. Disaffected populations within multi-ethnic societies might be the targets for irredentist or secessionist appeals, and modern forms of communication mean that state authorities are often unable to prevent this happening. Contagious influences from outside can exacerbate these centrifugal tendencies.

Since the modern era and the advent of rapid population growth, intellectual opinion has tended to take a globalist position and see unrestrained growth as deleterious. This tradition was first enunciated in the writings of Thomas Malthus, the nineteenth-century thinker who was the father of intellectual pessimism about population growth and resources. His basic tenet was that population will tend to outstrip the means of sustaining it. Stabilization might be achieved by positive restraint, but it is more likely that population stability will be restored by the negative checks of famine, pestilence and war. Such is the impact of Malthusian tendency statements that in the twentieth century climate of opinion pessimism still tends to pervade thinking about population trends. Thus the first Brandt report spoke of a ‘vicious circle’ between high birth rates and poverty in the Third World. Malthus is now, however, presented with a humanized face. Population management is the twentieth-century extension of Malthusian ‘positive’ checks. There is no gainsaying the point that since 1950 the South has experienced a population explosion. Infant morality rates in these regions fell by half between 1950 and 1980. Famine and malnutrition are more likely to be caused by political mismanagement and the fall-out from war than by some kind of Malthusian inevitability. Paradoxically population management has been least successful where it is needed most — in the Fourth World. Lack of resources and conservative cultural traditions again emphasize that population dynamics are not easy to control or manage.

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Religion

Despite its neglect by contemporary scholars religion has had, and continues to have, an enormous effect on international relations both in the structural sense and as part of its process. The neglect has not been total; there have been a number of studies of the influence of belief systems and ideologies, for example, but the apparent secularization of twentieth-century politics has tended to marginalize its overall significance. Where it has been considered in, for example, explanations

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of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its subsequent foreign policy, it has usually been seen as an atavistic aberration which has temporarily distorted more orthodox explanations of state behaviour. Realists in particulars have tended to subsume religion under the all-embracing concept of ideology which in any case only conceals the true nature of foreign policy (i.e. Morgenthau’s (1948) ‘interest defined in terms of power’). Where it has been given serious consideration, usually by sociologists, it has been defined largely in terms of its social functions as a set of ideas or beliefs which bind people into distinct social groups and in this way has been extended to include ideas such as nationalism and communism.

In fact, religion and the notions of law and justice it general had a significant influence on the development of the classical state-systems of Europe, Islam, India and China. The idea of res publica christiana, to take one example, underpinned the Westphalian codification of an association of states. Christianity became the dominant religion in Roman Europe in the fourth century. Subsequently, with the disappearance of the empire, the single most important binding force (the word religion comes from Latin religare — to bind) was Christianity. Although in the later conflicts between Church and State the temporal power was almost universally successful, the ideas that had been generated, especially concerning sovereignty, law and morality persisted. The state was the victor, but the state itself was premised on religious ideas. Despite the distinction drawn in the New Testament between God’s domain and Caesar’s, religion provided the justification for claims to state sovereignty, whether this was divine rights for kings, or later for peoples. Apart from its role in state-building and system building it also had an incalculable effect on the development of modern international law. From the Romans onwards, Christian teachings and precepts were used to codify rules for mutual relationship and dealings. The Grotian concept of international society is in essence a Christian one. The idea of religious internationalism, which is the tendency to organize a multinational society around identical legal and moral principles, is integral to the development of modern international organizations. In sum, the structural effect of religion on world politics is by no means marginal.

On a more empirical level, its effect on the process of world politics is no less important. At the beginning of the 1980s, according to UN data, the world contained more than one thousand million Christians, around six hundred million Muslims, four hundred and fifty million Hindus, two hundred and fifty million Buddhists, one hundred and seventy million Confucians, and nearly seventeen million Jews. The notion of religious freedom was recognized internationally for the first time in the Oliva Peace Treaty of 1660, and was subsequently

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endorsed in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in 1941 and by the UN Commission on the Rights of Man (1955−1960). Despite this, the sheer weight of numbers and the diversity of beliefs is bound to affect the stability of the contemporary international order. No theory of state behaviour can afford to ignore it, or to relegate it to the outer edges of the discipline.

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Balance of Power

A pervasive and indispensable concept which is part of the stock-in- trade of both students and practitioners of diplomacy. Indeed, it is regarded by some scholars as the nearest thing we have to a political theory of international relations. However, its meaning is by no means clear and it is open to a number of different interpretations. Martin Wight, for example, distinguishes nine different meanings of the term:

1.An even distribution of power.

2.The principle that power should be evenly distributed.

3.The existing distribution of power. Hence, any possible distribution of power.

4.The principle of equal aggrandizement of the great powers at the expense of the weak.

5.The principle that one side ought to have a margin of strength in order to avert the danger of power becoming unevenly distributed.

6.(When governed by the verb ‘to hold’) A special role in maintaining an even distribution of power.

7.(When governed by the verb ‘to hold’) A special advantage in the existing distribution of power.

8.Predominance.

9.An inherent tendency of international politics to produce an even distribution of power.

Given this wide variety of meaning, it is helpful to distinguish between balance of power as a policy (a deliberate attempt to prevent predominance) and as a system of international politics (where the pattern of interaction between states tends to limit or curb the quest for hegemony and results in general equilibrium). British foreign policy in relation to Europe from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century is an example of the former, while the European state-system itself, from 1648 to 1789 and from 1815 to 1914, is an example of the latter. The break in this chronological sequence is the period of the rise of French radicalism and its refusal to be bound by notions of balance. In 1815 France, after a period of Napoleonic expansion, was restored to her former territorial limits and the balancing system

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was institutionalized. The Congress of Vienna and the Concert system it spawned throughout the nineteenth century represents the most articulate and self-conscious expression of balance in international history. Thus the most widely accepted meaning of the term is where it refers to the process whereby no one state, or group of states, gains predominance so that in Vattel’s words ‘it can lay down the law to others’. It is associated particularly with independence, its main function being to preserve intact the multiplicity of states and to oppose empire in particular, and change in general. Order and stability are prized values rather than considerations of justice or fair play.

History

The idea of balance is inseparable from the mechanics of international politics and the practice was familiar to the ancient Greeks. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, although not specifically acknowledging the concept, is widely regarded as a classic account of its occurrence, albeit in bipolar form, revolving around the relationship between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC. However, although the process undoubtedly occurred in the ancient world (in Europe, in China and in India) it was not until the Renaissance that it was self-consciously recognized as one of the basic formulas of political life. The Italian city-state system of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which besides being fairly self-contained had a number of distinct and independent locations of power (Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice and Vatican), was a lively arena of diplomatic forces where the principle was able to develop. Surprisingly, it was not Machiavelli who first elaborated the idea (despite his obsessive concern with power politics) but his contemporary, Guicciardini, in History of Italy (1537). This is generally regarded as the first systematic analytical treatment of the theme. The first explicit reference to it in treaty form was in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), where the idea of maintaining the balance of power was regarded as essential for the peace of Europe.

Balance of power both as policy and system is inseparable from the diplomatic history of the modern world and a plausible account of international politics up until 1914 can be given in terms of it. The League of Nations was a specific attempt to replace it: the principle of collective security which was at the heart of the organization was designed to obviate the need for balance. Many realists argue that its absence in the inter-war period resulted directly in the Second World War. Since 1945 the international political system is not so readily explained in terms of the concept and notions of bipolarity and multipolarity have replaced it. However, echoes of it are still common in the language of diplomacy, especially balance of terror. Most scholars would agree that changes in the character of the basic actors

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in world politics (especially the growth of non-state actors) have led to a general disregard of the concept as an explanatory device. It is now more often used as a journalistic metaphor rather than as a theory of international behaviour.

Theoretical implications

Balance of power, according to Hedley Bull, has fulfilled three positive functions in the modern state-system:

1.It has prevented the system from being transformed by conquest into a universal empire.

2.Local balances of power have served to protect the independence of states in particular areas from absorption by a preponderant power.

3.It has provided the conditions in which other institutions on which the international order depends might develop, e.g. diplomacy, war, international law, great power management.

Bull’s analysis is perceptive but it should be noted that in relation to the first function, empire and balance have existed side by side in state policy and although the whole system was not transformed into a universal empire, parts of it were. Thus European imperialism took place during the same period that balance of power was the orthodox power management technique. In relation to the second function, some states have lost their independence as a result of it, e.g. partition of Poland in the eighteenth century and Czechoslovakia in 1939. With regard to the third function, although it has provided the conditions for mitigating general anarchy, war is a central feature of the system, its function being either to restore the balance or to rearrange it. Thus action-reaction, challenge-response, revisionist/status quo, dissatisfied/satisfied, are key ideas associated with the operation of the system. It clearly presupposes some shared beliefs among the participants, especially concerning the nature, role and legitimacy of the state, yet the system in inherently unstable. A simple balance involving two states (a bipolar system) is likely to be more unstable than a complex balance (a multipolar system). This is because a sudden technological change which dramatically increases the power of one of the poles (e.g. the success of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957 and its perception in the United States) can, unless immediately corrected, destroy the equilibrium. Multipolar system, because of the possibility of shifting combinations, can more readily cope with these occurrences. Indeed, flexibility of alignment and diplomatic mobility are important characteristics; under such a system states must be able to change sides regardless of ideological affinity (the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 is a classic example). The corollary is also true; states must

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be willing to abandon an erstwhile ally when conditions change. A further point to note is that the system, because it involves constant calculation of power and interest, is likely to produce an international hierarchy where states are categorized into at least three divisions: great powers, middle powers and small powers. Equality therefore exists only in a formal legal sense. All states are equal, but some are more equal than others. The balance of power era has been described as the golden age of diplomacy and it is not difficult to see why. Although war is essential to it, the wars that did occur tended to be fought with limited means for limited ends. The delinquent state which had upset the balance was allowed to re-enter the system and replay the game (e.g. France after defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, 1815). It was premised on a recognition of common interests and it permitted the development of international law on the basis of reciprocity — one of its most important ground-rules being non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states. Obviously, it was bound up with the conditions that created it, and in the second half of the twentieth century (despite attempts by neo-realists to prove otherwise) these conditions have all but disappeared. But whatever else might be said of it, balance of power as a method of conflict management was the first, and some would say, the most sophisticated, attempt to provide a practical political solution to the problem of coexistence in a decentralized international system, so much so that it became synonymous with the very idea of international relations.

3.4.Образцы материалов для подготовки к вступительному экзамену на факультеты

иотделения искусств

иискусствоведения

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Moscow

Moscow is the traditional capital of Russia. In 1328 the metropolitan Peter transferred his see from Vladimir to Moscow, thereby making the city the capital of the new Russia. Though superseded as the capital by St. Petersburg in 1703, Moscow remained the ecclesiastical center. It became the capital of the U.S.S.R. after the Revolution of 1917.

Moscow boasts many remarkable churches, a number of them located within the famous Kremlin. The Cathedral of the Assumption, founded in 1326, was rebuilt from 1475 to 1479 by Aristotele Fioravanti.

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As the Metropolitan Church of Moscow, it served as the coronation church under the czarist regime. The Cathedral of the Archangel Michael was rebuilt between 1505 and 1509 by Alevisio Novi, who introduced a cornice of white stone, the first of its kind to be seen in Russia, as well as other Renaissance features. Some twenty-five grand princes and czars are buried in this building. The Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed (1555−1560), near the Kremlin, features а combination of the Byzantine domed church and the Russian tent-shaped church. The Church of the Ordination of 1701 is the last important church to have been built in the old capital before intensive building in masonry was confined to St. Petersburg.

Prominent secular buildings in Moscow are the Теrem Palace, which was added to the Kremlin’s buildings as late as the 17th century but is medieval in conception, and the Granovitaya Palace (1487−1491), the first palace in the Kremlin to be built of stone. The tall bell tower of Ivan Veliki (built by the Italian Marco Bono between 1532 and 1541) set a precedent, and henceforth the steeple began to replace the dome in Moscow’s churches.

Among Moscow’s landmarks of the 20th century are the building of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, a gigantic eight-storied block, and the austere, rather oppressive Military Academy. But making for charming rustic diversions within the city are the Pushkinskaya Embankment of the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest and the emergency gate at the entrance to the Moscow Volga Canal, where an essentially utilitarian program has been successfully converted into a pleasing landscape design.

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Vasili Perov

Perov, Vasili Grigorevich — Russian painter (b. Tobolsk, 1833; d. Moscow, 1882). Perov opened the era of trenchant social criticism in Russian painting. Early works such as Arrival of the Police Inspector (1857) and Village Sermon and Easter Procession (both 1861) attack the sloth and corruption of government and church. Despite the outrage attending these paintings, he was awarded a travelling scholarship to Paris and spent two years there (1862−1864), painting genre scenes that are untouched by the revolutionary developments of French painting. Perov’s social concerns parallel those of Courbet and Manet, but his creed of realism involved no formal innovations. After his trip to Paris he turned to milder satires of middle-class life and vignettes of the lower classes. In his late period, while teaching at the Moscow Art School, he produced religious and historical works.

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