Text 10

(continued)

Neither man has ever commented directly on what occurred, but Mr. Blair, prodded by questioning from David Frost on the BBC Sunday morning, said for the first time that there was no such deal. Mr. Brown's aides have always suggested that there was.

Mr. Blair. 50, the son of middle-class Conservative English parents, is seen by some Labour loyalists as a latecomer to the party. Mr. Brown, 52, grew up in a Labour neighbourhood in Scotland, and he was already active in the party as a teenager. Mr. Blair is the man credited with modernizing the party, shedding its Socialist past and making it electable. Mr. Brown, though a full and active participant in that project, can appeal more to those who hark back to the romanticized cloth-cap days of the party.

Such is the public interest in the skirmishing that their speeches are given comparative literature analysis by political writers.

Mr Brown's remarks Monday were notable for their emphasis on "Old Labour" values. He mentioned the party 64 times and never once put the word "New" before it, as Mr. Blair always does.

Mr. Brown borrowed the concluding sound bite phrase from Mr. Blair’s speech to the conference last year - "best when boldest" - but shaped it to his own reference, adding "best when we are Labour".

In what was also seen as a coded criticism of Mr. Blair, he said, "You do not defeat the Tories by imitation or just by better presentation, but by Labour policies and Labour reforms, grounded on Labour values."

Some commentators even observed that he went out of his way to say that tuberculosis or "TB," as he called it, was a curable disease. "T. B." is the designation for Tony Blair in all Downing Street correspondence.

For his part, Mr. Blair told the delegates on Wednesday that he was committed to running a third time in the next election, two years from now, and serving out a full term. He pointedly failed to mention Mr. Brown or his contribution to the party's success, something he had done in all previous nine leadership speeches he has given.

In what appeared to be a response to what had been said the day before, Mr. Blair asserted: "I have beliefs too. New Labour for me was never a departure from belief. It is my belief."

His view of the past differed considerably from Mr. Brown's. "For too many of our 100 years," he said, "we have been a well-intentioned pressure group."

Despite their rivalry and their oratorical duelling this week, the two men share the same broad vision and have worked effectively as a partnership at the fop of the government.

One area of disagreement between them, however, emerged Wednesday, and the outcome was instructive in considering who usually ends up the winner when they clash.

The conference debated legislation that the government has introduced to grant management autonomy to some high-performing hospitals in the National Health Service, a step that worries the union movement and its supporters, who fear it could be the forerunner of widespread privatisation.

It is a program that Mr. Brown has opposed in the past, and the delegates voted against it. Mr. Blair's response was to say he would move ahead with the bill anyway.

Part 2

Text 1

If military-political “high” politics is no longer the dominant, system-shaping process, then both the Westphalian model and realism are in deep trouble. And a case can be made that some quite fundamental transformations are underway in the relative importance of military-political as opposed to economic interactions in the international system. This case rests on two stories that are now very prominent in discussions of international relations: “democratic peace “ and “globalisation’.

Democratic peace is about the apparent end of Great Power war in the international system, and thus about the quality, political salience, and, perhaps also the amount of interaction within the military-political sector. Specifically, it is about the statistical observation that democracies (and particularly liberal democracies) very seldom if ever go far to war with each other. Explanations for the apparent abandonment of war amongst a growing group of states that includes all of the most developed and powerful societies, vary from fear of nuclear weapons, through economic interdependence, to the spread of democracy (though for the purposes of the argument we want to make here, the causes matter less than the simple fact). If sustained, the cessation of Great Power war would dethrone military interaction from its millennia-long reign as the principal defining process of international systems. The shift from negative (balance of power, war) to positive (security regime, security community) security interdependence not only changes the dominant type of military-political interaction, but makes that type of interaction a less urgent and less prominent feature in the day life of states. Closely linked to this story is the assumption that as capitalism extends into non-democratic areas of the world liberal democracies will eventually form in its wake. From this perspective, the most effective way of promoting liberalism in countries such as China is to engage them in the capitalist world economy.

Text 2

As one reviews the historic problem of the Italian state one is struck by the disparity between its exiguous resources and the demand made upon it. It was created by an efficient but small kingdom, which employed conquest, craft, aid from dangerously strong foreign powers, and an alliance with a scattered, brave but vague nationalist movement. The new state could rely on no national culture, whether defined by language or worldview.

The organization that came closest to embodying such a culture, the Church, was its enemy. Soon after it was founded the new state was challenged by a Socialist movement, which, because the masses were divided and pre-politic, took messianic forms (such forms were unthinkable in a state like Britain, where a strong, homogeneous working class operated within a long parliamentary tradition). Onto this state was placed the burden, imposed by world time, of turning Italy into a modern nation endowed with an industrial economy and a more than subsistence agriculture. To continue the work of the Unification, colonies had to be acquired and a seat at the European councils had to be won.

Unsurprisingly the Italian state was frenetically active as it sought to catch up. Because it pillaged one group to help another, it satisfied none. The strong plundered it and the weak fled it. It was absent and overbearing, because it was overworked. It bequeathed to fascism its dilemma to which Giovanni Gentile’s answer was simple: “The State is the great will of the nation and hence its great intelligence. There is nothing it does not know and never does it remain aloof from what concerns the citizen, whether economically or morally”. By professing to offer such a solution Mussolini’s regime aggravated the problem.

Text 3

In the countries of the former USSR the confusion between ethnic and civic identities is especially strong, as reflected in the newly adopted constitutions and legislation on citizenship and minority rights. Partly this confusion stems from the fact that political institutions, which are supposed to inspire the loyalty of members of a civic community, are still in the process of formation; partly, as elsewhere, accommodation of the interests of ethnic minorities poses problems which do not have immediate solutions.

The aim of this article is to show that not only do these objective factors influence nation building, but the very structure of national discourse, which is shaped through intellectual debates, has an impact on policy making in the RF. In other words, the way in which the concept of a nation (as an ethno-social, ethno-cultural, biological or political and territorial category), nationalism (civic or ethnic) and national identity (as a “given” or open to change) are defined and understood has practical implications, reflected n politics, as these concepts become a basis for collective actions. In the case of Russia, attempts by intellectuals and politicians to define what is a nation reflect pre-revolutionary thinking, Soviet theories and practices as well as Western theories of nationalism which started to penetrate the USSR in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These competing influences have often created fantastic mixtures, which are affecting legislative processes and policy making.

By analysing the content as well as the conceptual and terminological framework of the current debates on Russian nation building, this article addresses the following questions. What cultural and historical heritage is used by contemporary Russian ‘social engineers’ (intellectuals and politicians) in their attempts to construct anew or reconstruct the Russian nation?

Text 4

With the ending of the Cold War, only hardened realists in IR have not been tempted to ask ‘are we moving into a new world order?” In other words, is the Westphalian international order coming to an end, and if so, what is going to replace it? Are we facing another transformation of the international system equivalent in significance to that symbolized by 1648, or is the basic framework set by Westphalia still the most accurate way to characterize the international system? In order to look to this question, it helps to understand the type of change that Westphalia is generally understood to represent. Our key to grasping its significance for IR is the idea that Westphalia represents the arrival of a new type of dominant unit, the sovereign, territorial state, and a distinctive form of international society associated with that unit. The Westphalian state differed in two substantial ways from both the very diverse primary units of the medieval world (church, empire, religious orders, cities, city-leagues, guilds, aristocratic estate and suchlike), and also from the main units of the wider non-European ancient and classical world (empires, city states, barbarian tribes). First, the Westphalian state had hard and precisely defined boundaries, and second, it consolidated into a single centre all the powers of self-government. This arrangement was in sharp contrast to those which preceded it. In the ancient and classical, and medieval worlds boundaries were more often frontier zones where authority faded away, and sovereignty was often dispersed, with different aspects of governance located in different actors.

Along with this new dominant unit came a new type of international society. Westphalian states constructed a diplomacy based on mutual acceptance of each other as legal equals, a practice in sharp contrast to the norm of unequal relations that prevailed in both ancient and classical and medieval international systems. They took religion out of international politics, and generated a self-conscious principle of balance of power aimed at preventing any one state from taking over the system.

Text 5

(continued)

The Westphalian international order was very much driven by military and political considerations. Given the obsession with exclusive sovereignty, the political structure of the system was necessarily anarchic, and its international politics dominated by self-help and military insecurity. States needed to purse power if they were to survive, and their pursuit of power ensured that the system was marked by military competition and the security dilemma.

The Westphalian international order just described is the model for the realist (and neorealist) paradigm of how to understand and theorize about the international system. In a move of quite breathtaking audacity, realists assume that the Westphalian model is somehow able to embrace all of world politics since the rise of civilization. Realism stresses states, balance of power, insecurity and competition as the key features of the international system. It assumes that the high politics of war and military rivalry dominate the international agenda, and that states will subordinate other objectives to those priorities. During the cold war, liberals also accepted an essentially realist orientation on international relations, but unlike the realists, they insisted that the Westphalian order contained the potential for systemic transformation. In the post Cold War era, whereas realists continue to view international relations from a Westphalian perspective, liberals are paying increasing attention to the transformative consequences of the global expansion of liberal capitalism.

Text 6

The Caribbean has not been a high priority in this process – Mexico has always been the key – but it has been embraced by the various initiatives and been forced to react, in one way or another, to the new US agenda for the hemisphere as a whole. Indeed, it has arguably been affected more profoundly than any other part of the hemisphere. Brazil has had a big enough domestic market to be able to preserve elements of its old import-substitution development model; Chile has been a successful enough international trader not to have rely predominantly on the US market; Colombia has proved to be resistant to a range of US initiatives on narcotics. By comparison, the economic and political agenda of the various small states of the Caribbean has been steadily reshaped over the course of the lat two decades to the point where the US is now able to lay down the parameters of what can be done in almost every policy arena. Leaders of states located just off the southern shore of the US that seek to pursue export-oriented economic development policies have little realistic choice but to do what is necessary to secure access to the US market and US investment flows. The conditionalities imposed reach well beyond the broad outlines of macroeconomic policy right into the detail of tax law, investment codes, tariff arrangements, intellectual property rights legislation and so on. They have been extended to maritime and overflight arrangements – the so-called “shiprider” agreements – proposed by the US in early 1996 to try to stem the intraregional flow of narcotics.

As a consequence, although it cannot really be said that the US put in place an alternative regional hegemony over the whole of the Americas, the special type of coercive and consensual power identified as hegemony by Cox does still aptly characterize its relationship with the territories of the Caribbean. The one remaining exception to this generalization, namely Cuba, in fact proves the point, because what it is now grappling to do with an ever decreasing likelihood of success, is to stay outside the embrace of US hegemonic power over the whole of the Caribbean. Due recognition of the continuing existence of US hegemony over the region is thus the first essential building block of a new approach to the analysis of contemporary US-Caribbean relations.

Text 7

All of this means that Caribbean states have not been able to wield much power in the international System, at least as traditionally understood. From the realist perspective, the formal sovereignty of the sixteen fully independent states in the region is one of their few power resources. Thanks to the centrality of the concept in the post-1945 organization of the international system, even the smallest and weakest states in he world, such as those in the Caribbean, have been given a weapon they can use.

It has worked for them both as a vote in international organizations and as a symbol in international debates. The argument in defence of sovereignty has become one with which offending states can be brought to the bar of international opinion, and to some degree restrained. In this connection, it is significant, to say the least, that all Caribbean states have survived as states in the post-Second World War era despite their proximity to the US and their emergence into statehood during some of the mostly highly charged phases of the Cold War.

Even so, there unavoidably remains something deceptive about their situation, even in realist terms, which is that the benefit which can be derived from the legitimising appeal of sovereignty may be more apparent than real. In the Caribbean context, this is well illustrated by the US invasion of Grenada in October 1983.

No amount of appeals to the shrine of sovereignty in international law—and the action was condemned in the United Nations General Assembly by an overwhelming vote of 108 to nine—could effect the removal of the marines or block the wider political purpose of the US in reasserting its power over the Caribbean.

Washington simply refused to play the new post-colonial game of respecting the sovereign rights of the weak, and got away with it.

From the structuralist perspective, which has equally predictably shaped most Caribbean-based commentary on the region's relationship with the US and the rest of the world, the key organizing notion has been the Caribbean's peripheral status in a world capitalist economy controlled after 1945 by the US. As the considerable literature of the Caribbean dependency school attests, the development of regions economy has been conditioned by its integration into a system not of making and not to its advantage.

Text 8

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of developments within the European regional system in the late 1990s is the speed of change, without shared concepts of where changes may lead to or what eventual shape of society or order should be pursued. The retirement of Helmut Kohl has removed from European politics the last protagonist for a federal political union in Europe, born of the bitter historical experience of the Second World War. Yet paradoxically West European states appear to be moving further away from the old intergovernmental model as their political leaders become more hesitant about where they may be moving to. A single currency has been introduced within the West European EU, without agreement on the political or economic implications of its introduction. Cooperation among police, intelligence agencies, customs and border/immigration agencies is growing rapidly, without any consensus about the implications for concepts of citizenship or democratic accountability. Economic and social transborder interactions continue to rise, while democratic politics remains stubbornly territorial; transnational elites coexist with surges of national populism. Even defence integration, since the Franco-British St. Malo declaration of December 1998, is at last coming onto the West European agenda.

Both the EU and NATO are committed in principle to radical enlargement to incorporate the former socialist states of central and eastern Europe, but without accepting that enlargement will necessarily transform the character of both institutions. The nation state remains the only accepted basis for legitimate representation in such institutions; but across Europe ‘suppressed’ nations are challenging the established structure of recognized nation-states. Within Western Europe several states are becoming looser entities, while in Eastern Europe weak states continue to emerge from national aspirations and discontents. The break-up of Yugoslavia may not yet have ended; the status of Kosovo and Montenegro hovers between autonomous region and independent state. Malta is now reviving its application to join the EU, alongside Cyprus, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia; four of these are also pressing to join NATO. Accession to European institutions of a succession of states with populations and GNPs much smaller than those of sub-state entities within other member states—Catalonia, Lombardy, Flanders, Scotland, Bavaria— may strain the principle of sovereign equality, and the privileged position of states within the European system, to breaking point.

Text 9

Different world orders not only co-exist, they are often interpenetrated by one another. Although they may be associated or correlated with a single (“core”) state actor at a given moment in time (i.e., the United States, the former Soviet Union, or Islamic Iran), and although they may rely on one of those states for their extension, the presence or absence of different world orders are not limited to, or exclusively contained within any particular state’s designs. Aspects of the basic ideas of American liberalism have existed within communities in both the former Soviet Union and contemporary Iran, even at the height of greatest interstate conflict between the U.S. and those countries. Just as there were once Marxists all over the world, so today there are liberals and Islamic transnationalists scattered across the globe. There is no one-to-one correspondence between geohistorical space and a world order perspective, or the set of practices they may be said to energize, direct or coordinate.