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3251. Taiwan Strait II: The Risk of War

Publication Date:
06-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
China's underlying position on its cross-Strait relations, however strong its current commitment to peaceful diplomacy, is that Taiwan must make sustained, visible progress toward a peaceful settlement or risk a resort to armed hostilities. It has also indicated that any move by Taiwan that might demonstrate its substantive rejection of this new demand could well be the last straw.
Topic:
International Relations, Sovereignty, and War
Political Geography:
China, Taiwan, and Asia

3252. Dividing Papua: How Now To Do It

Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
A presidential instruction (Inpres) issued in January 2003 to divide Papua, Indonesia's easternmost province, into three parts has done more to create tension and turmoil there than any government action in years. The instruction undercuts a special autonomy law passed by the parliament in November 2001 that assumed the province to be a single territorial unit, and it has thrown Papua's administrative status into legal limbo. It undermines moderate intellectuals who saw special autonomy as a way of strengthening Papuan institutions and encouraging independence supporters to work within the Indonesian state. It has infuriated many Papuans, pro-independence and pro-autonomy alike, who have a deep attachment to Papua as a single political unit with a distinct history and who see the decree as a divide-and-rule tactic by Jakarta. All major religious leaders in the province have come out against it.
Topic:
International Relations, Development, and Politics
Political Geography:
South Asia and Indonesia

3253. Pakistan: The Mullahs and the Military

Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
The resurgence of the religious parties in the October 2002 elections portends ill for Pakistan's political, cultural and social stability. For the first time in the country's history, an alliance of six major religious parties – the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) – has won power in two provinces, vowing to Islamise state and society through Taliban-like policies. The MMA based its electoral campaign on Islam and anti-U.S. slogans, targeting President Pervez Musharraf's pro-U.S. policies and pledging the enforcement of Sharia law. It now runs the government in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), bordering on Afghanistan, and shares power in Baluchistan.
Topic:
International Relations, Development, and Politics
Political Geography:
Pakistan, United States, South Asia, and Taliban

3254. Multiethnic State, Ethnically Homogenous State and the Future of the Nation-State in the Balkans

Author:
Plamen Pantev
Publication Date:
02-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Austrian National Defence Academy
Abstract:
Approaching and testing the capacity and effectiveness of the nation-states in the Balkans is a long-term research necessity for many reasons: First, despite the tendency of making the state boundaries less and less significant in the era of new information technology, global economy and new communications capabilities the nation-state will remain the key organisational unit of the international system and the features of national sovereignty will continue to dominate and influence the management toolbox of international relations and domestic politics. Hence, any form and nuance of the nation-state in the Balkans will have a decisive meaning for dealing with the political and security agenda of the region.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Ethnic Conflict, and Globalization
Political Geography:
Eastern Europe and Balkans

3255. Coercion and Risk-Taking in Nuclear South Asia

Author:
Verghese Koithara
Publication Date:
03-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University
Abstract:
The partition-bred conflict between India and Pakistan that began in 1947 went into remission in 1971 following India's emphatic victory in war that year. It reemerged in 1989 when serious disaffection in the Kashmir Valley gave Pakistan an opening to promote militancy. This created a dangerous situation because it was about the same time that both Pakistan and India also acquired nuclear weapons. There was a major confrontation between the two countries during March-May 1990. Since then there has been continuous tension with each attempting to coerce the other. In May 1998 both countries carried out several nuclear tests each. A year later, during May-July 1999, the two fought a two-month "limited war" in the Kargil region of Kashmir that caused over 1,200 fatalities. Kargil was a clear effort on Pakistan's part to test the deterrence value of its nuclear weapons. In December 2001 India resorted to an unprecedented military mobilization (Operation Parakram), holding out the clear threat of attacking Pakistan unless the latter stopped its sub-conventional operations.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, and Nuclear Weapons
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, and India

3256. Why Delegate the Allocation of Foreign Aid to Multilateral Organizations? Principal-Agent Problems and Multilateralism

Author:
Helen Milner
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for International Studies, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Why do countries delegate the distribution of foreign aid to international institutions? Specifically, why have the advanced industrial countries chosen to distribute part of their foreign aid through multilateral organizations, such as the European Union (EU), World Bank, IMF, UN, and regional development banks (RDBs)? The delegation of aid provision to an international institution is puzzling. Why would governments relinquish control over their aid if they are a useful instrument of statecraft? Governments delegate aid delivery to international institutions when their publics lack information about the consequences of aid and fear that their governments will deviate from their wishes concerning its use. By using the international organization to send aid, the government issues a credible signal to voters about the use of foreign aid. This signal leaves all actors better off by helping to solve a principal-agent problem in domestic politics. When publics are skeptical about the benefits of aid, governments are more likely to turn aid over to multilateral organizations in order to reassure taxpayers that their money is being well spent. Using data on about 20 donor countries of the OECD from 1960-2000, I investigate the sources of multilateral giving, showing that public opinion has the expected negative relationship to multilateral aid-giving.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Europe and United Nations

3257. CERI: Public Administrations and Modes of Government in the Face of Europeanization: A Comparison between Southern Europe and Eastern Europe

Author:
Béatrice Hibou and François Bafoil
Publication Date:
12-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Enlargement today is a priority on the European agenda. Examining Portugal and Greece from a comparative perspective with respect to Poland, this Study analyzes the original and specific paths each of these national configurations have taken as regards administrative and institutional changes, particularly through the regional dimension, policy reorientations and modes of government. Given the large body of acquis communautaire that must be integrated, the nature of Commission involvement and the highly regulatory nature of European directives, this dimension emerges as the most significant in the process of Europeanization: public administration acts as a filter in this dynamic and nation-states are paradoxically strengthened by European integration. This comparison is an opportunity to underscore the importance of innovations and the singularity of modes of government, suggesting that certain arrangements put into practice in cohesion countries may provide sources of inspiration for the new entrants, which are faced with similar problems of administrative competence, bureaucratic blockages and political and state legacies that are remote from the European model of public administration, civil service organization and rules. With the effect of European constraints, a threefold dynamic is at work: a dynamic of delegation, or privatization, through the creation of agencies, offices and institutes, a dynamic of politicized (re)centralization, and a dynamic of political, institutional and social innovation. Thus components of these models are constantly borrowed and reshaped, hybrid constructions are formed and configurations take shape that are no less European than what can be found in the "heart" of Europe.
Topic:
International Relations, Development, and Government
Political Geography:
Europe

3258. CERI: For a theory of nationalism

Author:
Christophe Jaffrelot
Publication Date:
06-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Nation is state-oriented, whereas nationalism is an ideology which may simply promote one's own identity against others. Therefore, theories of nation-building do not explain nationalism. Other theories adopting a materialist approach do, like Gellner's model in which nationalism appears as resulting from socio-ethnic conflicts, but they ignore the inner mechanism of this ideology. Theories looking at nationalism as an export product from the West also miss this point too. In contrast, a convincing body of theories anchor nationalism in socio-cultural reform. The intelligentsia which undertakes it in order to resist the threat posed by some dominant Other – often from the West, that fascinates them-eventually develops a nationalist attitude, because it is not willing to imitate the West but strive to restore its culture by incorporating into it prestigious features of the West through the invention of a convenient Golden Age, the cornerstone of nationalism. This approach finds a parallel in the theories of ethnicity which do not apply the primordialist paradigm but focus on the making of group boundaries. Barth highlights the decisive role of the relationship to the Other and the little importance of cultural contents – compared to the maintenance of group boundaries – in the making of ethnic identities, in such a way that there are more affinities between his theory of ethnicity and theories of nationalism than between the latter and theories of the nation.However, one can construct an integrated model of nationalism by organising different theories in a sequence. While the ideology-based approach comes first, the creation of a nationalist movement implies the rise of socio-economic conflicts and the massification of nationalism, a process of nation-building.
Topic:
International Relations, Demographics, Development, and Nationalism
Political Geography:
Global Focus

3259. Some remarks on Trans-Atlantic Convergences and Divergences

Author:
Bronislaw Geremek
Publication Date:
11-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Transatlantic Relations
Abstract:
Only a few short years have passed since we bade farewell to the 20th century and ushered in a new millennium. Generalised assessments always include the question of whether the glass is half empty or half full; and so there have been differing evaluations put forth on the outcomes of the passing century and the prospects of the new one. However, we can quite safely say that we bid farewell to the 20th century - the century of two world conflicts, totalitarian ideologies and systems, of the holocaust, concentration camps, the gulag-with a sense of relief. The cold war came to an end, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the spread of democracy and freedom around the globe seemed to justify proclamations of the advent of a Hegelian "end of history". The United Nations Millennium Declaration announced the undertaking of new and effective action that would liberate the world's population from the plagues of hunger, poverty and fear.
Topic:
International Relations, NATO, and United Nations
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

3260. Materiales para la Docencia: El Marco Conceptual B á sico de la Disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales

Author:
Arturo Borja Tamayo
Publication Date:
04-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
Abstract:
This working paper provides a discussion of the basic conceptual framework of the discipline of international relations. It is designed to support the teaching of I.R. in Spanish, and is part of an introductory textbook the author is currently preparing. The first section deals with the concept of the international system, explaining the different meanings of anarchy and order in both international and domestic politics. Next, historical examples are used to explore the three levels of analysis: the individual and the decision-making process; the political units; and the systemic level. The last section deals with the various actors in international politics. Throughout the paper, some of the conceptual differences between the two dominant approaches of the discipline, realism and liberalism, are identified.
Topic:
International Relations, Development, Education, and Politics