Author: Noah Feldman

   A CFR Book. Princeton University Press

   April 2008

   200 pages
   ISBN 978-0-691-12045-4
    $22.95

Overview:

Perhaps no other Western writer has more deeply probed the bitter struggle in the Muslim world between the forces of religion and law and those of violence and lawlessness than Noah Feldman.

His scholarship has defined the stakes in the Middle East today. Now, in this penetrating book, Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

Western powers call it a threat to democracy. Islamist movements are winning elections on it. Terrorists use it to justify their crimes. What, then, is the sharia? Given the severity of some of its provisions, why is it popular among Muslims? Can the Islamic state succeed—should it?

The process of preparing for the Games is tailor-made to display China’s greatest political and economic strengths: the top-down mobilization of resources, the development and execution of grand-scale campaigns to reform public behavior, and the ability to attract foreign interest and investment to one of the world’s brightest new centers of culture and business. Mobilizing massive resources for large infrastructure projects comes easily to China. Throughout history, China’s leaders have drawn on the ingenuity of China’s massive population to realize some of the world’s most spectacular construction projects, the Great Wall, the Grand Canal, and the Three Gorges Dam among them. The Olympic construction spree has been no different. Beijing has built 19 new venues for the events, doubled the capacity of the subway, and added a new terminal to the airport. Neighborhoods throughout the city have been either spruced up to prepare for Olympic visitors or simply cleared out to make room for new Olympic sites. Official government spending for the construction bonanza is nearing $40 billion. In anticipation of the Olympics, the government has also embarked on a series of efforts to transform individual behavior and modernize the capital city. It has launched etiquette campaigns forbidding spitting, smoking, littering, and cutting in lines and introduced programs to teach English to cab drivers, police officers, hotel workers, and waiters. City officials have used Olympic projects as a means to refurbish decaying buildings and reduce air pollution, water shortages, and traffic jams.

Yet even as Beijing has worked tirelessly to ensure the most impressive of Olympic spectacles, it is clear that the Games have come to highlight not only the awesome achievements of the country but also the grave shortcomings of the current regime. Few in the central leadership seem to have anticipated the extent to which the Olympic Games would stoke the persistent political challenges to the legitimacy of the Communist Party and the stability of the country. Demands for political liberalization, greater autonomy for Tibet, increased pressure on Sudan, better environmental protection, and an improved product-safety record now threaten to put a damper on the country’s coming-out party. As the Olympic torch circled the globe with legions of protesters in tow, Beijing’s Olympic dream quickly turned into a public-relations nightmare.

Although the Chinese government excels when it comes to infrastructure projects, its record is poor when it comes to transparency, official accountability, and the rule of law. It has responded clumsily to internal and external political challenges — by initially ignoring the international community’s desire for China to play a more active role in resolving the human rights crisis in Darfur, arresting prominent Chinese political activists, and cracking down violently on demonstrators. Although there is no organized opposition unified around this set of demands, the cacophony of voices pressuring China to change its policies has taken much of the luster off of the Beijing Games. Moreover, although the Communist Party has gained domestic support from the nationalist backlash that has arisen in response to the Tibetan protesters and their supporters in the West, it also worries that this public anger will spin out of control, further damaging the country’s international reputation. Already, China’s coveted image as a responsible rising power has been tarnished.

For many in the international community, it has now become impossible to separate the competing narratives of China’s awe-inspiring development and its poor record on human rights and the environment. It is no longer possible to discuss China’s future without taking its internal fault lines seriously. For the Chinese government, the stakes are huge. China’s credibility as a global leader, its potential as a model for the developing world, and its position as an emerging center of global business and culture are all at risk if these political challenges cannot be peacefully and successfully addressed.

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Summary: The Republic of South Africa is both engaging in a ‘vicious and ugly’ civil war and ‘waging an undeclared war against its neighbours’. After reviewing RSA intervention in Mozambique and Angola, and arguing that the front-line states are opposed to apartheid, not to whites or to Western interests, calls for US policy-makers to match words with deeds, namely by backing a policy of economic sanctions. Then prime minister, now president of Zimbabwe.

Robert G. Mugabe is Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe, and currently chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement.
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The main purpose of publishing this article in my blog was not to criticize it. I would like to share my own view on this multi-ethnicity problem but from a different perspective. World population in my view is mono-ethnic but this ethnicity’s roots are not related with skin, land, language or any other criteria that is needed to establish an ethnic background. In reality this ethnicity is based on status of the persons within the society. Top dogs in terms of economic and political power throughout the world make the first of the caste or varna, and it does not matter which language they speak, where they live, how many wives they have etc. The reason is that their only purpose in this life is to have more than they have right now. In economic terms they life ideology could be defined as “profit maximization” no matter what happens. People kill each other? So what, lets sell arms and weapons and make profit out of it. The world is gone stray? Lets support the casino, brothel, sex club, alcohol and other types of dirty businesses, and make profit out of it. The second caste in this pyramid could be classified as “idiots of society”. There are two types of them, first ones are the “greedy idiots” who would try all their life to be a top dog but they never understand that they are just used as a tool by first varna in their purposes. The others are “happy go idiots” who does not care about anything but themselves. As much as, there is a roof on my head – have food for today( in the best case for tomorrow) then they are happy and ready to die. The third caste is “the blacks”, these people have no value in this world. Does not matter, whether they are in Australia, US, Iraq or Zimbabwe.

In conclusion, I do not care whether people do agree with me, but the reality is that the most of the world is working the way as I have described it. Dignity, pride, love have no place in this world anymore. No more moral values can be seen. This can be changed – individuals have to change – search for better inner-self. We have to know who we are at the first place, where are we coming from and where are going to go.

Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.

JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought.

Article:

Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.

Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.

But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.

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