Suchergebnisse

In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.

Small states throughout the Asia-Pacific are confronted by a growing dilemma over how to balance their traditional security ties with the US and rapidly growing trade with China. This gives Washington and Beijing potential leverage over small states to use within their competition with one another. This article explores the implications of this for New Zealand – a small South Pacific state that prides itself on maintaining an independent foreign policy. Situated within the small state literature, it utilises a material-based strategic triangle to illustrate the fundamental facets of New Zealand's position. Relatedly, the article examines how Wellington has managed its burgeoning relations with China and the US over the past decade and critically considers New Zealand's independent foreign policy. It finds that New Zealand has adopted a mixed set of strategies to manage its position between the US and China, closely aligning itself with Washington while remaining nonaligned on some key security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. New Zealand has certainly not opted for neutrality. The article concludes that New Zealand and other small states must remain vigilant, may want to consider alternative strategies of alignment, and outlines a number of areas where additional research could prove fruitful. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

In this volume, which was originally published in 2003, a distinguished collection of specialists analyzes the critical elections that ushered out the Boris Yeltsin era in Russia and ushered in the leadership of Vladimir Putin. These parliamentary and presidential elections were critical for the future of Russia.