Suchergebnisse

Did the Suez crisis mark the end of empire in GB & France, their submission to the political domination of the US & the beginnings of a new Europe? Or did it stimulate a rethinking & reformulation of the meaning of empire, its utility & costs? This article argues that the "retreat from empire" was not so much a simple, reflexive response to demands from below as a conscious effort by those from above to find new ways of exploiting the opportunities that the world beyond Europe offered them. Decolonization, it is argued, is best understood in terms of contemporary business thinking, ie, a conscious design on the part of managers to downsize, restructure, & reengineer the imperial project. After Suez, GB attempted to demonstrate to the Americans that maintaining their access to Middle Eastern oil was vital both strategically & economically. They attempted to persuade them that "Nasserism" was second only to communism as a danger to the Western alliance, to have them drop their anticolonialist rhetoric & support the Bagdad Pact. In order to combat the anticolonial movement, they established a colonial bloc at the UN. Assuming that the Suez crisis marked the end of empire has hidden the struggle between GB & France to redefine its meaning & has concealed the extent to which ambitious designs continued to persist in the contest to determine the future shape of a united Europe -- a struggle in which neither the British nor the French regarded themselves as pawns of the Americans in the Cold War, but rather, one in which they attempted to move the powerful new American piece around the chess board in the Middle East, Africa, & Asia. Adapted from the source document.

DEMOCRACY SUPPORT IS A RELATIVELY NEW FORM OF DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE. THERE ARE NO BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING DEMOCRACY OR FOR ASSISTING THOSE SEEKING TO DO SO. THIS AUTHOR DISPUTES TWO SCHOLARS' VIEW THAT DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE IS TOO EXPENSIVE. HE STATES THAT IN ADDITION TO DWELLING ON THE DOLLAR COSTS OF DEMOCRACY, SCHOLARS MUST ALSO LOOK AT WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED THE "MISSED-OPPORTUNITY COST" - THE QUANTIFIABLE AND NONQUANTIFIABLE COSTS OF THE ALTERNATIVE TO DEMOCRACY AND THE LONG-TERM COST SAVINGS FROM DEMOCRATIZATION.