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Sous-officier des Forces Armées Royales (FAR), Ahmed Marzouki a participé à son corps défendant au coup d'État de juillet 1971 contre le roi Hassan II au palais de Skirat. Ce coup d'État mal organisé par la haute hiérarchie militaire a tourné au véritable carnage. Des soldats ont tiré dans la foule des invités du roi qui fêtait son anniversaire. Le roi sauva sa vie en se cachant plusieurs heures dans les toilettes. Il est parvenu ensuite à renverser la situation en réapparaissant par surprise. Un certain nombre de responsables militaires ont été fusillés aussitôt après. D'autres qui avaient été envoyés en commando sans connaître le but de leur mission ont été condamnés à des peines de 3 à 5 ans de prison. Ahmed Marzouki était de ceux-là. Il a été condamné en février 1972 à cinq ans de prison. Estimant que la justice s'était montrée trop clémente en condamnant ces militaires innocents, Hassan II les fit enlever de la prison où ils purgeaient leur peine et ordonna de les enfermer dans une prison secrète, construite au fin fond du royaume pour assouvir cette sinistre vengeance. Pendant des années, on ignora tout de leur sort. L'auteur a écrit ce livre juste après avoir trouvé sa liberté = Non-commissioned officer of the Royal Armed Forces (FAR), Ahmed Marzouki participated reluctantly in the coup d'état of July 1971 against King Hassan II at the palace of Skirat. The poorly organized coup by senior military hierarchy has turned into carnage. Soldiers fired into the crowd of guests of the king who were celebrating his birthday. The King saved his life by hiding several hours. He then managed to reverse the situation by turning out of the blue. A number of military officers were shot soon after. Others who had been sent as a commando unit without knowing the purpose of their mission were sentenced to terms of 3 to 5 years in prison. Ahmed Marzouki was one of them. He was sentenced in February 1972 to five years in prison. Believing that justice had been too lenient in sentencing the innocent soldiers, Hassan II had them removed from the prison where they were serving their sentences and ordered them to shut up in a secret prison, specially built in a remote region. For years, no one knew anything about their fate. The author wrote this book after his release

When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win. It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime. But he delivered. In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime in New York City went down by 33 percent, the murder rate was cut in half -- and Bill Bratton was heralded as the most charismatic and respected law enforcement official in America. In this outspoken account of his news-making career, Bratton reveals how his cutting-edge policing strategies brought about the historic reduction in crime. Bratton's success made national news and landed him on the cover of Time. It also landed him in political hot water. He earned such positive press that before he'd completed his first week on the job, the administration of New York's media-hungry mayor Rudolph Giuliani, threatened to fire him. The author gives a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the sizzle and substance, and he pulls no punches describing the personalities who really run the city. Bratton grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood, always dreaming of being a cop. As a young officer under Robert di Grazia, Boston's progressive police commissioner, he got a ground-level view of real police reform and also saw what happens when an outspoken, dynamic, reform-minded police commissioner starts to outshine an ambitious mayor. He was soon in the forefront of the community policing movement and a rising star in the profession. Bratton had turned around four major police departments when he accepted the number one police job in America. When he arrived at the NYPD, New York's Finest were almost hiding; they had given up on preventing crime and were trying only to respond to it. Narcotics, Vice, Auto Theft, and the Gun Squads all worked banker's hours while the competition -- the bad guys -- worked around the clock. Bratton changed that. He brought talent to the top and instilled pride in the force; he listened to the people in the neighborhoods and to the cops on the street. Bratton and his "dream team" created Compstat, a combination of computer statistics analysis and an unwavering demand for accountability. Cops were called on the carpet, and crime began to drop. With Bratton on the job, New York City was turned around. Today, New York's plummeting crime rate and improved quality of life remain a national success story. Bratton is directly r ...

A review essay on books by (1) Korwa Gombe Adar & Rok Ajulu (Eds), Globalization and Emerging Trends in African States' Foreign Policymaking Processes: A Comparative Perspective of Southern Africa (London: Ashgate, 2002); (2) Patrick Bond, Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (Cape Town, South Africa: U Cape Town Press, 2001); (3) Greg Mills, The Wired World: South Africa, Foreign Policy and Globalization (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg for the South African Institute for International Affairs, 2000); (4) Philip Nel, Ian Taylor, & Janis Van Der Westhuizen (Eds), South Africa's Multilateral Diplomacy and Global Change: The Limits of Reformism (London: Ashgate, 2001); & (5) Ian Taylor, Stuck in Middle GEAR: South Africa's Post-Apartheid Foreign Relations (London: Praeger, 2001). The author makes the point that much writing about South Africa is still couched in an outdated theoretical framework, as reflected in these books, & the point that a single "homogenizing idea can set the limits of scholarly imagination" -- in this case, globalization. Mills, who is decidedly pro-globalization, is said to use a narrow conceptual range in discussing South Africa within that context. Further, his book is said to be little more than an updating of his "earlier polemic." Bond has an opposite perspective, as he believes that the dispossessed are agents for social change, & that globalization "brazenly contradicts society's strong motivation for more equitable development to redress the massive disparities of apartheid." Adair & Ajulu's book explores the creation of foreign policy, in different African states, in the context of the effects of globalization. The coverage is reportedly uneven, & there is no chapter on Tanzania, which was so active in the liberation movement. The essays edited by Nel et al explore multilateralism as the focus of foreign policy in post-apartheid South Africa. The editors make the point that South Africa has used its high profile to affect multilateral institutions on behalf of more vulnerable countries in areas such as environmental diplomacy, human rights, debt relief, the reform of international trade, & the global campaign to ban land mines. Taylor explains why the new South Africa has embraced globalization but focuses particularly on why multilateralism is embraced so enthusiastically. He demonstrates the emergence of a neoliberal policy, GEAR (for Growth & Economic Recovery Programme), & asks who is benefiting from South Africa's foreign policy, in a work of "genuine contemporary scholarship." These books are said to represent South Africa's unhappy past, & the reviewer also offers comments about works by Rodney Davenport & Christopher Saunders, Jacqueline A. Kalley, Steven D. Gish, Thomas Koelbe, & A. J. Christopher, which are said to represent more conceptual daring. M. S. Northcutt

There is substantive interest in politics and public life. People are well informed but they receive their information in most cases from the electronic mass media, state televison and local radio stations. The positive level of interest is not translated into their political efficacy. A strong majority of the people think that they have no influence on the local or national government. Elections are the major form of collective political participation. In Croatia they had additional importance as the instrument of democratic change. In general electoral participation the turnout is getting smaller. Citizens prefer to observe and vote and are not willing to take part in party campaign activities. Croatian citizens see their problems in the economic area, income, standard of living, unemployment, etc. Political issues are not their priorities. They see the strength of the countr in the people and natural resources, combined with the national values and the independent state. + The author presents the basic findings of the survey on political participation in Croatia. Data presented indicate that Croatian citizens still have rather satisfactory level of political interest and that they do follow the political information in the mass media, specifically on television. On the other hand, they express low levels of political efficacy and believe that there is very little that can be changed by political participation and activism. The formal forms of political participation, like voting, also show the declining rates. Levels of non-satisfaction with the quality of democratic life are high. Major problems in the country are perceived as economic and major strengths are seen in the natural resources and potential of the people. + The areas of possible intervention by strengthening participation and community efforts are human rights and local democracy in general. In these areas there are basic positive conditions for improvement and change in the desired direction. One of the major obstacles to participation is seen by the people in the lack of resources, skills, information, time, and money. Investment in democratic capacity and potential will influence those areas in which citizens today see a limited space for influence (the areas under the strong state regulation). Participation is not only the instrument of democratic change but also has value in itself, and this can have many other positive and unexpected consequences. As an additional form of conclusion I have created the "public participation index" from four data sets: general interest, perception of influence, perception of possible change by political participation and motivation to participate in election campaigns. Used in future surveys it can show the basic trends in the Croatian democratic life. (SOI : PM: S. 10; 22f.)

History, however, is not Phillips's strong suit. Moreover, his peculiar take on the country's cyclical experience with wealth and democracy is a telling commentary on his own oddly inflected populism. His is the populism of the 'silent majority,' which first made his reputation back in the days of Richard Nixon's 'southern strategy.' Phillips's lingering Republican past leads him to fantasize about some underground tradition of progressive middle-class Republicanism, which in Phillips's quirky narrative confection embraces the governments of William McKinley, Richard Nixon, and Abraham Lincoln. Phillips imagines these regimes as all suspicious of unsupervised wealth and mildly friendly to labor, while nonetheless operating under the dominating influence of the economic elites of their day. The characterization might loosely apply to Lincoln's new party, although the great merchant bankers of the antebellum North were the Great Emancipator's loyal opposition, not his natural constituency. When applied to McKinley and Nixon the notion verges on the preposterous--industrial workers in 1896 were terrorized into voting for the Ohio governor or staying away from the polls, while the whole tenor of the Republican campaign and the McKinley presidency that followed entailed an explicit repudiation of any suggestion of wealth redistribution or government regulation of big business. The evidence for Nixon's labor sympathies seems to consist of presidential invitations extended to the ossified leadership of the AFL-CIO to visit the White House. Phillips himself acknowledges that in every case--even in the one that most robustly supports his argument, namely Teddy Roosevelt's reign--the Republicans soon gave themselves over to the most self-interested, money-mad, socially irresponsible fat cats who always peopled the party's inner sanctums. As the author demonstrates, only during the Progressive Era, which was half Democratic, and during the New Deal order did the apportionment of national income and wealth swing the other way and were the commanding institutions of the private sector subject to some serious public surveillance and discipline. The Clinton interregnum, conversely, was the outcome of what Phillips calls the first white-collar recession of the early nineties-itself a fitting epitaph to the extreme 'financialization' of the Gordon Gekko years--conjoined to the rapidly inflating Internet bubble. The atmosphere of sixties' cultural liberation that hovered over the Clinton administration had more to do with the borrowed anti-hierarchical argot and upscale designer egalitarianism of the new dot-com billionaires than it did with any sixties-era political engagement with the lower orders. While the New Deal welfare state was wrapping up its affairs, the new information-age elites were busy putting in place a global corporate welfare system of 'financial mercantilism.' Wall Street quickly acclimated itself to the new environment. It became heavily invested not only financially and not only because the microprocessor transformed the way it conducted its own high-velocity speculations. Psychologically and culturally as well, the Street became vested in new-era hype. Phillips talks about 'grinds and globalists' supplanting the old skull-and-bones elites, committed to a relentless, de-regulated 'securitization' of the universe, transforming customary signs of distress into market-cheering acts of 'downsizing,' deepening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots at home and abroad.

(1) The emergence of nations is not a historical deviation, but a normal and cocomitant occurrence of the positive historical development. The establishment of democracy created some elbowroom for the affirmation of nations in post- communism. The role of the nationalist activity in these events was not central. The disintegration of the former communist federations was not a fortuitous event and had a common cause. The redefinition of the nationality issue, though inevitable, produces conflicts. (2) International conflicts are potentially dangerous and violence-laden. (3) Conflicts cannot be avoided by denying national identities and national rights, by ignoring real or imagined problems, but by confronting them. (4) Nationality issues cannot be eliminated but regulated. Political theory and practice have developed numerous mechanisms for the accommodation of conflicting rights. Their recognition and implementation can only help in the non- violent resolution of disputes. Ignorance is not only harmful, but can be dangerous as well, because it stimulates exaggerated and biased expectations which may produce volatile and baleful outcomes. (5) Concrete solutions will always depend on the balance of political powers in each case. International practice, universally accepted principles, international community's pressures and its early direct involvement can contribute to the finding of the solution and the avoidance of violent options. (6) Demanding more rights than implied by rational standards means cruising for a bruising, asking for trouble, which can get the conflicting parties the short end of a stick. Extremism and chauvinism are dangerous not only for the other side, but affect negatively the nation which generates it. This rule applies both to the dominant nation in a state and to the minority nations. (7) Democracy and tolerance make a positive environment for a successful regulation of international disputes. Violent and unilateral imposition of solutions only worsens the situation and makes it explosive in the long run. A democratic society reduced to a dominant nation is not feasible unless national rights are recognised and implemented for all those who live in that state. Minority nations cannot realise their rights unless they take into consideration the democratic system on the whole and democratic rights for everybody. Democratic societies are nationally tolerant societies. And vice versa. (8) Democracy and nation-building are not incompatible notions. They are immanent to post-communist societies. Nation-building, despite everything, creates the conditions for the emergence of stable states, the only stable framework of the political and the economic transition (Jahn, 1992, 68). (9) The unresolved and undecided nationality issues significantly aggravate the consolidation of democracy. (SOI : PM: S. 151; 176f.) + The author's starting point is the claim that, despite integrative tendencies, the number of national states in the world is on the increase. The opposing national interests and conflicts may be mitigated or avoided if the central concepts and issues, tie ways of the accommodation of interests and the features of the postcommunist transitions are known: The author explains the concepts and issues such as nation, ethnic group, national state, nationalism, protection of minorities, the right to self-determination, decentralisation, autonomy, federalism, consociational democracy, non-territorial autonomy. He focuses on the issues that reflect the current controversies of the global and the national policies. He concludes that, among other things the national issues are central to the process of transition and that they cannot be ignored (since nations are a reality which must be coped with), that there are principles and mechanisms of the regulation of the conflicting national interests

The protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle marked a turning point in trade politics. The size and depth of the international coalition that came together to protest the WTO was striking. And then there were the television images and the stunning denouement: Teamsters marching with 'turtles,' tear gas and police charges in the darkness, the collapse of the negotiations. The author of one of the books reviewed here, Jagdish Bhagwati, was in Seattle as an adviser to the WTO's director. While trying to get to the meeting, he found himself 'confronting a tough Chinese Red Guards-style female demonstrator who was blocking my way illegally.' A colleague then 'drew me away from a confrontation that would surely have left me bloodied, saying, `You are the foremost free trader today; we cannot afford to lose you!" Bhagwati's story speaks to several things, including his considerable ego. Most important, though, it captures the embattled state in which mainstream trade economists loyal to free trade doctrines now believe they exist: 'there are not too many out there, fighting the fight for free trade,' Bhagwati worries, 'We need to change that.' Do Irwin and Bhagwati understand that this is what most of the critics believe? I'm afraid not. Both authors characterize the critics as 'anti-globalization.' Although this accurately describes some, it is not true for the majority. Both authors seem to think that the main reason critics are against globalization is that they are anticapitalist and antimarket. Irwin, for example, tells us that for many of these groups, 'Free markets and capitalism are seen as embodying and furthering environmental destruction, male dominance, class oppression, racial intolerance and colonial exploitation.' To characterize most environmental organizations, or most contemporary trade unions, as 'anticapitalist' is absurd, if that means that they are committed to the abolition of capitalism. If the term means that they are critical of the way that capitalism currently operates, the characterization is accurate, but then the authors' summary dismissal of that position becomes puzzling. The critics insist that there are better and worse forms of market economy, that the neoliberal model of regulation toward which we are currently moving (one that expands property rights while ignoring human rights) is worse than feasible alternatives, and therefore, that the current model of global economic regulation can and ought to be changed. Unfortunately, Irwin and Bhagwati, by tilting at anticapitalist windmills, fail to join the real argument. IN THEIR EFFORT to extract free trade from the wider matrix of economic globalization, the authors downplay the degree to which trade deals such as NAFTA and the WTO shape the character of the larger economic system. For example, some of the most novel and important provisions in NAFTA and the WTO--pertaining to investor property rights and the deregulation of financial services--undoubtedly increase international capital mobility. Dani Rodrik has argued that increased international capital mobility could significantly increase the 'price elasticity of the demand for labor.' That is, firms will shift production to other countries in response to smaller and smaller differences in labor costs, other things being equal. This could dampen wage growth not only in the North, but in the South as well. Bhagwati and Irwin both devote considerable effort to exploring how free trade affects wages, yet neither so much as mentions Rodrik's well-known argument. Why not? Free capital mobility is one thing, Bhagwati says, free trade is another. He favors considerably less of the former than we have today, and much more of the latter. But while conceptually distinct, the fact is that both principles are promoted in NAFTA and the WTO. If we want to assess the impacts of these international agreements, we must consider how they affect capital mobility, and how it in turn affects workers, the environment, and so on. Slippage in the way the concept of 'free trade' is employed permits Bhagwati and Irwin to evade this challenge.