Suchergebnisse

I discuss what Aquinas' doctrine of divine simplicity is, and what he takes to be its implications. I also discuss the extent to which Aquinas succeeds in motivating and defending those (putative) implications.

According to egalitarians, there is no privileged now-possible history. Egalitarianism seems to provide an attractive way to reconcile openness and omniscience, but, I argue, it does not.

This article assesses the rise of China by exploring a number of recent popular Chinese political texts to go beyond explanations that take the international system as the level of analysis. It proposes that a merging of nationalism and geopolitical thinking is taking place, resulting in the emergence of a new form of nationalism that can be categorised as 'geopolitik nationalism' because it deploys many of the themes evident in the political thought of Germany and Japan before the two world wars. By considering the impact of such ideas, it is possible to gain new insights into recent assertive actions in Chinese foreign policy. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

This critique assesses Prof. Chang Ya-chung's draft basic agreement for cross-Strait relations by arguing that it overstates changes in Beijing's Taiwan policy, which is based on a strategy that has not seen substantial change since it was devised in the early 1990s to prevent the island's democratization leading to the exercise of self-determination. By over-estimating Taiwan's political, diplomatic, military, and economic vulnerability the proposal unnecessarily narrows down Taibei's options to the point where it has to accept Beijing's one-China principle. This merely closes off other options that Taiwan can just as readily pursue, such as continuing to develop cross-Strait relations through ad hoc solutions to practical problems or seeking more imaginative ways to create a durable modus vivendi with international support. Even more problematic is that a political framework for stability based on the principles of Chinese nationalism is unlikely to be acceptable for Taiwan's liberaldemocratic politics and could thus amount to an unnecessary risk that would lead to a less durable cross-Strait status quo than that which has been maintained over the last two decades. (JCCA/GIGA)