Suchergebnisse

In this volume practitioners and theorists from East and West assess the results of four years of transformation in Eastern Europe. In a general assessment of the stabilisation policies pursued, some authors take a critical view of the 'conventional' monetary and fiscal restrictive programmes which have helped to bring down inflation and to introduce elements of the market economy, but have also left the economies concerned with heavily reduced output and real incomes. An evolutionary strategy of structural transformation, and demand management should play a primary role in recovery from the 'transformational recession'. Further issues discussed are the reform of the financial sector; liberalisation of foreign trade; privatisation and restructuring; and the social aspects of transformation.

This volume reports the proceedings of a conference of highly qualified practitioners and theorists from East and West, dealing with competition and the important part it plays as an essential element of the market economic system. So far, in the countries of Central and East Europe and of the former USSR, privatisation of state enterprises has failed to bring about a more responsive, more competitive behaviour of these firms. It is recognised that various elements of competition - privatisation, breaking down of monopolies, trade liberalisation, strengthening of small- and medium-sized competitors; and institutional requirements - should be implemented simultaneously.

The present study looks at the life and works of the historian. Against the background of his career, an attempt is made to explain why he wrote what he did, and did not write any major work after the age of forty. The study aims briefly to situate his writing on South Africa and the context of his own intellectual development and of its times

The author reviews Donald W. Shriver's Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).The title and subtitle of this book may mislead, for it is not primarily a study of the meaning of patriotism, but rather a kind of commentary, and often a very personal one, of the way three countries have remembered, or failed to remember, past "misdeeds." As the three countries include the United States and South Africa, a review in these pages seems appropriate. Though the bulk of this book is concerned with the United States, Shriver begins with a chapter on Germany, followed by a chapter on South Africa. Though his book is addressed to "we Americans," it has significance beyond the United States. Shriver shares the angst of American liberals about the rise of antiAmericanism and the way the image of the country has, in the era of "the war against terror" and the Iraq war, taken a beating. Many of the issues the book raises are as relevant for South Africa as for either of the two other countries it concerns. As we shall see, Shriver believes there are lessons for the United States to learn from Germany and South Africa (e.g., 125). While the "misdeeds" of his subtitle include the most appalling atrocities imaginable, the spirit of his book is, he insists, "celebratory: how some of us…recover facts and images of painful historical pasts for the sake of honouring those who suffered them and for committing our societies to 'never again'" (209).

The now substantial literature on the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa defines 'transition' in different ways. In the third edition of his History of South Africa (2001), Leonard Thompson devoted a chapter to the political transition that took place between 1989 and 1994.1 Rodney Davenport wrote in similar vein in lectures published in Canada as The Birth of the New South Africa and in South Africa as The Transfer of Power in South Africa. 2 Both historians implied that the fundamentals of the apartheid order were still in place in 1989, and that the apartheid order could have continued for some time, for the state was not on its knees and the security forces stood firmly behind it. Instead of apartheid continuing, however, we know that its pillars – the Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act and Land Act prime among them – were repealed in the early 1990s, and in 1994 political apartheid was ended with the introduction of a constitution providing for one person one vote and that all citizens were equal before the law. So within the remarkably short period of five years, in this interpretation, a transition took place from an apartheid order to a formally democratic one, with a new government taking office after the first democratic election in April 1994.