Obama in Asia: West Looks East After the "End of History"

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumphant celebrations of the West, a new chapter of history has opened featuring the rising powers of Asia, led by China. Though embracing free markets, China has looked to its Confucian traditions instead of liberal democracy as the best route to good governance. Will China manage to achieve high growth and a harmonious society through a strong state and long‐range planning that puts messy Western democracy and its short‐term mindset to shame? Or, in the end, will the weak rule of law and absence of political accountability in a one‐party state undermine its promise? Francis Fukuyama and Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean thinker who has become the apostle of non‐Western modernity, debate these issues. In this section we also republish a collective memoir by George H.W. Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, recalling their fears and hopes two decades ago as they brought the Cold War to an end.     

执政能力建设与执政系统的优化

执政能力是指执政系统的整体能力。执政系统的整体能力关涉党的执政系统的生存和发展 ,关涉执政系统的结构和功能 ,执政能力的增强依赖于整个执政系统的优化。从政治学的角度看 ,执政系统赖以生存和发展的因素主要包括两大方面 :执政系统的合法性和科学性。执政能力的增长以执政系统的合法性为基础 ,以提高党的执政系统的科学性为主要增长点。而优化执政系统的主要目标就是不断增强执政系统的合法性和科学性。     

Pathologies of Development Practice: Higher Order Obstacles to Governance Reform in the Pakistani Electrical Power Sector

Development actors are regularly aware of the shortcomings of governance interventions before, during, and after development assistance is introduced, yet those programmes continue and are even revisited. Why? This paper uses the Pakistani experience with power sector reforms to illustrate how the donor-led reform agenda had readily apparent shortcomings. A new wave of development thinking responds to such failures by drawing on complexity theory and moving toward more local, iterative and experimental approaches. However, by highlighting how the awareness of problems with reforms isn’t sufficient to avoid them, this paper points to a higher order of obstacles which remain unaddressed.     

The End of the Age of Empire

The article was adapted from a keynote address given at the conference “1989 and Beyond” at the New School for Social Research, New York City, April 2008.