Ethnic and Religious Hostilities in Early Modern Port Cities

An analysis of ethnic and religious conflict in early modern port cities, such as Amsterdam, Genoa, and several Islamic cities in the Ottoman Empire including Constantinople. The essay reflects on the connection between maritime trade and the freedom of conscience that promotes tolerance, civility, and a lessening of violence toward outsiders. It examines ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, and the institution of slavery in early modern port cities, as well as milieux that fostered pluralism such as the Exchange, gambling dens, military units, and the harem. Most important, it explores the decisive role of merchant oligarchies, relatively open elites, in promoting tolerance.     

Taiwan as a Factor in China's Quest for National Identity

The premise of this paper is that China has a divided national identity, characteristic of a category of nation-states divided for political reasons since World War II. Until 1999, responsibility for this sense of national division could be diffused, but since the retrocession of Hong Kong and Macao, frustration and blame have focused on Taiwan, the last remaining symbol of China's ‘national humiliation’. Characteristic of such a divided identity are ambivalent feelings, aiming on the one hand to idealize and desire to incorporate the ‘missing’ or ‘lost’ segment of the nation, and on the other to punish it for refusing to return. It is important to understand that Chinese feelings about Taiwan are not a simple reflection of empirical developments on the island, but also project latent ideas about China's own unresolved national identity. China's attempts to overcome this division have undergone several changes, making significant progress while encountering difficult (and as yet still insuperable) obstacles.     

American Asia Policy and the U.S. Election

This article reviews post-Cold War U.S./Asia policy and its potential electoral impact even as the United States selects its future foreign policy leadership and course of direction. This essay is presented in three parts: the first focuses on the U.S. security architecture in the Asian region, a brief second section on the relevance of recent changes in regional political economy, and the third attempts to determine how this emerging economic-security model might dovetail with perceived American political interests at a time of national resolution.     

The Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership

The Sino-Russian Astrategic partnership, formed after decades of rancorous verbal (and sometimes lethal) dispute, we find to be genuine, bespeaking a genuine desire on both sides to put the past behind them and forge a more friendly and mutually profitable relationship. Certainly there are underlying problems and suspicions, but the painstakingly institutionalized, multi-stranded network of exchange and consultation seems quite capable of containing areas of friction. Though primarily oriented to bilateral concerns, the partnership also has a more ambitious international agenda, oriented essentially to the protection of national sovereignty from the forces of globalism and human rights, as typically symbolized by the United States.     

Examining rival theories of demographic influences on political support: The power of regional, ethnic, and linguistic divisions in Ukraine

Abstract. What effects do regional, linguistic, and ethnic divisions have on support for the government and political system? What is the effect of each when the others are controlled for? Are apparent differences in support across regions simply compositional effects of ethno-linguistic patterns in those regions? This article provides answers to these questions, through the analysis of late 1998 mass survey data from Ukraine. The results indicate that region of residence strongly shapes support for the government and regime. Ethnicity and language, on the other hand, have weaker effects than scholars would expect, once region is controlled for. Thus, regional differences are not simply reflecting ethno-linguistic patterns in Ukraine, as scholars have often implied. These findings shed light on rival theoretical approaches to understanding regional, ethnic and linguistic sources of identity. They also highlight the necessity for scholars who have emphasized ethnic and linguistic cleavages in other countries to consider controlling for region of residence before jumping to conclusions about effects on political attitudes. Finally, the findings have narrower, but important, implications for the study of Ukraine and for its stability.     

The Sino-Japanese-Russian triangle

This paper attempts to understand the relations between three important actors in Northeast Asia — China, Russia, and Japan — since the end of the Cold War. Whereas the political changes attending the collapse of the communist bloc have opened new foreign policy opportunities to all three actors, only China and Russia have been quick to move on them. Japan’s relative inflexibility, attributable to its alliance with the US on the one hand and its territorial dispute with Russia on the other, has had the effect of impeding the application of triangular diplomacy. Editor ofAsian Survey, has written or editedSino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (1992),China’s Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, 1993), and many other analyses of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. His most recent book (with Haruhiro Fukui and Peter N.S. Lee) isInformal Politics in East Asia (Cambridge, 2000).