A new international order: Lessons of Kosovo

An examination of how the worsening AIDS epidemic in Africa has been used to construct a simplistic and racial view of Africa in the West as a continent that is homogenous, backward, sexually permissive, unpredictable and in need of control, advice and help from outside.     

Steven Chaffee and the Future of Political Communication Research

This article discusses four basic characteristics of Steven Chaffee's research: going beyond the "common research wisdom," careful explication of concepts, avoiding unsubstantiated charges against the media, and investigation of the social aspects of communication. The evolution of political socialization research is used as an example of how these characteristics have strengthened Chaffee's contribution to that area and to the larger field of political communication. It is argued that the future of this field would benefit from emulation of these characteristics. Continuing problems of political communication research are noted, and various emerging problems are discussed.     

Kavanagh and Mckenzie on power

This article responds to an earlier analysis by Kavanagh which criticised the basic thesis of McKenzie's British Political Parties. The author of the present article believes that Kavanagh made some important criticisms of McKenzie, but it is still true that power in the Labour Party is similarly distributed to power in the Conservative Party ‐ broadly the parliamentary party is autonomous, and the Leader, especially in government, is in control of the party. Events since 1983 have served to underline this fact.     

New Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand: The Construction of National Identities by Two Labo(u)r Governments in the Early 1970s

During the 1970s the Whitlam government in Australia and the Kirk government in New Zealand each adopted a policy of new nationalism in an attempt to come to terms with a rapidly changing and increasingly decolonised world marked by the decline of Britain as an economic and military force in the world. In each case this new nationalism prioritised local and national identities over a larger pan‐British identity. Both governments were more inward‐looking and yet also more engaged with the Asia‐Pacific region than their predecessors. They promoted their own national distinctiveness and independence, while also forging closer relationships with each other and the wider region. Both embraced a new understanding of their geographic position and repudiated the idea that Australia and New Zealand were European nations on the edge of Asia. The nationalisms they promoted were remarkably similar, yet there are important differences that reflect their different ethnic makeup and geographic position.     

The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain,France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s

The theory of “preventive war” states that, under certain conditions, states respond to rising adversaries with military force in an attempt to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power. British and French passivity in response to the rapid rise of Germany in the 1930s would appear to constitute one of the leading empirical anomalies in the theory, one the theory's proponents must explain. After clarifying the meaning of the preventive motivation for war and specifying the conditions under which it should be the strongest, we examine French and British behavior in the crises over the Rhineland in 1936 and Sudeten Czechoslovakia in 1938 through an intensive study of government documents and private papers. We argue that French political leaders, anticipating a continuing adverse shift in relative power, wanted to confront Hitler, but only with British support, which was not forthcoming. British leaders believed, even by 1936, that the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that German ascendancy was only temporary and that British rearmament would redress the balance of power in a few years. We contrast our argument with alternative interpretations based on domestic political pressures and ideologically driven beliefs and interests.     

Review of public budgeting and financial management

User charge is an alternative option to privatizing public service provision. But its use as a policy instrument, compared with that of asset sales or contracting out, for instance, is less researched and documented. This paper tries to fill the gap. By contrasting the experiences of employing user charge for two public services in Hong Kong with diametrically opposing results, this paper offers preliminary conclusions on several lessons, which governments, in their drive toward improved efficiency, can learn in commercializing their trading activities. Implications to public policy making are also suggested. These include: the user-pays principle has to be applied equitably, the public service market has to remain depoliticized, the management has to be transformed to behave more entrepreneurially, and the users have to be educated.     

Teaching labour law in a technical college

In this lecture, the author identifies six themes in UK (predominantly English) and European practice which have permeated his 19 years in quality assurance: the vagueness of the term ‘quality assurance’; its uncertain purposes in the early years; the critical importance of its ownership and financing; the increasing tendency for quality assurance to be seen as a proxy organ of external power and control over autonomous higher education institutions; the rise and growing importance of developments in Europe; and the uncertain future direction of quality assurance. He examines changes in the purposes informally ascribed to the process and concludes that there has been a shift first from, and then back towards, accountability as the dominant purpose, and that this may displace enhancement as a key objective. The ownership and financing arrangements of the QAA limit its independence of action and possibly its effectiveness. They are also indicative of the government's desire to influence the direction of external quality assurance. In the European arena, the quality assurance aspects of the Bologna Process are described in terms of a jockeying for power over higher education between universities, governments and the European Commission. The lecture ends with some general observations about quality assurance.