Kafka meets Machiavelli: Post-war,post-transition Eastern Slavonia

As the agonising over 'what next' for Kosovo and Serbia continues, Eastern Slavonia offers a transition experience and timescale from which we may learn. Each case is specific in historical and political terms, and in the nature of international intervention. But questions of transition and minority rights are inherent across the region. Though Eastern Slavonia was one of the areas of former Yugoslavia that saw some of the fiercest fighting in the 1991 Serb-Croat war, few international aid agencies now remain. The 1995 Dayton Agreement provided for a one-year transition period for its re-incorporation into Croatia, under the auspices of a special UN mission (UNTAES). Based on extensive fieldwork, this article details the constraints on the UN's input into integrated social and civil structures, and describes the Kafkaesque welter of legal and bureaucratic obstacles as well as economic and other forms of discrimination that now face minority groups living in, or returning to, Croatia. Without a firm government commitment to full equality and fair treatment of all citizens, the pattern of violent 'ethnic cleansing' may yet repeat itself.     

IMPLEMENTING CHANGE IN HEALTH SYSTEMS: MARKET REFORMS IN HEALTH SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM,SWEDEN AND THE NETHERLANDS

IMPLEMENTING CHANGE IN HEALTH SYSTEMS: MARKET REFORMS IN HEALTH SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, SWEDEN AND THE NETHERLANDS
Michael I. Harrison
Sage, 2004, 256 pp., £21.99 (pb) ISBN: 0761961763     

Prostitution Policy in Europe: A Time of Change?

There has been considerable recent debate about prostitution in Europe that reflects concerns about health, employment and human rights. Legal changes are being introduced in many countries. We focus on two examples in order to discuss the likely implications. A new law in The Netherlands is normalizing aspects of the sex industry through decriminalizing both workers and businesses. In Sweden, on the other hand, prostitution is considered to be a social problem, and a new law criminalizes the purchasers of sexual services in an attempt to reduce demand.Both reforms appear to have had their desired effect at one level; in The Netherlands, health and safety regulations will be introduced as in any other job, and EU sex workers gain full social, legal and employment rights; in Sweden there was initially a tenfold decrease in the numbers of women working visibly on the streets, and some workers have left the industry. However, in both countries, the new legislation has also driven some sex work underground. Many sex workers are excluded by the Dutch system and move underground to become effectively invisible to the authorities. In Sweden sex workers and their clients also become less visible in order that the latter can avoid sanction. Social and economic changes, such as increased migration and the growing use of the Internet will also render the sex industry less visible both to state regulation and to health care workers.The major problems of prostitution for the workers remain exploitation, stigma, abuse and criminalization. These are not unique to the industry, and can only be tackled effectively by the self-organization of sex workers into unions and rights groups, along with full decriminalization. An alternative vision is promised through self-organization and anti-racist actions by sex workers in Germany; normalization and workers’ rights are tackled alongside training programmes for those seeking alternatives. Policy makers throughout Europe would do well to look at their experience and not simply at the clash of legal reforms.     

Limited Liability: Large Company Theory and Small Firms

Current enthusiasm for the 'enterprise culture' results in strong support for easy access to limited liability forms of business organisation. This has manifested itself in the creation of new limited liability vehicles such as the LLC and the LLP. The UK Company Law Review is examining ways of enhancing the attractiveness of the limited liability company to small business owners. This article examines the claims made for the 'efficiency' of limited liability and the applicability of these claims to small firms. It raises the importance of taking into account public policy issues beyond economic efficiency when considering the degree of risk taking and shifting to be encouraged. The article concludes that, although it is difficult to find rational methods of restricting access to limited liability, it does not follow that limited liability should be positively encouraged for all small firms. It is important to signal the limitations of limited liability.     

Gandhi and India's peasants, 1917–22

The general problem raised here is peasant involvement in Afro‐Asian nationalist movements. As a case study the focus is M. K. Gandhi's attitude to and activities among Indian peasants from 1917 to 1922 and their response, firstly to his broad span of rural work for social reform and the rectification of particular peasant grievances, and then to his India‐wide passive resistance campaigns on continental issues which had no specifically rural appeal. This analysis underlines the fact that ‘India's peasants’ were no monolithic group. They differed from area to area in economic and social position and were further fragmented by the ties of religion, tribe and caste. Consequently the nature and range of their wider public awareness varied, and their relationships with Gandhi were diverse and complicated. In certain areas he attracted wide support, even adulation, particularly where he campaigned on local grievances. But peasant response to his all‐India calls for passive resistance was geographically restricted, and often dependent on a very garbled understanding of the issues at stake and the expected pay‐offs of the movement. Peasant activists were often outside Gandhi's control; and this threat to cohesion and discipline made him very ambivalent towards wide rural participation. His relationship with India's peasantry illustrated the problems any continental leader or organisation faced in trying to accommodate ‘national’ appeals and tactics to the diverse and often specifically local needs of rural groups — an accommodation which was difficult, dangerous yet essential in some degree if nationalist movements were to be broadly based.