Toward Olympics 2008: China's development in the reform period

Owen Bennett-Jones presents ‘Newshour’ and ‘The Interview’ for BBC World Service Radio. He has reported from all over the world and was the BBC Correspondent in Islamabad between 1998 and 2001. He is currently preparing a second edition of his book Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

世界大变局与中美日三国战略选择

在世界大变局中,战后国际格局重大变化的主要标志是“世界老二”易位。苏联、日本皆不例外;21世纪以来欧盟也由盛转衰。未来国际格局可能有三种前景:1.中美两极对抗体制;2.中美竞争合作的“两极多元体制”;3.世界各大力量多元并存,构建多元一体的人类命运共同体。这要看世界潮流是走向和平多边主义还是暴力多边主义。中国实现伟大复兴后的战略选择是“济弱扶倾”,为世界可持续发展与可持续安全做贡献。日本面临的战略选择是:继续在《日本国宪法》下走和平发展道路,还是修改宪法,成为“能战国家”的一员,加入暴力强权的多边主义?坚持开放的地区主义与国际协调,还是搞排他经济集团,远交近攻,以中国为竞争对手?利用中美对立从中渔利,还是促进中美协调而避免在中美之间“选边站”?妥善处理中日两国围绕钓鱼岛归属认知争议和台湾问题,还是重走历史老路?囿于冷战思维和传统权力政治的现实主义决策逻辑,同中国搞战略对抗,还是树立共同、综合、合作、可持续安全的新安全观,与中国加强合作?这些战略选择将关乎未来30年的中日关系。     

International institutions and market expectations: Stock price responses to the WTO ruling on the 2002 U.S. steel tariffs

Many scholars assert that international institutions have little power to enforce laws, punish offenders, or force compliance. Others stress that international institutions are important actors, specifically in the regulation of international trade. In this paper, I show that the recent trade dispute over U.S. steel protection provides us with a critical case to evaluate the role of the World Trade Organization in settling trade disputes and specifically stabilizing expectations of market actors over future steel policy. I argue that stock prices can serve as an important tool in answering these questions. In an empirical analysis using daily steel stock prices, I find that during the 2002 WTO steel case, the WTO dispute mechanism helped market actors stabilize expectations of future trade policy.

The impact of the Second World War on postwar social spending

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.     

Sectoral linkages at the beginning of the 21st century: The role of Polish economy in global production structures

This paper provides a first attempt in analyzing the role of Polish economy in the production structure of the global economy in the early years of the 21st century. For the purpose of this analysis, we propose a new approach in which two most important aspects of interindustry linkages in a global input-output model are examined. Contrary to previous studies focused on output-oriented key sector analyses in post-communist CEE economies, we focus on a fundamental policy target variable – income per gross output. In order to analyze the issues in question in a dynamic framework, the empirical results are based on the 2000 and 2014 global intercountry input-output tables for the 28 EU countries as well as 15 other major countries in the world.     

Brexit: A Cliff Edge or a Small Bump in the Road?

It is becoming increasingly accepted, not least by the Prime Minister and opposition leadership, that the negotiation of a comprehensive trade relationship with the EU is necessary to prevent the UK economy falling off a ‘cliff edge’. This concern is shaping the UK's strategy towards negotiations with the EU and has provided at least part of the motivation for the UK to consider requesting a transition period to facilitate the Brexit process. But how accurate are these fears? What evidence is there for the existence of a ‘cliff edge’? How disastrous would it be for the UK to revert to trading with the EU on the same basis as most other countries in the world, namely according to World Trade Organisation rules? This article seeks to address these issues and it highlights a number of implications for policy makers which flow from understanding the available evidence a little more clearly.     

The Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage application: lessons from Myanmar on transnational advocacy networks

The announcement of 22 June 2014 from the World Heritage Committee that Pyu Ancient Cities had been added to the World Heritage List was significant for Myanmar, since it represented the country’s first World Heritage site. The World Heritage listing was the culmination of a process driven by a convergence of forces originating from within and outside of Myanmar. An interpretation of Pyu Ancient Cities as involving a transnational network of supporters echoes the work on transnational advocacy networks, which looks to phenomena involving transnational efforts to advance particular issues on behalf of activists against their government. This study examines Pyu Ancient Cities by producing a model that helps to illuminate the efficacy of its social network to engage in transnational advocacy.     

20世纪国际关系领域的基准时间:历史视角中的三次世界大战

基准时间是宏观历史过程中的临界点,标志着一连串的重大变革可能会在较长时间内延续。基准时间具有九条标准,可以分为一等基准时间、二等基准时间和三等基准时间。20世纪的基准时间主要包括三次世界大战(一战、二战和冷战),第二次世界大战前后发生的变革比第一次世界大战和冷战前后的变革都要来得更为深远。将20世纪的三个基准时间置于两个世纪的视角中加以审视,可以突出现代性革命,这种视角能够观察20世纪的三个基准时间在正在展开的"全球性变革"这一大的主题下是否会相互联接、是如何相互联接的。20世纪国际政治的关键事件,都应该被视为19世纪"全球性变革"所引发的发展态势和挑战的后期结果。     

The birth and development of the language of global development in light of trends in global population,international politics,economics and globalisation

The 1940s saw an intensification of worldwide interest in the problems of development and underdevelopment. One consequence of this was a rapid evolution of the language of global development. The reconstruction of its genesis is most commonly attempted through the analysis of literature on the subject and accounts by those who took part in or observed the debates of the time concerning the world’s development and structure. This article proposes a different approach which locates important events in the evolution of the modern language of global development on timelines tracing populational, political, socio-economic and civilisational processes.