The politics of rescue
To intervene or not? - this should always be a hard question. Even in the case of a brutal civil war or a politically induced famine or the massacre of a local minority, the use of force in other people s countries should always generate hesitation and anxiety. So it does today among small groups of concerned people, some of whom end up supporting, some resisting interventionist policies. But many governments and many more politicians seem increasingly inclined to find the question easy: the answer is not! Relatively small contingents of soldiers will be sent to help out in cases where it isn’t expected that they will have to fight-thus the United States in Somalia, the Europeans in Bosnia, the French in Rwanda. The aim in all these countries (though we experimented briefly with something more in Mogadishu) is not to alter power relations on the ground, but only to ameliorate their consequences - to bring food and medical supplies to populations besieged and bombarded, for example, without interfering with the siege or bombardment.
The Macedonian Syndrome
An historical Model of International Relations and Political Development By Myron WEINER (Center for International Studies, M.I.T, Boston)
LEFT AND RIGHT IN THE POST COMMUNIST COUNTRIES
By giving a short overview of the relevant politicological literature for the ideological positions of political parties in post-communist countries, the purpose of this work is to reveal to which extent these differ from the conditions and processes in established democracies and what these differences owe to. The knowledge gained will serve as a reference framework to analyze the ideological profilation of the parties in the Macedonian post-communist society. Here, we will pay special attention on the position of the political subjects (political parties and citizens/voters) on the two-dimensional specter: left - right and conservatism - liberalism. With the use of the data from the empirical research of the political identities in Republic of Macedonia, the author has come to the conclusion that in the Macedonian case the intriguing Kitschelt’s thesis (of 1992) according to which economic liberalism in post-communist societies is accompanied by political liberalism (double liberalism) has only partially been confirmed.