From The Economist print edition
America and China need each other, but they are a long way from trusting each other, says James Miles.
“OUR future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe,” said the American president as he contemplated the extraordinary commercial opportunities that were opening up in Asia. More than a hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt made this prediction, American leaders are again looking across the Pacific to determine their own country’s future, and that of the rest of the world. Rather later than Roosevelt expected, China has become an inescapable part of it.
Back in 1905, America was the rising power. Britain, then ruler of the waves, was worrying about losing its supremacy to the upstart. Now it is America that looks uneasily on the rise of a potential challenger. A shared cultural and political heritage helped America to eclipse British power without bloodshed, but the rise of Germany and Japan precipitated global wars. President Barack Obama faces a China that is growing richer and stronger while remaining tenaciously authoritarian. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.
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Congratulations to Joanne Jung-wook Hong, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in global studies for her paper Power of McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’: Globalization of American Culture and Value
Abstract: This paper aims at exploring and discussing how powerfully McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ contributes to globalization of American culture and value in ‘alliance’ with representation and hence ideology in the American animation industry. In particular, as a critical linguistic research, the paper focuses on investigating intertextual and ideological meaning constructions in American animation and McDonald’s promotional discourse for Happy Meal. The discussion will be mainly based on social semiotic analysis and intertextual/interdiscursive analysis of American animations and McDonald’s global Happy Meal promotional leaflets, focusing on construction of socio-cultural values and identities of America and McDonald’s.
If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.
Written by Timothy Garton Ash The New York Review of Books
BOOKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ESSAY
1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
by Mary Elise Sarotte
Princeton University Press, 321 pp., $29.95
Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
by Stephen Kotkin, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross
Modern Library, 197 pp., $24.00
Der Vorhang Geht Auf: Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa
by György Dalos
Munich: C.H. Beck, 272 pp., e19.90
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Written by Various Editors Dissent Magazine
NINETEEN-EIGHTY-NINE WAS a year of historic revolution and possibility. Popular and often nonviolent uprisings overturned communist rule in much of Eastern and Central Europe; and pro-democracy movements began to challenge its legitimacy in the Soviet Union and China. “Nothing in our past thinking, or in anyone else’s, prepared us for the remarkable turn of events,” wrote Irving Howe in 1990. “So much the worse for theory, so much the better for life!”
But has life changed dramatically for the better? While many economies have begun to liberalize, political illiberalism still lurks. And while many on the left hoped that social democracy might replace communism, many post-Soviet nations have adopted the policies of neoliberalism and the language of nationalism. “Any great social change unleashes great expectations,” Adam Michnik observed in 1999. “And therefore, of course, it leads to great disappointments.”
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By Richard Spencer Telegraph.co.uk
Dubai’s wealth came quickly, and it got a little carried away: artificial islands, gaudy hotels and pointy skyscrapers, spectacular or tasteless as they are, according to your viewpoint. But at first, wealth brought amenities we take for granted: running water, electricity, roads. Dubai’s first electric lights were hooked up in the Sixties. It put in taps and telephones around the same time.
When the Emir of Qatar married a Dubai princess, the dowry was to pay for the city’s first tarmac road; a year later, he paid for a bridge connecting the emirate’s two halves. He probably felt sorry for his backward neighbour, which had just been taken over by his eccentric new father-in-law, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum.
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