scholarly journals Editorial: the American Century in Europe

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-126
Author(s):  
H. L. WESSELING

In 1999, the Whitney Museum of American Art had a very successful exhibition called The American Century. Indeed, there were two exhibitions, The American Century, Part I about the first half of the 20th century and Part II dealing with the following 50 years. The presentation was divided up into decades, each of them having its own motto. The one for the 1950s was: ‘America takes command’. This may sound rather martial but the motto is indeed very appropriate, as one could argue that as from then on American leadership also included cultural leadership.The name of the exhibition, ‘The American Century’, was of course derived from the title of the famous article that Henry Luce, the editor/publisher of journals such as Life and Time, published in Life on 17 February 1941. Luce wanted the Americans to play a major role in the war for freedom and democracy that was in progress at that time and the building of the better world that would have to come after that. In his article Luce insisted that ‘our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals’. The idea of America as a world power and, indeed, as the world power of the future, is, of course, much older than the concept of the 20th century as the American century. Already in 1902, the British liberal journalist and advocate of world peace through arbitration, W.T. Stead published a book with the title The Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. According to Stead, the heyday of the British Empire was over and the US was the Empire of the future. The enormous success of America was due to three things: education, production and democracy. Britain's choice was between subjugation or cooperation. Stead even proposed the merger of the two countries. In the following decade, this idea that America was Britain's successor and that the two countries should – and could – form a union because of their intimate familiarity, became popular among British writers.

2011 ◽  

The US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq led to more than a million people being killed, displaced five million from their homes and shattered countless more lives. It was a colossal, premeditated war crime. Leaders of governments in the countries responsible for this enormity seek to minimise and forget about it: to ‘move on’. We must not let them, because they want to retain the option of making the same political decisions, condemning more innocent people to death, somewhere else in the future. Contributors to this book are united in saying: never again. They examine how and why this unmitigated disaster for humanity was allowed to happen, and how we can prevent it being repeated. And they imagine more peaceful ways to engage with conflicts and crises in times to come. It raises a question: what will you do to help end war and build peace?


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Arcuri

This article discusses a number of pitfalls of the US-Tuna II Panel Report. This Report is interesting because it offers an occasion to reflect on some provisions of the Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) Agreement, which may be crucial for the assessment of the legality of environmental labelling regimes. The most troubling part of the Report is the one dealing with the trade-restrictive nature of the measure. The Panel seems to have relied on a test by which if a measure does not reach its objectives perfectly, any other ineffective measures adopted with allegedly the same goals can be judged as a valid less-trade restrictive alternative. In other words, two wrongs seem to make a right in the view of the Panel; a conclusion that, for obvious reasons, will not be greeted with enthusiasm by environmentalists.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 242-245
Author(s):  
Debora Card ◽  
Craig Nelson

Purpose With the US unemployment rate at 50-year lows and the increased use of automation expected to force organizations to replace or retrain over 25 per cent of their workforce, enterprises need new ways to re-skill employees to prepare for future needs. Design/methodology/approach The authors spoke with HR leaders of different enterprises to see how they will adapt to the future of work with the combination of automation in the workplace. After gaining insights from multiple sources, they were able to come to some conclusions on how the future of work is shaping up to be. Findings After gaining insights, they were able to find that companies that seek to combine the best of human ingenuity, empathy and change resilience with the prudent use of automation and re-skilling will be leading the workforce of the future. Originality/value This paper from ISG was created to give insights into Strategic HR Review from real customers and research conducted. This paper gives valuable insights on how enterprises are actually re-skilling employees to adapt to the rise of automation and IT skills gap.


Tempo ◽  
1994 ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
Bret Johnson

Among established American composers, Jacob Druckman's music remains unique in the breadth of its range, the mastery of its orchestration and the totality of its expressive power. There is little point in spending too much effort in drawing comparisons with some of his closest contemporaries and, in any event, such comparisons are hard to come by. He has had a remarkable career: as an academic, as composer-in-residence to the New York Philharmonic, as a conductor (he has conducted a number of his works with the BBC Philharmonic), as artistic director of many festivals, and as lecturer and administrator. He now devotes as much times as he can to composing, but whatever the future brings, there can be little doubt that he has already made a major contribution to the growth and development of 20th-century music.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Cajetan Iheka

Mineral extraction in Africa has exacerbated ecological degradation across the continent. This article focuses on the example of the Niger Delta scene of oil exploration depicted in Michael Watts and Ed Kashi’s multimedia project, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Analyzing the infringement on human and nonhuman bodies due to fossil fuel extraction, I read the Delta, inscribed in Watts and Kashi’s image-text, as an ecology of suffering and as a site of trauma. Although trauma studies tend to foreground the past and the present, I argue that Curse of the Black Gold invites serious consideration of trauma of the future, of-the-yet-to-come, in apprehending the problematic of suffering in the Delta. I conclude with a discussion of the ethics of representing postcolonial wounding, which on the one hand can create awareness of ecological degradation and generate affect, but which on the other hand, exploits the vulnerability of the depicted and leaves an ecological footprint.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Burri

The autonomy robots enjoy is understood in different ways. On the one hand, a technical understanding of autonomy is firmly anchored in the present and concerned with what can be achieved now by means of code and programming; on the other hand, a philosophical understanding of robot autonomy looks into the future and tries to anticipate how robots will evolve in the years to come. The two understandings are at odds at times, occasionally they even clash. However, not one of them is necessarily truer than the other. Each is driven by certain real-life factors; each rests on its own justification. This article discusses these two “views of robot autonomy” in depth and witnesses them at work at two of the most relevant events of robotics in recent times, namely the Darpa Robotics Challenge, which took place in California in June 2015, and the ongoing process to address lethal autonomous weapons in humanitarian Geneva, which is spurred on by a “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots”.


1967 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Åke Ström
Keyword(s):  

In point of principle, Christianity does not give room for any belief in fate. Astrology, horoscopes, divination, etc., are strictly rejected. Belief in fate never disappeared in Christian countries, nor did it in Scandinavia in Christian times. Especially in folklore we can find it at any period:  People believed in an implacable fate. All folklore is filled up with this belief in destiny. Nobody can escape his fate. The future lies in the hands of fate, and the time to come takes its form according to inscrutable laws. The pre-Christian period in Scandinavia, dominated by pagan Norse religion, and the secularized epoch of the 20th century, however, show more distinctive and more widespread beliefs in fate than does the Christian period. The present paper makes a comparison between these forms of belief.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-166
Author(s):  
Alan Dupont

Governments and telecommunications companies have invested heavily in measures designed to protect overall system security. But these measures may not be enough if China is successful in setting the rules and designing the architecture of a new internet, because the one-party state’s internet vision reflects authoritarian values that are diametrically opposed to ours. China has suggested a radical change to the way the internet functions to the International Telecommunications Union. This would bake authoritarianism into the architecture underpinning the web, giving state-run internet service providers granular control over citizens’ use. The authoritarian state’s ability to monitor and control undersea fibre optic cables is emerging as a major national security issue for Australia and other democracies. The world could split into two separate information worlds, one led by the US and the other by China. A Balkanised internet is not in Australia’s interest. We must engage with friends and allies to come up with a fit-for-purpose world wide web that is more efficient, secure, user friendly and compatible with democracy.


2011 ◽  
pp. 489-496
Author(s):  
Ted Becker

Up until very recent times in Western political philosophy, theory, science, and discourse, the words predominantly used to describe the democratic pole of Aristotle’s political continuum were direct democracy, indirect democracy, social democracy, and, in Aristotelian terms, republic or representative democracy. The latter half of the 20th century, however, saw dramatic changes in democracy around the world in its spread, variation in form, and in the use of the word. In fact, there have been a number of books in recent years that have discussed a wide array of models or degrees of democracy (Held, 1996; Sartori, 1987). Phrases such as participatory democracy, managed democracy, strong democracy (Barber, 1984), and semidirect democracy (Toffler & Toffler, 1994) are just some of the clusters of terms now used to define particular kinds of democracy that exist or are theorized to be better forms of it. Also, as the 20th century drew toward a close, there was a virtual consensus among Western political scientists that a potentially dangerous schism has grown between the citizens of both representative and social democracies and their governing elites. Indicators of such are public-opinion polls that manifest an increasing discontent with the political class and politicians (usually termed alienation) and a general decline in voter turnout (albeit with occasional upticks). Most of this dissatisfaction with, or alienation from, various forms of representative democracy is considered to be due to the growth of the influence of those who lavish large sums of money on the public’s representatives in these political systems. Another widely perceived cause of this gap between the people and their governments is the inertia of bloated, entrenched bureaucracies and their failure to acknowledge the wishes of the general public in policy implementation. Both of these phenomena seem to be present in all modern, industrialized, representative democracies, and they even seem to become manifest in the youngest, least industrialized countries as well. For example, in the fall of 2004, Cerkez-Robinson (2004) reported that the turnout in the Bosnian national election had fallen precipitously because most Bosnians are tired of repeated fruitless elections. As this complex problem in modern representative democracies seems to have become systemic, a potential technological solution has also come upon the scene. This involves the previously unimaginable proliferation of information and communications technologies of the late 20th century and early 21st century. This new and rich mixture of rapid, electronic, interactive communications has been seen by many political thinkers and actors as an excellent medium by which to close the gap between the people of representative democracies and their elected and administrative officials. This has led to a plethora of new adjectives and letters to prefix the word democracy, each referring to some theoretical or experimentally tested improvement in the present and future forms and practices of both direct and/or indirect democracy using ICTs. Thus, in the past decade or so of reinventing government (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992), we have come to learn of such new ideas and ideals of democracy as electronic democracy (or e-democracy), digital democracy, cyberdemocracy, e-government, and teledemocracy (Becker, 1981; this listing is far from exhaustive.) Taken together, they demonstrate that the future of democracy around the world is in flux, that there is a broadly perceived need by those in and outside government for some changes that will ultimately benefit the general public in various aspects of governance, and that these new technologies are seen by many as part of the solution. As alluded to above, there are numerous experiments and projects along these lines that have been completed, many are in progress, and there are multitudes to come that probably will be a part of any such transformation in the future of democracy on this planet.


Author(s):  
T. M. Luhrmann ◽  
R. Padmavati

Persons with schizophrenia and other serious psychotic disorders often experience a wide range of auditory events. We call them “voices,” but in fact, people hear scratching, buzzing, bells. They hear voices inside their heads and voices that seem to come from outside, from the world. Sometimes the voices are clear; sometimes, indistinct. Sometimes they make kind and even admiring remarks (“You’re the one. You’re the one I came for.”) Sometimes they are horribly mean. Sometimes they command, and sometimes they comment. In general, on average, people with schizophrenia in India are more likely to experience their voices as people they know or as gods, and in general the voices are more benign than they are for many patients in the US. That may make it easier to live with them. This chapter considers the voice-hearing experience of a Chennai housewife with schizophrenia.


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