The Decline of International Studies

1991 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 233-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Thompson

In a recent report by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, “Education in U.S. Schools of International Affairs,” Princeton's former president Robert F. Goheen presents several crucial factors in the apparent decline of international studies in the U.S. The private sector, which at first demanded broadly-educated professionals, have recently shown little enthusiasm for students of international affairs. This has resulted in lack of funding and lack of interest in the field of international studies. This is paradoxical primarily because the students of international affairs undergo a multidiscplinary curriculum, facilitating their adaptation to practically any field of work following graduation, contrary to those students who have chosen a strict and narrow profession. Unfortunately, much of the fault, according to the report lies with the universities and the graduates themselves, who fail to articulate properly their comparative essential advantage in the broad field of their education. Thompson expounds on a more serious ramification of the decline in interest in international studies: the imminent failure to foresee future international crises. As the case of Iraq's growing power in the Middle East has demonstrated, the U.S. looked the other way, toward the developments in the former Soviet Union, and was not able to act in time to circumvent Iraq's aggression. With the world looking to the U.S. for strategic leadership in ethics and power, Americans cannot afford to deny American youth a strong foundation and education in international studies.

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Dunlop

Given the headlong and convulsive pace of political change occurring in the republics of the former Soviet Union, predictions concerning future developments in that area of the world must necessarily be tenuous and hedged about with caveats. The question of the likely scale of in-migration from the other former union republics into the Russian Republic over the remainder of this decade is, however, so politically charged and so important that analysts and forecasters can ill afford to ignore it. One suspects that Western policy-makers are increasingly going to have to focus their attention upon the fate of the 25.3 million ethnic Russians living in that part of the former Soviet Union now called the “Near Abroad” (blizhnee zarubezh'e).


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benyamin Neuberger

The principle of national self-determination has been haunting the world since the French Revolution. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union alone 20 new “nation-states” were created in the 1990s—200 years after the French Revolution. They were all established on the basis of the principle of national self-determination. There may be no other term in modern political discourse which is used with more emotion and passion. Recent history has known many wars fueled by conflicting interpretations of self-determination. Woodrow Wilson thought that implementation of the principle of self-determination would lead to a better world, a world without wars and “safe for democracy.” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, had doubts. He suspected the concept of self-determination to be “loaded with dynamite” and capable of causing even more bloodshed because it “will raise hopes which can never be realized.”


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benno Torgler

Abstract Discussions about tax evasion often assume that tax evasion is not desirable. Thus, this paper analyses people’s value regarding tax evasion using the World Value Surveys. Our data analysis shows that tax morality did not fall significantly in the OECD and developing countries. On the other hand, there is a decline in tax morality for the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe countries. Furthermore, we find a significant correlation between tax morality and the size of shadow economy. Finally, we focus on constitutions, showing the importance of a legitimate political process.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-156
Author(s):  
Mediel Hove

This article evaluates the emergence of the new Cold War using the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts, among others. Incompatible interests between the United States (US) and Russia, short of open conflict, increased after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This article argues that the struggle for dominance between the two superpowers, both in speeches and deed, to a greater degree resembles what the world once witnessed before the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991. It asserts that despite the US’ unfettered power, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is now being checked by Russia in a Cold War fashion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107-136
Author(s):  
James C. Nicholson

Chapter Five discusses the origins of the International Race and the British contestants' transatlantic voyage to America. August Belmont II, chairman of the powerful Jockey Club in New York, convinced Benjamin Irish, the farmer and caterer of relatively modest means who owned Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, to agree to a match race against a to-be-determined American horse. Kentucky Derby champion Zev was the likeliest choice. Admiral Cary T. Grayson, friend and physician to former president Woodrow Wilson, owned the other leading American candidate, My Own. But Hildreth and Sinclair manipulated the selection process. Newspaper coverage of the procedural gamesmanship helped to hype the event. Sportswriters' profiles of the men associated with the English horse -- including jockey Steve Donoghue, who had risen from a rough industrial town to become the most famous rider in the world, and a modest second-generation Newmarket trainer named Basil Jarvis -- spread the ballyhoo nationwide.


2020 ◽  
pp. 75-96
Author(s):  
Ronald W. Schatz

The Labor Board vets insisted that they were always realistic and had no ideological convictions of any kind. This chapter argues that such a characterization is not accurate. Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, and the other veterans of the board’s staff were in truth utopians—not utopians as that term is usually imagined, but liberal reformers who believed that they could transform the world over time, one step at a time. The famous German sociologist Karl Mannheim termed that mindset “liberal-humanitarian utopian.” The chapter looks back to their youth to explain how they came to that worldview and how unarticulated utopian beliefs pervaded their teaching, writing, and other work. The chapter concludes with the prediction advanced by Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Charles Myers, and Frederick Harbison that the U.S. and Soviet systems would converge in the future--a conviction that appeared realistic in the latter 1980s and the early 1990s.


Author(s):  
S. Nazrul Islam

Chapter 4 provides a few case studies of rivers to illustrate the consequences of the Commercial approach. These rivers are: the Colorado River of the United States; the Murray-Darling river system of Australia; the Amu Darya and Syr Darya of the former Soviet Union; the Nile River of Africa; and the Indus River of South Asia. It shows that in each case, the application of the Commercial approach has led to river fragmentation and excessive withdrawal of water, leading to exhaustion of rivers, which in turn led to salinity intrusion and erosion, subsidence, and desiccation of the deltas. The ecology of the river basins has been damaged, including loss of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. In case of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers, this damage includes the destruction of the Aral Sea, once considered the second-largest inland waterbody of the world. In each case, the Commercial approach has led to conflicts among co-riparian countries.


Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.


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