Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The debate about international financial architecture is ending in a whimper. This is too bad for Asian voters and for Asian democracies. Financial faults both at home and abroad were the seeds of the Asian crisis. But it was nurtured by unfortunate politics in Thailand, Indonesia and Korea. The end of the crisis should not mean the end of efforts to make political life a part of the solution.
The congressional Republican party hit bottom last week. A majority of Republican House members cast two deeply irresponsible votes on the U.S. military action against Yugoslavia. No amount of Republican support for increased defense spending can cover up the shame of that vote. As GOP presidential front runner, Bush should lead and reiterate his position that America must win this war.
Combining keen political analysis with the unique perspective of a native observer, Lilia Shevtsova offers a valuable assessment of the forces that will shape the post-Yeltsin era.
The partition of Kosovo--let alone Macedonia--and the acceptance of solutions involving partition for the Caucasus will take courage on the part of Western leaders, because it would require deals (especially with Russia) which will be unpopular with Congress. But at a time when servicemen are being required to show courage in the field, it is not inappropriate to ask their leaders to do the same.
Why has Russian law not got stuck, although plenty of laws have been promulgated and all the legal bodies have undergone substantial reform? So why do not Russians trust and use the judicial system to a greater extent?
In making assessments of Russia's behavior in the world, it is critical that we recognize that Russia is not a totalitarian state ruled by a Communist Party with a single, clearly articulated foreign policy. That state disappeared in 1991. Rather, Russia is a democratizing state, and Russia's foreign policy, in turn, is a product of domestic politics in a pluralistic system.
This paper examines the problems of Russia's post-communist economic transformation. Its main thesis is that the Russian attempt at radical economic reform largely failed, because of extraordinary rent-seeking by old enterprise managers through export rents, subsidized credits, import subsidies and direct government subsidies, while they gained little from privatization.