Since the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) entered into force in December 1993, discussion of access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits (ABS) has penetrated intellectual property rights (IPR) forums at the national, regional, and international levels. The debates have spawned a series of derivative issues that now constitute a full-fledged legislative agenda. Under the umbrella of the CBD, one finds the implications of IPR for biosafety, agrobiodiversity, and traditional knowledge (TK).

You lawyers must have uncorked the champagne a few weeks early in 1993! Or should I say “sparkling wine” if the bottle wasn't shipped out of Champagne, France? Nudge, nudge. (The interloper from the previous chapters is in fine form.)

Is expansion necessarily “progress?” How does one measure progress in reconciling IPR and the CBD or vice versa? The simplest way is to gauge the follow-up of IPR in the evolving framework of the CBD. Bean counters need beans to count. Nine Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the CBD have been held since the first one was convened in Nassau, Bahamas in 1994 and over one hundred decisions have been adopted. The official recommendations from the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advance (SBSTTA) also number in the hundreds. In terms of the quantity of bureaucratic infrastructures, almost all of the 190 countries which are party to the CBD, as of this writing, have at least a desk or an officer encharged with IPR issues.

Positivism has often been compared to the revolution brought about in the natural sciences by Galileo, Newton, Dalton and their ilk. Before them, scientists confined their attention to the question ‘why’ – why, for example, did things fall down and not up, why did a moving body come to a stop, why did a stone fall faster than a feather, and so on. Philosophers like Aristotle sought to answer the questions by saying that it was the inherent nature of bodies to fall and stay at rest, and that heavier bodies tended to fall faster than lighter things.

Around the time of the Renaissance, however, thinkers realised that their insistence on the question ‘why’ was misplaced. They instead began to examine the question ‘how’ – as in how bodies fell, how moving bodies came to a standstill, and so on. Doing so, they came up with a set of rules explaining natural phenomenon that were both logically consistent and in agreement with observed facts.

Similarly, prior to the advent of positivism, legal thinkers tried to construe the law in terms of its purpose. They postulated that it was a means to give effect to divine will, justice, morality and so forth. Consequently, many held that laws that did not conform to these purposes were not laws at all, that is, they were devoid of legal sanction.

The positivists, on the other hand, realised that a law's objective has little bearing on its validity.

Bulgaria joined the European Union (EU) as a full member state on 1 January 2007. This momentous event was the culmination of a long and demanding political project that has often been described as ‘Europeanization’. Although the first foundations of this project were laid fairly soon after the fall of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) regime in 1989, the pace was slow and it was only at the end of the 1990s that it really gained momentum. Over the intervening years the project had ebbed and flowed, but what kept the Bulgarian people committed was their strong belief that joining the EU would fill the wider political, economic and security vacuum which the dissolution of the communist bloc had produced. EU membership was popularly seen as a panacea that would allow Bulgaria to stabilize its newly born democratic system and overcome the economic problems of the post-communist transition. It was also seen as offering confirmation that the Bulgarians were really Europeans and that Bulgaria did belong to Europe.

This identity question partly arose from the very search for EU entry. Rejection would imply that the country lay outside the pale, and this possibility was repeatedly stressed by the political elite as they sought to justify the hardships the country had to bear in order to become part of the European mainstream. However, the question also had deeper historical roots, because being seen as Europeans is a political and cultural challenge that all the modern Balkan states have faced since their independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Dostoyevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov is constructed around the very complex and compelling ideal that action – committing an act and thereby causing something to be – is only one and perhaps a trivial element in the moral economy of guilt and wrongdoing. In the novel, all the brothers are guilty of their father's death, although only one of them has killed him, because each recognizes that he might have done so instead. Dostoyevsky plays with a not uncommon thought: the awareness of one's actual character traits sometimes warrants feelings of guilt and responsibility, ordinarily ascribed only to wrongdoers. We are responsible in this view, if we have the sort of character that could have done it, even though we did not actually do it; Gunter Grass' sardonic and rueful introspections trade on this thought, and much of the literature on collective violence, during partition, derives its power from holding us responsible by asking: are you the sort of person who could have done it? Even others wrongdoing can impugn our character and our values make us feel guilty and responsible, even if we did not ourselves do anything wrong. All we need to do is counterfactually establish that we could have done it. The suspicion that one might oneself be capable of acting wrongly or monstrously is an instance of what Christopher Kutz has called counterfactual guilt.

The present millennium is different from all earlier such occasions. We have the most delicate and advanced scientific knowledge, the most capable and sophisticated technology, the fifth generation microprocessors with knowledge and information; but do we have wisdom to make use of all these, so that there is human face impressed on these achievements? One of the features of human history has been that people, resources, ideas and consciousness move from one place to another, and in the wake of globalisation they are moving all too fast and getting transformed gradually; but what has been the role of values in such movements and transformations? Is our identity getting lost in the process of globalisation? Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10th December 1948 by the United Nations Organization, there have been intense and endless debates and discussions so far as the legal, political, cultural, ethnic, social and philosophical aspects are concerned. Indeed, the need for the Declaration of Human Rights has arisen from the sense of insecurity faced by human beings after World War II. Moreover, it raises the questions of human dignity, self-respect, right to live and work in the world that has become the driving force and furtherance of human rights. As a matter of fact, globalisation has intervened human life and activity since 1975 onwards, and since 1990 it has become unavoidable and inevitable.

Introduction

In times of ‘cultural studies’ as a leading paradigm in historiography, a paper on institution building seems to be utterly outdated. Looking at institution building seems to belong to the suspicious tradition of ‘modernization theories’ in which institutions and their functional role were taken as crucial for any process of social change. The topic sounds like being part of the famous macrohistorical ‘master narratives’ of the past decades, focussing on ‘big structures’, but ignoring individuals and their experience, which for good reason have lost much of their attractiveness. In the opposite view, ‘Europeanization’ today is usually discussed in terms of identities, symbolic orders and cultural perceptions, but not in terms of structures or institutions. The newly risen interest in institutions that for a certain amount of time came up with the end of communism, in the meantime again has declined; even scholars, who in former times had little sense for culture in the explanation of social change, today have discovered culture as a crucial, if not as the decisive factor for ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ transformations. ‘Culture matters’, as S. Huntington and L. Harrison have claimed in a book discussing the preconditions of economic and social change. Francis Fukuyama has figured out that the cultural good of ‘trust’ is a major criterion for successful economic development, not formal institutions, and David Landes has explained world wide economic inequalities in terms of cultural preconditions.

Taking intergenerational differences, inter alia, into account, if the villagers, and people who shared the communes, districts and provinces, of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and Kim Il-sung could accommodate men of their respective calibres there might have been no Korean War or Vietnam War as well as the last Chinese Civil War (compromises on contradictory ambitions or aspirations that had failed to be ironed out seemed to be a fundamental cause of disagreements).

In the wake of the Potsdam Declaration and post-war civil wars in China, Korea and Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference as well as the Vietnam War, etc. revolutionaries or activists like Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap or Ngo Dinh Diem as well as the equivalents of their predecessors in due course helped to bring what was considered as the Vietnamese or Annamese ethnie or race to the public attention in the West.

Rights over genetic resources and traditional knowledge (TK) are founded in the law and the protracted discussion over access and benefit sharing (ABS) is largely a question of the law. A primary task of the Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain (MUBIO) is to clarify a few basic facts of the:

1. legal commitment that States have “sovereign rights” over the genetic resources within their borders

2. complementary commitment to respect, preserve, recognize traditional knowledge (TK) and when consent is given, promote its wider application, and “encourage the equitable sharing” benefits derived from such knowledge

3. international recognition of the primary governance principles of due process of law, equal protection, and equity, and

4. trajectory of the Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) and bilateral free-trade accords.

Once such knowledge is acquired (Bloom's Level One), the visitor can begin to participate in the international conversation about the evolving Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

You mean to tell me, that after all that hullabaloo about climbing Bloom's pyramid, you're kicking me down from Level Six to Level One? (The interloper from the previous chapters seems especially irascible, irritated for having agreed to listen to more than one legal argument, after a lifetime of telling the joke about the blood in the water, the sharks, and professional courtesy.)

The manner in which the law deals with bioprospecting is a “lawyers derby” of academic publications and doctoral dissertations.

Where does one begin to discuss a tour-de-force? Perhaps the best place is the beginning. After the title page, the editor, Joseph Henry Vogel, dedicates the anthology to Darrell Posey who died in 2001 at the age of 53. Posey was a pioneer in the interdisciplinary analysis of “intellectual property rights” (IPR) and “traditional knowledge” (TK). He would often intervene at the Conference of the Parties (COP) during the public commentary and introduce himself “Darrell Posey, and I am proud to say I am not a lawyer.” Although the corpus of Posey's work is only mentioned briefly in the volume, his spirit is there on every page, especially his humor. As Posey showed us, “bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain” are not and cannot be the exclusive domain of the lawyers. The proposed museum is the latest attempt to broaden the dialog by creating a place which, as the subtitle of the anthology indicates, will also be process and a philosophy.

Where does one go next in discussing this roller-coaster ride of an introduction and six chapters, crisply written and packed with original ideas? In his capacity as editor, Vogel provides an easy solution to this seemingly impossible problem. It is the same one he uses to weave the chapters together into a meaningful whole: an interloper. I will review the anthology by focusing on how the interloper interlopes in each chapter.

I would like to sketch in this part of the book a fairly simplistic as well as surgical background overview of the warring picture of former French Indo- China as well as Vietnam, part of which appeared on the policy-making agenda of the last years of Sir Winston S. Churchill at Number Ten. As such, this Preface also partly extends, in a way, the broad content of the first chapter, the Introduction, insofar as an overall background treatment is concerned.

The staffing of a salary man bureaucracy in a decolonized South East Asian Greeneland might also be likened to the direction and movement of an army corps that might fare better or worse with different terrains and weathers. Greeneland is defined in an Oxford dictionary as a ‘world’ of the characters in the noveldom of Graham Greene which includes The Quiet American–first published in 1955–referring to the last years of the French Union in South East Asia with many Vietnamese and others leading a life fraught with instability and danger. The Quiet American was probably the first rather well-known fiction of an established writer in Great Britain who mentioned the name ‘Viet Nam’ of a country in the Far East to his readers. In this respect and connection, a South East Asian or Asian Greeneland is mentioned in my book when Vietnam or a country comparable with the Vietnamese nation of the late 20th and early 21st century is touched upon albeit necessarily only at the outer edges of the work for some more or less pertinent vagueness or hypothesization without any ambitious attempts of alchemy.

Introduction

To be sure, sexuality is still not seen as a serious area for academic enquiry in India. The two constituencies that have taken sexuality up as a complex for research and action have been the women's movement and Women's Studies and the same-sex rights movement in India (more popularly known as the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and, increasingly, as the ‘queer’ movement, another indication of how globalisation matters given the currency of this term in contexts like India despite its provenance in US academia). Both these constituencies – feminists and LGBT folk – are themselves fledgling and marginal to mainstream political and academic life in India, the two arenas in which they seek to make interventions. Consequently, their claim that sexuality needs to be focused on is also fledgling and marginal.

Both movements have used the academic and the cultural as important vehicles in the articulation of their positions and these positions have been built as much on the streets as in theoretical and academic knowledge production. Further, this articulation has borrowed heavily from the available languages of feminism and sexuality-based movements in the West (by which I mean Western Europe and North America), as the presence of both movements in the West preceded their formal formation as movements in the Third world. Both the women's movement and the LGBT one from their inception here have been accused of being imports from the West, inauthentic and inorganic to the Indian contexts.

Dharma has been one of the most dominant and pervasive concepts of Indian view and way of life. It has been the foundation of the entire life and culture of India underlying all her achievements in the fields of science, philosophy, literature, arts, morality, sociality, polity, religion and spirituality. As Prof. Cromwell Crawford has truly opined, ‘To know India try grasping the myriad forms of Dharma, for in the depths of this single word lies an entire civilization’. (Crawford, 1967: XVI) Dharma is an extremely rich and polymorphous concept embracing diverse though not unrelated senses. In the course of several centuries it has acquired wide ramifications of meanings and has been used in different contexts–metaphysical, moral, religious, artistic, social, political, legal, etc. But its basic law-centered meaning has remained unchanged. Because of its proliferous nature no one all-inclusive definition of dharma can be provided and its precise meaning is to be understood from the context in which it has been used.

Indian culture is characterized by a spiritual orientation and an integral and holistic approach. Its varied and variegated fabric is interwoven with multiple ideas and ideals, thoughts and practices among which the notion of dharma is both pivotal and foundational. It is like a luminous jewel that not only enlightens Indian culture but also has the potentiality of illuminating the entire world culture and civilization.