The subject of this chronicle is not the current war in Iraq, or direct filmic treatments of that war, even though these have already begun to be made: witness James Longley's documentary Iraq in Fragments (2005), Philip Haas's fiction feature The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield's docudrama Battle for Haditha (2007), and Kathryn Bigelow's thriller The Hurt Locker (2009). Nor is my subject metaphorical movie treatments of a “present” conflict, like the Iraq or Afghan one, through the lens of a past war (be it World War II, Vietnam, or Korea). No, my subject here is two films, produced in the twenty-first century, that are directly about World War II: Clint Eastwood's unique “double feature,” Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of them about the same World War II battle, the first picture made from the American point of view, the second from the Japanese perspective. (The only remotely comparable work I know is The Human Condition [1961], Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy of films about one Japanese man's continuing, and harrowing, experiences during the Second World War.)

Eastwood's pictures deserve comment precisely because, though they are World War II films made during a subsequent, unpopular war, together they are not meant (as were How I Won the War [1967] and Catch-22 [1970] vis-à-vis Vietnam) to be the metaphorical lens through which we are meant to view the Iraqi conflict (except in the most generalized sense, that war is hell).

Introduction to Meshchaninov

Very little work by the theorists of Japhetidology have appeared in English translation, and so the Anglophone reader has hitherto had to rely on secondhand accounts, many of which were written in the midst of the Cold War and marked by its oversimplifications and rhetoric. Only a few scattered works by Nikolai Marr have ever appeared in English, generally in publications that are now difficult to obtain, and the work of some of the most talented scholars who worked within the trend have never been translated or even discussed in any sustained fashion. There are probably good reasons that Marr's own tortuous musings have never attracted a dedicated translator, for they frequently try the patience even of native Russian speakers, but this cannot be said of all the scholars who espoused some version of Japhetic Theory. It is with this in mind that we offer Ivan Meshchaninov's ‘Theses’ on Japhetidology, which were published at the beginning of his 1929 book Introduction to Japhetidology (Vvedenie v iafetidologüu), in which the author aimed to provide a systematic and accessible overview of the field. The book was published as one of a series of monographs of the Institute of the Comparative History of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (Institut sravnitel'noi istorü literatur i iazykov Zapada i Vostoka) in Leningrad that included such well-known works as Pavel Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenü, 1928), Valentin Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, 1929) and Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskü's Art (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, 1929).

Background

Since its creation out of the prior General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has attracted the interests of many. Individuals, corporations, governments, policy makers, NGOs, and academics are drawn to study this international organisation which has in such a short time made significant impact on the lives of all people in our global community.

With over 20,000 pages of legal documents comprising WTO negotiated agreements over trade and other trade related issues and a plethora of decisions reached under the various dispute settlement cases brought before the Dispute Settlement Body of the Organisation, the legal framework of the WTO presents a formidable mass of scholarly material. Research into the activities of the organisation has been remarkable and varied. It has ranged from analyses of the general practicability of a rules-based approach to trade regulation, to recurrent arguments over the potential gains of participation in a rules-based system for less developed country members of the Organisation.

This latter scope of research activity has occupied the interests of scholars in both developing and developed countries. Most of the work done in this area has been preoccupied with identifying the importance of global market integration for developing countries.

Almost twenty years ago I began researching British travel writing relating to the first century of Irish tourism, 1750–1850. Gradually, two paths of enquiry opened up. One concerned how the travelers looked at and sought to account for the Irish landscape and the people they encountered during their tours. This involved investigating the aesthetic, social and ideological biases British tourists brought to the encounter with Ireland and how these preconceptions influenced their ultimate inability to understand pre-Famine Ireland. Based on this research, I published in 2008 Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland.

While tourism provided a context for that book, its focus on the travel writers and their opinions left no room for any real exploration of the phenomenon of tourism itself. The century or so prior to the Great Famine (1845–1852) saw the emergence of modern tourism based primarily on landscape, whether in the carefully designed parklands of the great estates or amid mountains, lakes and sea cliffs. Ireland was in the forefront of the development of the scenic pleasure tour. In fact, the foundations of Irish tourism were laid during the century from 1750–1850. The present book is, therefore, concerned with the evolution of tourism in Ireland and the creation of the Irish tourist experience.

In the second decade of the twentieth century two historical events occurred that were quite incommensurable, but which exerted a decisive influence on the development of the study of language in Russia and then the USSR. The first was the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the social changes that followed in their wake, and the second was the paradigm shift in linguistics, traditionally connected with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which also first became known in Russia in 1917.

Of course paradigm shifts do not occur all at once. New ideas of one type or another were announced before Saussure, and in Russia many ideas appeared significantly earlier, with the conceptions of Mikolaj Kruszewski and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay proving especially important. Yet in Russia, as in other European countries, the nineteenth-century linguistic paradigm, based on the recognition of historical linguistics is the only scientific method, and the comparative-historical method as the only rigorous method, continued to dominate the discipline until 1917, and in many respects even longer. One example will suffice. In Russia today, and in the USSR before that, courses in contemporary Russian language maintain a leading place in the training of student philologists, who specialize in Russian. Yet Petr S. Kuznetsov recalled that when on completing his postgraduate studies in 1930, he had to teach a course on the contemporary Russian language, he did not know what to do at first.

The kernel of what would eventually become the film of Forbidden Games (1952) was a somber and disquieting screenplay that its author, François Boyer, found impossible to sell. He expediently repackaged the contents as a novel, published in 1947 under the title The Secret Game and virtually ignored in France, but which enjoyed a major, if freakish, commercial success in America. Unexpectedly, it now looked like a hot property, so René Clément and the screenwriting partners Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost took Boyer's film script-cum-novel and turned it back into a screenplay. But that wasn't the end of the movie's tortuous prehistory. Forbidden Games was originally planned as a humble short subject – the middle section of a three-part omnibus or anthology film to be called Cross My Heart and Hope to Die. This larger project got shelved after financing fell through, and the existing footage composed no more than a vignette. Impressed by its lyricism and grace, however, the producer Robert Dorfmann urged Clément to expand the material to feature length.

Like many great films, then, Forbidden Games sprang serendipitously from a chain of accidents, failures, and stopgaps, none of which are remotely evident onscreen. Clément's direction is so scrupulously measured, and the theme so archetypal, that every shot achieves a kind of fatedness.

Trade, the WTO and Development – An Introduction

The dictionary definition of trade is: ‘the buying and selling of goods and services; a commercial activity of a particular kind’. Development signifies a progress from a less sophisticated phase to a more advanced stage. It is defined as ‘a new stage in a changing situation; a new product or idea’. Synonyms include: advance; betterment; change; enlargement; growth; progress.

In the past, ‘development’ remained within the realm of discourse on economic and social rights of individuals and societies around the world. As such, development work is largely credited to the activities of international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and alliances between nations under which some financial assistance is offered to the less developed countries of the world, such as the G8. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) with its rules-based system, its compulsory dispute settlement mechanism and its promotion of the free trade ideology, has not hitherto been counted as an international development agency. Therefore, it could be argued that ascribing a development character to this trade organisation may well be beyond its circle of influence. It is important to assess the validity of both sides of the argument.

Trade and development, the two concepts which form the basis of this study, must necessarily be assessed in the context of their relationship within the WTO. The starting point is to appreciate the WTO: what it stands for, how it came into being, and how it functions in the trading environment. The understanding, both of the WTO and of most trade practitioners, is that the Organisation is principally, a trade negotiating body. The trade negotiation role of the WTO in the multilateral trade arena is not in doubt. Part of the appeal of a regulated system for multilateral trade even under the umbrella of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was and still is the accessibility it affords its membership to negotiate on a wide range of trade and economic related issues.

International trade has grown in the past century largely because the world’s nations have expressed a joint interest in eliminating protectionist domestic legislation and in promoting the free trade mechanism for trade in goods (and services).

Introduction

To fully appreciate the obligations and the impact of the rules-based system, one has to go beyond identifying that the WTO is a trade-negotiating body. It is in the detailed provisions of the respective Agreements that one may discern a true glimpse of the potential which trade has for development. In this selected study we opt for a more fundamental approach in assessing the dynamics of trade and economic development by taking a closer look at one such Agreement: the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures – the SPS Agreement. The essence of the SPS Agreement lies in the demands for public health and safety which is a universal need, placed alongside the need to ensure that the protection of public health and safety does not constitute the basis of arbitrary restrictions on trade by national governments. Thus while the importance of public health and safety is acknowledged, the adoption of unfair restrictive trade measures lacking scientific basis is denied.

It is not too difficult to understand the reasoning behind this perspective. Regulating the international market and all trade and economic endeavour carried out therein must be seen to have a positive impact on not only producers, but also on consumers. This is because when a rule of international trade reaches into the domestic environment as they all inevitably do, its only justification must be that it is well balanced against the legitimate aims of the domestic regulations. Thus trade rules are negotiated with the objective of ensuring that the multilateral co-operation under the WTO takes into consideration those essential aspects of societal regulation which are for the common good. On the other hand, domestic trade policies and measures which have not been sufficiently backed by science cannot, riding on the need for public health and safety be allowed to restrict trade, a restriction which may only be a disguised form of protectionism.

This case study provides a more in depth and empirical study of the benefits and challenges which WTO Members face in exercise of their obligations as WTO Members. Particular emphasis will be on developing countries’ capacity to execute their obligations under the Agreement. Our study will be in three broad parts.

Dublin—In the Shadow of the Grand Tradition

Although Ireland's principal tourist attractions were located in its picturesque countryside, once landed in Dublin, many visitors toured the capital city before setting out for the glens, mountains and lakes. In fact, many travel writers devoted considerable space to describing the Empire's “second city,” partly because of genuine interest in Dublin and partly in response to the touring habits established by the urban-centered Grand Tour, to which Georgian Dublin itself owed much of its character. Like their English counterparts, Anglo-Irish grandees returned from their Italian tours with paintings, statues, architectural designs and sketches to be incorporated into their townhouses and country estates. Many of Dublin's buildings, public and private, reflected what one observer, referring to the new Parliament building, called “the true Italian taste.” Working with architect Sir William Chambers, Lord Charlemont drew upon his experiences in Italy to design his Palladian mansion on Rutland Square (today's Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art) and his exquisite miniature hideaway, the Casino, on his Marino estate overlooking Dublin Bay. C. T. Bowden described it as “one of the most beautiful and elegant seats in the world.”

By the middle of the eighteenth century the capital was already on its way to becoming a great Georgian city. Land on both sides of the River Liffey had been reclaimed and the river channeled along the city's quays.