One of the most unusual aspects of the Italian cinema of the late '50s and the '60s is the way in which it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Whereas the directors of the French New Wave each created a unique poetic universe, Italian cinema of the same period feels like a series of moons circling around one planet. Again and again, one encounters the identical sociological material, whether filtered through Michelangelo Antonioni's exacting nihilism, Luchino Visconti's luxurious emotionalism, Dino Risi's comic exuberance, or Valerio Zurlini's stirring sobriety. Over and over, one sees the same construction sites, quick-stop cafés, barren roadsides, and cramped apartments (owned by noisy, nosy landladies) that were constants of postwar Italian society. Most strikingly of all, these films feature a parade of young men outfitted in regulation white-collar attire yet betraying their essential inexperience – of the world itself as well as the work-world. That is, they are ill-equipped for a life of work and responsibility in a mechanized, high-efficiency world, and consequently they are lonesome for the nurturing comforts of home.

Of all the talented filmmakers who visited this particular terrain, none responded more soulfully than Ermanno Olmi (born 1931).

In the wake of Titanic back in 1997, a cinematic lifeboat managed to float my way from Europe: La Promesse (1996), by the Belgians Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. This film is about cultural clash and the moral enlightenment as well as emotional awakening that, under the right circumstances, can come of it. Ironically, the “right circumstances” are those of war and captivity – not literal phenomena in this case but figurative. This is not exactly a new subject – the attempt to reveal a human bond between characters who are otherwise military enemies, political opponents, religious rivals, or racial opposites – but it need not be one in the hands of sensitive writer-directors like the Dardennes, interested in something other than sentimentality, hyperbole, and oversimplification.

Measured though moving, La Promesse has a national origin that certainly didn't help its distribution prospects. What didn't help this film, either, is its title – The Promise, in English – which was the title as well of the German director Margarethe von Trotta's emotionally empty, politically clumsy, and melodramatically labored 1995 romance about the profound impact the Berlin Wall had on all of its German captives, East and West alike. La Promesse premiered in the United States at the 1996 New York Film Festival and was made by two brothers, then in their forties, who had spent most of their twenty-year filmmaking career collaborating on documentaries for European television.

Ideological Positions

Writings on the Raj have often been fuelled by political interests and nearly always served some particular ideological purpose. James Mill's History of British India (1817), for example, represents an early attempt by a distinguished protagonist of utilitarianism and advocate of Enlightenment values, to support the idea of converting the Indian subcontinent into a nation governed by reason, fed by European knowledge. There were many other accounts, both preceding and following Mill's description of pre-European India as a society characterized by despotic rule and barbarism, and of Europeans' corruption and idle high living, or devotion to duty. Some of these were immersed in a vision of the spirit of Enlightenment or, more militantly, the pax Britannica spreading across the Indian peninsula. They sometimes described gruesome details of violent Indian customs (such as the burning of widows, mutilation of children and strangling of travellers) as evidence for the necessity of Westernization. Others (of which there were fewer) attempted to adduce evidence as to why India was no longer ‘worth keeping’.

Diversity of view is however not confined to the realms of fiction and scientific writing. It is in fact liable to characterize any but the most totalitarian political system. Government officials in India, too, espoused a variety of different ideological positions, personal interests and idiosyncrasies. Discussion of any aspect of government is therefore bound to reflect this, and lunacy policy is no exception.

While there can be little doubt that the period between the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War Two saw an extraordinary upsurge in innovative approaches to language in Russia and then the USSR, only isolated examples have reached an Anglophone audience beyond a relatively narrow circle of Slavists. This is especially regrettable since many of the questions that now occupy theorists of language and society were those with which early Soviet linguists grappled, and one can still learn a considerable amount, both positive and negative, from this experience. As the work of what have become known as the Bakhtin and Vygotskii Circles began to appear in translations in the late 1960s, structuralist and then poststructuralist approaches to language became dominant in Western scholarship in the humanities. This movement was led by scholars who often claimed to be giving language due consideration for the first time, and who, polemically, presented previous approaches in caricatured form, as outdated and naïve theorizing that either unwittingly or willingly made common cause with Stalinist totalitarianism. As a result of this, the newly translated Russian texts appeared as exceptions that proved the rule, covertly subverting the official Soviet position and so anticipating, in fragmentary form, the new French-led paradigm. Just as these approaches arose in Europe, so in the United States William Labov led a bold attempt to catalogue and theorise social variations within American English by synthesizing dialect geography, attempts to define language as a social rather than natural science, and US writings on language contact and conflicts of the 1950s into a new discipline that was to be known as sociolinguistics (Koerner 2002).

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.

Tourist Space in Ireland

As the preceding chapters have made clear, the Irish Tour involved more than the picturesque. In order to understand the complexity of the tourist experience, it is necessary to investigate “tourist space” in Ireland. The term as used here considers the parts of a country in which tourism occurs, and how deeply into a country tourism may penetrate. Tourist space may be thought of in terms of traveling to, traveling through and/or traveling into a country. Each involves very different kinds of tourist experiences.

Much tourism today involves the most limited form of tourist space: travel to a country. People fly to a location, enjoy a resort, shop around a city, attend a convention or international sporting event, and fly out again. Even on “side trips” to famous ruins or scenic attractions, visitors may move quickly to and from their destinations, encapsulated in buses, planes or helicopters. This sort of point-to-point travel, whatever its joys and rewards, offers a very limited experience of the host country, treating it like a series of unconnected “dots” or sites.

Traveling through a country invariably takes more time. In following a well-trod itinerary with little deviation from the guidebook or the route established by the tour guide, this sort of trip may allow the tourist enough time to observe bits of the countryside and the towns along the way; to make brief stops at minor attractions; to visit enough cafes, inns, or food stalls; and talk to enough natives to get some sense of the local as opposed to the international.

The Western Hemisphere's Integration Precursor Efforts: The Founding of a Pan American Society Versus the Establishment of a US Sphere of Influence (1889–1945)

Today's Inter-American system is a result of the search by the United States and Latin America for common ground as each has simultaneously sought conflicting objectives. The traditional goals of the US for regional preponderance have time and again conflicted with the Latin American states' perennial aspirations to secure national sovereignty and self-determination. This fundamental difference in objectives helps explain why, even today, Latin American states tend to distrust and resist US leadership. US interests and goals are perceived to hinder Latin-America's objectives to build and secure sovereign and democratic states; forge an inter-state society capable of addressing common security concerns; and accomplish regional cooperation and integration around a common purpose (Waltz 1979; Bull 1984; Morgenthau 1993; Buzan and de Wilde 1998; Gilpin 2001; Herz 2003; Buzan 2004; Hurrell 2005).

Since the early nineteenth century, the Latin American ideals of independence, modernization, democratic consolidation and regional integration have been contested not only from within by the domestic authoritarian and populist tendencies but also from without, by European imperialism and by recurrent attempts by the US to establish and institutionalize its claim to regional hegemony (Waltz 1954; Waltz 1979; Watson 1984).

By 1970, it's worth reminding ourselves at the outset, film's recognition as an art form had not been in question for some time. Yet film, as it was mostly being made above ground in the United States at that moment, had very little aesthetic identity in the minds of its chief practitioners and enthusiasts, or at any rate its most vocal ones. There are more ironies than one here: unquestionably better, more mature, more salient and thematically sophisticated as many of America's new films had become, superior as a class as they were to the great bulk of American movies for a generation, they caused an excitement, an intensity and vigor of response, much beyond what was then accorded the current theater or new fiction. But this had almost nothing to do with any perennial or universal conceptions of “art” and almost everything to do with political, sociological, and psychological phenomena that are either indifferent or actively hostile to such conceptions.

Let's call the New American Cinema of this period, the late sixties and early seventies, the cinema of make-believe meaning. Changes in the United States connected with sex, race, gender, and class (“women's liberation,” “gay liberation,” birth control, abortion rights, minority rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, the lifting of censorship restrictions) – that is, with anti-authoritarianism directed at the patriarchal “Establishment” – had, inevitably, changed the tone of its film industry.

Estate Tourism

According to Dean MacCannell, “sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiation of society.” Certainly, tourism in Great Britain and Ireland originated within the differentiation between the very top of society and all that lay beneath. On both islands pleasurable travel began with visits to the great estates. As early as the sixteenth century, improved roads and maps had encouraged the English to explore their own country. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did travelling for pleasure within Britain, the “Home Tour,” begin to emerge in its modern form. By then, a general curiosity regarding the next shire had given way to visiting the estates of the landed aristocracy.

Many of those estates dated to 1537 when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and vast amounts of property suddenly fell into the hands of the aristocracy in England and Ireland. In England the enthusiasm for building great country houses, begun during the Tudor and Stewart eras, continued through the eighteenth century, spurred on, in the case of the great Whig families at least, by their secure positions in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The grandeur lavished on British estates went beyond private satisfaction. Power and status were on public display. Writing about the great English houses, Ian Ousby has affirmed that “attracting tourists has always been part of their function….” Even as picturesque scenery, antiquities and, for a time, mines and mills, became incorporated into the Home Tour, the country house remained an enduring tourist attraction in Britain for several centuries.

Since the virtual disappearance of the Soviet threat in 1991, the Organization of American States (OAS) has been experiencing important transformations and becoming a significant actor in promoting regional inter-state cooperation and consensus. There is some evidence that indicates that the OAS is assuming new functions and taking on a more active role in setting the rules and agendas for regional governance in the hemisphere. This research found evidence that between 1991 and 2005, the OAS, together with other International Organizations (IOs), was instrumental in setting the Western Hemisphere on the right path towards developing an integration scheme around democratic norms and values. The findings in the security issue-area indicate that through the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission CICAD and the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM), the OAS is participating in the beginnings of a drug-regime development. In the good governance issue-area, legal instruments such as the Resolution 1080; oversight procedures such as the Electoral Observer Missions (EOM); intraelite negotiations mechanisms such as the Mesa processes; and bureaucracies promoting education on democracy such as the Unit for Promotion of Democracy and the Secretariat of Political Affairs (UPD/SPA) indicate that the OAS is attempting to regulate the regional democratic agenda and promote the development of a Western Hemisphere society of states. Nevertheless, future opportunities and challenges lie everywhere for Latin American civil societies and political elites to strengthen democratic institutions, and for the authorities of the OAS to assume a more active role.