As G8 leaders meet for the first time in Northern Ireland, Bruce Clark visits the divided city of Derry-Londonderry to find out if culture can effect reconciliation after decades of violence
Tax havens have been around for decades but they were viewed as marginal if not esoteric phenomena. Attitudes are changing. As new data on international financial flows becomes available, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that tax havens are at the very heart of 'neoliberal' globalization, aiding and facilitating tax avoidance on a vast scale.
Three earthquakes have shaken the main pillars of the global system - security, economy and politics - over the past two decades. The foreign policy Turkey has pursued throughout these three major earthquakes draws on principles that are in line with the challenges of the enormous transformations underway. The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11 and, most recently, the Arab Spring and the euro crisis have had tremendous implications for the international order. With its international position and historical depth, Turkey has shown that it has the potential to contribute to the transformation of the international system, and it will continue to maintain its determined stance in the future.
China and the United States have just experienced political transitions that allow the leaders of both countries to focus on bilateral relations free from the pressures of domestic political campaigns. But the domestic politics of the bilateral relationship inside each country are, like the structural tensions between the established power and the rising challenger, intensifying, as Washington takes new steps to assert its primacy in Asia and Beijing works to edge America out of its neighbourhood. US-China relations are likely to be less stable and more prone to conflict over President Obama's second term, unless the two nations can arrive at a modus vivendi to keep the peace in Asia. The challenge is that such an entente likely requires the kind of political change in China its leaders seem determined to block for fear of the threat it would pose to their own legitimacy. The reverberations of a relationship that is conflict-prone, but in which conflict holds such downside risks for both countries, will be felt well beyond Asia.
The only means available to the US to assume a responsibility to protect the Syrian people from slaughter was by credibly threatening Bashar al-Assad and the security and military elite surrounding him with a decapitating air strike if they did not immediately cease murdering protestors and begin negotiations with opposition figures to the end of making the regime broadly representative of the Syrian population. Credibility probably demanded an initial decimation, a technically possible move. In part because the US lacks the ideology and institutional structure of a real imperial power, in part because it is post-Bush a careful calculator of national interests, Syria, unlike Libya but much like Sudan and the DRC, was a bridge too far.
The Russian government sincerely believes that Assad's removal from power would trigger the expansion of jihadism and instability in the Caucasus and southern Russia. Moscow is deeply concerned about the rise of Islamists in the Middle East, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia's efforts to support the most radical factions in Syria. At the same time, the obvious absence of the ideological background behind current Russian-Syrian relations makes them a trade item. Thus, official guarantees that the jihadists will not export their revolution elsewhere accompanied by promises to preserve some Russian economic positions in post-Assad Syria will probably create the necessary ground for the emergence of a compromise stance on Syria (including the issue of foreign intervention).