The New Federalist

Anything To Keep Aung San Suu Kyi Out of Burma’s Electoral Process

The Myanmar military dictatorship currently speaks of “Myanmar’s Road to Democracy.” This is not unlike the earlier slogan of General Ne Win and his Burma Socialist Programme Party’s “Burmese Road to Socialism.” That Road led a relatively prosperous, rice-exporting country to one that is on the UN’s (...)

Saturday 15 August 2009

Growing up in East Germany

German children who grew up before 1989 had very different childhoods based on whether they were born in the Western or Eastern part of their country. The general perception of West Germans is that childhood must have been troublesome in the East. True, East German kids did generally have fewer (...)

Thursday 13 August 2009

Beginning of the End of China’s One-Child Policy?

For the first time in 30 years, the authorities in Shanghai have started to urge the parents, who are themselves only children, to start planning their second child. This came as a result of increasing demographic imbalance which caused rising number of elderly people in the city and fears of (...)

Monday 10 August 2009

“Noisy” European absence in Moscow’s negotiations

On 7 June 2009, the summit between the US President Barack Obama and the Prime Minister of Russia took place in Novo Ogarevo. The two leaders-protagonists of the international political scene set the most acanthoid multidimensional issues of the current international system establishing (...)

Friday 7 August 2009

The War on Terror: A new strategy of crush the Taliban

In late May 2009, the Pakistani government launched a military operation against Taliban militants in the Swat valley in a bid to flush the Taliban out of Pakistani soil. In June, the Pakistani government launched another military operation in South Waziristan, another Taliban stronghold. In (...)

Tuesday 4 August 2009

Environmental refugees

1/5 of world population lives in coastal areas threatened by rising sea levels… 1 billion people will be affected by future melting of ice in the Himalayas... ¾ of the land now cultivated in North Africa threatened by desertification… to be continued… Experts point out that by 2080, 150-200 (...)

Sunday 2 August 2009

Copenhagen Climate Change Summit: a series of unanswered questions to be addressed

To what extend are industrialized and rapidly developing countries such as China and India willing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions? Which are going to be the finance mechanisms for the poor countries to combat climate change and how are they going to be managed? These are only some of (...)

Thursday 30 July 2009

The future of the Lisbon Treaty

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso stated of the Lisbon Treaty, “We have a treaty that will give us now the capacity to act. Our citizens want... to see what Europe brings them…I believe we have a treaty that will give us now the capacity to act.” Leader of the PES, Martin Schulz, (...)

Tuesday 28 July 2009

The eyes of the world on Iran: signs of a new ’coloured revolution’?

"Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation” : the analysis of a CIA report, not from 2009 but August 1978. Indeed, just six months before the Shah was ousted. As this demonstrates, the Iranian regime under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was not considered in danger of (...)

Sunday 26 July 2009

New Delhi Court takes promising step forward for LGBT rights in India

The High Court of New Delhi decriminalised homosexual intercourse between consenting adults in a July 2nd 2009 judgment on Section 377 of the Penal Code. This decision is the result of years of advocacy of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi- and transsexual) rights activists and comes at a time when India (...)

Friday 24 July 2009

The Uyghurs : The Periphery Moves

The abrupt departure of the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, from the G8 Summit in Italy is a sign that the Chinese leadership considers the unrest in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to be such that a collective decision of the ruling circle was necessary. The first decision was the classic (...)

Wednesday 22 July 2009

Nuclear safety – a step in the right direction or a fallacy of EU action?

The first EU Directive on the safety of nuclear installations has just been published. It is a profoundly watered-down document that falls short even of existing international law. Its usefulness is disputable, at best. Precisely because this is such an important and clearly cross-border issue, (...)

Monday 20 July 2009
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