Multilateral Development Finance in Non‐Western Thought: From Before Bretton Woods to Beyond

Recent initiatives of China and other emerging powers to create new multilateral development lending institutions (MDLIs) are often portrayed as efforts to build upon and/or reform an idea pioneered by Western officials during the Bretton Woods negotiations. However, recent literature has shown that support for MDLIs also had deeper non‐Western roots in the pre‐Bretton Woods era. What led thinkers outside the West to propose MDLIs in that earlier period? How might their ideas be relevant to current non‐Western initiatives to create new MDLIs? This article addresses these questions with a special focus on the ideas of China's Sun Yat‐sen (1866–1925) and Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979). Although their intellectual journeys were quite distinct and their specific proposals differed, these two thinkers advocated the creation of MDLIs for similar reasons that stemmed from their anti‐imperialist sentiments. Their ideas find some echoes in current non‐Western initiatives.     

From Little Britain to Little Italy: an urban ethnic landscape study in Toronto

Before World War II, most of Toronto's residents were of British descent, and this was reflected in the urban landscape. On St Clair Avenue West, bordering British working class neighbourhoods, a Georgian style predominated and the area was known as Little Britain. After the war, heavy Italian immigration diversified the city and St Clair. Immigrants settled around St Clair where the identity of Little Britain gave way to Little Italy. This study documents and interprets landscape change on St Clair since the war. Photographs show that St Clair retail façades experienced early and sustained change up to the 1990s with new materials and uses of space. Informant interviews with Italian-origin proprietors yielded insights into the identity and meaning of their own renovations and landscape change generally. The changing landscape, like the social process of ethnicity, involved both pride and tensions. Proprietors believed their own «Italian-style» renovations had necessarily improved upon St Clair's original appearance, and that St Clair now suffers because of recent storefront changes brought on by new immigrant settlers. Together, the visible changes and their meaning to occupants of the landscape suggest how places like St Clair can contribute to our understanding of both landscape and ethnicity.     

The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas,and Beyond

Summary

The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into general usage, arguing that while by the later 1960s it had generally been rejected by philosophers, it was saved from disappearance by its migration into fields such as psychology and theology. From there, it moved into critical theory and then into international relations. Its entry into these latter areas first made plain its potential in political argument. Eventually, multiple meanings of the term came to coexist with one another, with the practical and rhetorical usage supplementing rather than replacing its original philosophical sense.     

Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale: International Intervention and ‘Local’ Politics

The evident failures of international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions (PSBIs) have recently prompted a focus on the interaction between interventions and target societies and states. Especially popular has been the ‘hybridity’ approach, which understands forms of peace and governance emerging through the mixing of local and international agendas and institutions. This article argues that hybridity is a highly problematic optic. Despite contrary claims, hybridity scholarship falsely dichotomizes ‘local’ and ‘international’ ideal‐typical assemblages, and incorrectly presents outcomes as stemming from conflict and accommodation between them. Scholarship in political geography and state theory provides better tools for explaining PSBIs’ outcomes as reflecting socio‐political contestation over power and resources. We theorize PSBIs as involving a politics of scale, where different social forces promote and resist alternative scales and modes of governance, depending on their interests and agendas. Contestation between these forces, which may be located at different scales and involved in complex, tactical, multi‐scalar alliances, explains the uneven outcomes of international intervention. We demonstrate this using a case study of East Timor, focusing on decentralization and land policy.     

19世纪后期至20世纪初期美国城市政治改革

19世纪后期美国城市的迅猛发展和城市政治体制的缺陷造成城市社会形势的严重恶化和腐败行为的泛滥,从而引发了城市政治改革运动的兴起。改革家虽然都出身于中上层阶级,但改革的方向有多种,改革的支持也复杂多样。总体来说,城市政治改革的进行实现了城市政治体制的重大发展,增强了城市政府治理城市的能力,政治腐败也得到一定程度的遏制。     

Both Too Much and Too Little: Sources of Federal Instability in Canada

Federalism is often praised for being able to accommodate diversity within the confines of a single state while preventing secession. Federalism, however, is fraught with tensions and instability. Federalism is typically adopted as a second-best alternative among actors whose first choice is either a more centralized state or a more decentralized state. These preferences persist over time. Instability in federation, then, comes from federal partners pushing in opposite directions at the same time. From this dynamic comes the much-examined propensity for secessionism to develop within federations. Largely unexamined in the literature on federalism, but equally problematic from the standpoint of stability, is the equal and opposite risk of consolidation (or centralization). This article examines sources of federal instability by exploring the origins and evolution of federalism. I use examples from Canada to demonstrate the extent to which my argument is applicable to real world federations. In conducting the exploration, we come to understand how federations can be both unstable and durable.     

From Revanchism to Ambivalence: The Changing Politics of Street Vending in Guangzhou

By focusing on Guangzhou's street‐vending policy transformation, this article explores how exclusionary practices of urban politics in China are undermined by those who it seeks to exclude and the progressive political climate that questions the exclusionary framework. The exclusion of street vendors in Guangzhou has been led by the National Sanitary City campaign as a revanchist project. It has been discovered that while the exclusionary strategies are rendered difficult to operate due to the resistance of street vendors who develop a flexible, individualized and small‐scale activism to maintain their livelihoods, the discourse of social harmony at national level has driven local authorities to seek alternatives expected to alleviate social resistance and address people's livelihoods. However, rather than an overturn of the punitive framework, an ambivalent approach, recognized in a recent critique of revanchism, has been adopted to mediate the tension between the needs to retain attractive city images and address the livelihoods of the poor in Chinese cities.     

Global Rhetorics, National Politics: Pursuing Bank Mergers in Canada

In the neoliberal reconfiguration of both national and international political economies during the 1980s and 1990s, the interests of North American financial capital have apparently reigned supreme. Having ceded sovereignty to financial markets and financial institutions, national states seem to have lost their power to control them: the genie appears to be well and truly out of the bottle. Drawing upon an analysis of political debates in Canada over plans by the country's largest banks to merge, this article critically engages with literatures that imply that liberal strategies and corporate politics are doomed to prevail. In exploring the reasons for the Canadian government's rejection of the mergers, the article demonstrates the complex relationships between geography, politics and economics in the discursive representations of the national interest. Not only did the banks fail to understand the need to lobby effectively, the paper argues, but bank finance has gone from occupying a privileged role in the Canadian body politic to one in which its interests must now compete openly against others, highlighting important political changes in a globalising world.