The international monetary system: diffusion and ambiguity

This article examines the dynamics of power and rule‐setting in the international monetary system. It begins with a brief discussion of the meaning of power in international monetary relations, distinguishing between two critical dimensions of monetary power: autonomy and influence. Major developments have led to a greater diffusion of power in monetary affairs, both among states and between states and societal actors. But the diffusion of power has mainly been in the dimension of autonomy, rather than influence, meaning that leadership in the system has been dispersed rather than relocated—a pattern of change in the geopolitics of finance that might be called leaierless diffusion. The pattern of leaderless diffusion, in turn, is generating greater ambiguity in prevailing governance structures. Rule‐setting in monetary relations increasingly relies not on negotiations among a few powerful states but, rather, on the evolution of custom and usage among growing numbers of autonomous agents. Impacts on governance structures can be seen on two levels: the individual state and the global system. At the state level, the dispersion of power compels governments to rethink their commitment to national monetary sovereignty. At the systemic level, it compounds the difficulties of bargaining on monetary issues. More and more, formal rules are being superseded by informal norms that emerge, like common law, not from legislation or statutes but from everyday conduct and social convention.     

Thomas Fitzherbert's reason of state

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms.     

《桃花源记》以桃命篇论

陶渊明诗文喜用菊、松、柳等托物寄情,然在《桃花源记》一文中,却为何舍熟就辟,取桃与桃花意象来命题立意？对此,学术界讨论较少。本文将从民俗信仰和文学的比兴手法两大角度来讨论该问题。     

Public reason and private passion

Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that female consciousness is constituted through the exclusion of women from the public domain, and relates it to earlier interconnections between the male‐female and public‐private distinctions in Rousseau, Hume and Kant.     

1920年代旅苏华侨的悲惨遭遇及其原因

1920年代,苏联国家新立,财政经济极其困难.掠夺华侨财产成为苏联地方政府解决财政困难的重要手段之一.其主要手段包括以莫须有的罪名诈取华侨财产、发行毫无价值之公债、征收苛捐杂税以及使用各种行政手段直接没收财产.旅俄华侨受虐待的主要原因包括俄国社会传统的“黄祸”思维的影响、苏联政府处理涉侨事务的新思维以及旅苏侨界根深蒂固的矛盾.在这些因素的影响下,旅苏侨界被苏联政府“以华制华”的策略所压制,逐渐走向衰落.     

A tale of ambiguity: citizenship,nationalism and democracy in Turkey

ABSTRACT. We argue that historically the official Turkish nationalism and citizenship regime have been marked by an ambiguity that arises from the simultaneous existence of – and repeatedly occurring swings between – the ethno‐centric and civic‐political understandings of citizenship. We also suggest that the concept of territoriality, which took precedence over other factors in the creation of a new state in 1923, has functioned as a hegemonic reference in the official conceptualisations of the Turkish nation and self. The territorial focus, over time, has been conflated with the ethnic conceptualisations of the nation: both become the underlining elements of the discourse of official nationalism in Turkey, and are utilised in the successive reformulations of citizenship into the 2000s. Through the analysis of schoolbooks and curricula, we further argue that the major oscillations in nationalism nevertheless coincided with the ruptures that characterised the making of modern Turkey: modernisation, democratisation, globalisation and Europeanisation.     

Range ambiguity effects in Barker-coded multipulse experiments with incoherent scatter radars

A Barker-coded multipulse is the best of the classical modulations when high spatial resolution is needed in incoherent scatter measurements. Unfortunately, this type of modulation generates range ambiguities which reduce the quality of data. In this paper, range ambiguity functions for an EISCAT experiment, ESLA-T4, are displayed. A method of eliminating the ambiguities in data analysis is developed and its applicability is demonstrated. It is found that the method can remove the effects of the range ambiguities in the lower part of the E-region, but above 120 km altitude the correction is not sufficient. The residual of the fit is reduced by an order of magnitude. The changes in the temperatures are a few Kelvin at the lowest altitudes and a few tens of Kelvin between 110 and 120 km.     

中国佛教世俗化表现及原因探析

作为一种文化现象,佛教具有其自身的特点。但在佛教扎根中国的过程中,随着佛教与中国本土文化的日益融合,佛教愈来愈多地打上了中国传统文化的印记,而佛教原始教义里的一些本质的东西也随之消失或变更,比如佛教的戒律,佛教关于人与人之间以及人与世界宇宙之间的关系,人的价值观等等。实际上产生了一种与原始佛教完全不同的中国式佛教,这种中国式佛教的最大特点就是以功利主义为核心的世俗化。     

Swept under the rug: the problem of unacknowledged ambiguity in lithic residue identification

Microscopic analysis of organic residues on stone tools is used to interpret prehistoric stone tool functions. The morphology of some residues can be difficult to interpret, yet this ambiguity is rarely acknowledged in the literature. Our research seeks to understand the nature of this ambiguity by objectively identifying ambiguous residues in our reference collection. We trained four archaeologists in residue analysis using one part of our reference collection, then tested their ability to identify sixty-eight residues in another part of the same collection. Forty-eight of the residues in the test (70%) were correctly identified by three or all four subjects. We considered the remaining twenty residues, which were correctly identified by two or fewer of the subjects, to be ambiguous. These are most often in the hide-scraping, bone-scraping, and hardwood-scraping (macerated) categories, and tend to have an atypical morphology which falls in the range of variability of another residue category. Some of these residues also have optical properties which make them more difficult to image than others. We explore the potential for scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to improve residue identification in a second test. This test shows a modest improvement in identification success rates of ambiguous residues when SEM images are included. We conclude that while images from different types of microscopes can improve reliability of identification, some residues will always be ambiguous. Rather than being ignored, these ambiguities should be brought to light, closely examined, and published as such.     

论中学生嫉妒心理的形成原因及教育对策

中学时期是人生的一个关键阶段,但是嫉妒心理却普遍存在于中学生群体之中。嫉妒心理对中学生的心理发展带来了危害,因此,分析和矫正中学生的嫉妒心理就成为迫在眉睫的任务。     

Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy

Twenty‐first‐century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia–Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post‐Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based‐order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Yet for any strategy to be effective—in an international order subject to change—a clear political aim is required, which might deviate from the general rule. Preoccupied with universal postulates, legal normativism has lost sight of the particular. The argument put forth in this article is that the failure of contemporary western foreign policy in the twenty‐first century to address this limitation or to prioritize political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of abstract rationalist approaches to global governance and return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that avoided premature generalizations and treated norms as maxims of prudence rather than axioms requiring universal application.