Nation Building

Nation building is fighting a constructive form of "people´s war." You start with organizing the people to defend themselves and advocate for their own interests and needs. The process is "bottom-up," not "top-down."

Why?  Because a nation is not the same as a state.  (Reference)

A state is the government, its agencies, and its capabilities.  It refers to an institutional capacity 'to plan and execute policies and to enforce laws cleanly and transparently', as Professor Francis Fukuyama writes in his important recent book, State-Building: Governance And World Order In The 21st Century.  A state is 'a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory'.

A nation is something larger than a state.  A nation is a community bound together by shared history and culture. A matter more of shared sensibilities than institutions, a nation is the work of generations.

Given these facts, the first thing the international community should realise about the nation-building exercises it is undertaking in various parts of the world is that it is an impossible task.  Nation-building is much more ambitious than state-building. Anyone can create an army or a police force, but to convince people of different ethnic groups that they live in the same society and have common interests is much more difficult to pull off.  There it is wise for a country to build a state first, and then nation can come later.

There are three distinct phases in state-building:

• The post-conflict reconstruction stage, 'where state authority has collapsed completely and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up'. Here the issue is 'the short-term provision of stability through infusions of security forces, police, humanitarian relief and technical assistance to restore electricity, water' and so on;
• Creating 'self-sustaining state institutions that can survive the withdrawal of outside intervention'; and
• Strengthening weak states, 'where state authority exists in a reasonably stable form but cannot accomplish certain necessary state functions, like the protection of property rights or the provision of basic primary education'.

60 years on after the Holocaust

A display of books and information to mark the Holocaust is on show at Torquay Library this week to mark the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust. Titles on offer will include one of the most widely read books in the world – The Diary of Anne Frank, an autobiographic account of a German-Jewish teenager forced into hiding with her family by the Nazis during World War 2.  Viktor Frankl was trained a psychiatrist before becoming imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps for three years in World War II. In the first part of Man´s Search for Meaning, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, Frankl engrosses the reader the feelings and general experience of the average concentration camp prisoner.  In his book "Man's Search For Meaning", he does not focus on the horrific details of the camps, but rather, he poignantly expresses the psychological state produced by these experiences.  Library Services has gathered the collection together as part of the nationwide Holocaust Memorial Day on Thursday, January 27, 2005.

Mr. China, who is he?

For all China´s race towards modernity, the country´s language, script, customs and politics remain extremely alien and any visitor will be richly rewarded by reading something about the country´s history and culture in advance.

Mr. China by Tim Clissold (Constable and Robinson), an Englishman who lives and works in China, where he's been for the last 16 years.. Hilarious account of how to lose US$420 million on ill-advised business dealings in China, by a British man who did just that. THE way Mr Tim Clissold tells it, China seemed like a land of endless business possibilities when he arrived as a young tourist in 1988. Two years later, the 30-year-old auditor quit his job in London to study Chinese in Beijing and, when China opened for business in a big way soon after, he and a small group of investors raised US$420 million (S$699 million) to invest in various sectors, including automated components for vehicles.

With ambition, drive, and what he calls a "wilful infatuation" with all things Chinese, what could possibly go wrong for the Mandarin-speaking Englishman? Everything, apparently, from the usual red tape to obfuscating officials and stubborn factory managers who resisted change with the standard line: "You don´t understand China!"  Clissold tells an engaging story of the myth and allure of China, and the ways in which capitalism attempted to transform it and the rest of the world wanted to take advantage of the financial possibilities they could see.   He talks of factory tours and astonishing drinking sessions; huge amounts of money, won and lost; entangled bureacracies; and a whole new set of rules.

This is a must-read China business story, heralding back to the early days of China foreign investment in the early 1980s.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

The publishers of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez´s new book said Friday they were moving up its release date by a week because pirated versions are already being sold on the streets of Bogota.

"We´re going to start selling them Wednesday because of the pirates," said Moises Melo, editor of publishing house Norma de Colombia, which has printed 350,000 copies of the novel to sell in Colombia and neighbouring countries. The book called Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes, or Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is the Colombian author´s first novel in more than a decade.  Melo said pirate publishers must have stolen a copy of the new novel from a delivery truck. Street vendors on Thursday began peddling the pirated version at traffic lights in this Andean capital.  Melo said he´s confident that "no more than a couple hundred were being sold" on Bogota streets and that a quick police crackdown would halt the pirated sales altogether. He said the novel will be sold in Colombian bookstores for about $10 US. The pirate copies were fetching about $5 US on street corners.   While Garcia Marquez´s previous books have all been pirated, Melo said this is the first time the illegal copies hit the streets before the official versions came out.

“In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin.”  An elderly journalist decides to celebrate his 90 years in a grand way, giving himself a present that will make him feel like he’s still alive: a virgin. In the brothel of a picturesque town, he sees the young woman from the back, completely naked, and his life changes radically. Now that he meets her he finds himself close to dying, not of old age, but rather of love. Memoria de mis putas tristes is the story of this eccentric, solitary old man, a narrative of his sexual adventures (of which there were many), for which he always paid, never imagining that this would be the way he would discover true love.  This new novel, written in Gabriel García Márquez’s incomparable style movingly, contemplates the misfortunes of old age and celebrates the joys of being in love.

More than $100 million US in pirated videos, DVDs, CDs and books were sold in Colombia last year and accounted for more than half of all sales of these products, according to the Washington-based International Intellectual Property Alliance.