Introduction

To fully appreciate the obligations and the impact of the rules-based system, one has to go beyond identifying that the WTO is a trade-negotiating body. It is in the detailed provisions of the respective Agreements that one may discern a true glimpse of the potential which trade has for development. In this selected study we opt for a more fundamental approach in assessing the dynamics of trade and economic development by taking a closer look at one such Agreement: the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures – the SPS Agreement. The essence of the SPS Agreement lies in the demands for public health and safety which is a universal need, placed alongside the need to ensure that the protection of public health and safety does not constitute the basis of arbitrary restrictions on trade by national governments. Thus while the importance of public health and safety is acknowledged, the adoption of unfair restrictive trade measures lacking scientific basis is denied.

It is not too difficult to understand the reasoning behind this perspective. Regulating the international market and all trade and economic endeavour carried out therein must be seen to have a positive impact on not only producers, but also on consumers. This is because when a rule of international trade reaches into the domestic environment as they all inevitably do, its only justification must be that it is well balanced against the legitimate aims of the domestic regulations.

Introduction

More than fifty years after its creation in 1948, the Organization of American States (OAS) is undergoing significant transformations. Contrary to skeptical assessments of this organization, some analysts theorize that at the present historical juncture, the OAS may be emerging from its original role as a secondary instrument of US hegemonic power to become a relatively significant actor in promoting regional inter-state cooperation and consensus. Indeed, there is at least some evidence that indicates that the OAS is assuming new functions and acquiring new powers and, in the process, taking on a much more active role in setting the rules and agendas for regional governance in the hemisphere.

Any examination that deem the OAS as a significant instrument of cooperation and consensus always needs to take into consideration that there are also different views that regard any type of post-World War II effort to build a multilateral system largely as a failure. For instance, John O. Ikenberry (Ikenberry 1989) articulates his ambivalence toward the success of the multilateral efforts by the US in Europe to promote its particular brand of a postwar multilateral liberal system. According to Ikenberry, in spite of its hegemonic power, the US failed in its attempt to bring its own understanding of liberal multilateralism to European states and prevail upon them to create a grouping of western industrial democracies with a distinctive pattern of a deeper security association with the US (Inkenberry 1989, 376 and 395).

The second half of the eighteenth century is the most significant in the history of British and French exploration and colonization in the Pacific. An abundance of travel literature, about real and imaginary voyages, formed a creative palette for synthesizing information from more than a century of European discovery in the antipodes. Imaginary voyages continued to draw upon well-known antipodean imagery and to offer utopian critiques of European society, and they weaved in the increasing material evidence of new geographies and new cultures. More imaginary voyages were published in this period than at any other time. Many examples engage with or comment directly upon the political and philosophical issues raised by the growing European presence and cross-cultural encounters taking place in the antipodes. Out of this environment emerged the two anonymously published texts, Fragmens du dernier voyage de La Pérouse [Fragments from the Last Voyage of La Pérouse] (1797) and The Life of La Perouse, the Celebrated and Unfortunate French Navigator (1801). They offer a fascinating glimpse of how writers of fiction were able to capture and exploit the appeal of contemporary exploratory voyages. In these marvellously realistic stories, distinctions between fact and fantasy are carefully masked. Both examples are framed around the mystifying disappearance of the famous French navigator, Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, a tragedy that was a magnet for public speculation.

References to the ‘great south land’ and ‘South Seas’, respectively alluding to an immense area of land and of ocean, emphasized a broad-brush perspective and drew attention to the extent of uncharted spaces, awaiting discovery, that kept driving exploration.

The subject of this chronicle is not the current war in Iraq, or direct filmic treatments of that war, even though these have already begun to be made: witness James Longley's documentary Iraq in Fragments (2005), Philip Haas's fiction feature The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield's docudrama Battle for Haditha (2007), and Kathryn Bigelow's thriller The Hurt Locker (2009). Nor is my subject metaphorical movie treatments of a “present” conflict, like the Iraq or Afghan one, through the lens of a past war (be it World War II, Vietnam, or Korea). No, my subject here is two films, produced in the twenty-first century, that are directly about World War II: Clint Eastwood's unique “double feature,” Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of them about the same World War II battle, the first picture made from the American point of view, the second from the Japanese perspective. (The only remotely comparable work I know is The Human Condition [1961], Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy of films about one Japanese man's continuing, and harrowing, experiences during the Second World War.)

Eastwood's pictures deserve comment precisely because, though they are World War II films made during a subsequent, unpopular war, together they are not meant (as were How I Won the War [1967] and Catch-22 [1970] vis-à-vis Vietnam) to be the metaphorical lens through which we are meant to view the Iraqi conflict (except in the most generalized sense, that war is hell).

Introduction to Meshchaninov

Very little work by the theorists of Japhetidology have appeared in English translation, and so the Anglophone reader has hitherto had to rely on secondhand accounts, many of which were written in the midst of the Cold War and marked by its oversimplifications and rhetoric. Only a few scattered works by Nikolai Marr have ever appeared in English, generally in publications that are now difficult to obtain, and the work of some of the most talented scholars who worked within the trend have never been translated or even discussed in any sustained fashion. There are probably good reasons that Marr's own tortuous musings have never attracted a dedicated translator, for they frequently try the patience even of native Russian speakers, but this cannot be said of all the scholars who espoused some version of Japhetic Theory. It is with this in mind that we offer Ivan Meshchaninov's ‘Theses’ on Japhetidology, which were published at the beginning of his 1929 book Introduction to Japhetidology (Vvedenie v iafetidologüu), in which the author aimed to provide a systematic and accessible overview of the field. The book was published as one of a series of monographs of the Institute of the Comparative History of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (Institut sravnitel'noi istorü literatur i iazykov Zapada i Vostoka) in Leningrad that included such well-known works as Pavel Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenü, 1928), Valentin Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, 1929) and Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevskü's Art (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, 1929).

Background

Since its creation out of the prior General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1995, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has attracted the interests of many. Individuals, corporations, governments, policy makers, NGOs, and academics are drawn to study this international organisation which has in such a short time made significant impact on the lives of all people in our global community.

With over 20,000 pages of legal documents comprising WTO negotiated agreements over trade and other trade related issues and a plethora of decisions reached under the various dispute settlement cases brought before the Dispute Settlement Body of the Organisation, the legal framework of the WTO presents a formidable mass of scholarly material. Research into the activities of the organisation has been remarkable and varied. It has ranged from analyses of the general practicability of a rules-based approach to trade regulation, to recurrent arguments over the potential gains of participation in a rules-based system for less developed country members of the Organisation.

This latter scope of research activity has occupied the interests of scholars in both developing and developed countries. Most of the work done in this area has been preoccupied with identifying the importance of global market integration for developing countries.

Almost twenty years ago I began researching British travel writing relating to the first century of Irish tourism, 1750–1850. Gradually, two paths of enquiry opened up. One concerned how the travelers looked at and sought to account for the Irish landscape and the people they encountered during their tours. This involved investigating the aesthetic, social and ideological biases British tourists brought to the encounter with Ireland and how these preconceptions influenced their ultimate inability to understand pre-Famine Ireland. Based on this research, I published in 2008 Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland.

While tourism provided a context for that book, its focus on the travel writers and their opinions left no room for any real exploration of the phenomenon of tourism itself. The century or so prior to the Great Famine (1845–1852) saw the emergence of modern tourism based primarily on landscape, whether in the carefully designed parklands of the great estates or amid mountains, lakes and sea cliffs. Ireland was in the forefront of the development of the scenic pleasure tour. In fact, the foundations of Irish tourism were laid during the century from 1750–1850. The present book is, therefore, concerned with the evolution of tourism in Ireland and the creation of the Irish tourist experience.

In the second decade of the twentieth century two historical events occurred that were quite incommensurable, but which exerted a decisive influence on the development of the study of language in Russia and then the USSR. The first was the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the social changes that followed in their wake, and the second was the paradigm shift in linguistics, traditionally connected with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which also first became known in Russia in 1917.

Of course paradigm shifts do not occur all at once. New ideas of one type or another were announced before Saussure, and in Russia many ideas appeared significantly earlier, with the conceptions of Mikolaj Kruszewski and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay proving especially important. Yet in Russia, as in other European countries, the nineteenth-century linguistic paradigm, based on the recognition of historical linguistics is the only scientific method, and the comparative-historical method as the only rigorous method, continued to dominate the discipline until 1917, and in many respects even longer. One example will suffice. In Russia today, and in the USSR before that, courses in contemporary Russian language maintain a leading place in the training of student philologists, who specialize in Russian. Yet Petr S. Kuznetsov recalled that when on completing his postgraduate studies in 1930, he had to teach a course on the contemporary Russian language, he did not know what to do at first.