By 1970, it's worth reminding ourselves at the outset, film's recognition as an art form had not been in question for some time. Yet film, as it was mostly being made above ground in the United States at that moment, had very little aesthetic identity in the minds of its chief practitioners and enthusiasts, or at any rate its most vocal ones. There are more ironies than one here: unquestionably better, more mature, more salient and thematically sophisticated as many of America's new films had become, superior as a class as they were to the great bulk of American movies for a generation, they caused an excitement, an intensity and vigor of response, much beyond what was then accorded the current theater or new fiction. But this had almost nothing to do with any perennial or universal conceptions of “art” and almost everything to do with political, sociological, and psychological phenomena that are either indifferent or actively hostile to such conceptions.

Let's call the New American Cinema of this period, the late sixties and early seventies, the cinema of make-believe meaning. Changes in the United States connected with sex, race, gender, and class (“women's liberation,” “gay liberation,” birth control, abortion rights, minority rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, the lifting of censorship restrictions) – that is, with anti-authoritarianism directed at the patriarchal “Establishment” – had, inevitably, changed the tone of its film industry.

Estate Tourism

According to Dean MacCannell, “sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiation of society.” Certainly, tourism in Great Britain and Ireland originated within the differentiation between the very top of society and all that lay beneath. On both islands pleasurable travel began with visits to the great estates. As early as the sixteenth century, improved roads and maps had encouraged the English to explore their own country. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did travelling for pleasure within Britain, the “Home Tour,” begin to emerge in its modern form. By then, a general curiosity regarding the next shire had given way to visiting the estates of the landed aristocracy.

Many of those estates dated to 1537 when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and vast amounts of property suddenly fell into the hands of the aristocracy in England and Ireland. In England the enthusiasm for building great country houses, begun during the Tudor and Stewart eras, continued through the eighteenth century, spurred on, in the case of the great Whig families at least, by their secure positions in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The grandeur lavished on British estates went beyond private satisfaction. Power and status were on public display. Writing about the great English houses, Ian Ousby has affirmed that “attracting tourists has always been part of their function….” Even as picturesque scenery, antiquities and, for a time, mines and mills, became incorporated into the Home Tour, the country house remained an enduring tourist attraction in Britain for several centuries.

Since the virtual disappearance of the Soviet threat in 1991, the Organization of American States (OAS) has been experiencing important transformations and becoming a significant actor in promoting regional inter-state cooperation and consensus. There is some evidence that indicates that the OAS is assuming new functions and taking on a more active role in setting the rules and agendas for regional governance in the hemisphere. This research found evidence that between 1991 and 2005, the OAS, together with other International Organizations (IOs), was instrumental in setting the Western Hemisphere on the right path towards developing an integration scheme around democratic norms and values. The findings in the security issue-area indicate that through the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission CICAD and the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM), the OAS is participating in the beginnings of a drug-regime development. In the good governance issue-area, legal instruments such as the Resolution 1080; oversight procedures such as the Electoral Observer Missions (EOM); intraelite negotiations mechanisms such as the Mesa processes; and bureaucracies promoting education on democracy such as the Unit for Promotion of Democracy and the Secretariat of Political Affairs (UPD/SPA) indicate that the OAS is attempting to regulate the regional democratic agenda and promote the development of a Western Hemisphere society of states. Nevertheless, future opportunities and challenges lie everywhere for Latin American civil societies and political elites to strengthen democratic institutions, and for the authorities of the OAS to assume a more active role.

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. The literature has centred on particular aspects of developing country participation – agriculture and the need for greater access to developed country markets; the restrictions of the agreement on Intellectual Property which confront those countries which have not evolved a strong intellectual property framework prior to their accession to the WTO; the challenges of assuming further obligations on new proposals in trade negotiations without a sufficient capacity for entering into trade negotiations in the first place. This work in contrast, presents a holistic view: the view that what is important is to identify the nature and potential of the WTO as an organisation which can contribute to the socio-economic well-being of individuals and societies across the world as they engage in global economic endeavour.

The research here is at a more fundamental level, and offers concrete reviews of WTO action in line with the Organisation's development obligations. Much has been made of developing countries and the problems they confront with implementing the obligations in accordance with the ‘single undertaking’ requirement of accepting all the agreements under the WTO as binding.

The tourist experience begins and ends in the mind of the visitor, bounded by anticipation and recollection. The experience consists of those on-site activities, encounters, sights, and other sensations, along with any accumulation of souvenirs, that promise to make the tourist's visit memorable. Of course, the experiences of visitors to Ireland varied from one individual to another, depending on interests and itinerary. Many centered their primary experiences on picturesque scenery, trying perhaps to capture it in watercolors or sketches. For others the tourist experience may have included collecting information about schools, roads, ruins, farming practices or poverty. Some busied themselves investigating the conditions of the peasantry, while others were happy enough merely to be entertained by them. At the end of each day tourists made notes, finished sketches, up-dated their journals, wrote letters and planned the next day's activities.

The process by which a site becomes incorporated into tourism involves a series of steps. Although they often occur in combination with each other, initially there may be a particular sequence. For example, before a site can be toured it first must be “discovered.” This means that it is perceptually abstracted from the “ordinary” and placed in the “extraordinary” context of tourism. It becomes a sight that must be seen. Then it must be “marked”—placed on the tourist's mental as well as paper map. Although a tourist sight can be marked in many ways, naming is most important.

An examination of the legacy of two Russian linguists of the early Soviet period, Boris Alexandrovich Larin (1893–1964) and Lev Petrovich Iakubinskii (1892–1945), shows that their interest in ‘living vernacular speech’ (‘zhivaia razgovornaia rech'’), so typical of the sociolinguistic approach to language study, served as a source of genuine inspiration that led them to a novel approach to Russian language studies in early Soviet linguistics. It also provided them with what largely constituted their source of data – everyday language, mostly spoken (or transcribed spoken language) and all language varieties rather than just the standard one.

Representatives of the first generation of Soviet linguists, Boris Larin and Lev Iakubinskii advanced the sociological paradigm in Russian linguistics in the beginning of the 20th century while simultaneously pursuing traditional lines of research. They had been educated as linguists by, inter alia, Jan (Ivan) Baudouin de Courtenay, a linguist of exceptional abilities and a person of liberal values, active civic orientation and political awareness, and by Aleksei Shakhmatov, who imbued them with his love for ‘living speech’. Both Larin and Iakubinskii lived and worked in Leningrad; their professional paths crossed at Petrograd- Leningrad University and the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, the institutions where they worked in various capacities in the 1920–1930s, and at seminars at ILIaZV (Institut sravnitel'noi istorii iazykov i literatur zapada i Vostoka (Institute for Comparative History of the languages and Literatures of the West and East), which promoted creative thought and new research.

While Ritchie's and Fisher's conclusions may not be typical of those pursuing the picturesque tour in Ireland, most travel writers did at least take notice of Irish poverty and privation. But if social realities had the power to push their way through the conventions of the picturesque, the reverse is also strangely true. By the time of the Great Famine, the picturesque had so defined Ireland that even some of those who came to observe the crisis and/or to minister to its victims were drawn to Ireland's scenic landscapes. Although the number of “tourists” must have dropped during the Famine, roughly the same number of travel accounts appeared during the most critical years, 1846 and 1849, as had been published between 1840 and 1845, the year the potato blight first appeared.

Relatively few of the travel accounts produced during the Famine described what might be considered conventional picturesque tours. In what may be one of the first examples of “disaster tourism,” visitors from Britain came to Ireland during the worst years of the crisis to verify the extent of the problem or to provide relief. Touring during 1847, one of the worst years of the crisis, Rev. John East visited some of the hardest hit areas. An Evangelical who suspected that the Roman Catholic peasantry and their clerical leaders had brought the catastrophe upon themselves, East encountered and described some grim scenes. Yet, he also visited Killarney, Bantry Bay and other scenic locations, which he greatly appreciated.

The months of July and August in 2004 saw announcements from India's BJP-led government preparing citizens for major changes in the country's labour laws. This is an important undone task from the reforms initiatives of the early 1990s. I have, over the years, written about the need to revise our labour market policies, and welcomed these announcements. At the same time, the statements from the government were so conflicting that I could not help feeling apprehensive that the effort would be botched once again.

A proper reform of labour laws requires intimacy with the field of law and economics, and a modicum of understanding of the role of incentives in markets. But there is no sign of the Indian government wanting to marshal the kind of research and knowledge needed for this purpose.

Judging by past laws and policy debates, the Indian policy-maker's understanding of the role of labour legislation is deeply fallacious. The first fallacy is to view the marketplace as a zero-sum ‘game’, where, as I said earlier, one person's gain is invariably another person's loss. This has led to the oft-repeated observation that for India to progress, organized labour must be prepared to make sacrifices. So the reform is presented as something that will hurt organized labour but is justified in the interest of the nation's overall growth. In fact, a properly revised labour policy can help us achieve faster economic growth and at the same time benefit all workers, including organized workers.

To the saying ‘Behind every great man there is a woman’, Groucho Marx famously added, ‘And close behind her is his wife.’ Much is to be learnt by looking beyond what meets the eye. In trying to understand India's predicament we often look only for the proximate causes—corruption, squabbling politicians, rhetoric sans action. But fifty years of Independence is a good time to go behind these immediate factors to take stock of how we have come to be where we are.

India was born of an astonishing intellectual legacy. It had the good fortune of immense inputs from statesmanship and scholarly intelligence over its formation. This gave us our democratic tradition and commitment to higher education. But it also became the source of economic ambivalence. India's economic system emerged from an uneasy compromise between Mahatma Gandhi's objective of a village-based economy and Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in the welfare state and heavy industry. Nehru confided to his diary in 1933 his growing alienation from Gandhi's ideology: ‘I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally. His continual reference to God irritates me […]. What a tremendous contrast to the dialectics of Lenin & Co.’ By the time India became independent in 1947, Nehru was disillusioned by Lenin's method, but he still believed in planning and heavy industry.

Historically, India's position vis-à-vis the WTO has been to argue that the WTO is an instrument of the North and to resist virtually its every move. Thus, before the Ministerial Meeting at Doha, the Indian government's line was to oppose the launching of a new trade round, resist the liberalization of trade in industrial products, and oppose the use of trade sanctions to punish countries that fail to meet minimal labour standards.

The perception that the WTO is largely an instrument of powerful industrialized nations is correct, but India's response to this, namely, opposing it on all fronts, is wrong. We must learn to take a more sophisticated line towards the WTO and the North in general. We can hope to gain much at the fifth ministerial meeting, projected to take place in Mexico in 2003, if we do so.

Spokespersons for the WTO will tell you that it is a democratic organization that runs on the principle of ‘one country one vote’. But anybody who has been following the goings-on at the WTO knows that the way the rich countries get around this ‘nuisance’ is through the ‘green room’ channel, to wit, the lobbying behind the scenes to fix the agenda in advance.

While all this is true, India's response to it is wrong for several reasons.

First, it is important to recognize that in today's globalized world, with complex trading arrangements and disputes, we cannot do without a centralized ombudsman.

Last week I went to a notary public in Ithaca to have my signature on a document attested. I had phoned in advance and when I stepped into her office, she guessed: ‘Professor Basu?’ In about ten minutes I was out of there, job done. As I drove back to Cornell I could not help feeling impressed by the efficiency. But I must admit, there was also a feeling of nostalgia for India.

Last August my wife and I had to get a document notarized in Delhi. Dodging a procession of banner-waiving protesters of some sort, near the crossing of Sansad Marg and Ashoka Road, we entered an open arena resembling what I imagine the bazaars of ancient Babylon must have looked like during the decline of the Mesopotamian civilization, where notaries public (I just checked—that is the right way to write the plural) keep their offices. ‘Offices’ here means a cluster of ramshackle desks and chairs beneath makeshift sheds and tarpaulin to keep the sun out. Right in front of this arena is a garbage dump, with additions to it appearing like missiles every now and then from a window in an adjacent building. Chai-wallahs and peons weave their way through rows of desks where an assortment of men in black coats sit, some working, some staring vacantly, some dozing.