Liberal Realism

Hillaroius comment on the US foreign policy on Pakistan

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China-Brasil Strategic Partnership??

Translation: Pax China in Brazil. Pax Brasilera in South America. Really interesting. The visit of Lula to China may mean a lot in the near future.

Why is Spain so corrupt?

Check this interesting post at Charlemagno blog, from the Economist. Has raised a debate about the cultural reasons of corruption, bringing back to live the ideas of Max Weber on the role of religion and political behaviour. The post is a comment of a press article from El País.

It says:

THE provocative title of this posting is not my own. It is the headline from a thought-provoking, if not completely convincing, opinion piece published today in Spain's best newspaper, El País. The author, Víctor Lapuente Giné, is a Spanish political scientist transplanted to the chilly, rigorous world of the University of Gothenburg's Quality of Government Institute.

Against a familiar backdrop of multiple scandals in Spain, many of them involving property deals and local government, Dr Lapuente Giné asks why countries like Spain, France, Italy or Portugal "have for years shown levels of corruption and governance closer to those of developing nations with authoritarian governments, than advanced capitalist democracies, which have belonged to the OECD for decades".

The article tries to isolate some factors which distinguish Spain, say, from countries with very low levels of reported corruption, such as Sweden. What caught my eye was that the article, early on, seeks to discount theories based around cultural difference. Dr Lapuente Giné writes that it is no more acceptable to say corruption is just "in our culture" than it was acceptable when people used to say that Catholic or Mediterranean countries were unfit for democracy…

Doha is gone (again) and there is nothing to cry about.

Finally, somebody with a bit of common sense is writting about the Doha round. Check "Do not cry for Doha", by Dani Rodrik, to get a realist view of what was going on. That guy is one of the few scholar that ha not been trapped and blinded with everything he reads.

Noam Chomsky on United States foreign policy