spectacles ), Dienstag does not comfort and flatter his reader by affirming the view that democratic communities are strengthened when the right kind of people appreciate the right kind of movies. There is no satisfying reconciliation of critique and community, which, quite appropriately, makes his essay more like The Rule(s) of the Game than The
which rule to employ for a given decision. Now it might seem that this simply pushes the whole problem back one stage but it does not. From a democratic point of view, what matters is not that a given decision rule may produce results which conflict with our intuitions concerning what a democratic decision would be but that the democratic community has determined what the authoritative rule is for a given class of decisions
cultural options, ethnic or otherwise, are created by us. Social not just cultural life is a process. Social action can be directed in ways that make the public culture richer and more meaningful, or that degrade and destroy the opportunities for freedom it provides. The best polity is not one where each person is free from the will of others. It is one where democratic communities assume responsibility for the social opportunities available to
Yugoslavs). When war broke out in 1992 the three leading national parties took over the state and organised the spontaneously forming defence groups into a structured military system. For the Croats the leading national party was the Croatian Democratic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the HDZ BiH – a party closely connected to the ruling Croatian party, the HDZ. Extremist forces within the HDZ BiH linked up and were supported by extremist groupings in Croatia planning to establish a Greater Croatia through the annexation of parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a result of
constitutive of a true civil society. But why should the West want to spread civil communality? Because, Blair argued, ‘the spread of our values makes us safer’, since states that share civil values will eventually integrate into a democratic community and, following the logic of his new international community, will subscribe to ‘the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self
to understand: its pessimistic depiction of democracy indicts its audience and their desire for instruction and moral uplift from aesthetic works. This tragedy of remarriage, I maintain, would be a better instructor of a democratic community, if such a community were prepared to listen. That it is not is one of the obstacles that aesthetic optimists fail to acknowledge. In the
part by going to Germany and re-establishing ties with German life as well as creating new ones where possible. ‘It is 200 A war of individuals the soldiers who will be the good Pacifists – just as every decent Pacifist should be a soldier’, he wrote to a friend.21 It was his direct experience as a soldier that compelled Keeling to write a powerful article for the New Statesman against the issue of compulsion. ‘Now that I know what one’s experiences in the firing-line at their worst actually are’, he wrote, ‘I cannot as a responsible citizen of a democratic
decisions’. This principle could become ‘the Caucasian reply to the globalisation and separatism that destroy a national state from the top and from the bottom’; it would reflect ‘modern tendencies in state inter-connections: the formation of regional democratic communities’. The structure of this cooperation should include an all-Caucasian two-chamber Parliament, in which one chamber would incorporate national authorities (three Caucasian states and Russia); the other would join representatives from autonomous republics, regions of South Russia and national minorities. In
democratic community. 151 The Lance argued that putting up arches was contrary to the egalitarian spirit of New Zealand and that citizens should be encouraged, instead, to decorate their homes and businesses to their own liking. 152 And the editors were enraged when they learned of plans to rope off the streets and erect barricades, which they argued might be a
be enough. The UN’s General Assembly has been the only truly global public political forum for which all states are equal. It has provided a framework for decolonisation and the pursuit of the reform of international institutions. The UN Charter has provided seeds for a claim made on behalf of an alternative organising principle of world affairs, namely for a democratic community of states, with equal