Political Disaster Research Articles

The politics of disaster – Nicaragua

The occurrence of natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes, are, in themselves, beyond oar control. However, careful preparation before such events, and the correct management of the problem once it occurs, can both lead to major redaction of the suffering involved. Disaster preparation and emergency planning are both inextricably linked to politics and economics, both on a national and an international scale. Disasters themselves raise a number of issues of a political or economic nature, and die response to a natural disaster both in the short and the long term is largely determined by the political relations within a country, and between that country and the international community. This paper examines these issues by taking the examples of the earthquake of Managua, Nicaragua in 1972 and the flooding that occurred in Nicaragua in 1982. These two natural disasters occurred under different administrations in Nicaragua, and tills allows some interesting comparisons.

Capitalistic organization and national response: Social dynamics in the age of Schumpeter

In retrospect from the present, the period 1920–1940, bracketed between two catastrophic wars, appears also as one of unusual economic disturbance in the advanced countries and in the world economy. This paper seeks to go behind the incidents, personalities and flimsy policy structures of these decades, and to root both the economic and the political catastrophes in the growing nationalism of Western countries after 1870. That cultural and political development in turn is seen to be derived from a misfit between expanding international and large-scale capitalist production organization and the basic economic interests and social identity of many groups and classes in the European nations. Conditions in European and world economic organization since World War II are considered briefly in this light.

Guidelines to the selection of robots

It is often claimed that flexible automation is the key to the survival of the manufacturing industry. The most significant and emotive form that flexible automation can take is the robot, yet this saviour of the manufacturing industry can be at best an expensive though worthwhile investment, and at worst a financial and political disaster.

Modernism Restored: West German Painting in the 1950s

After the defeat of the fascist regime in May of 1945, the situation in the three western zones was at first utterly confused. There was no "point zero," no radical break, no ideological turning point. Despite all the apparent disruption, a considerable continuity prevailed in political, economic, social and cultural spheres. This was particularly true of the world of painting, which was less affected by the Allies' licensing restrictions than werejournalism and publishing, or theater and concert performances. In the realm of painting, even former Nazis were able simply to continue painting and selling their works to private collectors, all the more so since many of the so-called "Nazi painters" had painted primarily portraits, landscapes and harmless genre works even before 1945.1 The situation was very different, on the other hand, for those painters who tried to address a broader public after 1945. The stylistic and thematic plurality which characterized post-war painting was welcomed as a relief from the fascists' effort to synchronize art into a onedimensional carbon-copy realism which obscured actual realities. In spite of such plurality, it is possible to identify three major trends right off the bat: an anti-fascist Left, a non-representational avant-garde and an eclectic quasi-modernism. The motifs of the anti-fascist, politically partisan and socially critical leftist movement confronted the political disasters of the immediate past head-on with lamentation, condemnation and/or satire. This group represented the smallest school of painters (approximately 510%). Because the Nazis had destroyed every organization of the leftist artists, painters like Hanns Kralik, Otto Pankok and Karl Hubbuch found meaningful support after 1945 only in thejournal Bildende Kunst and in the "Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands" (Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Ger-

Whither The First New Nation

The First Nation is a product of the early 1960s. Appearing in 1963, before the assassination of President Kennedy, it obviously did not deal with the sources and consequences of the prolonged series of political disasters and protest reactions which the United States faced from November 22, 1963 on. Those bygone almost bucolic days of the New Frontier, when America saw itself as the prosperous leader of the Free World, now seem like an almost ancient era.

The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought

The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought

The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought.

The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought.

The Politics of Natural Disaster: the case of the Sahel drought edited by Michael H. Glantz New York, Praeger, 1976. Pp. xix + 340. $21.50.

The Politics of Natural Disaster: the case of the Sahel drought edited by Michael H. Glantz New York, Praeger, 1976. Pp. xix + 340. $21.50.

Book Reviews

Book reviews in this article:The Phylogeny of a Ghetto Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Block Cleveland, 1870–1930.Official Cooperation Leonard A. Cole, Blacks in Power: A Comparative Study of Black and White Elected Officials.Rotten Apple Fred Ferretti, The Year the Big Apple Went Bust.Planning by Jury David J. Brower et al., Urban Growth: Management through Development Timing.Cities versus Suburbs Paul R. Porter, The Recovery of American CitiesUrban Grand Tour Herbert R. Lottman, How Cities Are Saved.Beyond Localism L. S. Bourne, Urban Systems: Strategies for Regulation–A Comparison of Policies in Britain, Sweden, Australia, and Canada.Urbanization Alternative Macolm D. Rivkin, Land Use and the Intermediatesize City in Developing Countries: With Case Studies of Turkey, Brazil, and Malaysia.Hopping a Derailed Train Andrew Marshall Hamer, The Selling of Rail Rapid Transit: A Critical Look at Urban Transportation Planning.Sound and Fury John Costello and Terry Hughes, The Concorde Conspiracy.Reclamation Guidelines William S. Doyle, Strip Mining of Coal: Environmental Solutions.Genetic Deficiency Harry M. Caudill, A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future.Lifeworld John A. Jakle, Stanley Brunn, and Curtis C. Roseman, Human Spatial Behavior: A Social Geography.Everything's Free in America Susan Sheehan, A Welfare Mother.Oddvar Aresvik, The Agricultural Development of Jordan.F. Lee Brown and A. 0. Lebeck, Cars, Cans, and Dumps: Solutions for Rural Residuals.William Gorham and Nathan Glazer, eds., The Urban Predicament.Gene F. Summers et al., Industrial Invasion of Nonmetropolitan America: A Quarter Century of Experience.William Worthy, The Rape of Our Neighborhoods: And How Communities Are Resisting Take‐Overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies.David E. Apter and Louis Wolf Goodman, eds., The Multinational Corporation and Social Change.James Cannon, A Clear View: Guide to Industrial Pollution Control.Soliman Demir, The Kuwait Fund and the Political Economy of Arab Regionaf Development.Erik P. Eckholm, Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects.Michael H. Glantz, ed., The Politics of Natural Disaster: The Case of the Sahel Drought.Orville F. Grimes, Jr., Housing for Low‐Income Families: Economics and Policy in the Developing World.

The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860-1920 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS285 The Money Machines: The Breakdown and Reform of Governmental and Party Finance in the North, 1860-1920. By C. K. Yearley. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970. Pp. xvii, 377. $12.00.) Serious students of the remarkable transformations in American life which took place in the half-century following the Civil War need to read this book. It sheds needed light on a critical and recondite aspect of those transformations, namely (1) changes in the legal tax structure, especially by state and local governments in the industrializing northeastern quarter of the country, (2) the parallel, extralegal or illegal revenue -raising devices of political party organizations, and (3) the connections between the two, in terms of social class, economic interest, and conflicting values. Professor Yearley shows that the "middle class," the small but growing group of urban and rural property-owners, was hardest hit by the prevailing general property tax, felt threatened by the propertyless and often immigrant poor on the one hand and the emerging plutocracy on the other, floundered for decades through a maze of gradually changing theory and practice on taxation, and finally (after 1900) supported and adopted, as ways of financing government, taxes on corporations and individual incomes which had been efficiently if often illegally practiced by the machine politicians whom the middle class abhorred. These conclusions, and many others to which one cannot do justice in tin's space, rest on a broad and solid foundation of primary sources. A few criticisms are required. Although the author recognizes that the changes in governmental finance which he discusses were "unsensational ," one wonders if he had to treat them so undramatically. A mass of detail sometimes obscures the author's main points and the narrative sequence which might link them more clearly. The connection between the two fiscal structures, a thesis stressed by the author, is more asserted than proved until the closing pages. More rigorous copy-editing , especially to weed out a number of syntactical ambiguities, would have made for easier reading of a tough subject. But the book's virtues greatly outweigh these minor flaws. Yearley's impressive objectivity leads him away from the trap into which so many historians of the post-bellum period have fallen: their identification with the moral values and mental processes of middle-class reformers from the Liberal Republicans through the progressives, and their consequent acceptance of those reformers' ideas and attitudes as basically valid. He refuses to moralize when he discusses the extralegal, sometimes criminal (by the values and statutes of the time) financial devices of political-party organizations. Instead the overriding question concerning public finance was "whose money morality . . . was to prevail?" (p. xvii). He observes that governmental financial structures broke down in the late nineteenth century, and were reorganized in the early twentieth in a manner peculiar to "pluralism" rather than "mass" democracy, whereby nobody got everything he wanted, but most got something. He 286civil war history sees that "a total victory for reform might have proven as great a political disaster for Americans as a total victory for powerful elements of business" (p. 272). As it happened, he says in a powerful and accurate conclusion, the crucial questions of what governments were to pay for, and how they were to do it, were resolved by men who "enshrined in the basic institutions of the land, for better and for worse, middle-class definitions of democracy, efficiency, and stability" (p. 279). The ramifications of this book into the history of the United States in the post-Civil War years are exceptionally numerous. W. T. K. Nugent Indiana University, Bloomington ...

Anti-Colonialism as a Basic Indian Foreign Policy

SOME RECENT ATTEMPTS have been made to investigate the roots of India's foreign policy. Frequently, these attempts have been based on an equation between the ideas and attitudes of Prime Minister Nehru and Indian policy. Jawaharlal Nehru is certainly both the leader and symbol of modern India and, in that sense, has gained a position strikingly similar to that enjoyed by Gandhi prior to the transfer of power in India. Yet, it would be unfortunate if students of foreign policy were to overlook the fact that there are also basic considerations that have come to limit and determine a good deal of Indian foreign policy decision-making. By reference to both the history of the Indian national movement and some recent events in the application of Indian foreign policy, this article seeks to explain and elaborate upon the title's assertion that anti-colonialism is one such basic consideration. A basic policy achieves an existence independent of the leaders who strive to work with it. Its roots are to be found in cultural attitudes and chains of events, rather than single statements by individual leaders or resolutions passed by legislatures. A leader who negates such a basic policy, without careful manipulation of his support, faces political disaster. The ability to change this policy depends as much upon outside events as it does on the strength of the position of the leader(s). Isolationism is an example in the American historical experience, while the dangers of attempting to move away from a basic policy are well illustrated by Franklin D. Roosevelt's efforts in the period 1937-40.

Pakistan's Economic Development

T HE FIRST DECADE of Pakistan's eventful history has demonstrated the typical growing pains of an expanding economy slowly emerging out of economic stagnation. During this period the country has passed through a series of political upheavals and natural catastrophes that have rendered the task of economic development infinitely more difficult than it otherwise would have been. The mass movement of refugees into an already disrupted economy, the untimely death of the founder of the state, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the assassination of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, the dispute over Kashmir, the failure of popular governments, and the frequency of cabinet crises culminating in i958 in the establishment of a military regime, are but some of the more severe political strains that have influenced Pakistan's brief economic history. The problem has been aggravated by the recurrence of widespread floods, drought and crop failures, disputes with India over the use of canal waters in the Indus valley, trade deadlocks with India and Afghanistan, a recession in export markets and serious pressure on balance of payments. It is against this background of formidable handicaps that any realistic appraisal of the country's economic evolution has to be made. Pakistan's national income (calculated at constant prices), as well as her per capita income, has slowly risen during the last decade, as is evident from Table i.

Carl Becker: An American Liberal

In some parts of the Western World intellectuals seem to be in retreat. Or if not in retreat, at least they are on the defensive, being assailed on the radio, in the press, in Congressional committees. A few critics have suggested that with the intellectual lies much of the responsibility for the political disasters of the twentieth century. Many agree that intellectuals have proved to be politically dangerous, economically naive, personally unreliable. Not that there is no answer to all this, nor that there are no defenders of this besieged group. intellectual gives as good as, and sometimes better than, he gets. Very often, however, he lacks the publicist devices to make himself heard. Often enough, too, he finds his defense more difficult to put across than the indictment against him. For the most part, it is the charge which interests the public, the Congressman's constituents, the sensational newspaperscharges without qualification and sometimes without substance. Refutation is at best dull business. Better by far, in the public mind, to sweep on to the next excitement, the next revelation, the next pillorying. victims left behind in the dust of the committeeman's graceless steamroller may choke themselves to kingdom come for all the TV-viewer knows or cares. With difficulty they brush themselves off and set about their normal business again. show moves on. At such time one regrets the loss of able minds and strong voices which might have spoken up against the tyranny of reckless accusation. One such person disappeared from the American scene less than ten years ago, someone who knew that he lived in period of reverses when, as Robinson Jeffers put it, you could feel a gathering in the air of something that hates humanity. Carl Becker went on to say that this something which hated humanity, hated reason and truth, too. But it was the measure of his faith, during his last illness and in the depths of the war, that he still concluded that The best case for democracy, and our best reason for having faith in the freedom of learning and teaching which it fosters, is that in the long history of civilization humanity has proved stronger than

Courage or Perdition? The Fourteen Fundamental Facts of the Nuclear Age

However distasteful it may be, nuclear weapons of the fission and fusion types have come to stay. Henceforth, they will be as much a part of human existence as rain and snow, morality and crime, the telephone and the airplane, pacifism and aggressiveness, freedom and tyranny, stupidity and wisdom. It is unlikely that this new invention can be undone except through the destruction of civilization itself. On the contrary, nucleonics sooner or later will provide the foundation of industrial civilization all over the globe. Given the anticipated increase in consumption of our energy resources, it appears that nuclear fuels, on a large scale, will have to be made available to industry within the life span of the present generation. Otherwise economic decline (and hence political catastrophe) must come about as the result of the gradual depletion of oil and coal deposits, the concurrent price rise of mineral fuels, the lack of a mineral energy basis in many countries, the rapidly rising demand for industrial goods, and the uninterrupted increase of population.

The Individual and Goodness

D<OU BTLESS our question is coeval with the world of men as a vale of tears. Where distress and failure are not to be expelled, where nature is harsh, society corruptible, and death supreme, what is the point of it all as far as the individual himself is concerned? What may justify the epitaph that it is better that he should have lived as he has done than that he should never have been born at all? Perhaps it is their presumptuous experimentation in soulmaking that is one main reason for men's tears. If ever there was a time when men did in fact have no fantasy of an individual life independent of social membership, if at that time they did in fact have no shadow of doubt as to the sovereignty and immortality of their group, we may surmise that then indeed they proceeded from the cradle to the grave with acquiescence, efficiency, and no self-pity. In particular, there is the objection that men display anxiety for the salvation of their souls, as also for communion with God, primarily by way of compensation for political convulsion. In ethical and religious preoccupation we have but a signal of political escapism. Only when they consider the state to be sick beyond all remedy do men look elsewhere for their final fascination. This, however, even if true, would scarcely suffice by itself to condemn nonpolitical effort. Failure by one path may yet permit success by another. Though the state be constantly revealed as a cheat, we may yet repudiate the vanity of all things. Because political catastrophe may be the occasion, it need not for that reason be the refutation of ethical and religious audacity. Nevertheless, some would even stigmatize exhaustion by po-