Western Efforts Research Articles

The Effects of Westernization Efforts on the Turkish Education System

Westernization refers to the establishment of a system based on science and technology in the life of a society and encourages developing countries to learn and then use what the West has found in science, technology, human rights, prosperity, and art. In this paper, we have argued the effects of Westernization efforts and how the power holding groups use these efforts on their behalf to have authority over governmental institutions and change the education policy of Turkey according to their ideology. Quijano’s notion of Coloniality was used to explain how people, who had a control over governmental authorities used Westernization to impose their own ideology in Turkish education policy. In the paper, firstly, we argued why the conflicts due Westernization arise between pro-Westerners and anti-Westerners and how this situation effects the education policy of some societies in the world. Second, we discussed the Westernization efforts made in Turkey. Third, we explained criticism towards Westernization since the Ottoman period. Lastly, we argued how the conflicts between pro-Westerners and anti-Westerners ended up in military coups.

Reynolds , David Pechatnov , Vladimir The Kremlin Letters: Stalin's Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (review)

REVIEWS 183 Portukalian, put the point precisely. His fate was to witness ‘The reign of the absurd — which flourishes today in the question of the Middle East’. Despite all, he remained an optimist. This moment, he wrote on 22 May 1922, ‘will not last forever. Stability, the logic of things, will again take the upper hand’ (p. 204). How sadly mistaken he was, and how similar to today’s Middle East is the story told in this commemorative memoir. Department of History Jay Winter Yale University Reynolds, David and Pechatnov, Vladimir (eds). The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s WartimeCorrespondencewithChurchillandRoosevelt.Withtheassistance of Iskander Magadeyev and Olga Kucherenko. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2018. xx + 660 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £25.00. The correspondence of the World War Two leaders of the ‘Grand Alliance’, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, has long been of interest to historians. A first version was published in Moscow in 1957 in Russian and English editions. The Moscow edition was accurate and prepared as part of a Soviet reply to ongoing Western efforts to delegitimize and render invisible the preponderant contribution of the Red Army to the destruction of the Nazi Wehrmacht. Stalin himself worked on the project, but it was only published after his death. As the editors David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov point out, the Soviet government also wanted to counter the selective use of Stalin’s letters by Churchill and other Western memoirwriters . The first edition of the big three correspondence was without much contextual material which Reynolds and Pechatnov have provided in this new edition. An earlier two-volume Russian version of the correspondence was published by Pechatnov and his colleague at MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations), Iskander Magadayev (Perepiska Stalina s Ruzvel´tom i Cherchillem v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 2 vols, Moscow, 2015). The correspondence begins after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and ends with Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945. It covers all the major issues of the war-time alliance, most importantly, the opening of a second front in France, the direct route into the heart of Germany, and the delivery of war materiel to the Soviet Union via Arctic convoys. Stalin and his diplomats pressed from the very beginning of the war for a second front to relieve pressure on the Red Army which faced 80 per cent of SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 184 Axis forces in 1942. Churchill stalled on the second front for as long as he could. This was well known in Britain where cartoonists David Low and Leslie Illingworth often drew images of Churchill dragging his feet, conniving to delay a landing in France. British public opinion was keener on the second front than was the British prime minister who was more interested in the Mediterranean theatre of operations. When he felt pressure from Moscow or British opinion, Churchill lashed out that Stalin had only himself to blame for his difficulties because of signing the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. This argument was disingenuous, as Churchill must have known, since it was the Soviet government which had pressed for a broad anti-Nazi entente from late 1933 onward and the British and French who demurred and sought their own deals with Hitler. The conduct of the British and French governments in their last chance negotiations with Moscow during the spring-summer of 1939 was particularly scandalous. After the tide of battle turned against Nazi Germany — marked by the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in early 1943 — Stalin still pressed hard for the second front, though he appeared to believe that the Red Army could finish off the Wehrmacht without the Western allies (April 1944). ‘Our allies are in a hurry’, Stalin remarked: ‘They are afraid we will rout Nazi Germany without them’ (p. 409). In February 1942 this was in fact a topic of discussion in the Foreign Office. Better late to the party than never was, nonetheless, Stalin’s view. It was only when Roosevelt came down on Stalin’s side at the first Big Three conference in Teheran in November 1943, that operation ‘Overlord’ was finally...

Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism. By Richard M. Jaffe

In the wake of the orientalist critique and the discursive turn in the humanities, the category of “religion” has come under suspicion of being a Western construct forced upon non-Western, often colonial, subjects by brute epistemic violence for sordid political and economic motives. In seeking to salvage their subject matter, scholars of religion increasingly turn to a strategy of embracing the constructed nature of “religion” but contextualizing it within the project of a global history: “religion” is argued to be not simply a Western imposition but rather a global co-creation, not merely a tool of subjugation but a means of creative self-re-articulation. Richard Jaffe’s Seeking Śākyamuni follows this broad strategy, yet goes one step further. Its focus is no longer on the interaction between Western efforts to construct a world religion called “Buddhism” and the indigenous Asian responses to these efforts, but rather on the creative interactions between Asian Buddhists themselves. Jaffe persuasively demonstrates that the construction of at least one iteration of the new world religion “Buddhism,” namely modern Japanese Buddhism, is the result not simply of the Japanese encounter with the West but also with the Buddhist world of South and Southeast Asia in the wake of the 1868 Meiji revolution. For many Japanese Buddhists, Jaffe argues, “South Asia was a central ‘contact zone’ . . . where Buddhist texts, ideas, practices, and scholarship, both Asian and European/American, were transformed . . . and disseminated” (107). This transformation, Jaffe asserts, was no straightforward response to Western ideas. Rather, it was a process of reconceptualization and transculturation (238) in which the Buddhist “modern” was negotiated by a plurality of actors, including Western scholars, their South Asian mentors and students, and Japanese seekers and pilgrims. The latter not only acquired new knowledge and, especially linguistic, skills that allowed them to remake their own tradition but in turn also contributed East Asian Buddhist notions, both modernist and traditional, to the remaking of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism (chapter 5). It is to Jaffe’s credit that he vividly captures the fluidity and dynamism of these Asian entanglements in a richly documented, engagingly narrated, and methodologically innovative fashion.

Kosovo and Libya: Lessons learned for limited humanitarianism?

Debates surrounding the appropriateness of “humanitarian intervention” remain a key feature of the post-Kosovo international security environment. NATO has attempted, in the past, to intervene on “humanitarian” grounds, both in Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011. By systematically comparing both operations—analyzing three related phases, namely the pre-intervention justifications offered, the manner in which NATO, and particularly the United States, sought to intervene, and the level of commitment shown in the post-intervention phase—it is clear that the best that Western organizations and efforts can hope for is “limited humanitarianism,” even with the added boosts—in the case of Libya—of a cleaner international mandate from the United Nations Security Council and normative support from the relatively newly minted but already damaged concept of responsibility to protect (R2P). There are lessons for future operations of this nature.

Suspect sexualities: contextualizing rumours of homosexuality within colonial histories of population control

This article examines the widespread notion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ in relation to a historical contextual factor that has been widely neglected within efforts to situate and make sense of this widespread notion: the legacy of western population control interventions in Africa and the anxieties, fears and suspicions that they have provoked. The article discusses the relevance of population control history within efforts to understand emerging forms of intolerance towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) people across the continent. Western population control interventions initiated after the official demise of colonial governments have provided a historical basis for suspicions and rumours about how the West continues to manipulate and control African communities despite the formal termination of colonial rule. While positivist western epistemic frameworks have largely constructed such suspicions as ‘irrational’ and as barriers to its development agendas, critical approaches have argued that they can provide critical insights into social imaginaries, particularly in relation to dynamics of power and inequality. In interrogating the suspicion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ from a critical perspective, analysis considers the rise of the international population movement and history of population control agendas in African countries in order to open up new ways of understanding the historical contextual factors that have engendered rumours that homosexualiy is a western imposition. Discussion specifically considers rumours and suspicions that homosexuality is a form of population control which have been iterated by African thought and political leaders. The article also relates these discourses to the increasing influence of the US pro-family movement in African sexual politics. Analysis draws on discursive data that was collected through online ethnography and fieldwork as well as a critical review of literature examining population control agendas and rumours in Africa. This article concludes that the history of the international population control movement is directly implicated within contemporary stigma and scapegoating of LGBTIQ+ people in Africa. The persistence of the suspicion that homosexuality is ‘unAfrican’ can therefore be explained, in part, through its genealogy within longer standing awareness of western efforts to contain population growth across the continent.

An example of the effects of the Westernization period on the First National Architecture: the Reşadiye Numune School

ABSTRACTIt has been known that the westernization efforts that started in the last period of the Ottoman Empire continued in the Republican era and that a wide and radical change was made in order to build a new and modern state. This period also includes the formation, development and the end of the First National Architecture movement. Reşadiye Numune School, which is one of the representatives of First National Architecture movement has been studied in this article. During the Ottoman Empire’s Westernization movements period, there were fundamental changes in the materials and techniques used in Ottoman architecture via the influence of architects and engineers trained in Europe. In addition, important discussions were carried out on architecture under the influence of the prevailing movement of Turkish Nationalism. The Reşadiye Numune School of Architect Kemalettin was an early example of hosting all contemporary qualities discussed above. Through the analysis of this building, the planning of school buildings, their construction techniques and materials, and how their architectural forms were interpreted during the First National Architecture period shall be examined. The preservation and reuse of historic and structural values of construction shall be emphasized in terms of addressing the possibilities in this direction.

Role of German-speaking scholars in the development of pathology in Turkey.

The Westernization efforts initiated in the Ottoman Empire (also historically known as the Turkish Empire) in the 1800s also addressed medical training. Sultan MahmudII opened aWestern-style medical school, the Imperial School of Medicine, in Galatasaray, Istanbul, in 1839. Dr. Karl Ambros Bernard (1808-1895) from Vienna, who was educated at the Josephinum Military Medical Academy, was appointed as the director. The Sultan allowed the use of cadavers and autopsies, provided that they were carried out on deceased Christians. Dr. Sigmund Spitzer (1813-1895) from Vienna joined the medical school as an anatomy and dissection specialist in 1839. In the pre-World WarI period, Professor Robert Reider (1861-1913) from the University of Bonn and Professor Georg Deycke (1865-1938) from Eppendorf Hospital in Hamburg came to Istanbul to train Turkish military doctors in postgraduate studies. The Gulhane Military Postgraduate Education & Training Hospital was opened in 1898. Astudent of the hospital, Hamdi Suat, was sent to Germany to specialize in pathology. He completed his education under the supervision of Professor Marchand (1846-1928). Professor Hamdi Suat Aknar (1873-1936) is regarded as the founder of pathology in Turkey. The Nazi pressure on scientists of Jewish origin during the pre-World WarII period led to the emigration of scientists from Germany to Turkey. Professors P.Schwartz (1894-1977) from Frankfurt University and S.Oberndorfer (1876-1943) from Munich-the latter of whom was the first to define carcinoid tumors-took charge at Istanbul University, where they established the contemporary under-postgraduate pathology education and training system.

Sailing through the Cold War: Indian Navy's Quest for a Submarine Arm, 1947-67

ABSTRACTIt took approximately two decades for the Indian Navy to acquire submarines even when the first naval plan prepared by the Naval Headquarters in New Delhi and informally submitted to the British Admiralty in September 1947 contained an active submarine component. Other littoral navies in the Indian Ocean went for submarines much earlier. Using Indian, British, and U.S. archives, this article argues that the delay in India’s submarine arm was largely a result of the vagaries of the Cold War. Both Britain and the United States wanted the Indian Navy to contribute to the Western effort for a collective defense against the communist threat, which was largely conceived to be submarine based. This resulted in a surface heavy force structure. However, as India’s threat perceptions changed in 1960s, its quest for submarines gained momentum. When negotiations with the Western powers did not result in anything concrete, Indian Navy turned to the Soviets for initiating its own submarine arm. This decision had long-term implications for the Indian Navy as its underwater fleet thereafter remain dependent upon Soviet assistance for the rest of the Cold War.

Data Driven Governance: Building Data Driven Accountability Based Regulatory Systems in the West and Social Credit Regimes in China

Data driven governance systems are transforming the regulatory landscape of both states and other governance institutions. Grounded in principles of accountability and embedded in incentive based systems for reducing risk and managing behaviors through mechanisms of choice and markets, these governance systems may well reshape the way states and other governance organs are constituted and operate. This short essay has two objectives. The first is to examine the challenges that credit, ratings or assessment systems pose for effective implementation. Social Credit itself refers generally to a new mode of data driven governance through which data analytics are used to create and operate algorithms that provide a basis for rewards and punishment for targeted behaviors. More specifically, credit references the specific project of the Chinese state to create a comprehensive legal and regulatory mechanism grounded in data driven metrics that they have named social credit. To that end, Section II considers first the difficulties of separating the role of credit as a set of techniques and as a means of advancing ideological principles and objectives, in the context of Chinese efforts. Section III then examines some of the ways in which Western efforts at credit institutions have sought to meet similar challenges. The section first explores the context of credit systems in the West, and its operationalization, principally in the private sphere and through the use of market mechanisms for behavior management. It then examines the way that credit might be used in the West as a technique of governance and as a means of embedding international standards in domestic behavior. The essay concludes by suggesting that credit represents the expression of new forms of governance that are possible only through the correct utilization of big data management. The shift in regulatory forms also point to significant shifts in the relationship between law, the state and government. Accountability regimes grounded in behavior standards enforced through data driven analytics may well change the focus of public law from constitution and rule of law to analytics and algorithm.

Strategies and Goals of Russian Diplomacy During the Kosovo Conflict (1998-1999)

The article supports the thesis that despite Cold War style oratory and criticism of the NATO's intervention against Yugoslavia, Russian policy on Kosovo armed conflict represented a realistic and pragmatic approach. It points that Russian leadership was conscious of the domestic political and economic problems as well as the unfavourable post Cold War shift of power and changes of the international system and knew that Russia could not reply to the unilateral NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia. It argues that Moscow admittedly wanted to avoid NATO intervention at the Balkans which inevitably undermined the international position of Russia, but despite some political gestures and claims about the traditional Russo-Serbian friendship had no direct geopolitical interests at the Kosovo conflict, did not believe the Milosevic's 'truths' and actively participated at the high-level international peacemaking initiatives together with the West. It claims that Russia actually supported Western efforts aimed to stop the violence at the province and start political dialogue between Belgrade and Kosovo Albanians about the autonomy of the province. It finally argues that Russian constructive approach 'helped' the Alliance to end its war over Kosovo and stresses that peace proposals offered to Belgrade were collectively worked out and endorsed by the West and Russia.

Lights, Camera, Lumino-Politics: LightingThe Searchers, from Paraffin to LED

Across the past decade or so, “politically committed” strains of film studies have undergone a much-vaunted aesthetic turn. It is now widely acknowledged that political struggle is as likely to converge in and around the tangible, audible and/or visible surface of the filmic image as it is to involve forces operating “within,” “beyond” or “behind” that surface. Yet while this so-called aesthetic turn has restored questions of film sound, film form and film colour to the film-political agenda, questions of film lighting are yet to feature prominently in these discussions. This essay addresses this situation through a re-reading of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), a film whose ambivalent engagement with America's troubled settler-colonial history has seen it mortgaged to depth-oriented reading methods. Countering these approaches, I argue that, even before the filmic image signifies or symptomatizes settler-colonial struggle, that struggle is played out across the surface of the filmic image in the form of efforts to control the diffusion, distribution and dissemination of light itself. In arguing this, I will show how The Searchers situates its own formal and technical efforts to regulate light's movement across the surface of the cinematic image within a history of settler-colonial efforts to regulate light's movement across varied domestic, civic and geographic surfaces. In doing so, I contend, the film both foregrounds cinema's complicity in, and delivers a searing critique of, Western efforts to control light.

Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Batıcı Düşünce Çerçevesinde Dr. Abdullah Cevdet Ve İctihad Dergisi

The Ottoman Empire started to make westernization efforts in the XVIIIth century.These efforts have been formerly realized in military fıeld and in the XIXth century bothin social and administrative fields. These efforts were taken with dissatisfaction by societyand with suspicion by the clergy. This tension caused a great dynamism in the society. Onone side extreme Westernizationers on the other side those who hate the West and for thisreason want to become westernized and on the another side intellectuals who avoid anythingcoming fom the West by assuming it as a life style and also Ottoman society composed ofcompletely disinterested public accepted the westernization as a social, administrative andimportant problem.Ictihad Dergisi (Journal) that was published by Dr. Abdullah Cevdet, acceptedwesternization as a life style and extremely defended westernization “being the same asWest”. Through the 28 years of publish of the Journal of İctihad, it continiously defendedwesternization in the most fıxed, stable and insistent way. It had as a principle to understandand to analyze every event, every subject and every question in a western way. Thisunderstanding was criticised violently by its contemporary intellectuals.Concurrently always defending westernization, it opposed in a most violent wayagainst Sultan Abdülhamid in the course of years 1904-1908. İctihad not only having greatsatisfaction by the declaration of Meşrutiyet but also o pposed the İttihat Terakki Assemblygovernment in the course of years 1913-18 since there has not been a rapid developmentin the field of Westernization in Meşrutiyet era as they expected it to be. Meanwhile it wasaccused of being irreligiousness by Islamic Press. In addition, against the Ittihadists madea cooperation with Islamists if needed.

“THREE LEAGUES AWAY FROM A HUMAN COLOUR”: NATSUME SOSEKI IN LATE-VICTORIAN LONDON

Natsume Soseki arrived in Londonin October 1900, with great expectations, both his own and those of the Japanese government officials who sponsored his scholarship to study abroad for two years. Soseki would eventually become one of the most important figures in modern Japanese literature, featured on Japan's 1000-yen note from 1984 to 2004; before he wrote the novels that earned him such fame – includingI Am a Cat(1906),And Then(1910), andKokoro(1914) – Soseki, who was then a young English teacher in the Japanese provinces, was sent to study English language and literature as part of Japan's large-scale modernization and westernization efforts, following the “opening” of Japan to the West by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Soseki's London sojourn coincided with the peak of British imperial might and also Japan's emergence as a world power. Soseki witnessed numerous important historical events as the Victorian era drew to a close, including the return of troops from the second Boer War and Queen Victoria's funeral procession. Following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Japan won major financial and territorial concessions from China, a sign of Japan's new military power and ambition. Indeed, much of the funding for the “rapid expansion of the Japanese higher education system” came from these war reparations that “essentially bankrupted the Chinese government, hastening the downfall of the Qing Dynasty and the Sino-centric order in Asian culture. . . . Soseki's journey to London – metropole of the British Empire – was part and parcel of the geopolitical rise of one empire and the fall of another” (Bourdaghs, Ueda, and Murphy 4). Questions of empire and the relative strength of nations were very much on Soseki's mind during his time in London. During what was then a fifty-day journey by sea from Japan to England, “all ports between Yokohama and Marseilles were under British, French, or Dutch rule” (Hirakawa 171).

The International Regime for Treating Civil War, 1988–2017

The post–Cold War international order has promoted a “standard treatment” for civil wars involving the use of mediation to end conflicts and the deployment of peacekeeping forces to implement the resulting settlements. The United Nations has played a leading role in applying this standard treatment, which enjoys broad international support. By contrast, Western efforts to promote more robust humanitarian intervention as a standard response to civil wars remains controversial. While effective in relatively permissive postconflict environments, international mediation and peacekeeping efforts have proved insufficient to resolve harder cases of civil war, such as those in South Sudan and Syria. The UN has struggled to make the standard treatment work where governments refuse to cooperate or low-level violence is endemic. Growing major-power tensions could now undermine the post–Cold War regime for the treatment of civil wars, which, for all its faults, has made a significant contribution to international order.

Undermining Western democracy promotion in Central Asia: China’s countervailing influences, powers and impact

ABSTRACTThis article examines whether and to what extent China’s involvement in Central Asian countries undermines the democracy promotion efforts of the European Union and the United States. Findings confirm that China does indeed challenge Western efforts, but in an indirect way. First, Chinese provision of substantial and unconditional financial assistance makes Western politically conditioned aid appear both ungenerous and an infringement of sovereignty. Second, the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, inclusive of China’s leadership role, creates an institutional means through which the (semi-)authoritarianism of member states is legitimized and challenges Western emphasis on democracy and human rights. Finally, by the power of its own example, China demonstrates that democracy is not a prerequisite for prosperity, the rule of law and social well-being.

Autocratic diffusion and cooperation: the impact of interests vs. ideology

ABSTRACTThis introductory essay argues that patterns of diffusion and cooperation among non-democratic regimes differ significantly in goal, mode, impulse, and scope. Autocracies that are guided by a dynamic, missionary ideology, such as interwar fascism and, less fervently, the Bolivarianism of Hugo Chávez, actively promote their new credo in a wide range of countries. Moreover, these messianic belief systems stimulate diffusion processes across the globe. A wide range of political leaders take inspiration from these missionary ideologies and emulate their values and ideas to a greater or lesser extent. By contrast, most authoritarian regimes in the contemporary era lack an expansive ideology and are driven mostly by political interests. International diffusion and cooperation among these regimes reflects mainly the defensive goal of immunization against Western efforts at democracy promotion. To guarantee regime survival, authoritarian great powers in the post-Cold War world, such as Russia and China, concentrate on fortifying their regional sphere of influence. Thus, targeted, calculated collaboration and instrumental learning prevail.

Private Military and Security Companies policy in Africa: Regional policy stasis as Agency in international politics

The purpose of this article is to explain the policy stasis around private security regulation in Africa. Africa is one of the largest theatres of private military and security company operations in the world. Yet, there is still no new regional convention or policy on their regulation. Previous studies focused on Western efforts to formulate regulatory instruments as well as the role of private military and security company activities in Iraq and Afghanistan and previous controversies of Executive Outcomes. This article examines factors that inhibit the continent from moving on from the Organisation of Africa Unity Mercenary Convention of 1977. It broadly argues that the regulatory policy stasis is primarily a question of agency and preferences. The African Union and its member states have pursued two forms of ‘agency slack’—shirking and slippage—in order to favour a legally binding international convention through the United Nations. This position is the sum of historical and incumbent experiences at a regional and international level, most of which are outside the control of regional institutions. Thus, the African Union and its member states have used shirking tactics to minimize participation in non-United Nations initiatives. They also used slippage tactics to justify exemption from such initiatives while stating their understanding of private military and security companies. These two tactics summarily shield African regional preferences in a world where the region has relatively lower power in international politics.

Minimizing Loss: Explaining Russian Policy Choices during the Ukrainian Crisis

Realist and liberal scholars of international relations offer very different interpretations of Russia’s decision to militarily intervene in Ukraine. While liberals describe the Russian actions as part of a new, more aggressive foreign policy resulting from increasing authoritarianism within Russia itself, realists view these actions as largely defensive; a reaction to persistent Western efforts to peel Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence. Applying insights from the foreign policy decision making literature to a close examination of events from late 2013 through the Russian military interventions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine reveals weaknesses in both these explanations. Consistent with the realist view, Russian behavior does appear to have been motivated more by geopolitical interests than by the domestic politics considerations. However realist accounts underestimate the extent to which prior Russian policy choices, rather than Western efforts, contributed to the undermining of Ukraine’s political stability.

On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems by Paul Rouzer

Reviewed by: On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems by Paul Rouzer Christopher Byrne Paul Rouzer, On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xii, 266 pp. US$40 (hb). ISBN 978-0-295-99499-4 Despite the numerous translations and popularity of the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan 寒山 (Cold Mountain) among Western audiences since the mid-twentieth century, no one has produced a comprehensive analysis of his corpus until now. In this first major study of Hanshan, Paul Rouzer adds new dimensions to our understanding of the poet and proposes inventive methodological directions in reading Hanshan from a Buddhist perspective and by formulating a study that is at once scholarly and popularly accessible. With his focus on the Buddhist message within Hanshan’s verse rather than the poet’s personality, Rouzer effectively illuminates the didactic and doctrinal quality that characterizes many of Hanshan’s verses, and Rouzer’s translations convey a subdued and pedantic voice that significantly differs from that of the countercultural icon fashioned by Gary Snyder or the sorrowful and frustrated scholar-official portrayed by Burton Watson. Rouzer’s study is divided into three parts: “Part One. The Poet” reconsiders how to understand the figure of Hanshan; “Part Two. The Poems” analyzes Buddhist themes and elements within his poetry; and “Part Three. Reading Buddhists” examines selections of North American literature that correspond with Hanshan’s Buddhist inclinations. Although Rouzer’s intention is to disavow the biographical construction of Hanshan, “Part One. The Poet” devotes considerable attention to available biographical materials and their reception in scholarship. Rouzer justly criticizes the speculative methodologies apparent within both Chinese and Western efforts to establish Hanshan’s dates and life history. Instead of reading Hanshan’s work as autobiographical, Rouzer proposes that we interpret his poetry as doctrinal teachings whose universal message transcends the poet’s individuality. In “Part Two. The Poems,” Rouzer analyzes didactic and doctrinal elements of Hanshan’s poetry, including structural techniques designed to challenge dualistic oppositions (chap. 3, Juxtapositions); Hanshan’s criticism of the conventional life of the householder (chap. 4, At Home and Abroad); the poet’s engagement with a select number of Buddhist tropes and images (chap. 5, Tropes); and his penchant for heaping scorn on various targets of critique: wealth, scholars, fools, and the Buddhist clergy itself (chap. 6, Satire). In reading these poems as Buddhist, Rouzer translates and organizes his analysis around Zen master Hakuin Ekaku’s 白隠 慧 鶴 [End Page 220] (1686–1768) own commentary on Hanshan. This is a valuable contribution to understanding how a Zen master interpreted and utilized Hanshan’s poetry. At the same time, I would have preferred if Rouzer organized his study as a systematic analysis of major Buddhist themes, rather than rely on a traditional eisegesis that elaborates on minor elements to express the master’s own viewpoints. Rouzer’s close readings are most interesting when attending to previously ignored features of Hanshan’s poetry, particularly the poet’s satirical techniques and his use of the image of seductive ladies, which Rouzer soundly criticizes for its misogynistic perspective. In comparison, sustained analysis of major Buddhist themes is rather sparse—the best examples limited to the images of jewels and the moon as symbols for Buddha-nature and enlightenment (pp. 124–138). While Rouzer touches on key ideas, he focuses on identifying explicit Buddhist allusions and explaining Hakuin’s commentary, rather than drawing out the underlying Buddhist significance of Hanshan’s poetics, as one would expect from an intentional Buddhist reading. Considering Rouzer’s task, there are a number of pertinent questions I would like to see addressed further: How do central Buddhist themes, such as emptiness, compassion, or linguistic inadequacy, inform the composition and interpretation of Hanshan’s corpus? How does the prevalent symbolism of Cold Mountain that is the hallmark of Hanshan’s poetics create Buddhist meaning? How would Rouzer defend interpreting Hanshan’s poems that do indeed reflect on his life events as impersonal and universal—an interpretation that significantly challenges traditional assumptions that guide the reading of Chinese poetry? In this regard, how does Hanshan express “no self”? And if he is...

ROLE OF THE BLACK SEA REGION IN THE REGIONAL AND GLOBAL CONTEXT

The present entanglement that is happening today between Europe, Asia M inor and Russia, placed the Black Sea region in the center of world attention. As he speaks in his work Histoire de la M er Noire, published in France, Gheorghe Constantin Bratianu, the great historian and professor: “Theater presented at the Black Sea coast, argues for considerations exceeding the regional issues. (...) Due to its sea routes and ports, the Black Sea deserves the title of the great port of international traffic and trade” [1, p. 25]. Currently the geopolitical and economic situation in the Black Sea region has become more complex, particularly after the decision on NATO enlargement in 2002. A new geopolitical apparatus, was announced in the Black Sea region back in the 90's of the last century, when there were proposed the first pr ojects for the pipelines of energy supply from the East to the West. Today, the Black Sea region is gradually beginning to occupy a central place in the western efforts to protect and promote its interests in the Caucasus and the M iddle East.