Article available in the IIS library, 5th floor.

Bart will not be speaking about his recent review of Alison and Zelikow in International Security, but it is available in the IIS library (5th floor) as background.

Few will dispute that the essence of our times can be conveyed by two simple words: " Global" and "Change". Economies, technologies, information, media, culture, and indeed security issues have been vastly internationalized and transformed in the incredibly short period of the half century following World War II . The world is being consumed by the forces of change driven by the engines of technology and geoeconomics. Economic change and technological development, like wars or sports, are usually not beneficial to all. Progress only benefits those groups of nations that are able to take advantage of newer methods of science, just as they damage those that are less prepared technologically, culturally, and politically to respond to change. Only societies free of rigid doctrinal orthodoxy and possessing attributes such as the freedoms to inquire, dispute, and experiment; a belief in the possibilities of improvement; a concern for the practical rather than the abstract; and rationalism that defies mandarin codes, religious dogmas, and traditional folklore, are likely to prosper in the new millennium. In any case, we must look with caution into the future. History teaches us that the only thing we can be certain of is that we will be surprised; our vision may well turn out to be distorted and myopic, our best guesses will often be wrong and we are likely to be disappointed in our expectations. We can only be certain of continuing conflict on a technology-driven planet with concurrent dwindling resources and increasing population.

In 1975Ð76 the fall of Saigon was followed by national reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic. Access to the Mekong Delta was widely expected to facilitate rapid neo-Stalinist industrialization and the appearance of a powerful military threat to capitalist SEA. But this did not happen. By 1981 partial reforms had permitted all state enterprises to operate in markets and some degree of agricultural decollectivisation. In the second half of the 1980s there was a clear de-Stalinization of everyday life. And by 1989Ð90 a recognizable market economy had emerged. Since then the Vietnamese Communist Party has, with some success, negotiated a major opening-up of the country to foreign contacts. Vietnam has joined ASEAN, and has seen the emergence of land, labor, and capital markets, and the confused processes by which classes form. Fundamental economic and political change has therefore occurred. Growth has been rather fast and the use of state violence minimal. Politically, for the still-Leninist VCP, the shift from Plan to Market has been a great success. What is the political economy basis for this? Despite emergent capitalist classes and a market economy, the political economy of "post-transition" Vietnam is heavily marked by its recent history, and remains very different from other ASEAN members. Notwithstanding revolutionary change, dualities common to both the traditional and modern political economies have offered great potential for political restructuring. In this sense "development doctrines" are perhaps less exotic and more indigenous than elsewhere in SEA. This facilitates relatively harmonious political adaptation and is the key to understanding change. For example, wide rural land access, with a collective tinge in the most densely populated areas, has a strong and pervasive effect upon the macro political economy. "Voice and exit" are enhanced. Thus we see rather high levels of migration, and risk bearing be farmers. Rural GDP has grown fast through the 1990s. Also, real wages in urban areas tend to be higher and the labor regime less brittle. What are the political implications of such a land regime? At the end of the day, one reason for the lack of extensive state violence against the population seems to be that the party/state has sufficient sources of support and power for tense economic issues in the rural areas to be fought out without property rights needing violence to enforce them. These issues are fought out locally (within cooperatives and communes) and in macro contexts (access to world markets). But in the rural areas the state does not, apparently, need to support particular economic interests for its survival. One reason for this is that the "land issue" has been addressed through the adaptation of socialist models, so that large-scale land property is not (yet?) a major issue. Dominant groups in the rural areas do not depend upon land access for their incomes. Adam Fforde is a development economist. He holds an Oxford MA (Engineering Science and Economics), a London MSc (Economics) and a Cambridge PhD (Economics). He studied Vietnamese in Hanoi during 1978/79 and was a visiting scholar at the National Economics University (Hanoi) in 1985Ð86. He lived in Vietnam from 1987 to 1992 while working as an advisor to the Swedish aid program, and in Australia from 1992 to 1999, where he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and Chairman of Aduki Pty Ltd (Consultants). He is now senior fellow at the SEA Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has published on topics including the economic development of north Vietnam prior to 1975, agricultural cooperatives, and the transition from plan to market. He is currently working on class formation and the emergence of factor markets in the 1990s, industrial reform since the early 1960s, and Vietnamese development doctrine.

Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. In his talk, Krauss will argue that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Professor Krauss is a leading expert on Japanese Politics, U.S.-Japan relations, and Japan's political economy. He also is the director of the International Career Associates Program (ICAP) at IR/PS. His most recent book, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (Cornell University Press, 2000), discusses Japan's mammoth public broadcaster, and its relationship to and consequences for politics. He recently received a prestigious Abe Fellowship to conduct research on Japanese foreign policy decision making in APEC and its impact on U.S.-Japan relations. Krauss is co-editor of Media and Politics in Japan and has co-edited and written contributing articles for Democracy in Japan and Conflict in Japan. He wrote a monograph for the Foreign Policy Association, entitled Japan's Democracy: How Much Change? and has authored many articles in professional journals of political science and Asian studies.

On January 1 Sweden assumed the rotating chairmanship of the European Union. While serving as the Swedish EU Commissioner from 1995 to 1999, Gradin was in charge of immigration, home affairs and justice. She will discuss Sweden's priorities for the EU, and the results of the December EU summit in Nice, France, with its associated Treaty of Nice. Gradin has a distinguished career: she was Vice-Chair of the national Federation of Social Democratic Women in Sweden, Chair of the Council of Europe's Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography, and Minister with responsibility for immigrant and equality affairs at the Ministry of Labor (1982-86). From 1968 to 1992 she was a member of Parliament and a member of the parliamentary Standing Committees on Education and on Finance, as well as a delegate to the Council of Europe. From 1986 to 1991 Gradin was Minister with responsibility for foreign trade at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and from 1992-94 she was Sweden's ambassador to Austria and Slovenia and to IAEA and UN in Vienna.

S.B. Woo is a physicist and former Lieutenant Governor of Delaware. He was born in Shanghai, China, and came to the United States from Hong Kong at the age of eighteen. He received his B.S., summa cum laude, in mathematics and physics from Georgetown College in Kentucky and his Ph. D. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1964. His other experiences include being trustee of the University of Delaware, an Institute Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. As OCA's (Organization of Chinese Americans) National President in 1991, his vision was to help make the Asian- American an equal partner in the making of the American Dream. After politics, Dr. Woo returned to University of Delaware to teach Physics. He enjoys greatly using the methodology of physics to do research in economics, education and national technology policy. He is currently working on a project called The 80-20 Initiative.

Prof. Panikkar will address the relationship of history to issues of power, politics, and censorship in the context of the recent controversy involving the withdrawal of two volumes on modern history by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR).

Prof. K. N. Panikkar teaches at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the Chairman of the Archives on Contemporary History and formerly the Dean of the School of Social Sciences, JNU. He is associated with several universities and institutions in India and abroad. He has been the President of the Modern History Section of the Indian History Congress and a member of the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Indian Council for Historical Research. He has also been a member of several academic and research organizations and a visiting professor to universities abroad.

Prof. Panikkar's main area of current research is intellectual-cultural history of modern Indian on which he has written extensively. His publications include, Culture, Ideology and Hegemony--Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India; Culture and Consciousness in Modern India; Against Lord and State--Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar; Communal Threat, Secular Challenge and British Diplomacy in North India. Among the books he has edited the latest is The Concerned Indian's Guide to Communalism.