Asia
SOUTH ASIA AT 50: A RETROPECTIVE
December 1997

December Article Abstracts

Title: The United States and South Asia: Trapped by the Past?
Author: Selig S. Harrison
"To remove the 'bristling feeling' from their relations, both the United States and India will have to show greater sensitivity and forbearance. The United States will have to learn that it cannot cling forever to its self-appointed role as the 'only superpower'. . .and India will have to recognize that political and economic accommodation with the United States is a necessary precondition for its own achievement of superpower status."


Title: India: A New Test Begins
Author: Gautam Adhikari
"Perhaps being simultaneously elderly and youthful leaves India in a state of schizophrenia as it struggles to make up its mind whether to resist or to master the forces of change and modernity. In that struggle India can claim a singular achievement: it has preserved its unity and integrity as a nation while remaining a democracy for 50 years. Whether its experiment in democratic development can be described as an unequivocal success is a question that will continue to challenge India over the next 50 years."

Title: An Opportunity for Peace in Kashmir?
Author: Sumit Ganguly
As India and Pakistan "enter their sixth decade of independence, it is time to close a tragic chapter that has bedeviled their relations from the very outset."

Title: Pakistan at Fifty: A Tenuous Democracy
Author: Samina Ahmed
"Successive elected governments have advanced the military's interests in the belief that the military establishment holds the ultimate political veto. . .[U]nless the political leadership realizes that its very survival lies in collaborative efforts to consolidate a representative, pluralistic, and participatory system strong enough to withstand military intervention, democracy in Pakistan will remain vulnerable."

Title: Testing the United States-Japan Security Alliance
Author: James Shinn
"If, as some Japanese critics have charged, this is not really an alliance at all but rather a patron-client relationship, then it is a peculiar relationship, one in which the patron commits to the defense of the client and the client commits to little in return. To paper over this asymmetry, the benefits of the alliance have been undersold to the Japanese public and oversold to the American public." But this is about to change.

Title: Cambodia: Between Hope and Despair
Author: Marvin C. Ott
The UN-sponsored peace process in Cambodia put an end to civil war and oversaw democratic elections. But, as the coup this summer made clear, it was unable to ensure that Cambodia's political leaders, on their own, would be "sufficiently determined to make the new political arrangements work."

Title: The Media and Democratization in Southeast Asia
Author: Peter Eng
"Southeast Asia's current economic turmoil has badly hurt its news media. . . Some journalists fear that with the media financially battered, governments will seize the opportunity to exert greater control. On the other hand, the global democracy and information technology revolutions continue to inspire the region's journalists to try to prove that the 'Asian values' argument is false-a story planted by autocrats who want to keep the people ignorant and docile."