The immediate response of President Bush and his administration to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States was superb, both purposeful and principled  a military, political, and diplomatic success. But what comes next? In his State of the Union address, Bush suggested specific targets of future phases of the war  the axis of evil of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. But what has been missing in the discussion of the second stage (and perhaps the third, fourth, and fifth stages) of the war on terrorism is an articulation of the general principles that will guide policy in difficult times ahead. The new threat to American national security and the American way of life is no less threatening than such earlier challenges as the defeat of fascism in Europe and imperialism in Japan during World War II, or the containment and ultimate destruction of world communism during the Cold War. A grand vision of the purposes of American power is needed not only to shape strategy, but also to sustain support from the American people and Americas allies.

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Just about a year ago, this newly created Subcommittee opened its formal hearings with a look at the U.S.-European relationship. I said at the time I felt that the transatlantic relationship was the most important relationship this nation had. Today, in the aftermath of 911, I feel this relationship is even more important and in many respects stronger than ever.

It is fitting today that we open our hearings with what I consider the second most important relationship we have, that with Russia. U.S.-Russian relationships have significantly changed since the terrorist attacks on September 11.

Russian President Putin, in what some have defined as a bold defiance of many in his own population, his bureaucracy and his military, has seized upon the tragedies of the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an opportunity to transform relations with the U.S. from distant and sometimes hostile to one of broad cooperation and new opportunities in many fields.

By identifying terrorism as the common enemy and associating Russia with the common cause of the United States and others to deal with global terrorism, President Putin seems to be attempting to forge a new alliance with the West and with the United States.

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The transition from communism in Europe and the former Soviet Union has only sometimes produced a transition to democracy. Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the twenty-eight new states have abandoned communism, but only nine of these have entered the ranks of liberal democracies. The remaining majority of new postcommunist states are various shades of dictatorships or unconsolidated "transitional regimes." This article seeks to explain why some states abandoned communism for democracy while others turned to authoritarian rule. In endorsing actorcentric approaches that have dominated analyses of the third wave of democratization, this argument nonetheless offers an alternative set of causal paths from ancien régime to new regime that can account for both democracy and dictatorship as outcomes. Situations of unequal distributions of power produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule. In countries with asymmetrical balances of power, the regime to emerge depends almost entirely on the ideological orientation of the most powerful. In countries where democrats enjoyed a decisive power advantage, democracy emerged. Conversely, in countries in which dictators maintained a decisive power advantage, dictatorship emerged. In between these two extremes were countries in which the distribution of power between the old regime and its challengers was relatively equal. Rather than producing stalemate, compromise, and pacted transitions to democracy, however, such situations in the postcommunist world resulted in protracted confrontation between relatively balanced powers. The regimes that emerged from these modes of transitions are not the most successful democracies but rather are unconsolidated, unstable, partial democracies.

Some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order revolve around a frequently invoked but highly contested concept: sovereignty. To what extent does the concept of sovereignty - as it plays out in institutional arrangements, rules, and principles - inhibit the solution of these issues? Can the rules of sovereignty be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they represent an insurmountable barrier to stable solutions or can alternative arrangements be created? Problematic Sovereignty attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions by taking account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory, components of the concept of sovereignty in cases ranging from the struggle for sovereignty between China and Taiwan to the compromised sovereignty of Bosnia under the Dayton Accord.

Countering the common view of sovereignty that treats it as one coherent set of principles, the chapters of Problematic Sovereignty illustrate cases where the disaggregation of sovereignty has enabled political actors to create entities that are semiautonomous, semi-independent, and/or semilegal in order to solve specific problems stemming from competing claims to authority.

Political parties are one of the core institutions of democracy. But in democracies around the world -- rich and poor, Western and non-Western -- there is growing evidence of low or declining public confidence in parties. In membership, organization, and popular involvement and commitment, political parties are not what they used to be. But are they in decline, or are they simply changing their forms and functions? In contrast to authors of most previous works on political parties, which tend to focus exclusively on long-established Western democracies, the contributors to this volume cover many regions of the world. Theoretically, they consider the essential functions that political parties perform in democracy and the different types of parties. Historically, they trace the emergence of parties in Western democracies and the transformation of party cleavage in recent decades. Empirically, they analyze the changing character of parties and party systems in postcommunist Europe, Latin America, and five individual countries that have witnessed significant change: Italy, Japan, Taiwan, India, and Turkey. As the authors show, political parties are now only one of many vehicles for the representation of interests, but they remain essential for recruiting leaders, structuring electoral choice, and organizing government. To the extent that parties are weak and discredited, the health of democracy will be seriously impaired.

This paper introduces a new methodology to examine the empirical relationship

between democracy and economic growth. Democratic institutions are assumed to affect growth through a series of channels. We specify and estimate a full system of equations determining growth and the channel variables. Results suggest that democracy fosters growth by improving the accumulation of human capital and, less robustly, by lowering income inequality. On the other hand, democracy hinders growth by reducing the rate of physical capital accumulation and, less robustly, by raising the ratio of government consumption to GDP. Once all of these indirect effects are accounted for, the overall effect of democracy on economic growth is moderately negative. Our results indicate that democratic institutions are responsive to the demands of the poor by expanding access to education and lowering income inequality, but do so at the expense of physical capital accumulation.

Some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order revolve around a frequently invoked but highly contested concept: sovereignty. To what extent does the concept of sovereignty -as it plays out in institutional arrangements, rules, and principles -inhibit the solution of these issues? Can the rules of sovereignty be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they represent an insurmountable barrier to stable solutions or can alternative arrangements be created? Problematic Sovereignty attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions by taking account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory, components of the concept of sovereignty in cases ranging from the struggle for sovereignty between China and Taiwan to the compromised sovereignty of Bosnia under the Dayton Accord.

Countering the common view of sovereignty that treats it as one coherent set of principles, the chapters of Problematic Sovereignty illustrate cases where the disaggregation of sovereignty has enabled political actors to create entities that are semiautonomous, semi-independent, and/or semilegal in order to solve specific problems stemming from competing claims to authority.

Every international system or society has a set of rules or norms that define appropriate behaviors. These norms are, however, never obeyed in an automatic fashion. Perhaps more than any other setting the international environment is characterized by organized hypocrisy. Actors violate rules in practice without at the same time challenging their legitimacy. In nineteenth-century East Asia this was true for countries embracing the European sovereign state system of formal equality and autonomy, and the Sinocentric Confucian system of hierarchy and dependency. The West imposed the treaty port system which violated the sovereign principle of non-intervention. China accommodated the West, tacitly jettisoning demands for ritual obeisance. Japan chose those principles that were most suitable for its material interests. Korea, however, dominated by a literati class whose position was associated with Confucian principles, failed to pursue policies that might have maintained Korean independence.

The post-Cold War world is divided into two worlds - a liberal core and a realist periphery. The core and the periphery, however, are not permanently divided, and their interaction in Europe is particularly dynamic. In general, the core powers - led by the United States - have moved to expand their zone of peace and prosperity eastward. And while Russia should (and often says it does) feel threatened by this eastern expansion, Moscow has generally pursued a policy of integration with the West for the last decade.