发布时间 : 星期日 文章魏剑峰的经济学人笔记更新完毕开始阅读
180. A less visible battle has been going on between various Ukrainian oligarchs and the members of Mr Yanukovych’s extended family who took their place at the trough.
181. In the Orange revolution she was treated like a messiah. This time, while people were glad to see that she had been freed, they knew better than to put their fate in her hands—or those of any other politician for that matter.
182. What complicates the picture further is that holding the country together depends in large measure on the co-operation of the oligarchs,
183. Some this is the product of hysterical propaganda on the Russian television channels that are watched on that side of the country.
184. Some people in Donetsk—Mr Yanukovych’s home city—have said they will reciprocate by speaking Ukrainian.
185. Sebastopol, Crimea’s largest city, is mostly populated by Russians —not least because it is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
186. Politicians in Russia are talking of distributing passports in Crimea—a ruse used to strengthen Russia’s pretext for annexing the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008.
187. While making no public comment on Mr Yanukovych’s defeat, Mr Putin has ordered an urgent drill to test the combat-readiness of 150,000 soldiers in the region.
188. he despised the man, but placed great store in having a compliant Ukraine.
189. elites on whom Mr Putin depends. Even if Russia does not make a military move on Crimea, it may use it as a lever to ratchet up pressure on whoever holds power in Kiev.
190. In the original map included in this article we transposed the Party of the Regions’
191. In the original map included in this article we transposed the Party of the Regions’ election results with those of the Freedom party.
192. The resultant economic burden—estimated in the tens of billions of dollars—will soar as the economy and the cost of health care grow.
193. China is starting to take notice of the problem.
194. Although these proclamations look impressive on paper, they have not amounted to much in practice.
195. Smoking is less common than it was in urban offices and restaurants but China has hardly kicked the habit.
196. Medical studies add to the sense that the damage done by tobacco is set to rise.
197. Hence talk of beefing up efforts to curb smoking.
198. But even then the impact may be limited, for two reasons.
199. And the tobacco business is so entwined with government that it is likely to thwart any effective anti-smoking effort.
200. anti-tobacco campaigns need six planks.
201. The first is reliable data on tobacco use and prevention, which is lacking in China.
202. The second is the sweeping imposition of smoking bans, not the partial bans still being mooted in Beijing.
203. Another plank is to educate smokers on the harms of tobacco.
204. But China’s cigarette brands have found many ways to circumvent official prohibitions, for example by setting up charities that fund schools and sporting events in their name (though officials say they will now crack down on this practice).
205. Foreign brands are relegated to a niche market in China but the ciggy bigwigs now have their eyes on global expansion.
206. China’s government is hooked on cigarette revenues.
207. some argue that all that show-biz has become a liability, dragging the military’s name into the quagmire of commercialism.
208. Laying off entertainers may be relatively easy but changing the army’s predilection for syrupy songs sung by comely stars could prove more difficult.
209. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures.
210. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk
so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal.
211. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes.
212. In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism,
213. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world. In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid.
214. The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe.
215. Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes.
216. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later.
217. democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone into reverse.
218. Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once again.
219. The Chinese elite argue that their model—tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless effort to recruit talented people into its upper ranks—is more efficient than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock.
220. Autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have followed suit, perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than doing away with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.
221. Mr Bush sincerely believed that the Middle East would remain a breeding ground for terrorism so long as it was dominated by dictators.
222. Foreign-policy realists took Iraq’s growing chaos as proof that American-led promotion of democratisation was a recipe for instability.
223. But the euphoria soon turned to despair.
224. Along with war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, this has dashed the hope that the Arab spring would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East.
225. Meanwhile some recent recruits to the democratic camp have lost their lustre.
226. National politicians have also responded to globalisation by limiting their discretion and handing power to unelected technocrats in some areas.
227. Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust,
228. Plato’s great worry about democracy, that citizens would ―live from day to day, indulging the pleasure of the moment‖, has proved prescient.
229. The result can be a toxic and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one hand, and disdain for it on the other.
230. countries naturally wanted to emulate the world’s leading power.
231. But as China’s influence has grown, America and Europe have lost their appeal as role models and their appetite for spreading democracy.
232. Democracy has been on the back foot before.
233. The elite is becoming a self-perpetuating and self-serving clique.
234. They regarded democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism: something that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness human creativity but also to check human perversity, and then kept in good working order, constantly oiled, adjusted and worked upon.
235. Conversely, the first sign that a fledgling democracy is heading for the rocks often comes when elected rulers try to erode constraints on their power—often in the name of majority rule.
236. Mr Morsi would not be spending his life shuttling between prison and a glass box in an Egyptian court, and Mr Yanukovych would not be fleeing for his life, if they had not enraged their compatriots by accumulating so much power.
237. Established democracies need to update their own political systems both to address the problems they face at home, and to revitalise democracy’s image abroad.
238. America’s Senate has made it harder for senators to filibuster appointments.