Juan M. in Costa Rica Del Aguila, in Journal of Interamerican
Studies and World Affairs (Aug. 1982), Box
24-8134, Univ. of Miami, Coral Gables,
Fla. 33124.
Alone among Central American nations, Costa Rica has managed to avert civil strife and to sustain democratic institutions. Today, how- ever, mounting economic woes imperil its long social peace.
Costa Rica enjoys the highest per capita gross domestic product ($1,311) of any nation in the region and has a growing middle class. Ninety percent...
Andrew
Boyd, in The Economist (Aug. 28, 1982), 515 Abbott Dr., Broomall, Pa. 19008.
Twenty years ago, Finland was a wintry country known chiefly for two exports: wood products and the workers it sent to other Scandinavian countries. Today, having turned to its advantage both its climate and its geography-its proximity to the Soviet Union-Finland has joined the front ranks of Europe's industrialized nations.
Neighboring Russia has always loomed large in the Finnish view of the world. The retirement...
Norriss S. Hetherington, in The
Middle East Journal (Summer 1982), 1761
N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini unseated the Shah of Iran in 1979, it seemed that Iranians had rejected their former leader's Western-style modernization goals. Actually, says Hetherington, a University of Cali- fornia research associate, it was the inefficiency and slowness of the Shah's program that turned his people against him.
The Iranian standard of living rose sharply after the first...
Alan Ehrenhalt, in Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (Sept. 3,1983), 1414 22nd St. N.W., Wash-
the Statehouses ington, 0.020037.
Being a member of the state legislature may seem about as glamorous as running a laundry. Yet the statehouses are currently in ferment, re- ports Ehrenhalt, a Congressional Quarterly editor.
Unobtrusively, state governments have extended their reach in re- cent years, as Washington has delegated more responsibility for federal-state programs-e.g., health, welfare, e...
public opinion surveys. [For evidence of a possible recent turnabout, see WQ Autumn 1983,
p.10.1 Between 1958 and 1964, for example, the percentage of respon- dents who believed that Washington could not be trusted "to do what is right" remained steady at about 22 percent. 1970, amid America's Vietnam involvement, the percentage had doubled. It was up to 63 per- cent in 1976 and 73 percent by 1980.
Such attitudes do not stem from political apathy, the authors argue. If anything, Americans...
Stephen Gillers, in The Nation (Sept. 17, 1983), P.O. Box 1953, Marion, Ohio 43305.
The nine-member U.S. Supreme Court is now dominated-at least, nu- merically-the appointees of conservative Republican presidents. Yet, for years now, the Court has confounded predictions that it would take a sharp Right turn.
The days of the liberal Warren Court nominally ended when Chief Justice Earl Warren retired in 1969 and was replaced by Warren Bur- ger, a Nixon appointee. President Nixon later named three...
William C. Adams, in Public Opinion (Aug.-Sept. 1983), American En- And the Public terprise Institute for Public Policy Re- search, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036.
For all his talents as a "Great Communicator," Ronald Reagan has had difficulty rallying support for his stoutly anticommunist foreign policy.
Conservatives blame the lukewarm popular response on the influ- ence of the liberal national news media or the public's "post-Vietnam syndrome." Actually, writes...
John Lewis Gaddis, in Diplomatic History Cold War Ashes (Summer 1983), Scholarly Resources
Inc., 104 Greenhill Ave., ~ilmin~ton,
Del. 19805.
Among American historians, the debate over the causes of the Cold War is still a hot topic.
Until the late 1960s, the orthodox view was that Josef Stalin's aggres- sive stance forced America into the Cold War during the late 1940s. Then, New Left "revisionist" historians, such as Oregon State's Wil- liam Appleman Williams and York University's...
Kenneth Adelman and Marc Seriously Plattner, in Atlantic Quarterly (Spring1983), Longman Group Limited, Sub-
scriptions Dept., Fourth Ave., Harlow, Es-
sex CM19 5AA England.
To many Americans, the glass-walled United Nations headquarters in New York is both a symbol of hope for international cooperation and a source of chronic irritation.
Simple arithmetic makes a certain amount of U.S. frustration inevi- table, note Adelman and Plattner, former member of the U.S. delega- tion at the UN (now...
failing to work together. In 1981, for example, America's NATO allies sided with the United States in only 75 percent of the votes in the General Assembly. Most of the NAM's members, contrast, voted for the group's official position more than 90 percent of the time.
Western disunity, the authors argue, stems from the cynical view in some Western European capitals that what the UN does matters very little. Europeans cast General Assembly votes with an eye to winning the Third World's goodwill "on...