After the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, many analysts expected that relations between the European Union and China would enter a honeymoon phase. Facing a protectionist and potentially destabilizing period in U.S. foreign policy, Europe and China would necessarily have to cooperate more closely on issues ranging from climate change to trade, in order to head off threats to the very future of globalization. The recent EU-China summit, taking place the day after Trump’s announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, would have been the natural occasion to showcase this new alignment, which would represent [...]
Editor’s Note: This article is the first in an ongoing WPR series on LGBT rights and discrimination in various countries around the world. In late May, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage in the country’s civil code was unconstitutional. As Buzzfeed reports, the ruling says that permitting same-sex marriage would contribute to a “stable society.” It ordered the government to change the law within two years, making it likely that Taiwan will become the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. In an email interview, Jens Damm, associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies [...]
For much of its 16 years of existence, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, has carried perhaps the greatest promise of any multilateral organization in Eurasia. Made up of Russia, China and four of the five Central Asian states—Turkmenistan, characteristically, kept the organization at arm’s-length—the SCO hasn’t just provided a high-level forum for discussing regional counterterrorism efforts. It has offered an outlet for Moscow and Beijing to coordinate their security and, increasingly, economic policies without concerns of Western input. The SCO was never quite a “counterweight to NATO” as some asserted, but it provided the groundwork for cohesion to come. [...]
