In The Mid-Morning Hours Of 11 September 2001, Shortly After the second Twin Tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed, amidst the fog surrounding us all – who, when, why – I heard a brief item of news on the radio. Canada had closed its airspace to all American planes still en route; since US airports were also closed for several hours on that day, these pilots would have no choice but to return to their destinations or to circle the airs in search of ‘safe haven’. This news was not repeated. Canada eventually did permit US airplanes to land and many transatlantic passengers found safety in Iceland's Reykjavik airport for a period of time, up to several days in some cases.

This small incident is one among the many in recent years that have made increasingly transparent the fragility of the territorially bounded and state-centric international order. For a few brief hours, the passengers of the airplanes that could not obtain landing permission were like refugees without first admittance claims. The same logic that permits states to deny first admittance to certain refugees and asylees, and often contrary to the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, was operative in this instance as well. Invoking national security concerns, the USA's closest neighbour could, even if briefly, follow the imperatives of sovereign statehood and close its airspace as well as landing privileges to passengers who had now become ‘refugees in orbit‘ in the heavens.

This Article Explores The Nature Of Contemporary Social democracy, questioning, with like-minded scholars, John Gray's interpretation of the relationship between social democracy and globalization, which asserts that social democracy is a historically exhausted project. Garrett, for example, in rejecting such assertions, argues that social democracy remains a distinctive and viable ‘project’ within the global economy, specifically in cases where strong left-of-centre parties are linked to ‘encompassing labour movements’. He has subsequently argued that social democracy in ‘Euroland’ (with or without encompassing labour movements) can pursue a less constrained fiscal policy, and expect a more accommodating monetary policy than some predict. Garrett thus insists that social democratic governments within the Eurozone are able to ‘use macroeconomic policy to lessen market dislocations and to redistribute wealth and risk in the ever more globalized economy’.

As Christmas 2000 Approached In Dublin There Appeared Little prospect that its citizens would avoid the annual rigmarole associated with securing a safe passage home after an evening out. Anaesthetized by now to forecasts of an integrated transport system the envy of Europe, this was a public that had become weary. As for getting a taxi home, there are few it seems who by now could not recount to you their own little horror story: two-hour vigils at a taxi rank in the rain had become firmly ensconced within the mythology of the Celtic Tiger. And yet, as with so many other anecdotes of this period, they would have to vie for our attention in a conversation space crowded with incredulous descriptions of Dublin's morning gridlock, its escalating house prices or political and financial embezzlement.

In this article we open the black box of governance in the new democracies by examining episodes where these governments are confronted with urgent threats that require swift and decisive state responses. This provides a unique insight into how political and administrative decision-making actually takes place. It enables us to analyse and evaluate the performance of the new institutions at times when it matters most. Specifically, we discuss how three of these new democracies, the Baltic states, have dealt with risks and crises in vital societal and political domains such as health and safety, public order, economic management and foreign policy. All belong to the core of the classic state functions.

The Very Nature Of Democracy Makes Its Defence Difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and legitimation of social conf lict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the American Communist Party could claim to incarnate ‘twentieth-century Americanism’ following the same logic used by Marx a century earlier to criticize the ‘merely formal’ nature of bourgeois democracy. But so it was too when the CIA took it upon itself to finance not only political opposition to Soviet inf luence but also to support and encourage what Francis Stonor Saunders's recent study of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters revealed. The shared logic of the CIA and the communists turns out, as the saying goes, to be no accident.