Word: citizen
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When the Chinese government announced earlier this week the formal arrest of four Shanghai-based executives of global mining giant Rio Tinto - one Australian citizen and three Chinese nationals - it seemed a deliberate ratcheting down of a case that had stunned foreign investors in the country. After all, Beijing had effectively dropped the case's most ominous element: the charge that Rio's Stern Hu and his three colleagues had allegedly stolen "state secrets," in part by bribing executives of Chinese steel companies, who are Rio's largest buyers of iron ore. Under a state-secrets charge, the four...
...Currently, barring any criminal record, most who settle in the U.K. can apply for citizenship after about five years. The new probationary-citizen plan would lengthen an immigrant's total wait to an estimated six to 10 years, according to the Home Office. (The wait for those immigrating on the basis of family ties would jump from two years to between three and seven...
...answer to this paradox lies at the heart of the Swiss tradition of the citizen-at-arms, the fully-committed participant of direct democracy. Compulsory conscription is part of the Swiss identity...
...past, a nationally drafted militia kept the cantons from raising armies against each other. But it quickly became enshrined as the ultimate symbol of solidarity and subsidiarity. As Dr. Sabine Mannitz at the Peace Institute Research Frankfurt (PRIF) writes, “the Swiss concept of the citizen-soldier aims at the lowest possible degree of institutionalising military structures and at a maximum of immediate democratic control.” Compulsory militia service, the obligation to defend the polity on equal share, is the other side of the coin of semi-direct democratic participation rights. If you have equal decision...
...scheme would be impractical and undesirable in a large republic. But one still cannot help but admire the Swiss commitment to serve. As a citizen of a country once again reflecting upon what civic responsibility means, I have come to hold a certain appreciation for the Swiss sense that "everyone is in this together"—even if there are no enemies to fight...