Word: consensus
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...that the international community is having a little trouble agreeing on an agenda for a U.N. conference on racism in South Africa later this month.The event's spectacularly turgid title - the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance - captures some of the difficulty in achieving a consensus even over what to discuss, and, inevitably, to disagree...
...Rumsfeld, of course, still declined to refer to China as a "friend," preferring "communist dictatorship" instead. His differences with Powell are palpable, and yet they're always going to be settled by consensus. The balance may shift periodically, but within the limits defined by a long-term relationship in which both sides have an overriding self-interest...
...interests that fund both political parties in the U.S. strongly discourage any jeopardizing of business with China for ideological or political reasons - maintaining the relationship has become an article of bipartisan faith in Washington right up there with a balanced budget. In Beijing, the reformists have created an equivalent consensus around the fact that China's modernization depends on dramatically expanding foreign trade and investment, which requires a good relationship with the West. And that serves to temper the more hawkish instincts of the hard-liners...
...course China's reformists have the harder time of it. The corollary of modernization and reform, in Beijing's consensus, is maintaining order and stability under the centralized control of the Communist Party. But the deeper the scale and pace of reforms, the more potentially volatile their society becomes. To comply with World Trade Organization rules, for example, China will have to open its doors to competition that will leave millions of its citizens jobless in a fast-changing society. So the hard-liners have plenty of material to work with, even as the reformists have to keep the door...
...Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and others to sort out their own differences on Kyoto. Whatever the treaty's imperfections, there was a collective sense of achievement among the overwhelming majority of the world's industrialized and developing nations at the fact that they'd fashioned an epic international consensus on global warming despite the objections of the one nation that still aspires to global leadership...