Word: self-interest
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Humanitarian considerations aside, Europeans have a keen self-interest in seeing calm restored to the Balkans. When people run for their lives across not only internal borders but international ones as well, the financial consequences are heavy. According to the U.N., 1.25 million people, most of them Bosnians and Croatians, remain within the boundaries of old Yugoslavia. An additional 250,000 have sought sanctuary, mostly in Western Europe; tens of thousands more have probably slipped over borders illegally to stay with relatives. Already the largest forced movement of Europeans since World War II, this flood may be just the beginning...
...point. It is Japan's one-party democracy, its corporate monopolies, its patriotism that amounts to protectionism that exasperate; it is Japan's trade practices, in fact, and economic strategies. But trade practices are in some respects the product of cultural values, and no country pursues policies in which self-interest plays no part. The Japanese system is different from ours; so too are the French, the Chinese and the South African. And when it comes to competition, all of those powers go with their strengths. Yes, you will add, but the Japanese keep telling us they're different. Indeed...
...urban leaders are trying to find a silver lining in the clouds that rose over the burning blocks of Los Angeles. "What you are starting to see more and more -- and Los Angeles brought it home dramatically -- is that you can't isolate yourself in your little island of self-interest," says New Jersey Governor Jim Florio. "In a place like New Jersey, you can go from Short Hills, a very affluent community, to Newark in the space of 10 minutes...
...dispersing the poor in manageable numbers to the suburbs. Courts in several states, including New Jersey and Kentucky, have ordered localities to provide low-income housing, or forbidden them to prevent the construction of such housing. The prospect of poor people nearby makes suburbanites shudder. Yet the same self-interest that has made them turn away from the cities may eventually force them to recognize that the larger health of America requires the cities to be rescued. Even in a nation as spacious as the U.S., people are running out of places to escape...
Clinton hopes that enlightened self-interest will cause swing voters to buy his agenda. He tirelessly repeats a statistic popularized by New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley: by the year 2000, only 57% of those entering the work force will be native-born whites. "It has become increasingly clear that the economic future of whites is tied inextricably to that of minorities," says Clinton. "From now on, we all rise or fall together, economically as well as morally...