Word: sovereign
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...between Diana and Prince Charles, heir to the throne, they were sniping at Andrew's spouse for her idleness, her "materialism" and, well, her behavior that was Not Quite His Class, Dear -- reproofs that were said to reflect Buckingham Palace's views. Britons high and low agreed: their revered sovereign and her family deserved better...
...this, unfortunately, is as pertinent as ever today. After two world wars, some thought that we might be heading for something approximating world government. But nationalism proved stronger than anybody had expected. New nations proliferated, many of them hardly viable; at last count we have 170 sovereign states in the world speaking 4,000 different languages...
...were, into ever smaller ethnic or religious units -- which really is not nationalism but tribalism. Such splintering in the name of self-determination and freedom is understandable, but can also be dangerous. It makes no sense for every tribe, every language group, every cultural community to try to be sovereign...
...accomplish all of this before April 1993, when it is to organize and oversee "free and fair elections" for a 120-member constituent assembly. To do it, the U.N. force will in effect have to run the country by wielding supervisory control over the internal workings of a sovereign government. Even if they succeed, the outcome may not be happy. Warns Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who heads the interim Supreme National Council: "There is a true danger after the elections that the losing parties could decide to use their guns against rivals to exact revenge." The U.N. may be needed...
...civilized and inquisitive taste could ask for." For less quixotic souls, however, the Spanish city has always been something quite other, a contentious, raffish, yeasty place of shopkeepers. Catalans, as Robert Hughes sympathetically calls them, pride themselves on their pragmatism and their independent-mindedne ss: two of their sovereign virtues are mesura and ironia. And at the heart of their idealized self-image is seny, or "a natural level-headedness." The patron saint of Barcelona, St. Eulalia, is also the patron saint of stonecutters, bricklayers and millstone makers...