Kurt Waldheim

How could a man with a past mired in Nazi membership and alleged involvement in war crimes become Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization dedicated not only to the maintenance of peace but also to the preservation and advancement of human rights? Bending with the Winds is the result of Finger and Saltzman's exploration of that question. Hundreds of confidential telegrams and in-depth interviews, including some with Waldheim himself, provide a basis for study of his performance. This broad discussion leads to a search for a new procedure of choosing a Secretary General.

The American public has become increasingly disenchanted with the United Nations. Some responsible sources in this country are already advocating withdrawal from U.N. agencies and perhaps even from the entire system. This book, by the former Director of Research at UNITAR, the U.N.'s "think tank," examines the record of the U.N. during its first 40 years in the clear light of American national interest. Franck offers a balance sheet which confirms that the U.N. during its first 40 years in the clear light of American national interest. Franck offers a balance sheet which confirms that the U.N. often operates in a way that undermines respect for individual human rights and hampers conflict resolution. At the same time, he does not shrink from showing that the fault frequently lies with the United States itself. He shows how the U.S. helped form the U.N. with unrealistic views of what it could do, how for a decade or more the U.S. was able to use the U.N. essentially as a tool and adjunct to its foreign policy, and how Washington failed to predict and plan for the inevitable shift in power at the U.N. led by the newly emergent Third World nations. Franck warns of the American penchant for treating international relations as a series of unrelated encounters instead of an ongoing, institutionalized system in which the tactics and outcome of one crisis inevitably affect the way the next context is played out. Taday the U.S. and its allies are often the butt of antagonisms that the U.N. system seems to encourage and exaggerate. Nevertheless Franck shows that even now the U.S. position in the U.N. is far from hopeless, and he provides a blueprint for a strategy of "playing hard ball," which is far more realistic than abandoning the world organization.

According to Simon Wiesenthal, nearly half of the crimes associated with the Holocaust were committed by Austrians, who comprised just 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater German Reich. Bruce Pauley's book explains this phenomenon by providing a history of Austrian anti-Semitism and Jewish responses to it from the Middle Ages to the present, with a particular focus on the period from 1914 to 1938. In contrast to works that view anti-Semitism as an inherent national characteristic, his account identifies many sources and varieties of the anti-Semitic sentiment that pervaded Austrian society on the eve of the Holocaust.

Anton Pelinka analyses and describes the many facets of Austria, past and present. The book emphasises the decline of the traits that have been considered essentially Austrian, typically these are Austrian Catholicism and social partnership.

Discourse and Discrimination is a study of how racism, antisemitism and ethnicism are reflected in discourse. The authors first survey five established discourse analysis approaches before providing their own model and three case-studies. Drawing on a wide range of sources, they question why racism and anti-Semitism are still virulent worldwide.

In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. "Symptoms of Modernity "traces this development in the context of Central European history.

Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. As "Symptoms of Modernity "shows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals.

Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination--a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers. "Symptoms of Modernity "gives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.

Forty years after its mandated inception, the practical role of the Secretary-General of the United Nations is still not clearly defined. Based on an in-depth understanding of the pertinent articles of the United Nations Charter as well as the experiences of the five Secretaries-General of the United Nations, this study addresses the need to clarify the position of Secretary-General by examining and evaluating the diplomatic resources currently available to the office in the critical area of crisis prevention. Convinced that the prevention of international conflict will be well-served by increasing the Secretary-General's direct involvement, Thomas E. Boudreau builds upon recent reforms and proposes a global system of conflict identification which will enable the office to fulfill its intended role.