Return To the Middle Ages
D URING the First World War it was usual for the Allies to represent their cause as that of democracy, which was defined as the free and spontaneous movement of the human spirit, unfettered by logic. Germany, on the other hand, stood for machine-like regularity and cold, calculating rationality. Henri Bergson and Gustav LeBon grew quite eloquent on this theme. During the Second War, the roles were reversed. This time Germany was the country of blind instinct and wild emotional surges, moving in a kind of somnambulism and thinking with its blood. The West stood for reason and logic, for an ordered view of life in conformity with permanent rational values. In defiance of all respectable historiography, the United Nations were made the heirs of the cool and tranquil culture of Rome, with Christian universalism added, whereas Germany represented the survival of the frenetic barbarism of the Nordic pagans. Even the boundary line was supplied: it was the Wall of Limes in southern Germany, which marked the farthest outpost of permanent Roman settlement. Now that the Third War is in the offing, the boundary line has been changed, but the protagonists remain much the same. The Wall of Limes has moved to the Elbe, a shift which makes naturalized democrats of the Germans, who a short time ago were regarded as the mortal foes of democracy. On the west bank of the Elbe today stands Christian democracy, a sort of Joan of Arc, the champion of reason and natural law, while atheistic Bolshevism, foe of this two-millenial culture, glowers from the east bank. The reader can document this picture from his daily paper. There is nothing new or out of the way about this. The Incas, before conquering an adjoining people, used always to spread the story that their enemies were cannibals and deserved what they were about to get. What the Incas said may or may not have been true, but it is certain that the current representation of the East-West dispute is false. The idea of a unified Christendom with a common heritage was always a myth, and the myth itself was shattered at the Reformation. Democracy, again, is the product of the spiritual individualism and the secular rationalism which replaced the theocratic conception of a law of nature of the middle ages, and is altogether inconsistent with that conception. Ten years ago no one would have had the face to talk the kind of history that is now current.
Deterioration of a sustainable agro-silvo-pastoral system in the Sudan: the gum gardens of Kordofan
The development and establishment of agroforestry systems is often suggested as a way to stabilize rural economies in developing countries [King, 1979]. At the same time, some traditional systems are being lost, due to an inability to protect the perennial or tree crop components of the system. These traditional systems and the forces that reinforce or destroy them should be carefully studied by those in the process of encouraging adoption of agroforestry systems in the developing world. The gum gardens of Western Sudan are a case in point.Acacia senegal (hashab) andAcacia seyal (talh) are the two major marketable gum-producing trees found in the western region of Sudan. TheAcacias are grown as part of an agro-silvo-pastoral system that has persisted for more than a hundred years in Kordofan Province, where 70% of Sudan's gum Arabic was once produced, as well as most of its grain and livestock products. After a lengthy drought lasting from 1979 to 1985 gum production in Sudan drastically decreased. It was reported that pest attacks and drought were major causal agents in the decline of gum production [Awouda, 1989; Sungar, 1986]. A survey executed in Northern Kordofan Province, starting in August of 1986, did uncover a great number of deadAcacias due to drought and pest attack, but from interviews with gum farmers we conclude that the decline in gum production is largely due to unfavorable socioeconomic relationships exacerbated by the drought, leading to the deterioration of the agroforestry system of production. An inability to get a fair price for gum at the local level and increasing emphasis on a cash economy led to the neglect of the tree components of the system. The gum gardens have long flourished with the intensive husbandry of small-scale farmers. Once these farmers were no longer able to care for them, the gum trees disappeared from the system, indicating that a lack of community stability can be fatal to even a well-developed agroforestry system.
The Human Rights Act and Parliamentary Democracy
The Human Rights Act 1998 is the culmination of an aggressive campaign for the incorporation into domestic law of the European Convention on Human Rights, a campaign in which the judges joined forces with other political activists. Variously described as 'brilliant';' 'a masterly exposition of the parliamentary draftsman's art';2 and even 'a thing of intellectual beauty',3 the Act has also been greeted as an 'ingenious compromise' between the 'maximalists' and 'minimalists', the former supporting a judicial power to invalidate legislation, as is the case in Canada.4 But although it is purported to reconcile in 'subtle' form the protection of human rights with the sovereignty of Parliament (a claim even more credible after an important but unsung Commons amendment), the Act also represents an unprecedented transfer of political power from the executive and legislature to the judiciary, and a fundamental re-structuring of our 'political constitution'.s As such it is unquestionably the most significant formal redistribution of political power in this country since 1911,6 and perhaps since 1688 when the Bill of Rights proclaimed loudly that proceedings in Parliament ought not to be questioned or impeached in any court or any other place. In the words of Baroness Williams of Crosby, we have crossed our 'constitutional Rubicon',7 at least to the extent that the courts may now declare a statute incompatible with Convention rights. The enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 was marked by an unusually high quality of debate, particularly in the House of Lords, with powerful performances by the Lord Chancellor and Lord Lester of Herne Hill. The performance of the latter on one occasion was too much for Lord Campbell of Alloway, unaccustomed it seems to cerebral rather than ceremonial contributions in their Lordships' House. Lord Campbell was heard to protest (in a manner dubbed 'offensive' by Lord Ackner)8 about 'these escoteric lectures on law at this time of night', having 'never heard anything like this after dinner' in the 18 years he had been in the Lords.9 He had better get used to it: the law and the lawyers are about to dominate all the debates, at all times of the day and night, before and after every meal time. Indeed in the Second Reading Debate on this Bill in the House of Lords 'full of