POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Decentralization
Document Summary
Argument: germany and france met the challenges while britain did not. (1) learning disaster of wwii and 1950 france. They drew the lesson that they needed to fix their institutions. (2) difference between the two is a function of learning and institution. Famines only occur in non-democracies because non-democratic institutions are less efficient. In non-democracies you can starve your population, however, in democracies, you don"t get re-elected. Europe is the best and the worst of humanity. Portion that gave us human rights and gave us the holocaust. It is also the part of the world that embodies most directly, the theme, that linked together, the majority of lectures. Europe was both the location of the emergence of human rights as a concept (institutions, charters, laws) and the continent that perfected expulsion, genocide, and war. Europe is a shifting geographical and spatial entity! In 1913 they were made up mostly of two empires.
