| Abstract | Dick Wilson points out in the article that a combination of technical and socio-political developments have made people in many countries around the world feel more independent and more individual, less harnessed to government decrees, more free to do their own things. Such people are less easy to govern than they were before, and the consequence is that governments feel slightly less able to act for them on the international stage. Centuries-old habits of deference to authority are visibly crumbling in Japan and China, so much so that Beijing is trying to curb and control traffic on the Internet, that liberating device which lets people into each other's parlours or back gardens like the magicians in the Arabian Nights. |
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