Volume 14, Issue 1 (1998) Transitions in Emerging Democracies

This is the next to last issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy before we usher in the new millennium. In the coming year the word itself will go through many uses, many permutations of meaning, be subject of so much tendentious punditry, idiotic speculation, inane commentary, and pompous prognostications that it will have been sucked dry of meaning, and we will be left with a plethora of "millennium specials" and "the top one hundred of the millennium" in everything from cat food to human diet fads, and of course your perennial millennium "special sales" and "personalities of the millennium."

And being the next to last issue of the journal in this century, it will also be a first of its kind: a venture into the global village to ascertain how or whether we, as a species, are improving the ways in which we govern ourselves, the lives of the six billion-plus inhabitants of this small planet, in securing the liberty and freedom of the individual, the primacy of law and dispensation of justice, the enhancing of human potential, the provision of work for the able, the construction of the groundwork for a better life for all — dignity and respect, freedom from hunger, tolerance, adequate shelter, elimination of illiteracy, proliferation of the new literacy, ending dictatorial and authoritarian rule, promoting the inviolability of human rights, stemming the flow of hundreds of millions of refugees who live in little more than badly upgraded concentration camps, countryless and uncared for except for the unstinting efforts of underappreciated and underfunded nongovernmental organizations and the like, and improving the health and sanitary conditions in which three-quarters of the world is mired in cycles of disease and poverty, in making some headway in closing the gap between the rich and the poor.