Latin America pays a high price for being the Number One laboratory of neoliberal experimentation in the past quarter of a century: the area has now turned into one of the most unstable regions in both economic, political and social sense. 2003 could be a decisive year for the future of the continent.

The trinity of oil, terrorism an liberal political liberalisationprovides several meanings to the war againts Iraq. The liberal perspective unites these three lines in one and claims that although war is not a decent thing but at least it removes one bloody dictator. In the historical-critical view, however, the picture is incomplete. The war agains Iraq can be understood as the spreading the exhausted "values" of the US civilisation in the frame of a "recolonisation" that aims to integrate the peripheric and semi-peripheric parts of the world into the coming global order.

In Hungary, a selective educational system has evolved and seems to have stabilized, which is incapable of providing social equality even on the lowest level. The factors, which have pushed the quality of mass education "upwards", such as technology constraint, raison d'état, and labour movement, have disappeared. If it represents the fundamental values of public education (liberty, democracy and solidarity), is there a chance for progressive pedagogy to meet the political left again?

The genetic knowledge accumulated in the last few years represents an enormous value in biological and medical research. Therefore, it was and is only up to the collaboration of devoted scientists, that the genom of the human race has not been "privatised" – that is, it has not been sold to private laboratories.

In 2002, the American legislation adopted a new agricultural bill, under which $18 billion per year is given to promote American agriculture. It seems, however, that the highly concentrated food industry, owned by a few multinationals, will be the only beneficiary of the support, and not the farmers themselves.