It says its relationship with Taipei is founded on the "1992 consensus" between the two sides that effectively rules out the idea of Taiwan ever gaining independence.
Coming from a prime minister who relies heavily on the hard right, "post-fascist" National Alliance, Mr Berlusconi's comments touched a hyper-sensitive nerve in a country whose postwar democracy was founded on an anti-fascist consensus.
A political consensus founded on economic success, with a complacent citizenry, a compliant press, and a vastly popular leader who rarely deviates from public opinion — Merkel's Germany is reminiscent of Eisenhower's America.
Hezbollah insists the government is no longer legitimate without the participation of Shiite ministers, who represent Lebanon's single largest community in a political system founded on the notion of sectarian consensus.
That consensus is founded on two indisputable realities: First, that the Hispanic share of the electorate is increasing as America's Anglo majority diminishes and disappears, and second, that Hispanics as a bloc are more likely to favor liberal immigration policies than other voters.
The methodology is founded on the premise that, absent a consensus on social policy priorities, that are, on which indicators are more important and should be given higher weights in the index, each state is granted leeway for deciding how to weigh its own indicators and the most favorable weights for indicators are determined for each state.
The Barn's administrative system, collectivist and consensus-based, is founded on the metaphor of cooking.
During the 1980s, both the IMF and the World Bank adopted the "Washington consensus" on economic policy, founded on the belief that free markets, privatisation and minimum government interference in the economy was the best way to achieve development.
The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend.
The "set of principles", that the Forum was seeking, "founded on solid evidence, to guide the new consensus on development cooperation" [ 43], are not yet clear.
What happened, we now know, was the collapse of the American consensus, the postwar social contract, founded on a mixed economy at home and bipartisan Cold War internationalism abroad.
