September 2009

September 15, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – “5,500 journalists and 700 in the American delegation alone” reported a London newspaper on the Kyoto global warming jamboree. Doubtless, given the world’s newly awoken interest there will be many, many more at tee follow up conference in Copenhagen at the end of the year. If only one tenth of those would turn up for a conference on supplying pure water and giving every girl a basic primary education then we might be getting somewhere with the most tangible pressing environmental need of our age. (And one that cannot be scientifically questioned, to boot.) Still, give Kyoto its due. This is the way issues get placed firmly on the political map. “I have only a modest proposal” said Kierkegaard “to make the true state of affairs known.” It may be the wrong issue, it may be an overblown issue but if you believe...

September 22, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: ‘it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace’. So wrote Edward Luttwak in Foreign Affairs. The end of the bombing in ex-Yugoslavia was a case in point. It ended with both sides claiming victory – the Western allies got the Serbian army removed from Kosovo and the Serbs won agreement from NATO that it would disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army. The tragedy of war or violence is not that sometimes it does not have positive outcomes, it is that these same goals could have been met without war, if the protagonists had only been prepared to be more farsighted, wiser, and more prepared to be more patient and creative in their diplomacy and less bellicose in their confrontation. Tossing such arguments back and...

15 september, 2009 Håkan Wiberg Recension av Fredrik S. HeffermehlNobels viljeVidarforlagetOslo 2008 På 1890-talet var Alfred Nobel en av de rikaste svenskarna och hade skapat ett industriimperium över hela Europa baserat på flera hundra patent. Han var också en ensam, sjuk och periodvis deprimerad man. Hans överväganden om vad hans förmögenhet skulle användas till resulterade i hans testamente 1895, vilket blev offentligt känt efter hans död följande år vid 63 års ålder. Testamentet har varit omgivet av drama från första början. Heffermehl beskriver hur den unge testamentsexekutorn Ragnar Sohlman lyckades rädda förmögenheten från otaliga angrepp. Franska skattemyndigheter hoppades på väldiga arvsskatter. Ett koppel advokater med ambitioner om oändliga processer kom snabbt i gång. Oscar II försökte manipulera brorsonen Emanuel att få Nobel-familjen att sätta stopp för planerna på Nobelpriserna, vartill Alfred Nobel enligt honom förletts ”av fantaster och särskilt fruntimmer”. Allt gick dock väl, såtillvida att den därtill testamenterade delen...

September 7, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Will historians a hundred years hence look at the beginning of the twenty first century, much as we look at the end of the nineteenth century, and say, Unfortunately the peace and prosperity of the moment was but an interlude before the bloodiest century in mankind’s history? Will they conclude, as Aldous Huxley did, that “every road towards a better society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war and preparations for war?” This is the truth, the odious and unacceptable truth. The pessimists of today have grist for their mill. President Barack Obama is engaging America in what is going to a long and bloody battle in Afghanistan. Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace recently warned this could be his Iraq or even Vietnam. Despite this the big picture is good, arguably far better and more inherently...