EU peace

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden, June 3, 2014 Fears has been expressed in Europe about the recent EU parliament voting pattern. Instead of the fear and denouncing the winners we should ask: What causes such an outcome? My short answer is this: Democracy itself is in deep crisis. It has become performance or ritual rather than something genuinely lived. Two things stand out – one, the increase in votes going to nationalist, populist, right-wing and anti-Muslim parties as well as Euro-skeptics – particularly in Denmark, France, Greece and Britain. Secondly, the voter turnout has fallen from 62 per cent in 1979 to 43% in 2009 and this year it increased only 0.09% in spite of the EU Commission’s attempt to increase it. So while people struggle around the world for democracy, only 43% of the EU citizens find it meaningful to go and vote every 4th year. How tragic for an EU...

Speech given in Brussels to the European External Action Service, Free University The EU is in a crisis mainly of its own making. Some of it is economic and can be solved by strict control on speculation, separating savings and investment banks, by gradual debt forgiveness, by lifting the bottom up, the most miserable communities, by the GIPSI (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland) countries cooperating, by stimulating agricultural cooperatives with direct sales points, etc. But much of it is political; the EU has become invisible on the world scene, incapable of a foreign policy building peace and security, also much too tied to US and Israeli fundamentalisms and too anti-Islamic. The following are some ideas about steps that can be taken. The EU glittering success as a peace zone is much needed in zones of war and where war threatens: the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia. A Middle East...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, would never have agreed with her French counterpart, the late President Francois Mitterand, who said “Nationalism is war”. To her nationalism was necessary and good and she felt much as Mitterand’s predecessor, Charles de Gaulle, who said of the French nation,“it comprises a past, a present and a future that are indissoluble.” But the nationalism that Thatcher fought for was a largely negative force. It antagonized the other members of the European Union. She did not believe her country could learn from them how to carry out economic reform without severe social disruption. She went to war with Argentina without trying to enlist the US as a mediator because it lent towards Argentina’s side. One can date European nationalism from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648

By Farhang Jahanpour In the second part, Dr Jahanpour lists 20 steps that can be taken if the West switches to a conflict-resolution and trust-building perspective instead of war-mongering. Please share this as widely as you can, thanks. Iran (2) Build Trust – 21 proposals from TFF on Vimeo.

By Gunnar Westberg, TFF Board member In 1984 we, a group from IPPNW Sweden, met with the Norwegian general Tönne Huitfeldt, at that time Chief of the military Staff of NATO. He was a man with great confidence in himself and in the military system. “General Huitfeldt”, we asked, “when you work with your scenarios in the NATO Headquarters, with the destruction of the world through a nuclear world war looming as the outcome, are you not scared?”. “Oh no, never”, he said. “the Russians are as rational as we are. They will never let it go too far. I am never scared”. Well, we were. And are.

It was only a few years ago that Europe was being praised as the savior of world order, and heralded as the hope for the future of world order. Books with such titles as The European Superpower and Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century were widely read. They celebrated the realities of a European post-colonial recovery, even a new type of ascendancy, results that were welcomed by many who hoped for a more peaceful and equitable world. I shared much of this enthusiasm, believing that the European Union was a bold and generally progressive experiment in regionalism that was better suited to our era of intensifying globalization than a state-centric world of sovereign territorial communities habituated to the dynamics of warfare.

An individual psychosis setting him apart from others, also in daily life, does not seem to fit his case. But there is another form of psychosis that fits his narcissistic hatred and paranoid violence so removed from the average. His psychosis is produced and triggered by the polarization-escalation aspect of conflict, not easily captured by individualizing psychiatry as his daily life attitude and behavior may be (near) normal. His psychosis is collective, shared. His ego is part of a real or imagined collectivity that may include those higher up; not an individual disorder associated with the deviant lower down. There is a class aspect to psychosis, marginalizing the individual cases, catapulting extremist collective psychopaths into top power.

It is undoubtedly true that the greatest unacknowledged achievement of the European Union (EU) is to establish ‘a culture of peace’ within its regional enclosure for the 68 years since 1944. This has meant not only the absence of war in Europe, but also the absence of ‘war talk,’ threats, crises, and sanctions, with the single important exception of the NATO War of 1999 that was part of the fallout from the breakup of former Yugoslavia. This was undertaken by the American-led alliance both to accomplish the de facto independence of Kosovo from Serbian rule, to ensure the post-Cold War viability of NATO, to reinforce the lesson of the Gulf War (1991) that the West could win wars at low costs due to their military superiority, and to rescue Albanian Kosovars from a possible humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of their Serb oppressors.

We all feel desperate watching the horrible killing, feeling the suffering of the bereaved, the whole people. But, what to do? Could it be that the UN, and governments in general, have a tendency to make the same mistake, again and again, of putting the cart before the horse? The formula they use is generally: [11 Get rid of No. 1 as key responsible, using sanctions; then [2] Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing; [3] Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that [4] A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There is a key responsible, President Assad, ordering the killing; get rid of him by all means. Then the cease-fire, the fire ceasing; then negotiation, and then the solution emerges. Logical, yes; but maybe not very wise.

/10/janoberg.jpg”> On Monday the 23rd of January 2012, the EU’s 27 members unanimously decided to stop their oil import from Iran on July 1 this year. That sort of policy is considered benign in comparison with warfare. It won’t be when seen in the long run. Sanctions usually have the opposite consequences of those “intended”. Secondly, as we know from the Iraq case, they are part and parcel of a build-up to war and will have, in the longer run, devastating, cruel consequences for innocent civilians whose lives are already hard. How come EU leaders seem not to see the counterproductivity of their decisions? Do they not know that they contribute to a build up to a war that will be much more catastrophic than that on Iraq both for the region, for themselves and for the economy they otherwise try to keep from even deeper crisis? Virtually everyone speaking...

EU förbjuder all oljeimport från Iran, och Iran hotar med att som svar blockera all trafik av olja genom Hormuzsundet. Till TT uttrycker utrikesminister Carl Bildt viss skepsis inför beslutet, risken är att vi ”glider in i en konfrontation som ytterst kan sluta i krig – och dit vill ingen”. På sin blogg Alla dessa dagar är Bildt ännu mera kritisk till sanktionerna, som han menar möjligen kan påverka Irans ekonomi men knappast landets politik. Men varför deltar Sverige då i beslutet??

Voltaire described Europe as “a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions. They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world.” Ten years ago, this January 1st,  in a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe became a reality. A single currency was the most dramatic of the steps taken towards what surely one day will be a single political entity.