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LONDON – The on going terrorist threat from the Basque separatist group, ETA, has become the trump card for the ruling Popular Party in Spain’s general election on Sunday. This goes to show that, while the Spanish think the Americans overdid it with their reaction to September 11th and 90% of them opposed Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s decision to align himself with Washington in the Iraq war, when terrorism knocks on their own door they jump to the right like everyone else. As with its counterpart, the Northern Ireland conflict, the continuation of Basque nationalist terrorism in Spain is too fueled by historical sentiment and myth on one side and by narrow minded authoritarianism on the other for easy settlement. Nevertheless, Northern Ireland has found a peace of sorts and the lion is lying down with the lamb, at least to the extent that the truce of 1998 is prevailing....

Brasil’s government headed by President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has proved to doubters in international finance its competence in managing the economy. This sprawling nation is self-sufficient in energy, plentiful agricultural land and natural resources, with vast untapped domestic markets. Its 180 million motivated citizens boast, by the new quality-of-life statistical measures (www.calvert-henderson.com) one of the highest per capita income and wealth in the world. Investors who distrusted President “Lula’s” economic team lost big. They watched Brasilian bonds and stocks rise over the past 15 months by over 150% and the equally stellar performance of Brasil’s exports. Now President Lula is braced to implement his promise to develop Brasil’s real economy, provide jobs to address official unemployment figures of 13% and match its export-led growth with similar growth of its vast untapped domestic markets. This will entail a bold change of emphasis – away from the now-discredited conventional formulas...

LONDON – The human rights theologians are going to have a stressful week or two trying to decide whether the U.S. and France moved against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti because they defending human rights or undermining them. Perhaps it all depends on which end of the telescope you look through. Were they deposing a freely elected president and thus subverting the cause of democracy or were they attempting to end a state of affairs where an elected president had surrounded himself by street gangs, thugs and manifestly corrupt acolytes, and the rule of law on which all human rights depend had become a violence-provoking sham? There is an unthought out belief circulating in the human rights community that under the Bush administration the U.S. stance on human rights has sharply deteriorated. There is, needless to say, much evidence of this- the Guantanamo detentions of Al Qaeda suspects and rather well...

LONDON – As recently as mid November the U.S. was ignoring the UN despite it being obvious to the outside world that it was increasingly bogged down in Iraq. On November 15th , when the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council signed an agreement that set up a transition plan, the UN was not even mentioned. But a short two months later Washington is on its knees before the UN, its transition plan in tatters.  It’s revealing how in a real crisis- and Iraq is but the latest example- the big powers can run to it to chew the cud and find a solution short of war or revolution. When the antagonists have either talked or fought themselves into a corner they tend often to crawl back to the body that they were not long ago denouncing to find an exit from the horrors that confront them. But then...

Keynote, Sophia University/ICU, Tokyo, 14/12/2003; and Regional Studies Association, Tokyo, 10/01/2004 1. Human needs and the life expectancy of concepts and words Concepts come and go; they do not stay around forever. “Human security” is in, “humanitarian intervention” is on its way out. This applies to science, to politics in general, and to world politics and the UN community in particular. The total human condition has many facets and they all have a justified claim on our attention. A human condition, like the plight of misery, stays on, but “poverty elimination” may retire from the front stage like “community development”, “self-reliance”, “new economic world order” did, and even “women in development” will do. Cruel, but such is the life cycle of concepts. Why? In science there is Thomas Kuhn’s[1] epistemological answer: because the paradigm underlying the concept has been exhausted. The paradigm has been squeezed for whatever it is worth,...

LUND, SWEDEN – Immigration, we are belatedly beginning to realize, has enabled western industrial societies to put on hold problems it should have been forced to confront earlier. In particular it has postponed the re-organization of economic life in the most humdrum parts of the economy, putting off the day when menial jobs would have to be reshaped to attract unemployed locals. It has also delayed the day when a lot of businesses should have packed up thirty years ago and relocated in lower cost, emigrant-producing countries. And it has postponed a re-think of our antiquated attitudes to older workers. Even in America, which for now accepts, if not always as uniformly as it once used to, that it will continue to be a country whose vitality partly comes from immigration and where the process of social adopting and adapting is more smooth than in Europe and Japan, economists find it...

In the post 9/11 world there has been strong concern about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or “rogue” states. The pretext for the initiation of the US war against Iraq was the concern that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including a suspected program to develop nuclear weapons, posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. While it turned out that Iraq had neither such weapons nor programs, the United States continues to maintain a large nuclear arsenal as a matter of long-standing national policy. Whether US nuclear weapons policies serve to promote prospects for world peace and national security, or conversely to undermine them, is a question that begs for serious public debate. US nuclear weapons policy should be a subject of concern to every American. Yet there exists some kind of taboo that prevents the subject from being debated in public forums, in the media, or...

Det har blitt mørkt før vi får ordentlig fyr på bålet denne påskeaften 1996. Vi er nærmere tjue personer som får oss litt varme i kroppen. Veden er i bygningsmateriale fra et hus som er helt ødelagt av russiske bomber. Våren er kall og snøen ligger fortsatt flekkvis i Kaukasus. De som har overlevd Jeltsins krig de siste to årene klarer ikke å glede seg over at krokusen blomstrer og trærne igjen blir grønne. Ved hjelp på av en tolk får jeg god kontakt med en eldre mann som har i bodd i et hus i nærheten. På samme måte som nærmere nitti prosent av alle hus i Tjetjenia er også hans barndomshjem bombet og ubebolig. Han forteller at det er tungt å innse etter over sytti år at det meste han “har lært seg” gjennom et langt liv har vært løgner. Sovjetiske skolebøker og medier fortalte ikke sannheten om...

LONDON – When last week Pakistan’s chief nuclear weapons’ scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, admitted his role in sharing nuclear weapons’ technology with rogue regimes he not only highlighted the wilful blindness of his own government to his activities but in effect that of the U.S. as well. It is the old, sad story, of the powers-that-be in Washington not seeing the big picture, of trying to take short cuts for the sake of political expediency and, in the Cold War days, of having an ultra-reactive reflex to all and everything Moscow did. In April 1979 the Carter Administration, convinced that Pakistan was secretly building a nuclear weapon, suspended military aid. But that December it reversed itself, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and persuaded Congress to authorize a large arms aid program. For the next decade, in return for Pakistan’s help in building up the mujahadin fighters in Afghanistan, who later...

BUSHS OKÄNDA VÄRLDAv Eric LaurentÖversättning Ingvar RydbergAlhambra Det stundande presidentvalet i USA är inte minst en uppgörelse mellan olika maktgrupperingar. Sören Sommelius har läst en bok om Georg Bush och den amerikanska ultrahöger som i dag leder landet. “Hans Blix är en inkompetent tönt” skrev förre folkpartiledaren Per Ahlmark i den konservativa amerikanska tidningen Washington Times i november 2002. Ahlmark, en med åren alltmer ultrakonservativ tyckare i den svenska debatten, gick hårt åt sin förre partikamrat, som han karakteriserade som en “lättlurad narr” (citaten ur Aftonbladets referat 3.11.02). I dag ger ju krigets historiska förlopp nya förutsättningar för att avgöra vem som var mest “tönt”, Ahlmark eller Blix. Men vad var det för tidning han skrev i? Washington Times startades 1982 som en konservativ motvikt till inflytelserika Washington Post. Bakom den nya tidningen stod framförallt pastor Sun Myung Moon (med koreansk bakgrund), grundare av sekten Enhetskyrkan. Moon satsade 100 miljoner...

Kapitel 3: Fremtiden – problemer der skal løses Kapitel 4: Mulige fremtider i USA og Europa: Kan de bidrage til løsninger frem til 2025? Mulige udviklinger for USA (1) Mulige udviklinger for Europa/EU (2) Mulige udviklinger i forholdet mellem dem begge (3) Mulige udviklinger i forholdet mellem de to og resten af verden (4) Diskussionstema 8 Kapitel 5: Efterord Forslag til litteratur Kapitel 3: Fremtiden – problemer der skal løses Hvis vi bruger vores viden og forestillingsevne kan vi måske “se” ind i fremtiden. Vi véd ikke med sikkerhed hvordan den bliver, men hvis vi tænker rigtig meget på fremtidige muligheder, tendenser og begivenheder, så står vi bedre rustet overfor det, der rent faktisk sker. Den, der tænker – og lever – sig ind i mulige fremtider, bliver lidt mindre overrasket end andre og vil i processen også ofte få idéer til hvorledes vi kan og bør handle i nuet...

LONDON – If it is time to review the procedures that persuaded President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction then it is surely time overdue to examine the impact of sanctions. The assumption seems to be that they are a good thing, a softening up of the enemy before war in some cases, as with Iraq and Serbia, and even an alternative to war in others, as with Iran, Libya and Cuba. But, frankly, we are in a muddle about the worth of sanctions. They didn’t appear to work with Saddam Hussein. After Iraq President Woodrow Wilson, when trying to sell America the League of Nations, argued that sanctions were better than war: “A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly, remedy and there will be no need for force”.  Yet,...