Forum

MADRID- Americans are not good at giving away their territorial possessions, few though they’ve had. The renunciation of their ownership of the Panama Canal Zone has been handled with as much grace as a sack of potatoes. Refusing to attend if the ceremony were held at noon on December 31st as the treaty mandates, the celebratory party was advanced a couple of weeks to mid-December. Even then only ex-president Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 negotiated the treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction, made the relatively short journey. New situation, but the same reflexes. In the words of Ronald Reagan, who helped nearly cripple the young Carter presidency with a vitriolic anti-Canal Treaty campaign, “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours”. But, despite all the second thoughts in Washington and the whispering campaign about a future Chinese grab for the canal via the Hong Kong company that has won the lease to...

LONDON- The Russian parliamentary election has well and truly knocked the pessimists off their perch. Few predicted that the Communist Party in these hard economic times would receive such a setback. The Russian voter, despite the total failure of capitalism to deliver the goods, has made it crystal clear that he is still in no mood to wind back the clock. Optimists can be forgiven for believing that democracy, like the stock market, appears to have entered an unprecedented benign era. There have been numerous setbacks, but it does seem true that this century has become, after all its failures of world war, extreme ideology and Cold War, the century of democracy. And now with Russia set to consolidate its young democracy, the 20th century is ending on an undoubted top C. Yesterday the New York-based Freedom House published its annual survey of democratic trends and concluded that “there were major...

LONDON- U.S. and British policy towards Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has hit a wall. Whichever way the vote in the Security Council goes (had gone, the vote is scheduled for later this week) on the sanctions issue Britain and America have come out of their nine year old entanglement with Saddam the worse for wear. It is, in fact, a diplomatic smash-up of historic proportions. In brief, it can be summed up as the U.S. and Britain embracing anarchy and demonstrating they have little or no interest in the legal underpinnings of international order. The bombing of Iraq on almost a daily basis continues. The decision to try and modify the bite of sanctions affects the continuing air war not at all. But by what right have Washington and London arrogated the responsibility for deciding they can bomb for as long as they like? Only – as with sanctions – the UN...

LONDON- In the month which sees the return to China of Portuguese Macao , the last imperial enclave, the eyes and thoughts of strategists are turned to Beijing’s next quest. Will it be Taiwan, a hard nut to swallow? Or will it be the easily digestible small raisins of the Spratlys, the mass of supposedly oil-rich islands that lie scattered through the South China Sea? In the last couple of weeks there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity over the Spratlys as Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, has worked his way round the Southeast Asian countries which also lay claim to the islands. The trip was only a partial success. Mr Zhu did his best with a tight brief to give the impression that China is more interested in conciliation that conflict. Nevertheless, his spokesman indicated that China is not prepared to modify its total and exclusive claim to “the historic...

By Christian P. Scherrer What is the scope of reconciliation? Can we talk about a need of reconciliation as opposed to justice – especially in case of non-war violence? The discussion about the notion of reconciliation needs to be aware of some basic distinctions. The whole notion, which is a very important one, needs to be related to what we have to be reconciled with. There my first remark is that we should not mix warfare with slaughter. Compared to the tremendous increase of intra-state warfare and non-war types of mass violence such as genocide and mass murder the Clausewitzean type of inter-state conflicts was in recent decades a rather exceptional phenomenon. There are two important findings to be considered: Today more people die by slaughter than by war. And, in two third of all contemporary conflicts the ethnic factor (e.g. ethnic nationalism) is a dominant or influential component. The...

LONDON- Rarely, if at all in the post Cold War world, has there been such a stark case of high politics and doubtful economics. The oil company’s director of international affairs has been openly blunt about it: “The only way this is going to work is to make the pipeline as affordable as possible for shippers to put their oil down it. We are asking the U.S. government to attract as much oil as possible and to attract as much financing as possible”. Thus BP Amoco, the world’s third largest oil company, opens its begging bowl for a taxpayers’ handout with the fulsome backing of the U.S. government. All in the cause of giving Russia, now supposedly no longer our enemy, a black eye. Left to itself and the dictates of the competitive market, BP Amoco would not build a new pipeline to carry Caspian Sea oil across Turkey, avoiding the...

Nuclear weapons, which are instruments of genocide, incinerate human beings. The Peace Memorial Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki display gruesome evidence of the atomic bombings of those cities; one can see walls where human shadows remain after the humans who cast those shadows were incinerated into elemental particles. During World War II the Nazis put their victims into gas chambers and then incinerated them in ovens. While the Nazis took their victims to the incinerators, those who possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons plan to take these weapons, that are really portable incinerators, to the victims. Nuclear weapons eliminate the need for gas chambers. They provide a one-step incineration process — for those fortunate enough to die immediately. The behavior of the Nazis leading up to and during World War II is universally condemned. The German people are often criticized for failing to oppose the atrocities of the Nazi...

framfart och resenärer Introduktion Globalisering är ett ord som nämns allt oftare i tidningar, på TV och av gemene man. Trots detta är det inte många som vet vad termen globalisering egentligen innebär och vad den verkligen syftar till. Det är inte underligt då sökandet efter den rätta definitionen är i full gång och åsikterna går isär om hur en sådan ska se ut. Det finns heller ingen konsensus om vilka konsekvenser globaliseringen genererar. Vissa talar om homogenisering och andra om fragmentering. Några betonar ekonomiska faktorer som framväxten av transnationella företag och en världsmarknad, medan somliga fokuserar på teknologiska framsteg och ökad kommunikation. Det råder ovisshet och osäkerhet om vad som egentligen händer och i vilken riktning vi är på väg. Vad innebär dagens utveckling för individer, samhällen och nationalstater? Detta är enligt vår mening en viktig och spännande fråga till vilken det dock inte finns något enkelt och tillgängligt...

1. Nuclear weapons were needed to defeat Japan in World War II. It is widely believed, particularly in the United States, that the use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to defeat Japan in World War II. This is not, however, the opinion of the leading US military figures in the war, including General Dwight Eisenhower, General Omar Bradley, General Hap Arnold and Admiral William Leahy. General Eisenhower, for example, who was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe during World War II and later US president, wrote, „I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [to Secretary of War Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use...

LONDON- In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, the great detective Sherlock Holmes lectures his faithful assistant, Watson, on the unlikely subject of free trade. Says Holmes: ” Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to give you an extract from The Times, ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason why such legislation must in the long run keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our imports and lower the general condition of life in this island.'” “What do you think of that, Watson?” cries Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Don’t you think that is an admirable statement?” That was written in 1901. At century’s end the intellectual battle for this central point in economic life is being fought...

”With e-mail and Internet it has become so much more easy to generate and share ideas instantly. Below you find 53 different ideas about peace in Macedonia from people around the world who responded to our call in the preceding PressInfo. It’s a free gift to anyone who cares to listen and take inspiration – many could also be implemented in Kosovo,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. “Our respondents are not a representative sample but, among other things, this exciting experiment shows that: 1) there are so many ideas out there and an amazing willingness to contribute constructively; 2) people who have not been to Macedonia can share ideas and initiatives that have worked in other conflicts, a general body of knowledge and experiences are developing; 3) they focus much more on the human dimensions of conflict-resolution than governments do; 4) they by and large reject military means in peacebuilding,...

LONDON- The West has gone uncannily calm about last month’s military take-over in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Could it be embarrassment, that it hasn’t delivered on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – an essential ingredient in the grand bargain of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that states that the old established nuclear powers will make significant progress in disarmament in return for the rest of the world – 95% of it in fact – abjuring manufacture of their own nuclear weapons? Or is it just carelessness that takes its cue from President Bill Clinton’s lack of conviction on the urgent necessity for nuclear disarmament? It is a quite extraordinary silence. Nowhere else in the world does the military – so blatantly at least – have its finger directly on the nuclear trigger. There has always been, right through the darkest days of the Cold War, the buffer of civilian authority. Even when the Soviet...