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LONDON- Continental Europe, that fabled land of sclerosis, high unemployment, over-taxation, weighed down by rigid labour practices and over strong unions and with mainly left of centre governments presiding over low economic growth, looks as if it is ready to give America a big surprise. It’s about to bounce back. The Euro, the single currency of most of the members of the Economic Community, appears to be on the mend. After falling since the day of its inception at the beginning of the year, it is now turning up against the dollar. Inflation and interests rates are at historic lows. Growth rates are beginning to find their stride. Seen from this vantage point in Nordic Europe the only question that seems relevant is when will the Americans and their British partners in the world of ultra free market doctrine come to understand the inner strengths of continental Europe? Have they been...

MADRID- After Kosovo why not next Colombia, land of the drug barons and 40 years of near continuous civil war? The rest of the world may drop its jaw at the idea of Nato troops being sent to pacify leftist guerrilla groups, army-backed, fascist-inclined paramilitaries and the world’s most ruthless drug cartels. But in Bogota, Colombia’s capital, it is being touted by some as a necessary solution. And if not Nato, at least the U.S. army. Don’t drop your jaw too far. For none less than the U.S. commander in chief, Bill Clinton, said last month that vital American interests were at stake in Colombia. It is “very much in our national security interests to do what we can”. When a U.S. president uses these code words it essentially means that the backbone of the U.S. military, intelligence and national security bodies has decided that, if necessary, the U.S. is prepared...

Can We Learn to Do Better Than We Did in Kosovo? This article was commissioned by the editors of  World Bank Institute Journal “Development Outreach” and written in August 1999. I was asked to write a thought-provoking piece. Whether it is, only the readers can judge. But the editors of Development Outreach seem to have thought it reached a bit too far …It would read so much better if “edited” down to two text bits boxed inside articles by other authors; they also threw in another full article so that, unfortunately, there was no space available for all my contribution. Below find the full article. The blue sections are those printed by the World Bank Institute Journal. Judge for yourself why this “editing” was done and what they didn’t want to print. And remember they said it wasn’t censorship. Deficient diagnosis, failed conflict-resolution A conflict is a problem that arises out of incompatible...

LONDON- Although you would not know it from Madeleine Albright, the North Korean rocket you can see coming towards you could be a light at the end of the tunnel! The North Koreans are at it again but, each time, fearing the worst, the U.S. and Japan get into a serious panic. They have convinced themselves of a mighty calamity. The U.S. , Japan and South Korea have now threatened a total embargo of the renegade outlaw country if it dare test-fire its new inter-continental ballistic missile. But it should not be a cause for fear, rather the excuse for some highly creative diplomacy. First, there was the row in 1994 over the plutonium-rich cooling rods unloaded from North Korea’s main nuclear reactor. Washington convinced itself that North Korea was on a fast-track to building an armoury of nuclear weapons. President Bill Clinton was heavily leaned on to threaten war with...

RABAT, MOROCCO – Unlike the late King Hussein of Jordan, the late King Hassan of Morocco who died on Friday has seemingly bequeathed his son, King Mohammed VI, a weak hand. A weak hand that is, if you judge power by autocratic reach. Hussein had dabbled with democracy, but his prime ministers and their governments came and went with alacrity and no one doubted who called the shots. With Hassan it was, until fairly recently, a similar, “l’etat, c’est moi”, even if he didn’t change his prime ministers so regularly. But a little over a year ago in a remarkable development, Hassan voluntarily handed over a good slice of power to a former political prisoner, once sentenced to death, the socialist parliamentarian Abderrahman Youssoufi, ending 40 years of conservative rule. Most royal functionaries were sidelined, apart from the king’s powerful, but much reviled, minister of the interior, Driss Basri. Democracy not...

LONDON- After the Congo peace agreement, nothing but an eerie silence. Will they? Won’t they? President Bill Clinton made a post Kosovo speech only a few weeks ago promising immediate U.S. intervention the next time lives are at risk. Yet the silence continues. Mention the word Congo and whether it be in Washington, London or Paris, you can hear a pin drop. Is Washington now prepared to turn the clock back to where it was before the 1993 Somalia debacle when in the flush of good feeling following the end of the Cold War UN peackeeping was not only to be given a new lease of life and a rush of new mandates but more robust guidelines for military engagement? It was all dramatically undermined by a great American panic after 18 U.S. rangers were killed in a firestorm of guerrilla bullets in Somalia. Today it is not so much a...

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”. Thus writes Edward Luttwak in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. The end of the bombing of Yugoslavia is a case in point. It ended with both sides fairly claiming victory- the Western allies got the Yugoslav army removed from Kosovo and the Serbs won agreement from NATO that it would disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army and shelve its previous promise to the Kosovars to hold a referendum on Kosovo’s political status. This makes possible an honest negociation over the future of Kosovo, with both sides able to get what they most want. The Albanian Kosovars want the partition of Kosovo and the incorporation of their part into a Greater Albania; the Serbs want the incorporation of the Serbian part of Bosnia...

LONDON- A nuclear war creeps up on the world by an unmarked path. As India and Pakistan confront each other daily over “the line of control” that marks the temporary division over their rival claims for the state of Kashmir the chance of their conflict spiralling out of control can no longer be dismissed. And if that happens the nuclear weapons that both sides exhibited to the world for the first time last year are within a hairtrigger of being used. “The first false alert could be last”, said one seasoned observer not very long ago. We should think of Kashmir as a permanent Cuban missile crisis, when in nose to nose nuclear brinkmanship the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is unacceptably high. With only 4 or 5 minutes warning time before a nuclear weapon fired from one country would detonate in the other there is no time for second thoughts...

LONDON- If the war with Slobodan Milosevic is now in abeyance it is, perhaps, to remind us that only temporarily were we allowed to forget that the one with Saddam Hussein continues. The bombing never stopped; neither do the sanctions. The one important thing always to recall when discussing what next to do about Saddam Hussein is what President Bill Clinton has said more than once: that the UN arms inspectors found and destroyed more Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than were destroyed during all the days of intensive bombardment during the days of the Gulf War. Briefly put, most of the work of disarming Iraq has now been done. The UN inspectorate may not have been a perfect fool-proof system but it was pretty good. Nothing that existed before, in the annals of warfare, short of total military occupation, had such a record of success in disarming a nation. If...

LONDON- Logjams that busy, but unthinking, beavers have been building up for decades are now to be broken up. The distance between inaction and action on dismantling the dams that impede social progress in Third World countries has been narrowed and the rivers of opportunity should be able to run a little faster. On Friday, President Bill Clinton makes [made] an historic visit to the Geneva headquarters of the International Labour Organisation, one of the oldest UN bodies, established to bring unions, employers and government into a closer working relationship. His speech in favour of a convention aimed at eliminating the most intolerable forms of child labour is, by any measure, an important milestone. On Saturday, the Group of 8, the world’s leading industrial nations together with Russia, open their heads of government meeting in Cologne and debt relief for the poorest nations is, after Kosovo, the most significant item on...

1. Democratic Control of a Military Alliance: Challenges and Problems The recent NATO military intervention in FR Yugoslavia (24 March – 11 June, 1999) underlined an urgent need for addressing some very significant theoretical and political issues the two most important ones being: 1) the issue of legal use of military force in international relations, or more precisely on legitimacy of humanitarian interventions; 2) the issue of democratic control of a military alliance in action. Obviously, the first question is relatively old, while the second one emerged as a rather new one. However, in the light of the Kosovo war they appeared to be deeply interrelated. The NATO intervention over Yugoslavia should not be considered as the main reason for theoretical deliberation of this relationship, but rather as an appropriate occasion for bringing the discussion up. From a theoretical and a political point of view, the relationship between NATO and...

Birger Schantz and Torsten Seeman The threat of an outbreak of smallpox anywhere in the world is indeed a frightening prospect. It’s quite obvious that even a very small terrorist organisation could easily spread the disease globally without technically advanced vectors – provided it had access to the pathogenic virus. Furthermore, smallpox belongs to the category of biological weapons of mass destruction. It is extremely contagious and will easily spread outside the area of conflict. Thus completely “innocent” or only peripherally affected people can be stricken with disease. This is a severe, global threat against one and all! As a Swedish citizen one must ask: can we handle an attack even if we are affected only in the second-hand? Have those who have been delegated the power created a realistic preparedness against what may happen? In 1980 smallpox was officially declared eradicated following an internationally successful vaccination campaign. Simultaneously the...