Forum

LONDON–Joschka Fischer, the Green foreign minister of Germany, visited Washington this week for talks with the U.S. government. It raises the interesting question of how the world might look if President Bill Clinton could be persuaded to adopt a foreign policy that would satisfy the rank and file members of Germany’s Green Party. The cynics and hard realpoliticians would say, we already have pretty well got that with Clinton. What they want is a policy, talking of Germany, more like the Kaiser and his court. Using that extra margin of power the defeat and vanquishing of the enemy has brought to impose America’s will far and wide–establishing a “benevolent global hegemony” as argue William Kristol and Robert Kagan, editors of the conservative Weekly Standard. But Clinton’s foreign policy has not been what these gentlemen infer, a “green” policy of military disengagement. It has been a mishmash of hot and cold....

Inga bomber fälldes över Balkan dessa oroliga oktoberdagar. Vi som tror att bomber sällan fungerar som konstruktiv problemlösning kan andas ut. Men vad var det som hände? Och hur kunde de dramatiska förhandlingarna mellan kontaktgruppens medlare Richard Holbrooke och Jugoslaviens president Slobodan Milosevic i så många sammanhang skildras som en ödesmättad strid mellan det goda och det onda. Nu var det Holbrooke som fixade freden. Hade det blivit krig hade Milosevic varit den skyldige. Så kunde det verka. Hur kunde vi överlåta åt dessa två prestigefyllda medelålders maktuppfyllda herrar att avgöra Kosovos öde? Varför insisterade åtminstone inte vi i det fortfarande alliansfria Sverige på att frågan skulle behandlas i FN:s säkerhetsråd? Visst, Ryssland och Kina hade inlagt veto mot bombningar. Men kanske kunde ett sådant veto trots allt ha bäddat för överläggningar utifrån andra förutsättningar, inte bara som ett Dayton två, utan som verkliga förhandlingar med representanter för de olika...

MADRID–Nearly two weeks of communist government in the heart of western Europe and hardly a whisper of complaint. The media has barely remarked on it. It makes one long for some old Cold War warriors to step out, gird their faithful chargers, shoulder their lances and create some mayhem. Where are the hard questions and the hard knocks? Indeed, where’s the blood on the floor? After all, not very long ago, (a short 20 years), Aldo Moro, the former prime minister of Italy and, at the time, the country’s most influential politician, was savagely murdered by a group of communist fringe militants (the Red Brigades) in what in all likelihood was an attempt (it badly backfired) to propel the communist party into power, as part of the so-called “historic compromise”. Antonio Gramsci, the great founder of Italian communism, wrote in 1920: “Italy is truly prey to demoniacal spirits, impossible to...

LONDON–We would like to know what kind of stuff these German Greens are made of. The Kosovo to bomb or not to bomb decision arrived on their platter as soon as the election results were counted. Richard Holbrooke may now have got them off the hook as much as he did Slobodan Milosevic, but the issue on the use of the deployment of NATO force, and its ancillary decision, to use it without an explicit UN mandate, is very likely to return during their term of office. Supposedly pacifist inclined by early conviction, definitely pro United Nations and wary of enforcement or peacekeeping actions done in its name without a Security Council vote, the Greens are bound to be difficult bedfellows for western governments, who have a tendency to bend the rules on military intervention. The Kosovo decision had all the makings of an early clash between principle and realpolitik....

LONDON–Watch out Slobodan Milosevic, watch out Saddam Hussein and Hun Sen. As Martin Luther King said, “The arm of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” One day you too may be old and ill and want to use your ill-gotten gains to go to the best medical treatment money can buy–in London, New York orGeneva–and they will get you. Just as the British police have now pounced on Chile’s 82 year old ex-dictator lying in a London hospital. They’ll pull you out of bed a few days after your operation, and slam you behind bars, just when youthought you’d go and recuperate under the warm sun in an exclusive hotel in the Seychelles. Whether the arrest made in London on the request of a Spanish magistrate willstand up in court remains to be seen. If only the World Criminal Court, created in Rome in July (but...

WASHINGTON DC–Brazil’s general election has produced the goods–continuation of sober government, fiscally conservative with a social conscience. With a bit of luck Brazil’s present role as the lynchpin that could make or break the world economy will, before too long, be regarded as an historical anomaly. Assuming–and a lot of hard work remains to be done–they can get their act together, the West’s Group of Seven and the International Monetary Fund will soon extend the large loan necessary to get Brazil over the hump of the stream of dollars hemorrhaging from the country. (A total of $50 billion is the quite mammoth loan talked about.) To let Brazil go on sliding down the financial chute would be to give another shove to the cannon-balls rolling and ricocheting round the deck of the good ship “World Economy”, with the likelihood they’ll puncture first the deck and then the hull. Fernando Henrique...

WASHINGTON–As the international economic crisis heats up attention swivels to the financiers who are in danger of losing their fancy pants. It would be more appropriate, if admittedly not so politically pressing, if we reserved rather more leeway for action not just to aid the financiers and their billions, necessary though that may be “to save the system”, nor just to aid the new poor now being created in abundance, but to be able to give a lift to the old poor still weighted down under the debt accumulated from past financial crises. One United Nations estimate suggests that 20 million African children will die before the end of the millenium as a consequence of old albatrosses, unless the continent’s long-standing debt crisis is resolved. Africa has attracted too little private capital for the crisis now besieging emerging markets in Asia, Russia and Latin America to have much direct effect...

LONDON–In the 1970s it was Brazil that was going to be the superstar of the decade – – and perhaps for ever more. In the 1980s the talk was of Japan. In the 1990s China. Brazil and Japan came unstuck in different ways – – Brazil, after decades of being the century’s fastest growing economy (along with Taiwan), because it overspent and, in its massive state and social sectors, chronically underperformed. Japan because its quasi feudal company and ministerial structures too well protected the dross as well as the gold in a system that never could bring itself to embrace capitalist meritocracy in all its parts. Now the indications are increasing that China will be the third big falling star of the latter half of the twentieth century. China perhaps after all “is not a miracle about to be performed”. In China the veneer of end-of-the-century technology and know-how is...

LONDON – “Austria to Start Returning Artwork Looted by the Nazis” was a headline last week in The International Herald Tribune, exactly 53 years and 7 months after the defeat of the Nazi Reich. And close on 90% of those who should benefit from restitution, whose homes and businesses were looted and whose precious artifacts transported either to German and Austrian museums or often to the homes of Nazi leaders, are now dead. Even if you were a Rothschild your name and influence in all these post-war years may not have been sufficient to regain what was stolen. If you were Jewish in Austria it was as if the state in all its successive plumages since the war, socialists, centrists or coalition was not going to pull its finger out on your behalf. Even the promise made in the Austrian parliament earlier last month on the belated return of works of...

“Today the flames of the nuclear fire are all over. I am thankful to God…that we have jumped into these flames.” – Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif “I cannot believe that we are about to start the 21st century by having the Indian subcontinent repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, when we know it is not necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national greatness, or to personal fulfilment.” – U.S. President Bill Clinton In a three week period, both India and Pakistan have conducted nuclear tests, thus becoming new members of the nuclear weapons club. Their tests have brought forth broad, even jubilant, support among the Indian and Pakistani people. Following the Pakistani tests, one Pakistani clerk effused, “Pakistan is now a superpower.” It is not surprising that India and Pakistan would view nuclear weapons as a path to international security and prestige. The five original members...

LONDON–The gathering economic crisis, which the financial papers are somberly predicting has too many of the makings of turning into a world depression, must be a time for mental stock-taking. It comes after one of the most successful boom periods in history, which for a while seemed to sweep all before it, not least the old time critics of untrammeled capitalism, free markets and wide open societies. It coined a new word “globalisation” – – open your doors wide and you’d gain more on the swings than you’d lose on the roundabouts. President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin are passionate proponents of this brand of economics and their faith appears unshaken despite all the turbulence. As a long run theory, globalisation and 100% wide open doors and windows in the financial and economic markets may make a lot of sense (and some of it like free trade...

Earlier published by ACCORD in South Africa Introduction United Nations peace-keeping operations have increasingly entered internal conflict areas, in which the role of an overstrained United Nations has become more complex, comprehensive and, consequently, more demanding, The United Nations now routinely faces challenges which do not always fit into a “first” or “second” generation of peace-keeping and the Member States are less inclined to be involved in operations which are considered politically insecure or may develop into costly undertakings where lives may be lost, thus creating difficulties in national and domestic politics. If peace-keeping is to remain one of the United Nations’ most important instruments for securing world peace, it requires improved as well as new peace-keeping mechanisms in areas where the international community faces potential or existing conflicts. This not only obligates greater efforts by the Member States to provide a timely availability of troops and to have them...