Forum

LONDON– The most dangerous frontier of the post Second World War world was the Iron Curtain, the ideological barrier which at the command of Soviet Russia fell in 1945 from Lubeck Bay on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic. It was given its name by Winston Churchill and as Jan Morris has observed, “it separated not just states, or people or territories, or histories, but ideas” The apex, the epitome and the most public shame of the Iron Curtain was the Berlin Wall. When that was breached in 1989 we knew that European communism was dead, liberty was restored and military confrontation that came close to nearly incinerating half the planet was over. Or did we? We had not counted on President Bill Clinton’s decision 9 years later to expand the military alliance Nato, whose sole raison d’etre was this Iron Curtain, right up to the western frontiers of the...

LONDON– “Human rights is a dirty business.” So said the late Martin Ennals, Amnesty International’s first secretary-general. And once again with Rupert Murdoch, press baron extraordinaire, we have yet another instance when wealth, power and narrow, self-serving, political interest outrank freedom of speech, democratic values and anti-totalitarianism. Murdoch has stopped his publishing house HarperCollins going ahead with the publication of “East and West”, a book authored by Chris Pattan, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a highly respected British Conservative politician. “Kill the book” an angry Murdoch banged the table as he shouted at Anthea Disney, the chief executive of Murdoch’s News American Publishing in New York. Murdoch’s underlings should not have been surprised. Indeed the only question is why they signed up Patten since their boss has a long record of cosying up to Beijing and Patten has an equally long record of fighting Beijing tooth and nail...

Where Is the International Peace ResearchAssociation, IPRA, Heading? IPRA holds its 17th General Conference, this time in Durban, South Africa from June 23 to June 26.On this occasion IPRA Newsletter has carried a debate about the development and priorities of the academic discipline and its relation to the world around it. Participating in it was Dr. Bjoern Moeller, Secretary-General of IPRA and Dr. Jan Oberg, director and co-founder of the Transnational Foundation. The debate started with Dr. Bjoern Moeller who in the September 1997 issue wrote a “letter from the Secretary General”: “IPRA as an organization, and indeed peace research as a discipline, may be at a juncture where the futures of both will be decided. Peace research had a very clear raison d’etre during the Cold War, in the sense that it was to be the only academic area of study that did not take war, conflict, and arms...

LONDON– On too many occasions the UN has been the big man’s whipping-boy. Bill Clinton for one has kicked it harder than his two immediate Republican predecessors ever did. Nikita Krushchev banged his shoe at it and Charles de Gaulle called it “ce machin”. Yet once again we see how in a crisis the big powers run to it to get themselves off the hook, this time for a bombing no one really had the argument or stomach for. Back in 1954 there was the charged incident over the capture of 17 U.S. airmen by China. American opinion became extremely agitated. There was even some wild talk about the use of nuclear weapons. The UN was asked to intervene and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold went to Beijing to talk to Premier Chou Enlai. It took six months of negociating but finally the men were released. Dwight Eisenhower, the then U.S. president,...

LONDON– The war hero Antoine de St. Exupery, better known to most of us as the author of the children’s classic, Le Petit Prince, wrote in his autobiographical novel, “Flight to Arras”, about the rigours of air combat, some lines that President Bill Clinton could usefully reflect on: “Orders are given for the sacrifice of the air arm because war must be made to look like war. And nobody admits meanwhile that this war looks like nothing at all. That no part of it makes sense. That not a single blueprint fits the circumstances”. Mr. Clinton’s profound mistake is that he has acted all along as if he were back in 1990, in George Bush’s shoes at the time of the Gulf War, threatened by a military monster armed with weapons of mass destruction. And now that he’s raised the flag, the momentum of superpower ego is pushing him into a...

LONDON– India’s elections are like India’s trains–lumbering along at no great speed, taking days before the destination is reached but, despite the discomfort along the way, reliable, sturdy and arriving at the station more or less on time. The world’s largest democracy will soon be in action for the second time in two years in a desperate search to find a stable government, an extraordinarily difficult task now that the founding party of India’s independence, Congress, is a pale shadow of its original self and the strengths of local, regional, religious and caste parties, not to say the phenomenal rise of the Hindu nationalist, Bharatiya Janata Party, are now the deciding factors in Indian politics. Yet it is safe to predict it will be probably the fairest ever, without significant violence or vote-buying. Indian democracy is cleaner by the year. This is partly thanks to the former election commissioner T.N. Seshan...

LONDON– Fifty years on from the death of Mahatma Gandhi, lawyer, political activist, apostle of non-violence as a means of settling political disputes and vanquisher of the British Empire, the world is in crying need again for the philosophy he propagated and the debate he provoked. As Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of newly independent India, said on the day of his assassination, “the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere”. If only India had listened to him more there would have been no division with Pakistan. If only the British had learnt more from him there would have been no colonial massacres in Kenya or Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. Perhaps, if Bill Clinton could spare a thought for Gandhi today, he would find a way of keeping Saddam Hussein in check without risking the horrors of war, a war that New York Times...

LONDON–Clinton’s sex life in the White House is surely only his wife’s concern. It certainly shouldn’t spill over into the nation’s business and even more certainly it shouldn’t spill over into foreign affairs. And yet we have officials in the Kremlin telling the New York Times that “they were increasingly worried that President Bill Clinton, enmeshed in a deepening scandal at home, would attempt to assert his leadership abroad with a rapid military strike on Baghdad”. Pace, Moscow. There were some good and sound reasons for a military strike long before the scandal broke. If ever there was a case for using military force in the post-communist world this is probably it. There are no doubts about Saddam Hussein’s moral qualms–he has none. He has used poisonous gas not only during his war with Iran but against his own people. There are no doubts about his geopolitical ambitions–he has tried...

LONDON–The split at the top of the British government could not have come at a worst time. Just as Britain is stepping into the presidency of the European Union the unpleasant rivalry, until now sublimated, between the camps of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his effective number two, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has hit the political headlines, threatening to throw Britain’s young Labour government into spasms of internal conflict just as all its attention is needed for what is certainly to be the most difficult task of its period in office, constructing the right relationship with its European partners. The political calendar is turning fast and time is not on Britain’s side. What has been talked and negociated about for many years is going to reach its denouement in mere months. On May 10th a summit presided over by Mr Blair will decide the membership of the European...

LONDON–A circle is closed next week when the long awaited trip of the Pope to Castro’s Cuba finally takes place. 507 years after catholic Spain started the rape of the continent with an historic voyage that began from here, the Church in a new guise leads the charge to usurp the last outpost of Latin dictatorship and render it a member of the continent-wide family of democracies. Five hundred and seven years from Columbus to Castro is a long time to wait for democracy to arrive, especially when measured against the much earlier rapid progress of its northern cousins in the United States and Canada. And for that we have no one to thank but catholic Spain and catholic Portugal. North America was settled by pilgrims, idealists, political and religious refugees. They wanted to create a New World and democracy became the chosen instrument. It was flawed, of course. It...

I. Framing the Argument The dominant modern idea of citizenshipThe dominant modern idea of citizenship was definitely linked closely to the emergence of individuals endowed with entitlements or rights in relation to the governments of territorial sovereign states. Thus the history of citizenship could be traced from the entitlement associated with freedom from abuses of governmental authority, especially arbitrary exertions of coercion to freedoms to, that is, freedoms of a more affirmative character to participate directly or indirectly in the governing process, and finally, to a series of entitlements associated social democracy or the welfare state (Marshall 1950). Secular varieties of nationalism were not an invariable backdrop, but it was the most characteristic political form in which modern forms of citizenship flourished under conditions in which the state was the focal point of a juridically conceived nationalism, that is, a geographically bounded ideal of political community. This contrasts with an...

Håller USA på att med vapenmakt bygga ett eget globalt imperium, där man ger sig själv en maktens rätt i olika sammanhang?  Recension av Sören Sommelius,TFF konfliktläkare och kulturredaktör på Helsingborg Dagblad FORTRESS AMERICAThe American Military and the Consequences of Peace.William GreiderPublic AffairsNew York 1998 UTANFÖR DEN LILLA staden Killeen i Texas, USA, ligger USA:s största armébas, Fort Hood där 43.000 man är stationerade. Fyrtio procent av den amerikanska arméns utrustning, 11.000 pansarfordon, 2.400 stridsvagnar och en stor mängd helikoptrar, finns uppställda i närheten av staden här, på en rad av inhägnade fält som sträcker sig sammanlagt tio kilometer. Efter det kalla krigets slut har det skett vissa nedskärningar av den amerikanska försvarsbudgeten, skriver William Greider i en ny bok, “Fortress America” med undertiteln “The American Military and the Consequences of Peace” (Fort Amerika. Den amerikanska militären och fredens konsekvenser). Men, fortsätter Greider, USA är fortfarande rustat för att utkämpa...