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COPENHAGEN–The most peculiar aspect of the Asian economic crisis so far is that no one has mentioned the three words, John Maynard Keynes. Yet the response both from national governments (in particular Japan), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Washington and, now with Monday’s meeting in New York, the commercial banks joined by the securities houses, has been utterly and totally Keynesian–prime the pump. Keynesian economics, intellectually derided by the Chicago school, in particular Milton Friedman, and politically rubbished by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, has had its comeback. “Signs of solution are at last beginning to emerge where it matters most, in Japan”, editorialized the Financial Times approvingly on Monday (but without mentioning the word Keynes), “the use of public funds to support the banking system and a readiness to put fiscal policy on an expansionary track”. Yet, even now, elements of anti-Keynesianism persist in the current economic doctoring. The...

LONDON– It’s almost exactly one year since General George Lee Butler made his confessional statement before the National Press Club in Washington–that as commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command which controls all navy and airforce nuclear weapons he’d had moral qualms and profound doubts about America’s possession of nuclear weapons. The speech triggered an avalanche of supportive phone calls and letters from all over the world. This led General Butler to conclude that he could “discern the makings of an emerging global concensus that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh the presumed benefits”. Yet barely a month passed before General Butler realized that for all this initial enthusiasm the heavyweight critics in the political, military and journalistic establishments were not impressed. They had, he said later, “sniffed imperiously at the goal of elimination, aired their stock Cold War rhetoric, hurled a personal epithet or two and settled...

LONDON– Not even the cynics consumed by South Korea’s dire economic crisis doubted that the country’s general election would be honest, above-board, with a result that would meet with widespread acquiescence both at home and abroad. Yet only 18 years ago this country was a dictatorship; only 50 years ago a poverty-ridden village economy. For all the magnitude of its present financial troubles it cannot be gainsaid that South Korea has gone from rags to riches, from one man rule to one man (and one woman) one vote in a generation. It is truly one of the wonders of our age. After all, only in the late 1940s did most western countries become fully-fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. Outstanding through the march of time South Korea’s progress has been, it is part of a broader movement that has swept most of the world in recent decades. Last year I reported...

I somras bekräftade EU-kommissionen sitt beslut från mars 1995 att som ett led i den planerade utvidgningen av unionen inleda medlemskapsförhandlingar med Cypern. Den 12 – 13 december 1997 ska EU:s regeringschefer vid ett toppmöte i Luxemburg bestämma vilka av de tio kandidatländerna som EU skall påbörja en förhandlingsprocess med. Hur än EU väljer att hantera Cyperns väg mot medlemskap kommer det att få återverkningar på den potentiellt explosiva relationen mellan öns grek- och turkcyprioter. Cypern, som har haft ett associationsavtal med EG/EU sedan 1973 och en tullunion sedan 1988, ansökte 1990 om fullt medlemskap. 1993 passerade ansökan det första nålsögat. Då uttalade EU-kommissionen i en avi att Cypern uppfyllde de ekonomiska villkoren för fullvärdigt medlemskap. Däremot innehöll avin reservationer kring huruvida Cypern kunde anses uppfylla de politiska villkoren för medlemskap, bland annat kravet på fri rörlighet, så länge den långvariga konflikten på ön var olöst. I Agenda 2000, EU-kommissionens...

LONDON– Graham Greene’s great novel, “The Comedians,” set in the Haiti of dictator Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a Caribbean island gets more of a press than it deserves? Moreover, it is, apart from Bosnia, the one part of the world that gets both a UN peacekeeping presence and the U.S.’s own one. It is in part the legacy of Graham Greene; it is partly the fascination with the lurid; but it is also, as it was for Central America in the last decade, because it is in America’s own backyard, with the added issue that when the politics and economics of this impoverished “vast wrinkled wasteland” go wrong the people take to their boats,...

At the outset of President Clinton’s second term there was hope among those working for a more peaceful world that the new term would be different and more positive than the first term. Clinton has been a master at generating hope–and then dashing it with policies that fail to meet the expectations he has engendered. Sadly, by his lack of positive initiative in the area of disarmament, President Clinton may be missing his appointment with history. Clinton began his first term as U.S. President by announcing support for gays in the military. The military opposition to this was so strong that Clinton has not challenged the military on any issue since. Even now in his second term, with no further elections facing him, Clinton appears to be incapable of challenging the military in any significant way, no matter how outrageous their appetite for armaments and other resources. Most recently, under...

LONDON– It has been whispered that Bill Clinton is deeply envious of his vice-president, Al Gore. Mr. Gore stands the chance of being the president Mr. Clinton wanted to be, trained and matured for the job, able to set his own agenda and priorities. Clinton, when he ran for the Democratic nomination, never expected to win; his intention was to position himself for a future attempt. Perhaps this is what explains his lack-lustre performance in foreign affairs. Unschooled, his ill thought out, event-driven foreign policy has been arguably the greatest twentieth century opportunity missed. Every leader’s foreign policy is event-driven to some extent, since the unpredictable is a large part of human life. But no other American president in my memory has made it almost an art form. Nothing demonstrates this more than Iraq. For all the sabre rattling of the last couple of weeks, Clinton the last few years has...

LONDON– By the hour the outline of the Russian-brokered deal is becoming clearer. Saddam Hussein has won what he has long sought– light at the end of the sanctions tunnel. But in return he has to renew his long-standing, but very on and off, commitment to the UN–to let its arms inspectors and dismantlers do their work unimpeded, until they are totally satisfied they have done their job. It is a good deal. America is giving away what it should have done a long time ago–the right for Iraq to live sanctions-free once the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction is complete. In return Iraq will give the world peace of mind. Over the last six years the UN inspectors have successfully dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme. Now they will continue the work of keeping his biological and chemical weapons programmes contained. The world has belatedly begun to wake up to...

Top Stories from the Editorial/Opinion pages of theInternational Herald Tribune, Friday, November 14, 1997 WILMINGTON, Delaware – The recent dramatic announcements of record-setting contributions to international causes by Ted Turner and George Soros suggest tremendous possibilities for the future.These two men signify the rise of a new breed of global philanthropist active in fashioning an international civil society. It was globalization that gave them the opportunities to amass extraordinary wealth. It now provides them and others with a unique opportunity to contribute to human well-being. This includes pushing for the democratization of the global order, a goal that governments are reluctant to promote. Such individuals could do this most imaginatively by providing funds for the establishment of a popularly elected Global Peoples’ Assembly, which would provide the world’s citizens for the first time with a forum to express their planetary aspirations and grievances outside the traditional nation-state context. Elections for this...

LONDON– Bill Clinton’s first foreign policy action when he became president was to bomb Iraq. Now five years on perhaps he is going to end up bombing Iraq again. With a military whose firepower has no peer, supported by a budget more than the military budgets of all the other industrial nations of the world combined, the temptation to work outside of UN authority and deliver a quick one is doubtless difficult to resist. The job of U.S. president comes with the burden of two hundred years of America’s twin aspirations–to be invulnerable and to be able to realize its imperial ambitions. One thing can be said with assurance after watching Mr. Clinton as commander-in-chief for five years: he never absorbed in any significant amounts the worldly wisdom of his mentor, William Fulbright, the Arkansas senator who became chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee and who resisted president Lyndon Johnson’s...

The disintegration of the last Stalinist redoubt continues apace–and is still way ahead of schedule. That is if one assumes, as the world did a mere ten years ago, that even the “liberal” Soviet satellite states, such as Poland and Hungary, would not turn to democracy for another generation. The fall of one man communism before the end of the millennium, now probably imminent in North Korea, could not have been supposed until we learnt by living experience how friable the Berlin Wall really was. Yet both South Korea and the U.S. behave for far too much of the time as if North Korea is still a behemoth to be feared, a piece of reinforced concrete that is impenetrable to the ideas and influences of the outside world. No one in their right mind, remembering the Korean War and the subsequent years of terrifying sabre rattling and terrorism by the...

VIENNA, Austria–On the last day of last month India used its own domestically produced rocket to hurl into orbit a large satellite. Within days the newspapers were full of new Indian-Pakistani gun duels over the bitterly disputed territory of Kashmir. It was all coincidence, but a telling one. No place on earth is more likely to spark a nuclear war than Kashmir. And the rapid progress being made by both Pakistan and India on rocket development brings that final day of sub-continental Armagaddon dangerously closer. Until recently it could be argued that the relatively primitive state of the nuclear-bomb art in both Pakistan and India meant they have engaged in a form of deterrence that the local experts call “recessed.” In other words, their limited nuclear capabilities are not destabilizing– there is no pressing need, now that both have low-level nuclear armories, to join an arms race of nuclear testing,...