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LONDON– How quickly the spotlight has turned from the expansion of NATO to the expansion of the European Union. But this is where it should have been concentrated all along. If the former Warsaw Pact eastern European members want security AND economic well-being this is the place to find it, all in one. President Boris Yeltsin says he sees that too; he wants Russia to win its own place within the European Union. The debate over NATO expansion has been a dangerous distraction from the main task. At the least a distraction, more likely something worse, a provocation, a running sore, that could in post-Yeltsin Russia lead to a new era of east-west confrontation. Left to their own devices, the West European leaders would never have thought up the expansion of NATO. It was foisted on them by the hubris of their friend, the American superpower which, in turn, had been...

LONDON– Those who sweated blood and tears to bring peace to Cambodia six years ago can be forgiven if they now say they see very little causal relationship between the magnitude of their efforts and the result now at hand–the coup d’etat by Hun Sen and the effective suspension of civil liberties. The Cambodian veterans and the rest of those who labor wearily in the vineyard of peacemaking are manifestly at a loss what to do next. It is somewhat of a cruel irony that the Secretary-General of the United Nations has deployed as his envoy to Cambodia Thomas Hammarberg who for years, as a brilliantly effective secretary-general of Amnesty International, did much to focus the spotlight of global attention on the gruesome details of the Cambodian genocide. Now it is if, in a perverse retribution for those days, he has to pay personal penance and go back and watch, perhaps,...

LONDON– Democracy has finally arrived in Mexico leaving only Cuba, among all the Latin American states, out on a distant limb. Yet the substance of the opposition’s victory is less tangible. Can the principal electoral victor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, who now stands a good chance of winning the presidency itself in the year 2000, deliver to the poor and dispossessed of Mexico, whose numbers and plight have so dramatically worsened in recent years, what the demagoguery of electioneering has seemed to promise? Indeed this is the question for all of democratic, free-market, Latin America, bar the continent’s one success story, Chile. Unemployment and the deep poverty it sustains is every country’s bain. “How long will the people wait for trickle-down to trickle down?” as Newsweek’s David Schrieberg tellingly asked recently. Even in the best of times Latin America has never been good at dealing with its poor. It is the continent...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden– Eight years on from the end of the Cold War we seem to be mired, even entrapped, in a seamless web of failures on the international scene. United Nations peacekeeping, once the flagship, has been holed below the waterline and is sinking fast–it doesn’t even try to put in a port call in bloody African conflicts these days. START 2 (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) meant to cut the over-large U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, first held hostage by Senator Jesse Helms is now a prisoner of the equally chauvinist Russian Duma. The Clinton Administration’s energies have been deployed almost exclusively on the expansion of NATO–there are not many beads of sweat to be seen in Washington from the pushing for START 2, much less START 3. Elsewhere, Saddam Hussein is still trying to build weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East peace process is dead in the water…...

LONDON– The last British emissary to Hong Kong who seriously misread the situation got recalled to London by fast clipper and reposted as consul-general to Texas. Charles Elliot became unstuck because, as Queen Victoria put it, “all he wanted might have been obtained if it had not bneen for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot–he tried to obtain the lowest terms from the Chinese.” Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s current government, is also about to be recalled to London. On June 30th after the union jack is hauled down at midnight and the yellow star hauled up he too will sail away, along with Prince Charles on the royal yacht, Britannia. Did Mr. Patten, too, seriously misread the bnargaining relationship with China, not by settling for the lowest terms, but by demanding too much? Perhaps, say his legion of critics, he totally underestimated the Chinese, endlessly provoking them by pushing through...

LONDON– Imagine that the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France gave up all their nuclear weapons under international treaty and next imagine that a “rogue” nation secretly developed a nuclear arsenal and posed the risk of threatening one of them with a nuclear attack. But the big powers, anyway, quietly decided, without fuss or hyperbole, to take the situation on the chin and continue to live without the capacity to retaliate in kind. Well, actually, that is the situation we are already in with another weapon of mass destruction, one that could, in the right conditions kill 100,000 people in a city of 500,000. It is the biological weapon. According to American estimates eleven nations are now developing them in defiance of the Biological Weapons Convention, signed into international law 25 years ago, one of the more benign legacies of Cold War warrior, President Richard Nixon. On Monday, the New York...

Mahatma Gandhi and the Revival of Nonviolent Politics in the Late 20th Century I. What is the Gandhian Legacy? Gandhi’s successful challenge to British colonialism is viewed as a heroic anomaly in a world still generally interpreted by way of a ‘realist’ prism that regards violence and hard power relations as the main causative agents of history, while at the same time deliberately excluding moral and legal considerations as distractions from a rational decision process. Although the memory of Gandhi is revered everywhere, the life and ways of Gandhi have not been treated as influential in relation to subsequent patterns of political practice, either within states or at a global level. Instead, there has been a widespread belief that what Gandhi achieved was unique to his time, place, and person. In this sense, the persisting importance of Gandhi, outside of the efforts of academic programs devoted to peace studies and...

LONDON– There is not going to be another Tiananman Square in Hong Kong. The Chinese communists’ ruling cadre may have little natural empathy for Hong Kong’s political freedom but they know, whatever protests meet them after the July 1st. hand-over by Britain, that a violent clamp-down of such proportions would alienate the western world in a manner that could not be so easily repaired as it was after the events of June 4, 1989. If Presidents Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac or Chancellor Helmut Kohl then chose to continue to be as accommodating to China’s interests as they are now they would be overwhelmingly overruled by both public opinion and their legislatures. The Beijing authorities are shrewd enough to know that, while the student protestors of Tiananman Square were naive enough to think their own mass could somehow defy and triumph over their government to the extent that they pointedly refused...

LONDON– Let’s imagine what post-Mobutu Congo could become. It has diamonds, copper and gold. It has rain and sunshine in abundance. It is not, given its immense size, overpopulated. It has wise political leadership, a stable democracy, economic and financial discipline and good governance. It is the heart of Africa, not Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness.” In a word it is not the Congo it is Botswana which, bar the rain (Botswana is a desert country), could be the Congo’s twin. Botswana in the 1960s was one of the poorest African countries, far poorer than the Congo. Today it is a prosperous middle-income country. During the 1970s it grew at a world record breaking 16% a year and in the 1980s a handsome 11%. in the 1990s it suffered a few bumps when it was blighted by the worst drought of the century and the diamond market hit the floor. (Diamonds...

LONDON– In Paris on Tuesday (May 27th.) President Boris Yeltsin and NATO’s 15 heads of government are going to sign a “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security.” As the Economist noted last week it is “Russia’s second surrender.” Seven years ago the Soviet Union ended its hold on eastern Europe. Now Russia will allow its three most important ex-allies, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, to join the military ranks of its long-time protagonist, NATO. The western nations are making a mistake of far reaching consequences, one they stand a more than even chance of living to rue. They missed one historic chance to change for the better the face of Europe in 1991-93, when the radical democrats held the strings of power in Moscow, by refusing to provide Russia with the economic wherewithal to make its transition to capitalism a less debilitating and wrenching experience. And now they...

LONDON– Once again in Europe the discussion about admitting new members is coming to the boil and, once again Turkey, promised membership of the Union over 30 years ago, is not on the list. In fact it is even worse than that. Turkey is being actively blackballed. At a get-together of European Christian Democrats in March a prominent member, Wilfried Martens, was widely quoted as saying, “The European Union is in the process of building a civilization in which Turkey has no place.” It was also widely noted that another participant, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany made no effort, unlike other leaders present, to distance himself from Mr. Martens. The hand of European chauvinism is again being dealt to Turkey, home to Istanbul, the city that strides two continents, the only city to have served as the capital of three empires, the historic meeting place of east and west, cradle of...

LONDON– By the day the reports of the magnitude of the famine now overwhelming North Korea become both more vivid and more disturbing. Yet, as is so often the case, Mao Zedong’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” has enough truth in it to ask if the regime’s hold on power is in serious question. The regime could well survive whatever the cost in human suffering and devastating economic decline, always using as a stick to beat back the intrusions of the rest of the world the threat of abrogating its nuclear freeze agreement and adding nuclear weapons to its already sizeable arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Yes or no. Is this how it will be, or will the regime just collapse one night as it did in East Germany? It is an unanswerable question and one can make a persuasive case either way. Thus...