World Affairs
Vol 2, Number 2 (Apr-Jun 1998)

Letter from the Executive Editor

By Harish Kapur

To mark the centenary of Zhou Enlai, we are devoting a part of this issue to him — to his personality, his character and his political role inside and outside of China. For this purpose, we invited contributions from people who had known him, or who had worked with him or who had written about him. The result is an interesting mix of views. While all of them praise Zhou’s humanity and his remarkable role in international affairs, there appears to exist some doubts regarding his performance in China, whenever it was mired in turbulent crises. It has generally been argued that he avoided standing up to defend his views, and had the unfortunate tendency of going along with the views voiced and policies proposed by Mao Zedong, even when he had serious doubts regarding their viability. By adopting what was clearly a prudent attitude, was Zhou being opportunistically realist, or was he weak-kneed — fearful of losing his position as many others did? In the different articles published in this issue, both interpretations have emerged, regarding Zhou’s political behaviour in moments of crisis.

The other articles in this issue are: Russia’s wrenching shift from a planned to a market economy, India’s difficulties in coping with some aspects of its foreign policy, the emergence of the three Asias each of which is mired in serious problems within its region, and the terrible holocaust that marked World War II.

Post-Communist Russia is clearly faced with major difficulties while making the transition to a pluralist, politico-economic system. No one really knows how this new “Russian Revolution” is going to evolve.

India has two major foreign policy problems — the new problem of coping with the economic dimension of its foreign policy, and the predicament of continuing the process of normalisation with China. The task of effectively mastering the economic dimension has been rendered difficult by the absence of any institutional mechanisms that would facilitate viable linkages between India’s economic and political diplomacies; while the goal of accelerated Sino-Indian normalisation has become even more problematic by the unexpected and stunningly defiant Indian decision to take the nuclear option in its military strategy, as evidenced by the five underground explosions carried out in May 1998.

The emergence of Central Asian nations as new international actors has altered the Asian landscape radically. We are now faced with three Asian sub-regions (Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia), each of which is entangled in a serious crisis. All are heavily subjected to global pressures, emanating principally from the Western world. Given the fact that some factors link the three of them, will they be able to construct a non-conflictual triangle of three Asias? It seems very doubtful, since what separates and divides them preponderates over what unites them.

The holocaust of the Jews during World War II has marked the twentieth century. Though there have been other genocides and massacres since then (Cambodia, Rwanda-Burundi, etc), the Western world is clearly very affected by this horrendous tragedy — a tragedy that has been a subject of an endless number of books, the most recent and the most important of which we have included in a review essay in this issue.

Harish Kapur
May 1998
Geneva