World Affairs
Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul.–Sept.1998)

Letter from the Executive Editor

By Harish Kapur

 

This issue is devoted to an array of crises — crises linked to the nuclear weaponisation of South Asia, to the financial turbulences in Southeast Asia, to the continuous aggravation of North-South dichotomy, and to the structural quandary of the United Nations system.

The nuclear option taken by India and Pakistan has created a new situation on the subcontinent. Some consider this as a stablising factor since it would now deter the two countries from taking any military initiative out of fear that it may explode into a nuclear conflagration. There are others who argue differently — in fact just the opposite. They consider that since “the Indian subcontinent is the most dangerous place on earth” (William E Burrows and Robert Windrem Critical Mass, London: Simon and Schuster Ltd, 1994, pp 351), and since the two countries do not have an institutionalised decisional and command system — with all the built-in checks and balances — the risks of a nuclear conflict are more real on the subcontinent than anywhere else. Only time will tell which of the two schools of thought are close to reality. It would be pointless to pontificate on the relative weightiness of the two argumentations at a time when we are faced with an area of darkness on the subject.

The other major event covered in this issue is the financial chaos in Southeast Asia —a chaos that is highlighting the dysfunctionality of a largely corrupted banking system, and the unruly process of deregulation of international financial operations. The consequences are horrendous: skyrocketing of debt services, the sliding of the currency exchange rates, the flight of short term capital, and the crumbling of foreign reserves. The spill-over of this crisis — originally confined to South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia — has begun to effect the other countries of the region, including Japan and Hong Kong. But, will this process expand onto the shores of Western Europe and the United States? It is of course difficult to say, though many are counting on the fact that the levels of inter-independence between the affected countries and the developed world are not critical enough to seriously jeopardise the latter.

The North-South dimension has also become dichotomous. Frankly, the South has lost everything — its negotiating power, its leverage, its intra-South solidarity and even its normative socio-economic goals, so much so that none of the third world mainstream countries evoke anymore any alternatives other than globalisation and marketisation of economies.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has come in for sharp criticism for the strong remedies it is recommending in exchange for a financial bail-out. It has been attacked for proposing the same remedies for illnesses that are different and symptoms that are disparate. The administration of excessive antibiotic treatment to all of them is having the opposite effect — the effect of becoming more ill.

The United Nations, too, is faced with a myriad crises — a political crisis caused by the unipolarity of the international system, and, by a structural crisis engendered by an excessive proliferation of institutions. Even more problematic is the unnecessary duplications, and the absence of any viable inter-agency cooperation that has now flawed the whole system.

The post-cold war era thus is offering us a panorama of critical situations over which the international community has neither the capacity of managing them nor of containing them. Our international system, like the planet earth, is spinning so fast that no one is able to control the succession of crises that are descending upon us metronomically.

Harish Kapur Aubonne, Switzerland September 1998