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CIAO DATE: 09/04
Volume XXI, No 1, Spring 2004
America Unlimited The Radical Sources of the Bush Doctrine
Karl E. Meyer*
The year 2003 was for many Americans a time of wonder and worry, and for some of us, consternation. Its events confirmed that the winds of a radical new doctrine had swept through Washington, a doctrine that has yet to find a suitable name but whose effects can be clearly discerned in the war in Iraq and its aftermath. For the first time, the United States claimed the self-validating right to wage wars of choice, not only on grounds of potential future threats to national security, but as well to promote, even implant, a political and economic system deemed a universal template.
Paradoxically, the president who dispatched U.S. forces across the globe was a Texan who had shown scant interest in foreign affairs prior to his inauguration in 2001. Eight months after assuming office, propelled by the terrorist attacks on September 11, George W. Bush had metamorphosed into an avenging warrior. He next assumed an even bolder role, as high pontiff of an ideological campaign to democratize Islamic lands.
Encouraging this transformation was a close-knit group of advisors who had vainly pressed a similar forward policy while serving the elder George Bush during the first Gulf War a decade earlier. Prominent in this camarilla were the vice president and the secretary of defense and their like-minded senior aides, all of whom were broadly agreed on the flabbiness of multilateral diplomacy and in their conviction that America possessed the means and moral authority to behead its adversaries, with allies if possible but alone if necessary.
The new outlook was formally enshrined in a robust state paper, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, promulgated on September 19, 2002. Notable both for its global aspirations and its absence of any sense of limits, its tone was established in President George W. Bush's prefatory sentences: "The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom--and a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise." The paper maintained that America's unparalleled supremacy had to be sustained beyond challenge to counter the terrorist threat and to expand democracy and free markets. Most striking was the president's affirmation of America's right to wage preventive or preemptive war. In his words: "We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain and curtail our enemies' efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed [because] the only path to peace and security is the path of action."
Hence the consternation among those, like myself, who supported President Bush's justifiable intervention in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors. Iraq was a different matter. It was different because Washington failed to establish a credible casus belli; because having prevailed in Afghanistan, the Bush team showed perfunctory concern with rebuilding a shattered country; and because the United Nations and its inspectors in Iraq were not merely bypassed but scorned. Finally, because a war launched to forestall a hypothetical threat provided a dangerous precedent for others.
*Karl E. Meyer is the editor of this magazine and the author, most recently, of The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland (2003). This essay is adapted from a new introduction to the paperback edition that PublicAffairs will publish later this spring.
Redrawing the Map of the Future
P.H. Liotta and James F. Miskel*
When the Cold War ended, scholars, pundits, and policymakers turned to the task of defining the new world order and America's place in it. Some warned of coming anarchy or of the clash of civilizations. After September 11, those warnings seemed prescient. Since 9/11, our sense of insecurity has only increased, as has our reliance on military solutions to the problems we see before us. Yet the more we rely on military force, the less secure we feel. Perhaps the difficulty is in how we see the world that confronts us. It is as if we are trying to find our way using an old map, only to discover that the roads marked no longer exist.
One new map that may be particularly useful in helping us to see the contours of the future is the "earthlights" image reproduced here and available on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's website. The image is a composite of satellite photographs taken over a period of months that recorded the illumination from city lights, producing, according to NASA, a unique measure of "the spatial extent of urbanization." The earthlights map forces us to think about some disturbing trends and effects that, if left unchecked, will likely come to haunt us in the coming decades. These developments, broadly considered here, are: the changing demographics of cities, particularly in what we call the Lagos-Cairo-Karachi-Jakarta arc; the increased possibility of failing regions within functioning but troubled states; and the rise of the "feral city" in states and regions inextricably linked to the process of globalization.
As one looks at the earthlights image, patterns of world order and disorder begin to emerge, and it becomes clear that tectonic forces are at play in the globe's physical, economic, cultural, and political geography. The patterns of light suggest the inevitability of Central and Eastern Europe drawing ever closer, like moths to a flame, toward an enlarging European Union. Likewise, North Africa is being pulled away from the rest of Africa--and from the Middle East, despite certain cultural ties--and drawn toward a larger Euro-Mediterranean community. The earthlights image is revealing in other ways as well. It is interesting to see that India and Pakistan, which began from relatively equal starting points at partition in 1947 have gone in radically different directions: all of India is lit, while Pakistan is dark. The same story is evident on the Korean peninsula, where the thirty-eighth parallel forms a dramatic dividing line between the lights of South Korea and the dark shadow that is North Korea. The lights in the People's Republic of China are clustered in the east, along the country's Pacific coast, not evenly distributed throughout the country as in Taiwan or Japan. This suggests the eventual formation of "two Chinas"--one consisting of ever more densely populated urban zones, the other of underdeveloped and undergoverned hinterlands.
It is our view that we must pay greater attention to the shadows on the earthlights map. Like the drunk who loses his keys in the dark and looks for them under the streetlight because that is the only place he can see, we tend to focus our gaze on places where the lights are shining, even though the keys to greater security lie elsewhere. The attacks of September 11 not only revealed that Americans were vulnerable on their home soil; there also came the disturbing awareness that the new threat we faced came not from an enemy whose identity and capabilities were "in the light," but from one operating from the shadows.
*P. H. Liotta holds the Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography and National Security and James F. Miskel is associate dean of academics and professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed here are the authors' own and do not represent those of the Department of the Navy.
Is Cuba's influence in Latin America on the rise? Washington seems to think so, and the Bush administration, which sees this as a threat to regional stability, has been sounding the alarm.
During most of the 1990s, Cuba's status as the lone dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere--and one of the few remaining communist countries anywhere--left it isolated and increasingly irrelevant. Under the iron- fisted leadership of Fidel Castro, Cuba struggled to ward off economic collapse as other Latin American countries focused on consolidating democratic rule, expanding trade, and pursuing closer ties with the United States. Most regional governments disapproved of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, which they saw as counterproductive, but few saw any advantage in strengthening their bilateral ties with Havana. In 1999, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo excoriated Castro for the lack of political freedoms on the island at the Ibero-American Summit in Havana.1 Excluded from such regional initiatives as the Summit of the Americas and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and denied participation in the Organization of American States (OAS), Cuba appeared to have been permanently relegated to the hemispheric sidelines.
In the five years since Zedillo's speech little appears outwardly to have changed. Cuba remains outside the inter-American system, embargoed by the U.S. government, and criticized for its repressive policies at home. If anything, Castro's rule in Cuba cuts even more deeply against prevailing norms. In a rebuke to democratic opening, the Cuban government cracked down on internal dissent in the spring of 2003, sentencing 75 democracy activists and independent journalists to prison terms averaging more than 20 years. Eschewing diplomatic niceties for Cold War-style confrontation, Castro continues to relish a fight. Recent targets of the Cuban leader's ire have included Mexican president Vicente Fox, Peru's Alejandro Toledo, Uruguay's Jorge Batlle, and even Cuba's crucial economic partner, the European Union. With ftaa negotiations ranking as a top hemispheric priority, and Chile, Colombia, and the Central American nations pursuing separate bilateral trade agreements with the United States, the Cuban government remains unceasingly critical of free trade and regional integration. While most of Latin America favors better relations with the United States, Castro appears to revel in the unrelenting antagonism of the Bush administration.
Yet Fidel Castro's relations with Latin America appear to be on the mend. Last year, the Cuban leader was publicly feted when he attended presidential inaugurals in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay. He has developed a close personal and political relationship with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, the controversial populist who has presided over the leading oil-producing country in the hemisphere since 1999. While Latin American countries continue to support U.N. resolutions condemning the human rights situation in Cuba, an OASresolution to that effect fell apart in the spring of 2003, spurned by a dozen Caribbean nations and several of the hemisphere's major countries. Cuba's sweeping program of medical diplomacy has earned Havana substantial goodwill in the region, even in Central American countries with conservative governments where official ties remain cool. In 2002, when Honduras normalized relations with Cuba after 41 years, the head of Cuba's medical brigade became the first ambassador to that country. Today, only Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Uruguay lack full relations with Cuba (and if a leftist candidate wins Uruguay's presidential election this year, that list may be down to two). Meanwhile, Cuba has established closer ties with the new presidents of Brazil and Argentina, and even Mexico appears to be looking for a way to get out of Castro's doghouse following a period of rocky relations. The more U.S. officials have voiced their displeasure at what they see as Castro's guiding hand--for example, in Chávez's political resurrection following a 2002 coup attempt or in the collapse of the conservative government of Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in the fall of 2003--the longer Castro's shadow appears tobe.
But can it seriously be argued that the democratic countries of Latin America are embracing the hemisphere's lone dictatorship?
*Daniel P. Erikson is director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C.
Michele Wucker*
This was to have been a year of celebration for Haiti. It is the bicentennial of the world's first free black republic, created on January 1, 1804, when former Haitian slaves routed the mighty Napoleon Bonaparte's troops. This coming October 15 also will mark the tenth anniversary of the defeat of the military regime that had toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and of his triumphant return to Haiti with international help. Instead, it is a time of anguish, of dashed hopes for a once-beloved leader, of carnage, recrimination and revenge, of the return to Haiti of troops from its former occupiers, the United States and France, and of the glaring recognition of how badly Washington and the international community have failed Haiti. All this cruelly coincides with America's election year preoccupations, and with the Bush administration's skittishness about a flood of Caribbean refugees heading toward Florida.
In February, a photograph in the New York Times showed Haitians on the docks of Port-au-Prince jeering at a man and a little girl who just had been repatriated by the U.S. Coast Guard. Those refugees, who had fled violence and desperation only to be sucked back into it and then mocked for seeking a better life, seemed to be an emblem of Haiti itself.
When Aristide was overthrown in a military coup in September 1991, not even a year after he became Haiti's first freely elected president, condemnation was universal--by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and human rights groups everywhere. The United Nations and the OAS imposed oil and arms embargoes, trade sanctions followed, and envoys and mediators shuttled to and from Port-au-Prince, but the measures did less to intimidate the de facto regime than to further impoverish the country's already destitute population. At one point of low comedy in the effort to return Aristide to power, the Clinton administration, fearful of domestic backlash, pulled out its putative peacekeepers when dockside rioters threatened a round of grapeshot.
When President Aristide was flown into exile for the second time this February 29, it was hard to say that he would be sorely missed. Once seen as a long-sought source of hope for Haiti, the embattled former priest had steadily alienated most of the people who once believed in him. Even those who protested the removal of a (more or less) democratically elected leader would be hard-pressed to argue that Aristide was a shining example of democracy--and some made a point of saying so.
However, many members of Haiti's intransigent opposition, particularly the Democratic Convergence, can hardly be said to have made a genuine effort to reach a settlement that would have allowed a transfer of power via elections instead of guns. Nor could the rebel leaders, who plotted against Aristide from the neighboring Dominican Republic and then returned to bring him down, be described as Boy Scouts. Louis-Jodel Chamblain allegedly ran death squads in the 1980s, later was a key member of the fraph paramilitary group during the 1991-94 military regime, and has been implicated in the high-profile political murders of Justice Minister Guy Malary and businessman/activist Antoine Izmery and in the infamous April 1994 Raboteau massacre of as many as 50 opponents of the military government. His accomplice, Guy Philippe, a former Aristide ally, has been accused by international observers of ordering executions of suspected gang members in the late 1990s.
Despite the rebel leaders' notoriety, Aristide could not muster enough support at home or abroad to prevent a ragtag band of not more than 200 rebels from overcoming the government in northern areas in a matter of weeks. As in other nations that have emerged from long dictatorships, many citizens appear to be choosing authoritarian order over democratic chaos. Indeed, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the "president for life" who was overthrown in 1986, recently announced from France that he would like to return to Haiti, an idea that many of Aristide's opponents have entertained since a constitutional ban on Duvalierists holding office expired.
Yet to focus solely on Aristide's lapses and Baby Doc's possible aspirations would be not only a misplaced effort but ultimately damaging. Washington's obsession with one leader's personality, rather than Haiti's need to build functioning institutions, was an essential part of what ultimately undid the country's fragile democracy. This has created a dangerously polarized nation and set major obstacles in the way of a better future for the country.
*Michele Wucker is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.
Europe's Search for a Constitution
Mark Gilbert*
The European Union is no stranger to crisis, but there is little doubt that its latest row over the small print of its new constitution poses a large question mark over Europe's future. A conference of Europe's leaders not only rejected the new constitution last December, but the EU finance ministers earlier backed down from applying sanctions to France and Germany for flouting budgetary rules. The EU can often seem opaque to nonspecialists. What follows is an attempt to outline what the fuss is all about.
The first broad marker to bear in mind is that since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992, the EU has striven both to "deepen" integration, by extending the EU's policy responsibilities, and to "widen" it, by accepting new members from Central Europe and from the Mediterranean. The new constitution is supposed to provide the political architecture for the economic giant created by these choices.
Disappointment over the failure of the constitution was especially strong in Berlin and Paris. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder hinted broadly that Germany would not carry on paying for the EU if the constitution were not adopted. French president Jacques Chirac, while insisting there was no "crisis with a capital C," also brandished the threat that a "pioneer group" of countries centered upon France and Germany would pursue advanced integration in a wide range of areas: the "two-speed Europe" that supporters of European integration have hitherto sought to avoid. This pioneer group, to judge by the immediate reactions of the Czech and Hungarian prime ministers, might even include some of the EU's new intake. These countries are heavily dependent upon Germany for direct investment and markets.
Germany's budgetary muscle will eventually bring Poland and Spain, the chief foot-draggers over the constitution, to heel. Fear of jeopardizing the EU's past achievements may cause the pioneers to tread carefully, at any rate for now. A compromise based upon the constitutional treaty will likely be reached during the Dutch presidency of the EU in the second half of 2004. But the events of recent months are a warning for analysts who have assumed that the EU is a superpower in posse if not in esse.
After the intergovernmental conference (IGC), the constitutional treaty's principal author, the aloof former president of France Valéry Giscard D'Estaing, argued that "nobody would understand" if the Europeans spent the next 20 years squabbling among themselves while China superseded them as a rival to the United States in world politics. The stakes are unquestionably high. But the EU looks as if it is not yet ready to take its place at the top table.
*Mark Gilbert is associate professor of international history at the University of Trento. He is the author of Surpassing Realism: The Politics of European Integration since 1945, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003.
How the Alien Tort Act Promotes Human Rights
Joshua Kurlantzick*
Last fall, in an ordinary room in an upscale Bangkok hotel, a group of lawyers took depositions from clients who had filed a civil suit, quizzing them on their personal histories, their alleged injuries, and their relationship to the defendants. Downstairs, hotel guests planning visits to the city's famous royal palace and other tourist sights flowed in and out of the glitzy lobby, unaware of the activity upstairs.
Despite the seeming ordinariness of the deposition taking, this was a landmark event. The lawyers in the case were employed by the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), a Washington-based nongovernmental organization (ngo). Their clients were a group of impoverished Myanmar villagers who had filed suit against Unocal, the California oil giant, in an American court, under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The villagers claim the company is "vicariously liable" for human rights abuses committed by the Myanmar military during the construction of the $1.2 billion Yadana natural gas pipeline in eastern Myanmar in the 1990s. According to their depositions and reports by human rights groups, the military forced villagers living along the pipeline route to build roads and army camps. It also forced them to carry heavy loads for miles through the jungle for no pay, shooting porters who moved too slowly. The military even used villagers as human minesweepers.
The plaintiffs argue that Unocal is liable because the company knew of these abuses and did nothing to stop them. (Unocal has a 28 percent stake in Yadana and, along with its partners, hired Burmese troops to provide security for the project; the company denies that it knew about the abuse.) According to a report in Time magazine's Asian edition, court documents show that a consultant hired by Unocal warned the company in 1992, before the pipeline was built, that "throughout Burma, the government habitually makes use of forced labor." Later, as the pipeline was being built, the same advisor told Unocal that forced labor, forced relocation of villagers, and arbitrary killings by the military were occurring along the pipeline route. In 2001, in its annual assessment of human rights in Myanmar, the State Department concluded: "Forced or compulsory labor remains a widespread and serious problem."
Now, for the first time in history, an American court has shown itself willing to let such a suit go to trial to consider whether a U.S. corporation can be penalized for knowingly standing by while its overseas partners--in this case a foreign military--commit abuses, even if the company did not actually direct the abuses itself.
Although the Unocal case may be the first to go to trial, the idea of litigation against companies allegedly complicit in abuses committed by repressive regimes is beginning to shape the international human rights agenda. In recent years, a coalition of rights advocates in the developed world and plaintiffs from the developing world have begun using a litigation-based strategy to enforce global human rights.
*Joshua Kurlantzick is foreign editor of The New Republic.
The Evolution of Russian Organized Crime
Vsevolod Sokolov*
One of the most persistent images of Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union is of a state in the grip of criminal enterprises*of thugs in leather jackets shaking down and brutalizing helpless business owners and big-time kleptocrats making off with the country's wealth while strangling its nascent free market. But this is a dated picture, and one without nuance.
Russian organized crime, like other Russian institutions, has had to adapt to the tumultuous changes that have taken place within the country over the past decade and a half and, in so doing, has developed a complex relationship with the private market. In an attempt to understand this relationship and to dispel some of the myths surrounding the Russian criminal enterprise, I have conducted extensive interviews with criminals, business entrepreneurs, government and law enforcement officials, and journalists in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
An interesting picture has emerged as a result of this research. First, the organized criminal enterprises that became such a big part of the story after 1989 did not spring from the ashes of the Soviet state, but were the evolutionary offshoots of Soviet-era criminal-business partnerships. Second, the positive economic impact of Russian organized crime has frequently been overlooked. Over the past decade, Russian organized crime has largely abandoned the purely predatory behavior that characterized the years immediately following the fall of communism. In the early and mid-1990s, criminal groups provided protection to businesses and enforced contracts when the state was too weak and corrupt to do so. In the process, they actually helped sustain private enterprise, albeit at a high cost to business. The emergence of an economic market for private protection--in which criminal groups compete among themselves as well as with other newly formed private security agents--has stabilized the business-criminal relationship. Recently, criminal networks have taken a more businesslike approach to maximizing profit and, in many cases, have used their ill-gotten gains to fund legal private enterprises.
Getting a protection agent, known as a krysha (literally, "roof"), is still a prerequisite for opening a business in Russia. But according to the businessmen I interviewed, it is now possible to operate without being extorted by a criminal group, so long as one has acquired some sort of protection agent. Indeed, organized crime's loss of its monopoly on private protection rackets, combined with its move toward legitimacy, legal and regulatory business reform, and the consolidation of central power under Russian president Vladimir Putin, have greatly decreased its hold over the Russian private sector. Although organized crime remains a significant factor in Russian business life, its influence has waned relative to that exercised by rent-seeking oligarchs, large corporations, and the state security services.
*Vsevolod Sokolov is a research associate at the Center for Defense
Information, Washington, D.C.
Rumba Diplomacy in the Age of Bushismo
Ned Sublette*
One Havana morning in June 2001, members of the rumba group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas were filling out U.S. Optional Form 156 BNS, version in Spanish, to get visas for a forthcoming tour of the United States. I saw the old familiar question, "¿Es Ud. Miembro del Partido Comunista de Cuba? [Are you a member of the Communist Party of Cuba?] Sí ___ No ___."
Below that, a new question had been rubber-stamped onto the printed form: "Es Ud. Miembro o Representante de Una Organización Terrorista? [Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?] Sí ___ No ___." I took out a notebook and copied it down, because I didn't believe my eyes. Was this perhaps a test of the applicant's basic intelligence?
Shaking their heads in disbelief, the Muñequitos checked the "No" box.
That rubber-stamped question encapsulates the absurdity of U.S. policy toward Cuba. President Bush had been in office less than six months, and the "war on terrorism" was not yet a household catchphrase, but his new administration was eager to portray Cuba as a terrorist threat to the United States. This administration was, and is, permeated with the hardest of Cuba hardliners, who occupy positions of power as never before. That in turn has translated into a distortion of U.S. foreign policy, skewing our approaches both to Latin American policy and to national security.
The stated goal of the administration--regime change in Cuba--cannot be achieved without igniting a conflagration. Meanwhile, 31 states have trade agreements with Havana under a 2000 law that permits the sale of foodstuffs to Cuba for cash, though the administration has lately been refusing to process visas for Cuban buyers and travel licenses for U.S. farmers. In statehouses around the country people are complaining that foreign policy has been hijacked by South Florida politics. To placate a small constituency demanding action against Fidel Castro, the administration is also undermining one of the most positive developments in U.S.-Cuban relations in the last 45 years--a cultural rapprochement between people in the United States and people in Cuba that took place in the 1990s, even as the politicians were busy talking tough.
*Ned Sublette is a 2003-04 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His book, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, will be published in June by Chicago Review Press.
George Papandreou's Honorable Legacy
Nicholas X. Rizopoulos*
There is the often told story about Winston Churchill learning the devastating news of his party's electoral defeat, in July 1945, at the hands of a seemingly ungrateful British public, only to have his wife tell him that, given how exhausting the previous five years had been for him, this was perhaps "a blessing in disguise." Without missing a beat, Churchill famously shot back, "If so, the disguise was perfect."
On March 7, Greece went to the polls, and in giving the conservative New Democracy Party and its leader, Costas Karamanlis, a fairly healthy parliamentary majority--165 seats in the 300-seat parliament--the electorate not only threw out of power the Socialist (PASOK) Party, which had ruled Greece during 20 of the preceding 23 years, but also effectively put on hold the meteoric career of George Papandreou, who had been Greece's foreign minister since early 1999 (as well as the recently elected chairman of PASOK), and who, in the eyes of most knowledgeable international observers, was seen as being one of the few truly admirable European statesmen of our time.
One of the most striking things about the 52-year old Papandreou is that both in his private and professional life he has proved to be so unlike his grandfather (and namesake), prime minister at the end of the Second World War and again in the mid-1960s, a mercurial rabble-rouser whose liberal-cum-republican credentials (and even occasional marxisant pronouncements) never stopped him from cutting deals with the Right when it suited his own career advancement; and even more unlike his father, Andreas Papandreou, founder of PASOK and himself prime minister through most of the 1980s and early 1990s, who--though intellectually distinguished, genuinely respected early in his life as an academic economist living in the United States, and unquestionably charismatic--turned out to be, in the main, an irresponsible demagogue masquerading as a populist and Man of the Left, who also cultivated in public a virulent streak of anti-Americanism.
By way of contrast, the younger George Papandreou (whose mother, like Churchill's, was American) has always behaved in a low-key fashion, with a personal lifestyle (unlike his father's or grandfather's) unmarred by sexual or other scandals. A relative latecomer to the riotous world of Greek politics, he gained respect--especially abroad--by showing himself to be smart, well-informed, unexcitable, and utterly unostentatious. Until very recently, he had concentrated almost entirely on international issues. At the Foreign Ministry, he surrounded himself with like-minded--and, by Greek standards, relatively young--professionals who were themselves cosmopolitan in their outlook and refreshingly unburdened by chauvinistic blinkers. (True to form, this closely knit group of advisors, many of whom had studied in Britain and the United States, were derisively nicknamed "the Americans" by the "superpatriots" within PASOK.)
*Nicholas X. Rizopoulos is academic director in the Honors College at Adelphi University and a senior research associate at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, New York City.
Could Prague Have Defied Hitler?
What Churchill's Courier Learned
Milan Hauner*
"Mr. Deakin from Oxford received by Mr. President at 11:30." This spare entry, dated April 12, l938, in the book of audiences of the Czechoslovak president Eduard Benes, only hints at a dramatic encounter scarcely known to historians. A month earlier, German troops had occupied Austria in a bloodless union, or Anschluss, that violated the spirit of the Versailles Treaty. The question now was whether Hitler's legions would turn on democratic Czechoslovakia, whose independence was guaranteed by the same treaty and whose nationhood had been proclaimed in 1918 by Thomas Masaryk and his successor as president, Eduard Benes. Could the young republic stand up to the Führer? To find out, Winston Churchill, determined opponent of British appeasers, sent a young and unpretentious Englishman as his private emissary to Prague.
Who was Mr. Deakin? William F. Deakin was a history tutor at Wadham College, Oxford, who at the time was also helping Churchill prepare his multivolume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Twice a week, Deakin would go down to Chartwell, Churchill's country home, and work from lunchtime until the early hours of the morning, when he would drive back to Oxford to resume his tutorials at 9:00 a.m. The Churchill Archives at Cambridge University contain copies of two letters that Churchill wrote at the time on behalf of Deakin: a letter of introduction to President Benes, dated April 1, 1938, and a second, dated four days later, which contained important instructions to his young assistant.
Churchill's second letter was a model of brevity and precision. He wanted Deakin to ask the Czechoslovak president how best his British friends could help his country. Above all, he sought answers to four vital questions: Was it true that fortifications were already completed opposite the new Austrian front? (Of course, they were not, but note Churchill's positive phrasing to this important question to which he wanted a "yes" reply.) What were Prague's communications with Romania and Russia? How would he describe relations with Romania and Yugoslavia? Was it worthwhile for the British to propose an alliance with the Danubian states for economic and, ultimately, military purposes?
*Milan Hauner, a historian, is the author of six books and more than a hundred scholarly articles on the history of Germany, India, Central Asia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. He is affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Rock Pool on the Baltic: A Latvian Journal
Benjamin Pauker*
RIGA--The winter sun casts long shadows over medieval Doma Square, where mud-speckled new Audis and BMWs traverse the icy cobblestones. Here, where Latvia was reborn as a sovereign democracy 13 years ago, one senses a spirit of change. On April 2, Latvia--along with its Baltic sisters, Estonia and Lithuania--became members of NATO. And, on May 1, they will formally join the European Union. No less important psychologically, six weeks later Latvia will also claim an unlikely and unprecedented spot in the final tournament of the quadrennial European soccer championships in Portugal, a prime showcase for the continent's largest sporting and economic powers.
But although the near future ostensibly bodes well, a second round of democratization and capitalization will open Latvia to the scrutiny of Europe and to the caprices of a global trading system. All the Baltic democracies, still in their adolescence, are entering choppy waters. EU accession entails tough new requirements on human rights and a crackdown on corruption; it also exposes inefficient, undercapitalized economies to Western competition. Meanwhile, as the Baltics look westward for support, new troubles gather in the east. Russia is demanding free transit of goods through Lithuania to the isolated Russian port of Kaliningrad; it seeks official status for the Russian language in Estonia and Latvia; it is wary of NATO warplanes now policing its borders; and it is lobbying for greater EU dependence on Russia's western oil reserves that currently languish without a market.
All the while, the still-fragile Baltic governments cope with their domestic disorders. Lithuania's president, Rolandas Paksas, was impeached on corruption charges on April 6, and Latvia's ruling coalition in parliament recently imploded, resulting in the appointment of a new prime minister just months before the country is due to enter the EU. But in Riga, the largest city in the Baltics (population: 800,000) and an elegant example of the prosperity that with wisdom and luck awaits the region, there is hope for a smooth transition and the resolution of old animosities..
*Benjamin Pauker is associate editor of World Policy Journal.
A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy by David C. Hendrickson
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In America's Name by Linda Wrigley
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