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World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 4, Winter 1998/99
William Pfaff, who is a syndicated columnist for the International Herald Tribune and the author of The Wrath of Nations, Barbarian Sentiments, and other books on international affairs, warns of danger ahead in “The Coming Clash of Europe with America.” Arising out of industrial competition in the globalized and deregulated international economy, and as a reaction to Washington’s hegemonic pronouncements, the inevitable conflict is likely to be destabilizing and dangerous. “It is interest, not volition, that will produce a deepening rivalry between Europe and the United States during the decades to come, with competitive searches for economic and political influence in the rest of the world.” Pfaff writes. Meanwhile, “the fundamental American policy debate is between those who believe that the American interest and America’s security can be found in international balance and accommodation, in an international system with several major players, and those who believe that national security--and manifest destiny--lie in global preponderance and hegemony.” But, Pfaff warns, “hegemony is an inherently unstable condition, since the international system naturally seeks balance and resists the hegemon.” The question, therefore, is how gracefully to cede the hegemonic claim.
In its first year, the Clinton administration promised to be aggressively multilateral in its foreign policy, notes Stephen Schlesinger, director of the World Policy Institute, in “The End of Idealism: Foreign Policy in the Clinton Years.” It has since steadily backtracked from that position. While the administration may take credit for its attempts to negotiate peace settlements in Haiti, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and the Middle East, President Clinton’s irresolution in the Bosnian and Rwandan crises, his chronic deference toward the American military, and his failure to anticipate or respond adequately to the Asian financial crisis have sown the seeds of future adversity.
In “Mutualism: An American Strategy for the Next Century,” Hugh De Santis, a former State Department officer who is now professor of international security policy at the National War College, details an “interest-based, non-American-centered framework” for international relations. “The assumption that it is up to the United States to maintain peace and order in a potentially turbulent world is tenuous at best: credible for the moment but insupportable in the longer term,” he writes. “If the world is truly changing, as American policymakers reflexively say it is, and if no nation possesses the resources to solve or even manage the array of global problems that lie ahead, we may have to plot a course that flows from the premise that the United States is now inextricably part of an interdependent community of nations that will have to rely on each other to satisfy their respective interests and goals. . . . Mutualism views regional rather than global structures as the foundation of the emerging international system; it maintains that international cooperation is more likely to occur when states exercise responsibility for solving their own problems rather than when solutions are hierarchically imposed by overarching political structures and institutions.”
“There is little doubt that the euro will change the face of Europe,” asserts Werner Weidenfeld, professor of political science and director of the Center for Applied Policy Research at the University of Munich, in “A Demanding Agenda for the New Europe.” The economic, political, and cultural changes it will bring in its train will require new directions in the distribution of governmental power, modifications in the institutions of governance, the development of common foreign and security policies, and the creation of a realistic framework for further European integration.
David Fromkin, who teaches international relations, law, and history at Boston University and who is the author of the forthcoming The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Twenty-First Century, discusses the limits of international law, particularly in advancing ethical norms, in “International Law at the Frontiers.” His essay explores the historical evolution of international law and concludes with a proposal for the civilized great powers to assume responsibility for running the planet in a better fashion. “The evident thing is for them to join together, forge a consensus, and impose their will.”
Karl E. Meyer, a former member of the New York Times Editorial Board and the author, with Shareen Blair Brysac, of the forthcoming Tournament of Shadows, a book about Central Asia, relates the tale of the extraordinary scholar-diplomat, William Woodville Rockhill (1854?1914), the first Westerner to befriend and advise a Dalai Lama on the most sensitive of secular issues, Tibet’s status within the Middle Kingdom. Rockhill, Meyer writes, in “Close Encounters of an American Kind,” was “the original China Hand, the principal drafter and executor of the Open Door policy, the envoy nicknamed ‘Big Chief’ who, between postings in Peking, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople translated Tibetan texts.”
In “‘Blood and Soil’: What It Means to Be German,” Anthony Richter, who writes on post-Soviet affairs and directs the Central Eurasia Project at the Open Society Institute, illuminates the changing attitudes with respect to nationality and citizenship in Germany by examining the fate of the 2 million ethnic Germans living within the borders of the former Soviet Union. In the past, “True Germans” were “German both by ethnicity and by their command of German culture, its folkways and its food as well as its high culture, and, of course, the German language itself,” Richter writes. But this concept of Deutschtum is falling by the wayside. “Today, the bright people in Germany working on nationality and migration policy are not looking inward, nor are they looking to the East in search of a greater German identity. They are organizing naturalization campaigns for Turks and Bosnians, and looking toward a Germany in which a European identity is the bedrock and Deutschtum is an increasingly incomprehensible artifact of the past.”
Colette Braeckman, the chief Africa correspondent of the Brussels daily, Le Soir, asks: What do we really know about Rwanda? And what do we really understand about the 1994 genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were massacred? In her appreciative review of Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Braeckman leads the reader to the deeper questions: How to live after a genocide, how to find once more the unity in a divided nation, how to rebuild a state, how to facilitate reconciliation over the long term, how to fight against impunity, how to move forward without abandoning memory?