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CIAO DATE: 04/02
Volume XVIII, No 4, Winter 2001
Where does the U.S. administration's new emphasis on counterterrorism leave NATO? Some alliance observers say NATO's role as a fighting body is over, or will at best be limited to peacekeeping. Russian president Vladimir Putin would like NATO to become a political forum. U.S. officials have yet to specify the alliance's relevance to their antiterrorism campaign, and the form and extent of future military participation by NATO allies. Given the growing gap between U.S. military needs and NATO capabilities—both those capabilities of the individual European members and the collective skills of the allies as a group—the alliance may find itself relegated to the role of bit player in future U.S. defense planning.
Excluding NATO from America's fledgling war on terrorism does hold some advantages from the U.S. perspective. No longer does Washington need to seek the approval of all 19 allies for each and every step of the military campaign, as was the case in Kosovo. U.S. commanders need not worry whom to trust with key intelligence or who might leak it to the enemy.
On the other hand, the go-it-alone approach carries a price tag.
As we adjust to living in the shadow of September 11, 2001, it is vital to understand both the nature of the assaults on the United States and the steps we can take against their perpetrators. The long-term planning, ingenuity, and sheer fanaticism involved in mounting the attacks grimly confirm that terrorists have improved their capabilities exponentially. We must respond with an even greater improvement in counterterrorism.
In this fight, the United States can directly benefit from examining the lessons others have learned in their own struggles. Among Western democracies, few countries have more experience in coping with terrorism than the United Kingdom. The British have waged a prolonged, low-key, yet deadly struggle against both international and domestic terrorism for 30 years. Not all of Britain's lessons are positive.
Viewed through the lens of contemporary Spanish history, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the return of democracy to Spain may justly be deemed an event of momentous significance. Indeed, the survival of democracy in Spain since 1977 (not to speak of its success) is nothing short of extraordinary. The country's previous and only significant attempt at living under a democratic system (the brief and chaotic Second Republic, 1931-36) descended into civil war and cemented Spain's reputation as a society in which conflict and the potential for violence were ever-present. In turn, the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the bloodiest of the many civil conflicts that erupted in interwar Europe, gave birth to one of the longest and most entrenched dictatorships of the last century, the Franco regime (1939-77). Franco's authoritarian rule endured because the Spanish people had been socialized to believe that Spain was "different," that it was an inherently anarchic country in need of a strong hand.
No less significant than the triumph of democracy in a historically improbable environment is the importance of the Spanish experience to our understanding of the conditions that make democracy possible.
It is a common failure of the imagination to dismiss as a "soft" add-on to foreign policy American efforts to combat pestilence and ill-health elsewhere. In blunt truth, the United States benefits doubly from every victory won abroad, not only in the intangible form of goodwill but also in our own homeland defense against disease. The returns for relatively modest expenditures are enormous. As part of America's self-examination in the wake of September 11, this overlooked dimension of Washington's global role cries out for attention. Immediately, an exceptionally promising opportunity is to work with Russia to help arrest a continuing and dismaying decline in fertility and life expectancy.
Foreign health assistance deserves a corresponding rank with other vital elements of diplomacy—security, trade, and development. The humanitarian concerns are obvious. The enormous health and medical resources possessed by the United States—knowledge, pharmaceutical and medical industries, trained personnel, and effective nongovernmental organizations—speak for themselves. Yet the record of the last decade, during which the U.S. government devoted less than 0.1 percent of the country's gross national product to foreign health programs, and thus ranks behind all other industrialized states, also sadly speaks for itself.
The end of the Cold War, the collapse of totalitarian states, and the various "waves" of democratization that have occurred in different regions of the world for the last 30 years (in Latin America, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Africa, and East Asia) have fundamentally changed the international dialogue about human rights. "Pluralism" is in vogue, as the Bangladeshi newspaper Dainik Janakantha recently editorialized: "It is the age of achieving freedom . . . . It is the age of singing songs of triumph...of pluralism over authoritarianism. It is the age of exception, the age of difference, and the age of proclaiming the victory of mankind and diversifying the sources of creativity."
Most people, whether in Germany, Singapore, Venezuela, Egypt, or Uzbekistan, now live under systems that uphold the principle of pluralism, that citizens have freedom of choice in matters of thought, religion, belief, and lifestyle. "Totalitarian" states are few and far between. The Chinese journalist Ren Zhongping's exaltation of Marxism—"Marxism is our guiding ideology on building our party and state, the guide to action in all our work . . . . Only by upholding and consolidating Marxism's guidance position will the entire party and the people of the entire country be able to always advance in the correct direction"—sounds increasingly archaic in the contemporary world.
We are much more comfortable with the rhetoric espoused by a Ugandan minister and a leading figure in his country's ruling National Resistance Movement, who said that the task now facing the state is to transform political life "where the culture of tolerance is paramount and change of guard is determined by the people . . . . Others who do not share in this view will eventually realize it is the wisest way to go . . . . To say 'no' to the president augurs well for the politics of this country. It shows that Ugandans have matured politically and do not want the idea of alagidde [he has ordered] . . . . It is obvious, it is a natural process . . . . "
The debate is no longer over whether citizens have a right to choose—but how many options should be made available to them.
Reflections
On September 11, fifteen hijackers crashed three passenger airplanes into symbols of American power. The greatest act of terror in U.S. history was soon attributed to archterrorist Osama bin Laden, who remained sheltered in Afghanistan by the radical Islamist regime of the Taliban. In the shantytowns of the West Bank and the impoverished urban centers of Pakistan, angry crowds celebrated the mayhem unleashed on the United States. Suicide bombers, fiery clerics exhorting the virtues of martyrdom, and theological schools inculcating an ideology of wrath are all now the prevailing media images of Islam. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's prophecy of a coming "clash of civilizations" seems suddenly prescient, as pundits and politicians loudly wonder whether Islam is compatible with modernity. Can an Islamic Middle East produce governments and populaces prepared to accept international norms of conduct? Can these states accommodate the necessary political reforms and foster representative institutions? Is the Middle East destined to retain its unenviable media status as a depository of despotic regimes and terrorist cells while democratic revolutions and accountable governance become increasingly the mainstay of world politics?
Western commentators have long identified Middle Eastern culture—specifically the pervasive influence of Islamic religious doctrine—as the main obstacle to democratization. No less an authority than Bernard Lewis, the American doyen of Middle East studies, has claimed that "Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy as the fundamentalists themselves would be first to say: they regard liberal democracy with contempt as a corrupt and corrupting form of government." For Lewis, and indeed an entire generation of Western scholars, Islam's fusion of divine revelation and state power produces a political culture that can neither accommodate pluralism nor tolerate dissent.
Iran's Muslim revolutionaries reinforced this view after they seized power in 1979. With his glowering visage and antediluvian edicts, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini embodied the rejection of the democratic hopes of all those Iranians who coalesced under his leadership to topple the monarchy, and the Islamic Republic he established menaced both its citizenry and its neighbors. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, pundits and policymakers touted fundamentalism—the Islamic "Green Peril"—as the principal threat to the stability and prosperity of the Middle East, and the much anticipated "new world order" was ruptured by religious and cultural fault lines.
However, throughout the Middle East, a new generation of Islamic thinkers and parties are transcending such trite slogans and are seeking to harmonize imaginatively Islam's injunctions with democracy's imperatives. For leaders such as Iran's Mohammad Khatami and thinkers such as Tunisia's Rached Ghannouchi, a pragmatic interpretation of the sacred texts and reliance on Islam's democratic ideals is the most stable path for establishing durable representative institutions. While bin Laden and the Taliban may dominate media images, an Islamic perestroika has unexpectedly sprung from the crumbling edifices of the various autocratic systems that persist across the Islamic world, manifesting itself through increasingly effective political movements that eschew the radicalism of their revolutionary co-religionists. Today, moderate Islamism—with its emphasis on democratic accountability and civil society—is on the upswing throughout the region.
Reportage
West Berlin in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, still felt like the island it had been in the sea of East German communism, sharing much of the spotless perfection of other West German cities. The Kurfärstendamm, its main shopping street, was a showcase of capitalism, a purposeful provocation to the regime in drab East Berlin, only a stone's throw away. But Romania's communist government had fallen in late 1989, allowing free travel to East Germany, and unlike West Germany, East Germany had no visa barriers against Eastern Europeans. Taking advantage of this new freedom, Romanians—among them, thousands of Romanian Gypsies—streamed toward the West by way of East Berlin. For a brief period in 1990, the Kurfärstedamm's orderly sidewalks were taken over by darkly colorful Gypsy families begging, sometimes aggressively, on every street corner. Though they were not the majority of Romanians who had come to Germany, it was these beggars who became the public face of Germany's "foreigners problem."
This remarkable confrontation between well-off West Germans and alien, impoverished Gypsies brought into sharp relief the immense economic disparities between East and West that would only worsen in the coming years (the Romanian government ultimately agreed to take back the visitors in exchange for monetary payments from Germany). At the same time, it foreshadowed what was already becoming Eastern Europe's major human rights problem—the plight of Europe's largest minority, the Gypsies, or Roma, as most now prefer to be called. The roots of this problem are ancient, dating almost to the first European arrival of the Roma from India, believed to have occurred perhaps as early as the twelfth century. According to the magisterial eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910), the Gypsies were "a wandering folk scattered through every European land, over the greater part of western Asia and Siberia; found also in Egypt and the northern coast of Africa, in America and even Australia." There was no correct estimate of their number outside Europe, and even in Europe official estimates were contradictory and unreliable. This remains unchanged, as does the type of popular prejudice the encyclopedia captured: "They have no ethical principles and they do not recognize the obligations of the Ten Commandments. There is extreme moral laxity in the relation of the two sexes . . . . At the same time, they are great cowards."
No people in Europe has been at once so persistently maligned and so excessively romanticized. Gypsies have simultaneously been despised as incorrigible criminals and admired as musicians, dancers, and free spirits, as in Bizet's Carmen or George Barrow's Romany Rye. In reality, as I found in a recent visit to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, Europe's estimated 8-10 million Roma are a historically oppressed minority who have become the biggest losers following the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, where they are mainly concentrated.
Knowledge
Largely unremarked by policymakers and the public, the events of September 11 have as seldom before shaken academia here and abroad. Immediately in the wake of the attack, American educators were startled when Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California called for a six-month moratorium on student visas. More than 500,000 foreign students are enrolled here, and any number of academic institutions, notably business schools, benefit financially. For the country as a whole, there is a broader, more lasting benefit. On returning from America, these soon-to-be scholars and scientists, health workers and public servants, managers and teachers become part of a global vanguard. Hence the uproar among U.S. educators. Senator Feinstein wisely backed down and called instead for a tightening of visa regulations. Within a week, President Bush did just that, issuing a directive to ensure that "if a person has applied for a student visa, they actually go to college or university." This allayed but did not dispel fears of a backlash that could cripple programs that, as Feinstein acknowledges, make "a great contribution to our institutions of higher learning."
At the same time, changes are occurring in higher learning overseas that merit increased political attention. Even before September 11, a worldwide movement to promote liberal arts education was gathering momentum. Colleges and universities in places as diverse as Belarus and Dubai, Estonia and Hong Kong, Hungary and Kazakhstan, South Korea and Kyrgyzstan, Poland and Russia, South Africa and Tajikistan, are introducing multi-disciplinary liberal education curricula and experimenting with new pedagogical styles that emphasize small classes, dialogue, and critical thinking. This movement offers both an opportunity and a challenge.
Dossier
Last June 15, the Czech Press Agency (CTK) briefly noted that Karel Vas [pronounced like the French word for "cow"—la vache], a former military prosecutor, had been sentenced to seven years in jail. The senate of the Prague City Court had found the 85-year-old man guilty of having forged evidence against Gen. Heliodor Päka, who had been selected as the prime target in the purges initiated inside the Czechoslovak officer corps in the immediate aftermath of the Communist takeover in February 1948. The sentence against Vas, mild in itself, has been regarded as symbolic atonement for past crimes committed during Communist rule. It has been well received in the Czech Republic, though voices of sympathy were heard in favor of the aged defendant, suffering from Parkinson's disease, who himself became a victim in the 1950s of the same deadly mechanism of justice he helped to lubricate. However, most commentaries agreed that an outrageous miscarriage of justice in the name of ideology, whether National Socialist or Communist, had to be punished, even if it had happened more than a half a century ago.
Hearing the verdict, Vas declared himself innocent; he and his counsel immediately dismissed the sentence as fabricated. Both repeatedly said that they would appeal. Deputy Premier Pavel Rychetsky, himself a lawyer by training, told the press that the sentence set a moral and political precedent in that the same legal standards as applied to Nazi prosecutors and judges could be applied to Communist crimes. Although more than 50 years have passed since General Päka's execution and despite the turbulent political changes in Central Europe, this is certainly not the last word about the Vas trial. It is, in a sense, a retrial of General Päka, an attempt to rectify historic wrongs, like the trials of octogenarian Nazi judges and prison guards, or Vichy administrators, accused of maintaining the appearance of legality in the Nazi empire.
Coda