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The World Today
April 1999
Tocqueville questioned America’s ability to conduct a successful foreign policy because of the tendency of a democracy to ‘obey its feelings rather than its calculations and to abandon a long matured plan to satisfy a momentary passion.’ Have the Americans and Europeans developed such a passion for bananas?
At first glance the dispute seems comic, and makes one wonder if the world has not been hit by a banana bug on the eve of the millennium. A world trade war has started about a fruit that neither of the two trading blocs produces — accounting for only $525 million of trade while total world trade is estimated at $400 billion annually.
Brigitte Granville is Head of the International Economics Programme at Chatham House.
The names Bosnia and now Kosovo have become part of the everyday international lexicon.
Is Montenegro about to join those parts of the former Yugoslavia infamous for violence and suffering?
With the first round of diplomatic brinkmanship over Kosovo ending in fudge, there is little certainty that subsequent negotiations will settle the region’s many problems. President Slobodan Milosevic may yet be able use the time bought in February at Rambouillet to window-dress acceptance of NATO-led or other military deployment in Kosovo. Should he refuse and risk NATO bombing, he may calculate that this would strengthen him within Serbia and the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).
Elizabeth Roberts is an independent analyst of Balkan affairs.
Has the snatching of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan allowed Turkey to achieve victory over its ‘troublesome’ Kurdish people? Or might the protest triggered by the arrest and impending trial provide a new focus which could be more uncomfortable for Turkey than attacks by Öcalan’s guerrilla fighters?
David McDowall is the author of ’A Modern History of the Kurds‘ (IB Tauris, 1997) and ’The Kurds‘ (Minority Rights Group International, 1996).
Iranian voters have again chosen change rather than clerical conservation. In elections for city and village councils the majority of successful candidates are moderates. It is a process which aims to create a new clan of elected officials responsive to the people’s views.
At the end of February, Iran went to the polls for the second time since President Mohammed Khatami was swept to power in May 1997 by an unprecedented majority clamouring for change. Of course, the expectations of an electorate in which the majority no longer remembers the Islamic revolution twenty years ago would be beyond any politician to satisfy. He also suffers from limited powers and on-going faction-fighting in Tehran.
Yet there have been massive changes in how Iran’s complex form of religious government views itself and its responsibilities towards Iranians. The real question has been whether these changes have been sufficient to contain popular impatience or whether Mr Khatami has so failed to meet aspirations that Iranians have begun to turn away in despair.
George Joffé is Deputy Director of Chatham House. He was in Iran during the election campaign.
The strategic coordinates that guided NATO through forty troubled years to ultimate success have been all but relegated to the archives of history. But at fifty the alliance is still the centrepiece of international security, indispensable for the Europeans, while it continues to secure the role of the US as a European power. This is in the interest of both the European NATO countries and Washington.
For the foreseeable future, NATO will remain a regional alliance, but its members, whether they like it or not, have global interests. It is bound, therefore, to look at horizons that in the past could safely be left undefined, part of the wider Cold War theatre.
Professor Michael Stürmer of the Institute of History at Friedrich Alexander-University, Erlangen, writes for Die Welt.
The NATO 50th Anniversary Summit will produce a new strategic concept for the alliance. This is meant to be a mission statement, to guide alliance authorities in their planning. It may well not address the key question — what is NATO for?
Prosperous western europe is under no significant military threat but it is faced with certain economic and social problems. In Eastern and Central Europe those same sorts of difficulties range from substantial, but being brought under control, to dire and likely to wreck entire states — including Russia. The list of worries includes organised crime, migration, drugs, and, in the case of Russia, concern over the safety of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
William Hopkinson is Head of the International Security Programme at Chatham House.
The convention to ban the use of landmines, which came into force in March, attracted considerable international attention, one hundred and thirty-two countries have now signed. Campaigners are now turning their attention to the big killer: millions of light weapons used to fuel conflict and crime.
The devastation caused by the proliferation and mis-use of small arms has never been more apparent. Whether in conflict in Angola, the Congo or Sierra Leone, hostage-taking in the Yemen or deadlock over decommissioning in Northern Ireland, small arms have a deadly impact.
Paul Eavis is Director of Saferworld, an independent foreign affairs think-tank working to identify, develop and publicise more effective approaches to tackling and preventing armed conflict.
After President Suharto’s resignation in May 1998 there were encouraging signs that the new government would take measures to improve Indonesia’s poor human rights situation. Many initiatives have since been launched, but so far they have failed to make a significant impact on the lives of ordinary people. And, while permanent, positive change could be on the cards in East Timor, in this and other troubled areas such as Aceh and Irian Jaya, there has actually been a recent increase in human rights violations.
Lucia Withers is Amnesty International’s campaigner on Indonesia and East Timor.
Almost two years after the election of the Labour government — and perhaps half way through its term — a pattern of far reaching change can be seen. Governments, diplomats and businesses dealing with London will find themselves facing a quasi-federal state. The new constitutional settlement will introduce a new order in parliament, the civil service and the law.
Professor Robert Hazell is Director of the Constitution Unit in the School of Public Policy at University College, London. This article draws on his book, Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years (London: Oxford University Press, 1999).