One World, Many Peaces

Is the International Criminal Court Working?

Among major world bodies, new and old, none holds the place of the International Criminal Court (ICC), sometimes mistakenly called the World Court. Speaking in Uganda this past week, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon sang the ICC's praises, seemingly oblivious to the serious shortcomings its critics have been pointing out since its inception.

As of March 2010, 111 states are members of the Court, and a further 37 countries have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute. However, a number of states, including China, India, Russia and the United States, are critical of the court and have not joined. Clearly the ICC isn't without problems, but what of the solutions it offers?

As the ICC's website relates:

"In the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, tribunals like the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda were the result of consensus that impunity is unacceptable. However, because they were established to try crimes committed only within a specific time-frame and during a specific conflict, there was general agreement that an independent, permanent criminal court was needed. On 17 July 1998, the international community reached an historic milestone when 120 States adopted the Rome Statute, the legal basis for establishing the permanent International Criminal Court."

Article 5 of the Rome Statute grants the court jurisdiction over four groups of crimes, which it refers to as the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole”: the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. The countries that have not joined generally contend that doing so would impinge on their sovereignty as states, but also are among the most militaristic on the planet.

The statute defines each of these crimes except for aggression: it provides that the court will not exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression until such time as the states parties agree on a definition of the crime and set out the conditions under which it may be prosecuted. So far, the ICC has almost exclusively focused on crimes committed in Africa, almost as if they were never committed elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Ban Ki Moon had nothing but nice things to say: "Few would have believed then that this court would spring so vigorously into life, fully operational, investigating and prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity," he told the delegates to a conference, AFP news agency reports.

"In this new age of accountability, those who commit the worst of human crimes will be held responsible." Strangely, those countries who are responsible for other of the worst human crimes are not being held responsible, including states and their leader who have refused to become members.

As a current event creating the future, the International Criminal Court is at best a necessary evil, and at worst a world body which turns a blind eye to evil itself.

Major Change in Afghanistan Strategy Hardly Makes US News, Shift from War to Peacemaking

In major world news that has received very little attention within the US, Afghanistan President Karzai is preparing to pitch and execute a new peacemaking plan with the Taliban in his country. In an abrupt about face that comes in the wake of Yemen’s similar peacemaking plans with Al Qaeda, Karzai announced on BBC over the weekend that he is prepared to make disarmament deals with the Taliban. This just weeks after President Obama promised more troops for and military action in Afghanistan, to the great dismay of many citizens and commentators. Is this a split in policy?

The top NATO military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan, General McChrystal, seemed uneasy in his doublespeak about the shift in Afghan policy towards more peacemaking as it relates to the US troop buildup towards more warfare. In McChrystal’s own words, and keep in mind that he initiated the successful call for a troop surge:

As a soldier, my personal feeling is that there's been enough fighting. I believe that a political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome. And it's the right outcome. I think any Afghans can play a role if they focus on the future, and not the past.

He was responding to a question regarding Taliban in government in saying “any Afghans.” President Obama has not even mentioned the efforts President Karzai has made in recent days to gather support for his peacemaking plans at the 70-party international conference in London Thursday, undermining both of their authorities, to say nothing of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. The US Undersecretary of State went as far as to say the troop surge and reconciliation were complimentary, dumbfounding peace experts.

In stark contrast to General McCrystal, President Karzai seems resolute in his pursuance of peace, if unsure as to how his allies and current foes will react. He even went so far as to call for “peace at any price,” a doctrine that has proven dangerous to hold fast historically. “We trust them [the Taliban] because we are in a relationship together,” he added. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went silent on the matter, and even the BBC changed the title of its report to Karzai being “moot” about peace prospects a day after the video interview was released.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown championed the idea of reconciliation with Taliban, saying  the Afghan government can “bring over some people previously associated with the Taliban by the renunciation of violence, this would be of value to the peace process.” We would expect that such momentous changes, which if successful could bring home American soldiers and increase the lifespan of Afghanis considerably, would be heralded by domestic media. They have not been in the least.

American news channels as well as news distributors such as AP and Reuters have missed this major shift in policy on the part of the Afghan leadership, to the extent that it is hard to imagine that they did not purposefully ignore it, or were censored by the powers that be domestically. Instead, we have news about warlords being appointed, bombs going off and troops being rallied, making Iraq and Afghanistan wars indistinguishable insofar as news reporting about them is concerned. President Karzai’s new peacemaking approach to the Taliban would quicken the safe return of American soldiers and lead towards a better future for Afghanistan, but as far as US news is concerned it seems hardly a current event worth mentioning.

The End of American Democracy As We Know It, Ironically Thanks to 'Free Speech'

The saying "putting money where your mouth is" assumes that there is a distinction between the two. The US Supreme Court's ruling this afternoon that corporations and unions can limitlessly fund political campaigns overlooks this distinction, and in so doing puts an end to American democracy as we know and love or hate it. This is one more act of an interventionist court that, as we have previously reported, is imposing a court-run democracy on the country.

"Money talks," another saying goes, but money doesn’t have freedom of speech-- people do. Whether or not free speech is a right for natural persons only, as opposed to legal entities such as corporations and trade unions as well, the constitutionally blasphemous logic of the Supreme Court is the same. Funding political campaigns can be compared to funding terrorists in that neither has to do with the free speech.

Who benefits most from allowing corporations and trade union to spend limitlessly on political campaigns? The anser is simple: most of campaign money goes to advertizing, which means media companies like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.-owned Fox, to single out the most openly politically biased, are going to get their greatest windfalls and revenue streams, ever. This may be the biggest and most blatant act of political patronage in human history, no exagerration. 

The limitations were originally put in place by the Supreme Court in 1907, during the so-called Gilded Age of massive corporate conglomerates and tycoons. Then, and why not now is beyond us, it was held that corporate financial influence on the political process would not only disrupt it, but that politicians would consider corporations as their constituents rather than their voters. Once in office, it was assumed and still proves to be the case, elected officials would keep corporate, not citizen, interests at heart.

Has anything changed since the Gilded Age? Now it has, and to boot. Now, corporations and trade unions can once again replace dollars for votes as the basis of democracy. Now, “rule by the people” (in effect or not) has actually been replaced by “rule by the legal entity.” Sure, citizens will still cast votes, but they will do so based on information provided to them by the media platforms the donations of corporations and trade unions offer. And, once in power, elected officials will cater to the needs of legal entities over those of natural persons more so than they ever did in the Gilded Age because there are so many more concentrated interests to coordinate.

The end of American democracy as we know it, love it or hate it, is not something to be taken lightly. This is a clear Republican preemptive assault on the fulfillment of President Obama’s campaign promise of campaign reform with both eyes fixed on the midterm elections of 2010 in November. For that matter, John McCain promised as much and has already worked hard towards it. Mass protests have often been mounted against elected legislators, but rarely against appointed members of the judiciary, let alone the highest court of the land. Never has there been more reason or, better yet, getting every free-speech loving lawyer in the country to get the overruled ruling overruled once again.

The Supreme Court’s supremely contentious decision today is one more nail in the coffin of the American Republic as its founders and immigrants to it envisioned, now the cradle of a dictatorial empire.

New Awards from Google, "Breaking Borders," Honors Web Projects' Freedom of Expression, Shows PR Strategy in Place Before China Row

 

Just before Google went public in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin circulated a letter to users and stakeholders highlighting their company's motto: "Don't be evil." Whatever it meant, two years later the company shocked users and stakeholders when it designed a special version of its software containing censorship parameters for use in China. Flip flopping once again, this week Google oddly became the champion of freedom of expression and sticking it to the man once again when it threatened to pull out of China after censorial hacker attacks. But a week earlier, Google announced the launch of the Breaking Borders Awards to honor web projects displaying courage in support of freedom of expression, making it difficult to hold that the China row was an unexpected isolated event.

 

"As part of Google's mission to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we want to commend online actors that are making the public aware of some of the social and political challenges we continue to face today," Google and its partners, Global Voices and Thompson Reuters, say on the website giving information about the Awards and how to nominate web projects.  The announcement came from Rachel Whetstone, Vice President Global Communications and Public Affairs, first on Google's Public Policy blog (perhaps confusing it with 'public relations'?), then on the company's official blog. The release date was January 6, and the China row occurred days later, implying that Google was already trying to change its image back to the "good guy" of the internet. Meanwhile, China has defended its position under pretenses of just requiring all companies to obey the law.

 

This appears to be Google's last gasp as the Robin Hood of internet and media companies. It has become a monolithic monstrosity with several of its services suffering, and Awards and standoffs with governments are flashy but futile arrows aimed at distracting customers-supporters from this fact. The litigation surrounding its copyright violations of book publishers is one issue it may be trying to smokescreen. In any case, by 2013, about 840 million Chinese will be surfing the Web at least once a month, predicts research firm eMarketer Inc., compared to between 330 million and 400 million Chinese who regularly use the internet now. Google cannot meet its self-stated goal of making the world's information universally accessible if China's population, about a fifth of the world's, does not have access to it. Moreover, shareholders focused on quarterly numbers will quickly find a company that will tap the market if Google refuses to for whatever reason. Google is without a doubt a current event creating the future, but it should think a bit more of its own.

Top US Diplomat Stresses Economic and Social Development, and International Dialogue, for 2010

In a landmark speech yesterday, top US diplomat Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State stressed the importance of economic and social development globally as the surest way to end terrorism and ensure the cooperation of states in achieving common goals. Speaking at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Clinton called development a "strategic, economic and moral imperative" for the US, bold terms seldom heard with such vigor since John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps almost a half century ago. Then, today, her renewed Middle East diplomatic efforts were announced, having told reporters that  "we're starting this new year with that level of commitment and we're going to follow through and hopefully we can see this as a positive year in this long process."

 

Unfortunately for Clinton and US foreign affairs generally, President Obama is stealing nearly all of their thunder, inadvertently (or purposefully?) belittling their initiatives almost to the point of ineffectiveness, and certainly to the point of being sidestepped in the media. More coordination and cooperation between the two former rivals would benefit the US and the world. Yet, despite the ongoing financial and economic crises, the U.S. aid budget increased nine percent in 2010 to over fifty billion dollars. However, what we view as the world's most pressing short-term and long-term problem, that one billion people worldwide are hungry, was not directly addressed by Clinton in her aid speech. She did have the following to say: "We cannot be assured" of promoting a safer world "when one-third of humankind live in conditions that offer them little chance of building better lives for themselves or their children."

 

On the Middle East diplomatic front, the rhetoric was even more diluted and the plans even more convoluted. What became clear is that in the coming weeks, another flurry of meetings will take place in Washington and European capitals based on a series of letters of intent on the parts of Palestinians and Israelis. But the fundamental point of contention, whether the pre-1967 war borders or Israel's occupation of their insides since will be the basis for territorial peace agreements, has not been resolved. Meanwile the contested West Bank continues to be settled by Israeli extremists. All in all, throwing more money at economic and social development globally without detailing how they will solve the hunger and other pressing problems, and encouraging dialogue when it will apparently only be used express disagreement are hopeful but not audacious current events creating a more peaceful 2010. 

Hot Off the Press-- 2009: The Year in Review from One World, Many Peaces with Antony Adolf

 

 

What was 2009 all about — or was but you didn’t hear about it? How will 2010 and beyond take shape? 2009: The Year in Review is One World, Many Peaces’ answer. Antony Adolf, author of Peace: A World History, shares the stories he covered throughout the year as “Current Events Creating the Future” — Ours.

Includes three new essays by Antony Adolf published together for the first time:

•Buyers and Buy-Nots: The New Economics of Poverty and Affluence
•Post-Islamophobia: How Cultural Integration Can Prevent Terrorism and Build Peace
•A Missile Shield by Any Other Name: Is Obama's Global Military Strategy Taking Shape in Eastern Europe?

One World, Many Peaces: The Blog and Podcast will start anew on January 5. Thank you for a great year and have a safe and happy New Year!

 

Beware the Rise of Regionalism: The Decade in Review, Part Two

The past ten years have seen a staggering rise in what is now being called, rather benignly, regionalism: groups of geographically proximate countries that unite in an organization or agreement to pursue common goals. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? It is in one way, but in another regionalism is exactly what George Orwell warns us of in 1984. He turned out to be quite accurate in his depiction of totalitarian communism, how feasible is it for his nightmare to come true in our waking dreams?

 

 
Much more so than not, I would argue. Just weeks ago Asian nations agreed to extend the existing ASEAN organization (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) of ten nations into a much larger powerhouse including China. They are self-consciously taking as their model the European Union (EU) which has been operating on ever larger scales for decades. What these two organizations have in common is that their most basic goals are economic, with foreign policy and internal governance important too, but secondary. Of course, security trumps all at least in name.

 

 

In South America, the Organization of American States (OAS) of 35 chartered member-states has as its slogan "democracy for peace, security and development," more than hinting at its origins as a U.S.-instigated group aimed at stemming communist influence in the region during the Cold War. I guess the OAS won, except for Venezuela. Two regional organizations that have not fared so well in being ineffective are the African Union (AU) and the Arab League. The AU, unlike the EU and ASEAN, set out to be a political organization first and an economic and security one second. It hasn't worked. The Arab League's sole purpose was to destroy Israel, and that hasn’t worked either.

 

The only comparable arrangement in North America is the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, which does form the economic kernel that has lead to success in other cases of regionalism. So far, all these organizations (except the Arab League at first) have been too preoccupied with internal squabbles to think of actively targeting their rivals. As current events, these regional bodies which have taken an ever larger part of the world stage may in the future take it over, and run alongside rather than against the multipolar paradigm we encountered last Thursday.

 

This decade's closing in three short weeks gives occaision to reflect upon it as well that which is about to open. In honor of this arbitrariness, One World, Many Peaces will run a four-part weekly series on Thursdays, "The Decade in Review," to offer provocative closing and opening. thoughts

Baby Steps Towards a Multipolar World: The Decade in Review, Part One

This decade's closing in three short weeks gives occaision to reflect upon it as well that which is about to open. In honor of this arbitrariness, One World, Many Peaces will run a four-part weekly series on Thursdays, "The Decade in Review," to offer provocative closing and opening thoughts.

Among the few certainties of 2000-2009 is, as last month's commemorative events of 1989 make clear, that the world is finally yet still slowly shifting away from the Cold War/ Superpower paradigm that was artificially sustained by the Bush regime under the banner of the "New World Order."

The U.S. still has some 800 bases and 1 million troops around the world, but these may be more to protect what's left of the American Empire than feasibly extending it further, as compellingly argued by Chalmers Johnson in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. So where are we heading?
 

Actually, the directions the tides of history are pushing us towards are not without precedent. From an imperial oligarchy in the 19th century, to a bipolarity in the 20th, to an imagined monopoly in the very early 21st, the rest of our century is likely to take up a form that has survived the lat two.

Not NATO, the militarism of which purportedly precludes it (or should) from playing a major role in non-military world affairs. Nor the U.N., which has been beaten into impotence by the U.S., the Security Council and its own structural flaws, namely a debilitating dependence on the sovereignty and dues of its members coupled with the lack of enforceable international law.

Rather, as I show in Peace: A World History and have proposed several times here, the Non-alligned Movement offers the best (and perhaps only workable) model for how states with different political, religious, cultural and other systems can build on common interests to achieve shared objectives.
 

 

The term "multipolarity" (as in Dilip Hiro's forthcoming After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World) has sometimes been used to describe the post-Cold War world, meaning that power is sufficiently dispersed around the globe to have superseeded the bipolarity of the previous period. I would argue that the symbolic gestures which have confirmed the underlying actualities were only put on global display when President Obama visited China and hosted the Indian premier just days ago.

The import of such signs is that they bear meanings which their bearers can only partially control. So in denying  what top experts predicted soon after the Cold War (unquestioned and unending American dominance), and confirming what their opponents had been saying all along (that American dominance is already imploding), a new paradigm based on current events is shaping the future. Call it multipolarity, "One World, Many Peaces," or just a world in which we have to learn to work with each other as we are before becoming something else together.

NATO is 'A Corpse Decomposing' Says General, Should it be Revived?

Halloween seems to be coming early to the largest and most powerful military alliance in existence anywhere today, if not ever. The former head of Canada's armed forces, a longtime member of NATO command whose soldiers are still at the front line in Afghanistan, characterizes the organization as "a corpse decomposing and somebody's going to have to perform a Frankenstein-like life-giving act by breathing some lifesaving air through those rotten lips into those putrescent lungs or the alliance will be done." This is also a clear indication of more fundamental and yet unaddressed issues ab

General Rick Hillier criticizes NATO in no uncertain terms in his new book A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, out next week. He goes on write that, with its ailing mission in Afghanistan, "NATO had started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance. Sadly, years later, the situation remains unchanged." However, he does not seem to directly address  the fact that NATO came into existence to defend capitalist countries against communist ones during the Cold War, and those conditions no longer exist. Instead, NATO is "dominated by jealousies and small, vicious political battles" and a "lack of cohesion, clarity and professionalism," according to General Hillier.

Ironically, NATO (for North Atlantic Treaty Organization)-- an exclusively military alliance-- has carried out more peacekeeping than military missions since the end of the Cold War. NATO's arch nemesis, the Warsaw Pact Organization (WPO), was created by the Soviet Union soon after NATO as a counterbalance and was disbanded soon after the communist bloc collapse in 1989. Again ironically, NATO and the WPO never fought a direct conflict with each other, and their member forces actually served as peacekeepers together. Yet NATO has persisted as if the Cold War was still in effect, without ever formally redefining itself or its purpose, and with as or more mixed results. The question General Hillier raises is: Should NATO be revived?

The U.N. has no permanent peacekeeping or other forces with which to enforce its conventions and treaties. NATO is often criticized by scholars and activists alike for reporting to no one except itself, meaning the military heads of its 28 member states, who are often at odds in terms of troop commitments, funding, purposes and so on. I propose that NATO be put under U.N. command, though I cannot say I am the first to do so. Noting that U.N. conventions and treaties are binding only insofar as members want them to be because of sovereignty issues, transferring NATO to the U.N. would bolster our only world government in ways that current events require and the future merits.

The Return of U.S. Big Stick and Dollar Diplomacy with Olive Branch to Sudan

The "comprehensive strategy to confront the serious and urgent situation in Sudan" President Obama outlined yesterday was far from anything new in American diplomatic affairs, which is not to say ineffective. Actually, the shift in policy marks a sharp return to diplomatic tactics the U.S. perfected during its expansionist phase in the 19th and early 20th centuries: 'big stick' and 'dollar' diplomacy.  Here is how the two policies worked then and are intended to now.

Dollar diplomacy works like dangling a carrot on a stick in front of a donkey, providing a motivation to move in any direction the dangler sees fit. The U.S. did this with Caribbean and South American nations throughout the 19th century to great effect, and is generally associated with Theodore Roosevelt, who also won a Nobel Peace Prize. The Sudan plan outlined by Obama  will hold out "incentives" for Khartoum if it improves its record on human rights and the advancement of peace. Dollar diplomacy incentives generally include generous aid packages and industrial development. Sudanese President Ghazi Salahadin calls this a policy of "engagement not isolation," euphemisms about which he would do well to seek critical historical scrutiny.

Big stick diplomacy generally tends to be used after dollar diplomacy fails, and its effectiveness lies in a threat and/or its actualization: do what we tell you to, or we'll beat you with our bigger stick. The U.S. has done this numerous times, most recently in Iraq under the pretext of eliminating weapons of mass destruction that were never found. While Obama did not explicitly mention the big stick diplomatic tactic, it is implied in affirmation that "Our conscience and our interests in peace and security call upon the United States and the international community to act with a sense of urgency and purpose." These words are remarkably similar to those uttered by George W. Bush and his father before attacking Iraq.

The original U.S. big stick and dollar diplomacies were put into effect because American could not, at the time, dictate terms to other countries because the global empires of the British, French and Spanish were still too strong. In our stage of globalization, the same holds true for different reasons. This is why Alex de Waal, Sudan expert at the Social Science Research Council, rightly states that "It is not as if the US can dictate the terms, let alone bring along Russia, China, and the Arab world." As current events,  President Salahadin is right to think these diplomatic moves are "new" in terms of U.S.-Sudan relations, but they are far from it as historical forces that have shaped the future in which we live.