Forward To The Future In Quest Of Global Security

By Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN (IDN) - Europeans are finding it hard to keep their heads above water as tidal waves of an overwhelming desire for participation in governance pound at the Arab shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The challenge thrown down by Arab uprisings is however only one front in the uphill battle for achieving "security for the global world".

Is there a European answer to that challenge? Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to find that out, and his 'New Policy Forum' gathered together in Munich a cross-section of some fifty knowledgeable people from around Europe and beyond.

The subject of the two-day deliberations in March was chosen several months earlier, "but it assumed particular urgency, as though taken direct from the front pages of today's newspapers," as Gorbachev put it on March 23, four days after the Paris Libya conference, which decreed "all necessary measures, including military" to enforce a UN resolution authorising a no-fly zone over the North African state with the declared aim of protecting civilians.

"The use of force is always a symptom of policy failure; this must be regarded as axiomatic. Conclusion should be drawn from this both by policy-makers and by those who seek to provide the intellectual underpinning for international politics," argued Gorbachev true to himself and the policy of perestroika that ushered in a paradigm shift in a world plagued by ideological war.

The gathering he addressed comprised of some eminent policy-makers of yesteryears who continue to provide more than "intellectual underpinning" to governments of former colonial powers, hiding behind the label of the UN Security Council to further their post-colonial goals, not seldom under the garb of promoting and protecting democracy, which as former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine rightly pointed out, is "not instant coffee".

Gorbachev, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, had to pay a high price for abandoning the entrenched Soviet hegemonial attitudes and actions in terms of being catapulted out of power and had to reconcile himself with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But his policies had a positive impact on the "common European house" he passionately campaigned for: several rooms began to communicate with each other intensively in the wake of the Berlin Wall tumbling down and two German states reunifying.

"International politics is not keeping pace with the rapidly changing world -- and that refers both to those who make policies and the intellectuals," Gorbachev told conference participants in Munich.

'WAITING FOR THE STORM'

"It is increasingly evident that the old concept of security, based on defending the country's territory and protecting the inviolability of its borders and its national interests, has become too narrow. In fact, it condemns us to a purely reactive approach, to 'waiting for the storm'," he added.

"If we want to avoid the storm, two new factors affecting security today must be fully understood," he explained to some of the die-hards among participants in a famous Munich hotel, not far from the building where France, Britain, and Italy signed the notorious agreement with Nazi Germany permitting Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland without Czechoslovakia attending those talks.

Former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Milon Zeman, was however a participant in the New Policy Forum's conference convened by Gorbachev's New Policy Forum together with the Foreign Affairs Association in Munich.

The word 'appeasement' was not heard. But one or the other present-day representative from the three signatories to the Munich Treaty perhaps had that at the back of his mind when fervently arguing for protecting civilians in Benghazi by firing missiles on Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi's forces.

Several other participants agreed with Gorbachev that the "international community" -- a synonym for the Western powers -- did not exercise its influence on Gaddafi to avoid getting things where they are today.

"The events there (in Libya) started not a few days but several weeks ago. Yet what was the response of the regional organization that according to the United Nations Charter must be the first to react, the Arab League? Did it try to influence Gaddafi's behaviour? And if the regional level faltered, then the UN itself should have acted much earlier to address the problem," argued Gorbachev.

"Perhaps the Security Council should have appointed a special envoy to be on site and to convey to the authorities its demands and monitor compliance with them. Perhaps some other way forward could (have) be(en) devised. Whatever the case may be, the Council should have addressed the different options instead of just watching from the sidelines," he added.

Analysing the overall situation in the region, the Nobel Peace Laureate hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that "Western democracies felt rather comfortable dealing with authoritarian regimes and, under the guise of fighting extremism and terrorism, sold weapons and befriended dictators and authoritarian rulers."

PUZZLING

A question many in Germany and elsewhere in Europe are asking is: Why French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, known for their close economic bonds with Gaddafi, did not fly to Tripoli and Benghazi to seriously negotiate a peaceful solution to prevent a crisis situation that has emerged meanwhile?

Equally puzzling is why the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon -- who in the meantime has come round to the view that the way out of the Libyan quagmire has to be a political solution – also did not care to fly to Tripoli to convince Gaddafi to discard his adamant attitude.

Back in 1998, Ban's predecessor Kofi Annan travelled to Baghdad in an effort to resolve the weapons-inspection standoff, and postpone the U.S.-led bombings of Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

The critical role of the United Nations and the global civil society in ensuring 'Security for the Global World' was emphasized by Roberto Savio, founder and chair of trustees of the Rome-based Inter Press Service news agency, and a member of New Policy Forum's academic advisory council.

Savio, also a senior advisor to Berlin-based Global Cooperation Council, stressed the need for giving voice to the voiceless by involving the global civil society in decisions on war and peace. Besides, "security" for the global world should be defined as "human security" and not as "military security".

Alexander Bessmertnykh, former Soviet foreign minister, pleaded for "civil disorders" -- similar to non-violent civil disobedience practised on a large scale by Mahatma Gandhi during India's independence struggle -- as a means to assert the voice of the global civil society.

Europe could indeed play a significant role in supporting moves to upgrade the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) into an Economic and Social Security Council on par with the Security Council in which the five permanent (P5) members -- Britain, France, USA, Russia and China -- have the final say by virtue of their veto rights.

ECOSOC is in fact the UN body from which much of the UN's human rights standards have emanated. However, human rights are also forming an ever-increasing aspect of Security Council deliberations on the maintenance of international peace and security.

"Recent humanitarian interventions demonstrate that the Security Council has a mandate to act in the face of massive human rights violations, and such interventions have been justified on the basis that such violations constitute a threat to international peace and security," says the British author Claire Breen in a paper published in the Journal of Conflict and Security Law.

Referring to this particular aspect, a representative of one of the western P5 member states said at the Munich conference that the UN Security Council was justified in approving military action against Gaddafi forces in Libya. "We have learnt from Bosnia."

He was referring to the Bosnian war -- the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II (1939-45) -- in former Yugoslavia from April 1992 to December 1995), which ended with the internal partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, deployment of NATO-led troops, massive civilian casualties for the Bosnian Muslims, at least 100,000 people killed and over two million displaced.

And yet, said one conference participant, "it is necessary to change mind-sets, de-militarise thinking at top political and policy-making levels, which would imply that precious resources required for socio-economic development in Europe too are not spent on producing tools of destruction, and that arms producers halt all exports to conflict regions."

The world was looking forward to a "peace divided" when the ideological war ended some twenty years ago. "Unfortunately the expected peace dividend has been squandered because Western policy-makers and the intellectual elite influencing international relations refuse to look ahead and instead prefer to look back to the future for buttressing their continued great power ambitions," said another participant echoing one of Gorbachev's insightful interventions.

One of the intellectual forces behind Gorbachev's transformation of Soviet foreign policy was Andrei Grachev. From the failed putsch in August 1991 until it was all over in December, he served as Gorbachev's press spokesman and confidant.

"The current international order has become unhinged and unstable," he says. "Supranational political and economic institutions are ridden with conflict and disagreement between their members. The hoped-for co-operation between states and the new world order at the end of the Cold War has failed to transpire. Rather, international affairs are now characterised by a world disorder as recent events exacerbate fundamental differences of opinion across the globe."

IDN-InDepthNews 20.04.2011