Globalaffairs

Issue 5/October-November 2007
By I.Manez

It’s 18.15 pm October the 1st, the National Day of the People’s Republic of China. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coming from the adjacent provinces of Beijing gather at Tiananmen Square waiting patiently for the lowering of the Chinese flag. This official ceremony closes off the most important day for Chinese people. Among the crowd, an elderly Chinese man, dark-skinned because of the work in the fields, attracts the attention of the crowd when he takes off his jacket, showing a complaint in Chinese characters.

I don’t know the name of this man, looking quite and peaceful, but I do know what the Chinese characters hand-drawn on his jacket mean. They denounce the fact that police had evicted him from his traditional home in order to allow The Great China/Dragon build one more road. This was a real demonstration in one of the cities, Beijing, and one of the places, Tiananmen, the most controlled place by Chinese authorities.

The man dressed in white is aware of it. His words remain silent, but the awareness of the consequences of his peaceful demonstration could be seen doubtfully at a glance.

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Issue 5/ October - November 2007
By Lazaro Rosa

Many things have been said about the current globalization process with all its consequences and counter-productive effects for the so called Third World countries, but from my own perspective nowadays those countries have fallen over the asymmetrical cliff and inhospitable ravines that have forced them to move to the subhuman Forth World.

However, it is true that in the core of the emerging nations there is a group of avant-garde states represented by Russia, China, India, Turkey and Brazil that have a continuous, stable and ascendant growth in economy (not in society because still in China, Russia and India there is a considerable poverty level). We cannot talk about Third World because in practice, in recent decades, the gap between poor and rich-industrialized nations (the central core of technological advance) has widened until the point that due to differences they seem two separated planets.

The called globalization is the increase in disparity between the players of current international relations, especially when taking decision that can promote changes in the world panorama. This process is due to fast development of high technologies in the communications area that allow a social communicator from his office in Bilbao to be continuously connected with correspondents from the far-off island of Oriental Timor, this is just an example.

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Issue 4/ August-September 2007
By Roger Casas

Nearly six years have passed since the attacks against the Twin Towers in New York and it is clearly seen a declared crusader against Islamic fundamentalism by the USA president, George Bush and his European minions. Usually it is useful as a pretext for any state to justify actions justified with difficulty in the name of “the war against terror”. Some examples are the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, the Indonesian military intervention in Aceh region in May 2003, or the recent attack to the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not an exception in this leaning. Uses and abuses that these states seem to be doing from the called “war against terrorism” have generally passed unnoticed out of the country. Maybe, because it is just about “domestic matters” as Beijing constantly said. It is about the private crusader form the Chinese authorities against the Islamic extremism centred in the North Western region of Xinjiang, the so-called “Eastern Turkistan” o “Chinese Turkistan”. It is one of the five autonomous Regions in the country, and inhabited by 14 different ethnic groups at least. The most numerous is the one formed by the Uyghur people (around 42% of the population in the region) in spite of the massive arrive of Han immigrants coming from the eastern regions of the country.

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Issue 3/ June-July 2007
By Eva Díez Ajenjo

Constructivism helps to grasp a deeper understanding of the way that Huntington builds his thesis. Constructivists hold that normative or ideational structures are just as important as material conditions in order to shape the behaviour of social and political actors. Constructivism emphasizes the particularities of culture, identity, and interest and their powerful influence on social and political action. According to Christian Reus-Smit ‘constructivists argue that material resources only acquire meaning for human action through the structure of shared knowledge in which they are embedded’ (Burchill 2001: 217). Moreover, they focus on the importance of normative and ideational structures because these are thought to shape the social identities of political actors. Furthermore, in order to explain interest formation, constructivists focus on the social identities of individuals or states.

In line with constructivist assumptions Mozaffari argues that ‘world order is a human phenomenon. Like other human phenomena, it is a social construction’ (2002: 37). He proposes in order to understand the world order to go beyond its description and to look to some deep structures in what the phenomenon is rooted. ‘The remarking of the world order’ stated by Huntington has its roots in the sharp cultural and religious divisions between civilization thus conflict arise in the fault lines between civilizations. Throughout his thesis he devises a dangerous and insecure world where the underlying assumption is the fear to what is different. This world is reified in the lexicon used such as Islam’s bloody borders, hate, fear, foes, dominance and decline.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Eva Díez Ajenjo

The growing interest in policies focus on religions, identities, and cultures is evidenced by the large amount of criticisms to the Huntington’s thesis the clash of civilizations. According to Huntington the international system and the future conflict in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War will be determined and caused by cleavages between and among civilizations. The author identifies civilizations with religion, culture, language, values, history, and customs (Huntington 2002) however; the central defining characteristic of civilization is religion.

Huntington (2002) suggests that shifts in power among civilizations are taking place due to a revival and assertiveness of non-Western societies and rejection of Western culture. Furthermore an erosion of Western culture follows the reassertion of the identities of non-Western states which is boosted by the consequences of modernization throughout the world.

Huntington is especially concerned about the global revival of religion ‘la revanche de Dieu’ (2002: 95) in particular Islam. He (2002: 217) depicts Islam as a ‘source of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and, in Europe, unwanted migrants’ and he asserts that ‘European governments and public have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the US has taken against its Muslims opponents’. But in this point the theory of Huntington is flawed because as the last international events have showed it has been a massive opposition to Iraq war from nearly every European country. This opposition has been illustrated in huge demonstrations against the war in countries such as Spain and the UK.

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Issue 2/ April-May 2007
By Josep Baques Quesada

The idea that a preventive war can be a fair war is present at least since the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius (17th century) proposed rules of play that make some international relations morally acceptable which in facto were quite deteriorated. In this sense, the legitimate character of preventive war is neither a crazy invention of a current political leader according to a temporary interest; nor a bad excuse of the strongest to frighten the weakest. On the contrary, it makes sense in principles because it can be seen as a sensible derivate of the most basic principles of Natural Law applied to International Relations; specifically in regard to self-defence criterion.

Each time that one of the fathers of the fair war theory tackles this thorny subject he does it with several and strict requirements of preventive war. The analysis of such requirements is the subject of the present article.

Despite author’s nuances of meaning, fair war theorists point that this case can be implemented just in case of urgency. Preventive war can be fair but it will rarely be. In other words, this mechanism is exceptional and should not be a usual recipe for resolving international conflicts. We can not rule it out but we can not use it very often.

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Issue 1/February-March 2007
By Carolina Garcia

Seven years ago, in September 2000 the Millennium Declaration was signed in the UN headquarter in New York that set the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This Declaration was a challenge for several reasons: it was approved by a large consensus within the international community; it was signed by 189 heads of State and Government and subsequently signed by two more governments. For the first time an international document states that the fight against poverty is not exclusive to UN but it has to involve all countries. Furthermore this document fixed a deadline for goals execution: 2015.

The Millennium Declaration is nothing new because it is mainly a compendium of several international agreements regarding development signed in the 90’s. The true advance of this Declaration is that makes the fight against poverty a priority for all states, besides for the first time it fixes a global agenda for development. The eight Millennium Goals agreed in the UN headquarter have to be accomplished in 2015. So as to quantify this task clear aims and deadlines for each goal were arranged; these two factors assess the goals implementation degree each year.

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Issue 1/February-March 2007
By Lucia Ferreiro Prado

The September 11th terrorist attacks had a transcendental impact on the world policy of the new millennium. The terrorist attack of Al Qaeda has taken a 180 turn in world policy. The change has been as important as it was the bipolar system after the Second World War. We are not at “The End of History” as predicted by Francis Fukuyama in the 90’s. Each historical period has difficulties and conflicts. The fall of Communism provoked an excessive collective optimism for years when the false illusion of a “happy world” was forged.

However, reality has been different. International policy understood as a bipolar system did not allow seeing other potential conflicts. Nowadays it could say that the stress on the war against terrorism distracts from other questions that could be important in the near future. For instance, the climate change or the scare energy resources, which are requested by Western countries as well as developing countries such as China and India.

In short, the globalization has created a complex, interconnected and interdependent world. Contemporary terrorism is not indifferent to these changes.

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Issue 1/February-March 2007
By Dimce Bukreski

The process of globalisation has brought new very powerful players in the global political arena which have distorted the constellation of power and created problems which require higher degree of coordination, cooperation and regulation beyond the nation-state.

UN and the other intergovernmental organisations such as IMF, WB and WTO are constituted and structured in such a way to support interest of powerful countries and TNCs, respectively. For instance, the reservation of permanent membership and veto power in the Security Council of the United Nations to five state and quota-based votes in the IMF and World Bank, where one-quarter of the member states control three-quarters of the votes, is clear example of undemocratic constitution of the world order (Scholte J. in Baylis & Smith 2001 p28). In such unfairly and unaccountably constituted international order, where developing countries have too little voice and are too unrepresented to impose any change, it is impossible to achieve democracy solely through state.

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Issue 1/February-March 2007
By Eva Díez Ajenjo

International Relations approaches regarding a natural civilizational conflict between Islam and the West are extremely in vogue; especially the one preached by Samuel Huntington exposed in his controversial work the clash of civilizations. He constructs conflictive approaches regarding cultures, religions, and identities thus leading to apparently inexistent conflicts between societies. According to the author religious world views are the principal cause of international conflicts among civilizations.

Moreover, the core argument of the book refers to the fact that differences among peoples are not ideological, political or economic; they are cultural because identities are lifted from the state level to the broader cultural entity of civilizations. Thus, as far as the main suggestion stated in the book is concerned refers to the fact that world politics should take into account civilizational differences in their foreign affairs. Huntington’s book has provoked a large amount of criticisms and the one highlighted in the article is the one stated by Senghaas. According to Senghaas, the only real cultural struggle taking place in world affairs comes against the modernity from the West and it mainly happens within civilizations instead of among them.

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