Diplomacy & Crisis News

There are few regions that share the same mix of familiar cultures, language, food and media like Spain and Latin America and separately so, the Middle East. While regions that share their heritage in the Anglo-sphere often dominate world culture and politics, the combined efforts and collective policy approaches of Spain and Latin America as well as the Middle East influence their neighbours, cousins and allies. Policy approaches, like those in tackling Covid or addressing larger international issues often come with a combined response. In this manner, groups of smaller nations can push for their own collective interests, even against larger and influential powers.

The ability to handle international topics to the benefit of their own regions may come from how countries in these regions had to respond to influence from abroad. A very recent example of Middle Eastern countries positioning themselves against regional and international foreign influence has come about this week with the peace agreement with the UAE and Israel, likely soon to be followed by other countries in the region. Latin America has created organised mechanisms like the OAS as well as MERCOSUR to name a few, in order to find a place for their region and neighbours in the larger international economy. While internal issues are always paramount, the flow of political and cultural movements within Latin America has had a great deal of push between countries and even in Spain.

A shared heritage in culture and language has also lead to a great deal of cross cultural influence in each region. While larger nations in the Russo-sphere and Scandinavia often dominate smaller nations, the large number of countries and power structures in places like Latin America and the Middle East make for a more interesting and less burdened dynamic when approaching policy or struggles between neighbours. More often than not, many families share relatives across borders and have done so for decades, so when there is strife in Beirut, it is felt by the same family is Damascus or Amman. When a conflict challenging narco-violence occurs in Mexico, often solutions and physical assistance comes from Colombia against the network of cartels in the greater region.

Nations without regional or cultural cousins often are weakened in their policy approaches towards larger powers. Forming bonds with treaties can often become just a function of interests, without any long term ties or application to policy, reducing the benefit of the nation acting as a lonely child on the world stage. The original concept of the EU, to form a type of family ties between European nations that have been at war for centuries, was based in a similar idea. Often Federated states were once a collection of smaller powers with similar heritage and interests, forming countries like the United States itself. With the economic and health crisis facing everyone in 2020, the future approaches of united countries may serve to maintain a stronger recovery than those countries working on their own.

Interfaces With The Global Commons

An odd policy problem arises out of the Covid pandemic, in the interface (pun noted) between private rights, i.e. not to wear a facemask, and public mandates to wear them.  The collision of particular rights with needs of the commons arises in many global issues.  Henry Kissinger points toward it in the international relations context, noting how “the pandemic has prompted an anachronism, a revival of the walled city in an age when prosperity depends on global trade and movement of people.”

The same collision occurs in issues of climate change, use of electromagnetic spectrum, open sea fisheries, and a host of other matters.  The question of particular rights versus commons raises a problem for America, and American leaders need to start crafting a durable approach.

The traditional Liberal approach to questions of commons rests on an extended idea of reciprocity.  If all benefit from some common need, then each party benefits individually, and a contractual process or protocol can be constructed.  Under the 1987 Montreal Protocol a consensus of nations agreed to limit ozone-depleting emissions, and appear to have plugged a hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer.  In the old practice of eminent domain a duly ascertained public interest allows the taking of private property, with compensation.  This has worked to the point that it raises public controversy only in exceptional cases.

Under the World Trade Organization, countries voluntarily accept regulation of their sovereign power to tax and control imports and exports.  The common benefit is global growth, which for many countries took the form of normalized trade with the United States.  The payoff may have had a less-idealistic reality to it, and in practice the rules were relatively soft, which helped the Liberal approach work.

But such solutions haunt Liberal conscience, which needs to be assuaged by the elaborate due process protocols.  These processes require, at some level, a high degree of underlying consensus that the common good to be gained justifies the overriding of a person’s or country’s rights.  The instant that the community has its consensus shaken, the question of particular rights versus commons becomes a political battle.

The non-liberal approach to the commons says simply that common good comes first.  A number of socio-political doctrines support this approach.  It is the essence of socialism; it fits Confucian premises of harmony and order; and the anthropological concept of collective identity backs those doctrines.  This approach supports measures such as China’ one-child policy, high taxes in many social democratic states, and Soviet collectivization.  It was a norm in pre-modern times, when rights were privileges granted by rulers rather than unalienable attributes of all persons.  The last American traces of those times are found in the vestigial ‘common’ found at the center of many old New England towns.

The problem for America runs deep.  The nation created itself in a rejection of traditional government – not just of a British government perceived as abusive, but of the very idea that government could override a person’s rights.  No other definition of American nationality has been given; the nation is committed to the truths of unalienable rights, and government tasked to secure those rights.  Hence the pangs over practices like eminent domain.  Hence the defiance of those who will not wear face masks during the pandemic.  Hence, in part, opposition to greenhouse gas related regulations and to the environmental movement.  And now that these issues have become issues rather than matters of quiet consensus, any other matter that pits individual rights against needs of the commons will also become politicized.

How America engages the world on climate policy, pandemics, use of electro-magnetic spectrum, maritime boundaries and protocols, and standards in social media, will be subject to our ability to reconcile  the needs, however urgent, of the commons with the rights, baked into our national definition, to live by my own chosen lights. Only in national consensus will we make this reconciliation.  At home or in the world, American leaders cannot enforce the needs of the commons, we have to sell them, which requires national consensus on those benefits.  American consensus is also needed to inspire people to abridge their rights, as individuals or for the nation.  Only in consensus can we address the new age’s global issues.  And only in consensus can America fulfill its commitment to rights.

The time has come for the United States to introduce a policy of strategic clarity: one that makes explicit that the United States would respond to any Chinese use of force against Taiwan.

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De colloques en dîners, les « Big Pharma » abreuvent médecins et associations de discours vantant les mérites de leurs innovations. Les sources d'information indépendantes des laboratoires sont quasi inexistantes. Ce scandale écœure plus d'un observateur du monde médical. Constatant que, de plus en (...) / Industrie pharmaceutique, Propriété industrielle, Recherche, Santé - 2002/02

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The wisdom and knowledge of indigenous people in Guatemala is central to the realization of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, targets agreed by countries around the world to end poverty, maintain peace and preserve the health of the planet. In this blog, the UN Resident Coordinator in Guatemala Rebeca Arias Flores explains how sustainable development is not new, but simply a new name that draws on ancient wisdom that is renewed with each generation of indigenous people. 

More than a human rights violation against an individual, enforced disappearances have frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within the whole of society, the United Nations said on Sunday, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance.

Syrian opponents meeting in Geneva as part of efforts to find a peaceful end to nearly a decade of conflict in their country have found common ground on which to pursue further discussions, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen said on Saturday.

Hundreds of rescued migrants and refugees currently on board three vessels in the Central Mediterranean, some of whom have been stuck at sea for weeks, must be brought to shore immediately, two UN agencies said on Saturday.

Skyrocketing housing prices threaten South Korea, the plight of LGBTQ people in Kashmir, and rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in Argentina. 

‘Under Beijing’s Shadow’ lays out in compelling detail how China is working to dominate the region.

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Disturbing video footage purportedly showing a teenager involved in a deadly shooting in the US state of Wisconsin is evidence that far stricter gun control measures are needed, the UN human rights office, OHCHR said on Friday.. 

The continent has largely eradicated wild polio, the crowning achievement of a massive, globally coordinated public health effort.

The United States hasn’t had to worry about Japan in nearly a decade. Now it might have to start.

A struggle to bring down South Korea’s soaring housing market could doom a presidency.

More than 360,000 internally displaced persons in Chad’s Lake province are facing a “double” crisis, exposed to security and environmental risks, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) has reported, highlighting the need to strengthen resilience of affected communities.

The longest-ever-serving Japanese prime minister steered the country through rocky years.