| 18 February 2010
President Obama standing in a Prague square on an April day in 2009, by a telecast speech to millions of people around the world, raised their hopes by stating: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
This call by American and many other world leaders has been echoed for decades since World War II’s first explosion of a nuclear bomb, revealed its tremendous destructive powers. In fact, The United Nations General Assembly’s very first resolution in January 1946 called for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons.” In 1968, this global wish was given serious hope by the signing of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Two years later, in 1970, the Treaty came into force after all the State signatories to the treaty also obtained their national legislative ratifications. NPT is the only and the largest multilateral treaty on nuclear non proliferation and disarmament. With 188 state signatories, it is only four countries (India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) short of the full UN membership.
| 08 February 2010
Certainly, this is not the first time the West engages in ‘civilizing missions’. The calls for ‘enlightening’ or ‘liberating’ more ‘primitive’ peoples echo throughout the ages. But the historical mix of the rise of universal human rights, globalized mass media, and democracy puts more pressure than ever on politicians to adhere to humanitarian principles. We see, for the first time, the direct injection of humanitarian thinking into military strategic objectives. The official mandate of NATO troops in Afghanistan states that “ISAF forces support the Afghan interim government in their implementation of human rights as well as the creation and continued assurance of internal security.”
| 27 January 2010
I had the privilege to represent International Security Forum of Cyprus to the 34th Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association (BISA) which took place at Leicester University, 14-16 December 2009. More than 350 congress delegates from all parts of the globe presented papers analyzing in depth and breadth multiple dimensions of international relations. The BISA represents along with the US International Studies Association (ISA), the top venues for presenting research findings and exchange of views between the academic world and government and non-governmental organizations.
During this congress the UK defence budget trimming was, inter alia, discussed. Consequently, also the scaling down of the British Armed Forces. Already in December 2009, this issue was mooted in a report of the authoritative British Television ‘Channel 4’. Channel 4 reported that the defence cuts would affect bases of the Royal Air Force (RAF). Consequently, the private UK TV channel surmised that among those bases could be the RAF base Akrotiri, Cyprus which is the biggest RAF base outside of British territory. This news item was largely overlooked in Cyprus and in Greece. As far as I could follow, no Greek Cypriot or Greek politician seems to have reacted to the possibility of even a partial British Forces withdrawal from the island after more than half a century of their continuous reinforcement especially during the period of the Cold War.| 07 December 2009
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany were followed by the quick dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Mikhail Gorbachev timely withdrew his support from the collapsing GDR. In June 1989, the former Soviet leader stated in Bonn, where he received a rapturous welcome: “I don't think the Berlin Wall is the sole barrier between East and West. We must improve many situations in Europe." That was a very wise and poignant remark. The fall of the Berlin Wall, allowing the re-unification of Germany, was meant to be the start but in no conceivable way the end, of the project of building constructive relations between the East and West. The jubilant mood began to spread through the following months: "a gentlemen's agreement" with the Bush administration was reached in February 1990 that NATO would not expand eastward beyond Germany. Gorbachev acknowledged that since no one could imagine then that the Warsaw Pact would shortly disappear, he had not pressed for formal commitments about other countries, and the US leadership had therefore not given them.