June 1997

LONDON– The last British emissary to Hong Kong who seriously misread the situation got recalled to London by fast clipper and reposted as consul-general to Texas. Charles Elliot became unstuck because, as Queen Victoria put it, “all he wanted might have been obtained if it had not bneen for the unaccountably strange conduct of Charles Elliot–he tried to obtain the lowest terms from the Chinese.” Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s current government, is also about to be recalled to London. On June 30th after the union jack is hauled down at midnight and the yellow star hauled up he too will sail away, along with Prince Charles on the royal yacht, Britannia. Did Mr. Patten, too, seriously misread the bnargaining relationship with China, not by settling for the lowest terms, but by demanding too much? Perhaps, say his legion of critics, he totally underestimated the Chinese, endlessly provoking them by pushing through...

LONDON– Imagine that the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France gave up all their nuclear weapons under international treaty and next imagine that a “rogue” nation secretly developed a nuclear arsenal and posed the risk of threatening one of them with a nuclear attack. But the big powers, anyway, quietly decided, without fuss or hyperbole, to take the situation on the chin and continue to live without the capacity to retaliate in kind. Well, actually, that is the situation we are already in with another weapon of mass destruction, one that could, in the right conditions kill 100,000 people in a city of 500,000. It is the biological weapon. According to American estimates eleven nations are now developing them in defiance of the Biological Weapons Convention, signed into international law 25 years ago, one of the more benign legacies of Cold War warrior, President Richard Nixon. On Monday, the New York...

Tilgivelse indebærer at man acceptere den, der har gjort forkerte ting og angrer det. Forsoning er en klarlæggelse og accept af det skete og en viljesmæssig beslutning om at komme videre og se fremad. Vi kan tilgive et andet menneske for dets gerninger og dermed give det en ny start. Vi forsones med faktum og med den skyldige og eventuelt også med at vi selv har været en medvirkende årsag til at det gik som det gik. Hverken tilgivelse eller forsoning handler om at glemme det skete. Gode venner af mig, der er kvækere, mistede for nogle år siden deres søn og kommende svigerdatter i en bilulykke som følge af en anden bilists helt uansvarlig kørsel. Det var vigtigt for dem at træffe det menneske, der havde forvoldt dem så dyb en smerte. Mens strafudmålingen var dem ligegyldig var deres budskab: “Vi kan tilgive Dig som menneske, men vi kan...

Mahatma Gandhi and the Revival of Nonviolent Politics in the Late 20th Century I. What is the Gandhian Legacy? Gandhi’s successful challenge to British colonialism is viewed as a heroic anomaly in a world still generally interpreted by way of a ‘realist’ prism that regards violence and hard power relations as the main causative agents of history, while at the same time deliberately excluding moral and legal considerations as distractions from a rational decision process. Although the memory of Gandhi is revered everywhere, the life and ways of Gandhi have not been treated as influential in relation to subsequent patterns of political practice, either within states or at a global level. Instead, there has been a widespread belief that what Gandhi achieved was unique to his time, place, and person. In this sense, the persisting importance of Gandhi, outside of the efforts of academic programs devoted to peace studies and...

LONDON– There is not going to be another Tiananman Square in Hong Kong. The Chinese communists’ ruling cadre may have little natural empathy for Hong Kong’s political freedom but they know, whatever protests meet them after the July 1st. hand-over by Britain, that a violent clamp-down of such proportions would alienate the western world in a manner that could not be so easily repaired as it was after the events of June 4, 1989. If Presidents Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac or Chancellor Helmut Kohl then chose to continue to be as accommodating to China’s interests as they are now they would be overwhelmingly overruled by both public opinion and their legislatures. The Beijing authorities are shrewd enough to know that, while the student protestors of Tiananman Square were naive enough to think their own mass could somehow defy and triumph over their government to the extent that they pointedly refused...