May 1998

MADRID–The American columnist and political philosopher Walter Lippmann once remarked that, in politics, there can be no concluding chapter because there is always more future out in front than recorded history behind. At no point is there a pause when all problems, upheavals and conflicts are solved and every good idea finds its proper place. In Asia, with the overthrow of Suharto and the detonation of the Indian H-bomb we have just had another jolting reminder of the truth of this observation. At the same time, barely noticed, in Latin America there is another event afoot that reaffirms the other side of political life, the often successful quest for a more ordered, self-disciplined and farsighted world, that certainly India and Pakistan could benefit from in their own fraught relationship over Kashmir and Indonesia likewise with its continued occupation of East Timor. Very soon one of the world’s last remaining inter-state...

LONDON–Almost a year after the British left Hong Kong this self-contained part of China– the Special Administrative Region to be precise–goes to the polls. Against the din of India’s nuclear explosion, the slow, but probably sure, toppling of Sukarno in Indonesia and the economic crisis in east Asia (which is now spilling over into Hong Kong) the question of how much democracy is going to be allowed to be practised in Hong Kong seems to be on everyone’s back-burner. Even the people of Hong Kong, who not that long ago came out on the streets en masse (one million out of a population of six million) to protest the killings in Tiananman Square, seem subdued- -or resigned. Perhaps this is a good sign. The transition from British to Chinese rule has gone not with a bang but a whimper in large measure because Beijing has been extraordinarily sensitive about not...

LONDON–The centre cannot hold–that has been the received wisdom since in 1921 the protestant bulwark of Northern Ireland was detached from the rest of this catholic- dominated, Irish island and incorporated into the United Kingdom. Now the historic peace agreement between the mainstream protestant unionists and Sinn Fein, the political front of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, will be put to the test in next week s referendum. It is not a simple choice between the ballot or the bullet, for Sinn Fein has long had a dual Armalite and ballot box strategy. Even now the decommissioning of the IRA’s formidable arsenal has been allowed a two year grace period, enough for the IRA to see if it gets anything out of this deal. But the accord has put the ballot box on a higher pedestal than the bullet and reverses a long-standing, almost sacred, position of Sinn Fein/IRA...

LONDON–“Some frontiers are only in the imagination” wrote Jan Morris in her “Fifty Years of Europe”. Prince Metternich used to say the frontier of Asia was at the Landstrasse, the street which ran towards Hungary away from Vienna’s city walls. It is also said that Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany after World War 2, held similar feelings about Prussia. He was a Rhinelander, and whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its way eastward to Berlin, he too would groan, “Hier beginnt Asia”, and pull the blinds down. After last week-end’s momentous event, the launching of the single currency, the Europeans now have to consider where they go next. Do they in fact need frontiers within Europe any more? If they can come this far, shouldn’t they let their imaginations work further and complete the journey to a United States of Europe? By any measure of history...

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