December 2009

December 31, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – If in 2010 the big nuclear weapons powers and UN Security Council permanent members – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – don’t make significant reductions with their nuclear weapons then an important opportunity will be lost. Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev appear to be of a mind on this. One has to go back to the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to get the full picture on the dismal progress on nuclear disarmament. Their Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, told both presidents nuclear weapons were unusable. Henry Kissinger, when National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, publically said the same, chiding the Europeans for thinking that they were under an American umbrella. He told them bluntly that America would never sacrifice its own cities to revenge European ones. Later President Ronald Reagan was quite clear that he could...

December 24, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – The American president, Barack Obama, has made the greatest speech ever uttered by a government leader in the twenty first century. Even comparing him with the great orators of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler he comes out in the top five- and that is just for delivery. As for content he is alone in the top place. Very few papers have published the full text and even less television programmes have run the full speech, which suggests that editors do not know their history and cannot perceive its significance. For the head of state of the one remaining superpower, whose military spending dwarfs the sum of all the world’s militaries combined, to talk of “the law of love” between peoples, to conjure up the examples of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, quoting the former...

December 19, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – What India wants India will get. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told me a couple of years ago, India wants to overtake China whilst putting its own runaway capitalism under tighter social control. At the time he seemed downbeat about realizing these goals. But as India has emerged faster than China, from the great recession, and as its huge anti poverty programmes begin to bite his pessimism seems unwarranted. Maybe it was just caution about the revolution he has wrought. I first came to Kolkata 35 years ago. It was then literally a “black hole”. I walked out of my hotel in the evening. Everywhere was dark. The city could only afford minimal street lighting. The bodies of families eating, defecating and sleeping were scattered along every pavement. The next morning I walked along the back lanes near the hotel. How could I...

December 9, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – To describe the Bhopal disaster of 25 years ago when a chemical plant owned by the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide sprang a leak and killed 4,000 people instantly and another 15,000 later in an agonizing Hiroshima-like death as “the unacceptable face of capitalism” does not do it justice. It was malevolence beyond belief. Union Carbide made only the most modest of efforts to compensate their victims and when later the company was bought out by the American company, Dow Chemicals, the same insouciance was continued. Imagine what would have happened if an Indian company had had an accident like that in the U.S. The bosses would be behind bars for a very long time. The company would have been milked dry by the courts to compensate the victims and to provide top-notch medical care for the survivors. Here was one of the...

Reflections on the increasing impossibility of funding peace research that refuses to be intellectual ‘embedding’ in power. Summary This analysis has come about for four reasons: The article gives examples of why free peace research – if not social research in general – is becoming increasingly impossible. It starts out with an exposé of the funds being available worldwide for peace and for the military – about 200 times more for the latter. The ratio of peace researchers to military researchers is probably 1:100+. It may both be true that (government-financed) peace research is booming and that scores of institutes have been closed down. Today’s funding situation in Denmark and Sweden for peace-oriented research is then described and comparative flashbacks made to the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. If you think of Scandinavia in general as liberal and generous in this field, it’s time for a reality check. Then,...

December 1st, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Enlargement of the European Union to bring in Turkey was never meant to be so tense an affair. When the Berlin Wall came down opinion makers in Western Europe were breathless before the quite unexpected overthrow of tyranny and were falling over themselves in their attempt to wave broadly stretched arms of welcome to those who could join the historic mission of making Europe one. In the event the incorporation of these nations into NATO (where Turkey has long been an unquestioned member) was easier to pull off than economic integration into the EU. It needn’t have been. It wasn’t the economics of the argument. It was the politics: in the military arena politicians simply have more independent room for manoeuvre. And anyway Bill Clinton, when president, was pushing for it for his own internal political reasons- he needed the east European ethnic...