'Europe's Neutral States: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?'

This book review appeared in the Fall 1987 edition of Strategic Review, a publication of the United States Strategic Institute. A shorter version was published in the Spring 1988 edition of Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 17, No. 1).

Balance-Sheets of Nonalignment

EUROPE’S NEUTRAL STATES: Partners or Profiteers in Western Security?

By Stephan Kux
London: Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies
1986. 42 pages. $8.00

Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What is the role played by neutral states in the international political system? Is the concept of neutrality still a truly meaningful one in contemporary international politics? Or has neutrality become merely a narrowly legal (and convenient) concept bereft of any real political cutting-edge?

If, as Professor Roderick Ogley asserts, neutrality is “an enormous subject, almost coterminous with world politics as a whole,” these questions deserve further exploration. What surprises the student of international relations today is the absence of relevant material. While descriptive analyses of the politics of individual neutral states are plentiful, no substantial, book-length study of neutrality has been published during the past twenty years — at least in the English language. There certainly have been no new challengers to Philip Jessup’s comprehensive, four-volume study of neutrality published in the mid-1930s.

This short monograph by Stephan Kux, a Swiss political analyst, makes a concise contribution to the literature on neutrality by focusing on Austria, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. He asks if these four countries are getting a “free ride” for their security on the back of the Western Alliance. He concludes that, except for Switzerland, none of them can adequately provide for their own defense, and that they lean instead on mutual nuclear deterrence between the superpowers and their alliances as their principal pillar of security.

Two of Kux’s examples best illuminate the phenomenon. One is Ireland. There is broad domestic-political support for Ireland’s neutrality, and public opinion in its favor hovers around 85 per cent. Neutrality is not rigorously defined in Irish law or politics, however, and it has “come to be regarded by the general public as an essentially nationalistic symbol, fraught with nostalgia toward a hard-won independence and with a persistently anti-British flavor arising from its irredentist claim to a united Ireland.”

Ireland is much too weak to defend its territorial integrity in the event of a major war. This is clear from the “strength” of the Navy of this island nation, which consists of approximately 1,500 men in 7 offshore patrol vessels and 3 helicopters, operating from a single base in Cork with a mandate to cover all of Ireland’s 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The Air Force features less than 900 personnel manning but 15 combat aircraft. According to Kux, “by far the greatest part of the country’s defense expenditure” — amounting to only 1.8 per cent of the gross national product and 3.1 per cent of the government budget — “is devoted to assistance of the civil power in policing the Irish conflict,” with much of the rest going to sections of the 12,000-strong Irish Army seconded to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Ireland’s hope for resisting invasion is vested not in the military defense of its integrity and neutrality but in the presumption that its territory will not be considered a prize by either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in the event of war. There are two geostrategic perspectives on Ireland’s importance. One argues that the country is unimportant and that any needs that NATO may have in the region are covered by permanent access to British bases in Northern Ireland. The second perspective sees Ireland as a “missing link” in the defense of the North Atlantic, because the country could “provide the opportunity for extending the reach of electronic surveillance systems, anti-submarine warfare and air defense systems.” The island would also provide a useful logistics base for resupplying NATO forces in the event of a protracted conflict on the continent.

The ambiguity of this geostrategic role has to some extent made Ireland’s neutrality a bargaining chip for Dublin. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill suggested that unification could be the reward for Irish participation in the war against Nazi Germany. The offer was repeated, sotto voce, upon the formation of NATO. On the latter occasion, the Irish refusal was accepted easily because it appeared that the Alliance’s strategic needs could be fulfilled without Irish membership in the Alliance.

Yet, the topic continues to be raised. Enoch Powell, the former Conservative Member of Parliament for South Down in Ulster, told a reporter for the Financial Times in May 1987:  “Without the island of Ireland there is a yawning gap in NATO.... NATO strategists have never been satisfied that Ireland is absent from their ring.” Powell believes that the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (the so-called Hillsborough Agreement) was the consequence of pressures from Washington designed to get the British to disengage from Northern Ireland, speed up the process of Irish unification, and in the end deliver a united Ireland for membership in the Atlantic Alliance. That none of this was discussed publicly by either Dublin or Westminster escapes Powell’s argument, which thus rings hollow. Nevertheless, the fact that the point is raised at all indicates both the sensitivity and continued liveliness of the issue.

Kux’s other telling case study is Sweden. Since 1815 Sweden has managed to stay neutral in all wars and to follow a policy of what is now called nonalignment. In the Twentieth Century invitations to join military alliances have never found a strong resonance among Swedish political leaders. Membership in NATO was firmly refused by Sweden. Immediately after the war, serious consideration was given to Swedish participation in a Nordic neutrality pact, but the idea was stillborn when Norway and Denmark joined the Atlantic Alliance


Swedish national security policy is geared to military defense of the nation’s neutrality and territorial integrity. It seeks to employ a defense force adequate to deter any potential attacker. Whether or not Sweden has that capability is moot.

The series of violations of Swedish territorial waters by Soviet submarines over the past six years has brought some of the inadequacies of Swedish territorial defense into focus. It has also brought an impetus to defense spending. There will be a rise in spending over the next ten years to begin to compensate for the steady decline between 1966 and 1986, when defense spending as a proportion of gross national product fell from 4.2 to 2.9 per cent. Nonetheless, Swedish Commander-in-Chief General Bengt Gustafsson has quipped: “We are still going to become gradually weaker, but more slowly than before.” He expects defense spending to rise to 3 or 3.5 per cent of GNP in the 1990s.

In response partly to the intruding Soviet submarines but also other developments, the recognition has grown in Sweden that its northern region holds more strategic value than it did twenty or thirty years ago. Indeed, George Richey of the Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies has posited that “Sweden is the key to the northern flank, and the northern flank is the key to Central Europe.” This view reflects the Soviet buildup in the Baltic and on the Kola Peninsula, and the construction of the world’s largest naval base at Murmansk.

Pending the proposed increase in defense spending — and provided that it is allocated to an optimal mix of manpower and weaponry — it is unlikely that Sweden will be capable of a viable defense of its neutrality in any general European conflict. As former Commander-in-Chief General Lennart Ljung has admitted: “There is a growing gap between the demands which have been placed on us and our actual capabilities.” An annual increase of 3 per cent over five years, he told a parliamentary committee, would be sufficient to redress the erosion of the past two decades. Certainly the infrastructure is there to inspire confidence — an arms industry of growing sophistication, a civil defense program that is nearly the equal of Switzerland’s, and 30 new Gripen multirole aircraft now on line. The details remain to be debated and implemented.

Notwithstanding these defense deficiencies and their strategic implications for NATO — which apply also in one measure or another to the other neutrals — any effort to steer these countries into an explicit embrace by the Atlantic Alliance may not be wise, let alone promising. Kux notes that “to exert direct pressure upon them to develop a closer relationship with NATO and the European Community could well prove counterproductive.” It is better, he believes, to accept the neutrals as “very much a part of the wider Western community.” As long as they share Western political values and practices, “the Western democracies should assist them in every appropriate way to maintain robust and credible defenses, and to pursue assertive but realistic foreign policies based upon a mature and informed public opinion.”

One drawback to this study is the author’s choice not to include Finland as one of Europe’s neutral states. The relations of Finland with the Soviet Union on the one hand, and with the West on the other, have strongly influenced some views of Europe’s future evolution. Indeed, Helmut Sonnenfeldt has spoken of possible “Finlandization of Eastern Europe,” just as other Western analysts have speculated fearfully about a subtle process of “Finlandization” in Western Europe. At any rate, Finland certainly meets the criteria of neutrality, and thus should have been included in Kux’s lineup.

This omission notwithstanding, Stephan Kux has given us a good, if brief, introduction to the problems and prospects of neutrality in Europe in the late Twentieth Century. Hopefully it will inspire more comprehensive and searching inquiry into these important but neglected factors of Europe’s geostrategic and political equation.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic'

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Wednesday, November 18, 1987.  A slightly different version was published in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 25, 1987.


BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Uncertain war against a deadly virus


And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
By Randy Shilts
St. Martin’s Press
$24.95, 630 pages

Considering the age of most victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the only possible analogy is with war — a generation decimated, felled not by bullets but by an insidious virus.

AIDS was a political hot potato even before the disease had a name. In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” a gripping account of the known history of the virus, veteran journalist Randy Shilts demonstrates how political interest groups fumbled with the issue. Whether this led to the needless deaths of some 21,000 people by 1987 remains to be proven. It is clear, however, that playing politics with human lives can be devastating.

More than any number of back- alley pummelings, the AIDS epidemic has made palpable the deep-seated American animosity toward homosexuals. The evidence is in the response to the epidemic:

In the early ‘80s the National Institutes of Health spent $36,100 of research money per Toxic Shock fatality (it was no longer a mystery disease by then) and $34,841 per Legionnaire’s fatality. In contrast, it spent $3,225 per AIDS death in fiscal 1981 and $8,991 in fiscal 1982.

As a University of California dean remarked early in the epidemic, “at least with AIDS, a lot of undesirable people will be eliminated.”

This blatant bigotry was matched by more subtle remarks. When pressed about AIDS research, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler noted her concern that it would break out into the “general population” — as though gay men, drug addicts, and poor blacks and Hispanics were an alien population or from another planet.

By May 1987, when President Reagan made his first public speech about AIDS, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed as having the disease, 20,849 had died and between 1 million and 2 million had been infected. The United States is today the only Western industrialized democracy without a coordinated program to combat AIDS.

It is far too easy to parcel out blame during a crisis. Only historical perspective will verify the accuracy of the charges. Few actors in the AIDS drama escape Mr. Shilts’ scrutiny. He identifies heroes, villains and victims.

The heroes include playwright Larry Kramer and political activist Bill Kraus, who early warned of the dangers of promiscuous behavior and who were ostracized b’ their colleagues for their efforts. They also include the tireless researchers at the national Centers for Disease Control, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and various hospitals around the country.

The political heroes were Democratic Rep. Phillip Burton of California, Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Edward Brandt. As Mr. Shilts writes, these men took the commonsense approach “that attentiveness to the AIDS issue was not determined by whether one was liberal or conservative but by whether one did or didn’t care about the public health.”

Sadly, the villains outnumbered the heroes. Government officials head the list: HHS Secretary Margaret M. Heckler and her spokesmen insisted that AIDS researchers had all the money they needed, even as scientists were sending her detailed memoranda outlining the specific shortfalls in funds, equipment and personnel amounting to tens of millions of dollars; Mr. Shilts presents a convincing case that Mrs. Heckler and the administration lied to the Congress, the press and the public about AIDS research.

Likewise he documents that New York Mayor Edward Koch, his health commissioner David Sencer and Gov. Mario Cuomo refused to support AIDS research or treatment for more than five years into the epidemic, though New York City had more than half the AIDS cases. They, too, lied to the public about their concern, he writes.

The media, particularly the TV networks and the prestige press, deserve even more censure. They simply refused to cover the crisis unless it involved someone other than homosexuals. The big papers ignored shocking reports from the Centers for Disease Control, the Government Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service. Besides the gay press, only the San Francisco Chronicle covered the epidemic in any depth.

Other villains were the bathhouse owners and paranoid gay political leaders who felt that promiscuous sex was a right to be vigorously defended. Blood banks would not acknowledge the danger AIDS posed to the blood supply. The infamous “Patient Zero,” a French-Canadian flight attendant, was linked with many early AIDS cases, yet continued to have sex with unwitting partners well after he had been diagnosed. And his irresponsible behavior was not unique.

More ambiguous is the case of Dr. Robert Gallo, credited for discovering the AIDS virus, which he dubbed HTLV-III. In this account Dr. Gallo is portrayed as childish and egotistical, refusing to cooperate with fellow scientists and setting back the search for a cure, treatment and a vaccine. The book also says there is substantial evidence that he might not have discovered the AIDS virus at all, but took his specimens from the French researchers who actually did.

The list of victims grows each day and includes Rock Hudson, Liberace, Michael Bennett, Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, Stewart McKinney, Terry Dolan, Roy Cohn and Michel Foucault. Regrettably, Bill Kraus, who fought for AIDS funding and against sexual promiscuity succumbed in early 1986.

Mr. Shilts makes no recommendations and offers no conclusions, but several can be inferred. One is that al if the AIDS crisis demonstrates anything, it is the need for a substantial public health emergency fund. AIDS caught everyone by surprise — scientists, doctors, public officials — and it can happen again. Research scientists and physicians should not have to fight tooth and nail for basic equipment in the early stages of a medical crisis. The Capitol Hill appropriations process must respond expeditiously or see thousands die.

The current government response shows no sign of improvement. The conflict between the stolid pragmatism of Surgeon General Koop and the naivete of Education Secretary William Bennett, whose solution seems to extend no further than advocating chastity, continues. And the petty squabbling within the Presidential AIDS Commission promises to destroy that body before its work begins. The band still plays on.

Richard Sincere Jr. is a Washington-based policy analyst and writer.

'Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers'

This review appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, September 9, 1987.


RICHARD SINCERE
Global Naval Strategy Not Confined to Superpowers

Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers, by Rear Adm. J. R. Hill, Croom Hill, London, 247 pp.
Discussions of maritime strategy in the the nuclear age often neglect the role of the medium powers except in the context of their alliances with the superpowers. What is omitted is the notion that medium powers have interests and military reach that do not fit into the moral conceptualization of the East-West struggle.

In this concise book, British naval officer and theorist J. R. Hill has provided the standards by which medium powers — he isolates Australia, Brazil, France, India, Israel, and Japan as examples, although there are others — may assess their maritime interests and capabilities. Much of what he says has relevance for the planning of the superpowers, China, and smaller powers as well. For instance, he derides those military and civilian planners who insist on having a threat scenario to plan, arguing instead that they should define and categorize the nation’s interests.

These are in addition to the normally reckoned vital interests of territorial integrity and political independence.

It is important to make assessments of threats to these interests by degree, and not just absolutely, and to respond to threats proportionately. In another context Hill asks, “Does it really matter to India that one Indian tanker is bombed at Kharg Island? Would it matter if all Indian tankers going to Kharg Island were singled out for bombing?” In other words, “Which interests are to be regarded as vital?”

On the question of alliances, Hill admits himself to be something of a Gaullist in his thinking, believing that a loosening of the NATO alliance would both strengthen — through increased flexibility — the alliance itself and allow for firmer and more independent action on the part of alliance members when defending their interests outside the scope of alliance responsibility.

Hill argues that perhaps the British insistence, since at least 1966, that all military and naval strategic planning be done exclusively in an alliance context, with solely the Soviet threat in mind, hampered the effort to resecure the Falklands in 1982 and could have been disastrous, were it not for even worse planning in Buenos Aires.

These are the general points of Hill’s book. He leads up to them with an extensive discussion of modes and models for the use of maritime power.

He notes the distinction between “sea-use” and “sea-denial” strategies, concepts that are linked yet different. He notes the applicability of the international laws of the sea and draws attention to the uncertain future attached to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, due to the unwillingness of the United States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany to sign it.

He discusses changing technologies in submarine and anti-submarine warfare and the advances in space-based surveillance and the effect these may have on medium- power strategies.

In a brief discussion of anti-missile defenses, he slyly expresses doubts about the United States Strategic Defense Initiative — though not in so many words.

Hill concludes his study by discounting both the fashionable view of the early 1970s that the world had become multipolar and the up-and-coming view of the 1980s that there will be no role for medium powers at sea in the future because of overwhelming superpower dominance. While “superpower at sea” will continue, he says, “the mutual constraints on it will also increase and the pressure needed to pull its trigger will be correspondingly greater.”

Meanwhile, as the resources available to the superpowers increase, so will those available to the small and medium powers. “Handy” weapons systems will “increase in number and effectiveness, often at manageable cost.” Therefore, the medium powers’ capacity “to take independent action in support of their interests at sea will not significantly diminish” — and, I might add, may actually be enhanced.

Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers makes a useful addition to the growing shelf of books on naval strategy.

Richard Sincere, a Washington-based policy analyst, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

'Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Monday, June 1, 1987, and in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, June 3, 1987.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Doctor’s Story Of Deliberate Famine And an African Hitler 

Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine, by Myles Harris, Picador, London, $4.85, 221 pp. 


In the play Man of La Mancha, the poet Cervantes explains what impelled a plain country squire toward becoming the knight Don Quixote: “Being retired, he has much time for books. . . . All he reads oppresses him, fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways toward man.”

This is one of those books. Breakfast in Hell came to my attention through an article by the author in The Spectator, the British public affairs weekly. The title was “The Regime That Kills Ethiopians,” and that sums up the whole story. It would be extraordinarily difficult to come away from Myles Harris’s account of the state-imposed famine in Ethiopia without profound anger and indignation.

Myles Harris is a medical doctor who has worked all over the world caring for the malnourished, ill-housed, poorly clothed and impoverished people who make up such a large number of us. Prior to his six months in Ethiopia with the Red Cross, he and his wife Janet had worked in undeveloped regions in Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Kalahari Desert.

It is clear from the outset that Harris went to Ethiopia with few, if any, preconceptions of what he would encounter there. The Red Cross needed medical personnel to work in famine areas, and he responded to their call. He had no trouble adopting the apolitical life of a Red Cross delegate and wanted only to help suffering Ethiopians.

He emerged from the country half a year later with bitter feelings toward the Mengistu regime, toward international aid agencies and toward petty Communist Party officials who blocked genuine humanitarian relief; he has fond and loving memories of his Ethiopian co-workers and the farmers, townspeople, young mothers and children he encountered in the feeding camps and medical stations.

Harris writes vividly and pulls no punches. He compares the Emperor Mengistu (as he calls Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictator) to Hitler and Stalin; indeed, reading some of the descriptions of Mengistu’s atrocities makes one think Adolph and Joe were mere pranksters.

For instance: The Soviets, as part of their aid to keep him on his throne, sent a unit of the East German Volkspolizei, “a secret police force with one of the finest pedigrees in suppression in the world. . . . At the time of the Ethiopian terror in 1977, some of the most senior Volkspolizei officers had once been serving members of the Gestapo. For, at the end of the Second World War, the capitulation of half the Third Reich to the Russians had meant little more for them than. . . swapping a swastika for a red star, before it was business as usual.”

The business these ex-Gestapo henchmen taught Mengistu was the need for a memorable terror to bring all Ethiopians into his iron grip. “Mengistu searched his heart for the most terrible thing he could do to bring his people through fear to the truth of Marxism-Leninism, and he thought of burial. Ethiopians hold burial to be one of the most important rites of life. To die unburied, to be forgotten in death, is so awful that even today those who whisper to you their memories of the Terror can hardly bring themselves to speak of this part of it…. [Mengistu] ordered that the bodies of the slain should lie unburied, and that those who tried to take them for burial were themselves to be slaughtered. One morning, the people of Addis woke to streets filled with corpses and a sky dark with vultures.” Later, “the lampposts were strung with corpses, not of men, but of young school boys who had tried and failed to rescue their fathers’ and brothers’ bodies for burial. . . . When it was over, of the 5,000 students at the University of Addis Ababa, only 1,500 were still alive.”

That excerpt exposes the minds of men who would, among other things, padlock food warehouses for days and weeks, refusing to give relief workers access to the tools of their trade; who would refuse hospital admission to obviously sick and dying children whose parents lacked the proper papers from the local farmers’ association, papers that took five days or longer to obtain; who would ship truckloads of grain from the famine-stricken north of the country to the healthier and more fertile south, where it was stored for unknown reasons -- perhaps for later shipment to the masters in Moscow. These are men who forbid the sale of yeast to Ethiopian citizens in order to secure a government monopoly on the baking and selling of bread.

Harris spares nearly no one from his understated but strongly felt wrath. The Red Cross and other relief agencies get criticism for trying too hard to work with and please the government -- a government that wants to keep the Red Cross from doing its job. At one point, he tries to explain this to his superiors:

“We had done exactly what we had been instructed to do by Geneva: emptied the camps of all except the very ill and returned the rest of the people to their villages.

“But each success would have found little favor with the Ethiopians. Suddenly, they had been washed into the center of a disaster worse than the First World War.

Confused and frightened, their only remedy -- huge feeding programs -- seemed the only rock to cling to. Then we came along and tried to close down their camps. Closing down their operation implied their failure, and, as in most aid programs, threatened bureaucratic livelihoods. Famine camps meant foreign aid, foreign aid meant jobs.”

Hitler, Stalin and Mao share one positive characteristic — they are all dead. But Mengistu and the communists who rule Ethiopia with him are alive and dripping with the blood of their countrymen. Why, then, do Western governments, the United Nations and Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid continue to send them money that perpetuates their tyranny?

Richard Sincere, a Washington writer, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies in international relations at the London School of Economics.

'The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain'

This review originally appeared in The Washington Times on Thursday, September 17, 1987.




BOOK REVIEW / Richard Sincere
Spain after Franco
The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain
By John Hooper
Penguin, $6.95 paper, 287 pages


Earlier this year, sporadic demonstrations and riots by students occurred in the Spanish university towns of Salamanca, Madrid and Seville. It was unclear to observers exactly what the students wanted. They seemed to riot for riots’ sake.

Some light is shed on the situation in “The Spaniards: A Portrait of the New Spain,” journalist John Hooper’s comprehensive examination of the Spain that has emerged in the 12 years since the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

One problem Spanish students face is the inability of the country’s job market to absorb university graduates. Paradoxically, the students are demanding the removal of all barriers to university admission and more state grants to those in higher education. If the government yields to these demands, the students may soon regret it. As Mr. Hooper reports, there are some 500,000 undergraduates in the universities and another 190,000 in the junior colleges or polytechnics, “which is more, frankly, than a country of her level of economic development requires, especially in a recession. Ever since the mid-’70s graduate unemployment has been a serious problem.”

Mr. Hooper does not limit his book to contemporary policy problems such as education. Although he says in the introduction that “this is not a book about politics or economics:’ it is in fact both. “The Spaniards” successfully takes the measure of the country since Franco’s death in 1975. Its chapters on the church, the family, the sexual revolution, the welfare state, housing and the media each vividly portray not only events since 1975, but the social forces that preceded them.

There is a misconception about Spain often encountered in North America and Europe (as Mr. Hooper notes, the Spanish, like the British, often refer to Europe as though it is somewhere else). This misconception is that for the four decades of dictatorship, Spain was a boiling pot with a lid clamped down, and that Franco’s death took the lid off, precipitating near-revolutionary change. This is only half true.

The social forces shaping Spain under the constitutional monarchy of King Juan Carlos have their roots in the rapid economic development that started in 1961 and began slowing down in 1973, a period known as the anos de desarrollo. As in so many countries where political development is hampered and channels of political expression are blocked, the energies of the Spanish people were directed toward industry.

The result of the anos de desarrollo was not only a nearly unbelievable rise in the standard of living — per capita income quadrupled — but a sea-change in Spain’s demographics. Whole regions of Andalusia, Murcia and the central meseta emptied as shanty towns multiplied in suburbs around Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and San Sebastian. This in turn caused subtle but discernible shifts in family living and in language patterns.

In prosperous Catalonia, for instance, non-Catalan workers began speaking Catalan instead of Castilian (Spanish) in the work place. The demographic shift also put pressure on the housing market and pushed up the demand for consumer goods.

The development of Spain’s new constitutional government is also a reflection of the time that came before it. Adolfo Suarez, the first prime minister chosen by the newly installed Juan Carlos, had been a junior member of the government under the late dictatorship; the current, Socialist prime minister, Felipe Gonzales, was once a member of the Young Falangists. The decision to grant autonomy to provinces and regions came about because of nationalist sentiments (and even terrorist movements) in the Basque region, Galicia and Catalonia that had been felt for decades.

It is in his descriptions of the various regions of Spain that Mr. Hooper is at his best. He provides capsule histories rich in detail that show how disparate countries came together to form a unified Spain, how successive governments in Madrid held the Iberian Peninsula together, and how in the last years of Franco, nationalism (‘regionalism” is too weak a word) had grown so much that it became an unignorable force.

The case of Catalonia is telling. I can attest to the depth of feeling there, having visited Barcelona province several months ago.

Although the new constitution gives the Catalan language full recognition along with Castilian after years of suppression under Franco, it is not uncommon to see bilingual commercial signs with the Spanish half smeared with red paint and a Catalan nationalist slogan, such as “Visca Catala” (“Long live Catalan!”), sprayed alongside it.

There is a movement afoot to have Catalan declared one of the official languages of the European Community — perhaps a not-unreasonable request, as more people speak Catalan than Danish or Irish. As if to make their point, Catalan-language enthusiasts sponsored a consumer fair on the Ramblas, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, in which all products were labeled solely in Catalan.

As Spain enters the mainstream of the Western political community -- it is now a member of both NATO and the EC -- it must come to grips with its new identity. The society that is emerging, Mr. Hooper says, is “distinctly idiosyncratic.”

Spain is “a federal monarchy with a tax-paying king whose father was alive when [Juan Carlos] ascended the throne; a welfare state in which three-quarters of the jobless do not qualify for unemployment pay; a former police state where the majority of detectives belong to a trade union founded by erstwhile members of the secret police; a democracy in which the circulation of a neo-fascist newspaper has risen sixfold; and a country dedicated to the cult of the Virgin Mary where there are a half a dozen whores for every nun.”

The past decade has been tumultuous, producing a Spanish state that is democratic; autonomous regions that are linguistically and culturally diverse; and multiple political parties competing for real power. Thus has Spain become a laboratory for the hypothesis that authoritarian states, which allow some freedom and competition, more easily become democracies than do totalitarian societies, which lack institutions that compete against the state.

There is still some fear that Francoist elements within the armed forces may attempt a coup. Such an attempt did take place in 1981. But younger officers are coming from more diverse sectors of society than their predecessors, and thus have more democratic views.

Those of us who spent the mid-1970s glued to the iconoclastic comedy “Saturday Night Live” saw Chevy Chase report, week after week, that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still seriously dead.” To American high-school students in 1975 the line was morbidly funny; in 1987, Spanish high school students can freely take to the streets as one of the fruits of Franco’s demise.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant.

'Politics and Government in African States, 1960-1985'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times Magazine on Monday, August 17, 1987.  This version was published a few weeks later in the New York City Tribune, on Wednesday, September 23, 1987. The bio-line is slightly inaccurate; I had finished my degree at the LSE in June 1987. This article must have been submitted to the newspaper before I left London but was not published until after my return to the United States.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Hefty But ‘Uneven’ Compendium of African Issues

Politics and Government in African States, 1960-1985, eds. Peter Duignan and Robert H. Jackson, Stanford, California, Hoover Institute Press, and London, Croom Helm, $36.95, hardcover; $20.95, paperback 434 pp.

In his comic novel Scoop, Evelyn Waugh describes the foreign editor of a major newspaper searching frantically and unavailingly on a map of Africa for the country of Ishmaelia, so that he can send a war correspondent to cover the revolution there.

Things have not changed much. In many American minds, the map of Africa stretches from Cape Town in the south to Pretoria in the north. The rest of the continent, because it tends to be forgotten by the major media, remains unknown to the American voter— and to students, businessmen and even political activists.

To be sure, a few rare instances of trouble in Africa outside South Africa have reached our television screens— Idi Amin’s hideous Uganda, the genocide in Ethiopia, ethnic strife in Nigeria — but these events merely scratch the surface.

In the 25 or so years since most of its countries became independent states, Africa has been a cauldron of political activity: exciting, disgusting, heartening, backward, progressive, tyrannical, and benign.

For these of us concerned with civil rights, personal dignity, and human freedom, most of Africa since 1960 presents a sad case. One-party systems and military dictatorships are the rule; ethnic conflicts tear many African states apart; governments teem with corruption; negative growth rates and reduced standards of living are the product of centralized planning in a socialist mold.

This hefty volume examines about half of the states of Africa. As might be expected in a multi-author work, the result is uneven. Some chapters, for instance, are quite good on colonial history and weak on current economics; others provide nearly no background on the colonial period yet give detailed accounts of recent political developments.

The book, unfortunately, has many faults. It lacks maps, even a single map of the continent; its many references to geography had me jumping up regularly to consult a wall map. Moreover, nowhere in the book are any of the nine authors identified.

It is apparent also that the Hoover Institution Press lacks a good copy editor — the volume suffers from numerous typographical errors, inconsistencies and impenetrable sentences that diminish readability and reduce credibility. (This, despite a long production process. Some of the essays indicate that they were written in late 1984, others in mid-1985, with publication late in 1986.)

Despite its flaws, this is a volume worth consulting. Once one had been warned of the potential inaccuracies -- and the fact that several of the essays have been overtaken by events, it is possible to find a wealth of information about and interpretation of politics in Africa over the past quarter century.

Political developments in individual African countries can be remarkably similar or remarkably different. All (except Ethiopia and Liberia) were colonies of Europe. All (except Somalia) are multinational states, with multiple languages and dialects, various religions, competing customs and legal traditions and burgeoning populations. All (except South Africa and, to some extent, Zimbabwe), are non-industrialized, economically underdeveloped, and lacking the capability to feed themselves.

There are some success stories. The Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Kenya have been politically stable and have to one degree or another been able to press ahead economically.

But as long as other African states persist in statist “solutions” to their economic and demographic problems, such as forced collectivization of agriculture, stagnation and poverty are inevitable results.

It took Europe and North America hundreds of years to rise from the grime and contagion of the Middle Ages to the political stability and economic prosperity they enjoy today. It was surely too much to expect that the fledgling African nations could do the same in less than a generation.

What the next 25, 50, or a hundred years will bring is anybody’s guess, but the story of sub-Saharan Africa since independence cautions us to be pessimistic.

Richard Sincere is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Richard M. Weaver Fellow.