Last weekend I covered the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., for The Metro Herald and for my two blogs, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts and the one you are reading.
Over the two days I was there, I had several opportunities to speak with authors who were selling and inscribing their books for the 10,000 or so attendees from around the United States.
I asked each author to give me an "elevator speech": introduce himself (they all turned out to be male, but that was not by design), describe the book, and explain why a viewer or listener will want to buy the book.
Among the authors I recorded were the chairman of the Cato Institute, Robert Levy; the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist; former White House speech writer Matt Latimer; and 14-year-old wunderkind Jonathan Krohn. You'll see the others in the list below, in alphabetical order.
John Fund, on the revised and updated edition of his book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy:
Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, on his book Grandma's Not Shovel-Ready!, an illustrated account of the Tea Party 9/12 March on Washington in September 2009:
Jonathan Krohn, the loquacious teenaged author of Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back:
Former presidential speech writer Matt Latimer has written a memoir about his time in the George W. Bush administration called Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor:
Bob Levy is co-author, with Chip Mellor, of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom:
Political activist Grover Norquist has written a book about the "Leave Us Alone Coalition" entitled, naturally, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives:
Finally, Heritage Foundation constitutional scholar Matthew Spalding is the author of We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future:
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
'Shattered Mirrors,' by Monroe Price
This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, September 25, 1989.
Can our civil rights survive AIDS?
SHATTERED MIRRORS: OUR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE AIDS ERA
By Monroe Price
Harvard University Press
$19.95, l60 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE
In “Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era,” Monroe Price, dean of the law school at Yeshiva University, takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore values and behavior during the AIDS years.
Though the topic is specifically AIDS, this slim volume actually contains a wide-ranging reflection upon the sources of contemporary American culture. It also focuses on the contradictory forces that influence our society and the paradoxes that ensue.
Mr. Price argues that AIDS has had an irreversible, if sometimes unapparent, impact upon our culture. To some this might seem to be an irrefutable assertion. Indeed, since millions of people may be carrying the AIDS virus (HIV) and many thousands of those are likely to become ill and die from the disease, the reverberations from AIDS are being felt widely and deeply However, Mr. Price’s argument rests upon an assumption that AIDS, either as an illness or as a social phenomenon, has been much more pervasive than is actually the case.
Because of this faulty assumption, one of the two main themes explored in” Shattered Mirrors” — whether the First Amendment can survive the health crisis — seems misguided. The other major theme, which, appropriately for a lawyer, focuses on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection (primarily under the 14th Amendment), travels on much firmer ground.
Mr. Price asserts that “the AIDS crisis has jolted our confidence” in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, which ‘gives the nod to the winner in ideology in cultural styles, and in advocacy of various modes of consumption” (that is, in political speech, artistic and literary speech, and commercial speech). Insofar as this marketplace of ideas is “unfettered, it has produced cultural ideas and habits that are a risk to the public’s health.”
Because the government has seen fit to offer advice and counsel on personal behavior during the AIDS crisis, and may in the future, if it has not already done so, join forces with organized religious groups in an effort to influence cultural norms, Mr. Price believes that First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press are threatened.
This assertion deserves much scrutiny, Certainly, we already have seen some self-censorship in the media: James Bond has fewer ladies to love, condoms are used to comic effect in movies and on television, rock musicians sing about delaying sexual gratification. There has been, fortunately, no attempt by the state to coerce such censorship. It has been a marketing decision. If Hollywood believes that sex doesn’t sell as well as it used to, let it act on that belief. Hollywood could, after all, be entirely mistaken and too cautious.
The government’s entry into the AIDS debate, and into an educational role (aimed both at children and adults), is not significantly different from the government’s role in public discussions or education on other issues.
To support his assertions that AIDS poses a threat to traditional First Amendment values and protections, Mr. Price invokes an “AIDS-as-war” simile that simply does not wash. AIDS is not comparable to the Black Death, to the influenza epidemic of 1918, or to belligerent attacks by a foreign power. The disease is quite difficult to transmit, far less contagious than influenza or the bubonic plague.
Indeed, the numbers of people affected —at least in the United States, which is the sole focus of this study — are far narrower than such comparisons suppose. There has not been, and if Michael Fumento is correct, there will not be, the long-anticipated breakout of the disease into the larger population beyond the two groups that have been primarily affected, homosexual men and intravenous drug users.
Because of this, however, Mr. Price has a much stronger argument when he says that the AIDS crisis poses a threat to the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Two groups of people, long marginalized by society turn out to be those most affected by a deadly disease. There are attempts by other citizens — including national leaders — to play upon archaic prejudices in order to isolate these groups even more.
Featuring Congressional Record screeds by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, this movement takes special aim at homosexual men, mostly because — unlike intravenous drug users, who tend to come from the underclass and the politically irrelevant — the homosexual community is large, organized and affluent. To the New Right, the homosexual community and its allies pose a threat to hallowed values. Add to this the hysteria whipped up by political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, and we have a recipe for a civil-liberties disaster.
These trends explain why, as Mr. Price argues, “one of the greatest dangers of AIDS to the national consciousness is the threat to the principle, so arduously achieved, that baseless discrimination should be officially condemned and that pnvate biases must not have public expression.”
In a passage that has relevance far beyond the realm of public-health concerns, Mr Price notes that “the constitutional notion of equal protection is complex, though the term is often invoked. We do not live in a system in which some constitutional talisman tells us the ‘right’ method of distributing wealth or health.
“Ours is, for better or for worse, s society that presumes, indeed thrives on, inequities that arise not out of the denial of opportunity itself but out of the differences in the way opportunity is seized. We know that the Constitution does not mean that every person will fare equally well, Yet, when we evaluate a course of government action — at least according to Constitutional traditions — we must ask whether a higher level of scrutiny ought to be exercised because of the very nature of the risk groups affected by the AIDS crisis.”
Citing Justice Harlan Stone, Mr. Price asserts that just as racial minorities can be identified if they are targets of discrimination. “those at risk of obtaining AIDS are subject to the kind of ‘prejudice against discrete and insular minorities’ that tends to affect the operation of political processes in a manner contrary to our basic values.” Mr. Price’s warning from all this: “We should be particularly suspicious when government approach disadvantages a group which, for longstanding reasons, those in control of the legislative process may seek to injure.”
As might be expected, Mr. Price praises the recommendation from the Watkins Commission
— the President’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome — that Congress should forbid discrimination against those who have AIDS or who are perceived to carry the AIDS virus. President Bush has endorsed this approach. It has become clear in recent years that AIDS-phobia has been used as a thin veil to justify anti-homosexual discrimination in areas where such discrimination is patently unjustified. (Indeed, one must wonder if it ever is justified.)
While these legal and constitutional issues make up the core of Monroe Price’s book, the author has collected many readable anecdotes, microportraits of our culture on the cusp of the l990s. Although some of his arguments fall short of expectations, Mr. Price raises a number of questions that deserve further exploration. In fact, one could read this book not as a definitive description of “identity and community in the AIDS era,” but as a memorandum of suggestions for future research.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.
Can our civil rights survive AIDS?
SHATTERED MIRRORS: OUR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE AIDS ERA
By Monroe Price
Harvard University Press
$19.95, l60 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE
In “Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era,” Monroe Price, dean of the law school at Yeshiva University, takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore values and behavior during the AIDS years.
Though the topic is specifically AIDS, this slim volume actually contains a wide-ranging reflection upon the sources of contemporary American culture. It also focuses on the contradictory forces that influence our society and the paradoxes that ensue.
Mr. Price argues that AIDS has had an irreversible, if sometimes unapparent, impact upon our culture. To some this might seem to be an irrefutable assertion. Indeed, since millions of people may be carrying the AIDS virus (HIV) and many thousands of those are likely to become ill and die from the disease, the reverberations from AIDS are being felt widely and deeply However, Mr. Price’s argument rests upon an assumption that AIDS, either as an illness or as a social phenomenon, has been much more pervasive than is actually the case.
Because of this faulty assumption, one of the two main themes explored in” Shattered Mirrors” — whether the First Amendment can survive the health crisis — seems misguided. The other major theme, which, appropriately for a lawyer, focuses on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection (primarily under the 14th Amendment), travels on much firmer ground.
Mr. Price asserts that “the AIDS crisis has jolted our confidence” in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, which ‘gives the nod to the winner in ideology in cultural styles, and in advocacy of various modes of consumption” (that is, in political speech, artistic and literary speech, and commercial speech). Insofar as this marketplace of ideas is “unfettered, it has produced cultural ideas and habits that are a risk to the public’s health.”
Because the government has seen fit to offer advice and counsel on personal behavior during the AIDS crisis, and may in the future, if it has not already done so, join forces with organized religious groups in an effort to influence cultural norms, Mr. Price believes that First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press are threatened.
This assertion deserves much scrutiny, Certainly, we already have seen some self-censorship in the media: James Bond has fewer ladies to love, condoms are used to comic effect in movies and on television, rock musicians sing about delaying sexual gratification. There has been, fortunately, no attempt by the state to coerce such censorship. It has been a marketing decision. If Hollywood believes that sex doesn’t sell as well as it used to, let it act on that belief. Hollywood could, after all, be entirely mistaken and too cautious.
The government’s entry into the AIDS debate, and into an educational role (aimed both at children and adults), is not significantly different from the government’s role in public discussions or education on other issues.
To support his assertions that AIDS poses a threat to traditional First Amendment values and protections, Mr. Price invokes an “AIDS-as-war” simile that simply does not wash. AIDS is not comparable to the Black Death, to the influenza epidemic of 1918, or to belligerent attacks by a foreign power. The disease is quite difficult to transmit, far less contagious than influenza or the bubonic plague.
Indeed, the numbers of people affected —at least in the United States, which is the sole focus of this study — are far narrower than such comparisons suppose. There has not been, and if Michael Fumento is correct, there will not be, the long-anticipated breakout of the disease into the larger population beyond the two groups that have been primarily affected, homosexual men and intravenous drug users.
Because of this, however, Mr. Price has a much stronger argument when he says that the AIDS crisis poses a threat to the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Two groups of people, long marginalized by society turn out to be those most affected by a deadly disease. There are attempts by other citizens — including national leaders — to play upon archaic prejudices in order to isolate these groups even more.
Featuring Congressional Record screeds by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, this movement takes special aim at homosexual men, mostly because — unlike intravenous drug users, who tend to come from the underclass and the politically irrelevant — the homosexual community is large, organized and affluent. To the New Right, the homosexual community and its allies pose a threat to hallowed values. Add to this the hysteria whipped up by political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, and we have a recipe for a civil-liberties disaster.
These trends explain why, as Mr. Price argues, “one of the greatest dangers of AIDS to the national consciousness is the threat to the principle, so arduously achieved, that baseless discrimination should be officially condemned and that pnvate biases must not have public expression.”
In a passage that has relevance far beyond the realm of public-health concerns, Mr Price notes that “the constitutional notion of equal protection is complex, though the term is often invoked. We do not live in a system in which some constitutional talisman tells us the ‘right’ method of distributing wealth or health.
“Ours is, for better or for worse, s society that presumes, indeed thrives on, inequities that arise not out of the denial of opportunity itself but out of the differences in the way opportunity is seized. We know that the Constitution does not mean that every person will fare equally well, Yet, when we evaluate a course of government action — at least according to Constitutional traditions — we must ask whether a higher level of scrutiny ought to be exercised because of the very nature of the risk groups affected by the AIDS crisis.”
Citing Justice Harlan Stone, Mr. Price asserts that just as racial minorities can be identified if they are targets of discrimination. “those at risk of obtaining AIDS are subject to the kind of ‘prejudice against discrete and insular minorities’ that tends to affect the operation of political processes in a manner contrary to our basic values.” Mr. Price’s warning from all this: “We should be particularly suspicious when government approach disadvantages a group which, for longstanding reasons, those in control of the legislative process may seek to injure.”
As might be expected, Mr. Price praises the recommendation from the Watkins Commission
— the President’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome — that Congress should forbid discrimination against those who have AIDS or who are perceived to carry the AIDS virus. President Bush has endorsed this approach. It has become clear in recent years that AIDS-phobia has been used as a thin veil to justify anti-homosexual discrimination in areas where such discrimination is patently unjustified. (Indeed, one must wonder if it ever is justified.) While these legal and constitutional issues make up the core of Monroe Price’s book, the author has collected many readable anecdotes, microportraits of our culture on the cusp of the l990s. Although some of his arguments fall short of expectations, Mr. Price raises a number of questions that deserve further exploration. In fact, one could read this book not as a definitive description of “identity and community in the AIDS era,” but as a memorandum of suggestions for future research.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
News from the Book Review World
Jordan Michael Smith reports in this week's Jewish Daily Forward that a new book review journal will be launched next week (with February 15 the scheduled publication date). The new periodical will be called the Jewish Review of Books, and, from the illustration that accompanies the Forward article, it looks like its format and appearance will be much like the New York Review of Books.
Smith writes:
(Cross-posted to Rick Sincere News and Thoughts)
Smith writes:
A quarterly magazine devoted to Jewish literary and political affairs, the JRB boasts heavy hitters on its editorial board, such as Michael Walzer, Leon Wieseltier and Ruth Wisse. An oversized, stapled newsprint magazine like the New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, the JRB will open with an issue that features contributions from Ron Rosenbaum, Adam Kirsch and Harvey Pekar....Given today's unsteady, uncertain environment for print media, launching a new publication -- especially a journal of ideas rather than, say, a gossip, sports, or entertainment magazine -- requires a large measure of bravery and even more confidence. Not to say chutzpah.
Abraham Socher, the editor ... took a leave from his spot as chair of the Jewish studies program at Oberlin College’s department of religion to launch the JRB. He’s both optimistic about the future of journals of ideas and opinions and well aware of the pitfalls that await any print publication in the 21st century.
“Magazines of ideas, which are willing to address a subject at as much length as is called for, which are willing to let writers be writerly, can remain print publications,” Socher said. Those readers attracted to long-form writing prefer to read their lengthier articles in print and are willing to pay for the privilege, Socher believes. “The great threat to print may be a far greater threat to newspapers and news magazines than it is to literary journals, journals of opinions and policy journals,” he said. The print JRB will be complemented by a Web presence before the end of February.
(Cross-posted to Rick Sincere News and Thoughts)
Friday, February 12, 2010
A Digression for VaBook10
Let me interrupt the usual format of this web log to point to a couple of exciting (at least from my perspective) developments.
First, the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book is coming up next month. From Wednesday, March 17, through Sunday, March 21, dozens of authors representing a wide range of genres will be in Charlottesville (at multiple venues including City Council chambers, various bookstores, and the Culbreth Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia) to discuss their books. Examples include Karen Spears Zacharias, Bob Zellner, and Elizabeth Zelvin -- and those are just the Z's. (A complete alphabetical listing can be found here, and listings by topic -- crime wave, family, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and publishing -- are also available.)
It will be my pleasure to be one of four guest book bloggers for the Festival. The others are Elizabeth McCullough (Cville Words), Bethanne Patrick (The Book Studio), and John Reinhart (Biblio's Bloggins).
I am currently reading one the books whose author will be speaking at the Festival, and I hope to publish a fresh review of that book here soon.
I also hope that, during the Festival, I will be able to conduct short video interviews with some of the authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book, as I did at the National Press Club last November with Frank Aukofer, Joan Biskupic, Ann Coulter, Haynes Johnson, James Reston, Deborah Tannen, Henry Waxman, and others.
For those so inclined, there is a fan page for the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book on Facebook, and a rather inactive Twitter feed for it, too. (Don't forget the hash tag, #vabook.)
In other book review news, I will be hosting the Book Review Blog Carnival on March 28. The current carnival is at Kitsch-Slapped. The next edition is scheduled to appear on Valentine's Day (February 14) at Mysteries in Paradise. (The 35th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival, hosted by Home School Dad, led off with a mention of my review of Rose Marie's memoir, Hold the Roses.)
A news conference to announce some of the events and activities anticipated at the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book was scheduled for February 10 but postponed because of the inclement weather (that is, the largest snow dump on Central Virginia in recent memory). It has been rescheduled for February 18 and I plan to be there.
If all goes well, the next post you will find here will be a book review, old or new.
It will be my pleasure to be one of four guest book bloggers for the Festival. The others are Elizabeth McCullough (Cville Words), Bethanne Patrick (The Book Studio), and John Reinhart (Biblio's Bloggins).
I am currently reading one the books whose author will be speaking at the Festival, and I hope to publish a fresh review of that book here soon.
I also hope that, during the Festival, I will be able to conduct short video interviews with some of the authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book, as I did at the National Press Club last November with Frank Aukofer, Joan Biskupic, Ann Coulter, Haynes Johnson, James Reston, Deborah Tannen, Henry Waxman, and others.
For those so inclined, there is a fan page for the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book on Facebook, and a rather inactive Twitter feed for it, too. (Don't forget the hash tag, #vabook.)
In other book review news, I will be hosting the Book Review Blog Carnival on March 28. The current carnival is at Kitsch-Slapped. The next edition is scheduled to appear on Valentine's Day (February 14) at Mysteries in Paradise. (The 35th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival, hosted by Home School Dad, led off with a mention of my review of Rose Marie's memoir, Hold the Roses.)
A news conference to announce some of the events and activities anticipated at the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book was scheduled for February 10 but postponed because of the inclement weather (that is, the largest snow dump on Central Virginia in recent memory). It has been rescheduled for February 18 and I plan to be there.
If all goes well, the next post you will find here will be a book review, old or new.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
'Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China'
Today's news reports about controversial arms sales to Taiwan from the United States -- resulting in a negative reaction from China -- sent me looking for this book review, which appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, March 2, 1988.
RICHARD SINCERE
Let’s Not Spite Our Allies to Appease Beijing
Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China, by A. James Gregor, Ethics and Public Public Center, Washington, D.C., $7.95, paperback, 111 pp.
American sailors in the Persian Gulf today are in danger, partly because of the sale of Silkworm missiles from the People’s Republic of China to Iran. The Silkworms, like our Stinger missiles, are devastatingly accurate weapons for destroying ships — including the oil tankers and merchant ships that belong to countries that have not taken sides in the war between Iraq and Iran. There is broad agreement that no outsiders should sell such modern weapons to either Iraq or Iran. Yet China continues to sell the Silkworms.
This brings home to us in a sharp and timely fashion why the United States should be wary of pursuing closer military ties to China. The same point is made in a scholarly way in the new book Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China by Prof. A. James Gregor of the University of California at Berkeley.
His argument is fairly straightforward: Essentially, the strategy seems simple enough — the most significant military and political threat to U.S. interests in the Western Pacific comes from the Soviet Union; the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a clear adversary of the Soviet Union; this creates a convergence of U.S. and Chinese interests in the region; therefore, the United States should provide military assistance to the Chinese.
Gregor shows persuasively that this syllogism of appealing simplicity has a very real shortcoming: it quite likely is wrong. Instead of syllogistic simplicity, the triangular political and military relationship between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in the Western Pacific is far more complex than some of our strategic thinkers seem willing to acknowledge. Some military planners seem to take a perverse glee in the idea of arming China as a way to “get” the Soviet Union, a glee that is glaringly shortsighted.
In Arming the Dragon, Gregor notes that the existence of Communist China alone complicates Soviet strategic planning. Half a million Soviet troops are tied down at the Chinese border. Were there no threat from China, those troops would be free to make mischief in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere in the world. It does not follow, argues Gregor, that the United States should sell arms or give military aid to Beijing, particularly since U.S. allies in the region believe China is a greater threat to them than the Soviet Union is.
It is clear that as long as Moscow and Beijing are at odds with each other, there is little chance that the Soviet border forces will be freed to unbalance the delicate equilibrium between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Thus, the United States should pursue political, economic and cultural rapprochement with China. But does it mean that closer military ties should be sought as well?
No, not at all. The selling of arms to the PRC, the provision of military technology, and the training of members of the People’s Liberation Army in the West are misguided efforts. Policies such as these generate suspicion and ill will among our allies in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, but also Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan. When a tiny nation like Singapore, for instance, feels that the PRC threatens it more than the Soviet Union, and that the United States tilts toward the PRC, it may be more inclined to seek Soviet support or at least to resist Soviet overtures less forcefully.
Our friends in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan deserve to have their needs and perceptions treated with respect in Washington. A cavalier attitude that places Beijing’s desires above those of our other, more reliable friends and allies will, in the long run, work against U.S. interests. The Silkworm missiles provide just one such example. With a broader perspective, Gregor’s book teaches that lesson quite clearly.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy analyst and writer.
RICHARD SINCERE
Let’s Not Spite Our Allies to Appease Beijing
Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China, by A. James Gregor, Ethics and Public Public Center, Washington, D.C., $7.95, paperback, 111 pp.
American sailors in the Persian Gulf today are in danger, partly because of the sale of Silkworm missiles from the People’s Republic of China to Iran. The Silkworms, like our Stinger missiles, are devastatingly accurate weapons for destroying ships — including the oil tankers and merchant ships that belong to countries that have not taken sides in the war between Iraq and Iran. There is broad agreement that no outsiders should sell such modern weapons to either Iraq or Iran. Yet China continues to sell the Silkworms.
This brings home to us in a sharp and timely fashion why the United States should be wary of pursuing closer military ties to China. The same point is made in a scholarly way in the new book Arming the Dragon: U.S. Security Ties with the People’s Republic of China by Prof. A. James Gregor of the University of California at Berkeley.
His argument is fairly straightforward: Essentially, the strategy seems simple enough — the most significant military and political threat to U.S. interests in the Western Pacific comes from the Soviet Union; the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a clear adversary of the Soviet Union; this creates a convergence of U.S. and Chinese interests in the region; therefore, the United States should provide military assistance to the Chinese.
Gregor shows persuasively that this syllogism of appealing simplicity has a very real shortcoming: it quite likely is wrong. Instead of syllogistic simplicity, the triangular political and military relationship between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in the Western Pacific is far more complex than some of our strategic thinkers seem willing to acknowledge. Some military planners seem to take a perverse glee in the idea of arming China as a way to “get” the Soviet Union, a glee that is glaringly shortsighted.
In Arming the Dragon, Gregor notes that the existence of Communist China alone complicates Soviet strategic planning. Half a million Soviet troops are tied down at the Chinese border. Were there no threat from China, those troops would be free to make mischief in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere in the world. It does not follow, argues Gregor, that the United States should sell arms or give military aid to Beijing, particularly since U.S. allies in the region believe China is a greater threat to them than the Soviet Union is.
It is clear that as long as Moscow and Beijing are at odds with each other, there is little chance that the Soviet border forces will be freed to unbalance the delicate equilibrium between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in Europe. Thus, the United States should pursue political, economic and cultural rapprochement with China. But does it mean that closer military ties should be sought as well?
No, not at all. The selling of arms to the PRC, the provision of military technology, and the training of members of the People’s Liberation Army in the West are misguided efforts. Policies such as these generate suspicion and ill will among our allies in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, but also Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Japan. When a tiny nation like Singapore, for instance, feels that the PRC threatens it more than the Soviet Union, and that the United States tilts toward the PRC, it may be more inclined to seek Soviet support or at least to resist Soviet overtures less forcefully.
Our friends in the Western Pacific — particularly the Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan deserve to have their needs and perceptions treated with respect in Washington. A cavalier attitude that places Beijing’s desires above those of our other, more reliable friends and allies will, in the long run, work against U.S. interests. The Silkworm missiles provide just one such example. With a broader perspective, Gregor’s book teaches that lesson quite clearly.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy analyst and writer.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
'Mad Dreams, Saving Graces'
Although I believe this book review was published in the International Freedom Review in 1989 or 1990, I have been unable to find that particular volume in my library. What did turn up in a file box was a typescript that shows its age simply by the fact that it was produced on a dot-matrix printer.
Mad Dreams, Saving Graces – Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy, by Michael T. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1989. Pages: 270. Price: $19.95 (hardcover).
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
For the Polish people, the month of September 1989 resonates with history — past, present, and future. It was fifty years ago this month that Hitler’s forces, in cooperation with Stalin’s Red Army, dismembered Poland less than twenty years after it had achieved independence upon the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. September 1989 will be the first full month in more than forty years that Poland’s government is headed by a non-Communist, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The new prime minister is an unassuming intellectual, a newspaper editor who only a few years ago was jailed by the order of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who last month requested that Mazowiecki form a government under the umbrella of Solidarity, the free trade union movement banned from 1981 until last year. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but given the rapidity of events that were unpredictable even eighteen months ago, for many people, optimism hard to avoid.
Michael T. Kaufman, an American reporter born of Polish parents in exile just before the Second World War, returned to his ancestral land as a New York Times correspondent in 1984.
What he discovered was a country living in conspiracy -- consciously, surreptitiously, historically living in a conspiracy designed to show that no totalitarian government whether Nazi orCommunist can keep the Polish people down.
Kaufman’s account of the underground Solidarity movement in the years following the declaration of martial law in December 1981 is full of tales of personal heroism. The heroes, however, are modest. What they do, they say, is only what is necessary to maintain their own dignity and that of their nation. Whether running from gun-toting secret police or editing underground newspapers, the conspirators felt that their conspiracy was nothing out of the ordinary, only the honest efforts of honest people to keep their heads above water. In Polish, writes Kaufman, “the word conspiracy has absolutely no negative connotation. A Pole will say, ‘I was a conspirator,’ in the same way a Frenchman might say, ‘I was with the wartime resistance.” It is a matter of pride.
It has become a commonplace among both travel writers arid political analysts to describe a nation as being filled with paradox. For Poland, however, this cliché is undoubtedly true. Kaufman writes that Poland’s “social landscape” is dominated by “tragic though sometimes ludicrous paradoxes. Almost everyone in Poland knew that what was economically necessary was politically impossible, that what was required was forbidden. The government knew this, the party knew this, the nation knew it.” He cites a Polish writer whom he had called absurdist in the tradition of Eugene Ionesco. The writer’s reaction to this characterization? “I am a realist like Zola. It is just Poland that is absurd.”
In Poland, merely not to lose is to win. This seems a paradox to us, because, as Kaufman explains, “For those brought up in pragmatic Western cultures, a system that accepts stalemate as the best possible substitute for success seems like a Wonderland absurdity.” Kaufman reminds us of the modest aspirations apparent in the Polish national anthem, which unlike national hymns that lay claim to God’s bounty or military victories, merely states, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela
" [“Poland has not yet perished”].
Poland is a police state like other Communist countries. It is just that the police are not quite so effective at stifling dissent and the underground conspiracy. The police are held in widespread disdain. One common joke in Warsaw asks: “Why do policemen here walk in threes?” Answer: “Well, the first is there because he can read, the second, because he can add, and the third, to keep tabs on the two intellectuals.” And are Poles proud that one of their countrymen, Feliks Dzierzynski, founded the Soviet secret police (forerunner of today’s KGB) arid participated in Stalin’s bloody purges? Well, in a manner of speaking. In one story about the monument to Dzierzynski in Warsaw, “an old peasant visits the statue, crosses himself, and tells a passerby that Dzierzynski was one of the greatest Poles who ever lived. When the stunned stranger asks why, the peasant tells him, ‘Because he killed more Communists and more Russians than vodka and winter.”
Poles are more aware of their history than perhaps any other European society. A university lecturer told Kaufman that “everywhere else, people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to our mothers and fathers and what is happening to us and our friends.”
What is happening now is the gradual transformation of a Communist police state into a democratic republic. The underground movement that arose spontaneously after martial law was declared in 1981 was not violent but intellectual. Said Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak, “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.” The underground consisted of “firms” of people engaged in political propaganda activities: newspapers, books, plays, musical performances, debates. The result was stimulation of political ideas and, finally, forcing the government to hold genuinely free elections in which Solidarity candidates won every seat that they contested.
Although Kaufman’s book necessarily ends its chronology of events some months before the most recent occurrences, it is interesting to note his guarded optimism about Poland’s future. Polish hopes for economic rescue by the West, he says, are “politically unrealistic. Some limited growth in capital from abroad [is] probable, particularly if state and society established a truce, but full-scale rescue by a consortium of benefactors seem[s] a chimera.” Moreover, the Polish example poses a threat to Soviet domination over its own republics, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where clamor for independence is loud today, and in the Ukraine and elsewhere farther down the road. How far will Gorbachev allow the Poles to go before saying “Enough!”?
It is far too early to make an accurate assessment of Poland’s economic and political future. What is clear to me, at least, is that the hard-won status now enjoyed by Solidarity is Solidarity’s to lose. Economic or political failure is the unfortunate likely outcome for a government made up of people who have never before held responsible public offices. The hard choices necessary to reform the Polish economy will come down most severely on Solidarity’s own constituents, the workers: higher food prices, layoffs, closing plants and industries. In fact, it may be necessary, on the basis of economic realities, to close down the inefficient and archaic Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which besides being totally non-competitive with foreign shipbuilders, is the birthplace of Solidarity. What an ironic, paradoxical grace note to accompany Solidarity’s triumph!
Richard Sincere, a Washington-based issues analyst, is an American of Polish descent.
Mad Dreams, Saving Graces – Poland: A Nation in Conspiracy, by Michael T. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1989. Pages: 270. Price: $19.95 (hardcover).
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
For the Polish people, the month of September 1989 resonates with history — past, present, and future. It was fifty years ago this month that Hitler’s forces, in cooperation with Stalin’s Red Army, dismembered Poland less than twenty years after it had achieved independence upon the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. September 1989 will be the first full month in more than forty years that Poland’s government is headed by a non-Communist, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. The new prime minister is an unassuming intellectual, a newspaper editor who only a few years ago was jailed by the order of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the man who last month requested that Mazowiecki form a government under the umbrella of Solidarity, the free trade union movement banned from 1981 until last year. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but given the rapidity of events that were unpredictable even eighteen months ago, for many people, optimism hard to avoid.
Michael T. Kaufman, an American reporter born of Polish parents in exile just before the Second World War, returned to his ancestral land as a New York Times correspondent in 1984.
What he discovered was a country living in conspiracy -- consciously, surreptitiously, historically living in a conspiracy designed to show that no totalitarian government whether Nazi orCommunist can keep the Polish people down.
Kaufman’s account of the underground Solidarity movement in the years following the declaration of martial law in December 1981 is full of tales of personal heroism. The heroes, however, are modest. What they do, they say, is only what is necessary to maintain their own dignity and that of their nation. Whether running from gun-toting secret police or editing underground newspapers, the conspirators felt that their conspiracy was nothing out of the ordinary, only the honest efforts of honest people to keep their heads above water. In Polish, writes Kaufman, “the word conspiracy has absolutely no negative connotation. A Pole will say, ‘I was a conspirator,’ in the same way a Frenchman might say, ‘I was with the wartime resistance.” It is a matter of pride.
It has become a commonplace among both travel writers arid political analysts to describe a nation as being filled with paradox. For Poland, however, this cliché is undoubtedly true. Kaufman writes that Poland’s “social landscape” is dominated by “tragic though sometimes ludicrous paradoxes. Almost everyone in Poland knew that what was economically necessary was politically impossible, that what was required was forbidden. The government knew this, the party knew this, the nation knew it.” He cites a Polish writer whom he had called absurdist in the tradition of Eugene Ionesco. The writer’s reaction to this characterization? “I am a realist like Zola. It is just Poland that is absurd.”
In Poland, merely not to lose is to win. This seems a paradox to us, because, as Kaufman explains, “For those brought up in pragmatic Western cultures, a system that accepts stalemate as the best possible substitute for success seems like a Wonderland absurdity.” Kaufman reminds us of the modest aspirations apparent in the Polish national anthem, which unlike national hymns that lay claim to God’s bounty or military victories, merely states, “Jeszcze Polska nie zginela
" [“Poland has not yet perished”]. Poland is a police state like other Communist countries. It is just that the police are not quite so effective at stifling dissent and the underground conspiracy. The police are held in widespread disdain. One common joke in Warsaw asks: “Why do policemen here walk in threes?” Answer: “Well, the first is there because he can read, the second, because he can add, and the third, to keep tabs on the two intellectuals.” And are Poles proud that one of their countrymen, Feliks Dzierzynski, founded the Soviet secret police (forerunner of today’s KGB) arid participated in Stalin’s bloody purges? Well, in a manner of speaking. In one story about the monument to Dzierzynski in Warsaw, “an old peasant visits the statue, crosses himself, and tells a passerby that Dzierzynski was one of the greatest Poles who ever lived. When the stunned stranger asks why, the peasant tells him, ‘Because he killed more Communists and more Russians than vodka and winter.”
Poles are more aware of their history than perhaps any other European society. A university lecturer told Kaufman that “everywhere else, people think history is something that happens to strangers, while here it is what happens to our mothers and fathers and what is happening to us and our friends.”
What is happening now is the gradual transformation of a Communist police state into a democratic republic. The underground movement that arose spontaneously after martial law was declared in 1981 was not violent but intellectual. Said Solidarity leader Zbigniew Bujak, “Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters.” The underground consisted of “firms” of people engaged in political propaganda activities: newspapers, books, plays, musical performances, debates. The result was stimulation of political ideas and, finally, forcing the government to hold genuinely free elections in which Solidarity candidates won every seat that they contested.
Although Kaufman’s book necessarily ends its chronology of events some months before the most recent occurrences, it is interesting to note his guarded optimism about Poland’s future. Polish hopes for economic rescue by the West, he says, are “politically unrealistic. Some limited growth in capital from abroad [is] probable, particularly if state and society established a truce, but full-scale rescue by a consortium of benefactors seem[s] a chimera.” Moreover, the Polish example poses a threat to Soviet domination over its own republics, particularly Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, where clamor for independence is loud today, and in the Ukraine and elsewhere farther down the road. How far will Gorbachev allow the Poles to go before saying “Enough!”?
It is far too early to make an accurate assessment of Poland’s economic and political future. What is clear to me, at least, is that the hard-won status now enjoyed by Solidarity is Solidarity’s to lose. Economic or political failure is the unfortunate likely outcome for a government made up of people who have never before held responsible public offices. The hard choices necessary to reform the Polish economy will come down most severely on Solidarity’s own constituents, the workers: higher food prices, layoffs, closing plants and industries. In fact, it may be necessary, on the basis of economic realities, to close down the inefficient and archaic Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, which besides being totally non-competitive with foreign shipbuilders, is the birthplace of Solidarity. What an ironic, paradoxical grace note to accompany Solidarity’s triumph!
Richard Sincere, a Washington-based issues analyst, is an American of Polish descent.
Monday, January 25, 2010
'The Wayward Professor' by Joel J. Gold
I found the typescript for this book review in a long-neglected file box. It was written in 1989 or 1990 but has not been previously published.
“Hail the Wayward Professor!”
A Book Review by Richard Sincere
The Wayward Professor by Joel J. Gold; illustrations by Vivian S. Hixson. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Publication date: April 1, 1989. 191 pages; $14.95, cloth.
A delightful new book from a most unlikely publisher — the University Press of Kansas — promises to be a good bet for the beach-reading set this summer.
Readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education (there are more of us than you might imagine!) are already familiar with the humorous essays of Joel J. Gold, a fiftysomething professor of English literature at the University of Kansas. Gold, who specializes in eighteenth century works by rakes and rogues, has delivered a rakish and roguish look at academic life and politics, foreign travel, and even the CIA and the IRS.
Gold approaches what might in other circumstances be mundane, even boring, subjects with wry panache — late papers, faculty dinner parties, dealing with insurance adjustors.
Take, for instance, his story about “smuggling” cut-rate liquor from Missouri to Kansas (which was a “dry” state). Gold begins the essay thus: “I would like to tell you about one of my earliest adventures in Kansas when I boldly outwitted the law, smuggled contraband liquor across the state line, and raced down the Kansas Turnpike with the aplomb of Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. I would like to tell you that story. Unfortunately, what actually happened will sound more like Don Knotts in The Panicky Professor.”
Not a few of the stories hinge on liquor, its uses and abuses. As an eighteenth- century scholar, Gold had discovered an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin, who claimed to have brought back to life several flies that had been preserved in a bottle of madeira. His curiosity got the better of him, so Gold the humanities professor sought out (some rather wary) biology professors to help him try a little experiment to verify Franklin’s strange claim. The results? Inconclusive.
Then there was the “Naked Lunch" party sponsored by some graduate students to honor visiting author William Burroughs. Under the gaze of guests under the influence of a potent punch (four parts gin to one part creme de menthe) that “carried an overwhelming taste of mothballs,” a living centerpiece lay among the canapes. Periodically, this non-speaking young man would rise, enter the men’s room, and emerge wearing one less piece of clothing than before. By the end of the afternoon, he was fully unclothed. It took more than a few moments for the guests, sensorily deprived by “Essence of Mothballs,” to see the connection: naked centerpiece = Naked Lunch (Burroughs’ most famous novel)!
Gold’s tales of travel abroad are equally compelling and quite amusing. Anyone who has had an extended stay in Europe for business or academic reasons will be able to identify with the plights of Professor Gold and his family. There was the time, driving through Italy, that the family car broke down. As it happened, Mrs. Gold was driving at the time, leading Professor Gold to repeat wearily and haplessly to the nearly uncomprehending Italian mechanic, “Mi sposi condotti.” (Roughly, “Blame my wife — she was driving!”)
This was only after the professor, rather confused, drove five times around Venice looking for the proper bridge to cross into the City of Canals, never realizing that all cars must be parked in Mestre for the passengers to embark, by boat, to Venice itself. By the third or fourth pass, smiling Italians were waving and applauding the little Gold vehicle.
Gold has not had much luck with cars. When he purchased a very nice automobile in Europe, he decided to keep it after his trip was over. He sent it across the Atlantic by ship while he returned by plane. After some time had passed, he began to worry about the car’s safe arrival. His worry was due — the car had been crushed by a load of steel girders that fell loose during the crossing. Try explaining that one to your insurance company!
Other stories relate the different methods of bureaucracy at the British Library and similar French institutions. True glimpses of humanity also are found. At a small provincial museum in England, Gold went searching for some letters by the eighteenth-century politician and satirist John Wilkes (one of the rogues in which he specializes). To his dismay, after the long train journey, he discovered that the entire box of letters consisted of photocopies of originals that were kept at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He had seen them all, But then, at the bottom of the pile, he found one that was not a photocopy. It was an original! Not only that, it was an original that no one else knew about. It was not listed in any existing index of Wilkes memorabilia. Fleetingly, Professor Gold considered purloining the letter and making himself a rich man. (Such a find could surely bring a small fortune at Sotheby’s.) His honesty got the better of him. He wrote down the letter’s contents and handed it to the librarian, explaining its value and walking away guiltless rather than famous.
It is impossible to convey the true flavor of a book of essays like this. Believe me when I say that you will laugh out loud from the moment you pick up the book. Complementing the jocularity of the text are the amusingly Thurberesque illustrations by Vivian Hixson, whose drawings often accompany Professor Gold’s work in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this age of criticism and distress over the state of the academy, it is a real pleasure to come across an academic who can rise above the fray through wit instead of venom, with wisdom instead of sophistry. With his tongue firmly in cheek, The Wayward Professor shows that Joel J. Gold is a credit to his profession. If his students leave college with just a jot of his humor, that should be enough to get them through life on an even keel.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based free-lance writer and editor.
“Hail the Wayward Professor!”
A Book Review by Richard Sincere
The Wayward Professor by Joel J. Gold; illustrations by Vivian S. Hixson. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Publication date: April 1, 1989. 191 pages; $14.95, cloth.
A delightful new book from a most unlikely publisher — the University Press of Kansas — promises to be a good bet for the beach-reading set this summer.
Readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education (there are more of us than you might imagine!) are already familiar with the humorous essays of Joel J. Gold, a fiftysomething professor of English literature at the University of Kansas. Gold, who specializes in eighteenth century works by rakes and rogues, has delivered a rakish and roguish look at academic life and politics, foreign travel, and even the CIA and the IRS.
Gold approaches what might in other circumstances be mundane, even boring, subjects with wry panache — late papers, faculty dinner parties, dealing with insurance adjustors.
Take, for instance, his story about “smuggling” cut-rate liquor from Missouri to Kansas (which was a “dry” state). Gold begins the essay thus: “I would like to tell you about one of my earliest adventures in Kansas when I boldly outwitted the law, smuggled contraband liquor across the state line, and raced down the Kansas Turnpike with the aplomb of Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. I would like to tell you that story. Unfortunately, what actually happened will sound more like Don Knotts in The Panicky Professor.”
Not a few of the stories hinge on liquor, its uses and abuses. As an eighteenth- century scholar, Gold had discovered an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin, who claimed to have brought back to life several flies that had been preserved in a bottle of madeira. His curiosity got the better of him, so Gold the humanities professor sought out (some rather wary) biology professors to help him try a little experiment to verify Franklin’s strange claim. The results? Inconclusive.
Then there was the “Naked Lunch" party sponsored by some graduate students to honor visiting author William Burroughs. Under the gaze of guests under the influence of a potent punch (four parts gin to one part creme de menthe) that “carried an overwhelming taste of mothballs,” a living centerpiece lay among the canapes. Periodically, this non-speaking young man would rise, enter the men’s room, and emerge wearing one less piece of clothing than before. By the end of the afternoon, he was fully unclothed. It took more than a few moments for the guests, sensorily deprived by “Essence of Mothballs,” to see the connection: naked centerpiece = Naked Lunch (Burroughs’ most famous novel)!
Gold’s tales of travel abroad are equally compelling and quite amusing. Anyone who has had an extended stay in Europe for business or academic reasons will be able to identify with the plights of Professor Gold and his family. There was the time, driving through Italy, that the family car broke down. As it happened, Mrs. Gold was driving at the time, leading Professor Gold to repeat wearily and haplessly to the nearly uncomprehending Italian mechanic, “Mi sposi condotti.” (Roughly, “Blame my wife — she was driving!”)
This was only after the professor, rather confused, drove five times around Venice looking for the proper bridge to cross into the City of Canals, never realizing that all cars must be parked in Mestre for the passengers to embark, by boat, to Venice itself. By the third or fourth pass, smiling Italians were waving and applauding the little Gold vehicle.
Gold has not had much luck with cars. When he purchased a very nice automobile in Europe, he decided to keep it after his trip was over. He sent it across the Atlantic by ship while he returned by plane. After some time had passed, he began to worry about the car’s safe arrival. His worry was due — the car had been crushed by a load of steel girders that fell loose during the crossing. Try explaining that one to your insurance company!
Other stories relate the different methods of bureaucracy at the British Library and similar French institutions. True glimpses of humanity also are found. At a small provincial museum in England, Gold went searching for some letters by the eighteenth-century politician and satirist John Wilkes (one of the rogues in which he specializes). To his dismay, after the long train journey, he discovered that the entire box of letters consisted of photocopies of originals that were kept at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He had seen them all, But then, at the bottom of the pile, he found one that was not a photocopy. It was an original! Not only that, it was an original that no one else knew about. It was not listed in any existing index of Wilkes memorabilia. Fleetingly, Professor Gold considered purloining the letter and making himself a rich man. (Such a find could surely bring a small fortune at Sotheby’s.) His honesty got the better of him. He wrote down the letter’s contents and handed it to the librarian, explaining its value and walking away guiltless rather than famous.
It is impossible to convey the true flavor of a book of essays like this. Believe me when I say that you will laugh out loud from the moment you pick up the book. Complementing the jocularity of the text are the amusingly Thurberesque illustrations by Vivian Hixson, whose drawings often accompany Professor Gold’s work in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this age of criticism and distress over the state of the academy, it is a real pleasure to come across an academic who can rise above the fray through wit instead of venom, with wisdom instead of sophistry. With his tongue firmly in cheek, The Wayward Professor shows that Joel J. Gold is a credit to his profession. If his students leave college with just a jot of his humor, that should be enough to get them through life on an even keel.
Richard Sincere is a Washington-based free-lance writer and editor.
'Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique'
This book review was published in Volume 3, Number 2, of International Freedom Review (Winter 1990).
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS IN ANGOLA AND MOZAMBIQUE
Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique
edited by Richard J. Bloomfield.
(Reference Publications, Inc.: Algonac, Mich., 1988. 261 pp., $24.95 hdcvr, $12.95 ppb)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
Sometimes even well-informed Americans have trouble understanding the differences between Angola and Mozambique, despite their location on opposite sides of the southern African continent. The similarities are readily apparent: Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies from the late fifteenth century until 1975. Both are poor. Both are in Africa. Both have had troubled relations with neighboring South Africa. Moreover, both have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties since independence.
However, the similarities do not go much beyond these few points, especially since after independence Angola and Mozambique have followed different paths and have come upon unique problems and opportunities. Each will have a decidedly different future.
The World Peace Foundation, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit foundation based in Boston that conducts studies of international issues,” has collected a number of essays on Angola and Mozambique in Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique, edited by Richard J. Bloomfield, the World Peace Foundation’s executive director. Bloomfield served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1978 to 1982. Strangely enough, considering Portugal’s ongoing (if uneven) ties with its former African colonies, Ambassador Bloomfield confesses In the Introduction to being “a neophyte” in the region, an odd position for a former U.S. envoy to Lisbon to invoke.
The essay contributions to this book vary in quality and substance and there is also a certain imbalance in the collection. For instance, an excellent and comprehensive survey of Mozambican history by Gillian Gunn does not have any counterpart dealing with Angolan history, a lacuna that really should have been addressed by the editor.
Moreover, as a book, this anthology is poorly produced. There are numerous typographical and editing errors, there is inconsistency in the typefaces and type-styles used, the leading (space between lines) on some pages is tighter than on others, and the text on some pages is longer than on others for no apparent reason (such as the beginning of a new section or chapter). Overall, this book gives the impression of being someone’s first effort at desktop publishing.
The contributors, for the most part, represent the best of liberal and center-left thinking on African issues. Their names are recognizable to anyone who deals with these issues frequently: Gerald Bender, Kurt Campbell, Carlos Gaspar, Kenneth Maxwell, Robert I. Rotberg, Wayne S. Smith, in addition to the previously mentioned Gillian Gunn and Richard J. Bloomfield.
In his opening essay, “The Legacy of Decolonization,” Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World at Columbia University, makes a valid criticism that many analysts of African issues often overlook because they themselves are guilty of the sin he identifies. The literature on decolonization falls into two categories, he says: either it has been “classically Africanist” or it has been “overly concerned with grand strategy—with East-West Issues and foreign interventionism.”
Consequently, the Africanists tend to see all events through the prism of “Africa” (in the abstract), undiluted by other considerations, while the other group focuses “almost exclusively on the actions of the superpowers and their allies.” Since the twain seldom meet, there is little interaction or understanding between the two groups. Rarely, Maxwell asserts, “does either side listen to the other, let alone accept that in both positions there is much truth.”
Certainly, this condition has affected the way American analysts and policymakers have approached Angola and Mozambique. There are some people who refuse to believe, for instance, that the MPLA and Frelimo (the Marxist parties ruling Angola and Mozambique) are driven by anything other than their Marxist ideology and therefore there should be no accommodation with them even in the interests of regional stability. There are others who think that the Marxist nature of the governments of Angola and Mozambique should be no cause for concern at all and that Americans should continue “business as usual.” Still others, wearing the blinders of anti-apartheid activism, think that Washington should ally itself with Luanda and Maputo against the aggressive-imperialist-racist South African state: their feeling is, “Any enemy of Pretoria is a friend of ours.”
Long-Standing Communist Ties
It is nevertheless difficult to set aside superpower considerations when dealing with Mozambique and, especially, Angola. Leaders of the future Marxist governments in Portuguese Africa were active members of the Portuguese Communist party and its allies during Portugal’s fascist period. These included Marcelino dos Santos of Frelimo and the MPLA’s Agostino Neto, who, according to Maxwell, “knew the Portuguese Left from the inside,” a characteristic lacking in rivals Holden Roberto of the FNLA and Jonas Savlmbi of UNITA.
From the beginning, Moscow supported the anti-Portuguese liberation movements. Maxwell reports:
Maxwell’s account of Soviet interests in southern Africa differs in tone if not in fact from that of Kurt Campbell, whose essay in this volume has also been published, in slightly different form, as an Adelphi Paper by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Campbell notes from the outset, however, the significant difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the region:
Mozambique, however, has not turned out to be quite the success the Soviets had hoped for. Frelimo came to power in 1975, essentially unopposed during its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and in 1977 signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Frelimo promised to become an orthodox “Marxist-Leninist vanguard party” (no small task in a country with no industrial proletariat to speak of) and by 1978 Soviet, East German, and Cuban advisors “were busy shaping Mozambique’s internal political system, assisting in party organization, ideological education, propaganda coordination, and the training of the internal security police.” The Soviets offered substantial military assistance, and Samora Machel, Frelimo’s chief, followed the Moscow line in international forums on all manner of issues unrelated to southern African politics.
Not ten years later, Campbell reports, despite this Soviet assistance:
Indeed, it seems that the Soviets were the exploiters rather than the saviors of Angola and Mozambique. For instance, Campbell points out:
Wayne S. Smith made a name for himself in 1982 when, as head of the U.S. interests section in Havana, he publicly dissented from Reagan administration policy toward Central America. His essay in this book, “The Cuban Role in Angola,” argues the case that the Cubans are not Soviet puppets but are conscientiously pursuing their own interests in Angola. He blames the United States for “shattering the Alvor agreement” (which was supposed to provide for free and open elections among the three competing liberation movements in Angola upon independence) despite the admissions of Admiral Rosa Coutinho, Portugal’s last colonial governor, that he had himself gone to Havana to get the go-ahead to install the MPLA as the post-independence government in Luanda in direct violation of the Alvor agreement.
The crux of Smith’s argument is this: Fidel Castro wanted to revivify his revolution and strengthen his position vis-Ã -vis the Soviet Union. Smith says:
Smith concludes from this that Castro acted on his own, without Soviet prodding. In a sense, that is probably true. Yet the reason for his action — sending 30,000 troops to Angola between November 8, 1975, and March 1976— was part of his traditional and necessary kowtow to the Kremlin. Interfering in Angola’s internal affairs was Fidel Castro’s way of toadying up to Leonid Brezhnev, so that Cuba could get a better deal on its sugar and gasoline to run its 1955 Buicks.
In defending Cuba’s continued military presence in Angola, Smith castigates the United States and South Africa for prolonging the war by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. “One can hardly imagine greater folly,” Smith writes. “Such an undertaking serves to help South Africa perpetuate the fighting In Angola. It Is a prescription for continuing the turmoil and bloodshed, not for ending them.” He does not seem willing to accept the suggestion that Savimbi and his Angolan supporters have legitimate grievances and a right to participate in a unified Angolan government, free of outside interference. Like other contributors to this volume, Smith believes that the United States should recognize the MPLA regime in Luanda and abandon the UNITA Freedom Fighters, in deference to Cuba’s wish for “a secure Angola. . . at peace with its neighbors, with its civil conflict resolved, and with its doors open to Western economic influence.."
Focus on Mozambique
Easily the best contribution to this collection is Gillian Gunn’s tightly-packed essay on the history of Mozambique, “Learning from Adversity: The Mozambican Experience.” Tracing developments In Mozambique from the early fifteenth century to the present, Gunn demonstrates how a confluence of regional and East-West interests affect Mozambique today.
One important difference between Angola and Mozambique is that in Angola there were three major liberation movements struggling against Portuguese rule (FNLA, MPLA, UNITA), while in Mozambique there was only one, Frelimo. As a result, the transition from colonial rule to independence was much smoother. At the time of independence, there was no organized resistance to Frelimo’s control of the government. It did not take long, however, for a resistance movement to come about, thanks in part to the connivance of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (then fighting its own guerrilla war and fearful of Marxist neighbors). However, Gunn points out, there were internal considerations as well:
Renamo, as the resistance group came to be known, had fertile ground on which to operate. Frelimo became ideology-ridden and, as a result, Mozambique’s economy and political stability suffered. As Gunn writes:
The consequence? “The balance of payments fell from its 1976 surplus of $41 million down to a 1978 deficit of $244 million, and an even more serious $360 million deficit in 1980.” The story observed in nearly every Communist country repeated itself in Mozambique. For example, Gunn writes,
In any case, a good many fanners were intelligent enough to by-pass the official, ideology-driven market, for “by 1982 one half of all peasant production was being sold on the black market.”
So the resistance movement had plenty of reasons to gain support in the countryside. Unfortunately, several self-generated factors worked against Renamo’s interests. One was its brutality. Gunn asserts that Renamo’s “behavior hampered the development of true popular support. Rape and severing of breasts, ears, and lips in retaliation for non-cooperation became common.” Perhaps more important, “Renamo’s inability to articulate a coherent political platform, beyond anti-communist rhetoric, also lessened its chances of developing firm grassroots support.” (And, I might add, its chances of acquiring support from democratic countries abroad. The same people who unstintingly support UNITA or the mujahideen in Afghanistan hesitate to do the same for Renamo.)
Gunn concludes that “Mozarnbique is not a classic Marxist state serving Soviet interests” because Frelimo has gradually returned to “its pragmatic habits.” The belief of many (on the American right, for instance) “that continuation of Frelimo in power means expansion of Soviet influence in the region is not supported by the recent factual record.” The character of Renamo—its lack of credentials as an indigenous movement, its brutality—lead to severe questions about its ability to lead. A Renamo-run Mozambique, says Gunn. “has little chance of being more stable than a Frelimo-run Mozambique.”
Gunn makes the case for increasing U.S. economic aid to Mozambique, because without such aid, “Mozambique is more likely to remain chronically unstable, and therefore unable to control ANC guerrilla infiltration into South Africa.” She asserts that “on several issues that really matter to the West,” such as excluding Cuban troops from Africa, “Frelimo has already shown that its definition of national Interest can overlap with the definition by the United States of Western interests.”
The Trouble with Ideology
The title of UCLA Professor Gerald J. Bender’s essay sums up his thesis: “Washington’s Quest for Enemies in Angola.” He argues, for instance, that Angola under the MPLA is more pluralist and freer than pro-Western neighbors.
In his conclusion, Bender criticizes U.S. policy toward Angola as confused. “What is clear,” he argues, “is that not only has there been a great divergence of perceptions about whether the Angolan government represents a danger to the United States but there have also been diametrically opposed policies proposed to address the situation.” Various parts of the Executive Branch and Congress have pursued policies “that reflect little, If any, consideration” of the policies pursued by other offices and agencies. He continues,
Editor Richard Bloomfield takes as his task the distillation of the wisdom imparted by his fellow contributors In a concluding essay, “U. S. Policy: Doctrine Versus Interests.” His views become clear early on when he asks, “Why should normal relations with Angola depend on a Namibia settlement? South Africa is the outlaw in Namibia, not Angola. Why should normal relations with Angola depend on the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola? These forces play a defensive role.”
Bloomfield seems to believe that ideology and political doctrine are opposed to U.S. national interests, rather than elements that inform interests and strategy. If that is the case, then the whole Carterite structure of human rights and democracy opposed to “an inordinate fear of Communism” that informed U.S. strategic interests from 1977 to 1981 comes tumbling down. From the very beginning, American values—political, moral, and economic— have helped to shape the national interest and national strategy.
Bloomfield turns the whole issue of U.S. relations with Angola and Mozambique into a stalking horse for U.S. attitudes toward apartheid in South Africa. He writes:
This is, if nothing else, a non-sequitor. The existence or nonexistence of apartheid in South Africa is irrelevant as far as the political rights of Angolans and Mozambicns go. The dos Santos regime in Luanda does not exclude Jonas Savimbi and his supporters from political participation because whites control the government in South Africa. He excludes Savimbi because he and the MPLA covet their currently held political power and fear losing It. Joaquim Chissano has adjusted his economy and relations with the West not because of apartheid in South Africa, but because his reliance on Soviet assistance and Marxist ideology proved disastrous.
For Bloomfield, U.S. policy toward Angola and Mozambique should be motivated as much by how it will affect American goals for the elimination of apartheid as it is by U.S. relations with the Soviet Union or U.S. disdain for Cuban imperialism in Africa. He argues:
This may be true with Renamo, but it certainly is not true with UNITA. Jonas Savimbi has long been on record in opposition to apartheid and even, at one time, supported the African National Congress. His acceptance of military and financial assistance from South Africa was a prudential move designed to advance his interests in Angola. Similarly, the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to defeat Hitler; that alliance did not imply approval for Stalin’s purges or any Marxist policy. A truly democratic government in Angola featuring Savimbi’s participation would probably support U.S. goals in South Africa without the baggage of ties with the Kremlin and an ideological need to undermine liberal democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Quickening Pace of Events
Events in southern Africa have caught up with, and, in some cases, passed by the analysis presented in this book. The independence of Namibia is just around the corner. Election results announced in November 1989 indicated that SWAPO garnered just 57 per cent of the vote in elections for a constituent assembly; 67 per cent was needed to bulldoze through its own constitution. The peaceful transition to independence in Namibia is supposed to be accompanied by the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. There may be good reason to adopt a policy of “watchful waiting” as far as that goes. Castro does not especially want to take back these troops, some of whom have contracted the AIDS virus, and may send them on some other mischievous adventure In Africa or elsewhere before he throws them a ticker-tape parade in Havana. American policymakers should beware of any Cuban adventurism in the future.
There is some hope for a negotiated settlement in Angola, too. Savimbi and dos Santos shook hands at a meeting of African heads of state and government in Gbadolite, Zaire, in mid-1989. Though a disagreement arose over just what transpired at Gbadolite*, pressure from the United States and its friends in Africa may just force dos Santos to agree to meet Savimbi at the bargaining table.
In Mozambique, the Chissano government continues to seek and receive Western economic, and even military, aid. Despite Renamo’s lack of ideological bearings, it has had some military successes that are worrisome for the Frelimo regime. David Hoile reports (in The World & I, December 1989) that Renamo “now probably controls more than 50 per cent of Mozambique and operates in some 80 per cent of the country,” adding that “factions within Frelimo itself have conceded the legitimacy of negotiating with Renamo.” So there is plenty to watch in Mozambique as well.
Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique is not the best book on the region. Neither is it the worst. The essays by Kurt Campbell and Gillian Gunn may be, as they say, worth the price of the volume But except for those with a die-hard interest in southern African affairs this is probably a book that can be passed up.
* See 1FF publication Angola Peace Monitor, Volume 1, Number 2—Ed.
Richard Sincere
is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS IN ANGOLA AND MOZAMBIQUE
Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique
edited by Richard J. Bloomfield.
(Reference Publications, Inc.: Algonac, Mich., 1988. 261 pp., $24.95 hdcvr, $12.95 ppb)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
Sometimes even well-informed Americans have trouble understanding the differences between Angola and Mozambique, despite their location on opposite sides of the southern African continent. The similarities are readily apparent: Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies from the late fifteenth century until 1975. Both are poor. Both are in Africa. Both have had troubled relations with neighboring South Africa. Moreover, both have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties since independence.
However, the similarities do not go much beyond these few points, especially since after independence Angola and Mozambique have followed different paths and have come upon unique problems and opportunities. Each will have a decidedly different future.
The World Peace Foundation, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit foundation based in Boston that conducts studies of international issues,” has collected a number of essays on Angola and Mozambique in Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique, edited by Richard J. Bloomfield, the World Peace Foundation’s executive director. Bloomfield served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1978 to 1982. Strangely enough, considering Portugal’s ongoing (if uneven) ties with its former African colonies, Ambassador Bloomfield confesses In the Introduction to being “a neophyte” in the region, an odd position for a former U.S. envoy to Lisbon to invoke.
The essay contributions to this book vary in quality and substance and there is also a certain imbalance in the collection. For instance, an excellent and comprehensive survey of Mozambican history by Gillian Gunn does not have any counterpart dealing with Angolan history, a lacuna that really should have been addressed by the editor.
Moreover, as a book, this anthology is poorly produced. There are numerous typographical and editing errors, there is inconsistency in the typefaces and type-styles used, the leading (space between lines) on some pages is tighter than on others, and the text on some pages is longer than on others for no apparent reason (such as the beginning of a new section or chapter). Overall, this book gives the impression of being someone’s first effort at desktop publishing.
The contributors, for the most part, represent the best of liberal and center-left thinking on African issues. Their names are recognizable to anyone who deals with these issues frequently: Gerald Bender, Kurt Campbell, Carlos Gaspar, Kenneth Maxwell, Robert I. Rotberg, Wayne S. Smith, in addition to the previously mentioned Gillian Gunn and Richard J. Bloomfield.
In his opening essay, “The Legacy of Decolonization,” Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World at Columbia University, makes a valid criticism that many analysts of African issues often overlook because they themselves are guilty of the sin he identifies. The literature on decolonization falls into two categories, he says: either it has been “classically Africanist” or it has been “overly concerned with grand strategy—with East-West Issues and foreign interventionism.”
Consequently, the Africanists tend to see all events through the prism of “Africa” (in the abstract), undiluted by other considerations, while the other group focuses “almost exclusively on the actions of the superpowers and their allies.” Since the twain seldom meet, there is little interaction or understanding between the two groups. Rarely, Maxwell asserts, “does either side listen to the other, let alone accept that in both positions there is much truth.”
Certainly, this condition has affected the way American analysts and policymakers have approached Angola and Mozambique. There are some people who refuse to believe, for instance, that the MPLA and Frelimo (the Marxist parties ruling Angola and Mozambique) are driven by anything other than their Marxist ideology and therefore there should be no accommodation with them even in the interests of regional stability. There are others who think that the Marxist nature of the governments of Angola and Mozambique should be no cause for concern at all and that Americans should continue “business as usual.” Still others, wearing the blinders of anti-apartheid activism, think that Washington should ally itself with Luanda and Maputo against the aggressive-imperialist-racist South African state: their feeling is, “Any enemy of Pretoria is a friend of ours.”
Long-Standing Communist Ties
It is nevertheless difficult to set aside superpower considerations when dealing with Mozambique and, especially, Angola. Leaders of the future Marxist governments in Portuguese Africa were active members of the Portuguese Communist party and its allies during Portugal’s fascist period. These included Marcelino dos Santos of Frelimo and the MPLA’s Agostino Neto, who, according to Maxwell, “knew the Portuguese Left from the inside,” a characteristic lacking in rivals Holden Roberto of the FNLA and Jonas Savlmbi of UNITA.
From the beginning, Moscow supported the anti-Portuguese liberation movements. Maxwell reports:
[T]heir support for the MPLA went back to 1958; and despite a cooling of the’ Soviet relationship with Neto during the 1970s, Soviet support went to one or the other of MPLA’s factions throughout the period of armed struggle against the Portuguese.This Soviet connection was sufficient to stimulate U.S. concern. He cites Helmut Sonnenfeldt’s view that the United States had had “no intrinsic interest In Angola” but that even a remote and unimportant territory acquires American interest once it “becomes a focal point for Soviet, and in this Instance, Soviet-supported Cuban military action.” The derivative U.S. interest that results is something “which we simply cannot avoid.”
Maxwell’s account of Soviet interests in southern Africa differs in tone if not in fact from that of Kurt Campbell, whose essay in this volume has also been published, in slightly different form, as an Adelphi Paper by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Campbell notes from the outset, however, the significant difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the region:
Since its dramatic entrance into southern Africa in 1975 to bolster the MPLA during the fractious Angolan civil war, the Soviet Union has played a central role in the military affairs of the region. While the counsel and pressure of both the United States and Britain have been heeded in various southern African capitals and boardrooms, only the Soviet Union, with Its allies Cuba and East Germany, has made its influence felt and demonstrated its commitment on the battlefield.Campbell adds that “Angola and Mozambique are the Soviet Union’s oldest surviving allies in black Africa, and have been the primary focus of Moscow’s energies to date.” Nonetheless, over the past three decades, Soviet moral, political, financial, and military support has benefited the African National Congress in South Africa, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, and the South West African People’s Organization. Angola and Mozambique merely represent the Kremlin’s first successes In installing revolutionary governments in southern Africa.
Mozambique, however, has not turned out to be quite the success the Soviets had hoped for. Frelimo came to power in 1975, essentially unopposed during its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and in 1977 signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Frelimo promised to become an orthodox “Marxist-Leninist vanguard party” (no small task in a country with no industrial proletariat to speak of) and by 1978 Soviet, East German, and Cuban advisors “were busy shaping Mozambique’s internal political system, assisting in party organization, ideological education, propaganda coordination, and the training of the internal security police.” The Soviets offered substantial military assistance, and Samora Machel, Frelimo’s chief, followed the Moscow line in international forums on all manner of issues unrelated to southern African politics.
Not ten years later, Campbell reports, despite this Soviet assistance:
Mozambique was in a shambles—the result of a concerted South African policy to destabilize the country, combined with a lethally incompetent Marxist economic system.... Currently, the Soviets stationed In Mozambique behave more as prisoners than as protectors of the faltering regime.What had happened was that the Soviet Union was unable or unwilling to deliver on its promises, particularly in the area of economic assistance. Although Joaquim Chissano, Machel’s successor, has maintained good relations with the Soviets, he “himself appears to look more to the West rather than to the East for economic assistance.”
Indeed, it seems that the Soviets were the exploiters rather than the saviors of Angola and Mozambique. For instance, Campbell points out:
[I]n the late 1980s the Soviet Union was taking 75 percent of the fish catch from the territorial waters of Angola and Mozambique, even while both countries were suffering from serious food shortages.The Cuban Connection
Wayne S. Smith made a name for himself in 1982 when, as head of the U.S. interests section in Havana, he publicly dissented from Reagan administration policy toward Central America. His essay in this book, “The Cuban Role in Angola,” argues the case that the Cubans are not Soviet puppets but are conscientiously pursuing their own interests in Angola. He blames the United States for “shattering the Alvor agreement” (which was supposed to provide for free and open elections among the three competing liberation movements in Angola upon independence) despite the admissions of Admiral Rosa Coutinho, Portugal’s last colonial governor, that he had himself gone to Havana to get the go-ahead to install the MPLA as the post-independence government in Luanda in direct violation of the Alvor agreement.
The crux of Smith’s argument is this: Fidel Castro wanted to revivify his revolution and strengthen his position vis-Ã -vis the Soviet Union. Smith says:
Castro was -- had always been -- interested in winning political influence, and In that sense Cuba’s intervention was perfectly consistent with the policies and objectives it had pursued in Africa since the early years of the Revolution.. . . Cuba was suddenly—if briefly—seen as a major Third World power to which other progressive but weaker governments could turn in times of trouble…. Thus, Castro doubtless calculated, if Cuba could save the day in Angola, that would strengthen its bargaining power with Moscow. Cuba would have advanced the cause of socialism and thus would be in a strong position to ask for better terms of trade and increased assistance from Moscow.
Smith concludes from this that Castro acted on his own, without Soviet prodding. In a sense, that is probably true. Yet the reason for his action — sending 30,000 troops to Angola between November 8, 1975, and March 1976— was part of his traditional and necessary kowtow to the Kremlin. Interfering in Angola’s internal affairs was Fidel Castro’s way of toadying up to Leonid Brezhnev, so that Cuba could get a better deal on its sugar and gasoline to run its 1955 Buicks.
In defending Cuba’s continued military presence in Angola, Smith castigates the United States and South Africa for prolonging the war by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. “One can hardly imagine greater folly,” Smith writes. “Such an undertaking serves to help South Africa perpetuate the fighting In Angola. It Is a prescription for continuing the turmoil and bloodshed, not for ending them.” He does not seem willing to accept the suggestion that Savimbi and his Angolan supporters have legitimate grievances and a right to participate in a unified Angolan government, free of outside interference. Like other contributors to this volume, Smith believes that the United States should recognize the MPLA regime in Luanda and abandon the UNITA Freedom Fighters, in deference to Cuba’s wish for “a secure Angola. . . at peace with its neighbors, with its civil conflict resolved, and with its doors open to Western economic influence.."
Focus on Mozambique
Easily the best contribution to this collection is Gillian Gunn’s tightly-packed essay on the history of Mozambique, “Learning from Adversity: The Mozambican Experience.” Tracing developments In Mozambique from the early fifteenth century to the present, Gunn demonstrates how a confluence of regional and East-West interests affect Mozambique today.
One important difference between Angola and Mozambique is that in Angola there were three major liberation movements struggling against Portuguese rule (FNLA, MPLA, UNITA), while in Mozambique there was only one, Frelimo. As a result, the transition from colonial rule to independence was much smoother. At the time of independence, there was no organized resistance to Frelimo’s control of the government. It did not take long, however, for a resistance movement to come about, thanks in part to the connivance of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (then fighting its own guerrilla war and fearful of Marxist neighbors). However, Gunn points out, there were internal considerations as well:
Three developments had created the conditions for the growth of an armed dissident movement should Frelimo gain power. First, factional fighting had led a number of middle and low level ex-Frelimo members to feel they had been badly treated. Second, the leaders of the defeated conservative movement stood ready to mobilize this anti-Frelimo sentiment. And third, Rhodesian intelligence had started to formulate the mechanism to organize and arm these elements.
Renamo, as the resistance group came to be known, had fertile ground on which to operate. Frelimo became ideology-ridden and, as a result, Mozambique’s economy and political stability suffered. As Gunn writes:
By the end of 1977 Frelimo was drifting away from the traditions it had developed in the guerrilla war [against Portugal]. Instead of developing ideology from experience, a process which at least ensured some link between policy and reality, it began to impose ideology upon reality.
The consequence? “The balance of payments fell from its 1976 surplus of $41 million down to a 1978 deficit of $244 million, and an even more serious $360 million deficit in 1980.” The story observed in nearly every Communist country repeated itself in Mozambique. For example, Gunn writes,
[T]he ideologically motivated emphasis on mechanized state farms. . . was disastrous.... It came to cost more foreign exchange for a state farm to produce a ton of grain than it would have cost simply to import the crop.
In any case, a good many fanners were intelligent enough to by-pass the official, ideology-driven market, for “by 1982 one half of all peasant production was being sold on the black market.”
So the resistance movement had plenty of reasons to gain support in the countryside. Unfortunately, several self-generated factors worked against Renamo’s interests. One was its brutality. Gunn asserts that Renamo’s “behavior hampered the development of true popular support. Rape and severing of breasts, ears, and lips in retaliation for non-cooperation became common.” Perhaps more important, “Renamo’s inability to articulate a coherent political platform, beyond anti-communist rhetoric, also lessened its chances of developing firm grassroots support.” (And, I might add, its chances of acquiring support from democratic countries abroad. The same people who unstintingly support UNITA or the mujahideen in Afghanistan hesitate to do the same for Renamo.)
Gunn concludes that “Mozarnbique is not a classic Marxist state serving Soviet interests” because Frelimo has gradually returned to “its pragmatic habits.” The belief of many (on the American right, for instance) “that continuation of Frelimo in power means expansion of Soviet influence in the region is not supported by the recent factual record.” The character of Renamo—its lack of credentials as an indigenous movement, its brutality—lead to severe questions about its ability to lead. A Renamo-run Mozambique, says Gunn. “has little chance of being more stable than a Frelimo-run Mozambique.”
Gunn makes the case for increasing U.S. economic aid to Mozambique, because without such aid, “Mozambique is more likely to remain chronically unstable, and therefore unable to control ANC guerrilla infiltration into South Africa.” She asserts that “on several issues that really matter to the West,” such as excluding Cuban troops from Africa, “Frelimo has already shown that its definition of national Interest can overlap with the definition by the United States of Western interests.”
The Trouble with Ideology
The title of UCLA Professor Gerald J. Bender’s essay sums up his thesis: “Washington’s Quest for Enemies in Angola.” He argues, for instance, that Angola under the MPLA is more pluralist and freer than pro-Western neighbors.
It would appeal that In Angola under dos Santos there is greater freedom to criticize the party and government without suffering arbitrary arrest, torture, or death than Is the case in the six non-Marxist states [of Gabon, Zaire, Togo, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kenya].
In his conclusion, Bender criticizes U.S. policy toward Angola as confused. “What is clear,” he argues, “is that not only has there been a great divergence of perceptions about whether the Angolan government represents a danger to the United States but there have also been diametrically opposed policies proposed to address the situation.” Various parts of the Executive Branch and Congress have pursued policies “that reflect little, If any, consideration” of the policies pursued by other offices and agencies. He continues,
The result has been a series of confusing, contradictory, and futile policies that have displeased Americans from left to right and that have had almost no impact on engendering change in Angola. Clearly, this state of affairs is good neither for the United States nor for Angola.
Editor Richard Bloomfield takes as his task the distillation of the wisdom imparted by his fellow contributors In a concluding essay, “U. S. Policy: Doctrine Versus Interests.” His views become clear early on when he asks, “Why should normal relations with Angola depend on a Namibia settlement? South Africa is the outlaw in Namibia, not Angola. Why should normal relations with Angola depend on the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola? These forces play a defensive role.”
Bloomfield seems to believe that ideology and political doctrine are opposed to U.S. national interests, rather than elements that inform interests and strategy. If that is the case, then the whole Carterite structure of human rights and democracy opposed to “an inordinate fear of Communism” that informed U.S. strategic interests from 1977 to 1981 comes tumbling down. From the very beginning, American values—political, moral, and economic— have helped to shape the national interest and national strategy.
Bloomfield turns the whole issue of U.S. relations with Angola and Mozambique into a stalking horse for U.S. attitudes toward apartheid in South Africa. He writes:
Let us imagine that the regime in Pretoria were one that accorded political rights to the black majority. If that were the case, it is likely that the guerrilla movements in Angola and Mozambique would be weak, if they existed at all. There would be no Cuban troops in Angola and the Soviet bloc presence in both countries would in all likelihood be minimal and largely civilian.
This is, if nothing else, a non-sequitor. The existence or nonexistence of apartheid in South Africa is irrelevant as far as the political rights of Angolans and Mozambicns go. The dos Santos regime in Luanda does not exclude Jonas Savimbi and his supporters from political participation because whites control the government in South Africa. He excludes Savimbi because he and the MPLA covet their currently held political power and fear losing It. Joaquim Chissano has adjusted his economy and relations with the West not because of apartheid in South Africa, but because his reliance on Soviet assistance and Marxist ideology proved disastrous.
For Bloomfield, U.S. policy toward Angola and Mozambique should be motivated as much by how it will affect American goals for the elimination of apartheid as it is by U.S. relations with the Soviet Union or U.S. disdain for Cuban imperialism in Africa. He argues:
U.S. objectives in each country must be consistent with U.S. interests. This seems obvious, but in the policy debate it is often as not disregarded. Thus, the objective of replacing governments that are ‘Marxist’ and friendly to the Soviet Union with their enemies in these two instances would only lead to governments that would be even less likely to cooperate with U.S. policy vis-Ã -vis South Africa.
This may be true with Renamo, but it certainly is not true with UNITA. Jonas Savimbi has long been on record in opposition to apartheid and even, at one time, supported the African National Congress. His acceptance of military and financial assistance from South Africa was a prudential move designed to advance his interests in Angola. Similarly, the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to defeat Hitler; that alliance did not imply approval for Stalin’s purges or any Marxist policy. A truly democratic government in Angola featuring Savimbi’s participation would probably support U.S. goals in South Africa without the baggage of ties with the Kremlin and an ideological need to undermine liberal democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Quickening Pace of Events
Events in southern Africa have caught up with, and, in some cases, passed by the analysis presented in this book. The independence of Namibia is just around the corner. Election results announced in November 1989 indicated that SWAPO garnered just 57 per cent of the vote in elections for a constituent assembly; 67 per cent was needed to bulldoze through its own constitution. The peaceful transition to independence in Namibia is supposed to be accompanied by the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. There may be good reason to adopt a policy of “watchful waiting” as far as that goes. Castro does not especially want to take back these troops, some of whom have contracted the AIDS virus, and may send them on some other mischievous adventure In Africa or elsewhere before he throws them a ticker-tape parade in Havana. American policymakers should beware of any Cuban adventurism in the future.
There is some hope for a negotiated settlement in Angola, too. Savimbi and dos Santos shook hands at a meeting of African heads of state and government in Gbadolite, Zaire, in mid-1989. Though a disagreement arose over just what transpired at Gbadolite*, pressure from the United States and its friends in Africa may just force dos Santos to agree to meet Savimbi at the bargaining table.
In Mozambique, the Chissano government continues to seek and receive Western economic, and even military, aid. Despite Renamo’s lack of ideological bearings, it has had some military successes that are worrisome for the Frelimo regime. David Hoile reports (in The World & I, December 1989) that Renamo “now probably controls more than 50 per cent of Mozambique and operates in some 80 per cent of the country,” adding that “factions within Frelimo itself have conceded the legitimacy of negotiating with Renamo.” So there is plenty to watch in Mozambique as well.
Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique is not the best book on the region. Neither is it the worst. The essays by Kurt Campbell and Gillian Gunn may be, as they say, worth the price of the volume But except for those with a die-hard interest in southern African affairs this is probably a book that can be passed up.
* See 1FF publication Angola Peace Monitor, Volume 1, Number 2—Ed.
Richard Sincere
is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).Sunday, January 24, 2010
'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.
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.
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