'Parochial' big powers ignore world trouble spots
By Ian Black
LONDON: Obsessions with domestic politics by the world's leading powers are weakening the international community's ability to deal with foreign threats and crises, a leading think- tank warned this week.
Issuing its annual report for 1996-1997, the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified a "a pervasive and persistent parochialism" that is restricting the potential for multilateral action.
Citing Albania and Zaire, institute experts predicted that inward-looking countries and blocs, including NATO and the European Union, would become even more reluctant to take risks to help restore order in faraway troublespots or to prevent famines.
Lack of stable governments, military overstretch, shrinking defense budgets and fear of open-ended intervention were all cited as reasons for inaction -- combined with scant domestic support if there was no obvious gain.
"The cold war tendency to see core interests indirectly at stake in distant parts of the globe has now totally eroded," the report said. "Comfortably coccooned in their own sense of security, citizens of democratic countries are in no mood to sacrifice their well-being for supposed international advantage, nor to rally to the service of a purely humanitarian goal."
But the report also warned of the need to take action against "rogue" states like Iraq or North Korea, which were "virtually impossible" to stop from acquiring potentially devastating biological weapons and toxins.
"The industrial democracies must be prepared to defend their forces and populations by force if and when deterrence and diplomacy fail to prevent aggression by rogue states armed with biological weapons," the institute said.
There is also growing concern about the threat posed by the spread of cruise missiles as weak international controls are easily circumvented. "Slowing the spread of these critical enabling technologies for highly effective cruise missiles will help defensive systems keep pace with threat improvements," it said.
The report was pessimistic about prospects for the Middle East peace process and worried by the fracturing of the Gulf War coalition as Iraq's Saddam Hussein, still firmly in power, continued to "play parts of the outside world off against each other".
There was gloom about Russia ("a country in waiting") where declining industrial production, frustrated armed forces and the criminalization of civil society were seen as a recipe for continuing instability, despite President Boris Yeltsin's improved health.
In Asia, the institute identified the need to develop coherent policies for handling an increasing assertive China, suffering from "potent paranoia", as the main challenge for the world. "In the short term China could... succeed in doing as it pleases regarding Hong Kong," the report said. "But in the longer term China is planting and feeding seeds of worry about the implications of a rising China."
It warned that European parochialism was strengthening as efforts focused on the single currency and further integration. "The UK's version of parochialism was the result of a tired government running out of political fuel... the Conservatives had lost that ethereal, but no less essential, will to govern."
Peace in Bosnia, it said, remained fragile as aspects of the 1995 Dayton Accords remained unfulfilled. "Unless these problems are addressed, and resolved, the international community will have to choose between staying militarily engaged for years, or even decades, and leaving the Bosnians to their own devices, at the risk of violence erupting once again."
-- The Guardian