Showing papers in "Foreign Affairs in 1975"

Restructuring the World Economy

Abstract: The future consequences of the present disequilibrium in the world economy and adjustment processes through which equilibruim can be restored are discussed. There are a few commodities whose high prices or short supplies are likely to have an important effect on the economic welfare of large numbers of people: petroleum, major foodstuffs, and fertilizer. The rise in oil prices is the most dramatic of a series of events that have been operating to change the distribution of world income through the system of international trade and capital flows. In order to analyze the possible adjustments to the oil problem, the varying positions of the principal oil exporters must be understood. Nonetheless, the type of adjustments that are likely to be required involve reducing nonessential energy needs, developing new energy sources, and persuading producers to reduce prices. Lesser developed countries have more limited adjustment mechanisms than those that can be employed by developed nations. Through cooperative efforts the resumption of satisfactory rates of development throughout the world should be possible.

Black Africa and the Arabs

Abstract: BLACK Africa and the Arab world have been linked by a fluc tuating pattern of economic and cultural connections for at least 12 centuries. In the secular field the Arabs have up to this time played two major roles in black Africa: first as accom plices in African enslavement, and then in the twentieth century as allies in African liberation. In the past several years they have built this alliance into a comprehensive political partnership, aimed at maintaining a solid front, particularly with regard to the Middle East and Southern Africa. The critical question for the future is whether the Arabs will also become partners in African development. The relationship between Arabs and black Africans has always been largely asymmetrical?with the Middle East usually the giver, and black Africa usually the receiver. Throughout the history of their involvement in black Africa the Arabs have been both conquer ors and liberators, both traders in slaves and purveyors of new ideas. Trade and Islam have been companions throughout, with the crescent following the commercial caravan, the muezzin calling believers to prayer from the marketplace. The Arab slave trade was a significant part of this commerce from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries. While the transatlantic slave trade on the West coast of Africa was certainly larger and more important, the activities of Arab slavers on the Eastern seaboard lasted a few decades longer?until they were officially outlawed in the late i8oos. Thus Islam may have been somewhat compromised in East Africa by the nature of its purveyors (who, in addition to slaving, also created Arab city-states along the East coast). European colonization did, at any rate, arrest the spread of the religion in East Africa more effectively than in the West. In the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Malawi, Islamization came to an almost abrupt halt in the face of the Euro-Christian challenge.1 In West Africa, on the other hand, Islam has continued to expand in spite of the impressive coun tervailing efforts of Christian missionaries and of the technological prestige of European civilization. A number of West African coun tries, including Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Niger are now predominantly Muslim, as is the northern part of Nigeria.

The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation

Abstract: THE United States has passed in the last decade from the United Nation's most influential state into a position of accelerating isolation as it confronts a very large proportion of the member states over a long agenda of contemporary issues. This is a truly novel development, one which threatens to poison international relations at a time that shrieks with the need for uniquely broad essays in interna tional cooperation. Three issues shape what may be called the North-South confronta tion. One is the question of how global income and wealth and deci sion-making authority with respect to international economic prob lems should be distributed. A second issue is the attitude of the United States toward the two white-supremacist regimes in Southern Africa. And the third is the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although each issue represents a distinct axis of confrontation, they are linked by a single world view, a kind of ideology, which imparts to them an in tense emotional coherence. That ideology is not, as suggested recently by Ambassador Moynihan, "socialist," unless one follows Durkheim in defining socialism not as a political program but rather as "a cry of pain." It does indeed incorporate certain themes which recur in British socialist thought, just as it patches in a number of convention ally liberal ideals such as self-determination. But socialist and liberal fragments are reshaped by a special historical experience to produce in practice a distinct amalgam which can most usefully be described as the developing states in fact describe it: "anticolonialism."

Report from Angola

Abstract: THE first European power to arrive in black Africa is now the last to depart. The April 1974 coup in Lisbon, one of those rare instances in history when a change in government reverses a vital national policy, has led to the end of cen turies of Portuguese colonization. Such a rapid shift in policy, resulting in the promise of independence for Mozambique on June 25 and Angola on November 11 of this year, was bound to fundamentally change the character of African politics. This decolonization in the south, together with the Ethiopian revolution, the new power of the oil-producing states, and the tragedy of the Sahel drought in the north, have made 1974-75 a historic time for Africa. Angola is the last and certainly the most difficult territory for Portugal to leave. Since 1483, when Diogo Cao first came to the mouth of the gigantic river he called "Za?re," Portugal has prided itself on maintaining this valuable territory, 14 times the size of the m?tropole itself and nearly twice as large as Texas. Besides these strong historical ties to Portugal, there are several factors which make Angola's transition to independence important, difficult, and as we shall see, potentially ex plosive.

Nuclear Spread and World Order

Abstract: UNTIL a year or two ago we were entitled to believe that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) could successfully hold the line at five nuclear weapons powers, if only a few holdout countries would sign or ratify it. Two events have thrown into serious doubt the ability of present policies to stem the further pro liferation of nuclear weapon capabilities among additional nations. The first event was the Indian "peaceful" nuclear explosion in May 1974, which jumped the firebreak between the five permanent mem bers of the U.N. Security Council?who are also the nuclear weapons powers?and all other nations. That barrier had held for ten years since the first Chinese detonation in 1964. What seemed to undermine the earlier mild optimism that the NPT could do the job was not that "nuclear-weapons-capable" coun tries such as Sweden, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and West Germany, or even nations in conflict like Pakistan, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, Israel, or Egypt were on the verge of exploding their own nuclear de vices (though many think Israel is in fact the "seventh" nuclear weap ons power). It was rather that the general climate of expectation about what was likely to take place had changed significantly. Many now believe that there will be Nuclear Weapons Power numbers 7, 8, 9, ad infinitum. Members of the international professional strategic community have already been discounting the future and shifting their planning to ways of living in a world of many nuclear weapons powers. The crucial new reality is thus not merely the existence of a sixth (or seventh) such power; it is above all the altered prediction that influential people around the world are making as a consequence.1 Having one more "nuclear-capable" power does not change the world. But what could change it would be a snowballing, fatalistic belief that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy unless it is countered by a different belief that is equally potent. The second event was the worldwide energy crisis. Predictions of numbers of future nuclear power plants now far exceed the figure planners had been using prior to the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74.

Making Nuclear Energy Safe and Secure

Abstract: BETWEEN now and the end of this century there is no realistic hope of meeting world energy needs without a substantial in crease in the use of nuclear energy; commercial nuclear reac tors are bound to multiply threeor four-fold even over the next 10 to 15 years. Commercial nuclear materials must be safeguarded against diversion or misuse by nations or individuals. At the same time, nu clear reactor designs and associated fuel cycle facilities now in com mon use present both real and public-perception problems as to their safe operation and the safe storage of the radioactive wastes they generate. More and more these problems are seen to be global concerns. By far the greatest risk in the expanded use of nuclear energy is that it may contribute to the spread of nuclear weapons. Such nuclear pro liferation was the main subject of the Review Conference just con cluded in Geneva, five years after the coming into force of the Nu clear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But the question of nuclear proliferation, vital as it is, is only part of the overall problem. Basi cally, the question is whether, and if so how, the use of the "peaceful atom" can be expanded to meet the world's energy needs without incurring unacceptable public risks of any sort. Although experts like to draw a technical distinction between "safety" and "safeguards"? and only the latter came in for extensive review at Geneva?in fact the regulation and control of the whole nuclear fuel cycle is often so closely related as to be almost impossible to divide into discrete parts. Obviously, much of the problem of additional nuclear-weapons countries is political in nature: if a nation is determined, as India was, to demonstrate the ability to build its own nuclear weapons, prob ably no international framework can prevent it from doing so ; the raw materials and the technology exist, to the point where no amount of international policing consistent with present concepts of national sovereignty?let alone the acute sensitivity of many nations today? can prevent nations from developing and exploding "devices" which are for all practical purposes weapons. To deter such decisions re mains a matter of "high politics," concerned partly with the damping of regional rivalries, and in considerable part with the actions and attitudes of the superpowers and other nuclear-weapons nations with respect to their own nuclear capabilities.1

Women of the World: Report from Mexico City

Abstract: They did not, however, look like revolutionaries: Imelda Marcos of the Philip pines and her corps of silken butterflies; the U.S. delegation, carefully dressed in styles ranging from Lord & Taylor to Peck & Peck; the Africans in their richly woven cloths and elaborately wrapped turbans?certainly not the solid Byelorussians, with their knotted hair and flower prints. Nor were they united be hind a single ideology: they were rather a microcosm of the differences which con front the women's movement as it gains international legitimacy. And, in fact, the women's revolution was immediately faced by what seemed like a counterrevolu tion?the delegates from the developing countries appeared for a time so intent on the redistribution of resources between rich and poor that the redistribution of power between men and women seemed for them a competing priority. That this threat to the liberation effort came from the oppressed was disarming. Both the women and the poor are trying to change the status quo, either by alter ing the existing power structure or by carving out a more advantageous place for themselves within it. For Western women, however, debate over any issue other than those directly affecting women could only be construed as wasteful and frus trating. They wondered whether the Third World position did not reflect a disdain or hostility by those countries and their male-dominated governments for the goals of the conference, an attempt to distract the women from how much they had in common. "The International Women's Year will have been another mockery," said France's Fran?oise Giroux, "if the results are subtly diverted toward either national or international political causes, no matter how pressing, respectable or noble their aims might be." A careful assessment must be made of these divergent positions. That political conflicts emerged between rich and poor, black and white, Arab and Israeli, signi fied that the event was taking place in the real world, not as an academic exercise or an oversized coffee-klatch. Women's issues remained paramount and a good deal of common ground was established there. The link between poor women and the world's poor was also felt and acknowledged by Westerners?perhaps in a new way?in discussing their own oppression. And yet the different perspectives the women revealed at the conference were highly significant. That both the conflict and the communication flowed almost exclusively between the Westerners and those from developing countries was strik ing. Regarding their own revolutions as complete, delegates from the communist countries complacently abstained from the revolutions of both women and the poor ?except for an enthusiastic endorsement of all attacks on neocolonialism, im perialism and similar evils.