ZIVKO BUDIMIR'S SPEECH IN BERLIN: EUROPE WITHOUT WALLS
 Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERATION OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Živko Budimir 

In Berlin, November 8, 2014

Ladies and gentlemen,
 
I come from a country that is disintegrated - which got to be one of the reasons that it is not and cannot be integrated into the European Union.  That is discouraging not only for me, but it should also be discouraging for Europe, where we belong as a civilization - not merely as its south-eastern part.  I hope that European Union urgently makes sincere and efficient gestures to help me and many people who share my vision of a non-divided and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina, achieve our goals.  Under our present circumstances - dictated by the unjust Dayton constitution, by the fraudulent Election process and by other severe travesties of justice - we are badly damaged, divided, discouraged... all things considered, we are forcefully, cynically denied the "European promise" given us as the Berlin Wall crumbled.
 
As the fall of the Berlin Wall wiped out the borders between "East" and "West", most states in "the East" expected freedom, security, prosperity, improved quality of life.  Twenty-five years later, it is reasonable to ask, whether these expectations were met? 
 
Yes, for the most, they were, but not for my country - Bosnia and Herzegovina.  While Germany got peacefully united, Bosnia and Herzegovina got forcefully divided, contrary to the International Law and contrary to the template of modern European civilization.  So now it is not a just, functional, safe, democratic, prosperous state.

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09.11.2014

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25 years after 9/11 – How many Germanies should Europe have?

Prof. Anis H. Bajrektareviæ

Ever since the Peace of Westphalia, Europe maintained the inner balance of powers by keeping its core section soft. Peripheral powers like England, France, Denmark, (Sweden and Poland being later replaced by) Prussia, the Ottomans, Habsburgs and Russia have pressed and preserved the center of continental Europe as their own playground. At the same time, they kept extending their possessions overseas or, like Russia and the Ottomans, over the land corridors deeper into Asian and MENA proper. Once Royal Italy and Imperial Germany had appeared, the geographic core ‘hardened’ and for the first time started to politico-militarily press onto peripheries, including the two European mega destructions, known as the two World Wars. Therefore, this new geopolitical reality caused a big security dilemma lasting from the 1814 Vienna congress up to Potsdam conference of 1945, being re-actualized again with the Berlin Wall destruction: How many Germanies and Italies should Europe have to preserve its inner balance and peace?

At the time of Vienna Congress, there were nearly a dozen of Italophone states and over three dozens of Germanophone entities – 34 western German states + 4 free cities ( Kleinstaaterei ), Austria and Prussia. The post-WWII Potsdam conference concludes with only three Germanophone (+ Lichtenstein + Switzerland) and two Italophone states (+ Vatican). Than, 25 years ago, we concluded that one of Germanies was far too much to care to the future. Thus, it disappeared from the map overnight, and joined the NATO and EU – without any accession talks – instantly.

West of Berlin, the usual line of narrative claims that the European 9/11 was an event of the bad socio-economic model being taken over by the superior one – just an epilogue of pure ideological reckoning. Consequently – the narrative goes on – the west (German) taxpayers have taken the burden. East of Berlin, people will remind you clearly that the German reunification was actually a unilateral takeover, an Anschluss, which has been paid by the bloody dissolutions affecting in several waves two of the three demolished multinational Slavic state communities. A process of brutal erosions that still goes on, as we see it in Ukraine today.

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Prof. Anis H. Bajrektareviæ
Vienna, 09 NOV 2014
anis@corpsdiplomatique.cd  

Author is professor in international law and global political studies, based in Vienna, Austria. His recent book Geopolitics of Technology – Is There Life after Facebook? is published by the New York’s Addleton Academic Publishers.


07.11.2014

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Why is (the Korean peninsula and East) Asia unable to capitalize (on) its successes

Asia needs ASEAN-ization not Pakistanization of its continent

Anis H. Bajrektarevic

Speculations over the alleged bipolar world of tomorrow (the so-called G-2, China vs. the US), should not be an Asian dilemma. It is primarily a concern of the West that, after all, overheated China in the first place with its (outsourced business) investments. Hence, despite a distortive noise about the possible future G-2 world, the central security problem of Asia remains the same: an absence of any pan-continental multilateral setting on the world’s largest continent. The Korean peninsula like no other Asian theater pays a huge prize because of it.

Why is it so?

How to draw the line between the recent and still unsettled EU/EURO crisis and Asia’s success story? Well, it might be easier than it seems: Neither Europe nor Asia has any alternative. The difference is that Europe well knows there is no alternative – and therefore is multilateral. Asia thinks it has an alternative – and therefore is strikingly bilateral, while stubbornly residing enveloped in economic egoisms. No wonder that Europe is/will be able to manage its decline, while Asia is (still) unable to capitalize its successes. Asia – and particularly its economically most (but not yet politico-militarily) advanced region, East Asiy its most advnced : ' teater remains a very hostige of ita – clearly does not accept any more the lead of the post-industrial and post-Christian Europe, but is not ready for the post-West world.

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03.11.2014

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The AsianSquare Dance - 1st part

By Michael Akerib, Vice-Rector, SWISS UMEF UNIVERSITY

Goldman Sachs first coined the expression BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India and China - to identify the economic giants of the future that will reshape the world economic order. While Russia's economy is linked to the prices of commodities, energy in particular, Brazil has not lived up to expectations. Of the four countries, China and India have shown the most impressive growth in recent years with, respectively, 10% and 8%. Excluding Brazil, the population of the BRIC represents 40% of the world's inhabitants.

With Asia, reckoned to be today the most dynamic continent, accounting for 65% of the world's population, and China and India together accounting for 40%, these two countries can potentially alter the fragile equilibrium of the world's economy. It is forecast that by 2030 the East Asian economies will be the world's largest economic bloc.

Due to diverging political ideologies and concerns, however, this bloc does not, in fact, exist other than in prose. Even worse, all the countries in the area have made significant investments in military equipment over the recent past thus sharply increasing the risk of conflict particularly as fears grow over China's intentions.

The US' dream, during the cold war, of creating an Asian equivalent to NATO was short lived. Today, Asia has five nuclear powers: Pakistan, India, China, North Korea and Russia. On the other hand, the US is constrained by budgetary problems.

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26.10.2014

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Jamil Maidan Flores: Why ASEM Is Vital to Indonesian Interest

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of ASEM, which bridges East Asia and Europe

By Jakarta Globe on 08:40 pm Oct 19, 2014
Category Columns, Opinion - Tags: el indio

(Image courtesy of ASEM)

Late last week, the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) held its 10th summit in Milan, Italy. The event involved 51 nations from the two continents plus two regional organizations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the European Union.

As European Council president Herman Van Rompuy pointed out, these 51 nations account for 60 percent of humankind, 50 percent of global gross domestic product, and 60 percent of global trade. Remove their contributions, and the global economy ceases to be viable.

Once again Indonesia wasn’t represented by its head of state and government at the ASEM summit. This time the world understood and excused Indonesia. After all, the summit coincided with the very eve of the turnover of the presidency from Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had just completed his second term, to his successor, Joko Widodo.

It was different in 2010 when President Yudhoyono failed to attend the ninth ASEM summit in Brussels. Although days after that summit, he visited the Netherlands. Earlier, Yudhoyono did not make it to the US-Asean summit either. As a result, speculation was rife that the Indonesian government, in deference to China, was distancing itself from the US and the West. It was around that time that the US announced its “pivot” or “rebalancing” toward East Asia after years of apparent neglect of the region by the administration of George W. Bush.

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 23.10.2014

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The political character of Social Media:
How do Greek Internet users perceive and use social networks?

by Dimitra Karantzeni

dimikar87@yahoo.gr

Abstract

This study investigates the political potential of social networks as popular platforms of mediated communication. The findings of the survey reveal the level of engagement of Greek internet users with different social media, the particular ways in which they prefer to use them as well as their future expectations as regards the development of these platforms and their deeper penetration into Greek society.

Keywords

Social media, Greece, politics, communication, citizen participation

Mass media, due to their symbolic character as well as their level of penetration into every aspect of social life, play a significant role in the formation of identity. According to Mezek (2011, p. 7), they have a triple role: “an information broker, arena for ideas and a community sustainer”, or in other words, they act as a forum for “public influence, identity and solidarity” (Alexander and Jacobs, 1998, p. 26). Thompson underlines the importance of media, as means of “acculturalisation”, that partly formulate our perceptions of belonging in groups and communities, creating a so-called, “mediated sociality” (Thompson, 1995, p. 35).

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17.10.2014

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Were the Crusades Justified? A Revisiting

Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella

If one surveys a magazine of opinion, such as Ovi, among others, it will not take long before one encounters a tirade or a rebuke against religion in general or Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular. The five phenomena which allegedly inspire the attack, coming usually from secularists and positivists are: 1) The suppression of knowledge and obscurantism, 2) the required celibacy of its priests resulting in pedophilia and homosexuality, 3) the Inquisition, 4) Witch hunting and burning, 5) the Crusades. These are phenomena which go back to medieval times which in themselves are usually declared as dark times (confusing the dark ages with medieval times in general) and therefore undesirable in our modern, scientifically advanced, “enlightened” times. Often enough a recommendation is freely and egregiously offered: the Church should simply disband itself after asking for forgiveness for its crimes and hanging its head in shame, and everybody will be much better off afterward. Enlightenment and peace, transparency and liberty and integrity will then arrive on the scene and will reign supreme: a sort of Utopian Garden of Eden. If any quarter is granted to any form of Christianity in this highly Utopian world free of corruption and sin, it will be for a reformed Church, that is to say, the Protestant Churches.

I have already dealt at some length with the first three historical phenomena. At times it has given rise to reactionary spirited counter-positions on the matter, sometimes those positions have degenerated into a diatribe. That is of course undesirable. At the risk of renewing such a diatribe, and in the more positive interests of free speech and truth, I’d like for the moment to tackle here the fifth of the above mentioned phenomena, the one on the Crusades and some of their assumptions and implications.

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15.10.2014

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Europe – the letzte Mensch or Übermensch,
the new Byzantium or declining Rome

Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic

 

A freshly released IMF’s World Economic Outlook brings (yet again, for the sixth year in a row, and for the third time this year only) no comforting picture to anyone within the G-7, especially in the US and EU. Will the passionately US-pushed cross-Atlantic Free Trade Area save the day? Or, would that Pact-push drag the things over the edge and mark an end of the unionistic Europe? Is the extended EU conflict with Russia actually a beginning of the Atlantic-Central Europe’s conflict over Russia, an internalization of mega geopolitical and geo-economic dilemma – who accommodates with whom, in and out of the Union? Finally, does more Ukrainian (and Eastern Europe) calamities pave the road for a new cross-continental grand accommodation, of either austerity-tired France or über-performing Germany with Russia, therefore the end of the EU? For whose sake Eastern Europe has been barred of all important debates such as that of Slavism, identity, secularism and antifascism? Why do we suddenly wonder that all around Germany-led Central Europe, the neo-Nazism gains ground while only Russia insists on antifascism and (pan-)Slavism?

Before answering that, let us examine what is (the meaning and size of) our Europe? Where, how and – very importantly – when is our Europe? For example, is the non-EU Europe the existent but invisible world, sort of the dark side of the moon? Or, is that more? Beyond the ancient Maastricht and Schengen: the Roman Hadrian Wall and Limes Line there was no world at all. There was only (an instrument of) the Silk Road – that antique WTO, isn’t it? Hence, is this unionistic condominium the best of Europe, or Europe itself?

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08.10.2014

Brazil – New Age

Patricia Galves Derolle
 

Brazil is the largest country in size and population in comparison to other Latin American countries, and it is the seventh largest economy in the world by nominal GDP. Since the mid 2000’s, Brazil has become a more attractive global player: it has diversified its economy and its partnerships, and launched the Growth Acceleration Plan (2007) in order to increase investment in infrastructure and provide tax incentives for economic growth. Brazil has also decreased domestic poverty through development plans: according to the World Bank, poverty (people living with USD 2 per day) has fallen from 21% of the population in 2003 to 11% in 2009. An overall view of Brazilian economy shows that the level of foreign direct investment is increasing, the wages are rising, the middle class in growing, and the unemployment rate is low, which offers a wide range of opportunities in different areas. Despite the positive scenario, Brazil is an emerging economy and faces issues and challenges to be surpassed.


Commercial and Economic Partnerships

Brazil has strong commercial and economic ties with both the developed and the developing world. To diversify partnership so that its economy is not entirely dependent on the West is not a recent action plan for Brazil. Since the 1960’s, with the Independent Foreign Policy, Brazil has searched for different markets to export primary goods. In the 90’s, Brazil focused its economy on the developed world, being the United States its primary partner. During Lula da Silva’s government, Brazil started searching for alternatives to boost economic growth and increase exports, although keeping traditional partners.

After the Goldman Sachs report on emerging economies, released in 2001, Brazil started again to diversify its partnership with other countries that were similar to it. In this context, Brazil, Russia, India and China decided to strengthen their relationships and to create a non-structured grouping called BRIC. Only in 2011 South Africa joined the grouping, turning the acronym BRIC into BRICS. Recently, the BRICS created a Developing Bank, which offers its members credit to infrastructure needs. With the traditional western partners, Brazil intensifies commercial and economic relations, mainly bilaterally or through regional groupings. In a simple analysis, Brazil exports primary and imports manufactured goods. In a multilateral level, Brazil disagrees with the West on issues that concern the International Monetary Fund (quotas) and the World Trade Organization (agricultural subsidies).


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Patricia Galves Derolle
Founder of Internacionalista
São Paulo, Brazil

25.09.2014

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“War as Usual” in Palestine.
Can Kosovo’s Independence Serve as Role Model for a Way Out?  
by Corinna Metz
 

Israel and Hamas are leading their “war as usual” like a cynical biennially routine at the expense of the civilian population of Gaza. However, when taking a look at the map of the Middle East one sees that time is running out for the Palestinian hope for a state since the territory it could be built on increasingly gets absorbed by Israel.

Kosovo Style Independence – A Purported Way Out of the Crisis

So what’s the solution? Palestinians desperately search for a way out of the stalemate in the conflict with Israel and thereby clutch at every straw. Without questioning the purpose and limits of analogy, several Palestinian officials perceived the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008 as universal remedy to conflicts about statehood. This was expressed in the statement “Kosovo is not better than us. We deserve independence even before Kosovo, and we ask for the backing of the United States and the European Union for our independence.” ⁱⁱ made by the high ranking member of the Palestine National Authority and advisor to the Palestinian President, Yasser Abed Rabbo. Despite its popularity, this approach was rejected by most members of the Palestinian leadership including President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat, who clearly commented the discussion with the assertion “We are not Kosovo”.ⁱⁱⁱ

Notwithstanding, political commentators and scholars seized the opportunity for a broader debate about the relevance of a comparison of Kosovo and Palestine.

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August 9, 2014 by Corinna Metz

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Global Climate Negotiations and Politics

Alisa Fazleeva

Alisa Fazleeva earned an MA in International Relations from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom in 2013. Her research interests include foreign policy decision-making, realism and constructivism, and social psychology and constructivism.

Once climate and ecological problems are put in the agenda of international organizations, they immediately become a tool for wider political controversies.

The first observation is that climate negotiations are becoming one more way for the governments to pursue their interests. The brightest example happened last year, at the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Conference for Climate Change) held in Bonn, Germany, which caused utter dissatisfaction among the delegates. The reason for that was an agenda dispute concerning a proposal by the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine to introduce a new item on legal and procedural issues related to decision-making under the Conference of the Parties (COP) and Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP). (Earth Negotiations Bulletin, 2013)

This is particularly interesting because, given the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by the Russian Federation in 2004 (the protocol at which many developed countries agreed to legally binding reductions in their emissions of greenhouse gases), it seems there was a shift in the Russian attitude towards the negotiation that needed to be addressed. Was the amendment to the Kyoto protocol desirable because the protesting countries intended to influence the environmental negotiations decision-makers? Or did it happen because the Russian economy is alive mainly because of oil extraction and chemical industry and pending the UNFCCC conclusions was beneficial for Russia?

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02.08.2014

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On 28^th July exactly 100 years ago, Central Europe declared a war to Eastern Europe, an event that marked the official outbreak of World War I. This was a turning point which finally fractured a fragile equilibrium of La Belle Èpoque, and set the Old Continent and the whole world with it into the series of motions that lasted for almost a century, before docking us to our post-modern societies. From WWI to www. Too smooth and too good to be true? Let us use this occasion and briefly examine our post-modernity and some fallacies surrounding it.

From WWI to www. – PUTIN NEXT DR

Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic

In the (Brave New) world of www. where, irrespectively from your current location on the planet, at least 20 intelligence agencies are notifying the incoming call before your phone even rings up, how is it possible to lose jumbo-jet for good? The two huge aviation tragedies affecting same country – Malaysia, are yet another powerful reminders that we are obsessed with a control via confrontation, not at all with the prosperity through human safety. Proof? Look at the WWI-like blame-game over the downing of the plane – a perfect way to derail our most important debate: Which kind of future do we want? Who seats in our cockpit and why do we stubbornly insist on inadequate civilizational navigation?! Consequently, Ukraine today is a far bigger crash site, which is – regrettably enough – well beyond an ill-fated MH 17.

Why in the www. world our media still bears the WWI-like rethorics? The ongoing demonization of President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin in the so-called mainstream media actually serves as a confrontational nostalgia call on the side of West. Hence, this main-scream seems aiming not to alienate, but to invite the current Russian leadership to finally accept confrontation as a modus operandi after a 25 years of pause.

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Vienna, 28 JUL 2014

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A Modest “Australian” Proposal to Resolve our Geo-Political Problems

The Continent and Nation of Australia

Dr. Emanuel L. Paparella
 

Climate Change and Re-Insurance:  The Human Security Issue
SC – SEA
Prof. Anis Bajrektarevic &  Carla Baumer
 

1  Introduction

Climate change, its existence, causes and effects, has been disputed by researchers, academics and policy makers.
The given degree of international consensus varies greatly between those most affected by changes to climatic conditions in contrast to those who are estimated to only experience a limited effect.

Controversially, it can also be claimed that some regions are set to gain from climate change such as the polar region nations currently disputing resource claims and logistic networks. In analysis of available data, research suggests the increased intensity of storms, hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, droughts, bushfires, mudslides and hailstorms along with increased temperatures, rising sea levels, and changing to pressure systems.

With climate change as a global phenomenon, not isolated to a certain region, the interest of stakeholders remains strongest in those with the ‘smallest’ voice such as the coastal areas, islands, commonly catastrophe prone and ‘future’ catastrophe prone regions in South East Asia.

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30.01.2014

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Call for Action in Syria
World Security Network reporting from Berlin in Germany, January 23, 2014

Dear Friends of the World Security Network,