URL: http://www.commondreams.org/
As she contemplates the last two years of her Cabinet tenure, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has begun drawing plans for a new international order, one that would revamp existing global institutions and spawn entirely new ones.
Albright sketched the outlines of her idea for a new, formal grouping of the world's democratic nations in a wide-ranging interview.
The new order, she said, would enable its members to work more productively to protect their own freedoms and help those countries within reach of self-government take the final steps toward democracy. She cited four initial candidates: Colombia, Ukraine, Nigeria and Indonesia.
An aide referred to Albright's concept as a kind of international ``democracy club.''
``The 21st century . . . ought to be the century of democracy,'' Albright said during the interview, conducted in her offices on the seventh floor of the State Department. ``We're going to be putting an awful lot more emphasis on organizing the democracies, working with them . . . so that they can work with each other better.''
There will be no retreat from global responsibilities for the United States as it enters the next century, she stressed. The challenge is determining how the United States can best project its enormous power.
Other nations will ``either organize with us or against us,'' she said. ``But we are the organizing principle, and we have to understand our responsibilities.''
During the interview, Albright:
-- Stressed the need to combat the growing danger inherent in the spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially from an economically unstable Russia.
-- Suggested for the first time that she would support deployment of an anti-missile defense system under certain conditions to combat the proliferation threat.
-- Cited the imminent enlargement of NATO to include Hungary, Poland and her native Czech Republic as the event that ``I feel best about and proudest of.''
Albright, 61, achieved celebrity status in January 1997, when she became the United States' first female secretary of state. She dominated the American foreign policy arena during much of her first year in office with infectious enthusiasm, snappy sound bites and a string of diplomatic successes.
Last year was different.
The crises that swept Southeast Asia and Russia were, at their heart, financial dilemmas, shifting key decisions from Albright's State Department to the Treasury. The standoffs in Kosovo and Iraq had strong military dimensions, elevating the Pentagon, the White House and President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. ``Sandy'' Berger.
As she outlined her priorities for the next two years, she left little doubt that she plans to devote more of her energy to changing the global political system and the way Washington deals with it -- changes she believes will better position the United States for the challenges of the 21st century.
Elaborating on Albright's comments, a senior State Department official said conceptual planning for a new organization of democratic states is still in its early stages. He indicated that the proposal has not been discussed with other governments, but Albright hopes ``to have a concrete program, a road map to that general goal, in a matter of weeks, perhaps by the beginning of the spring.''
The senior official suggested that multinational institutions normally not associated with the State Department -- such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank -- could fall within the scope of the department's review.
Albright's formulation is the latest effort by U.S. officials to define the U.S. role as the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world.
In 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, then President Bush talked about a ``new world order'' that would avoid the strife of previous decades.
In 1993, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Albright suggested a policy of ``assertive multilateralism.'' Critics complained that her idea also assigned too important a role to the U.N. bureaucracy and to other members of the world organization.
Today, Albright contends that the nation faces ``a very dangerous situation'' in the short term caused by the threatened spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially by rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea and transnational terrorist organizations.
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A11
AIDED BY CRISIS, CASTRO TAKES STOCK OF MARKET CUBA TO ATTACK GLOBALIZATION AT CONFERENCE
By Laurie Goering Tribune Foreign Correspondent January 18, 1999 HAVANA The speculative capital and free-market globalization that have come to dominate Latin American economies in the last decade have failed to lift legions of poor and have created unsustainable stock market gains that are doomed to disappear.
That's the economic view that Cuba, Latin America's only remaining communist country, will promote this week as it plays host to a 22-nation international conference on globalization and the problems of development.
The conference, billed as a search for solutions to the problems of free-market capitalism, is designed to capitalize on growing Latin American discontent with market volatility that seems to cut down the region's economy every time it begins to surge ahead.
Cuban President Fidel Castro could scarcely have chosen a better week. Days ago, Brazil began a slide toward the Asian and Russian economic abyss, devaluing its carefully protected currency and perhaps moving much of Latin America--and perhaps the United States--closer to economic hard times.
The world's troubled market economy recently has become a favorite issue for Castro, who this month devoted much of his speech marking the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution to it. After recounting historic guerrilla battles, the Cuban leader closed out his address with biting condemnation of derivatives markets and hedge fund bailouts.
The world, Castro said, is "globalizing quickly, unhaltingly and irreversibly" but this globalization, particularly of financial markets, "has turned the planet into a gigantic casino" in which "artificial creation of fabulous wealth (bears) no relation to the real economy."
Globalization, he argued, also has accentuated "unfathomable differences between the rich and poor within each country and between countries" and undermined the value of "merit, capacity, creative spirit and what each individual actually contributes to the welfare of humanity" in favor of "theft, speculation and the exploitation of the weakest."
"The economic order which dominates the planet will inevitably fall," Castro warned. "New and unsuspected phenomena are emerging, ones which escape the control of governments and international financial institutions."
Similar worries about market economies have taken hold across much of Latin America, though no one has found any alternative, and Cuba's model is not one any nation cares to copy.
In November, Venezuela's President-elect Hugo Chavez roared to victory over the country's two long-established parties, promising a new "human capitalism" with greater emphasis on social needs.
Colombia's new president, Andres Pastrana, also insisted last week during a visit to Havana that the region "shouldn't be proud of an economic and development model that generates unemployment."
"We shouldn't travel through history generating poverty, and we shouldn't demand that people stand by an economic system that is prodigious in producing want for many when they hope for real opportunities," he said.
Regional economists say an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with economic affairs in Latin America is understandable given the repeated economic blows suffered by the region after the 1994 Mexican peso crash and the more recent Asian and Russian crises.
Brazil, burdened by government overspending and a $1 billion-a-day flight of speculative capital, last week set off what might turn out to be a new Latin American collapse.
The country, seen as Latin America's bulwark against world economic crisis, faces a recession this year and could see inflation slowly return and unemployment hit 13 percent, analysts say.
Income inequality in Latin America remains among the worst in the world, with the richest 10 percent of residents taking home 40 percent of the pie and the poorest 30 percent earning just 7.5 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
Contrary to Castro's warnings, however, most regional economists believe the problems with new global free markets lie not in the markets but in Latin America's process of adapting to them.
Government overspending and heavy debt remain serious problems in most Latin American countries, putting them at the mercy of volatile world financial markets. Formerly protected state industries, including many in Brazil, have gone private and are struggling to boost efficiency and competitiveness. Workers often are undereducated, and unemployment is growing.
Cuban socialism, by comparison, has produced the highest literacy rates in Latin America, Cuban officials say, along with full employment, an unusual degree of income equality, and an admirable, though now declining, health-care system.
Even so, no other Latin American nation sees Cuba as a model. The country's key industries, such as sugar production, are in a disastrous state of disrepair. Highly educated Cuban engineers and doctors drive taxis for tourist dollars, and many Cubans strongly resent their lack of freedom.
Despite the problems of free markets, Latin American nations--except for Cuba--have opted to stick with them as their best bet at eventually besting tenacious poverty and inequality.
One particular point of hope is Chile, which launched market reforms a decade ahead of the rest of the region and has seen the region's only substantial drop in poverty.
Even Chavez, a charismatic populist who campaigned on a platform of freezing debt payments and taking a hard look at "savage capitalism," is promising to listen to the International Monetary Fund, a capitalist nemesis of Castro.
What some leaders would like to see, however, and what may be discussed at this week's Havana conference, is increased and revamped taxes and perhaps other controls on markets to ensure increased stability and to make certain some degree of the wealth they generate goes to meet deep social needs.
Brazil's slide, in particular, is sure to raise a round of hard new questions about the region's economic future.
The economic crisis of the last year may "signal that things are not as ideal as the economists who fight for the free markets of neoliberalism pretend," said Cuba's main daily newspaper, the Communist Party-run Granma, last week.
According to Granma, at least 65 economists from 22 or more countries will participate in this week's conference, which starts Monday and is jointly sponsored by the Cuban Economists Association and the Latin American and Caribbean Economists Association.