WASHINGTON'S CHILD-CENTRED FOREIGN POLICY
Six-year old Cuban Elian Gonzalez was taken from his grandfather's home in Miami at gunpoint by federal agents on 22 April. The sole survivor of a shipwreck of Cuban's seeking asylum in the US, Elian has been adopted by Miami's exile community as a symbol of opposition to the Castro government. Cubans, too, have fixed on Elian, holding massive protests in Havana for the return of the boy to his natural father. Washington's political establishment chose to face down the exiles and take the boy into custody.
Driving events is the fact that all the different players are hiding behind a six-year old boy. Instead of saying what they want to happen, all insist that they are acting in the best interests of the child. The exiles want to attack Castro; Castro wants to attack the exiles; and Washington wants to stop Cubans from seeking exile in Miami.
As an up-and-coming lawyer in the field of family law, Hillary Clinton's 1974 essay 'Children's rights: a legal perspective' proposed a new approach to the question of children's rights (Reprinted in PA Vardin and IL Brody, Children's Rights: Contemporary Perspectives). Making the rights of the child come first, Clinton proposed a re-motivation of family policy. Twenty-six years later, not just family policy, but foreign policy is being re-motivated around the rights of the child.
Cold War sabre-rattling has lost its appeal. Turning back asylum-seekers looks vicious. Few people feel confident asserting what should happen in the tortuous relation between Cuba and the US. But everyone is moved by a little boy's dilemma, and nobody is shy of making their opinions known. With Elian Gonzalez, the infantilisation of US Foreign Policy is well under way.
TARGETING MUGABE
To the dismay of the British Foreign Office, southern African leaders backed Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's land reforms at a summit on 21 April. Veterans of the liberation war have led the occupation of white- owned farms, leading to beatings and the deaths of two white farmers. British spokesman and former anti-Apartheid activist Peter Hain insists that the violence is designed to shore up Mugabe's fragile grip on power.
Britain is attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the Zimbabwe government. It is true that Mugabe has used the land issue to galvanise falling support. But in a week in which the British government rallied mobs against asylum-seekers, they have no room to complain about Mugabe's tactics.
The Mugabe government was created with a built-in weakness by the Lancaster House accords that ended the liberation war in 1979. Britain's Lord Carrington brokered an agreement that left the former white rulers of Apartheid Rhodesia with a guaranteed bloc of votes in parliament. (Carrington referred to Mugabe as 'Ebagum', or 'mugger-bugger', G Walden, Lucky George, p197.) Worse still, whites retained ownership of businesses and farms. Mugabe had control of the government, but not the economy.
Without growth, Mugabe's government has failed to widen its base of support beyond the rural areas, and faces a middle class opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change. More recently Mugabe has played the militant, sending 11 000 troops to fight alongside Laurent Kabila in the Congo. But the defeat of the proposed change in the constitution, abolishing the white bloc vote and entrenching presidential power, leaves Mugabe isolated.
Mugabe's demand that Britain funds land reform exposes his underlying weakness. British 'support' is dependent on dictating the course Zimbabwe chooses.
KEN'S HAPPENING
British Prime Minister Tony Blair lent his support to the Labour Party's candidate for the London Mayor, Frank Dobson, who has been pushed back into third place in the opinion polls by Tory Stephen Norris and the favourite, Labour rebel candidate, Ken Livingstone. It is ironic that Blair's attempts to stop Ken have earned him the reputation of being a 'control freak'. The real story of Labour's campaign of devolving power to the regions with the Scottish and Welsh assemblies and now the Greater London Authority, is just how easily Labour lost control.
Labour's membership has fallen and the party's officials have assumed control of policy. Labour's London members are a dwindling group of people with little responsibility and an exaggerated sense of hurt. The opportunity to support Livingstone and embarrass the leadership was too good to miss. The same Tony Blair who has insisted that candidates would be selected on the basis of One Member One Vote, was forced to use the trade union block vote to stop Ken.
The 'fix' gave Livingstone the excuse to run as an independent. At that point the Ken4London campaign moved into completely different territory. Ken's key supporters are not trade unionists like Unison's Geoff Martin, but the artists and glitterati who turned out for his celebrity fund- raising auction. By appearing to be a completely different kind of politician - one who is outside the mainstream of party fixers and spin- doctors - Livingstone has managed to capture an anti-political mood.
Livingstone's supporters on the radical left, like the candidates of the London Socialist Alliance, are about to learn the hard way that the Ken4London campaign is not a return to traditional left-wing politics. It is more like a piece of performance art - with the choice of a party colour, purple, an image-conscious pastiche of a political campaign.
Ken Livingstone's success is a consequence of the shrinking public sphere. With fewer people involved in the political process, the balance of forces has shifted. Labour's long-ignored London members found themselves suddenly more important than they had ever been before - and acted accordingly. With politicians less attractive to the public, artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, as well as pop stars like Norman Cook have more pulling power.
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