PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The fall-out from the Enron-World.com-Interbrew financial scandal continues to damage the Western elite. Questions were raised not just over US Vice President Dick Chaney's culpability in profit-boosting, but the President's, too. The surreal prospect that all of the growth of the stock exchanges in New York and London in the last five years will prove illusory has sent a shudder down the back of the governing classes.
European leaders are struggling to take up some of the mantle of world leadership. The elderly Valery Giscard D'Estaing (whose title was bought in auction after its true holder died in the First World War) is heading up a convention to deepen and enlarge the European Union. Earlier this month President Bush challenged the EU by unilaterally enlarging Europe's borders by the expansion of Nato eastwards. 'We seek a new Europe that has buried its historic tensions and is prepared to meet global challenges beyond Europe's borders', Bush told East Europeans - albeit by satellite link. But dwindling public support is hampering European leaders' ability to act in concert.
US-European tensions were only partially calmed when the UN Security Council cobbled together a deal over the American demand that its troops be exempted from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.
US sponsored efforts to supplant the Palestine Authority as well as the Iraqi regime accelerated. Various putative successors to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat include the (jailed) security leader Marwan Barghouti and 53 year-old lecturer Sari Nusseibeh. Meanwhile London hosted a closed conference of Iraqi military and monarchist oppositionists.
The founding of the African Union - successor to the Organisation of African Unity was largely pooh-poohed by Western leaders as a talking shop. But while the AU conference in Durban was dismissed, the international conference on Aids in Barcelona heaped praise on former South African President Nelson Mandela for his endorsement of the message that Africa is sickening. Western commentators are happier with the image of Africa as a diseased patient than as a self-governing continent.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
With the International Criminal Court back on track, Kirsten Sellars The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton Publishing, 2002) is a must read. Sellars account of the growth of human rights diplomacy as a component of US and European foreign policy is a compendium of cynical manipulation of the language of rights by great power chicanery. Covering the key episodes in the development of human rights, from Nuremburg through to the Balkan trials at the Hague, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights persistently exposes the mismatch between the ideal and the practice. In particular the account of US and British government involvement in the growth and influence of Amnesty International and Human Rights' Watch, as the principle non-governmental campaigners against Third World regimes is compelling.
-- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'