We continue our tour of the world, at least as it existed two decades ago, through the eyes of two political scientists, Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, pioneers of the "regional security complex theory" of international relations. They write about two Europes. Not East and West on the terms of the old Cold War division. The dividing line has moved well to the east. Western Europe extends right up to the former Soviet Union, and the new Eastern Europe consists wholly of the former Soviet states in their complicated interactions. Turkey and the Balkans (where the latter means specifically the states that used to be part of Yugoslavia) make up special cases. The Balkans sometimes seem as if they are about to be incorporated into (Western) Europe. But they are such trouble there is sentiment in the west to avoid or delay that incorporation. On the other hand, Turkey is a classic "insulator" state. But let us start with the west. These nations, roughly speaki...
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I believe several Mayors of the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, have been indicted. Some have served time. There are protocols for this in Waterbury. Regular training for what to do when the federal marshalls show up and want to speak to the Mayor. Nobody who grew up in Connecticut is all that impressed with the indictment of Mayor Adams in the city to our southwest. One neat thing about the indictment though, is that they don't play the cutesy games other indictments do when they are made public. The bill of indictment is readily available. In fact, I'll just give you the link in case you haven't come across it elsewhere. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2024-09/u.s._v._adams_indictment_1.pdf But what do I mean by "cutesy games"? The anonymization of terms with pretty obvious referents. Some US Attorneys would have referred to "Country Number 1" yet made it obvious what country was referenced. Maybe with a reference to a waterway that rhymes with the word...
Saudi Arabia and Turkey seem intent upon the full normalization of relations. If they proceed with this (despite the fact that a journalist was murdered not TOO long ago in a Saudi embassy on Turkish soil -- which is the sort of thing that might be thought de-normalizing) the fact may significantly impact the balance of power in western Asia. Looking at the big picture: Turkey was born in a secularist moment The Ottoman Empire was at last dead, killed by the First World War, and it was replaced with a republic that defined itself as NOT being an Islamic power. That meant defining itself as a secularist power, because in western Asia it has always been secularism that serves as the supercessionist threat to Islam. A century later, though, Erdogan seems intent on removing that threat. He has steered Turkey not just toward Islam (it has long been predominantly Islamic) but toward the politics of Islamism, almost back to the ideas of the Ottomans. So he and the bone-saw monarchy ...
A warning from the late Christopher Hitchens, one that seems especially pertinent in the light of the post-coup turmoil in Turkey these days: In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul last June, one of the President's handler's was astute enough to insert a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from -- yes -- 'the bridge that unites them.' The important thing, as the President went on to intone from Pamuk, 'is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West.' No, what is important is to recognize 'that other peoples in other continents and civilizations' are 'exactly like us.' De te fabula narratur. Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the exception. 'Remember y...
JFK authorized the Attorney General, his brother, to cut the deal that the US for years thereafter would deny it had ever made, the deal agreeing that the US missiles in Turkey would be dismantled in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. Robert Kennedy wrote the following of the moment of the crucial contact, with Dobrynin. "We have to have a commitment by at least tomorrow that those bases [in Cuba] would be moved. This was not an ultimatum, I said, but just a statement of fact. He should understand that if they did not remove those basis, then we would remove them. His country might take retaliatory action, but he should understand that before this was over, while there might be dead Americans, there would also be dead Russians. He then asked me about Khrushchev's other proposal dealing with removal of the missiles from Turkey. I replied that there could be no quid pro quo --- not deal of this kind could be made ... If some time elapsed --- and ... I me...
A few thoughts about Turkey. The readers of this blog are a well-informed bunch, and I'm sure they know the basics. To wit: on May 31, protests were underway (peacefully) in Istanbul, where the catalyzing issue was the government's plan to replace a historical park with a shopping mall. Police responded that day in a heavy-handed way, tear gas, water cannon, 63 arrests. This has led to a spreading of the protests and a wider range of grievances, while Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has asserted that he has the high ground, and called the protestors "hoodlums." This is clearly about a good deal more than a single land-use dispute. It reminds me of something I wrote in my book, Gambling with Borrowed Chips . I sought to explain an upswing in crude oil prices that began in April 2007 and that continued until the summer of 2008. The world price of crude is of course very sensitive to news about the politics of the middle east. In April 2007, when the upward mo...
The Cyprus/bank/bailout story is big. Really big . Too much for me to handle in my own voice just now. So I'll just provide a few links, following chronological order, in this post and the next. The above photo is Cyprus' finance minister, Michael Sarris. By February 28, Cyprus was clearly 'next up,' the new center of the ever-shifting limelight in Europe's traveling crisis over banks and sovereign debts. The new president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, said that day that though Cyprus would have to negotiate terms of a bail-out, "no reference to a haircut on public debt or deposits will be tolerated." A big EU meeting in Brussels began on March 3d, and involved a good deal of discussion of the matters that Anastasiades had tried to wish off the table. Skipping ahead a bit ... by March 14th, EU officials, as well as those from the IMF, were in round-the-clock talks on a bail-out of Cyprus that would include a depositor sacrifice, known politel...