Sunday, 31 October 2010

Traditional diplomacy


The roots of diplomacy were set in the ancient world. Moreover, the emergence of countries inevitably caused need to be maintained an active foreign policy on the international stage. It was necessary to establish forms of external contacts and relationships, to negotiate and conclude agreements. This is the sphere of diplomacy – to uphold the international affairs.
In addition to this, diplomacy occurs together with the emergence of foreign relations. It is constantly improving and has improved many centuries earlier before the creation of the term to be determined. Besides, at different stages of history diplomacy has been going through in diverse forms and ways that were consistent with the current conditions, and therefore they do not always coincide with the current ways and forms. Nevertheless, many basic principles of diplomacy and diplomatic skills and activities specific to the time treat distant past, have not lost their importance in our days. Now, a truly efficient diplomacy could be only the one, which is based on traditions, national and historical values and events, as well involving the problems of the modern days. Consequently, this allows the countries to optimally develop their line of foreign relations and successfully ensure their national and state interests.






In order to substantiate the validity of the idea that the ‘old’ diplomacy is contemporary applicable, we can adduce historical examples which aspire to find the solution to certain political affairs and problems of the modern time, since they are concentrated on what is happening in reality. For example, during the cold war nuclear weapons helped make competition between the US and USSR safer than it would have otherwise been if the superpowers had had only conventional arms on their disposal. Both were aware that if each of them had pushed the other too far, the conflict might have escalated to nuclear war engendering the obliteration of many towns and cities. The civil casualties would have been countless. Thus, because they used the diplomatic activities effectively and were aware of the probable aftermaths, they never actually fought a war with each other. So, from this historical paradigm we can perceive that the ‘old’ diplomatic methods and decisions are not only contemporary relevant, but also can be utilize very successfully on the political field nowadays.
Incontrovertibly, the diplomatic actions of the US and the Soviet Union were different during the cold war from those which take place at the present time. Notwithstanding, the history of the cold war implies that what matters is not the character of the countries that have nuclear weapons but the fact that they have them. Therefore, we do not need to look at the state level of analysis, which examine the regimes of the countries, their economic systems and domestic factors, in order to predict the relationship between the countries. Hence, we can witness that the fact that the US and the USSR have nuclear weapons makes the situation between them stable during the cold war, which can be scrutinize as some way of diplomacy to keep the relationships between those countries in tranquility.
On the whole, we can observe that the ‘old’ diplomacy is not outdated because what is happening currently in the international arena is not unique, but is rather reminiscent of events that took place in the past.
Web Links:
1) http://www.coldwar.org/

Thursday, 28 October 2010

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...: "Diplomacy occurs as a dialogue between independent states. When talking about diplomacy, one must understand that there are Old and New dipl..."

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...: "Diplomacy occurs as a dialogue between independent states. When talking about diplomacy, one must understand that there are Old and New dipl..."

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...

The New Diplomacy C: The Old and New Diplomacy related to Bilateral and...: "Diplomacy occurs as a dialogue between independent states. When talking about diplomacy, one must understand that there are Old and New dipl..."

Western Hypocrisy and Diplomacy

This is a reply to Mam

On the debate about Human Rights there had always been a double standard practiced by the West and  the UN Human Rights Commission in league with Western powers namely the US and her vassal states------the UK, Australia,New Zealand, Israel,  apartheid South Africa, Central and South American countries, and the EU-----all have appalling human rights record from the Second World War to the Cold War years to the torture and murder of Steve Bikko, Sharpville, Soweto, imprisonment of Nelson Mandela for 30 years in Robbins Island to the Iraq's Abu Ghraib torture pictures, the Gaza massacre, and all these have been confirmed by the recent Wikileak revelation on 27 October 2010 exposed such atrocities to be standard practice so much so that our study of international relations can never be the same again .

Why blame China for all the Western economic failures and financial crisis ???During the 19th and 20th century when both Britain and the US had their economic power through exploitation of the Third World resources and were prepared to use gun boat diplomacy and warfare against the LDC people with little regard for their human rights ( see John Pilger, Caroline Elkins et al) and put nothing back into the third world development. But when China moves into these areas and offered to build schools,roads,railways,hospitals the West starts to point to the country's poor human rights record . But as far as China, Malaysia, Singapore,Vietnam are concerned western idea of human righs is not importat because the West don't believe in it themselves and is only using HR to beat and point an accusing finger on countries whom they don't like. What are the basic HRs which Asian countries considers most important are good clean water, a roof over your head, free schools to college level, good roads, productive farm practice  and cultivation to produce food, a free health and welfare system, look after the aged , etc...one could go on . Feedong and education the 1.4 billion Chinese is more important then the polemics of HR . And all these were invested on the Chinese people since 1960 under the communist regime and today the Asian peoples are harvesting  these rewards invested by their government with an average annual economic growth of 8% compared to the Western hemisphere of 0.3% . The govrnment policy is that you can get rich in China but the State decides and today China produced more $ billionaires a year  than the entire EU countries  combined according to Forbes 2010 riches people publication . So it is educational to compare what are the best priorities for the Third World ???  comments please........ToraToraTora

Multilateral Conspiracy

Multilateral diplomacy is about talk and argument and involve a highlevel of conspiracy according to Jeniffer Mitzen (2005) . The Multilateral diplomacy that surrounded NATO's intervention in Kosovo is widely perceived as legitimate base on humanitarian intervention consideration but when compared to the American-led coalition's Second Iraq War is widely perceived as illegitimate (Johnstone,2004) because of the way the US conducted its multilateral diplomacy without UN sanction (Rubin,2003) and under the pretext of going after Iraq's WMD . The late Dr. David Kelly had already argued and presented his findings and confirmed that there were no WMD in Iraq, so to shut him up he was bumped off, claimed to be a suicide by the establishment .
Where legitimation is accomplished through argument, future disagreement must always be possible, but it must not devolve into violence that can destroy the social order ( J.Mitzen) ,and one would add avoid concerted efforts by interested parties to mislead UN member states in multilateral diplomacy and loses all credibility in international relations.

Jennifer Mitzen : Multilateral Diplomacy and Global Public Spheres, in American Political Science Review, vol.99, No.3. August 2005

Ian Johnstone (2004), US-UN  Relations After Iraq : The End of the World (Order) as we Know It ?, in European Journal of International Law  15(December) :813-38

James Rubin (2003),  Stumbling Into War  , Foreign Affairs (September/October) :46-66

ToraToraTora

Friday, 22 October 2010

NGO's are a Liability :Diplomatic Quangos

NGOs are a creation of powerful vested interests like e.g. the World Bank and the IMF to ensure that they have  a monopoly of Third World finances, markets and trade, and they are one of the causes of perpetual underdevelopment in some Third World countries in dependency theory and structural adjustment programmes(SAPs) .  NGOs are also the cause of crippling debts in poor countries and perpetuating what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal ( in Asian Drama ) termed the vicious circle and spiral of of never ending poverty.

It has its early history during the Green Revolution in agriculture pioneered by Norman Borlaug in the 1960s on dry rice cultivation without needing much water but tons of fertilizers that has to be imported from Monsanto, ICI,etc under a loan- aid  agreement for these new rice strain to survive and grow . Many underdeveloped countries  had to borrow heavily from the IMF and World Bank during the Cold War years and this serve the interest of the West, especially the USA .

The NGO diplomacy is generally seen as a body to market western products in the developing world .  Although superficially they are seen to be helping and aiding the Third World   like for example the fight against malaria  in Africa. But after 30 years the parasitic illness remain dormant in 2010 and new western medicines and other ineffective control reccommendation has failed to eradicate the plague but continue to be dumped on these countries at a price .
There has also been accusation that some NGO's  are using the Africans as live human  guinea  pigs to test western drugs in disease detection, birth control pills among the hill peoples of Thailand and the deadly   ebola virus  as WMD experiments . And possibly HIV/AIDS, a genetically engineered virus that appeared in 1982 is within the WMD programme tested on Africans first but soon got out of control ,cross the human ethnic barrier and swamped the world  .

NGOs are generally seen as both  a liability and a marketing tool of  Western interests and to keep redundant diplomatic bureaucrats in a job at great expense to Third World countries receiving aid from the First World.

However the same cannot be said of medicin sans frontier which is a highly respected independant organisation, but the same cannot be accredited to the Red Cross which has been tainted in the past and strongly connected with the Swiss banks and government during the Cold War years .It was used as a cover for Swiss banks in their shady activity with dictators in the Third World to embezzle millions of dollars out of their country into Swiss bank accounts .

My Face can you name one NGO that has been really successful in helping Third World countries to grow better crop yields or to eradicate disease . We are in the 21st century now and all the NGO particpation in the last century continue to be with us, why  ????? ToraToraTora