TyroCity: International Relations

Features of Foreign policy of Nepal

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Nepal has been mainly raising the following matters in the UNO, Non-Aligned conference, SAARC Summit and in the multilateral and bilateral forums:
1) Trust and values towards panchashil doctrines:
Nepal has adopted the foreign policy keeping trust and value in the following Five principles approved by Bandung Conference in 1955.
a)Non-interference
b) Non-invision
c) Respect to regional indivisibility, sovereignty and freedom of one country to another
d) To have equality and mutual well being
e) to maintain peaceful co-existence
2) To respect UN charter and make the UNO able and strong
3) To protect against casteism, color discrimination, colonialism and imperialism
4) To solve international conflict, misunderstanding and problems through peaceful means
5) Note to form and minitary part
6) keep trust in international law
7) maintain peace, unity, understanding and brotherhood in the world
8) to achieve sustainable peace by institutionalizing peace in Nepal
9) To emphasize on regional help
10) To emphasize on disarmament and protest armament
11) To secure and promote the genuine right of land locked countries
12) To initiate a new economic model in the world
13) To get help and support from friendly countries for economic prosperity
14) To protest any type of interference done by big nation
15) To advocate in favor of economic development and prosperity of very underdeveloped countries
16) Not interfere in the internal issues of the other countries
17) To adopt Non- alignment
18) To emphasize on protection and promotion of human right all over the world
19) To establish special and practical relationship with neighbouring countries, etc.

Policy provisions
Constitutional provision
Act 33. under the responsibility of the nation
Act 33 (dha) To implement the international treaties and agreements in favor of the nation effectively
Act 33 (na) using available water resources, natural means and resources for the well-being of the country
Act 33 (6) The international relationship of the nation will be directed in the direction of promoting national respect in the international arena yet maintaining sovereignty, indivisibility and freedom of the nation.
Act 35 under the state’s policy
Act 35(12) the state will adopt the policy of attracting foreign capital and technology in the country still giving priority to nation investment for nation development.
Act 35(21) Nepal will undertake its foreign policy on the basic of the norms of UN charter, non alignment, five principles doctrine’s, international law and world peace
Act 35(22) the state will adopt the policy that helps to institutionalize peace and order based on international norms and values with co-operative relationship along socio-economic as well as other different sectors based on equality with the neighbouring and friendly countries of the world.

Legal provisions
Existent acts

facility and freedom towards foreign stats and diplomatic representative act, 2027 2.continuity of foreign transaction act 2019
foreign investment act 2010
foreign investment and technique handover act 2049
passwort act 2024
labour act 2048
foreign employment act 2042
human trafficking control act 2064
treaty act 2047
non- inhabitant Nepalese act, 2064 Existent rules 1.passport regulation 2059
Labour regulation 2050 3.Hotel, lodge, restaurant, bar and guiding regulation 2038
Honorary consul general regulation 2039
Immigration regulation 2051
trekking and rafting regulation 2059
Mountaineering reguration 2041
regulation foreign exchange regulation 2020 9.Foreign investment tax regulation, 2020
Foreign empolyment regulation 2056

Verdict or orders of Supreme Court

the court cannot issue order on the mater which is of the nature to be solved by diplomatic effort.
Action plan record signed by two countries need not be confidential
Any written agreement between two countries will be regarded as treaty
No legal condition to use the land abandoned by Sugauli Treaty by annexing it in Nepal

Existent problems in Foreign policy and foreign relationship

Continuity of party partition in appointment of ambassadors without following diplomatic ability and efficiency
lack of professional competency with the ambassadors
The candidates having specialisation in industrial, commercial, employment and diplomatic sector are not selected to appoint ambassadors. 4.Weak condition of financial diplomacy 5.Lack of information and notice through well known international newspapers and magazines by publishing different articles about Nepal. 6.Lack of wide diversification in bilateral and multilateral business investment, technique handover and industrial promotion. 7.Lack of development of water resources through foreign policy and foreign relationship.
Lack of seeking investors and presenting proposals activities through foreign missions. 9.Lack of extension of potentials in tourism promotion through diplomatic missions. 10.Lack of efforts to promote export of nepalese goods in international market. 11.Lack of development and expansion of international gathering, exhibition and commercial representatives board. 12.Weak management of foreign assistance. 13.Adverse effect on foreign policy and foreign relationship due to political instability.

SUGGESTIONS TO SOLVE EXISTENT PROBLEMS IN FOREIGN POLICY AND FOREIGN RELATIONSHIP
1.To appoint ambassadors on the basis of diplomatic ability and efficiency.
2.No political partition on appointing ambassadors.
3.To train the ambassador in financial diplomacy before sending to foreign mission.
4.To include subject matter related to knowledge and experience of industrial, financial, employment and diplomatic sectors in the public hearing for the appointment of ambassador.
5.To broadcast and publish information and notice about different sectors of Nepal through chief newspapers and broadcast mediums of the world.
6.Diplomatic agencies established in the foreign countries should pay special attention to run different activities for the development of tourism, trade, commerce and business of Nepal.
7.Foreign relationship should be strengthened through the medium of international fete exhibition and business representatives boards.
8.Special attention to be paid towards conducting Nepal’s foreign policy and foreign relationship for the multisector utilization of water resources.
9.To conduct foreign relationship and diplomatic activities considering bilateral and multilateral business, promotion, and expansion of investment and technique handover.
10.To make special effort to promote export through foreign policy.
11.To build up any treaty and agreement insuring the favor of national wellbeing and national interest.

Intermediate Consequences of Cold War

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

- The Korean War
Japan had taken over Korea in 1910 & ruled it until 1945.

Republic of Korea (South Korea) was established in 1948 in the zone that had been occupied by the US after defeating Japan. Communist North Korean troops, backed by Soviet Union invaded South Korea in June 1950 in order to unite Korea under communist regime.

The U.S. sent troops to defend democratic South Korea. By mid‐July 1950, a 17‐nation military coalition fighting under a U.S.‐led UN Command was engaged in fierce fighting against advancing North Korean troops

In late December 1950, China intervened in the war when UN forces were about to defeat North Korean forces.

The Chinese troops pushed the U.S. back to the 38th parallel (38° North latitude) where the border of North Korea and South Korea still stands today.

The war came to the state of ceasefire in 1953 after the move of the UN Security Council. No peace treaty was signed, and North and South Korea remain technically at war to this very day.

Cuba and the 1962 Missile Crisis

The 1959 Cuban Revolution sparked the most dangerous confrontation of the entire Cold War.

The US wanted to crush emerging communism in Cuba that was just 90 miles from Florida.

US destabilize and topple the Castro regime, in april1961, the United States even sponsored a failed invasion of Cuba designed to remove Castro from power.

After that, the Soviets vowed to protect Cuba from U.S. intervention.

The John F. Kennedy administration publicly confronted the Soviets and demanded that supply of missiles be stopped.

The US relaxed its attitude towards Cuba, and the USSR withdrew supplying the missiles when the US agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey.

Propaganda before and after World War 2

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Propaganda before and after World War 2 before 1914, propaganda was usually associated with religion and the implanting of ideas to be cultivated in support of existing beliefs and ‘faith’. Its wartime applications, in the Napoleonic or the American independence wars, were confined largely to calls to arms, lampooning the enemy, glorifying victory, and sustaining morale. The intention by the few to impress the many can be traced back to the ancient world in art, architecture, and symbolism. The advent of printing in the 14th century shifted the emphasis from script to print. In wars of religion, propaganda from the pulpit remained a potent method of swaying emotions, hence the Vatican’s Sacre Congregatio. Massive advances in communications technologies in the 19th century, the development of a global cable network, and the arrival of the mass media by the end of the century extended propaganda to a global audience.

The Great War of 1914-18, a total war which industrialized warfare and made the home front as important as the fighting front, altered the nature of popular involvement and introduced domestic morale as a military asset. It also discredited the word ‘propaganda’ which henceforth came to be associated with the manipulation of opinion, by foul means rather than fair, with lies or half-truths, and with deceit. In particular, the popularization of atrocity propaganda through the relatively new mass-circulation press and the increasingly popular silent cinema discredited the relationship between propaganda and ‘truth’. It was this manipulative power over human emotions which Hitler identified as being a weapon that could be of enormous value for his purposes.

In the new USSR also, propaganda was seized upon as a device that could serve the state, by extending revolutionary ideas to the illiterate masses and, more innovatively, into the international class struggle. With the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the ability to transmit propaganda across frontiers and appeal directly to foreign audiences undermined traditional notions about non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. A series of radio ‘wars’ prompted the League of Nations in 1936 to pass a convention attempting to outlaw the use of broadcasting for these purposes. More honored in the breach as the Nazi and Fascist regimes positioned propaganda as a central feature of their domestic and foreign policies, the BBC ideal that ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace unto Nation’ fell victim to the ideological conflict that was to produce both WW II and the subsequent Cold War.

By the outbreak of WW II, the sound cinema had also become an important medium for disseminating propaganda. The British Ministry of Information (the choice of words reflecting the nervousness of democratic countries in eschewing propaganda) recognized that ‘for the film to be good propaganda it must also be good entertainment’. Once the USA entered the war, the formidable American motion-picture industry (‘Hollywood’) was mobilized in support of wartime propaganda themes: ‘why we fight’, ‘know your enemy’, ‘unity is strength’, and so on. The wartime democratic alliance evolved a ‘Strategy of Truth’ towards their propaganda, which did not mean that the whole truth was told. But the reputation for credibility which organizations like the BBC were able to develop in their broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Europe was a serious corrective to the propaganda output of Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment encapsulated by the phrase the ‘Big Lie’.

While propaganda by press, poster, radio, and film was used extensively on the domestic fronts to sustain popular morale through the harsh realities of war, bombing, rationing, victories, and defeats, on the fighting fronts it was used as an adjunct to military tactics. Millions of leaflets were dropped over enemy lines, mobile loudspeaker teams shouted out messages, and radio transmissions attempted to sow seeds of confusion, doubt, and defeatism. It is axiomatic that successful propaganda must go hand in hand with policy. The Allies in this respect shot themselves in the foot with the insistence on unconditional surrender following the Casablanca Conference of 1942. By announcing that all Germans in defeat would be treated in exactly the same way, this policy fused the fate of the German people with that of the Nazi Party in a way undreamed of by a grateful Goebbels. It enabled him to launch his own drive for total war, it pre-empted the Allied use of such inducements as ‘surrender or die’ since any German soldier would be treated as a war criminal, and it partly helps to explain why the German people kept fighting to the bitter end.

Developments in new communications technologies during the 1980s, such as the portable satellite phone, the laptop computer, and digital data transmission meant that such military control of the information environment would never be possible again. However, as the Gulf war of 1991 indicated, propaganda had not been confined to the dustbin of history. An increasingly sophisticated US military information policy was able to secure a desired view of warfare through the release of videotapes showing missiles hitting (not missing) their targets with unprecedented accuracy, and through live television press conferences which bypassed the traditional role of the media as mediator. Despite the unprecedented effort by the Iraqis to counter this propaganda of a ‘clean’ and ‘smart’ high-tech war by permitting correspondents from Coalition countries to stay behind in the enemy capital under fire, the military information agenda succeeded in dominating the media coverage. Democracies had indeed demonstrated that they could wage war in the presence of more than 1, 500 journalists, and thereby sustain public support in the process.

Propaganda, Diplomacy, and International Public Opinion

The Cold War inaugurated a paradigm shift in the U.S. practice of diplomacy that reflected changes in the nature of diplomatic activity worldwide. Through propaganda, policy initiatives, and covert action, agents of the U.S. government acted directly to influence the ideas, values, beliefs, opinions, actions, politics, and culture of other countries. Foreign affairs personnel not only observed and reported, they also participated in events or tried to influence the way that they happened. The old maxim that one government does not interfere in the internal affairs of another had been swept aside.

The pattern of international relations was further transformed by the electronic communications revolution and the emergence of popular opinion as a significant force in foreign affairs. Foreign policy could no longer be pursued as it had during the nineteenth century, when diplomacy was the exclusive province of professional diplomats who used (often secret) negotiations to reach accords based on power and interest. Developments in mass communication and the increased attentiveness to domestic audiences abroad to foreign affairs meant that the target of diplomacy had now widened to include popular opinion as much, if not more so, than traditional diplomatic activities. In other words, by appealing over the heads of governments directly to public opinion, effective propaganda and other measures would encourage popular opinion to support U.S. policies, which would in turn exert pressure on government policymakers.

Throughout the Cold War, propaganda and diplomacy operated on multiple levels. At the most obvious level, propaganda as it is conventionally understood (the utilization of communication techniques to influence beliefs and actions) was employed as a distinct instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Through the United States Information Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and other mechanisms, the United States waged a war of words and of ideas that attacked communism, promoted capitalism and democracy, defended U.S. foreign policies, and advertised the American way of life in order to win the Cold War.

On another level, the awareness that international public opinion had become a major factor in the conduct of diplomacy meant that propaganda considerations intruded on the policymaking process itself. American policymakers were increasingly aware that international public opinion had to be an ingredient in policy formulation at all levels: in the planning and policy formulation stage, in the coordination and timing of operations, and finally in the last phase of explanation and interpretation by government officials and information programs.

This attitude played itself out most visibly in the United Nations, which became one of the most important arenas for Cold War propaganda. It also was reflected in the marked increase in the foreign travel of U.S. presidents and vice presidents, an important device for generating news coverage and for reaching international audiences directly. On a more routine basis, consideration of international public opinion simply involved the careful selection of words and phrases to describe the objectives of American foreign policy—including the process of creating what came to be known as a “sound bite. Even within the State Department—an institution wedded to traditional diplomacy and wary of popular opinion—the Policy Planning Staff began to argue in the mid-1950s that convincing foreign officials was often less important than carrying issues over their heads to public opinion, reasoning that popular opinion would exert more of an impact on government officials than vice versa. The extensive and instantaneous media coverage that accompanied diplomatic conferences meant that negotiations needed to be conducted on two levels: on the diplomatic level between governments, and on the popular level to win international public support for policies. Diplomatic conferences were no longer merely opportunities for resolving international disputes; they were sounding boards for public opinion and forums for propaganda.

The psychological dimension of postwar American diplomacy also included a preoccupation with American prestige and credibility—concepts that connoted the reliability of American commitments and served as code words for America’s image and reputation. As Robert McMahon has argued, throughout the postwar period American leaders invoked the principle of credibility to explain and justify a wide range of diplomatic and military decisions. American actions in such disparate crises as Korea (1950–1953), Taiwan Strait (Quemoy-Matsu) (1954–1955), Lebanon (1958), and Vietnam (1954–1973) were driven by a perceived need to demonstrate the resolve, will, and, determination—in a word, credibility—of the United States. .

The infusion of psychological considerations and propaganda tactics into the practice of diplomacy is one of the Cold War’s most important legacies, but given the revolution in communication technologies of the late twentieth century it was perhaps inevitable that the ancient art of diplomacy would become affected by the techniques of propaganda and public persuasion. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War’s propaganda battles, foreign policy continued to be swayed by images transmitted instantly around the globe.

Propaganda

“Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.” – Jean Anouilh

“Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It’s a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.” – Elizabeth Drew

Propaganda is the dissemination of information aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or gives loaded messages in order to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda. Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

Propaganda can be defined as any message intended to modify the attitudes and behaviour of people at whom it is directed, primarily by appealing to their emotions. Its use is not confined to dictatorships and authoritarian organizations. Democracies have employed it extensively in wartime. In peacetime it plays a significant role in electoral politics, and in public-service campaigns relating to social problems. Messages may range from simple verbal texts to elaborate combinations of aural and visual signals (e.g. television commercials). The media used have included print, graphic art, film, radio, television, and architecture, from baroque palaces to fascist monuments.

Types
Propaganda is generally an appeal to emotion, contrasted to an appeal to intellect. It shares techniques with advertising and public relations. Advertising and public relations can be thought of as propaganda that promotes a commercial product or shapes the perception of an organization, person or brand, though in post-World War II usage the word “propaganda” more typically refers to political or nationalist uses of these techniques or to the promotion of a set of ideas, since the term had gained a pejorative meaning, which commercial and government entities couldn’t accept. The refusal phenomenon was eventually to be seen in politics itself by the substitution of ‘political marketing’ and other designations for ‘political propaganda’.

Propaganda was often used to influence opinions and beliefs on religious issues, particularly during the split between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches. Propaganda has become more common in political contexts, in particular to refer to certain efforts sponsored by governments, political groups, but also often covert interests. In the early 20th century, propaganda was exemplified in the form of party slogans. Also in the early 20th century the term propaganda was also used by the founders of the nascent public relations industry to describe their activities. This usage died out around the time of World War II, as the industry started to avoid the word, given the pejorative connotation it had acquired.

Techniques
Common media for transmitting propaganda messages include news reports, government reports, historical revision, junk science, books, leaflets, movies, radio, television, and posters. In the case of radio and television, propaganda can exist on news, current-affairs or talk-show segments, as advertising or public-service announce “spots” or as long-running advertorials. Propaganda campaigns often follow a strategic transmission pattern to indoctrinate the target group. This may begin with a simple transmission such as a leaflet dropped from a plane or an advertisement. Generally these messages will contain directions on how to obtain more information, via a web site, hot line, radio program, et cetera (as it is seen also for selling purposes among other goals). The strategy intends to initiate the individual from information recipient to information seeker through reinforcement, and then from information seeker to opinion leader through indoctrination.

A number of techniques based in social psychological research are used to generate propaganda. Many of these same techniques can be found under logical fallacies, since propagandists use arguments that, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid. Some time has been spent analyzing the means by which propaganda messages are transmitted. That work is important but it is clear that information dissemination strategies become propaganda only strategies when coupled with propagandistic messages. Identifying these messages is a necessary prerequisite to study the methods by which those messages are spread. Below are a number of techniques for generating propaganda:

Appeal to prejudice -Using loaded or emotive terms to attach value or moral goodness to believing the proposition.

Black-and-White fallacy –Presenting only two choices, with the product or idea being propagated as the better choice. (e.g., “You are either with us, or you are with the enemy”)
Beautiful people -The type of propaganda that deals with famous people or depicts attractive, happy people. This makes other people think that if they buy a product or follow a certain ideology, they too will be happy or successful. (This is more used in advertising for products, instead of political reasons)
Big Lie -The repeated articulation of a complex of events that justify subsequent action. The descriptions of these events have elements of truth, and the “big lie” generalizations merge and eventually supplant the public’s accurate perception of the underlying events. After World War I the German Stab in the back explanation of the cause of their defeat became a justification for Nazi re-militarization and revanchist aggression.
Demonizing the enemy -Making individuals from the opposing nation, from a different ethnic group, or those who support the opposing viewpoint appear to be subhuman (e.g., the Vietnam War-era term “gooks” for National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam aka Vietcong, (or ‘VC’) soldiers), worthless, or immoral, through suggestion or false accusations.
Direct order -This technique hopes to simplify the decision making process by using images and words to tell the audience exactly what actions to take, eliminating any other possible choices. Authority figures can be used to give the order, overlapping it with the Appeal to authority technique, but not necessarily. The Uncle Sam “I want you” image is an example of this technique.
Disinformation -The creation or deletion of information from public records, in the purpose of making a false record of an event or the actions of a person or organization, including outright forgery of photographs, motion pictures, broadcasts, and sound recordings as well as printed documents.
Euphoria -The use of an event that generates euphoria or happiness, or using an appealing event to boost morale. Euphoria can be created by declaring a holiday, making luxury items available, or mounting a military parade with marching bands and patriotic messages.
Half-truth -A half-truth is a deceptive statement which may come in several forms and includes some element of truth. The statement might be partly true, the statement may be totally true but only part of the whole truth, or it may utilize some deceptive element, such as improper punctuation, or double meaning, especially if the intent is to deceive, evade blame or misrepresent the truth.
Intentional vagueness -Generalities are deliberately vague so that the audience may supply its own interpretations. The intention is to move the audience by use of undefined phrases, without analyzing their validity or attempting to determine their reasonableness or application. The intent is to cause people to draw their own interpretations rather than simply being presented with an explicit idea. In trying to “figure out” the propaganda, the audience forgoes judgment of the ideas presented. Their validity, reasonableness and application may still be considered.
Name-calling -Propagandists use the name-calling technique to incite fears and arouse prejudices in their hearers in the intent that the bad names will cause hearers to construct a negative opinion about a group or set of beliefs or ideas that the propagandist would wish hearers to denounce. The method is intended to provoke conclusions about a matter apart from impartial examinations of facts. Name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against the an idea or belief on its own merits.
Oversimplification -Favorable generalities are used to provide simple answers to complex social, political, economic, or military problems.

Nazi Germany
Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Hitler took power in 1933. All journalists, writers, and artists were required to register with one of the Ministry’s subordinate chambers for the press, fine arts, music, theater, film, literature, or radio. The Nazis believed in propaganda as a vital tool in achieving their goals. Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Führer, was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918 (see also: Dolchstoßlegende). Hitler would meet nearly every day with Goebbels to discuss the news and Goebbels would obtain Hitler’s thoughts on the subject; Goebbels would then meet with senior Ministry officials and pass down the official Party line on world events. Broadcasters and journalists required prior approval before their works were disseminated. Along with posters, the Nazis produced a number of films and books to spread their beliefs.

Cold War propaganda

The United States and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, television, and radio programming to influence their own citizens, each other, and Third World nations and USA. The United States Information Agency operated the Voice of America as an official government station. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which were in part supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, provided grey propaganda in news and entertainment programs to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union respectively. The Soviet Union’s official government station, Radio Moscow, broadcast white propaganda, while Radio Peace and Freedom broadcast grey propaganda. Both sides also broadcast black propaganda programs in periods of special crises.

In 1948, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office created the IRD (Information Research Department) which took over from wartime and slightly post-war departments such as the Ministry of Information and dispensed propaganda via various media such as the BBC and publishing.

The ideological and border dispute between the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China resulted in a number of cross-border operations. One technique developed during this period was the “backwards transmission”, in which the radio program was recorded and played backwards over the air. (This was done so that messages meant to be received by the other government could be heard, while the average listener could not understand the content of the program.) When describing life in capitalist countries, in the US in particular, propaganda focused on social issues such as poverty and anti-union action by the government. Workers in capitalist countries were portrayed as “ideologically close”. Propaganda claimed rich people from the US derived their income from weapons manufacturing, and claimed that there was substantial racism or neo-fascism in the US.

When describing life in Communist countries, western propaganda sought to depict an image of a citizenry held captive by governments that brainwash them. The West also created a fear of the East, by depicting an aggressive Soviet Union. In the Americas, Cuba served as a major source and a target of propaganda from both black and white stations operated by the CIA and Cuban exile groups. Radio Habana Cuba, in turn, broadcast original programming, relayed Radio Moscow, and broadcast The Voice of Vietnam as well as alleged confessions from the crew of the USS Pueblo. George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are virtual textbooks on the use of propaganda. Though not set in the Soviet Union, these books are about totalitarian regimes in which language is constantly corrupted for political purposes. These novels were, ironically, used for explicit propaganda. The CIA, for example, secretly commissioned an animated film adaptation of Animal Farm in the 1950s with small changes to the original story to suit its own needs.

Afghan War
In the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, psychological operations tactics were employed to demoralize the Taliban and to win the sympathies of the Afghan population. At least six EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft were used to jam local radio transmissions and transmit replacement propaganda messages. Leaflets were also dropped throughout Afghanistan, offering rewards for Osama bin Laden and other individuals, portraying Americans as friends of Afghanistan and emphasizing various negative aspects of the Taliban. Another shows a picture of Mohammed Omar in a set of crosshairs with the words “We are watching.” This technique has been shown to be rather ineffective in terms of long term opinions change given current political and social conditions in Afghanistan.

Iraq War
In November 2005, The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, alleged that the United States military had manipulated news reported in Iraqi media in an effort to cast a favorable light on its actions while demoralizing the insurgency. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq, said the program is “an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents”, while a spokesman for former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the allegations of manipulation were troubling if true. The Department of Defense has confirmed the existence of the program. The New York Times published an article about how the Pentagon has started to use contractors with little experience in journalism or public relations to plant articles in the Iraqi press. These articles are usually written by US soldiers without attribution or are attributed to a non-existent organization called the “International Information Center.” Planting propaganda stories in newspapers was done by both the Allies and Central Powers in the First World War and the Axis and Allies in the Second; this is the latest version of this technique.

Anti-Semitic propaganda for children
In Nazi Germany, the education system was thoroughly co-opted to indoctrinate the German youth with anti-Semitic ideology. This was accomplished through the National Socialist Teachers League, of which 97% of all German teachers were members in 1937. It encouraged the teaching of “racial theory.” Picture books for children such as Don’t Trust A Fox in A Green Meadow Or the Word of A Jew, The Poisonous Mushroom, and The Poodle-Pug-Dachshund-Pincher were widely circulated (over 100,000 copies of Don’t Trust A Fox… were circulated during the late 1930s) and contained depictions of Jews as devils, child molesters, and other morally charged figures. Slogans such as “Judas the Jew betrayed Jesus the German to the Jews” were recited in class. The following is an example of a propagandistic math problem recommended by the National Socialist Essence of Education:

Nepal‘s role in SAARC

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Eric Hobsbawm has defined periods of history in terms of ages, Age of revolutions, of Capital, of Empires and of Extremes etc. By this analogy, our age can be called an “Age of Contrasts” which is the sum total of interdependence and marginalization, abundant prosperity and anxiety, technological revolutions and exclusion. This is the reality we live in.

Similarly, the present time also reminds us of what John Dunne had said about four centuries and a half ago, “No man is an island unto himself, every man is a piece of the continent, but part of the main”. It rings as true today as it was then. South Asia therefore is no exception to this general trend. In fact we are a microcosm of the world at large. The region enjoys a high growth rate but has one of the lowest Social indicators with incidence of poverty. It has a high potential of human and natural resources, yet it faces the great challenge of deprivation and marginalization. It is in that overall context that we would like to look at the SAARC process.

Before going to the specifics, let me state at the beginning that SAARC has gone through the vicissitudes of time in the last two decades. We have passed through moments of euphoria and also moments of frustrations. We are striving hard to gear up slowly towards the objectives of the SAARC. Let us also remind ourselves that SAARC holds a great promise only when we are all able to fully implement what we have agreed in various SAARC forums, and only when we practice what we preach.

South Asia at this point of time is at the crossroads. Globalization has really come to our door with all its attendant characteristics, both opportunities as well as challenges. The overall growth rate of the region has remained high for some years and there is a prospect of getting it even to a higher level and sustaining it at that level, if we all manage distributive effects of growth, infrastructure constraints and well-calibrated and visionary integration with the rest of the world. South Asia has also teeming millions, who are deprived and marginalized and hence have not been able to enjoy the fruits of this overall macro-level prosperity. There are problems of imbalances of growth, unemployment, violence and marginalization. Though such problems are of different nature and of different magnitude in each of the south Asian county, a humane and inclusive development strategy with high and sustainable growth is what every country is striving to achieve. And that has to be seen against the global trends and global reality.

That brings me to the core issues of SAARC, namely economic cooperation, cooperation in social fields, cooperation in poverty alleviation, cooperation in other areas of mutual advantage.

We are all aware that that there is no finality in the sequence between the economic and social cooperation and its impact on making political environment more conducive or vice versa. We have seen both the routes being equally effective. Each region has to deal with its own internal dynamics depending upon the intensity of the issues involved in that particular region. However, we all know that they reinforce each other if they move in tandem. We all must be a1le to look beyond the present and take a longer-term view so that we would be able to ensure peace, security and prosperity in the region and uplift the quality of life of the people as envisaged by the SARRC Charter.

We have also reached an important point of time at the moment. We have finally brought all the countries of geographic and historic South Asia together by having Afghanistan as our member. It is also very important from both short term as well as long-tent perspectives that we are having a number of observers from the neighboring region as well as beyond. These two events are very significant for SAARC and we hope that it would help us inject a new dynamism in the region for an enhanced level of effective cooperation and further promote regional consciousness.

Economic Cooperation

We are all aware that if we want to really touch the lives of the people and ensure them peace, security and prosperity as enshrined in the charter, economic cooperation should receive the highest prominence within the SAARC framework. History, geography, culture and now our common economic and social challenges have bound us together. Of late, the world has been fiercely competitive, and globalization has changed the world into a prospective single market for all, Cut-throat competition, global outsourcing, component trading, seamless flow between production and consumption, and the fast pace of changing taste and fashion are some of the defining features of the global trade today. And its intensity shows no sign of abating. On the contrary, it would be deeper and wider as we see the interplay of further liberalization drive through WTO negotiations and uninterrupted revolutions in science and technology. In this context, regional trade provides us with two important prospects. One is that geographical proximity still makes the bilateral trade more beneficial among the neighbors, as transaction costs become lower and the countries in the neighborhood enjoy the familiarity with the quality1 taste and the purchasing trend and power of the people. Besides, the South Asian community has a very large market within itself. Secondly, the robust regional trade helps the individual countries and their economic units to prepare better for the fierce competition at the global level as they share more strength, experience and the economies of scale through regional trade not only in production and marketing capacity but also in meeting standards and dealing with obstructive non-tariff and pan-tariff measures. Thirdly, regional economic cooperation and deeper integration are gaining in strength even in the regions that were riot that much involved in these endeavors before, such as Mercosur in Latin America, SADCC and COMESA in Africa. This is a general trend at the moment.

Despite our best efforts, SAFTA is yet to be operationalized and we are losing time and opportunity. It is illogical for a region that is enjoying so high an economic growth rate and so vibrant an economy to have less than five percent of its total trade within the region. We all know that there is more competition than complementarity in our products but as per the principles of comparative advantage, we could gain more by intensifying trade within the region through specialization and diversification, which would ensure benefits to all. Similarly, a the nature of trade and global financial markets go through transformation fuelling economic growth around the world, we must also look beyond the core sector of trade in goods and include cooperation in all trade facilitation measures such as services, investment, infrastructure, non tariff barriers including macro economic policies1 It is through the right mix of these factors that we can get due benefits from economic cooperation. Now we are glad to see that the energy issues are slowly coming to SAARC for discussion and cooperation. An important South Asia Energy Dialogue took place in March 2007 in New Delhi. South Asian border-crossings are more cumbersome than that of many other regions. Many studies have shown that the physical and non-physical barriers need to be reduced, as smooth connectivity would be indispensable for such activities. The cost of non-cooperation and benefits of cooperation in South Asia have been thoroughly analyzed innumerable times by many specialists and we should not be oblivious to those hard facts. Nepal strongly feels that we have a lot of stake in promoting economic cooperation in a comprehensive manner, but also in such a way that all share the fruits of cooperation on an equitable basis. The expansion of the capacity of the least developed countries among them should receive due priority. Otherwise such cooperation would not take off and even if it takes off, it would not be sustainable.

Cooperation in Social Sector

This is another area that needs our urgent and effective attention. We are all aware of the not so good record of this region on social issues. Low literacy rate, poverty, low health standards vulnerability or children, gender discrimination and exclusion are indeed serious constraints to harmonious development and prosperity in South Asia. We should concentrate our minds on how we can best coordinate our individual policies on these fronts, how we complement national programs with regional linkages and how we should not only devise but also execute effective regional programs. We have agreed to various action plans and programs to uplift the status of the targeted and vulnerable groups. Sharing of best practices, common standards in identifying and comparing the situations, bringing regional synergy in social programs have occupied our discussions of late. But when it comes to the effect on the ground of regional cooperation in these sectors, they are at best tentative, at worst non-existent. Therefore recent decision relating to the commencement of specific projects under the SAARC development fund is of great significance and indeed is a welcome sign. We must make sure that the projects are effective on the ground and they really bring about a change in the lives of the common man. We also hope that the other windows of the SDF would soon come into operation in an effective manner. This should therefore create additional momentum to our national efforts and also should work as an effective bridge between national programs and international cooperation.

We only hope that the decade of implementation as agreed during the thirteenth SAARC Summit is linked up with the decade of poverty reduction. The 22 SAARC development goals and elaboration of their indicators and monitoring mechanism are important addition to our collective commitment, but we should make efforts to translate them into reality with dedicated programs. Social issues are important not only for their own sake and not only from the perspective of human development, they are also important if we do not want to lay to waste precious human resources and wish to do away with violent internal conflicts and insurgency in the region! Therefore perhaps we should look at the social issues more seriously in a comprehensive manner. SAARC could look at how conflicts and violence fuelled by marginalization and exclusion have ravaged our region as a whole, even though they are of different magnitude and of different nature in each country in South Asia. As it has undermined the lives of the people throughout the region, this should be studied in a holistic manner within the framework of SAARC. There could be lessons that could be learned from each other on this issue as well.

Similarly, in other areas of cooperation, the first meeting of the SAARC home ministers has taken place in order to address the menace of terrorism and drug trafficking more effectively. Similarly, first meeting of finance ministers was also held and instructed IGEG to develop modalities for expeditious and time-bound realization of the mandate of SAARC economic union.

Relationship with Agencies and International Organizations

We are glad that interactions with the international organizations have increased over the years. It has two fold objectives. It provides us with technical expertise in the respective fields. Because of their long experience in their specialized areas, it propels us more towards creating a regional synergy in our projects as they start developing more inter- country operations. We all know that they cannot be a substitute for regional projects, but they can play an important complementary role in giving the necessary support for regional cooperation. One of the major stumbling blocks in the SAARC process in terms of deepening cooperation in the region has been the lack of regional projects. So far what we have is cooperation on the soft side, which is sharing of best practices, studies and meetings of technical experts. They are important to establish facts and understand the region better. However, what is now required is how to implement those common programs which would have a visible impact on the ground in terms of changing the lives of the people. The studies and fields of cooperation with the international organizations is expected to help us have a wider perspectives and also to initiate effective programs of cooperation. We would continue to strengthen our relationship with such organizations to improve our conditions as per the objectives of the Charter.

People-to-people Contacts and Business Contacts

One of the most important features of SAARC has been that it has opened up vast possibilities for people to people contacts through various associations of regional character. There is now more sense of regional identity than before; there are more contacts among the professionals of the region. Among them, the role and influence of the SAARC chamber of commerce and SAARC level think tanks have been more visible. They have created a distinct space for themselves and we are glad that they are coming forward with innovative ideas to give the strong popular character to this regional consciousness. We know that there are still many areas in which we can further promote people to people contacts by facilitating their interactions in a most comprehensive manner. We greatly value all such initiatives, as it helps us to look at different issues afresh.

Political Consultations

Though the charter does not provide for discussions on contentious issues and bilateral issues, informal political consultation process during the SAARC summit meeting has taken on its own life over the years. The practice of organizing retreats during the summit for a free wheeling discussions on all issues of importance, and the forum that the SAARC summit provides for bilateral consultations on the sidelines have been very useful to break the deadlock, as well as warming up relationship in times of difficulties. Considering the history of relationship among the South Asian countries, this provides an easy forum to engage in discussions without elaborate preparations and constraints of full-fledged bilateral visits. To what extent this process has contributed to crack the hard knots is a moot question, but it could certainly create a better atmosphere for serious negotiations.

Conclusion

We are glad that the forthcoming SAARC summit is taking up some of the issues outlined above. We are also talking about a vision for the third decade of SAARC. We are aware that there are a lot of expectations of the people from the process. We fully share that. And it is also a fact that there is much to be desired in terms of its impact on the ground, even though we have made a good progress on the conceptual clarity of our vision for a peaceful, cooperative and prosperous South Asia. We went through our infancy and adolescence and we are now at the young age of 21. And like anyone at that age, we must have an indomitable spirit, an ambitious vision and a vibrant energy to pursue our goals and objectives. Nepal will play its due role in taking the SAARC process forward with commitment and clarity. And I am hopeful that other members would also take it in that spirit, look around and move ahead with the times, with open eyes and an open heart.

Peace treaty of versailles

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

The Treaty of Versailles is a peace document signed at the end of World War I by the Allied and Associated Powers and by Germany in the Palace of Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919; it took force on January 10, 1920.

Background of First World War
Major Causes of World War I
Growth in German power and ambition: Although Germany did not become a unified country until 1871, it prospered and used its growing wealth to create military power. Britain was concerned that the growth in German power would threaten its dominance on the sea. Hence, it established formal ties with France and Russia. Since the European powers started to gang up against Germany, it sought more armaments and closer relations with Austria‐Hungary.
Arms races and nationalism: Germany expanded its naval weapon which seemed to threaten Britain’s dominance of the seas so essential for maintaining the British Empire. The alliance system and the tensions generated by the arms races fueled nationalism all over Europe, which in turn intensified tensions and mutual suspicions. German nationalism focused on achieving a world empire to match the country’s growing economic and military might. France, Russia, and Austria‐ Hungary also had their own agenda influenced by the ideology of nationalism. Slavic nationalism threatened Austria‐Hungary; Russian nationalism placed pressure on Russia to aid Serbia because
many Serbians and Russians shared common ethnicity; French nationalism demanded the return of its lost provinces of Alsace‐Lorraine.
Colonial rivalries: For many centuries, European nations built empires. Colonies supplied European nations with raw materials and provided markets for manufactured goods. As Germany industrialized it competed directly with France and Britain to gain colonies. Major European countries also competed for land in Africa.

Formation of peacetime alliances: By 1907 there were two major defense alliances in Europe. The Triple Entente, later known as the Allies, consisted of France, Britain, and Russia. The Triple Alliance, later known as the Central Powers, consisted of Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy (Soon joined by the Ottoman Empire). Once Russia acted in response to Austria’s attack on Serbia, alliance commitments pulled one European great power after another into the war.

World War I – Major Events
World War I took place for four years and three months between 1914 and 1918. The war killed more than 18 million people and the total cost was nearly $333 billion. The Great War began as a local collision between Serbia and Austria‐Hungary. Bosnia was controlled by Austria‐Hungary and a Serbian group was fighting to free Bosnia from Austria‐Hungary and make it a part of Serbian kingdom. The war was triggered when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne of Austria, was assassinated in Sarajevo (Bosnia), by a Serbian terrorist organization that wanted Bosnia to be free of Austria‐Hungary and to become part of a large Serbian kingdom. Bosnia had been thesite of numerous plots against Austria‐Hungary’s Hapsburg rulers, especially after 1908 when Bosnia Herzegovina was annexed by Austria‐Hungary. Austria‐Hungary placed the blame for the assassination directly on Serbia. Austria‐Hungary also saw the crisis as an opportunity to deal with Serbia once and for all.

Austrian leaders wanted to attack Serbia but feared Russian intervention on Serbia’s behalf since Russia (having a large Slavic population) had public pressure to defend fellow Slavs in Serbia and elsewhere from Austria‐Hungary’s threats. Hence, Austria‐Hungary wanted German assistance with a hope that the German commitment would prevent Russia from entering the conflict. Some historians argue that at least some of Germany’s leaders did not hope to deter Russia, but they actually hoped that war would begin so that Germany could defeat Russia before Russia’s growing military power made it a serious threat to Germany. On July 25th, 1914, Austria‐Hungary mobilized
its army, and three days later declared war on Serbia. Russia decided to support Serbia and Germany declared for Austria‐Hungary. Russia was also upset with Austria‐Hungary for its failure to perform the deal they had made in 1908 in which Russia would not raise any voice against the annexation of Bosnia‐Herzegovina by Austria‐Hungary and Austria‐Hungary would support Russia’s efforts to secure free passage to Russian warships into the Mediterranean. Germany’s agreement to support Austria‐Hungary is often cited when holding Germany responsible
for World War I. When Austria‐Hungary declared war against Serbia, Russia did decide to come to the defense of Serbia. Fulfilling its promise to back Austria‐Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1st and then on Russia’s ally, France on August 3rd. Germany planned to swing through neutral Belgium to attack France from the north where its defenses were the weakest. Great Britain also joined the contest on August 4 because of its moral obligation, especially to France with which it had made secret but informal military arrangements. The trigger for British entry in the war was the German invasion of neutral Belgium. The limited war in the Balkans spread across all of Europe because of the alliance system. In 1915, Italy joined the Triple Entente, thereby betraying its earlier obligations as a member of the Triple Alliance in return for territorial promises made in the secret Treaty of London. In 1917, the United States, which had been neutral, also tilted in favor of Britain because of a shared ancestry
and language. American had stronger economic interests with the Allies (Triple Entente). US had a major reason to be involved in World War I since American public opinion turned against Germany and Central Powers after Germany sank a British passenger ship on May 7, 1915 killing all passengers including 128 American tourists. Eventually, 32 countries on six continents became enmeshed in the conflict. The entry of the United States into the war in 1917 gave the Allies a much‐needed psychological boost, along with fresh forces and material. On the other hand, the Central Powers had no hope of getting fresh supplies. On November 3, 1918, Austria‐Hungary surrendered to the Allies. On November 11, 1918, Germany signed a truce ending the Great War.

Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles
The Paris Peace Conference, held at the Palace of Versailles, opened on January 12, 1919, and was attended by the political leaders of 32 countries representing three‐quarters of the world’s population. America’s President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain (1863–1945), Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France (1841–1929), and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy (1860–1952) were the victorious war leaders that dominated the conference and each had his own objectives. Britain sought to recreate a workable balance of power and safeguard its empire. France sought to dismember Germany and create security for itself in
Europe. Italy sought the territories it had been promised during the war. Wilson sought a forgiving and generous peace with America’s defeated enemies. Wilson sought a liberal world that reflected his Fourteen Points on the basis of which Germany surrendered.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points:
Geopolitical Issues:

Russia should be allowed to operate whatever government it wanted.
Belgium should be evacuated and restored to the situation before the war.
France should have Alsace‐Lorraine and any lands taken away during the war.
The Italian border should be readjusted according to nationality.
The national groups in Europe should be given their independence.
Romania, Montenegro and Serbia should be evacuated and Serbia should have an outlet to the sea.
The people of Turkey should have a say in their future.
Poland should become an independent state with an outlet to the sea.

General Ideology:

Ensuring freedom of the seas
Ending secret treaties and negotiations
Establishing equal and free trade
Reducing arms
Granting self‐governments to the peoples in Central Europe
Establishing League of Nations

However, America’s allies wanted to impose a harsh peace on Germany that would prevent any revival of German military power that might again endanger their security. Britain considered the freedom of the seas as a danger to the British Empire and wanted to make the Germans pay for the war. In the end, Wilson gave over his principles one after the other in order to get the last of them, a league of nations. Wilson’s League of Nations was written into the peace treaty with Germany as the first of 440 articles. The U.S. Senate opposed the treaty, instead signing the Treaty of Berlin with Germany in August 1921. Germany was not invited to attend the peace conference. Germany and the other defeated powers were forced to sign treaties that provided a very different peace than they had anticipated. The finalpeace settlement of Paris consisted of five separate treaties with the defeated nations ‐ Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. In addition to signing the Versailles Treaty with Germany, the victors and the defeated Central Powers signed four other treaties during the meetings: the treaties of St. Germain (with Austria), Trianon (with Hungary), Neuilly (with Bulgaria), and Sevres (with Turkey). The Treaty of Versailles with Germany, signed at Versailles near Paris, on June 28, 1919, was by far the most important. The Treaty of Versailles contained 440 articles. It dealt comprehensively with the territorial, military and war guilt of the Central Powers and the economic, political and other related aspects of the peace settlement. Germany had to accept the blame for starting the War. Germany was asked to surrender nearly 40,000 square kilometers of territory with more than seven million people. Germany was told to pay huge reparations, which after prolonged negotiations were fixed at $33,000 million. German colonies were taken away and were described as ‘Mandated territories of the League’ which France, Britain, and Japan distributed among themselves. Germany and Austria were barred form uniting. Germany had to reduce its army to a hundred thousand men, cut back its navy, and eliminate its air force. Alsace and Lorraine, taken by the Germans from France in 1871, were returned. Sections of eastern Germany were awarded to a new Polish state. German land along both sides of the Rhine was made a demilitarized zone and stripped of all weapons and fortifications. The conference created the League of Nations, the predecessor of today’s United Nations and the organization that gave voice to the idea of collective security. The conference also established the Permanent Court of
International Justice and the International Labour Organisation. The principle of national self‐determination was the most important and durable outcome of the peace conference. As the consequence of World War I and the peace conference, three empires—the Austrian‐ Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman (Turkish) collapsed, and in their place the independent states of Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary were born. The Ottoman Empire was divided into several political entities, including Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, each of which consisted of peoples of different ethnic, religious, and tribal groups. The Treaty also established Yugoslavia, another artificial nation‐state, from remnants of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire.

Negative Arguments regarding the Treaty of Versailles
None of the defeated nations had any say in shaping the treaty. Germany was shocked at the severity of the contradictions between the assurances made when the truce was negotiated and the actual treaty. The desire to punish and permanently weaken Germany gained priority over the quest for a just peace. The Treaty was not based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the Germans had been promised it would. The loss of territory and population angered most Germans who believed that the losses were too severe. Germans thought the Treaty was a dictated peace. They had not been invited to the peace conference at Versailles and when the Treaty was presented to them they were threatened with war if they did not sign it. The Germans considered the Treaty of Versailles a harsh
peace. They were especially unhappy with Article 231, the so‐called War Guilt Clause, which declared that Germany (and Austria) were responsible for starting the war. The harsh treatment of Germany prevented the Treaty from creating a lasting peace in Europe. It created anger among Germans who regarded it as unfair. This determination provided the climate for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and in the end, to World War II. Hence, some scholars claim that the ‘Peace Treaty of Versailles was an imposed Peace’ and the ‘Second World War was started immediately after the settlement of First World War’. The First World War was supposed to be the war to end all war. However, the Treaty of Versailles is often criticized as the ‘Peace to end all Peace’. Germany was imposed to pay $33 billion in reparations that it was not capable of paying. Although economists at the time declared that such a huge sum could never be collected without upsetting international finances, the Allies insisted that Germany be made to pay, and the treaty permitted them to take punitive actions if Germany fell behind in its payments. The rise of fascism in Italy
under Mussolini in 1922 is linked to the fact that Italy was deprived of territories that were promised through a number of secret treaties before the War. The Paris Peace Conference was supposedly guided by the principle of self‐determination. However, the mixtures of peoples in Eastern Europe made it impossible to draw boundaries along neat ethnic lines and compromises had to be made. As a result of compromises, almost every eastern European state was left with ethnic minorities. The problem of ethnic minorities within nations would lead to later conflicts.

Factors Determining International Relations

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

The Geographic Factor: The location of a State on this planet, its climate and size are such factors which influence its foreign policy in relation to other States. There are numerous authorities who have advocated that the foreign policy of a State is determined by the geography of that state i.e., the geographical position of a State determines its foreign policy. The geographical position of a nation is the principal factor conditioning its foreign policy – the principal reason why it must have a foreign policy at all. As for instance “the geographical factors have been decisive for the course of British history and explain, just as they dictated the main principles of British policy and the pre-occupation of British statement”. (Sir A Chamberlain’s view). If the geographical position of a country is sound, and its climate is healthy, if it is rich in food-stuffs and raw materials, it must follow an independent foreign policy. The geographical position and historical developments are such determining factors of foreign policy of a country that regardless of changes in the form of government, the foreign policy of a country has a natural tendency to return again and again to the same general and fundamental alignment. As for instance, if a state is strategically situated having natural barriers like seas, mountains, terrains, deserts etc., it is not ordinarily vulnerable to foreign invasions. Such strategically situated country follows independent foreign policy in relation to other States.
If a country lacks in all these geographical factors, it has to look to the other States and has to follow the course of the neighboring States in her relation with them. It cannot follow an independent foreign policy, of its own. Thus it is clear that a country which has unfavorable geographical positions cannot be able to keep itself isolated from the events happening in its neighboring countries. The typical example of strategically situated country is that of Great Britain which is surrounded by seas on all sides and the English Channel serves as the most effective barrier to foreign invasion of British Isles due to the fact of which Great Britain remains secure and continues to be a great power. Quite similar is the position of the United States of America. Its geographically isolated position on this globe has brought power and strength to it that it became able to compete Great Britain.

Economic Factors: The economic factors hold a key-plate in affecting the relation of a State with the rest of the world. The chief elements of economic factors which determine the position of a country in relation to other states are (i) its self-sufficiency and (ii) its capacity to provide food, clothing and shelters to its population. Since nature has unevenly distributed its wealth all over the world, no country can claim that it is wholly economically self-sufficient and thus a great power.
A State may be purely agrarian or agricultural being rich in its raw materials and food-stuffs only but lack in mineral resources as coal, iron etc. and hence such States cannot be industrially advanced. Again a State may be rich in mineral resources which can establish huge centers of production and hence they may be industrially advanced states. Again there is the third category of States which may be styled as the balanced States capable of producing enough food for their population and establishing industries out of the resources available within their territories, such as Great Britain, the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. But they also cannot pretend to be self-sufficient because they have to depend upon other States for import of raw-materials without which their industries cannot run successfully. Thus the so-called balanced States becoming able to exert influence on other States and become big powers in course of time. Whether it is the case of Great Britain, or of the United States or of the Soviet Union or of China, the story is the same. Just as the huge supplies of raw materials and natural resources are essential for a country for becoming a big power, a large population is also essential for bringing about greater industrial and agricultural output as well as for raising a powerful army and navy. The great development in China is an illustration on this point which has become one of the Five Big Powers of the world and very recently has taken its seat in the 15 members-Security Council of the United Nations. By population alone cannot make a country strong if it goes on increasing day by day without a corresponding increase in production. The case of India is a leading one on this point.

If a country does not control the increase in its population corresponding to the increase in its production it must look for some other territories to accommodate its increased expansionist policy. Japan invaded Manchuria with this motive; China occupied Tibet for similar ambition, Germany clashed with the Allied Powers with the same motive.

Demographic factor: The demographic factor – (a) the size of the population and (b) ethnic circumstances, also affect the international affairs to a great deal. A nation becomes great and powerful if it has both a growing large population and efficient industrial production. The Soviet Union and the U.S.A. are treated to be big powers only because they have large population and a market industrial development. In contrast to the above two countries, our country though having a large population has not become great power only because it has not been industrially so advanced as to satisfy its needs. Thus the size of the population and equally the huge and efficient industrial production determine the existence to which a nation can claim have an independent foreign policy of its own. Thus the size of population contributes to the weakness of the country. Greater the size more weak economic position is of a country.
Another demographic factor is the ethnic circumstances of a nation. Those countries having a single race or nationality have no internal problems to solve. Such countries are quite free to pursue an independent foreign policy but the countries which have various races or nationalities are bound to face numerous internal problems. The recent split of Pakistan into Pakistan proper and Bangladesh is due to the fact that Pakistan is composed of several racial groups. Though we find that India is composed of several racial groups but the constitution of this country has solved the internal problems of India and there is no likelihood of this country being split up into different entities. The case of India serves an example in that despite diversities there is unity.

Strategic factors: The military strategy of a country is another important factor to determine the foreign policy because is closely connected with the national security of the country. If a country has effective protective natural barriers, it seldom worries about its security, as for instance British Isles and Japan. These countries are surrounded by oceans on all sides and they enjoy the position of islands. Thus the natural barriers of these countries have afforded protection from foreign aggression. Since they are surrounded by oceans on all sides, they have become able to have strong navy to safeguard their frontiers from foreign attacks. This is the main reason that they are considered as great naval powers. Besides seas and ocean, mountains, rivers, snow, deserts, swamps and forests play significant roles in safeguarding the territories of countries.
The Soviet Union and Switzerland are among the few countries which have the most secured frontiers. Both of these countries play important roles in their international affairs as they are strengthened by the most effective protective natural barriers. Distance is another factor influencing the foreign affairs of country. Countries which are isolated from the disturbed areas of the world due to distance, remain actually unaffected by the U.S.A. on the globe serves an example in this respect which remained unaffected by the disturbances taking at some distant places. Thus the distance of a country from the centers of trouble spots is an important factors governing the strategic problems of that country.

Additional Factors:

The historical-psychological, sociological factors: If a country has its bold history, and its people are ready to sacrifice their blood for their motherland, its moral shall always be high. The future of a country cannot be assessed well if we do not study its to day’s affairs in light of the yesterday’s history. No country can pursue an independent foreign policy if the morale of its people is not high and their national character is not strong enough. Such elements are necessary for adopting an independent policy by any country or nation.

The organizational and administrative factor: This factor constitutes the form of the government within a political society and the attitude of the people towards it. Many of majority of foreign issues can be decided by the sound governmental organization, efficient public administration of a country. A government which has strong support from its people lasts long and becomes efficient with lapse of time and becomes also able to deal with the foreign affairs peacefully. Thus, general support of the government and the efficient administration are very important factors for the formulation of sound foreign policy.

The Military factor: Last but not the least significant factors is the military factor which determines the foreign relations of a country. This factor is considered from various aspects, e.g., size of the armed forces, quality and morale of army men, quantity and variety of weapons and equipments which determine the foreign relations also.

Function of diplomats

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

A diplomat has to organized series of function that includes observed, report, and deal with issues in their respective areas. Most functions contain for political affairs, economic and commercial affairs, information and cultural affairs, consular affairs, and administrative matters. In addition, within the functions of a diplomat usually includes a number of attachés from other government departments. Military, air, and naval attachés have traditionally been assigned to foreign missions, but agricultural, commercial, labor, and cultural attachés are becoming increasingly common as a new trend.

The activities of diplomats are extremely mixed. They range from such serious tasks as negotiating issues of great political significance and reporting and commenting on important events in the foreign country to meeting with foreign students, arranging itineraries of exhibits about life in the home country, and issuing visas. These are some of the majors’ functions of Diplomats:

Representation of State
(1) Legal Representation

A diplomat is a legal representative of his/her state in another state or international organization like the UN, the UNESCO etc. In his/her capacity as a legal representative of his/her state, s/he conducts negotiations with the government in the accredited state or participates in the deliberations and voting of UN organs in which his/her country is represented. Unless otherwise indicated, s/he signs the agreements on behalf of his/her state.

(2) Symbolic Representation

Diplomacy is very often subtle and symbolic; the more it is so, the more impressive it becomes. When the head of a state or government visits another country, the Ambassador posted in that country normally holds a reception at his/her Embassy which is attended by his/her counterparts and other senior officials belonging to the host country

(3) Political Representation

Diplomat’s job is to watch the politics of that country. What are political policies and like projection and what are the political parties at play and what is going to be the future leaders and politics of that country. The most important function of a diplomat is to assess the real nature of the policy and power of the country in which s/he is stationed and report it back to his/her External Affairs Ministry. The Ambassador and his supporting staff supply the raw material with the help of which the External Affairs Ministry formulates foreign policy. In the words of Professor Morgenthau: “As the foreign office is the nerve centre of foreign policy, so are the diplomatic representatives its outlying fibers maintaining the two-way traffic between the centre and the outside world”.

The diplomat, with the help of his/her military, economic and other attaches, assesses the real military strength of the country of his/her posting, stability of its government and its policy towards his/her own country. The function of the military and economic attaché’s is to collect military and economic information through wide reading and social contacts and to help Ambassador draft his/her reports to the External Affairs Ministry. The diplomat must not only help his/her foreign office in the formulation of the country’s policy, but must also possess the art of ‘selling’ his/her country’s policy to the government and people of the country in which s/he functions. His/her is a two-way dealing: with his/her own government at home and with the government of the country from where s/he functions.

Negotiations
Diplomacy is synonymous with negotiations and the diplomat must be an experienced negotiator. Many delegations from the diplomat’s country visit foreign countries to conduct negotiations on trade, political and military affairs. The team that negotiates with the foreign government normally includes the Ambassador of the country concerned, who is an on-the-spot assistant and informer. The execution of numerous trade and cultural agreements involves negotiations with the host country for the selection of institutions, persons, items etc.

When matters of great political importance are discussed and negotiated, the Prime Minister or the External Affairs Minister visits the concerned country and negotiates directly with the foreign government. The diplomat has to do the spade-work for such negotiations and thereby assist his superiors. The direct participation of the External Affairs Minister or high ranking officials from the Ministry does diminish the importance of the Ambassador in negotiations; nevertheless, his assistance and assessment are of great help. Thus, no negotiation between the two countries can be accomplished without the assistance and involvement of their Ambassadors to some extent.

The diplomats negotiate on four ways:

Official negotiation
Unofficial negotiations
Facilitative negotiations
Technical negotiations

Informal Function:
Press function: Diplomats has to read newspapers of concern foreign country because all politicians may not be honest and that is if diplomats even have access to them. He/She must read all papers to get a better color of what the media in the country is saying about their internal mechanisms. Diplomats need to make the best presentation of their country. Diplomats will try to get favorable eyes for his/her own country.

Commercial function: Commercial relations are not just political or media, but based on the trade between the countries. The better trade means the better relationship between the two states. They are good diplomats, who will able to distinguish the clarity of decision-making to expedite the trade and commerce.

Administrative function: Diplomatic mission are extension of the home government abroad. Thus, each diplomatic mission contains two key elements: A diplomatic element, whose chief functions are political (negotiation, information, etc.), and consular elements, whose chief functions are administrative. Administrative function includes:

Representation of home citizens and home institutions in the host state
Management of the affairs of citizens of the home state in the host state (e.g., facilitation of economic ties, handling legal problems of home citizens etc.)
Immigration policy and other support to their national

Responsible Person of the Diplomatic Mission

Ambassador:

Ambassador is chef official of diplomatic mission at foreign state. The ambassador is the highest-ranking official of diplomatic service with full responsibility. Unlike a minister and a chargé d’affaires, an ambassador is supposed to represent, in theory, the person of his or her sovereign. Although this theory has little significance now that monarchies are uncommon, it was because of this theory that the United States did not appoint diplomatic of ambassadorial rank until 1893. Today most republics appoint ambassadors in order to conduct relations on an equal basis with other nations. In recent years a majority of the heads of diplomatic missions representing the United States have also held the rank of ambassador.

The embassy abroad, or foreign mission, is headed by an ambassador assisted by a career diplomat who serves as deputy or first secretary. The deputy secretary oversees and coordinates the work of the staff and assumes the responsibilities of the mission as chargé d’affaires whenever the ambassador is away or incapacitated or is between ambassadorial assignments.

Diplomatic missions are staffed largely by Foreign Service officers, with the exception of the attachés who are drawn from their respective agencies back home. The secretaries and secretarial staff come from a separate civil service corps. Citizens of the host country may be hired as translators or for non sensitive jobs.

Consular:

Counselor is a diplomat ranking below an ambassador in foreign mission. Counselor is responsible to take care the problems of own citizens in concern state. He/she is also responsible for issuing Passports for native citizen, Visa, people in jail that need proper legal assistance in that country. In the foreign state this kind of assistance cannot be denied. Because of that Consular will be appointed as a government official living in a foreign state to promote the commerce of the official’s own state and protect its citizens in the concern state.

Consular operations are concerned with the economic and commercial relations between nations. Originally, diplomatic and consular responsibilities were kept strictly separate because early theorists felt that national interests should not be “contaminated” by private commercial matters. Thus, two separate services—diplomatic and consular—usually existed. Today all major countries have combined these two services, and a single corps of professional civil servants serves in both areas.

Consular work involves a variety of activities. Consuls issue birth, death, and marriage certificates to citizens residing or traveling in the foreign country. Consular officers also regulate shipping, aid their country’s citizens when they travel on business or as tourists, and report on economic and business conditions abroad. Activities are often carried out in consulates located in major trading and commercial cities as well as in the capital city.

Propaganda

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Propaganda is a Latin word that was first used by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, when he established the Sacred Congregation (Worshippers) of Propaganda, a commission designed to spread the Catholic faith worldwide. Since then propaganda has taken on a much broader meaning, and refers to any technique, whether in writing, speech, music, film or other means, that attempts to influence mass public opinion.

Definitions of Propaganda

Propaganda is generally defined as the dissemination of information or message, but more specifically, it connotes the dissemination of information for the purposes of influencing and advocating an agenda. These information/messages have been carefully designed to influence our opinions, emotions, attitudes and behavior. Their purpose is to influence us to believe in something or to do something that we would not normally believe or do. Most importantly, these messages have been designed to benefit someone.

On Military Term, propaganda is any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.

Propaganda is dissemination of ideas and information for the purpose of inducing or increasing specific attitudes and actions. Because propaganda is frequently accompanied by misrepresentation of fact and by appeals to passion and prejudice, it is often thought to be perpetually false or misleading. Although some propagandists may intentionally misrepresent fact, others may present it as faithfully as objective observers. The essential distinction lies in the intentions of the propagandist to persuade an audience to adopt the attitude or action he or she supports.

Propaganda may be disseminated by or for individuals, businesses, ethnic associations, religious organizations, political organizations, and governments at every level. Thousands of special-interest groups disseminate propaganda. Among such groups are patriotic societies, fire-prevention and traffic-safety committees, and the prevention of cruelty to animals, labor unions, chambers of commerce. No matter what its objective, propaganda attempts to persuade through rational or emotional appeal or through the organization of personal opinion. Efficient use of the communication media is central for the propaganda.

Some Characteristic of Propaganda:

Repetition: The concern message must be continuously propagated in order to take hold within the collective consciousness. Because of that repetition of the message was necessary for propaganda.

Simplicity: The message must be designed in such a way that it appeals to or is quickly understood by the lowest common intellectual people.

Imagery: The most powerful propaganda is well-established within appealing images. This imagery could be pictorial or descriptive. This is why movies and music are such effective forms of propaganda.

Sentiment: The message must contain as little detail as possible, and instead be designed in such a way that it appeals to some strong emotion or sentiment.

Unmin & it’s evaluation

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in November 2006.

The United Nation was entrusted with the role of monitoring of arms and armies as per the request contained in a letter jointly sent by the government of Nepal and the then CPN Maoist on 9 August 2006.

UNMIN came to Nepal as a special mission in support of the peace process and to create a free and fair atmosphere for the election of the Constituent Assembly and pursuit of the peace process.

UNMIN was established on 23 January 2007 by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1740.

At the request of the Government of Nepal, the Security Council unanimously extended the tenure of the office for seven consecutive term and finally it was flagged‐down from Nepal on 15 January 2011.

UNMIN mandates

1.monitor the management of arms and armed personnel of the Nepal Army and the Maoist combatants, in line with the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of November 2006;

2.assist the parties through a Joint Monitoring Coordinating Committee (JMCC) in implementing this agreement;

3.assist in the monitoring of ceasefire arrangements;

provide technical assistance to the Election Commission for the election of a Constituent Assembly, which eventually took place in April 2008

There are generally two opposing arguments regarding the role of UNMIN with one side claiming it to be a successful mission while others call it a total failure.

Positive Evaluation

The positive evaluations of the Mission include the support for the election of the Constituent Assembly, hard work for the successful exit of child soldiers from the Maoist cantonments, ensuring cordial atmosphere at the JMCC meetings, and making the political parties abide by peace agreements.

UNMIN played important role in terms of supporting the election of Constituent Assembly held in April 2008 in which the Maoists emerged as the largest party.

UNMIN lent valuable material and expert support for the election

Negative Evaluation:

UNMIN’s role in the election was later criticized with the argument that UNMIN should have advised to not to have the election when one political party still had its own fighting forces.

The verification of the Maoist Combatants was criticized as being deeply flawed. The number of Maoist Combatants who entered cantonments in the beginning of the peace process was 32,250.

After a year‐long verification in the Maoist cantonments, 19,602 were verified by the UNMIN in May2007.

Yet in January 2008, the Maoist chief, Pushpa Kamal Dahal admitted in a subsequently leaked videotape that the actual number of Maoist soldiers had been around 3,500

Out of the 32,250 Combatants, 4,008 were categorized as disqualified by UNMIN for either being minor or late recruits. The disqualified combatants were discharged from the cantonments in January‐February 2010.

Out of 19,602 UNMIN verified combatants, only 17,052 combatants participated during the process of updating and regrouping in November‐December, 2011.

Out of them, 15,608 have already been reintegrated into society as they opted for voluntary retirement and rehabilitation package and training center of Nepal Army. 1,444 combatants selected for integration have recently completed trainings

No significant progress was made for the integration of the combatants during the tenure of UNMIN.

The integration and rehabilitation process remained deadlocked for around four years.

The process moved forward along with Seven Point Agreement signed on 01 November 2011 between the major political parties. By this date, the tenure of UNMIN had already ended.

The Seven Point Agreement paved the way for updating and regrouping Maoist Army Combatants, cheque distribution, closure of cantonments coupled with the Nepal army being given the control over all weapons and ammunitions kept in cantonments.

The UNMIN was criticized for developing pro‐Maoist image.

During a briefing before the UN Security Council in May 2009, UNMIN chief Karin Landgren (who took over from Martin in January 2009) claimed that all the political parties had consented to then‐Prime Minister Dahal’s attempts to dismiss the army chief, Rookmangud Katawal, before backtracking.

UNMIN never recovered from the damage caused by this briefing, and charges of bias intensified thereafter.

There were also questions about UNMIN’s monitoring capacity. In May 2008, a businessman from Kathmandu, Ram Hari Shrestha, had been kidnapped, taken inside a cantonment, tortured and murdered by Maoists combatants and their commander from the Shaktikhor cantonment in Chitwan district right under UNMIN’s nose.

Among many incidents that raised questions over the mission’s monitoring of the cantonments was an incident in Kapilvasu district in August 2009. Nineteen Maoist combatants based in Kapilvastu came out of their cantonment with weapons, and were later arrested.

Nine of the confiscated weapons had been registered by UNMIN, meant only to be used for security on the cantonment perimeter.

UNMIN noted that the combatants had acted against the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.However, the fact that armed combatants from a main cantonment site could have left carrying weapons reinforced the suspicions over UNMIN’s monitoring.

India’s Reservation

India was not very positive regarding UNMIN’s role from the very beginning.
It is said that India was particularly concerned about UNMIN’s role in the integration of Maoist combatants in Nepal Army.
India’s security concerns may be responsible for extreme sensitivity regarding further extension of UNMIN’s mandate.
In India, there were certain sections, who were unhappy about the integration of Nepali army with ideologically indoctrinated Maoist combatants in view of its impact on India.
This seems to be the main reason behind extreme sensitivity on the part of India in involving the UN beyond monitoring to ensure that UNMIN does not have a role in integration of the two armies as envisaged in Comprehensive Peace Accord.

Impact of Holocaust in International Relations

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee from Poland, coined the word genocide in 1944 to describe what was happening in German‐occupied Europe. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944)
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, which requires governments to “undertake to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.”

Genocide Convention

Article 1 The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article 2 In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

International Accountability for Crime Against Humanity

After holocaust, Prosecution of top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg established the principle that individual officials could be held responsible for “crimes against humanity” and for implementation of policies that violated international law

Tribunals created by the United Nations Security Council are trying government officials for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,

What are the Crime Against Humanity ?

“Crimes against humanity” include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
} murder;
} extermination;
} enslavement;
} deportation or forcible transfer of population;
} imprisonment;
} torture;
} rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy,
enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of
comparable gravity;
} persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial,
national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds;
} enforced disappearance of persons;
} the crime of apartheid;
} other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing
great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.

International Protection of Human Rights

Before the Holocaust, international efforts to oppose human rights abuses were limited to other country territory.
As a result of holocaust, the recognition that the protection of human rights is an international concern expanded dramatically with the 1948 adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

When the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany became apparent after the war, the consensus within the world community was that the United Nations Charter did not sufficiently define the rights to which it referred. A universal declaration that specified the rights of individuals was necessary to give effect to the Charter’s provisions on human rights.

Protections for Refugees

} During the Nazi era, Jews fleeing the Germans and their collaborators often found that entry to other countries, including the United States, was barred.
} Later in 1951, under the United Nation Refugee Convention, governments promised not to return refugees to places where their life or freedom would be threatened on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Reconciliation Between Christian and Jews

The Nazis exploited centuries of negative Christian teachings about Jews and Judaism to foment hatred and promote their own racist, anti‐Semitic policies
Mainstream Christian churches—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—failed as institutions to protest or systematically oppose Nazi persecution of Jews.

In 2000 during a historic visit to Jerusalem, Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for “the hatred, acts of persecution, and displays of anti‐Semitism directed against Jews by Christians at any time and in any place.”

Idea of a Jewish Homeland

During the rule of Nazis in Germany, most Jews who sought to escape Nazi persecution were trapped in German‐occupied Europe because virtually no nation was willing to admit large numbers of Jews, even on a temporary basis.
After World War II, the United Nations divided Palestine into two potential states, one for Jews and one for Palestinian Arabs. The State of Israel was founded in 1948 as a homeland where any Jew could become a citizen under any circumstance.

Game Theory

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

Aspects of game theory were first explored by the French mathematician Émile Borel (1871-1956), who wrote several papers on games of chance and theories of play. The acknowledged father of game theory, however, is the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, who in a series of papers in the 1920s and ’30s established the mathematical framework for all subsequent theoretical developments. During World War II military strategists in such areas as logistics, submarine warfare, and air defense drew on ideas that were directly related to game theory. Game theory thereafter developed within the context of the social sciences. Despite such empirically related interests, however, it is essentially a product of mathematicians.

The game theory was largely disseminated by John Von Newmann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) in their works. The game theory has provided a means for analyzing many problems of interest in economics, management science, and other fields. In the International Relations, Game Theory is mostly related to study the conflict and consequences between two or more state and other actors of International Relations. Mostly the scholars Thomas Scheiling, William Riker and Martin Shubik used this theory on the study of international politics and relation. Among these scholars the contributions of Thomas Scheiling and Martin Shubik are significant to develop this theory than others.

Introduction:

As scholar Shubik says “Game Theory is a mathematical method for the study of some aspects of conscious decision making in the situation involving the possibilities of conflict and cooperation. It deals with the process in which the individual decision unit has only partial control over the strategic factors affecting its environment.”

Game Theory is a branch of applied mathematics that concerns itself with the study of multi-person interdependent decision-making in conflict situations. Such a situation exists when two or more decision makers, who have different objectives act on the same way and share the same resources. It is a set of techniques for analyzing strategic situations; that is, situations in which at least two agents make decisions that affect one another’s welfare. The perceptivities offered by the theory can be therefore applied across a wide range of disciplines including economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, biology etc.

Game Theory is a mathematical analysis of any situation involving a conflict of interest, with the intent of indicating the optimal choices that, under given conditions, will lead to a desired outcome. Although, game theory has roots in the study of such well-known enjoyment as checkers, tick-tack-toe, and poker also involves much more serious conflicts of interest arising in such fields as sociology, economics, and political and military science. There are two persons and multi person’s games. Game theory provides a mathematical process for selecting an Optimum Strategy (that is, an optimum decision or a sequence of decisions) in the face of an opponent who has a strategy of his own.

Game Theory is a theory of competition stated in terms of gains and losses among opposing players. In Game Theory a game refers to a strategic situation that involves at least two rational intelligent individuals called players. A rational player is one who consistently makes decisions tracking down of some well-defined objective and an intelligent player is one who knows everything we know about the game and who can make the same inferences as we do.

The game theory operates on the assumption that the international political process or international relation is the confrontation like a chess game, or a contrast between two merchants or brokers, or the movements of rival political candidates, or the counteractions of opposed diplomats, and within the game all institutions and countries are playing as individuals player. It is defined as a body of thought dealing strategies in situations of conflict and competition wherein each participant or player seeks to maximize his gains and minimize his losses. It is also a mathematical model in which the player is placed in a certain fixed situation and tires to make maximum gains out of his opponents.

There are two main branches of game theory: Cooperative (collaborative) and Non-cooperative (strategy) game theory. Non-cooperative game theory deals largely with how intelligent individuals interact with one another in an effort to achieve their own goals. But in cooperative both interact to achieve for their common goals.

Basic Concepts:

In game theory, the term game means a particular sort of conflict in which no of individuals or groups (known as players) participate. A list of rules stipulates the conditions under which the game begins, the possible legal “moves” at each stage of play, the total number of moves constituting the entirety of the game, and the terms of the outcome at the end of play.

a) Moves:

In game theory, a move is the way in which the game progresses from one stage to another, beginning with an initial state of the game through the final move. Moves may alternate between players in a specified fashion or may occur simultaneously. Moves are made either by personal/national choice or as counter the opponent for maximum benefits or achievements.

b) Payoff:

Payoff, or outcome, is a game-theory term referring to what happens at the end of a game. In such games as chess or checkers, payoff may be as simple as declaring a winner or a loser. In card or other gambling situations the payoff is usually money; its amount is predetermined by bets collected during the course of play, by percentages or by other fixed amounts calculated on the chances of winning. Moreover, in IR the payoff may be treaties determine role and responsibility, conventions for to do or not to do something collectively by players, agreements, compensation for something or some other outcomes as desire by the nation players with their opponent/s.

c) Extensive and Normal Form:

One of the most important distinctions made in characterizing different forms of games is that between extensive and normal. A game is said to be in extensive form if it is characterized by a set of rules that determines the possible moves at each step, indicating which player is to move, the probabilities at each point if a move is to be made by a chance determination, and the set of outcomes assigning a particular payoff or result to each possible conclusion of the game. The assumption is also made that each player has a set of preferences at each move in anticipation of possible outcomes that will maximize the player’s own payoff or minimize losses. A game in extensive form contains not only a list of rules governing the activity of each player, but also the preference patterns of each player.

Because of the enormous numbers of strategies involved in even the simplest extensive games, game theorists have developed so-called normalized forms of games for which computations (determining something by mathematical or logical methods) can be carried out completely. A game is said to be in normal form if the list of all expected outcomes or payoffs to each player for every possible combination of strategies is given for any sequence of choices in the game. This kind of theoretical game could be played by any neutral observer and does not depend on player choice of strategy.

d) Perfect Information:

A game is said to have perfect information if all moves are known to each of the players involved. Checkers and chess are two examples of games with perfect information; poker and bridge are games in which players have only partial information at their disposal. In IR role of UN can be groups as game of perfect information and any other role of nations with each other can grouped in partial or secreted information game.

e) Strategy:

A strategy is a list of the best possible choices for each player at every stage of a given game. A strategy, taking into account all possible moves, is a plan that cannot be upset, despite of what may occur in the game.

In the game theory the player built their strategy with the predication on the strategy chosen by his opponent, which gives information about all possible strategies, rules and payoffs or their possibilities that enables each player to maximize benefits while minimizing losses.

Scholar Davis B. Bobrow suggests that following properties of the situations with which game theory deals:

They involve two or more ‘players’ whose interest conflict, at least in part.
Each Player has two or more choices (Strategies) as to how to proceed in the game.
The outcome of the game is determined once each player has chosen a strategy.
And each possible outcome is associated with a particular payoff or return (positive or negative) to each player.

Commons Assumptions:

In game theory one usually makes the following assumptions:

1) Each decision maker [“PLAYER”] has available to him/her two or more well-specified choices or sequences of choices (called “PLAYS”).

2) Every possible combination of plays available to the players leads to a well-defined end-state (win, loss, or draw) that terminates the game.

3) A specified payoff for each player is associated with each end-state (a ZERO-SUM game means that the sum of payoffs to all players is zero in each end-state).

4) Each decision maker has perfect knowledge of the game and of his opposition; that is, he knows in full detail the rules of the game as well as the payoffs of all other players.

5) All decision makers are rational; that is, each player, given two alternatives, will select the one that give up him the greater payoff.

The last two assumptions, in particular, restrict the application of game theory in real-world conflict situations. On the other hand, game theory has provided a means for analyzing many problems of interest in economics, management science, and other fields.

Interests and Rules in Game:

As per the pro-scholars of the game theory, in the international politics the political game will be played with other players, which have these three characteristic with them when they are playing games:

Identical Interest: The player of the game will have same interest and want achieve maximum gains as per their interest. The strategy of both part of the game will be same and they only concern with their own interest. This will be the cooperative or collaborative game to achieve something common as per interests of players, where players negotiate binding contracts that allow them to plan joint strategies.

Game with opposite interest: On this players want to have maximum gains with minimum losses. It is based on “Loss & Gain Theory” of the game. Here one will get gains as per the losses of another player. This will be the non-cooperative or strategic game to achieve something opposite interests between players, where notiation and enforcement of a binding contract are not possible.

Game with mixed interest: This is the game, where the player will play game with common interest as helpful and with opposite interest as unhelpful. Here the losses and gains may be equal with each other. This will be some how cooperative- no-cooperative or collaborative- strategic game where sometime the interest are identical and sometime against each others.
There are certain assumption and rules of the game theory. The assumptions are that the players are guided by rational behaviour and choose the best course of action that brings them maximum gains. The rules are that the equation between the players is straight and the losses of one are the gains of another. The game theory is built up with the help of give importance conceptions: Strategy, Opponent, Pay-of, Rules and information.

Kinds of Game:

The situation of the game visualized are in the four kinds in the game theory for the study of the international relations and politics, these are:

Zero-sum two person game: Here the gains of one player are equal to the losses of the other player. In less formal terms, a zero-sum game is a game in which one player’s winnings equal the other player’s losses. Do notice that the definition requires a zero sum for every set of strategies. If there is even one strategy set for which the sum differs from zero, then the game is not zero sum.

Non-zero-sum two person game: In this kind of game, between two players the winner of the game will shared the outcome of the game and losses of one are not necessarily equal to the gains of another.

Zero-sum n-persons games: Here the player will be more than two, and the outcome is shared and the losses of the one are not necessarily equal to gains of another but the in accumulation the sum will become zero.
Non-zero-sum n-persons games: This is also a game between more than two player will play the games. In this game the situation in extremely complex and the gains and losses are shred by both sides of the game to some extent.

Prison’s Dilemma in Game Theory:

The prisoner’s dilemma was originally formulated by mathematician Albert W. Tucker and has since become the classic example of a “non-zero sum” game in economics, political science, evolutionary biology, and of course game theory.

A “zero sum” game is simply a win-lose game such as tic-tac-toe. For every winner, there’s a loser. If I win, you lose. Non-zero sum games allow for cooperation. There are moves that benefit both players, and this is what makes these games interesting.

Tucker began with a little story, like this: two robbers, Bob and Albert, are captured near the scene of a Bank Robbery and are given the “third degree” and interrogated in separate cells without a chance to communicate with each other by the police. For the purpose of this game, it makes no difference whether or not Bob or Albert actually committed the crime. Each has to choose whether or not to confess and implicate the other. If neither man confesses, then both will serve one year on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. If each confesses and implicates the other, both will go to prison for 10 years. However, if one robber confesses and implicates the other, and the other robber does not confess, the one who has collaborated with the police will go free, while the other robber will go to prison for 20 years on the maximum charge.

Bob and Albert both told the same thing:

If you both confess, you will both get 10 years in prison.
If neither of you confesses, the police will be able to pin part of the crime on you, and you’ll both get 1 year.
If one of you confesses but the other doesn’t, the confessor will make a deal with the police and will go free while the other one goes to jail for 20 years.

At first glance the correct strategy appears obvious. No matter what Albert does, bob will be better off “defecting” (confessing). Annoyingly, Albert realizes this as well, so Bob and Albert both end up getting 10 years. Surprisingly, if both “cooperated” (refused to confess) both be much comfortable.

And so the game becomes much more complicated than it first appeared. If Bob play time after time, the goal is to figure out Albert’s strategy and use it to minimize his total jail time. Albert will be doing the same. Remember, the object of the game is not to screw Albert over. The object is to minimize Bob’s jail time. If this means ruthlessly exploiting Albert’s generosity, then do so. If this means helping Albert out by cooperating, then do so.

The strategies in this case are: confess or don’t confess. The payoffs (penalties, actually) are the sentences served. We can express all this compactly in a “payoff table” of a kind that has become pretty standard in game theory. Here is the payoff table for the Prisoners’ Dilemma game:

Albert
confess don’t
Bob confess 10,10 0,20
don’t 20,0 1,1

The table is read like this: Each prisoner chooses one of the two strategies. In effect, Albert chooses a column and Bob chooses a row. The two numbers in each cell tell the outcomes for the two prisoners when the corresponding pair of strategies is chosen. The number to the left of the comma tells the payoff to the person who chooses the rows (Bob) while the number to the right of the column tells the payoff to the person who chooses the columns (Al). Thus (reading down the first column) if they both confess, each gets 10 years, but if Al confesses and Bob does not, Bob gets 20 and Al goes free.

So: how to solve this game? What strategies are “rational” if both men want to minimize the time they spend in jail? Al might reason as follows: “Two things can happen: Bob can confess or Bob can keep quiet. Suppose Bob confesses. Then I get 20 years if I don’t confess, 10 years if I do, so in that case it’s best to confess. On the other hand, if Bob doesn’t confess, and I don’t either, I get a year; but in that case, if I confess I can go free. Either way, it’s best if I confess. Therefore, I’ll confess.”

But Bob can and presumably will reason in the same way — so that they both confess and go to prison for 10 years each. Yet, if they had acted “irrationally,” and kept quiet, they each could have gotten off with one year each.

This game has fascinated game theorists for a variety of reasons. First, it is a simple representation of a variety of important situations. For example, instead of confess/not confess we could label the strategies “contribute to the common good” or “behave selfishly.” This captures a variety of situations economists describe as public goods problems. An example is the construction of a bridge. It is best for everyone if the bridge is built, but best for each individual if someone else builds the bridge. This is sometimes refered to in economics as an externality. Similarly this game could describe the alternative of two firms competing in the same market, and instead of confess/not confess we could label the strategies “set a high price” and “set a low price.” Naturally is best for both firms if they both set high prices, but best for each individual firm to set a low price while the opposition sets a high price.

A second feature of this game is that it is self-evident how an intelligent individual should behave. No matter what a suspect believes his partner is going to do, is is always best to confess. If the partner in the other cell is not confessing, it is possible to get 10 instead of 5. If the partner in the other cell is confessing, it is possible to get 1 instead of 0. Yet the pursuit of individually sensible behavior results in each player getting only 1 unit of utility, much less than the 5 units each that they would get if neither confessed. This conflict between the pursuit of individual goals and the common good is at the heart of many game theoretic problems.

A third feature of this game is that it changes in a very significant way if the game is repeated, or if the players will interact with each other again in the future. Suppose for example that after this game is over, and the suspects either are freed or are released from jail they will commit another crime and the game will be played again. In this case in the first period the suspects may reason that they should not confess because if they do not their partner will not confess in the second game. Strictly speaking, this conclusion is not valid, since in the second game both suspects will confess no matter what happened in the first game. However, repetition opens up the possibility of being rewarded or punished in the future for current behavior, and game theorists have provided a number of theories to explain the obvious intuition that if the game is repeated often enough, the suspects ought to cooperate.

Dominant Strategies

What has happened here is that the two prisoners have fallen into something called”dominant strategy equilibrium.”

DEFINITION Dominant Strategy: Let an individual player in a game evaluate separately each of the strategy combinations he may face, and, for each combination, choose from his own strategies the one that gives the best payoff. If the same strategy is chosen for each of the different combinations of strategies the player might face, that strategy is called a “dominant strategy” for that player in that game.

Definition of Dominant Strategy Equilibrium: If, in a game, each player has a dominant strategy, and each player plays the dominant strategy, then that combination of (dominant) strategies and the corresponding payoffs are said to constitute the dominant strategy equilibrium for that game.

In the Prisoners’ Dilemma game, to confess is a dominant strategy, and when both prisoners confess, that is dominant strategy equilibrium.

Issues With Respect to the Prisoners’ Dilemma

This remarkable result — that individually rational action results in both persons being made worse off in terms of their own self-interested purposes — is what has made the wide impact in modern social science. For there are many interactions in the modern world that seem very much like that, from arms races through road congestion and pollution to the depletion of fisheries and the overexploitation of some subsurface water resources. These are all quite different interactions in detail, but are interactions in which (we suppose) individually rational action leads to inferior results for each person, and the Prisoners’ Dilemma suggests something of what is going on in each of them. That is the source of its power.

Having said that, we must also admit candidly that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a very simplified and abstract — if you will, “unrealistic” — conception of many of these interactions. A number of critical issues can be raised with the Prisoners’ Dilemma, and each of these issues has been the basis of a large scholarly literature:

The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a two-person game, but many of the applications of the idea are really many-person interactions.
We have assumed that there is no communication between the two prisoners. If they could communicate and commit themselves to coordinated strategies, we would expect a quite different outcome.
In the Prisoners’ Dilemma, the two prisoners interact only once. Repetition of the interactions might lead to quite different results.
Compelling as the reasoning that leads to the dominant strategy equilibrium may be, it is not the only way this problem might be reasoned out. Perhaps it is not really the most rational answer after all.

Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded to some of major figures of Game Theory: the Nobel was shared by John Nash, J.C. Harsanyi and R. Selten in 1994 and William Vickrey and James Mirrlees in 1996. Herbert Simon won the Nobel in 1979 for concepts (e.g. bounded rationality) which have since been incorporated into the corpus of (Evolutionary) Game Theory.

Criticism:

The theory is highly abstract and works only under assumed conditions. The players are rarely as rational as presumed by this theory. Game theory may be criticized on two important grounds. First, it stands on the premise of zero-sum match in which one side wins and the other side loses. But we may find instances in which the game ends without any side winning or losing. Second, most of the crucial issues of international relations go on endlessly. Because of that scholar Deutsch says: “Game theory usually assumes that most games have an end, but international relations resemble rather an unending game in which no great power can pick up its marbles and go home.”

UNO vs. League of Nations

International Relations — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 05:41:42 +0000

The U.N.O. is a much wider organization than the League of Nations was. In fact, the League during the years between the two wars, (1919-1939) almost became a forum of imperialist powers, an instrument to maintain their own interests and resolve, if possible, their imperialist conflicts. The U.N.O. is a more representative body. The U.S.S.R. is one of the original and permanent members along with the imperialist powers.

Secondly, the Security Council takes decisions by seven votes including five permanent members while the League Council took decisions by unanimity. Even a small state could bloc the work of the League even if all the big powers and most of the states were in agreement. That cannot happen in the Security Council. On the other hand, its decisions are assured at only by agreement between permanent members.

The U.N.O. also enjoys an advantage over the League in so far as Asian and African states have come into existence and always throw their weight on the side of peace forces. The imperialist countries and states with aggressive designs cannot have an easy run. All decisions are to be taken on the basis of the unanimity of big five powers. Entire possibility of peace and war has been thrown on their shoulders.

The principle of unanimity has got its own benefits. Now no major power can have shelter behind the veto of a small state as was the case with the League of Nations when one hostile vote of Portugal made the League ineffective to take any action against Italy when she attacked Abbyssinia. In fact, the U.N.O. today takes decisions which arc unfavorable at time to the interests of these powers.

The economic and social functions of the U.N.O. have been separated from political and legal functions. In case of the League these were blurred. Similarly, the Trusteeship Council is a distinct improvement over the mandatory system of the League. Today the forces of peace are more powerful than those during the inter-war period. The U.N.O. thus functions under better conditions. That is the reason why the U.N.O. has been able to maintain peace for four decades or so.

The League of Nations and the United Nations

The imposition of a peaceful world order was a key objective for the League of Nations, established in the aftermath of World War One. How can its successor, the United Nations, react to the challenges of the 21st century? Charles Townshend assesses its chances.

The birth of the League ideal

The League of Nations, born of the destruction and disillusionment arising from World War One, was the most ambitious attempt that had ever been made to construct a peaceful global order. It was rooted in a comprehensive liberal critique of the pre-war international system, which was widely believed to have been the cause of the carnage of 1914-18.

The idea of the League was to eliminate four fatal flaws of the old European states: in place of competing monarchical empires – of which the Hapsburg Empire was perhaps the most notorious – the principle of national self-determination would create a world of independent nation states, free of outside interference; the secret diplomacy of the old order would be replaced by the open discussion and resolution of disputes; the military alliance blocs would be replaced by a system of collective guarantees of security; and agreed disarmament would prevent the recurrence of the kind of arms race that had racked up international tensions in the pre-war decade.

Before this, the closest approach to an international political structure had been the Congress System, in which the European great powers held occasional summit meetings to discuss issues they found urgent. (To his credit, the much-maligned Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had sponsored international efforts to ban ‘inhumane’ weapons such as expanding or exploding bullets; but these efforts were only partially successful.)

The surviving victorious great powers at the end of the Great War – Britain and France – would have preferred to go no further than regularising the old Congress System. The spirit of the times, however, which was overbearingly personified in the president of the USA, Woodrow Wilson, pushed towards the creation of a more comprehensive global organisation, which would include all independent states, and in which even the smallest state would have a voice.

The growth of a system

America failed to ratify the League Covenant Unfortunately, Wilson’s thinking about the way that self-determination would work in the real world, and about getting his idea for a ‘community of power’ off the ground, remained vague. Partly this was to avoid alarming US isolationist opinion, but in any case, when the League Covenant was agreed at the Paris peace conference in 1919, the US Senate refused to ratify it.

How the League would have worked with American participation remains one of the great ‘what ifs’ of modern history. As it was, the direction of the system was left in the hands of states – primarily Britain and France – whose altruism was questionable and whose economic resources had been crippled by the war

Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well, at least for a decade after the war. By December 1920, 48 states had signed the League Covenant, pledging to work together to eliminate aggression between countries. A series of disputes – between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia, between Italy and Greece, and between Greece and Bulgaria – were resolved under its auspices.

Though relatively minor, these were just the kind of incidents that had in the past triggered regional conflicts – and indeed World War One itself. There was a widespread belief, or hope, that the League’s prestige was growing incrementally. Methods of investigating disputes, and helping to keep the peace, were regularised.

Another crucial function was the establishment of Mandates to bring all the territories that had been liberated from German and Turkish rule, at the end of the Great War, to eventual self-determination. In Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the process seemed to be moving steadily forward. (In view of its subsequent history, the formal admission of Iraq to the League in 1933 was indeed premature.) The machinery of the League organisation grew more substantial, and the secretariat began to carve out the basis for a quasi-independent role, although this was unplanned and unlooked-for by the old great powers.

The proliferation of League activity, however, carried risks: as one of its founders, Lloyd George, put it, ‘it had weak links spreading everywhere and no grip anywhere’. ‘Grip’ ultimately meant the capacity to use force. When the crucial concept of collective security was put to the acid test in the 1930s, it dissolved. Once big powers started to challenge the status quo, as Japan did in Manchuria, the League found it practically impossible to reach a clear verdict on who was guilty of ‘aggression’.

Or, still more disastrously, in the case of Italian pressure on Abyssinia, the guilt was clear enough but the key powers, Britain and France, were unwilling to antagonise the guilty party because of their wider strategic fears. The failed attempt to impose an oil embargo on Italy demonstrated that any credible system of economic sanctions was far distant.

Death and transfiguration?

Like the proverbial old soldier, the League never died, but rather faded away. Between the humiliation of seeing one of its members, Austria, taken over by Germany in 1938 without even a formal protest, and the absurdity of expelling the USSR after the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 (an event that neither the USSR nor the League were involved in), all that remained were such wraithlike undertakings as the British Mandate in Palestine.

When the Allies finally began to prepare for the end of World War Two, they rejected any idea of restoring the League, and instead moved to establish a new organisation, the United Nations (UN). The structure of the United Nations was to give a much stronger position to the traditional great powers through the UN Security Council; the most significant thing about its creation, perhaps, is that this time the USA did not back away.

A significant number of the old League’s aims and methods were transmitted into the new organisation in 1945. Among these were not only such low-key but effective institutions as the International Court and the International Labour Organisation, but also the working assumptions of the secretariat, and some key operations – including those that would soon come to be called ‘peacekeeping’ operations.

The UN may have almost stumbled sideways into its peacekeeping role, but the motive and sustaining force in the process was the survival – and the strengthening – of the expectation of international involvement in the preservation of global security. Gradually this came to include the defence of human rights as well as the resolution of territorial conflict. The UN’s first attempt to resolve a serious conflict, in Palestine in 1947-8, was unsuccessful, even disastrous: it failed to implement its own partition plan, and its special mediator was assassinated.

None-the-less, UNTSO (the UN Truce Supervision Organisation) opened the gates to a wave of – often bafflingly labelled – successors: UNMOGIP, UNEF, UNOGIL, UNFICYP, UNIMOG, ONUMOZ, UNPROFOR. Some, like the observer force in Kashmir, have remained active for 50 years: not evidence of brilliant success, admittedly, but evidence of hard necessity and a degree of usefulness at least.

Other UN organisations had a shorter but more spectacular life: notably the Operation in the Congo (ONUC) from 1960 to 1964, which prefigured the alarming future for missions to states that were dissolving into civil war. In the Congo, the UN found itself using military force against Katangan rebels to preserve the unity of the state of Congo – a departure from the principle of strict neutrality which has usually been thought vital to the success of its peacekeeping missions.

Dealing with such internal conflict was a far more ambitious and demanding task than the traditional role of assisting consenting states to observe ceasefires. In effect it showed that the UN might need to take governmental responsibility in some situations.

A new international age?

The development towards taking responsibility in countries at risk of disintegration, was due to a dramatic increase in the prestige and initiative of the UN Secretary-General. This was especially at the time when the position was held by the charismatic Dag Hammarskjöld – from 1953 until his death in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961. The UN secretariat came to represent the apparent ‘democratisation’ of the organisation, as the General Assembly began to assert itself after a decade of US domination. (A vivid insight into how this American pressure operated can be found in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s To Katanga and Back.)

What some have called the ‘third world UN’ emerged out of the shadow of the ‘cold war UN’, to the horror of conservative American opinion, which had expected the UN to function as a vehicle for US values – or in effect US policy.

The end of the cold war triggered an unprecedented upsurge in UN commitments. Despite the recurrent funding problems, of the kind that had also dogged the old League, the upbeat official view was that the organisation’s prestige had never been so high. But the nature of the problems emerging in the last decade of the 20th century was extremely worrying.

The title ‘nation’ had always been (for both League and UN) a polite fiction for a club of sovereign states, who often contained within them various ethnically diverse minority groups, sometimes with a claim to nationhood in their own right. These states often denied the rights of their constituent nations to self-determination, and the breakdown of such states as Lebanon, Yugoslavia, and Somalia during the 1990s, revealed a maelstrom of elemental national forces. These could not be compartmentalised into old-fashioned sovereign states of the kind that the UN exists to guarantee, leaving the organisation unsure of how to treat them.

The challenge ahead

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic group Hamas Still more worrying was the explosive upsurge of terrorist violence, which in many places has dissolved the shape of military conflict in ways that make the traditional methods of monitoring ineffective. If there is to be a new age of terrorism, it can only be countered by the development of international – indeed global – security agencies. Only the UN could provide a framework for these; yet the possibility of taking effective measures is likely to be frustrated by the difficulty of finding a common definition of terrorism.

The League of Nations tried to draw up a Convention against Terrorism the 1930s, and could not get general agreement. The wider circumstances of that time were unpropitious, but the basic problem persists: as President Assad of Egypt told Tony Blair, in the wake of the attack on New York on September 11 2001, labelling is inescapably a political act. Members of Hamas (the Islamic resistance movement), and the Islamic Jihad organisation, may be terrorists to the government of Israel, but to others they are fighters against oppression. Does the UN have the ‘grip’ to impose a common view?