The World Today

The Milosevic era is over and with it, hopefully, the years of blood, carnage and collapse. President Kostunica and his allies face many obstacles and problems, but more than likely these will, sooner or later, begin to resemble the problems faced by normal countries. As Petar Lukovic, one of Belgrade’s best columnists put it ‘To live without Milosevic is a feeling that spreads slowly, that enters the veins slowly, very slowly.’

In one aspect of European Union development, Britain is seen by its European partners as the innovator and driving force. The European Defence Policy is widely known as the Blair Initiative. No one believes that the enthusiastic adoption of EU defence goals at the Helsinki Summit last December would have been possible without the crucial effort by the British government over the preceding year. However, there are signs that the process is in danger, and with key decisions to be made before the end of the year, imaginative new proposals are needed to save it. Britain seems surprisingly reluctant to take the lead again.

President Bill Clinton is going to Vietnam this month shortly after his successor is elected. The visit, just a few months after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, will be the first by a serving US president since Richard Nixon went to Saigon - now Ho Chi Minh City - in 1969. It will also be the first visit to the capital, Hanoi, by a serving US president. Clinton’s journey is thus rich in symbolism, marking yet another important step towards healing between Hanoi and Washington.

In the Basque region of Spain a fourteen month ceasefire by the Basque Homeland and Liberty Party – ETA – ended a year ago.

Teenage fighters roam the streets with guns ransacked from local armouries in a scene that could fit anywhere in the failing African states of Somalia, Sierra Leone or Liberia. But this is not Africa, it’s the Solomon Islands in the Pacific – a region meant to be as peaceful as its name suggests. In Australia and New Zealand this new look is prompting a major review of policies. The popular tendency to see the area in terms of bikinis or balaclavas – a tourist destination or, increasingly, a centre of strife – falls very short of the new reality.

Understanding Unilateralism in American Foreign Relations edited by Gwyn Prins. Published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000