The World Today

Fewer burning forests, more biofuels, new oil wells, Brazil could position itself for a key role in this year’s crucial climate change talks. A good move some would say – even if long delayed – for a country that played host to the Earth Summit seventeen years ago, which set off the whole environmental process.

To most of Europe, the Republic of Moldova has been a zone of unhappiness rather than interest. Since the election of communist President Vladimir Voronin in 2001, the dominance of governing clans has further corroded the country’s political and economic life, but not in a way to make Europe question the government’s democratic credentials. And so it was after the parliamentary elections of April 5, when the qualified endorsement of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was read without a murmur by almost everyone except the political opposition in Moldova itself. It worries about an authoritarian outcome and storm clouds on the international horizon.

Three governments have fallen, the new middle classes are feeling the pain, there is even fear of the emergence of dark forces. Is Eastern Europe in for a torrid time as the economic crisis bites? Can the once magnetic attraction of the European Union counteract the other factors at work.

Moscow has tried to lure them back into its sphere of influence, now the European Union is to launch a partnership programme for six post-communist countries. The best result would be for them to become a bridge between the two. In any event, energy is the issue.

The Council of Europe has become the conscience of the continent. When the ten founding states signed the Treaty of London sixty years ago, each agreed to ‘accept the principles of the rule of law and the enjoyment by all persons within its jurisdiction of human rights and fundamental freedoms’. Since then the Council has developed into a pan- European organisation encompassing forty-seven states, all subscribing to the founders’ high ideals. But practice does not always live up to principle in an organisation that reflects deep continental rifts.

Hardly had the world got used to the idea of a modern-day rush for Africa by resource-hungry, newly- developing countries, when the global crisis called the process into question. So where does this leave growth on the continent?