World Affairs in 1995

The crosscurrents of peace and war, of both agreement and conflict, were as much in appearance in 1995 as they had been in 1994, and it was impossible to say with certainty which of the two trends was prevailing in world politics. The agreement concluded in 1994 between the United States and North Korea concerning nuclear reactors was implemented during 1995. In May 1995, for the first time in 23 years, representatives of the British government met leaders of the Irish Republican Army in an attempt to find a solution to a conflict that had claimed thousands of victims over two decades. In March the Syrian government made it known that it would establish relations with Israel if the Golan Heights was restored to its sovereignty. More important, on September 28 in Washington, D.C., Palestinian and Israeli leaders signed an accord that scheduled an end to Israeli occupation of the main urban centres of the West Bank by March 1996. It was not clear what effect the assassination of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin (see OBITUARIES), would have on the continuation of the peace process. Even in former Yugoslavia a cease-fire came into being in October that effectively split Bosnia and Herzegovina more or less equally between the existing Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian government. The cease-fire followed intensification of the civil war, a Croatian offensive in the Slavonia region and in northern Bosnia, and, for the first time, NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in an attempt to end their shelling of Sarajevo and to compel them to withdraw their heavy weapons from the area.

Encouraging as such developments were, there was universal agreement that the road to peace in all these conflicts was still long and that even the achievements already gained were not secure and could be undone by the enemies of peace. Particularly in former Yugoslavia there still was danger that ethnic conflicts could turn into war between states that might involve countries that had previously stayed out of the conflict. Furthermore, old conflicts continued, such as the fighting between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi in February and March, which led to a new exodus and thousands of victims. Also in March Turkish forces crossed the Iraqi border and in the course of a two-month campaign battled the Kurdish separatists who had launched guerrilla attacks from bases there.

Worldwide attention was drawn to the Russian invasion of Chechnya in December 1994; fighting in the northern Caucasus lasted throughout 1995--despite a cease-fire ordered by Pres. Boris Yeltsin in June--and revealed surprising weaknesses in the morale, organization, and effectiveness of the Russian military units. The list of armed conflicts in 1995 was long; it included a war in January between Peru and Ecuador over the demarcation of their state borders, fighting between governments and nationalist separatists (as in Jammu and Kashmir), attacks by religious fanatics (in Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan), and terrorist actions, both national and international, in the course of which sarin, a highly poisonous gas, was used by Japanese terrorists in an attack in the Tokyo subway in March.

The United Nations played no role in the settlement of any of these conflicts except for an ineffectual one in former Yugoslavia. There was no progress on the road toward the establishment of an armed intervention force there, as Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary-general, had demanded since 1992. This failure to act decisively in the Balkans further deepened the crisis of the UN, perpetuating its status as an organization without teeth, incapable of taking decisive action.

A certain deterioration in the international climate was also felt in the relations between the great powers. China ignored appeals to improve its human rights record; it increased pressure on Taiwan and other neighbours, and relations with the United States were bedeviled by the Chinese reluctance to abide by copyright and other international trade conventions. The United States reacted by imposing temporary trade sanctions and, at the same time, practicing political appeasement. French nuclear tests in the South Pacific created worldwide protests, and anti-Western feelings in Russia spread markedly during the year. The latter development was connected in part with Western initiatives to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, a policy regarded in Moscow as a threat to Russian national security even though Russia had also been invited to join and, in any case, only a loose association had been envisaged. Generally speaking, a trend toward nationalism and populism could be observed in Russia as in Eastern Europe. The West was held responsible for the economic, social, and political failures of recent years, and there was even nostalgia for the past, in which order had prevailed and prices had been stable. The number of those who had materially benefited from reform was relatively small, which led to a backlash bound to manifest itself also in the field of foreign relations.

Further tension was generated by the willingness of major nations to supply the technology of arms of mass destruction to rogue countries building up their arsenals to attack or, at the very least, to threaten and blackmail their neighbours. As a result of the defection of two key members of Pres. Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, it became known that Iraqi preparations in this direction had been much further advanced than had been anticipated even by confirmed pessimists, and the Iranian nuclear buildup continued with undiminished speed. In Europe and North America the preoccupation with domestic affairs took pride of place, on the basis of the assumption that with all the conflicts occurring, the danger to world peace was now less than in previous decades. The assumption was correct inasmuch as military spending had declined in all major nations. It was wrong, however, in the sense that the absence of international controls made the approach of an age of conflict fought with unconventional weapons even more certain. This view also overrated the extent of international, social, and economic stability. In fact, the world order remained highly vulnerable on all levels, from the disorder of money markets and the weaknesses of many currencies and central banks to growing mass unemployment, not only in countries where it had long been endemic, as in Africa and the Middle East, but also elsewhere. Unemployment among young persons under age 25 was, with few exceptions, in the 20-30% range even in Europe, a grave portent not just for social stability but, in the long run, also for the European political and social system and for international affairs.

A worldwide trend toward democratic systems or at least away from dictatorship had been noted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By late 1995 this trend seemed to have come to a halt in various countries, including France, Italy, and Austria, as well as in Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union, where authoritarian parties polled more votes than before. In the Middle East religious fundamentalists preached that democracy was an abomination. There was no clear trend that could be defined as either left-wing or right-wing, rather only a feeling of discontent directed against the incumbents, be they conservatives in Britain or Socialists in France and Spain, to give but examples. The discontent was directed against a political system that provided neither economic nor political security; participation in grassroots politics and in elections declined in most parts of the world, and separatism, another frequent phenomenon in recent years, led to demands for strengthening central state power. These were primarily developments witnessed on the domestic scene, but they also were bound to affect relations between nations. The feeling of discontent led to a search for scapegoats, more likely than not to be found among minorities and foreigners. Aggressive nationalism was likely to trigger conflicts not only at home but also between states. At the very least, this negative mood was making cooperation between nations more difficult, and the movement toward greater unity, in Europe as elsewhere, came to a standstill.

This updates the article international relations.

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