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World Affairs in 1994

Relations between the major powers remained on an even keel in 1994, but bloody conflicts in various parts of the world acted as a reminder that a stable new world order had not yet emerged. It became equally clear that the ability of the major powers to act in unison to restore peace remained as limited as in the days of the Cold War.

The balance sheet was not all negative, however. The year witnessed the emergence of a free South Africa ruled by the majority. After the proclamation of a new constitution on Nov. 18, 1993, general elections took place in April 1994. While the National Party won in Western Cape province and the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu/Natal, the African National Congress (ANC) emerged as the overall winner, with 62% of the total vote. The ANC forces were incorporated into the South African army, and a new government under Nelson Mandela was installed. Another encouraging development was the armistice in Northern Ireland--after centuries of conflict and more than 20 years of acute terrorism.

Following months of secret talks, the Irish Republican Army expressed its wish in August 1994 to work for a political solution, and Protestants followed suit shortly thereafter. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, deposed president of Haiti, returned in October following massive pressure on the military junta exerted by the United Nations (the Security Council having authorized a military invasion in July 1994) and, above all, the United States. His return proceeded with little bloodshed.

There was spectacular progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process. In May 1994 Israeli forces withdrew from the Gaza Strip and Jericho, and Palestinians took control. While talks between Israel and Syria did not lead to immediate results, their positions did not seem unbridgeable in the long term. In July Jordan and Israel formally ended the state of war between them, and in October the draft of a peace treaty was initialed by King Hussein and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Israel was recognized by other Arab and North African countries, some of which had never established relations with the Jewish state and others of which had broken off relations at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967.

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There was growing tension in 1994 as North Korea refused to allow international teams to inspect its nuclear facilities. When the United States and other countries threatened sanctions, the North Koreans announced that if they were imposed, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, would become "a sea of fire." The North Koreans had previously denied the possession of nuclear bombs, but this threat seemed to suggest otherwise. Most outside observers thought that North Korea possessed such devices but was willing to negotiate to improve its desperate economic situation. Shortly before Kim Il Sung, who had ruled the country for decades with an iron hand, died on July 8 (see OBITUARIES), former U.S. president Jimmy Carter went on an official peace mission to work out a new inspection plan that at least temporarily defused the dangerous situation.

The achievements of diplomacy in 1994 were by no means secure, however. It was not certain that the South African government would be able to live up to the high expectations that accompanied it, especially in the economic and social fields. The progress made between the Arabs and Israel was equally insecure; the peace process had powerful enemies, as a new terrorist campaign by radical Islamists (in Argentina and Britain as well as inside Israel) showed. The attacks weakened the Israeli government’s willingness to proceed on the road of peace and also hurt Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and they made Arab governments less willing to take risks on the road to a rapprochement with Israel. Only a first, small step had been made toward peace in Ireland, and the armistices in Yugoslavia were only partly effective. There was constant danger that fighting would flare up again, even in parts of the Balkans such as Croatia and Macedonia, which had been relatively quiet in recent years. There was no certainty that the promises made by the North Koreans could be trusted.

Nor did diplomacy have much impact on what was perhaps the greatest single tragedy of 1994--the civil war in Rwanda. The apparent murder of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6 triggered fighting between Tutsi and Hutu in which hundreds of thousands were murdered, and an equal number of Hutu fled to Tanzania and Zaire. France was the only outside power to volunteer for a humanitarian mission involving troops. It did so to create a safe haven and, having accomplished this limited mission, withdrew its forces. The Rwanda disaster was frightening from yet another point of view; given the general instability in much of Africa, it showed how easily tribal warfare could flare up and how it could aggravate endemic starvation and epidemics.

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For a variety of reasons, the major powers showed a basic unwillingness to take significant initiatives in world politics except when their immediate interests were concerned. In the United States, where domestic policies loomed much larger on the agenda, there was a lack of interest in foreign affairs both in the White House and on Capitol Hill. In Japan economic recession and political instability were obstacles; no Japanese government seemed to have sufficient support, for example, to end the trade dispute with the United States. In China, which had traditionally regarded itself as an Asian rather than a world power, the very success of its economy caused inflation and social tensions that made its elderly leaders turn inward to an even larger extent.

Russian policy makers tried to reassert the position of their country in the "near abroad"--the non-Russian republics that had made up the former Soviet Union. Economic malaise--even greater in Ukraine and the other successor states than in Russia--and ethnic strife in the Caucasus and Central Asia assisted them. In several instances Russians were called in as peacemakers, in others to supervise truces that had been established. Russian armed forces were called in to reconquer Chechnya, a small region in the central Caucasus, which had seceded unilaterally from the Russian Federation. The troops encountered substantial resistance. The general trend toward the right (albeit not the extreme right) continued in Russian domestic politics. Although the government of Boris Yeltsin remained in power, equilibrium was not in sight, and many threats to the new system persisted.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl won the German elections in October with a reduced majority. He announced that he saw his main task as providing new impetus to the movement for political unity in Europe. Pres. François Mitterrand of France, in the last phase of his presidency and ill and politically weakened, was in no position to be of assistance. In Italy, in a political earthquake, the old system collapsed. Christian Democrats, who had ruled the country for most of the time since World War II, virtually disappeared, and the Socialists, likewise shaken by financial and other scandals, were decimated. A new right-wing coalition government was formed by media tsar Silvio Berlusconi, the Northern League, and the neo-Fascist National Alliance. The victors found it difficult to agree on common policies, however, and the weight of the investigation of scandals soon brought down the Berlusconi empire too.

It was the first time a neo-Fascist party had been represented in a major European government since the end of World War II, but there also was a strong showing of forces of the extreme right in other countries, most strikingly in Austria, where Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party scored 22% in the elections of October 1994. Some of the components of this new movement in Europe belonged to the far right, others were neo-Fascists, some tended toward "revolutionary nationalism," and others advocated conservatism. The mainsprings were the crisis of the democratic system on the one hand (or, to be precise, the failures of the incumbents) and, on the other, the presence of the many immigrants who had arrived in recent years, some as "guest workers," others as asylum seekers. Their growing presence, especially in the big cities, generated tensions from which the extreme right benefited. In some cases there were acts of violence against foreigners and even murder. Although the violence was not remotely on the scale of the campaign of terror carried out by radical Islamists in countries such as Algeria and Egypt, against both foreigners and coreligionists, it was still worrisome at a time when many thought that a more civilized political climate had prevailed.

This updates the article international relations.

World Affairs in 1994
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