Archivo de la etiqueta: Georgia

Europe’ s Blinkered Russian Policy

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Yekaterinburg_2013

Europe’ s Blinkered Russian Policy

by: Judy Dempsey, Carnegie Europe,  June 3, 2013

How blind the EU can be.

Despite worrying changes in Russia and Eastern Europe over the last six months, the EU’s policy toward both regions remains the same.

If the EU took its foreign relations seriously, the two developments should jolt it into adopting a very different Eastern strategy.

The fact sheets that EU officials drew up ahead of today’s EU-Russia summit in the southern Russian city of Yekaterinburg read nearly the same as the ones drafted six months ago for the last summit in Brussels. The statements prepared for José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, are also astonishingly similar.

Obviously, from the perspective of Brussels, little has changed in EU-Russia relations. In Russia, however, change has been disturbing.Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s main ideologist and the man behind the concept of “sovereign democracy,” quit last month. Apparently, the special ideological system he built for President Vladimir Putin was not sufficient to withstand or anticipate the 2011 antiregime demonstrations. More importantly, Surkov was critical of repression. His view was that it is better to co-opt opponents than to lock them up. Putin held a different view.

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Georgia: clashes on International Day Against Homophobia

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Georgia IDAHO_OnnikKrikorianEuronews, 17/05/2013 .- In Georgia, a rally for International Day Against Homophobia has been dramatically bombarded by priests and thousands of anti-gay protesters. Wearing religious and national dress, they marched into a square in central Tbilisi chanting nationalistic slogans.
Their motivation came from recent comments from the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who called the Gay Rights rally an “insult” to tradition.
Zaza Davitaia, who took part in the anti-gay demonstration said: “We are against the rally which comes in contradiction to Georgian morals and traditions.”
A Georgian Orthodox priest, Archimandrite Ioanne, explained why he was against the gay rights rally: “It is unacceptable in any way, especially today. It’s their plan to try our patience.”
Police escorted the gay rights supporters onto buses and drove them away to avoid violence.Organisers had hoped for a peaceful demonstration outside the old parliament building, with no more than 50 Georgians rallying in support of gay rights.
However, its thought at least 17 people, including journalists, were injured in the clashes.

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Revisiting Colour Revolutions

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Colour_revolutions_2013 Slovenia: next playground for NED operatives? Graffiti in Ljubljana, presumibly made by Odbor VLV, during the recent demonstrations

Revisiting Colour Revolutions

Carlos González Villa, Ljubljana, April 25, 2013

Over the last years, systemic world crisis has shaped political processes and has determined global approaches of the sole superpower of the Post-Cold War. In this context, foreign policy of the United States has been focused on preserving its presence and influence in a world in which several countries and whole regions have started to take over responsibilities of their own future. Considering this, US foreign policy community and “democracy-promotion community” in Washington DC (as Thomas Carothers denominates it) have developed since the 1980s new ways of influencing political changes in the peripheral and semi-peripheral areas of the world-system. So-called “colour revolutions” in Eurasia were a consequence of this idea.

Through these events, the United States  managed to canalize internal political changes with instruments of ‘soft power‘. Revisiting this phenomena is relevant, considering its influence in recent events, like the Arab Spring, or in other cases outside the Eurasian space (a good example can be found in Venezuela)

Nevertheless, it should also be noticed that learnings of colour revolutions could still be put into practice by the United States in other parts of the world in the future.

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The drone mania

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Drone_stock

When the Whole World Has Drones

The precedents the U.S. has set for robotic warfare may have fearsome consequences as other countries catch up

This article appeared in print as Standard Deviation

Kristin Roberts, National Journal, 22 March, 2013

[An interview with the author]

A slim aircraft glided through Israeli airspace, maintaining low altitude and taking a winding path to avoid detection. It flew over sensitive military installations and was beginning its approach to the Dimona nuclear reactor when it was blown from the sky by the Israel Defense Forces. The plane was pilotless, directed by agents elsewhere, and had been attempting to relay images back home. Whether they were successfully transmitted, Israelis won’t say, perhaps because they don’t know. But here’s what’s certain: It wasn’t American. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese. It was an Iranian drone, assembled in Lebanon and flown by Hezbollah.

The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles. Not toys or models, but real flying machines.

It’s a classic and common phase in the life cycle of a military innovation: An advanced country and its weapons developers create a tool, and then others learn how to make their own. But what makes this case rare, and dangerous, is the powerful combination of efficiency and lethality spreading in an environment lacking internationally accepted guidelines on legitimate use. This technology is snowballing through a global arena where the main precedent for its application is the one set by the United States; it’s a precedent Washington does not want anyone following.

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La “traslación de Obama”

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El pasado día 29 de enero, el profesor Francisco Veiga pronunció una conferencia en el Cercle d´Economía sobre la evolución geoestratégica del macrocontinente eurasiático entre 2001 y 2012. En recuerdo de Zbigniew Brzezinski, la exposición fue titulada, genéricamente: “El gran tablero de ajedrez. La nueva configuración de Eurasia desde 2001″

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