Interdependence for all
Hehir, J. Bryan
WORLD WATCH J. Bryan Hehir INTERDEPENDENCE FOR ALL A DECADE TO REMAKE THE WORLD It is clear that we face an enormous but positive challenge in the 1990s. The coming decade will be transitional...
...In response to this question, a proposal: the change in East-West relations requires nothing less than refashioniong the international system, politically, economically, and strategically...
...The prospect envisioned here is a split-level international order: planned and controlled change in East-West relations and chaos and conflict in vast sectors of the Southern hemisphere...
...Human life, human dignity, and human rights must flourish there also...
...The promise of the future works the other way: better relations at the top of the international system open the way for a changed relationship to other levels of the system...
...But a different relationship to the Soviets calls for redefining Western concepts of interest and responsibility in the developing world...
...A new chapter in East-West relations at least holds out the possibility that in the future the superpowers can be restrained from aggravating local conflicts...
...The very week that Lech Walesa was recounting to rapt American audiences how the transition from communism to pluralism was being accomplished without breaking a window-pane, news came that six Jesuits had been brutally massacred in San Salvador...
...There is no expectation here that the reshaping of the international system will begin with local or regional conflicts...
...On this point there is little dissent...
...Within a week the newly elected president of Lebanon, Rene Moawad, was assassinated in Beirut...
...This is the conclusion most commonly drawn from the Malta summit...
...But events at the end of 1989 point toward the need for a broader framework for assessing the political and moral problems of the coming decade of transition in world affairs...
...It is this conjunction of stunning peaceful possibilities in the traditional theater of the cold war and starkly murderous realities in the micropolitics of national and regional conflict that poses a basic political-moral challenge for the coming decade of transition...
...It is true that disengagement is better for the South than a continued pattern of superpower intervention and manipulation, but the question which needs to be pressed is whether these alternatives are the only options for the future...
...El Salvador and Lebanon forcefully reminded the world that peaceful change is not the inevitable pattern of world politics...
...The shared conception of interdependence that lies at the root of changing East-West relations needs to be extended to the Lebanons and El Salvadors of the international system...
...To argue against big-power disengagement from smaller nations is to call for a quite different style of engagement than we have known in the last forty years...
...How should this relationship of the new possibilities at the macrolevel of East-West relations and continuing chaos and conflict at the microlevel of intrastate and regional conflicts be conceived...
...The Western powers clearly have more resources to offer the South than do the Soviets...
...First, the good news: throughout the cold war superpower competition has usually intensified and complicated local conflicts...
...For some places the future promises neither peace nor change...
...The dangerous and dreary pattern has reached from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Central America and the Horn of Africa...
...Unless there is a dramatic and disastrous change of course in East-West politics, it is reasonable to predict a decade which will be intellectually, politically, and economically complicated but also a time of hope, expectation, and constructive cooperation...
...The engagement of one or both powers in third-world countries has escalated the military capacities of local actors, engaged the prestige of the big powers, and made diplomatic resolution of issues more difficult...
...But the conditions of local, national, and regional politics which have produced the Lebanese and Central American conflicts will not yield quickly even to the most optimistic developments in superpower and/or European relations...
...There is room for much debate, however, about the nature, complexity, and range of choices facing the West in the decade ahead...
...It will require Western plans to relieve the debt of developing countries, but not to forsake future lending for development.The new order should not be a world in which the East and West are so fixated on their possibilities for engagement with each other that they define the future only in terms of those legitimate but limited interests...
...To shape a system that simply ignores or isolates these problems is both morally and politically unacceptable...
...If the major powers-principally but not exclusively the superpowers-no longer see competitive advantage in the developing countries, the troubling possibility is that they will simply disengage: isolate the poverty, the debt, the violent struggles of the third world and insulate "northern politics" (of East or West) from "southern connections...
...A decisive move away from cold-war politics cannot but enhance the quality of international life...
...The riveting spectacle of thousands of East Germans flowing into West Berlin has understandably focused Western attention on "the German question," "the European house," and the changing shape of the Soviet Union...
...While Eastern Europe is peacefully passing through revolution, other regions are mired in mortal conflict...
...The coming decade will be transitional not only in the sense that it takes us into the next century, but in the deeper sense that fundamental adjustments must be made in the international order...
...But the conception of a new order will have to include specific attention focused on the immediate needs and the future development of "the Lebanons and El Salvadors" of the world...
...The foreign policy questions facing the United States, conceptually and operationally, will be as profound and as potentially fruitful as in any period since the end of World War II...
...The daily news from Berlin, Budapest, and Bratislava convince even the most skeptical that the structure and substance of the cold war are rapidly being transformed...
...Anything short of this goal will fail to grasp the potential of the moment...
...A new pattern of order which combines nonintervention with engagement is needed...
...Second, a troubling possibility: the potential for change in the superpower relationship, in the European theater, and in the German question is so broad and historically significant that these issues may simply absorb the interest, energy, and resources of international politics in the coming decade...
...Reshaping an international order which has been in place for four decades is not a task with clear lines of demarcation...
...It will require diplomatic interest by the big powers of the East and West but not military forces...
...Such cooperation would be a political and moral good of a high order and should be pursued and encouraged by all parties...
...Such a conception can be described in terms of its goals but not yet in terms of its means...
...At Malta it was clear that Central America was the one divisive issue of the summit...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 1
