Junio de 2007 (Continuación)

Nuestra sociedad, la que corresponde a la actual hora global, no queda suficientemente descrita si se la caracteriza como sociedad de masas. Tampoco la cultura en que nos hallamos integrados. Este concepto -las masas- debe ser repensado y criticado en profundidad. Lo masivo sería el sustrato inerte, emocional e intelectual, sobre el que se sustentan infinidad de figuras minoritarias.

El viejo paradigma jerárquico de élites gobernantes frente a masas en rebelión pertenece a otra época histórica. La nuestra nada tiene que ver ya con la que compartieron, antes de la II Guerra Mundial, Freud y Ortega y Gasset, o en los años treinta Walter Benjamin y T.…  Seguir leyendo »

La matanza de seis soldados españoles ocurrida el 24 de junio en Líbano es el último incidente de una serie de acontecimientos dramáticos y muy inquietantes que han afectado a ese país y también a Palestina en las últimas semanas. La ciudad de Jiam, que ya había adquirido mala fama como emplazamiento de una cárcel donde los israelíes y sus aliados libaneses recluyeron hasta dos mil presos árabes, se ha hecho famosa una segunda vez. La dramática cadena de acontecimientos se inició el 20 de mayo con el estallido de intensos combates entre el ejército libanés y los islamistas palestinos en la ciudad de Trípoli.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hace algunos años los dirigentes de la Unión Europea llegaron a la conclusión de que tanto el crecimiento en número de estados miembros como el avance en el proceso de integración requerían de un nuevo Tratado. Organizaron una Convención y de allí salió un texto, el «Tratado de la Constitución Europea» que fue presentado ante los ciudadanos. Estos tomaron nota de las declaraciones de unos y otros, fueron a votar y, a las primeras de cambio, franceses y holandeses lo rechazaron. Aquello fue un ejercicio normal de vida en democracia. Evidentemente suponía un trastorno para el funcionamiento de la Unión Europea, pero en democracia lo importante no es lo que piensan políticos y burócratas, sino lo que pensamos cada uno de nosotros.…  Seguir leyendo »

España ha sufrido las primeras bajas en Líbano. Era previsible, porque se trata de una misión de muy alto riesgo. En su momento, el Gobierno lo reconoció sin ambigüedades y en este sentido no se le puede acusar de iluso o de hipócrita. Sabía muy bien dónde estaba metiendo a las tropas. Lo que nunca quedó claro fue por qué.

España no tiene interés alguno en Líbano. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero llegó al poder en parte por el rechazo del pueblo español a la política exterior de Aznar, con sus fantasiosas pretensiones de que nuestro país era una gran potencia mundial y por lo tanto su política exterior debía ser ambiciosa y agresiva.…  Seguir leyendo »

The moment has been anticipated so long, it's easy to lose sight of its strangeness. The handover at Downing Street that will come today was formally promised six weeks ago, trailed last September and implied two years before that, when Tony Blair first announced that he would not fight a fourth election. This has been a slow-motion transition, three years in the making. Even longer, if you buy the Granita legend, which holds that the baton that passes today first left Blair's hand over an Islington dinner table in 1994.

We've had so much time to accustom ourselves to it that when the change comes, shortly after 12.30pm today, it will seem entirely normal.…  Seguir leyendo »

Iran's judiciary says it expects to announce a decision this week or next in the case of my wife, Haleh Esfandiari, and two other Iranian-Americans, Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri, who have been held in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin prison since early May. The fate of these detainees could be resolved by Iran’s government in a number of ways. Only one would be in the best interests of the Islamic Republic: the detainees should be freed and all charges dropped.

The three detainees are not connected to one another. Haleh is the director of the Middle East program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington; Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Tony Blair is the right person for the role of Middle East envoy, his long-term Irish peace process partner Bertie Ahern said this morning, as he paid tribute to the outgoing prime minister’s qualities of persistence and determination.

And Mr Ahern is absolutely right. The prospect of forging a durable new dispensation for Israel/Palestine may seem to have receded further towards the horizon than ever before, but Mr Blair is bringing a highly individual set of skills to a problem which is fundamentally about negotiation.

His experience in Ulster will ensure that his instincts on the two core issues will be right.…  Seguir leyendo »

History seems to be settling on some criticisms of the early conduct of the Iraq war. On the theory that America could liberate and leave, force levels were reduced too early, security responsibilities were transferred to Iraqis before they were ready, and planning for future challenges was unrealistic. "Victory in Iraq," one official of the Coalition Provisional Authority told me a couple of years ago, "was defined as decapitating the regime. No one defined victory as creating a sustainable country six months down the road."

Now Democrats running for president have thought deeply and produced their own Iraq policy: They want to cut force levels too early and transfer responsibility to Iraqis before they are ready, and they offer no plan to deal with the chaos that would result six months down the road.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el presente documento de trabajo se ofrece un análisis de la acción exterior autonómica y sus implicaciones en la política exterior española, y se evalúan algunas de sus opciones de reforma. Para ello se ofrece una aproximación panorámica y un diagnóstico de la acción exterior autonómica y de la participación de las comunidades autónomas (CC AA) en la política exterior española. Con datos de varias CC AA se describen asimismo los contenidos y campos geográficos y sectoriales preferentes de la acción exterior. También se abordan las posibilidades de mejora, mediante una descripción de la situación en países federales análogos o en otros sectores de actuación en España.…  Seguir leyendo »

La libre circulación de trabajadores es uno de los logros más sobresalientes del proceso de integración económica europea. Según los últimos datos proporcionados por la Comisión Europea, desde el año 2000 solamente el 0,1% de la población en edad de trabajar de la UE-15 ha cambiado de país de residencia cada año, lo que significa que aproximadamente entre 170.000 y 180.000 personas en edad de trabajar cambian anualmente de estado de residencia dentro de la UE-15. La opinión dominante en estos momentos es que las tasas de movilidad intracomunitaria dentro de los países de la UE-15 pueden ser muy parecidas a las observadas en los años pasados.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bernard Kouchner, France's new foreign minister, has a distinguished record as an advocate of intervention in countries where human rights are abused. As a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières he stated that "we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else's country". Saddam Hussein's mass murder of Iraqi citizens is why Kouchner supported the war in Iraq, and he has often said that the murder of his Russian-Jewish grandparents in Auschwitz inspired his humanitarian interventionism.

Whatever one thinks of Kouchner's policies, his motives are surely impeccable. The fact that many prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe and the US - often, like Kouchner, with a leftist past - are sympathetic to the idea of using American armed force to further the cause of human rights and democracy may derive from the same wellspring.…  Seguir leyendo »

Even as one of the principal architects of the Iraq war washes his hands of the whole bloody mess, there is still only a vague understanding of the real reason behind the invasion, but evidence of the intense interest of the international oil companies continues to build. Only last week, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson said in London: "We look forward to the day when we can partner with Iraq to develop that resource potential." Despite their interest and influence, however, the decision to attack was not taken in the boardroom. Iraq was indeed all about oil, but in a sense that transcends the interests of individual corporations, however large.…  Seguir leyendo »

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super- intellect has monkeyed with physics".

To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos.…  Seguir leyendo »

Under an agreement Congress and the administration made last month, free-trade accords with Peru and Panama moved forward. They are far from done, however. Congress should pass these modified agreements, which solidify our access to key countries and whose enforceable labor and environmental standards would set an important precedent for future trade agreements. Congress should also enact the Colombia free-trade agreement after setting enforceable benchmarks for Colombia to improve its record on human rights.

Trade agreements have always been difficult for Congress. Rarely are the debates about the merits of the deals themselves or even about our economic strategy or trade policy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Quietly, the real debate over Iraq is beginning.

It's not about whether the United States should pull out troops. That is now inevitable. The real challenge is to figure out the right timetable for withdrawal, whether a residual force should be left there and which American objectives can still be salvaged.

This is not the debate President Bush wants to have come September, when a slew of reports will be issued assessing the results of the troop surge. Already, the administration is preparing the ground for kicking the real choices into next year. Where once the White House seemed to be saying, "Give us until September," its spokesmen now seem to be insisting that we won't know much by then after all.…  Seguir leyendo »

When China announced its plans to pave a highway to the Mount Everest base camp in Tibet as part of its 2008 Olympic preparations, adventurers around the world winced at the latest encroachment into the Himalayan wilderness. Mountaineers who have already been to Everest, however, were more likely to greet the announcement of the “blacktop highway fenced with undulating guardrails” with little more than a shrug.

Despite an elevation of more than 17,000 feet, it’s been a long time since the Chinese base camp has resembled a wilderness.

A multistory hotel has been open for years now, just an hour’s walk from base camp, with hot meals, cold beer, soft beds and a telescope aimed at the mountaintop.…  Seguir leyendo »

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, is right: “The image of Guantánamo Bay and the reality of Guantánamo Bay are completely different.” It is disappointing that so many embrace a contrived image. Reality for Guantánamo Bay is the daily professionalism of its staff, the humanity of its detention centers and the fair and transparent nature of the military commissions charged with trying war criminals. It is a reality that has been all but ignored or forgotten.

The makeshift detention center known as Camp X-Ray closed in early 2002 after just four months of use. Now it is overgrown with weeds and serves as home to iguanas.…  Seguir leyendo »

Say you have a good friend, practically family, whom you’ve known for some time and whose advice you value. Of course there are differences in emphasis. He likes angling where you prefer soccer and he occasionally forgets – where you remember – that parking wardens also have a job to do. Then one lunchtime, over a glass of tap water, he reveals that he is a long-time member of Britons Against Fluoridation and regards the addition of any chemical to his water supply as an attempt by shadowy powers to interfere with his brain. Though disconcerted, you have two options – to nod or to argue.…  Seguir leyendo »

Al Qaeda, bien sea directamente o, lo que es mucho más probable, a través de organizaciones asociadas y de grupos afines al movimiento de la yihad global en su conjunto, plantea riesgos y amenazas para la seguridad de los soldados que actualmente desarrollan sus misiones en Líbano como parte de la fuerza interina que Naciones Unidas mantiene desplegada en el sur de ese país tras la guerra entre Israel y la milicia chií de Hezbolá del último verano. Por una parte, el pasado otoño fue el propio Ayman al Zawahiri, segundo en la cadena de mando de la estructura terrorista que lidera Osama Bin Laden, quien mediante un vídeo difundido a través de Internet amenazaba al conjunto de países que habían respaldado la resolución 1.701 del Consejo de Seguridad y decidido enviar tropas a aquel pequeño país del Mediterráneo oriental, amenaza que incumbía a España.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ya sé que lo de ETA y España no es una guerra. Ya sé que se emplea impropiamente el lenguaje cuando se habla de tregua, proceso de paz, etcétera. Pero eso no me impide realizar el siguiente análisis.

En varias ocasiones, a lo largo de más de cuarenta años, ETA ha venido marcando los tiempos y, en algunas ocasiones, tomando la iniciativa, en su odioso oficio de matar. Cuando le interesaba mataba y cuando le interesaba declaraba una tregua. Aunque los españoles no estemos en guerra con ETA, ETA sí cree que está en guerra con España, por lo que sería necesario razonar poniéndose en la posición del otro, que es una forma correcta de acertar en tus conclusiones.…  Seguir leyendo »