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	Meeting the changing threats to global security: 2005 as a watershed year by Gareth Evans International Crisis Group Belgium   Published: 6 July 2005   (Gareth Evans is President of the International Crisis Group. This article is from ‘G8 Summit 2005: Mapping the Challenges’, Gleneagles Summit Publication, July 2005.)   There is every reason for this G8 Summit to focus, as it will, on the two key themes of  Africa and climate change: both are huge problem areas, desperately needing new  momentum for their resolution.  But just two months later, at the Millennium Review Summit in New York, the world will be wrestling with an even larger agenda of  interrelated security, development and human rights issues –  essentially the whole range of threats to state and human security that we face in the 21st century – and it is critical that the Gleneagles G8 not drop the  ball in the messages it sends out on this wider front as well.   Security issues, particularly counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism, have loomed large on G8 agendas since 2002. They demand attention again in their own right this year, not least because some of them seem further away than ever from solution. The long-feared nuclear weapons breakout seems closer now than it has been for decades, with Iran and North Korea showing the hollowness of existing constraints and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference collapsing in May: there was no sign whatever of agreement on any of the four big activities crying out for shutdown by mutual consent - nuclear testing, new and continuing weapons programs, reprocessing or uranium enrichment – if a new cascade of proliferation is to be avoided.   Deadly terrorist attacks continue with alarming frequency, and nobody can be confident that one or more of the world’s major cities will not be laid to waste by nuclear, biological or chemical weapons some time soon. Major regional conflicts and tensions, not just in Africa, remain unresolved: the risks and horrors of new and ongoing war, not only within but between states, are very real in many other parts of the world.  And all of this is occurring in a wider human security context in which -  above all in Africa but not only on that continent -  there are still over a billion people living in extreme poverty, with life expectancy closer to 40 than the rich world’s 80; and with 100 of every 1000 children dying before their fifth birthday, compared with less than 10 in high-income countries.   What has been missing in the global response to these threats – including the reactions of the G8 itself -   has been any real sense of how they are woven together, and how crucial it is that we urgently revitalise the institutions of global collective security, above all the United Nations, if we are not to face a rapid deterioration in the global security environment. There is a very real sense around the world, not fully acknowledged by all the G8 countries, that not only are poverty, malnutrition, disease and environmental degradation not being tackled as effectively as they can and should be, but that the whole multilateral security system on which the world order was sought to be rebuilt in 1945 is once again at the crossroads. Almost strangled at birth though it may have been by the Cold War decades, the idea of a rule-based collective security system imposing universal constraints in the common interest flowered again the first heady years of the 1990s, but has since then lapsed back  into considerable disarray, with ineffective responses to major challenges in the Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Iraq, and an accompanying resurgence of unilateralism and exceptionalism by major powers reluctant to accept those constraints and disciplines.   In this environment, it is not an exaggeration to say that 2005 is emerging as a make or break year for global governance.  Three things have come together to make it so: the recognition of  a need for change, as just described; the emergence of an agenda for change more comprehensive and well argued than ever before – with the reports of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change  and the Sachs Millennium Project now welded together brilliantly by the Secretary General in his In Larger Freedom blueprint; and the occasion for change created by the UN’s 60th Anniversary and all the high-level summitry associated with it.   What is most obviously missing, as so often, is the fourth and most crucial ingredient of all, the political will to make it all happen – the spark, the catalyst, the leadership necessary to stare down the spoilers and make it all happen. The G8 summit offers the opportunity for the leaders of the developed world, if they can rise to the occasion, to provide just that spark. They need to show not only their willingness to respond, constructively intelligently and generously, to the central issues of the development agenda  - poverty, disease, malnutrition and environmental catastrophe -  but also those that are at the heart of the more traditional security agenda, aimed at strengthening the multilateral security system and above all the UN’s own institutions and processes.   The G8 Summit needs to embrace and articulate the core notion at the heart of the agenda-setting reports now being debated – that the threats to state and human security of the 21st century are interconnected; that there are inextricable links between development, security and human rights; and that collective security in the 21st century means above all else that all members of the global community have a shared responsibility for each other’s security.  It is not a matter of a North agenda being weighed and traded against a South agenda: in the interdependent, globalised world in which we now live, threats to one are a threat to all, and we must act together to meet them all.   In policy terms there are five touchstone security policy issues emerging as crucial,  as defined by the High Level Panel and refined in the Secretary-General’s own report. They are being greeted initially with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the G8 countries, but all are crucial in the mix, if the credibility and effectivness of collective security is to be restored.   The first is improving conflict prevention and resolution capability:  this means better peacemaking capacity (though better prepared and supported mediators and negotiators); far more readily available reserves, both military and civilian, for peacekeeping and other peace operation; and a far more systematic and coherent approach to post-conflict peacebuilding – the failure to follow through on which is the most depressingly familiar reason for the recurrence of avoidable conflict.   The second is disarmament and non-proliferation:  this means action on the supply side to constrain the availability of fissile material; on the demand side to reduce the motivations for acquiring weapons of mass destruction; improved international verification machinery; and more effective public health defences, in particular to cope with the ravages of biological weapons, the hardest of all to prevent being used.   The third is confronting terrorism:  the need here is to embrace a broad based policy response going beyond intelligence, policing and military cooperation to addressing root causes, including political grievances; and to find common cause at last on an international definition of terrorism making  attacks against civilians and non-combatants as indefensible as piracy and slavery.   The fourth is responding effectively to genocide, ethnic cleansing and similar massive human rights violations within states:  the prime need here is to give further momentum to the emerging international norm of the responsibility to protect in all its dimensions, both preventive and reactive  - the responsibility of the international community to step in when a sovereign state, through incapacity or ill-will, fails to protect its own people.   The fifth is redefining the rules governing the use of force,  both to clarify the scope and limits of what is legal under the UN Charter and, beyond that, to set some guidelines, especially for the Security Council, as to when the use of force is legitimate – the key criteria  being seriousness of threat, right intention, last resort, proportionality and balance of consequences.   The institutional reforms on the table in 2005, many of which are also up for endorsement in the Millennium Review Summit, are equally crucial if the multilateral system is not to lapse into irretrievable disrepair and irrelevance. Five reform areas are particularly crucial.   - Reconstruction of the Security Council.  If the Council does not come to better represent, in terms of its permanent or usual membership, the world of the 21st century rather than that of 1945, it will not fall apart immediately. But the powers of the present Permanent Five will be steadily diminishing assets. A Security Council without any guaranteed presence  of the major African powers, or India, or Japan or Brazil simply cannot remain credible in perpetuity.   - Creation of a Peacebuilding Commission.  Creation of a new institutional structure to deal effectively with the endemic problem of failed, failing and fragile states, particularly in the context of post-conflict reconstruction, is the most immediate need in the international system at the moment, and one that is widely recognised.   - ECOSOC and the General Assembly.  Both these crucial norm and direction-setting global debating chambers have become conspicuously  dysfunctional, and must be restored to pre-eminence: much of which is achievable simply through better agenda and process management.   - Secretariat Reform.   The central issues here are empowerment and accountability – the Secretary-General, presently probably the most impossibly micro-managed chief executive in the world, needs much more freedom of action to choose and deploy resources where and when they are needed, subject to full accountability. Those  who are committed to an effective multilateral system do it no service by leaving it inefficient and ineffective  - but change cannot happen without member states allowing and encouraging it.   - A new Human Rights Council.  Probably, the most  counterproductively dysfunctional of all the present institutions of global governance, a new body of higher stature, preferably smaller numbers, more credibly elected, and with less highly politicised procedures is critically needed to match with achievement some of the global lipservice now paid to human rights.   As we approach the critical decision-making period of this critical year, the need above all is to change our mindset as leaders, as policy makers and as those who influence them, to recognise that we stand together or we fall apart, and that it really is in everyone’s interest to move forward simultaneously on all elements – peace, development and human rights - of the state and human security reform agenda now before the international community.    That kind of change is what great leaders-  have shown themselves in the past capable of delivering  at great moments in history. If that leadership is not forthcoming – starting with this year’s G8 summit – we run a grave risk, all of us, north and south, of living in a vastly more dangerous world in the decades to come.
	The crisis of democracy in America by Gara LaMarche The Open Society Institute USA   30 - 6 - 2005   (Gara LaMarche is vice-president of the Open Society Institute)   The pillars of American democracy – the open society, the culture of law, a free media, independent science and academia – are under assault from the radical right, says Gara LaMarche of the Open Society Institute. A serious, coordinated response is needed, founded on robust and honest debate.   In the preface to the revised (1952) edition of The Open Society and its Enemies – from which the foundation employing me, the Open Society Institute (OSI) draws its name – Karl Popper wrote that his mood of depression over open society had passed, “largely as a result of a visit to the United States”. Popper’s spirits would not be lifted by a visit today.   In the last few years, radical-right political leaders have moved from the fringe essentially to control much of the national and many state governments. They, the fundamentalist clerics and their followers who comprise the “base” to which they feel most accountable, and the network of think-tanks and attack media which support them, make clear their intent to roll back the Great Society and the cultural, social and political gains of the 1960s. Now, with fights over social security and the courts, they are targeting the New Deal.   Some of these figures and institutions wish explicitly to return United States government, and its relationship to its citizens, to what it was before the Progressive Era. But their combined efforts to remake American society suggest a more recent and disturbing parallel: the McCarthy era.   It is tempting to take some satisfaction from the radical right’s recent missteps, and wait for the benefits of the backlash. But meanwhile it is doing steady damage to key elements of open society, the very elements that can monitor and check the abuses of a power-hungry political majority. We ignore it at our peril.   Why have I come to take so dire a view of our situation, and why do I think there is a serious and coordinated threat to open society – at times, it seems, even to enlightenment values – that calls for a serious and coordinated response? Before answering these questions, I want to retrace the history of the Open Society Institute’s activities and the thinking which lies behind them.   In the first ten years or so of George Soros’s philanthropy, he established foundations in countries that were in transition from closed to open societies, helping to create and take advantage of the “revolutionary moment.” Most of these, in eastern and central Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union, were shaking off decades of communism.   What they had in common was the absence of any meaningful checks on the power of the state. Elections and courts were rigged; political opposition was suppressed; any independent activity in media, the academy, the law and the arts that would serve to challenge official truth was crushed. Religion, in so far as it was tolerated, was in effect an arm of the state. In light of this legacy, the main task of the Soros foundations was to support the creation or re-emergence of independent institutions.   Click on the link below to access the complete article. Visit the related web page
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