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Poverty and hunger: a race against the clock
by Barbara Oudiz, journalist, FRANCE
Initiatives in the fight against poverty and hunger are constantly emerging, a reflection of the magnitude of these two scourges. Autumn 2004 saw an intense international mobilisation in pursuit of a balance between the world’s population and its resources.
These are signs of the times, tragic and at the same time bringing new hope. In September 2004, in Cairo ( Egypt), 179 countries gathered for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), under the aegis of the United Nations (UN), with the aim of drawing up a report on their ambitious action plan to reduce extreme poverty in the world. Introduced in 1994 for a period of twenty years, this plan is founded on the principles of human rights and sexual equality. It stresses the emancipation of women as one of the keys to economic development — an emancipation which includes the fight against all forms of violence (genital mutilation, rape, incest, etc.), as well as the exercise of fundamental and legal rights for women, especially in relation to birth control, education and health.
Glaring inequalities
Ten years later, i.e. half-way through the programme, the 2004 report of the ICPD reveals a more than uneven picture of the state of the world. While the population of Europe and Japan is falling, "in the poorest countries where fertility and mortality remain high and where access to family planning is limited", this fall is only just beginning. The world population today stands at 6.4 billion. If it continues to grow at its present rate the UN predicts that it will reach 8.9 billion in 2050. Even worse, the 49 least developed countries will see a 228% increase in their population, to reach 1.7 billion in 2050!
At the UN General Assembly in New York, also held last September, the first World Leaders Summit on "Action Against Hunger and Poverty", was organised on the initiative of the French, Brazilian, Spanish and Chilean heads of state. In the face of the glaring inequalities between the peoples of the world, the approach was for the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, and his co-instigators to open the way for new ideas to promote development. The summit culminated in a declaration, supported by 110 countries, on the need "to pay more attention to innovative funding mechanisms".
Despite the absence of any specific proposal, the idea of a world tax, mentioned by several countries, notably France, in various forms, seems to be gaining ground in the mind of the international community.
Food-related tensions
Another sign that speaks volumes is the 15th International Geography Festival, which attracted 40,000 visitors to France at the end of September 2004 and was devoted to feeding the world. Laurent Carroué, a professor and the festival’s scientific director, pointed out to the public in an interview with the newspaper Libération that: "Today, 850 million people are hungry […] and two billion suffer from mineral or protein deficiencies. Between now and 2030, there will be food-related tensions. The most vulnerable countries are in the Near and Middle East, the Maghreb, the Nile valley, West Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa […]."
25 years of Action against hunger
The year 2004 marked the 25th anniversary of the French non-governmental organisation Action contre la faim (action against hunger), founded by about twenty French intellectuals, writers and doctors. Now presided over by Jean-Christophe Rufin, doctor, teacher and writer, this NGO operates in around forty countries hit by serious food crises.
On the occasion of its twenty-fifth birthday, Action contre la faim, in partnership with the photo agency Vu, published Regards sur le monde, les visages de la faim [Eyes on the World, the Faces of Hunger] (pub. Acropole), a collection of photographic reports from five different countries by five women photographers members of Vu. The NGO also paid particular tribute, in 2004, to the populations of Darfur (region of Sudan, in Africa) affected by a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and launched an appeal for international solidarity to try to find a solution to the conflict which is afflicting the region.
(Label France magazine, N° 57– 1 st quarter 2005, Embassy of France)
1945–2005
60 years after the end of the war
By Prof. Gregor Schöllgen, H istorian and lecturer in Modern History at the University of Erlangen, Germany
May 8 is the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. After the horrendous crimes of the Nazi period, after the catastrophe of the war, the Federal Republic was given a chance to make a new, democratic beginning – and took it
In the beginning was the end. After the German generals signed the documents on Germany’s unconditional capitulation on May 7 and during the night of May 8/9, and after the victorious Allies took over supreme governmental power four weeks later on June 5, 1945, Germany was nothing more than a geographic term: the German nation state established by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 was history.
This unprecedented measure was not only the penalty for a campaign of military conquest and annihilation such as the civilized world had never seen before, it also expressed the view of the former victims and opponents that the eruption of violence had not been the exception, but the rule in German history. From the perspective of 1945, it seemed an irrefutable conclusion that German policy and conduct of the war since 1939 represented the culmination of a development which, they felt, had begun with the foundation of the Reich – if not even earlier with the rise of Prussia at the time of Frederick the Great.
On the basis of this view of things – in other words, understanding Hitler as the final representative of a tradition that had begun at the latest in 1871, a tradition that was even the root cause of the campaign of extermination against Europe’s Jews – there was no choice but to put an end not only to Hitler and his regime, but also to this tradition, and to smash its most important institution, the German nation state. This, then, was the situation in spring 1945, and nobody at the time would have thought it possible that the first (partial) state on German soil, the Federal Republic of Germany, could emerge just four years later and that by May 1955, exactly ten years after Germany’s unconditional surrender, this state would not only be largely sovereign in its foreign policy, but also a member of the Western European Union (WEU) and NATO security alliances.
The fact that this happened was not, or at least not primarily, because of Germany or the Germans, it was caused by the global political situation in general, and the actual (or perceived) onslaught of Communism in particular. Seen from this perspective, the Germans can thank the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants in Europe and Asia. For if it had not been for the “Cold War” between the power blocs of the West and the East starting shortly after the end of the Second World War, the Western powers would hardly have brought themselves to install a state structure on the territory of the three western occupation zones in Germany as early as May 1949. As it was, the Germans received from outside what they were unable to achieve on their own. After liberation from the Hitler dictatorship, the Allies brought them democracy. And it was no coincidence, of course, that Germany’s new Basic Law immediately drew the consequences from the errors and crimes of that era in its first few articles. Thus, Article 1 states: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.”
Initially, the new state was still weak on its feet, and who knows how things would have developed if Stalin – and with him Mao Tse-tung, the leader of the newly established People’s Republic of China – had not become active again? In any case, the West believed that the two leading communists were the real string-pullers behind North Korea’s attack on the southern half of the country in June 1950, which started a war that was to last three years.
The Cold War
The importance of the Korean War for the stabilization of the young Federal Republic cannot be overrated. For it added the military component to the country’s integration into the West and in this way consolidated not least the overall political environment – in which, for the first time in German history, democracy had a future. It was Konrad Adenauer, the young republic’s first chancellor and, for a while, foreign minister, who recognized this opportunity and showed the Germans which way to go.
For the latter, at least those living in the Federal Republic, the Cold War was therefore a stroke of good fortune. The fact that they themselves did not share this view for a long time was a result of the division of their country. The Germans were urged to overcome this division by their Basic Law. In actual fact, however, the more the Federal Republic became integrated into the West, the worse the prospects for unification became. And after a wall cemented the division of Berlin and Germany into the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic in August 1961, the aspiration looked a hopeless one for the foreseeable future.
Thereafter it was also evident that the German Question became a function, an expression of the East-West conflict. Its rules, however, were written by the all-eclipsing nuclear issue. Because the top priority under all circumstances was to prevent a nuclear war, all potential flashpoints – including the German Question – that could have become the fatal trigger had to be pacified. The Germans had no choice but to come to terms with this situation, to place all their hopes on détente and accept the division of Germany. Willy Brandt, the fourth federal chancellor, took on the difficult task of reconciling his compatriots with this reality. Between 1970 and 1973, treaties eschewing any revision of the territorial status quo were agreed with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and not least the GDR. This was just as important for the future of Germany as the firm embedding of the Federal Republic into the Western communities twenty years earlier.
Both facts documented the fundamental differences between the Federal Republic and the German Reich. Whereas the latter – usually acting alone and repeatedly using the means of war – had tried to adjust in its favour the semi-hegemonial position which had been created with the establishment of the Reich and which the Germans considered dangerous, the Federal Republic pursued a fundamentally different strategy, which involved integrating the country into the Western community of nations and recognizing the division of the country and the continent. Its aim was to keep open the possibility of overcoming this reality – within a European framework and, of course, using exclusively peaceful means.
A stopgap arrangement
The more time passed, however, the more evident it became that the wish was father to the thought in this respect. A unification of Germany required the end of the GDR, and in the 1980s hardly anyone considered that possible, because nobody foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, strictly speaking, until the time had come, nobody had wanted such a radical revision of the map of Europe – not the Federal Republic’s allies, and certainly not their geopolitical opponents. After all, what was at stake for the former victors over Hitler was nothing less than abandoning their say in the German Question. After 1944/45, the Soviets, the Americans, the British and later the French had only managed to achieve a compromise in this matter, and because everyone had been able to live with it from the late 1940s, what was basically a stopgap arrangement remained in place for nearly a half century. The German nation state had been dissolved, the two successor states to the west of the Oder and Neisse rivers existed with the reservation that the final solution could only be decided by a peace treaty – in other words, by the four Allies together.
For the victors, the arrangement had got off to such a good start that hardly anyone remained aware of its originally provisional nature. Furthermore, nobody questioned the tried-and-tested arrangement – until two unforeseeable events brought the German Question back onto the agenda: the peaceful revolution of the people in the GDR, leading to the fall of the Wall between East and West Germany in November 1989 and the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. The foreseeable loss of one member of the Anti-Hitler Coalition forced the victorious powers of the Second World War to find a final settlement in the only matter that formally still connected them. In the Two-Plus-Four Treaty, the four former occupying powers – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France – and the two German states – the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR – signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany: the basis for the country’s reunification. The treaty not only took over the function of the hitherto lacking peace treaty, it also sealed the overdue dissolution of the anachronistic Anti-Hitler Coalition and gave the Germans their liberty.
Thus, in less than a year – completely against the general trend of disintegrating nation states in Europe – the reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, created a sovereign nation state on German soil within the borders of the two former partial states, one which, for this reason alone, was of some weight. Overnight the Germans found themselves in a situation that had only existed once before – during the period of the German Reich, which was created in 1871 by Bismarck and which was led to destruction by Hitler in 1945.
The fact that the second German nation state had little in common with this first one (apart from its history) was also clear to the former victims and opponents. Otherwise, even the disintegration of the Anti-Hitler Coalition would never have led to the reunification of Germany. As it was, because the Germans had proved since 1945 that they were willing and able to accept reality as it was (which they had refused to accept before 1945), and because all the federal governments since the days of Konrad Adenauer had been committed to solid integration into Western, and above all European communities – including the government under Helmut Kohl that worked hard for a rapid unification of East and West Germany after the fall of the Wall – the path was clear.
Lessons of the past
So, once again it was history that shaped the face of the country. For decades, the politicians in Bonn had been judged according to whether they had learned their lesson and drawn the right conclusions from the stupidities, mistakes and crimes of their predecessors. And because they passed the test, it was now this chapter of German history that counted. The main criterion for judging German policy after reunification was not the destruction and annihilation wrought by the Third Reich, but the constructive and integrating achievements of the Federal Republic.
Of course, the new situation took some getting used to, especially for the Germans themselves. The others had fewer problems with it, quite the opposite: there seemed to be a general consensus among the great majority of observers all over the world that the Germans had passed their test almost a half century after the end of the Second World War. Now that the “decontaminated” Germans had been accepted as fully fledged members of the international community, their representatives reminded the country of its obligations and demanded that they behave in a way that was in line not only with Germany’s new status, but also with its weight and its possibilities. There were compelling reasons for this. The collapse of the rigid structure of the old world order had been accompanied by a return of war and civil war to the world – even to the northern hemisphere, even to Europe. The Germans were needed.
The drama that forced people to act was the war, triggered by Serbia, between and within the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. It soon became clear that any German commitment had to take different forms and dimensions than in Iraq, Cambodia and Somalia where the Bundeswehr had already been involved in various United Nations missions since October 1991. When the Bundestag agreed to deploy Bundeswehr soldiers in Bosnia in mid-December 1996, and German combat aircraft attacked strategic targets in Serbia as part of a NATO operation in connection with the Kosovo conflict in March 1999, the Germans were not least accepting the responsibility that resulted from their new situation.
Equal partners
It was Gerhard Schröder, the first federal chancellor with no personal experience of the Second World War, who went one step further and made use of the freedom that this new situation gave German policy. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was no question that Germany stood shoulder-to-shoulder with America. The situation was different, however, when the American president, George W. Bush, also sought to enlist German support for his military campaign against the dictator of Baghdad. In the spring of 2003, for the first time in its history, the Federal Republic refused to follow the United States and decided not to participate in the Iraq war – in close concurrence with the country’s French neighbour. In principle, Berlin was doing nothing more than exercising the right of a politically sovereign state of equal standing among partners. Although this might not have pleased some, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic, nobody, even there, came to the conclusion that Berlin was reviving fatal traditions that had been banished in 1945.
Only against this background, for example, was Germany able to play such an important role in the crisis region of the Near and Middle East. Germany’s Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer had travelled to Israel and Palestine for a series of mediation attempts in the name of the European Union after the turn of the century; and the proposal for a supervised road map and schedule for the solution of the conflict, which was submitted to the conflicting parties in late March 2003 by the Europeans, the United States, Russia and the United Nations, was also originally based on German ideas. And it was the Iranian leadership who insisted on German participation in European mediation on the dangerous controversy between Tehran and the international community and the International Atomic Energy Authority regarding its nuclear programme. Nobody considered it unusual to see the German foreign minister side-by-side with his French and British colleagues trying to persuade the Iranian leadership since autumn 2003 to agree to comprehensive controls of their nuclear programme.
So, at the dawn of the 21st century, Germany is quite naturally taking on the role that has fallen to it as result of the 1990 reunification and the radical geopolitical changes that have taken place since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. To do justice to this role requires a degree of self-confidence that is in line with the weight of the country, without falling back into old behavioural patterns. Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, there is no doubt: the Germans have learned their lesson. They took the opportunity that was offered to them after Hitler.
The author is one of Germany’s leading historians; he lectures in Modern History at the University of Erlangen. Text courtesy: Deutschland, Embassy of Germany in Kathmandu, Nepal.
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