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Editorial
News & Letters, July 2001
Europeans challenge Bush's arrogance
The day before George W. Bush started off on his whirlwind Grand
Tour of Europe to Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Poland and
Slovenia-the five countries carefully chosen as an audience for
his blatant right-wing agenda-he held an ostentatious Rose
Garden press briefing to make it clear that he had no intention
of reversing his opposition to the global warming accord
supported by the European leaders he was about to meet with.
The day after his return he made clear that he intended to
proceed with his plans for missile defense "with or without
Russia," as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
put it bluntly. Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed this the
same day: "We will get out of the constraints of the (1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty when those constraints do not
allow us to move forward with our technology."
There was no mistaking the Reaganesque arrogance of what Bush
was planning for the world. What his trip, however, also made
abundantly clear was the depth of the European opposition to
those plans.
In Spain, chosen as a "friendly" starting point, the
private meetings with Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar were
described as "diplomatic disagreements," but the
demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy were vigorous against Bush as
the "champion of the death penalty." The meetings,
friendly or not, were heavily guarded as protesters hounded Bush
wherever he went.
In Belgium, where Bush met with l8 fellow leaders of NATO, his
insistence that the l972 ABM Treaty with Russia was
"outdated" and that the U.S. intended to develop a
"missile defense shield" drew sharply undiplomatic
critiques from both German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and
French President Jacques Chirac, who called it a "fantastic
incentive to proliferate" weapons of destruction throughout
the world. As in Spain, the demonstrations and protests
continued outside of the heavily guarded meetings.
WIDE SPECTRUM OF OPPOSITION
But it was Sweden, where Bush appeared at a summit meeting of
the European Union, that showed the great difference between the
resistance to Bush's plans for the world expressed by all the
other leaders and the protests in the streets, which had grown
massive in Sweden. Tens of thousands filled the streets and
parks of Gothenburg, challenging Bush on global warming, his
proposed missile defense system and his support for the death
penalty. The demonstrators included all the forces we have
previously seen in Seattle and Quebec-from feminists and
environmentalists to the whole spectrum of anti-globalization
activists. The total contempt they had for Bush was most
dramatically displayed when dozens of protesters participated in
a coordinated mooning.
That it was in Sweden, of all places, that police for the first
time opened fire, felling three demonstrators, marks the
increasingly ferocious response of the authorities to the
growing movement. What the thousands of young people in the
streets were making clear-as one protester summed it up,
explaining the long list of complaints on her poster-was that
"the capitalist system" was "a way of
living" they would no longer accept. That they were
protesting not only Bush but the EU leaders as well was made
evident as the demonstrations continued long after Bush had left
Gothenburg. Indeed, they did not allow the leaders to ignore
that, while Bush made it arrogantly clear he had no intentions
of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, not a single
European nation has yet ratified it, either.
The week finally ended with "summit talks" between
Bush and Vladimir Putin in Slovenia, where those two
"hardliners" told the world they had come to look each
other in the eye, and Bush announced that in his two hour
private talk with Putin, he had been "able to get a sense
of his soul." Putin did not say what he might or might not
have been able to sense of Bush's soul. But the day after Bush
returned to the U.S. and made his missile defense pronouncement,
Putin responded that Russia could be counted on to ensure thatit
would be able to overwhelm any such a shield by upgrading its
strategic nuclear arsenal with multiple warheads.
More important, Putin had made it a point to fly to his meeting
with Bush in Slovenia from China, where he and Chinese President
Jiang Zemin had met to discuss their common opposition to any
U.S. missile shield. They had, in fact, signed the founding
charter for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and planned to
hold regular summits between them, the next one to be held next
summer in Moscow.
MORE PROTESTS TO COME
Meanwhile, more and more demonstrations against the
"international elite" were being promised for this
summer. But in the wake of Sweden, the meeting of the World Bank
in Barcelona was quickly cancelled, while Silvio Berlusconi's
Italian government made it known that it plans to shut down
Genoa completely for four days in an unprecedented security
crackdown on any anti-globalization protesters that might be
headed for the Group of Eight summit in that city.
There is no question that the increasing opposition from
below-which is the only real challenge being made to the plans
our rulers have to destroy us all, one way or the other-will
continue to grow. The imperative challenge, however, to the new
movement that has arisen since Seattle, is how it can
self-develop to become a movement that not only knows what it
opposes but finds a way to create, out of its uprooting, a new,
truly human world.
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