Salvatore Minolfi e Alberto Clarizia, NATO’s
new Strategic Concept
The translation of the official text presented in Washington on 23–23
April 1999 to mark the Alliance’s fiftieth anniversary, while the same
Alliance was bombing Yugoslavia without a break, is in itself an important
read. The introductory note by S. Minolfi sets out to explain the intrinsic
significance of the "new Strategic Concept" in the light of NATO’s
"innate hegemonic character". The analysis of the document illustrates
the role that the Alliance of "cold war" winners has assumed during
a "process of changing strategic balances that is without precedent in
contemporary history".
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Angelo Baracca,The role of science in the new International order
NATO’s intervention in the Balkan war has forced us to take a new look
at some established paradigms, such as globalisation, permeated as
they are by forcibly imposed and freewheeling neoliberalism, and at labels
such as First, Seeond, Third World; Developed and Developing Countries ete.
The main focus of the author’s "initial reflections", however,
is on the increasingly central role of science and technics in the "new
world order" announced by the USA in the early 90s. Two mechanisms bave
reached their full potential since then: the use of science and technology
as a means of violence, power and war, and their role in dictating what is
a "normal" form of life. The "non neutral" categories
of science need to be reassessed and updated: they are no longer at the service
of the "cold war" against "real socialism", but work for
the fulfilment and "objectivisation" of capitalist supremacy. The
author invites a debateon the nature and functions of these new tasks.
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Andrea Catone, The glossary of warfare: the ldeological discourse
of Justification
This essay, based on Italian sources, deals with the semantic structures of
war propaganda and its most popular expressions. The word "war"
itself makes a belated appearance in the vocabulary of political and military
figures, replaced as it is by such euphemistic and hypocritical substitutes
as the hackneyed adjective "humanitarian". Catone believes this
reveals the guilty feelings implied by the discourse of justification",
as aggression against Yugoslavia could count on "not a shred of international
legality". The most successful forrnulation is, however, "the international
conununity", which had in Nato’s war its final trial–run. Catone
shows how this expression refers not to every country in the world, but to
"the West, its liberal, free–trade values, its economy, its civilisation"
aiming at global domination, manu militari if need be.
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Luigi Ferrajoli,Just war, illegal war
This essay was written eight years ago for a Gulf War debate organised by
"Giano". It is no less pertinent today, however, in relation to
the NATO Balkan war. In the light of the approval of the UN Charter, the author
offers a thesis of the unacceptability of any "just war" doctrine
because: 1) since the Charter, war is forbidden by law and the ethical–political
criteria of the justness or not of war bave been superseded by the legal and
unquestionable fact of its illegality; 2) there is an outright contradiction
between war and human rights which are by their very nature an instrument
of peace; 3) modern warfare has an uncontrollably destructive nature which
is bound to involve civilian populations, and which is in direct contrast
with the principles that stand to protect the innocent. The whole question
is of vital importance for the future of intrnational law: the credibility
of the UN as guarantor of peace depends on it, with an alternative of the
re–legitimisation of war as the means of resolving international dispute.
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Vincenzo Strika, Kosovo–Gulf: the West’s fuel lime
The weak point in Western plans for global economic domination is the system
of energy supplies. It is significant that the two most important trouble–spots
in recent history, Kosovo and the Gulf, either sit on the worlds most valuable
oil and gas–fields, or straddle equally valuable supply routes. One of
the latter, the energy corridor between Central Asia and Western Europe through
the Balkans, is in the author’s view a main factor of Nato’s aggression
against Yougoslavia.
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Andrea Panaccione, War as perceived in Russia: states of mind and
political debate
The war fought by NATO has forced Russia to "take a dose look at itself
in the mirror", but it has also confirmed some of the fears that have
been around for a long time, expressed in particular by F. Primakov and G.
Javlinskij, concerning NATO’s eastward expansion. The dispatch of Russian
parachutists to Pristina was a reaction, born of pride, to an imposed state
of subordination, but it did not represent a new international stance. The
author examines Russia’s long–standing economic and political problems.
and in particular the Communist platform and the "Eurasian tradition"
that has been interwoven with the soviet experience. The desire to keep the
possibility of forming a new USSR alive, keeps the interests of the Communist
leader G. Zjuganov within the historical and geo–political sphere. This
area of Russian political research reflects a collective attitude fed by the
sense of humiliation imposed by the West.
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Michele Nobile, The State, environmental policies, and the future
of ecologists
The author develops his essay, For a critique of environmental policies, and
refutes the objections which were raised by it and published in Giano, 28,
January–April, 1998. He rejects the thesis of globalisation as a form
of liberal ideology investing the whole planet. Capitalist economy has always
been world–wide under different forms, and therefore what is here implied
by "globalisation" is certainly not something absolutely new, replacing
as it were relationships between national economic systems: it is not so much
globalisation, as regionalisation and polarization of power around a few dominant
States. The issue of State power, and of the struggle against it, is hence
anything but obsolete. The contradictory division of the world economy into
territorial States, and the gap in development levels, moreover, are the main
stumbling–block on the way to a solution of global ecological probiems.
As for the parties of the Left in power, and the Greens, the author believes
it essential, on purely environmental grounds, to give up any idea of joining
alliances with them, and abandon any hope of their adopting any acceptable
blueprint for change. On the other hand, there is no hope of a new environmental
balance developing gradually within capitalism and bypassing the issue of
the breakdown of class– and State–power. What is needed is a political
procedure capable of leading, through the direct experience of mass struggles
and the self–confidence acquired by means of limited but significant
success, to an awareness of the need to socialize the management of economics
and politics, and oppose those power structures which are against.
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Giorgio Nebbia, The "First Spring" of Italian ecology
With a special focus on the Italian situation, this article takes a critical
look back at the different phases of that brief season of ecological agitation
that ran from 1965 to 1975. This agitation often worked together with pacifist
and antimilitarist movements, or groups for women’ s rights. ethnìc
minorities, the mentally ill or disabled, etc. This historical re–construction
can help us choose which course to follow if we want to limit the violence
perpetrated against nature and the environment in an era when capitalism has
become the planetary, "global" means of conditioning relations between
mankind and nature. The author points out that the origins of the violation
of "ecological" rights lie in the capitalistic organisation of social
existence and the free market, which can in fact only work "properly"
by constantly exploiting collective goods for private ends. The impending
ecological catastrophes were illustrated through an extremely worrying set
of data which – once the season of unrest had run its course – were
hidden away or misrepresented by the powers that be. Like any other rights,
those of nature and the environment can only be protected by a freedom movement
created by a tninority and extended to a broad number of individuals.
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Dario Paccino, Working towards a new ecological beginning
With reference to the thesis that the young Marx labelled "naturalistic
humanism", under which mankind (a "naturally social" animai)
"will only develop its true nature within a society", the author
pinpoints the need to abandon traditional ecological and abstractly naturalistic
Weltanschauung and make room for the requirements of the freedom of
labour wìthout which ecological realism can never exist. It
should be clear by now that the fatai enemy of ecology –and the worker
– Is the product of human labour under total capital mie. A new ecological
beginning cannot, therefore, be postulated wìthout first extracting
the essence (the enslavement of the producers of social wealth) of a political
system under which traditional ecology has lost all credibility through its
inability to stop the "planetary destruction" that is threatening
humanity.
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Laura Loiacono, Ecology and Politics: some bibliographical suggestions
This bibliography is presented by the author as part of her work in progress.
It is strictly selective, aiming as it does at "providing information
and indications in view of a gradual approach to ecology, starting from a
point of departure which is not strictly specialist, while being a prerequisite
to a definition of the ecological domain". The structure of this work
(listing and describing over 200 titles) and its subdivision fits with the
methodological approach which Lojacono and ecologists identifying with Giano
wish to develop.
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Roberto Gianimanco, On culture and imperialism
The history of colonised peoples meets the categories of "backwardness"
and "the White man’s burden" with the widespread and uniform
nature of resistance to domination. This is the conclusion reached by the
author, mainly on the basis of Edward Said’s writings. and with special
reference to bis Culture and Imperialism. Particuiar praise Is aliotted to
Said’s analysis which "followed the material processes leading to
the turningpoint in the ìmperial imagination and its self–representation
in coincidence with the Gulf War". Giamnianco then deals with a recent
book by the young Italian scholar Isabella Camera d’Afflitto, Letteratura
araba contemporanea, stressing not only the wealth of its philological
contents, but also the fact that its interpretation is "built on the
tensions between the dynamics of dependency and resistance", within the
framework of the relationships between imperial culture, tradition, Islam,
and modemization, and is therefore firmly linked to the Arab peoples’
historical experience.
