Critics of the EU’s External Action Service (EEAS) agree that its creation will hardly be remembered as a high point in the annals of European foreign policy. Some say that the EU’s quasi-diplomatic corps does not yet work well because its leadership, under Baroness Cathy Ashton, suffers from inexperience and a poverty of ambition. Others say that the fledgling service can only be as strong as the message it is given to deliver and that governments are currently too distracted by the eurozone crisis to focus much on foreign policy.

There is a more interesting way to think about this problem. A psychologist might diagnose the hand-wringing and angst that surrounds the subject of the EEAS as ‘displacement’: the use of comfortably familiar but pointless introspection to distract from current realities that are too scary to face. In the EU’s case, the former is to maintain the pretence that innovations like the EEAS can, through institutional hocus pocus, produce a coherent European foreign policy by themselves. The harsher truth is that diplomats – particularly the European variety – have far less power to shape the world than they once did, whatever their internal organisation.

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History has long painted women as the submissive, the subservient, and this has often been codified in Eve. “Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve” delves into the biblical story of man and woman, and their relationship with each other and God, and the painting of womankind in its role as the second class, as Juliana Geran Pilon hopes to reconcile this notion through an analysis of legend, myth, and scripture. “Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve” is a fascinating and scholarly discussion of woman in love and life in ancient literature, an excellent choice through and through.

This review also appears in the December 2011 issue of the online book review magazineInternet Bookwatch and the Cengage Learning, Gale interactive CD-ROM series “Book Review Index” which is published four times yearly for academic, corporate, and public library systems.

The Rohingya: Myanmar’s outcasts
Millions of residents of western Myanmar have been stripped of citizenship and basic human rights. Will Suu Kyi help?

Washington, DC - The image of a smiling Daw Aung San Suu Kyi receiving flowers from her supporters is a powerful message of freedom and optimism in Myanmar, the symbol of democracy in a country which has known nothing but authoritarian oppression for decades.

Yet few ask one of the most pressing questions facing Daw Suu Kyi. How will she deal with the Rohingya?

“The Rohingya,” you will ask. “Who are they?”

The Rohingya, whom the BBC calls “one of the world’s most persecuted minority groups”, are the little-publicised and largely forgotten Muslim people of the coastal Rakhine state of western Myanmar. Their historic lineage in Rakhine dates back centuries, as fishermen and farmers. Over the past three decades, the Rohingya have been systematically driven out of their homeland by Myanmar’s military junta and subjected to widespread violence and the total negation of their rights and citizenship within Myanmar. They are a stateless Muslim minority.

The continued tragedy of the unrecognised Rohingya, both in Myanmar and as refugees abroad, casts a dark shadow over the bright hopes and prospects for democracy in a country plagued by violence and civil war. Suu Kyi is ideally placed to extend democratic reforms to all ethnic peoples, including the Rohingya, in a free Myanmar.

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Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and professor of International Relations at American University in Washington, D.C. From 1999 to 2000, Dr. Ahmed was the Pakistani High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the United Kingdom. He has also held many other senior positions in Pakistan. His many award-winning books include Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise, Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World, Jinnah Quartet, Journey into Islam, and, most recently, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam.

Mr. Fakhravar has been invited to address the 12th Annual Herzliya Conference, which will be held on January 30-February 2, 2012, at the Campus of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, in Israel. The Herzliya Conference is Israel’s foremost global policy annual gathering, drawing together the most senior Israeli and international participants from government, business and academia to address pressing national, regional and global strategic issues. He will discuss the topic “Iran: Will Sanctions Work?”

He will also address the entire Israeli Knesset as a keynote speaker at a special session devoted to a conversation with him on January 31.

Below is CCS Director Juliana Geran Pilon’s review of Irving Louis Horowitz’s book 

Reading Behemoth is the intellectual equivalent of watching a consummate athlete break the world record. Elegantly written, dispensing with the obligatory academic shibboleths, “Behemoth” is a breathtaking tour de force.

Anyone willing to accompany the author on his journey, revisiting the key themes underpinning the major theories of political and social change, will be amply rewarded with insights into the deepest dilemmas of modern life that elude the self-styled professional punditry that nowadays passes for intelligentsia. The book’s subtitle, “Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology,” refers to a critical yet generous (“there are no villains in this book”) overview of the most important efforts by eminent thinkers starting with Montesquieu, followed by Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx, among others, alongside the canonical sociologists including Durkheim and Weber, to explain the relationship between state and society. That relationship – the question of how political system and the social order interact – is what this superb book is about.

The word “Behemoth” is roughly synonymous with “Leviathan” – Hobbes’s all-powerful state – but Irving Louis Horowitz uses it primarily as a complement to “anarch,” which refers to “society,” or perhaps the “un-state,” which doesn’t merely precede the political (as it did for Hobbes) but complements it, opposes it, or, paradoxically, both. How to understand the tension between these two poles of human organization – the state and society? Simple dichotomies such as objective-subjective, private-public, conservative-liberal, will not do. The synthesis to which this narrative leads is the eventual, current merging of state and society, which he calls “the welfare state” (as distinguished from “the welfare society”). The modern “behemoth,” a bewildering product of contradictory forces and unintended consequences, though ostensibly, at least initially, benevolent, threatens in the end to smother the individual ( or rather, more comprehensively, if not less vaguely, the “human forces” which encompass the complex factors that “resist the blandishments of the welfare state”).

But is the modern behemoth not “democratic” (with all the honorific connotations)? Horowitz observes that “the ease with which the welfare state can be detached from any semblance of democratic moorings is itself a source of deep concern for liberals as well as conservatives. There is an uneasy feeling that the uncontrollable urgings of the welfare state combine the worst features of the State, its repressive potentials, with the worst features of the Society, its unbridled utilitarianism.” Sometimes euphemistically described as either the “liberal” state or “open” society, the new Behemoth is “indifferent to ideological labeling, whilst becoming remarkably attuned to the demands of the political elite and the social mass at the same time.” Marx would not be alone in finding such a proposition incomprehensible; so would most social “scientists” even (or rather, especially) today.

What then are we left with? On one side is “the oft-discarded and discredited notion of civilization” – sometimes synonymous with “culture” -that transcends any one nation-state, and on the other, various modern utopias such as the idealized “community,” whose presumed common interest the State is supposed to fulfill. Neither can save us from what, like it or not, is Behemoth as a force unto itself and, more ominously, “an end unto itself.” Progress has always been an illusion; technological advance can plunge humanity into the abyss as easily as its absence, if indeed not more efficiently. Though refusing to indulge in easy solutions, the book ends on a note of hope, if certainly not euphoria. At least we cannot say we have not been warned.

Please click here to purchase Behemoth on Amazon.

ABSTRACT
Enemies realize the potency of influence and will increasingly bend information to sway both friendly and hostile publics. To prevail in future conflicts, the Nation must not only be more adroit at telling its own story but also predictive about adversary inclinations and methods of using misinformation. We have progressed since 9/11, but the need remains to more fully exploit the tools of influence, especially through focused intelligence support. General Stanley McChrystal called strategic communication vital to securing the operational center of gravity in Afghanistan, which he identified as popular support. There as elsewhere, success comes through changing behavior through influence; thus, Americans must understand the environments they operate in as well as the thinking of enemies and host populations.

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