Newsletter of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs | Harvard University | Vol. 20 Num. 2 | Spring 2006
Features
- America in the World Today: A European View
- By Karl Kaiser
- Karl Kaiser, right, is pictured here with Kathy Molony, director of the Fellows Program (left), and Weatherhead Center Associate Donna Hicks. Karl is the Ralph I. Straus Visiting Professor at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in a joint appointment with the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. He is a professor emeritus of Bonn University, a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Bonn/Berlin, and a longtime associate of the Weatherhead Center where he worked first from 1963 to 1968. This text reproduces the slightly revised address to the American Philosophical Society on April 27, 2006 at its “Annual General Meeting Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful
Knowledge.” Photo: Martha Stewart.
- Any European, especially a German, who reviews America's role in the world with a sense of history, will do so with a feeling of attachment, respect, or gratitude. In my case it is all three. World War II ended for me as a ten-year old amidst enormous chaos, but I did not truly realize that I had been liberated until later, when the horrors of the Nazi regime became known to me and I understood that the Nazis had been defeated by America and its allies at terrific human and material cost. I experienced American soldiers as humane and helpful, from the first one who checked personally (despite the risk) before he tossed a grenade in our cellar where we civilians waited for the battle (then raging above our heads) to end, to the soldiers who later became our friends and allies, without whom the Soviets would have conquered Berlin (not to mention the rest of Germany and Western Europe). My shock when seeing the pictures of Abu Ghraib was therefore profound, and like many Europeans I asked “What has happened to our America?”…
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- Transitional Subjects? Paramilitary Demobilization in Colombia
- By Kimberly Theidon
- Turbo, Colombia, September 2005—The women arrived one by one, their spirits lifted by the bottles of chilled soda pop awaiting them. In the midst of a busy, sweltering afternoon, they had accepted our invitation to talk about the paramilitary demobilization process that was reconfiguring life in their communities. With each sip, the heat ceded to a bit more openness. As we would learn, many of them had husbands, partners, sons, and daughters in the guerrilla, the army, the paramilitary—in some cases, all at once. Several of the women shook their heads as they listed their family members and the armed groups to which they had belonged in the course of this interminable war. Slowly the conversation wound around to our central questions: “What do you think the government should do? We know this process is so controversial. What do you think of all this?” They murmured among themselves, some looked a bit uncomfortable. Finally one woman spoke on behalf of the group: ”Well, if we rounded up all the men who've ever held a gun and put them in jail—bueno, there'd be no men left around here.”
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