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by Christian Müller*
(14 February 2025) Can a woman be “a little bit pregnant”? No, either she is pregnant, or she is not! It is the same with neutrality: either a state is neutral, or it is not neutral. But the Swiss government is pursuing a US- and NATO-friendly course, while claiming that, as a “neutral country”, it is also a good place for peace talks.
by Ralph Studer,* Switzerland
(7 February 2025) “School education and pedagogical thinking are in crisis,” says Jochen Krautz, Professor of Art Education at the University of Wuppertal. What Krautz is talking about here is now a widespread consensus. There is a need for a return to fundamental principles. And good education would not be that difficult after all ...
by M. K. Bhadrakumar,* India
(7 février 2025) Russia and Iran, as two immediate neighbours and great powers with a glorious history, had a difficult, chequered relationship through centuries. It goes to the credit of Iranian pragmatism that it learned to live with the consequences of Tsarist Russia’s expansionism rather than getting locked in eternal enmity. In some ways, it also shared the plight of China at the hands of predatory powers. Such bitter experiences inevitably get embedded in a nation’s psyche.
by Karin Leukefeld,* Germany/Syria
(7 février 2025) The US, the EU, Israel, Turkey and their Arab partners in the Gulf – Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have achieved what they set out to do 20 years ago. The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad no longer exists; the new rulers are those who have been armed and trained by the “Friends of Syria” since 2011 with tens of billions of US dollars. “Sanctions are a slow-acting poison, like arsenic” explained Joseph Borrell, then EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to the EU Parliament in February 2023. “It takes time for them to take effect, but they are irreversible.” Unilateral economic sanctions imposed on Syria by the European Union and the United States have destroyed the country’s economy. Millions of US dollars paid to government and military defectors have paid off.
by Michael Straumann,* Switzerland
(2 February 2025) In 2021, the Swiss rejected the e-ID Act. The Federal Council and parliament are now trying to push the electronic identity through with a new Act. – It is not the citizens who are delegitimising the state, it is the state itself.
by Professor Glenn Diesen,* Norway
(2 February 2025) The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.