mercoledì 25 ottobre 2017

Anniversaries of Note in 2017

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Signing of the Maastricht Treaty, February 7, 1992. The European Union finds itself in the midst of an identity crisis these days. Economic growth is limping along, the British want out, and Euroskepticism is gaining ground. Perhaps the 25th anniversary of the Maastricht Treatywill help the EU regain its mojo. What the twelve members of the “European Economic Community” (EEC) committed themselves to a quarter century ago was remarkable. They weren’t content with having a common economic market. They wanted deeper economic, legal, and political integration. In advancing this “European Project,” Maastricht called for enhancing greater economic cooperation, developing a unified European foreign policy, and generating common judicial policies. The experiment with deeper integration worked—for a time. The EU grew to twenty-eight member countries, created the euro, and had serious people talking about how Europe would run the twenty-first century. Then came the Great Recession. Seven years of tough economic times have exposed deep divisions across the continent about the European Project. The EU’s fans say that its past stumbles have always led to more and deeper integration. Perhaps. But sometimes past performance is a poor indicator of future behavior.

Centennial of the Russian Revolutions, March 8-November 7, 1917. The Russian Revolution was actually two revolutions, one that gave hope to the dream that Russia might embrace liberal democracy and another that crushed it. The first, or February Revolution, began on March 8, 1917 when workers struck to protest food shortages in St. Petersburg. (Russia at the time used the Julian rather than Gregorian calendar, which is why the revolution’s name doesn’t match the date we now give it.) The protests spread rapidly. Calls for “Bread!” quickly gave way to chants of “Down with the Autocracy!” On March 10, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne after the troops he sent to suppress the protests defected. The Russian Duma formed a provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky. But Kerensky’s government struggled. The applause that greeted its decision to abolish the Tsar’s hated secret police and press censorship did not offset the anger generated by its decision to continue fighting in World War I. The decision to allow Vladimir Lenin to return from exile in July gave opponents a leader. On November 7, Lenin and his fellow “Bolsheviks” launched the October Revolution, overthrowing Kerensky’s government in a nearly bloodless coup d’état. Lenin made peace with Germany and began asserting control over the sprawling Russian empire. Anti-Bolshevik and pro-Tsarist forces fought back, but the “Red Army” defeated the “White Army” in a bloody four-year civil war. In 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was officially established. Historians were left to wonder what might have been.

Centennial of the U.S. Entry into World War I, April 6, 1917. For more than a century Americans obeyed George Washington’s injunction in his Farewell Address to keep out of the political affairs of Europe. That obedience ended on April 6, 1917 when Congress voted for war against Germany. The break with what had been the defining feature of American foreign policy did not come easily. When the “Great War” began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson immediately declared U.S. neutrality. But neutrality was hard to maintain. U.S. trade before the war favored Great Britain and the Allied Powers. With Britain’s dominance of the high seas, that tilt only increased with time. Germany responded by launching unrestricted submarine warfare, which led most famously to the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, and efforts to sabotage ports and railroads in the United States. Germany suspended unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916, but announced its resumption on January 31, 1917. Three days later, Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany. Weeks later he learned of the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret German offer to give Mexico land lost in the Mexican-American War if Mexico joined in a war against the United States. Wilson initially resisted growing public sentiment for war with Germany, worrying what it would do to the country. But he eventually relented. At 8:30 p.m. on April 2, he addressed a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war, saying that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Six-Day War, June 5-10, 1967. Wars don’t need to last long to have lasting consequences. Take for example the Six-Day War. In mid-May 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser mobilized Egyptian troops along the Israeli border after Soviet officials told him, incorrectly, that Israel was poised to attack Syria. Over the next week, Nasser evicted a UN peacekeeping force that had been in Gaza and the Sinai since the 1956 Suez War to provide a buffer between Egyptian and Israeli forces. He then took the step that Israel had said it would consider an act of war: he closed the Straits of Tiran, thereby cutting off Israel’s only access to the Red Sea. The Israelis were good to their word. At 7:45 a.m. on June 5, they launched Operation Focus, a series of devastating airstrikes against Egyptian airfields. Syrian and Jordanian forces immediately joined the fighting. Although numerically outnumbered, the Israelis quickly routed all three Arab militaries. On June 11, a UN-brokered ceasefire took effect. In just six days, Israel doubled the territory under its control, gaining the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and most important, East Jerusalem. Fifty years later, the results of the Six-Day War still reverberate in the Middle East.
 November 22, 1967 marks the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which demanded that Israel withdraw from territories it occupied during the Six-Day War.

Quincentennial of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, October 31, 1517. Fifth century theologian St. Augustine of Hippo profoundly shaped Catholic doctrine. More than a thousand years later an Augustinian monk challenged that doctrine and triggered the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther had been an obscure theologian teaching at various universities in central Germany. Then on October 31, 1517 the thirty-four year old defiantly nailed his “95 Theses” to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church denouncing the Catholic practice of selling “indulgences” to wipe away sins. That act—and his twin contentions that the Bible is the primary source of all religious doctrine and that only faith, not deeds, can lead to salvation—made him one of Western history’s most consequential figures. Germans angered by what they saw as the Catholic Church’s excesses rallied to Luther’s side, prompting Pope Leo X to issue a “papal bull” condemning his writings. When Luther refused to recant his beliefs before a gathering of secular authorities at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Pope Leo excommunicated him and forbade anyone from possessing or reading his writings. That edict was to no avail. Luther’s defiance inspired dozens of reformation movements throughout Europe. The continent would endure more than a century of religious conflicts until the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.
Centennial of the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917. The letter that British Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour wrote to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild on November 2, 1917 was no casual thing. It borrowed language that Rothschild himself had supplied months earlier and that Balfour and colleagues had reworked. Why so much effort for a letter that ran just about 125 words? Balfour and British Prime Minister David Lloyd Georgehoped in good part to notch a much-needed public relations victory. Britain was locked alongside France in a grinding stalemate against Germany. The effort to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war had failed at Gallipoli, and Russia looked ready to bow out of the war. By writing to Rothschild, a leading member of the Jewish community in Britain, with the promise to support the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” they hoped to rally Jewish communities, especially those in Russia and the United States, to the Allied cause. The Balfour Declaration never quite had that effect. By the time it became public a week later, the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia and sued for peace. But the declaration helped publicize, legitimate, and advance the cause of Zionism. Following the end of World War I, the League of Nations gave Britain administration over Palestine in part to implement the declaration’s promise, and Jewish migration to Palestine increased dramatically. The British government soon learned that the promises it made about a Jewish homeland conflicted with its wartime promises to Arab leaders.
from:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-historical-anniversaries-note-2017

 and

 60th Anniversary of the Treaties of Rome

 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome.

 Signed on 25 March 1957, the Treaties of Rome established the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM).

 The first Treaty, signed by high representatives from Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany, brought into existence the European Economic Community, also known as the Common Market. While its immediate objectives were to integrate trade and strengthen the economies of the area, one of its underlying political desires was to ‘lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the people of Europe’.

 The EURATOM treaty instead was meant to contribute to the formation and development of Europe's nuclear industries so that all the Member States could benefit from the development of atomic energy and that the security of supply would be ensured. 




An in-depth US view:

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