Apartheid

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the political and social privileges of unaccountability and impunity for apartheid crimes. Still,
that does not mean that liberation cannot be accomplished. We are heading into a new era, in
which nation-states, i.e. limited, two-dimensional surfaces, over which national governments,
legislative assemblies and judiciaries exercise sovereign power, seem to be playing an everdiminishing
role. Both international integration on regional as well as global bases and the
globalization of democracy and other human rights – as opposed to the already accomplished
economic or corporate globalization – seem to be additional ways out of the crisis, for
Israel/Palestine as well as for the whole region.
One example of the peace-making potential of regional international integration is the
way in which the establishment of European integration led to a breakthrough in the peace
process in Northern Ireland. Prior to that, the fate of the British-held territory, which has also
manifested several symptoms of apartheid (see Chapter I.4, above), was expected to be
determined within the triangle London-Dublin-Belfast. Now there are also the newly relevant
power centers of Brussels, Vienna and Strasbourg, to which both the Irish and the British are
subject as member states of the European Union, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Court of Human Rights, and the Council of
Europe.
With the USA superseding Britain as the main military, political and economic power
on the global stage in 1914, the same kind of extended constellation of power had led to the
establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1921, not least due to a strong immigrant Irish
lobby in America. Similarly, a solution to the conflict between the Basque people and the
Spanish state could perhaps only have been possible now that Spain is member of those same
four intergovernmental organizations. (The role of the UN as a guardian and promoter of
human rights and cultural diversity also comes to mind as a facilitator, both in Ireland and
Spain.) A Middle Eastern Union, an Eastern Mediterranean Union, or just a Mediterranean
Union – headquartered in, say, Alexandria, Nicosia, or Tunis – could thus transform ‘eitheror’
situations at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into ‘both-and’ or ‘neither-nor’
situations. 767
An instance of global integration, even more able to soon yield positive results, is the
formation of the International Criminal Court, for which the Belgian war crimes probe against
the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, could perhaps be seen as a failed dress rehearsal. In
the long run, however, the globalization of democracy and justice is unequivocally working
against apartheid and other kinds of ethnicism (which, as we have seen, is one of the main
reasons that the USA and Israel are so vigorously attempting to counteract and even sabotage
the formation, establishment and work of the global criminal court), but it is also working
against other, even more powerful, hegemonic interests, in particular corporate ones. And the
latter will no doubt present even tougher problems than the comparatively simple gross human
rights violations caused by apartheid.
Lastly, it is mostly up to both those who profit from and those who are directly
victimized by apartheid to get rid of it. Although a crime against humanity victimizes us all,
we owe it to the most directly affected victims, past and present, to let them have the last say
and to decisively form the process of liberation from apartheid. And in that last say, they
should be given space. My last suggestion here is that they should be able to relate in a
767 On Ireland, see also footnotes 52 and 152, above. On the Basque-Spanish conflict, see Wilkinson: Basque
Separatist Group Ends Four-Decade War with Spain, 2006. An overlap between the MEU, the EMU, and/or the
MU with the EU would in my opinion be preferable, whether it be defined by Turkey’s western or eastern
borders. The reason is that the development of watertight frontiers between the EU and its neighbors, in my
view, is likely to cause a scenario similar to the global power-constellation described in George Orwell’s novel,
‘1984’, i.e. a world which consists of only a handful of countries. Under such circumstances, there is, in my
opinion, an even greater risk of totalitarianism, systematic human rights violations, and perpetual warfare
developing than in the present state of the world or in a single world state. See Löwstedt 1995, Einleitung, and
Löwstedt: Weltstaat gegen Weltmarkt, 2000.