No one had supposed Albright could singlehandedly drag Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasir Arafat back to the negotiating table. But there had been at least a slim hope she might prevail by going over the two leaders’ heads. Albright took her case straight to the people, speaking to them on Israeli television and Palestinian radio. She wanted to send a message to Arafat and Netanyahu via a channel they wouldn’t dare ignore: their own people. As of late last week the effort seemed futile. Albright boarded her plane, saying she would return ““whenever the leaders have made the hard decisions.’’ Until then, she vowed, ““I am not going to come back here just to tread water.''
Albright has made her name as a most undiplomatic diplomat. Her sharp tongue and her love of playing to the crowd have made her enormously popular with American audiences. The question is whether Albright’s public diplomacy is a strategy that works where it counts–outside the United States. The Mideast could very well be a test that utterly defies solution, no matter what the approach. Nothing tried so far has been able to revive the near-dead Oslo accords. ““I am a realist and not a magician,’’ she told an Israeli audience. ““I cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat if there aren’t the makings of it there.''
Still, Albright’s performance disappointed many Israelis and Palestinians, who agreed she had misjudged her audience. It made no difference that careful logic was behind her tactics. A senior administration official says the secretary made it her first priority to gain the Israelis’ confidence (in the first 24 hours of her visit, she met no Palestinians). Having established her credentials as a friend, she then proceeded to put Netanyahu on the spot for his ““unhelpful’’ behavior. ““Israel should refrain from unilateral acts–including what Palestinians perceive as the provocative expansion of settlements, land confiscations, home demolitions and confiscations of IDs,’’ she declared in a nationally televised speech at a Jerusalem high school. She publicly urged Netanyahu to declare a ““timeout’’ on the expansion of West Bank settlements.
But such public berating of an Israeli leader can backfire. ““There are things that leaders can agree to behind closed doors,’’ said Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, who went on to say that no Israeli government could be seen to do something on the settlements as a result of outside pressure. Many Palestinians and Israeli liberals criticized Albright for appearing to take a far tougher line with the Palestinian Authority than with the Israeli government. ““The leaders of the Arab world probably gagged . . . at the scenes of Albright doing her best to please her Israeli hosts,’’ editorialized the mass-circulation daily Maariv. ““The Arabs must have muttered to themselves that it would have been better if she’d stayed home.''
In a sense, part of her did stay home–and that may have been the problem. When Albright arrived in Israel the first person to receive her was the country’s mostly ceremonial president, Ezer Weizman. He advised her to ““bang heads together’’ to restart the peace process–good public-diplomacy tactics. But banging Netanyahu’s risks antagonizing some very influential American Jews. Instead Albright did her best to soften the blow–and she thus lost the enthusiasm of many Palestinians. Local commentators cited the Democrats’ depleted coffers and the Jewish vote as factors shaping Mideast diplomacy. ““Congress will not al- low Clinton to pressure Israel,’’ said the Israeli paper Haaretz. ““Nobody on Capitol Hill is interested in angering Jewish voters, [and Albright] no doubt wants to continue her career under Gore.''
The Arabs were skeptical from the start about Albright’s mission. By the time she was ready to criticize Netanyahu, many of them had stopped listening. ““People are happy that she spoke on our Palestinian radio and put the blame on both sides instead of putting all the blame on the Palestinians,’’ said Osama Salah, a businessman in East Jerusalem. ““But it’s just talk. Nothing will happen on the ground.’’ After hearing Albright in a West Bank classroom, one Palestinian high-schooler told NEWSWEEK: ““What lies ahead may be even worse than the intifada. Instead of sticks and stones, people may use bombs.''
If that reaction is typical, Albright is stuck. No matter how good an American secretary of state may be on the airwaves or among crowds–and few have been better than Albright–America can’t unilaterally impose peace. Stubbornness is a major part of what brought both Arafat and Netanyahu to power. True, they probably would heed their own people’s calls for peace–if such calls come. In the end, whether or not public diplomacy works depends less on the diplomat than on the public. If ordinary Israelis and Palestinians don’t demand that their leaders work toward peace, Albright’s winning personality is worth little.
title: “Playing To The Crowd” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-02” author: “Mary Dejong”
But it couldn’t control the conference hall. In a demo that the cameras didn’t shoot, about 1,000 of the world’s most influential business leaders (and their spouses) grabbed early seats for the first-ever Davos speech by an American president. And when asked to vacate the place for a security sweep, most of them simply wouldn’t budge. American Secret Service personnel whispered nervously into their cuffs. WEF staff begged the audience to move. No dice; a German businessman, with the solidity of a nation that finds saumagen a light snack, settled down, arms folded across his chest. AOL boss Steve Case, perhaps in a fit of public-spiritedness, moved toward the door, took one look at the crowd outside, realized that once he left he’d never get back in and went back to his seat. “I haven’t done a sit-down demo since college,” said one banker, gleefully.
And this time, the state backed down. The security sweep was abandoned; lacking only a bare-breasted Marianne to lead them, the plus-chic culottes brayed in triumph. Had a tumbrel or two been available when Clinton and WEF president Klaus Schwab took the stage, who knows what would have happened? Clinton, thankfully, restored calm; he did what all rulers do to assuage a mob–gave them what they want. In this case, not bread, but a speech on the virtues of globalization. With the authority of a man whose nation is enjoying one of the longest economic expansions it has ever known, Clinton praised free trade and open markets, and supported the work of the WTO, that modern bogeybody. Any retreat from globalization, he said, would risk a return to the beggar-my-neighbor economic politics of the 1920s and 1930s, which led directly to World War II.
It’s easy to read the tale of the two demonstrations as a symbol of the power of commercial interests, and the weakness of their opponents. But that would be much too simple. Davos this year may have taken place at a time when much of the developed world–not just the United States–is luxuriating in a boom driven by revolutionary technology, a time when stupendous fortunes are made by near-teenagers in not much more than an instant. (In the most droll moment of the conference, computer gazillionaire Michael Dell quietly corrected Schwab. He was not 35, said Dell; he was 34.) But it also took place in the shadow of the fiasco in Seattle, when those whom globalization has aggrieved–or simply offended–found a voice.
Both Clinton and Tony Blair, the British prime minister who gave his own speech to the WEF the day before the president, stressed the need for political and business leaders to be more open in their deliberations. Clinton, said his senior economic adviser, Gene Sperling, was determined to give a “hard truths” speech on trade, in which each constituency was asked to face up to what it had to do to make globalization work. The speech, said Sperling, was designed to be “a road map for a new consensus” on trade and globalization. “Trade,” said Clinton, “can no longer be the private preserve of governments, CEOs and trade experts… We must find a way to let the dissenters have their say.”
Put in language that differed slightly from session to session, that was the key message of Davos this year. Globalization, said presidents and prime ministers, business leaders and representatives of the NGOs (far more numerous at Davos than ever before) could no longer be seen as solely an economic phenomenon. Politicians–the state–had a role in protecting those left behind by the pace of change. More than 1 billion people, it was said in the week’s most repeated phrase, live on less than $1 a day. Businesses should do their part to see that the benefits of the new technologies are made widely available, for example, through distance learning, or the discovery and distribution of an AIDS vaccine. (If you want to put money on a cause that may unite business, political leaders and civil society this year, the AIDS vaccine is it.)
It’s an attractive message; and to the extent that the business leaders who show up at Davos tend to focus on more than the bottom line, it went over reasonably well. And yet there was another side of the global economy visible at Davos–the sense that in the new age, where currencies can be shipped and goods ordered at the click of a mouse, some matters have simply passed beyond the power of government to control. The poor Eurolanders, convinced that their economies are on the verge of a real upturn, could do nothing but watch in bemused fashion as their currency fell to a new low against both the dollar and the pound and also looked uncomfortably weak against the yen. Every session on e-commerce was oversubscribed; every politician present dreaded the prospect of being unable to tax sales of merchandise on the Net. But since nobody in Davos–or, for that matter, anywhere else–knows in which country cyberspace resides, it was hard to see how the tax authorities would get their hands on the take.
The sense that politicians were losing power to the market fed into a second theme of Davos 2000: the supposed decline of the nation-state. With NATO’s war in Kosovo–an integral part of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia–fresh in the memory; with the rise of the megacorporation (Steve Case was the hot invite this year), and with the growing cohesion of the European Union, session after session asked if national sovereignty was a dying concept. (Not in our backyard, trumpeted every American present.) But then the debates faced an uncomfortable truth. The nation on its own may not be able to get its arms round the forces of globalization and channel them into noneconomic pursuits; yet there is no powerful multilateral institution waiting in the wings able to perform that role. An implicit message of Clinton’s speech was that the WTO worked fine for trade matters, but that the international institutions designed, say, to defend labor rights or the environment were nowhere near as effective.
To complicate matters still more, Davos–just as Seattle–heard plenty of voices from the developing world who did not want to slow globalization down. Western greens and labor unions preach the dangers of market forces for workers and the environment. Clinton’s message, Sperling insists, is that not all such efforts should automatically be seen as a “pretext for protectionism.” But the Seattle coalition sure could sound–well, preachy. There are some in the West, said Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico, “determined to save developing countries from development.” That didn’t go down well with the NGOs.
Rich protesters who feel guilty about their wealth; poor nations that don’t want help from the well-meaning Seattle crowd; CEOs who agree that they should do more than make money; politicians who fear things are slipping out of their grasp. That was Davos 2000. Revolutionary times; roll those tumbrels.
title: “Playing To The Crowd” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-26” author: “Evelyn Mcclellan”
The movie baldly announces its “love is everywhere” theme with a montage of embraces at the arrivals area of Heathrow airport, a sequence that could easily be mistaken for a long-distance-telephone commercial. “Love Actually” then plunges into its multiple tales of heterosexual romance, which unfold in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The sheer size of the cast is dizzying–as you’ll soon see. At the top of the social ladder is the bachelor Prime Minister (Hugh Grant, in his best diffident-charm mode), who finds himself preoccupied with a curvaceous staffer (Martine McCutcheon) from a dodgy part of town. The P.M.’s sister (Emma Thompson) is grappling with the wandering eye of her husband (Alan Rickman), whose saucy secretary (Heike Makatsch) is doing her best to seduce him. This triangle doesn’t really resolve itself, it just peters out.
Meanwhile, a cuckolded mystery writer (Colin Firth) retreats to France for solace, where he falls for his Portuguese maid (Lucia Muniz). Unfortunately, neither understands the other’s language. (You wonder if Curtis is aware that, in most of the affairs here, men are masters and women are servants.) Puppy love is represented by 11-year-old Sam (Thomas Sangster), who is coached in courtship by his recently widowed father (Liam Neeson). The tone shifts uneasily from bedroom farce to masochistic creepiness in a strand involving a pathologically unassertive American (Laura Linney) whose guilt-ridden devotion to her mentally ill brother continually foils the consummation of her lust for her co-worker (hottie Rodrigo Santoro). Are you following all this? There’s more.
The unexpected MVP of the cast is Bill Nighy, who gets the biggest laughs playing a lewd, jaded, over-the-hill rock star hoping to make a comeback with a dismal Christmas makeover of “Love Is All Around.” Further broad comic relief comes in the form of a randy, oft-spurred young waiter (Kris Marshall) who’s convinced that sexual salvation awaits him in Wisconsin, where his English accent will charm the pants off the natives. Then there are the shy young lovers who meet, naked, as stand-ins for the stars of an erotic movie–a one-joke gag Curtis milks twice too often.
Yet another thread, on the theme of unrequited love, involves a newly wed beauty (Keira Knightley) who discovers that her husband’s best friend (Andrew Lincoln) is hopelessly in love with her. The Hugh Grant sequences are among the most delightful (if not the most plausible), and they allow Curtis to get in a barbed anti-Blair and anti-American aside in the form of Billy Bob Thornton’s visiting U.S. president, a reptilian amalgam of skirt-chasing Clinton and bully-boy Bush.
As a director, Curtis is nothing if not promiscuous, equally embracing his best and worst ideas. This is the sort of movie in which a crowd of strangers breaks into applause as one character publicly proposes to another (a device that was overworked 10 years ago). Yet the scene works because the proposal itself is hilarious. Slick, expertly acted and shameless, “Love Actually” is alternately beguiling and bloated, witty and warmed over, smart and pandering. The majority is likely to swoon; the minority will squirm their way through it.
