On May 18 a roundtable organized jointly by CDDRL and CREEES and chaired by SIIS Senior Fellow Gail W. Lapidus brought together visiting scholars Temuri Yakobashvili from Georgia, Volodymyr Kulyk from Ukraine, Uladzimir Rouda from Belarus, and Wall Street Journal reporter Steve LeVine to examine the dramatic wave of democratic revolutions and protest movements which have transformed the geopolitics of the post-Soviet region over the past 2 years.

The participants argued that although the "Rose Revolution"in Georgia in October 2003, the Ukrainian "Orange Revolution" of November-December 2004, and the more recent regime change in Kyrgyzstan were all precipitated by popular protest against fraudulent elections, they expressed a deeper dissatisfaction with the widespread corruption and failures of the three governments, combined with the emergence of an increasingly mature and organized political opposition. While international organizations and actors played a supportive role in delegitimizing electoral fraud and nurturing civil society, domestic factors were the decisive ones in bringing about peaceful regime change.

The panelists also concurred that the "easy"revolts were now over. They predicted that future upheavals in the region were inevitable, but were far less likely to go smoothly. In Belarus, although popular hostility to a tyrannical political regime is growing, inspired by the successful example of neighboring Ukraine and the attraction of Europe, the absence of a united and organized opposition remains a major barrier. In Uzbekistan, the repressive regime of President Karimov has demonstrated its willingness to resort to violence to put down opposition, and to forestall international criticism by stigmatizing opponents as Islamist terrorists.

May 2005 opened with a bleak couple of weeks for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Delegates from 189 countries struggled to settle on an agenda for the seventh 5-year review of the Treaty, North Korea announced a new extraction of plutonium from its reactor to make nuclear weapons, and Iran stood firm against European attempts to dissuade it from pursuing a nuclear energy program that could be diverted for weapons-making. Yet CISAC's George Bunn, in an interview with BBC's "The World," cautioned against despair.

As the first general counsel to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Bunn has watched the NPT weather many diplomatic storms since it entered into force in 1970. Far from a failure, the treaty prevented nuclear weapons from becoming a commonplace in nations' defense programs, he said.

"I think that if there were no NPT, there would be something like 35 to 40 countries with nuclear weapons," Bunn explained. "When you think that at the time of our negotiations in the 60s, Sweden and Switzerland both had programs to explore the possibility of making nuclear weapons"--ambitions that the NPT helped dissuade--the treaty has provided incalculable benefits to world security. "If Sweden and Switzerland had nuclear weapons, think how many other countries would have them," he added.

Today the treaty's main weakness is its focus on states' possession of nuclear weapons, at a time when terrorists' ambitions to acquire the weapons is a major concern. At the treaty's outset, "terrorism wasn't perceived by us as a threat. The treaty hardly deals with the threat of terrorism," Bunn said.

The radio interview with George Bunn and his son Matthew Bunn, also a nuclear arms expert, is available at the link below. (Windows Media Player is required.)

Hans Blix, chairman of the International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction and former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, said at the Stanford Institute for International Studies' International Day, "Challenges in a New Era," on May 6 that he does not think the world faces a new nuclear arms race. Nuclear risks posed by terrorists and nations like Iran and North Korea could trigger a new nuclear arms race, warned CISAC Co-Director and Stanford professor Scott D. Sagan.

Blix said that there need not be a new arms race if the world diligently pursues diplomacy. Blix's speech attracted a strong response from Sagan, who participated in the same plenary panel titled "Looking Ahead: A New Nuclear Arms Race?" "I think there already is a new and very different kind of nuclear arms race going on," Sagan said. "It is a race between terrorists trying to develop a nuclear weapon and national and international efforts to stop that." As North Korea "race[s] ahead with its own persistent and provocative nuclear program," Sagan said the likelihood that the impoverished country will want to test its weapons or sell them to the highest bidder will increase. "I think Dr. Blix's paper greatly underestimates the threat of nuclear terrorism today," he said.

The exchange was one of many during the one day International Day that attracted hundreds of diplomats, policymakers, faculty and students. Other speakers included Oxford professor Paul Collier, the State Department counselor, Philip Zelikow, and Stonebridge International chairman, Samuel Berger. Zelikow and Berger both spoke on U.S. foreign policy.

The SIIS International Day also included discussion session on topics such as Russia's future, U.S. policy on the Korean peninsula, climate change, our energy future, United Nations reform, responses to infectious diseases, U.S.-European relations, and international criminal justice and security. Participants included both Stanford faculty and invited scholars, policymakers, and journalists.

Coit D. Blacker, director of SIIS, said the International Day, an annual event, will become part of the university's newly launched International Initiative that promotes interdisciplinary research and teaching. He also said the Stanford Institute for International Studies will be renamed the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, effective September 1, in recognition of alumni Bradford Freeman, a member of the university's Board of Trustees, and Ronald Spogli, a member of the SIIS board of visitors, who together donated a lead gift of $50 million to help launch the initiative last month.

Fifty years ago, in April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, the country's then-president Sukarno hosted a meeting that became a global icon of anti-colonial solidarity. The 29 African and Asian states represented at that first Bandung Conference swore their support for sovereignty and self-determination. Their priority was on national not individual freedom. The final declaration mentioned human rights. But it ignored the danger that foreign colonialists might be replaced with indigenous dictators. Democracy, corruption, and good governance were issues for the future.

This year in Indonesia, from 18 to 24 April, some 87 delegations, including 40 heads of state or government and more than 100 ministers, celebrated the "golden jubilee" anniversary of the Bandung Conference. In a series of summit, ministerial, and other meetings they sought to "reinvigorate the Bandung spirit" and forge "a new Asian-African strategic partnership" for the 21st century. The week climaxed on 24 April on the same day and in the same hall where the original conferees had launched the "Bandung spirit" of solidarity against imperialism half a century before.

Some of the leaders gathered for the celebration -- Bandung II -- were content to repeat the nationalist pieties of the past, or to redirect them from European colonialism to American unilateralism as the enemy of the day. But the current president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, known as SBY, struck a different note. His theme was not independence but introspection, not sovereignty but self-reform. He gently urged his fellow rulers to replace the old dogma of national liberation with a commitment to "good governance" as the latest and highest priority for developing countries -- in effect, self-reform as the new spirit of Bandung. At that moment, in Blitar, East Java, where he is buried, the nationalist firebrand Sukarno must have rolled in his grave.

"Good governance" did not and will not become the buzzword of Bandung II. The only other speaker who mentioned it, to my knowledge, was Singapore's prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. Fewer voices were raised in favor of self-reform than were aimed at American unilateralism. North Korea's Kim Yong Nam was among the latter. So was "Comrade R. G. Mugabe," as Zimbabwe's dictator called himself.

An Iraqi delegate, unable to insert in the ministers' communique a paragraph supporting his country's embattled transition to democracy, told me privately and bitterly, "The spirit of Bandung has not changed at all." In his view, most of the conferees in Bandung II preferred the odious sovereignty of Saddam Hussein to the induced democracy that followed, just as the leaders of the anti-colonial movement had tolerated tyrants in their ranks.

Yet SBY's speech did not fall on wholly deaf ears, and Iraq is not a good test case. More than a few delegates in Bandung supported democracy but opposed democracy-by-invasion. In developing countries, as representative government has spread, so has the desire to make it less corrupt and more effective. Over time, a new Asian-African agenda could give more prominence to democratization, religious moderation, the rule of law -- and honest, accountable governments as means to these ends.

But even if this does not happen, even if SBY's challenge is forgotten, the prestige of successfully hosting Bandung II already has strengthened his otherwise vulnerably "American" position inside a country whose future will help tip the balance of extremism and moderation in the Muslim world.

SBY is John F. Kennedy-esque: tall, handsome, young for a head of state, and able to project a democratic vision for Indonesia. A retired army general, he received American military and civilian training, including a master's in management from Webster University. No president before him has had more American exposure. This background will be in the spotlight when he pays his first presidential visit to the United States at the end of May.

Indonesia is the largest Muslim society, the third-largest democracy, and a tropical archipelago where defenders of the Bush administration are as scarce as snow. Indonesians will appreciate SBY's American experience if it enables him to deal with the world's only superpower in ways that help Indonesia. But if he is seen as too enamored of supposedly "American" values, he will create an opening for his political opponents.

In Bandung on the last day of the commemoration, crowds lined the streets, smiling and waving at the VIPs. Through the closed windows of air-conditioned limos and busses, the VIPs waved back. Compared with the week's grand abstractions -- sovereignty and self-reform -- this third spirit of Bandung was fleeting and local. But unless Asian-African solidarity becomes more than a slogan, or the vision of a better-governed Indonesia comes true, it may have been the most real.