18-20 May 2008
I
apologize for the lack of entries in recent days. On Saturday and Sunday I
attended a conference at my University where I always presented the paper Toward
a Theory of DDR which can viewed in the Recent Work section of my website. If
anyone would like to have a look, here is a link to the conference programme: http://www.kent.ac.uk/brussels/documents/DraftConferenceProgramme2.pdf
It
went quite well overall and I was pleased with my presentation as I received
very insightful feedback and questions. The most memorable parts of the
conference for most however, including myself, were the keynote addresses of
Dr. Jamie Shea (NATO) and Robert Cooper (Council of the EU). Both speakers
spoke eloquently and provided adequate answers to some pressing questions given
to them by conference attendees.
Skipping
around a bit, I will say something about last week’s LAC-EU Summit in Lima,
which I commented a bit on during Thursday and Friday’s entries. The outcome of
the Summit was that “European and Latin American leaders have pledged to fight
poverty, global warming and high food prices…” click this link for further
reading: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PERU_LATAM_EU?SITE=CADIU&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
This
AP article that I provided the link for above touted the conference as a sign
of unity among Latin American countries and positive breakthrough in Latin
America-European Union relations. Indeed it seems that way, however, I suspect
that that the admirable ‘pledge’ that these countries made was surely only
political lip service.
The
only really positive thing about this summit was that it is the last in this
series of summits between the Latin America and the European Union. As I
suspected in the beginning, Chavez received most of the attention—his
ties to the FARC being recently confirmed by Interpol aside. This summit was
surely a political fiasco that increased the legitimacy of Chavez on the world
stage. I think that most serious analysts would agree with me on this—as
most of them did not even acknowledge that the event was going on—much
less do any real reporting on it.
Again,
I am sorry for the lack of optimism in recent days but this is the reality.
Take
Care,
-Pat
