Introduction
A critical view of the various moderate Islam projects put forth by Muslim-majority states reveals the interplay between piety, domestic politics, and geopolitical developments. Singaporean Muslims need to discern an interpretation of Islam that best fits Singapore’s multi-cultural, multi-religious landscape.
Two recent high-profile Arab events honouring Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest and most moderate Muslim civil society movement, highlight a subtle tug-of-war over who will define ‘moderate Islam’ in the 21st century.
At the core of the tug-of-war is whether Islam in the 21st century will foster religiously and politically pluralistic societies or advocate autocracy.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may be the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature, but that does not make his work The Gulag Archipelago enjoyable reading. The detailed description of the methods of torture employed within the Soviet system alone will turn many readers away. Beyond the interrogations are the trials based upon a mock-legal system epitomized by Soviet jurist Andrei Vyshinsky’s theory that truth is relative and that evidence can be ignored, to be replaced by forced confessions gained under torture.
If you take a tram out of Vienna and climb to the top of the Leopoldsberg, you can see a series of memorials to the successful defence of Vienna in 1683 against the invading Ottomans. Looking out over the Danube to the East, you can see an awful lot of not very much at all, going on and on and on. It’s from these empty eastern spaces that the threat to Europe always seems somehow to appear. From the Mongols through the Turks to the Slavs, it’s always the same basic fear. Civilisation as we know it can’t really be guaranteed east of a line drawn roughly between Berlin and Vienna. Beyond lies barbarism, changing in its details, but always a menace that has to be met with military force. It’s not an accident that the medieval Teutonic Knights, who fought the heathens in what is now Poland and the Baltic States, were role-models for extreme nationalists in Germany, including the Nazis. And they served right up to the present day as inspiration for extreme right-wing nationalists in Europe as a whole, some of whom are probably not coming back from Ukraine. And it’s probably not a coincidence either, that the great economic threats to Europe—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China—are all in the East.
Living through the Cold War wasn’t without its moments of anxiety, and even fear: there were times when you went to bed wondering if you would wake up a radioactive crisp in the morning. Yet for all the angst and the serial crises, there was actually something quite comforting about those days: the moral certainty with which the West felt able to view the world. After all, generally speaking, standards of living in the West were higher, there was more political freedom, and there were no fences keeping people in. (Indeed, few even of the fiercest critics of western policy ever seriously thought of going to live in the Soviet Union.)
Reinventing a Cold War Strategy for the Contest With China
Few words are more closely associated with the late Henry Kissinger than “détente.” The term was first used in diplomacy in the early 1900s, when the French ambassador to Germany tried—and failed—to better his country’s deteriorating relationship with Berlin, and in 1912, when British diplomats attempted the same thing. But détente became internationally famous only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Kissinger, first as U.S. national security adviser and then also as U.S. secretary of state, pioneered what would become his signature policy: the easing of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.
France and Central Europe have often stood on opposite sides of European foreign policy debates. But Russia’s war and Donald Trump’s shadow are making their strategic outlooks align.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is reshaping European geopolitics, whether in terms of security dynamics, regional equilibriums, or national foreign policy positions. On the latter, France’s policy shift on Ukraine and Russia is particularly noteworthy.
That climatic and environmental stressors and human mobility have always been intertwined is
nothing new. Rather, it traces back to the origin of the humankind, to the exact moment when
unbearable climatic conditions led our ancestors to migrate for the very first time out of Africa.2
That’s the story of Homo Sapiens. That’s our story.
Norway is facing a more serious threat environment now than it has in decades. As the war in Ukraine enters its third year, Russia is about to gain the military upper hand. The Russian military industry is running at full steam, and China, Belarus, Iran and North Korea are providing considerable materiel support. Russia is better positioned in the war than it was a year ago, and the Russian armed forces remain the main military threat to Norway’s sovereignty, its people, territory, key societal functions and infrastructure.