ETH Zurich and EPFL make an important contribution to the security of Switzerland by training specialist personnel and facilitating knowledge transfer.
The emerging situation could stimulate increased bilateral cooperation, including in regional security affairs, but it could also create challenges for the relationship.
Carlson in this CSS Analysis. The three countries over the past five years have benefitted from increased trade with the EU, without however strengthening the rule of law to boost investments and lift them out of economic stagnation. The elites remain unwilling or unable to break vested interests, despite the pressure exercised by the Western actors, and partly because of Russian attempts to counterbalance or undermine pro-Western forces, argues Henrik Larsen in this CSS Analysis. That's not just bad news for Iran's 84 million people.
It's also bad news for, say, the 3 million people in Mississippi and the 5 million in Alabama. Practicalities, not principles, are holding back the payment of a m pounds British debt to Iran, seen as a precondition of the release of British-Iranian dual nationals held in Tehran, the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.
He said the payment would not be the equivalent of a ransom payment but the settlement of an outstanding debt. In his new book, Taste Makers, writer Mayukh Sen gives credit where credit is due. By profiling seven immigrant women chefs, he depicts their genuine struggles and contributions to what we know today as the American "melting pot.
We talked to Batmanglij and Sen about the book and the importance of food as a cultural connector. Iran's new population law further violates women's rights to sexual and reproductive health and puts women's health and lives at risk, Human Rights Watch said today. Iranian authorities should immediately repeal the provisions that restrict human rights. On November 1, , Iran's Guardian Council approved the "rejuvenation of the population and support of family" bill, which outlaws sterilization and free distribution of contraceptives in the public health care system unless a pregnancy threatens a woman's health.
Humanitarian needs in Iran rise as , Afghans arrive since Taliban takeover. The Norwegian Refugee Council calls for more funding and responsibility sharing, as 4, to 5, Afghans flee across the border to Iran daily. Iran cannot be expected to host so many Afghans with so little support from the international community. There must be an immediate scale up of aid both inside Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries like Iran, before the deadly winter cold.
China's Iran oil purchases rebound on lower prices, fresh quotas. China's imports of Iranian oil have held above half a million barrels per day on average for the last three months, traders and ship-tracking firms said, as buyers judge that getting crude at cheap prices outweighs any risks from busting U. Chinese purchases of Iranian crude have continued this year despite the sanctions that, if enforced, would allow Washington to cut off those who violate them from the U.
The tentacled butterfly ray hadn't been documented since , but in Mohsen Rezaie-Atagholipour started finding them hidden as by-catch in Iranian shrimpers' catch. Presumed extinct, scientists were shocked to find the species holding out in the water off Iran. Iran's pomegranate festivals celebrate harvest. It's pomegranate harvest season in Iran and a time to celebrate! As a tradition, pomegranate festivals are held across Iran to celebrate the harvest season during the autumn every year.
Iran frees Vietnamese tanker seized after US navy confrontation. Iran has freed a Vietnamese oil tanker that it had seized for trying to "steal" its oil in late October following a confrontation with the United States Navy in the Sea of Oman.
India hosts talks on Afghanistan boycotted by rival Pakistan. India on Wednesday hosted senior security officials from Russia, Iran and five Central Asian countries to discuss the situation in neighboring Afghanistan following the fall of the U. Mahlaqa Mallah, known as the "mother of Iran's environment" for dedicating her life to protecting the environment, passed away at the age of on Monday.
After studying philosophy, social sciences, and sociology at the University of Tehran, Mallah was awarded an MA in Social Sciences in In , she moved to Paris to study for a Ph. During her time in Paris, she also studied librarianship at the National Library of France.
Iran's failure to tackle climate change - a question of priority. It's like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. The status of Iran's response to climate change depends on the one hand on a conservative government that prioritises its economy over the environment, and on the other an international community that treats the country like a pariah with crippling sanctions imposed for its nuclear programme by the United States.
Mehdi Mahdavikia and Andranik Eskandarian are right and left backs in the list. Photos: Autumn in Alvand, Alangdareh Park.
This photo album depicts Alvand Mountains slopes which have become colorful in autumn in Hamedan Province, western Iran. It also shows Alangdareh Park, Gorgan, northern Iran. Powerful Iranian general visited Iraq after attack on PM. A top Iranian general visited Baghdad after the assassination attempt against Iraq's prime minister, and said Tehran and its allies had nothing to do with the drone attack that lightly injured the Iraqi leader, two Iraqi politicians said Monday.
The two Shiite Muslim politicians requested anonymity because Esmail Ghaani's visit was not announced publicly. They quoted the Iranian general as saying that Tehran is not opposed to any politician named by the Shiite blocs in the newly elected parliament to become the next prime minister. Build back better or more of the same? New arms deal to Saudi announced.
In the first major foreign policy speech of his presidency, President Biden pledged to end "all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales," and committed to "stepping up our diplomacy to end the war. Israeli hyperbole: The art of deception. Israeli hyperbole is as old as the Israeli state.
It is tautological, serving as the raison d'etre and modus operandi of Israel, the garrison state. It is farcical, fantastical, and also dangerous in the way it surpasses mere rhetoric to shape the country's strategy in Palestine and the Middle East in general.
For decades, Israel hyped and manufactured threats - grave threats, existential threats - using them as a pretext for preemptive wars and justification for holding onto occupied territories.
Russia capture record fourth Intercontinental Beach Soccer Cup crown. Russia have now won a record four of the 10 Intercontinental Cup events, making them the most successful nation in the competition. As Russia and Iran battled for the team title, the 74kg final was the perfect stage to decide it. And they put on a show. There's the initial temptation, particularly upon first glance from a Western viewer's perspective, to view Iranian filmmaker Elahe Esmaili's latest film The Doll as an indictment of the seemingly patriarchal implications of certain Islamic cultural traditions.
But The Doll doesn't serve a neatly wrapped up delineation of child marriage and women's issues against a backdrop of systemic oppression and patriarchy. Instead, Esmaili's film offers a nuanced and complex portrayal of a family caught between tradition, personal beliefs, and circumstance-and, frankly, it's all the better for it.
Miss Earth welcomes its first candidate from Iran. Despite its virtual set-up for the second straight year, the Miss Earth pageant has managed to draw 88 global beauties in its roster this year. This includes the first candidate from Iran in its year pageant history. Hami Zaker, 27, made her first impact at the pageant's eco-video preliminary competition where she introduced herself as a veterinarian and advocate of water and food security amid drought in her country.
The treasures of Elam, a civilisation gone but not forgotten. A digital dossier of artefacts collected by Macquarie University's authority on the art and archaeology of the Near East is putting the ancient civilisation of Elam back on the map.
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The demand— which amounted to a right of intervention in the affairs of a foreign state—was couched in the terms of universal moral principles but cut to the heart of Ottoman sovereignty. Ottoman refusal prompted a Russian military advance into the Balkans and naval hostilities in the Black Sea.
After six months Britain and France, fearing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with it the European balance, entered the war on the Ottoman side. The alliance systems of the Congress of Vienna were shattered as a consequence.
Prussia stayed neutral. The effort to isolate Russia concluded by isolating Austria. Within two years, Napoleon invaded the Austrian possessions in Italy in support of Italian unification while Russia stood by. Within Germany, Prussia gained freedom of maneuver. Within a decade Otto von Bismarck started Germany on the road to unification, excluding Austria from what had been its historical role as the standard-bearer of German statehood—again with Russian acquiescence.
Austria learned too late that in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness. Both have been viewed as archetypal conservatives. Both have been recorded as master manipulators of the balance of power, which they were. He was born in the Rhineland, near the border of France, educated in Strasbourg and Mainz. Metternich did not see Austria until his thirteenth year and did not live there until his seventeenth.
He was appointed Foreign Minister in and Chancellor in , serving until Fate had placed him in the top civilian position in an ancient empire at the beginning of its decline. Once considered among the strongest and best-governed countries in Europe, Austria was now vulnerable because its central location meant that every European tremor made the earth move there.
Its polyglot nature made it vulnerable to the emerging wave of nationalism—a force practically unknown a generation earlier. For Metternich, steadiness and reliability became the lodestar of his policy: Where everything is tottering it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge.
A product of the Enlightenment, Metternich was shaped more by philosophers of the power of reason than by the proponents of the power of arms. Metternich rejected the restless search for presumed remedies to the immediate; he considered the search for truth the most important task of the statesman.
In his view, the belief that whatever was imaginable was also achievable was an illusion. Truth had to reflect an underlying reality of human nature and of the structure of society. Anything more sweeping in fact did violence to the ideals it claimed to fulfill.
Bismarck, by comparison, was a scion of the provincial Prussian aristocracy, which was far poorer than its counterparts in the west of Germany and considerably less cosmopolitan. While Metternich tried to vindicate continuity and to restore a universal idea, that of a European society, Bismarck challenged all the established wisdom of his period. Until he appeared on the scene, it had been taken for granted that German unity would come about—if at all—through a combination of nationalism and liberalism.
To Metternich, order arose not so much from the pursuit of national interest as from the ability to connect it with that of other states: The great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a secondary importance. Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium … and of the united efforts of states … to force a return to the common law.
Bismarck rejected the proposition that power could be restrained by superior principle. Ultimate decisions would depend strictly on considerations of utility. The European order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest.
With the conservative monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring about a German national state for the first time in history.
With a few daring strokes between and , he placed Prussia at the head of a united Germany and Germany in the center of a new system of order. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together.
The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power. The crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of —71, which Bismarck had adroitly provoked France into declaring, was attended by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, a retributive indemnity, and the tactless proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles in Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others, much like the coalition against Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and Napoleon in the early nineteenth.
Only the most restrained conduct could avoid incurring the collective antagonism of its neighbors. In a world of five, Bismarck counseled, it was always better to be in the party of three. This involved a dizzying series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances for example, an alliance with Austria and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia with the aim of giving the other great powers—except the irreconcilable France—a greater interest to work with Germany than to coalesce against it.
The genius of the Westphalian system as adapted by the Congress of Vienna had been its fluidity and its pragmatism; ecumenical in its calculations, it was theoretically expandable to any region and could incorporate any combination of states. With Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility. But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met. Leo von Caprivi, the next Chancellor, complained that while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he had difficulty controlling two.
Almost inevitably, France and Russia began exploring an alliance. Such realignments had happened several times before in the European kaleidoscope of shifting orders. The novelty now was its institutionalized permanence. Diplomacy had lost its resilience; it had become a matter of life and death rather than incremental adjustment. Because a switch in alliances might spell national disaster for the abandoned side, each ally was able to extort support from its partner regardless of its best convictions, thereby escalating all crises and linking them to each other.
Diplomacy became an effort to tighten the internal bonds of each camp, leading to the perpetuation and reinforcement of all grievances. It did so not formally but de facto via staff talks, creating a moral obligation to fight at the side of the counterpart countries. Military planning compounded the rigidity.
The Franco-Prussian War was confined to the two adversaries. It had been conducted about a specific issue and served limited aims. By the turn of the twentieth century, military planners—drawing on what they took to be the lessons of mechanization and new methods of mobilization—began to aim for total victory in all-out war.
A system of railways permitted the rapid movement of military forces. With large reserve forces on all sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence. Preemption was thereby built into its military planning. Mobilization schedules dominated diplomacy; if political leaders wanted to control military considerations, it should have been the other way around. Diplomacy, which still worked by traditional—somewhat leisurely—methods, lost touch with the emerging technology and its corollary warfare.
They were reinforced in that approach because none of the many previous diplomatic crises of the new century had brought matters to the breaking point. In two crises over Morocco and one over Bosnia, the mobilization schedules had no operational impact because, however intense the posturing, events never escalated to the point of imminent confrontation.
Paradoxically, the very success in resolving these crises bred a myopic form of risk-taking unmoored from any of the interests actually at stake. It came to be taken for granted that maneuvering for tactical victories to be cheered in the nationalist press was a normal method of conducting policy—that major powers could dare each other to back down in a succession of standoffs over tangential disputes without ever producing a showdown. But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later.
World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades.
Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum. Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July , its deadline imposed a great urgency on decision making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war from which it never recovered.
All these decisions were made when the differences between the major powers were in inverse proportion to their posturing. A new concept of legitimacy—a meld of state and empire—had emerged so that none of the powers considered the institutions of the others a basic threat to their existence.
The balance of power as it existed was rigid but not oppressive. Relations between the crowned heads were cordial, even social and familial. But in the Balkans among the remnants of the Ottoman possessions, there were countries, Serbia in the forefront, threatening Austria with unsatisfied claims of national self-determination.
If any major country supported such a claim, a general war was probable because Austria was linked by alliance to Germany as Russia was to France. A war whose consequences had not been considered descended on Western civilization over the essentially parochial issue of the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Serb nationalist, giving Europe a blow that obliterated a century of peace and order.
In the forty years following the Vienna settlement, the European order buffered conflicts. In the forty years following the unification of Germany, the system aggravated all disputes. None of the leaders foresaw the scope of the looming catastrophe that their system of routinized confrontation backed by modern military machines was making almost certain sooner or later. Russia, by its constant probing in all directions, threatened Austria and the remnants of the Ottoman Empire simultaneously.
And Britain, by its ambiguity obscuring the degree of its growing commitment to the Allied side, combined the disadvantage of every course. Its support made France and Russia adamant; its aloof posture confused some German leaders into believing that Britain might remain neutral in a European war. Reflecting on what might have occurred in alternative historical scenarios is usually a futile exercise. But the war that overturned Western civilization had no inevitable necessity.
It arose from a series of miscalculations made by serious leaders who did not understand the consequences of their planning, and a final maelstrom triggered by a terrorist attack occurring in a year generally believed to be a tranquil period.
In the end, the military planning ran away with diplomacy. It is a lesson subsequent generations must not forget. In the ordeal, the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires perished entirely. In Russia, a popular uprising on behalf of modernization and liberal reform was seized by an armed elite proclaiming a universal revolutionary doctrine. None of the leaders who drifted into war in August would have done so could they have foreseen the world of They blotted from their minds nearly every lesson of previous attempts to forge an international order, especially of the Congress of Vienna.
It was not a happy decision. The Treaty of Versailles in refused to accept Germany back into the European order as the Congress of Vienna had included acceptance of a defeated France. The new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist government of the Soviet Union declared itself not bound by the concepts or restraints of an international order whose overthrow it prophesied; participating at the fringes of European diplomacy, it was recognized only slowly and reluctantly by the Western powers.
Of the five states that had constituted the European balance, the Austrian Empire had disappeared; Russia and Germany were excluded, or had excluded themselves; and Britain was beginning to return to its historical attitude of involving itself in European affairs primarily to resist an actual threat to the balance of power rather than to preempt a potential threat. Traditional diplomacy had brought about a century of peace in Europe by an international order subtly balancing elements of power and of legitimacy.
In the last quarter of that century, the balance had shifted to relying on the power element. The drafters of the Versailles settlement veered back to the legitimacy component by creating an international order that could be maintained, if at all, only by appeals to shared principles—because the elements of power were ignored or left in disarray.
Britain was increasingly withdrawn. The United States, having entered the war decisively in despite initial public reluctance, had grown disillusioned by the outcome and withdrawn into relative isolation. The responsibility for supplying the elements of power therefore fell largely on France, which was exhausted by the war, drained by it of human resources and psychological stamina, and increasingly aware that the disparity in strength between it and Germany threatened to become congenital.
Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.
With Germany neither morally invested in the Versailles settlement nor confronted with a clear balance of forces preventing its challenges, the Versailles order all but dared German revisionism.
Germany could be prevented from asserting its potential strategic superiority only by discriminatory clauses, which challenged the moral convictions of the United States and, to an increasing degree, Great Britain. And once Germany began to challenge the settlement, its terms were maintainable only by the ruthless application of French arms or a permanent American involvement in continental affairs.
Neither was forthcoming. France had spent three centuries keeping Central Europe at first divided and then contained—at first by itself, then in alliance with Russia.
But after Versailles, it lost this option. Left alone to balance a unified Germany, it made halting efforts to guard the settlement by force but became demoralized when its historical nightmare reappeared with the advent of Hitler. The major powers attempted to institutionalize their revulsion to war into a new form of peaceful international order. A vague formula for international disarmament was put forward, though the implementation was deferred for later negotiations.
The League of Nations and a series of arbitration treaties set out to replace power contests with legal mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. Yet while membership in these new structures was nearly universal and every form of violation of the peace formally banned, no country proved willing to enforce the terms.
Two overlapping and contradictory postwar orders were coming into being: the world of rules and international law, inhabited primarily by the Western democracies in their interactions with each other; and an unconstrained zone appropriated by the powers that had withdrawn from this system of limits to achieve greater freedom of action.
Looming beyond both and opportunistically maneuvering between them lay the Soviet Union—with its own revolutionary concept of world order threatening to submerge them all. In the end the Versailles order achieved neither legitimacy nor equilibrium. Hitler, who came to power in by the popular vote of a resentful German people, abandoned all restraints.
He rearmed in violation of the Versailles peace terms and overthrew the Locarno settlement by reoccupying the Rhineland. When his challenges failed to encounter a significant response, Hitler began to dismantle the states of Central and Eastern Europe one by one: Austria first, followed by Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland.
The nature of these challenges was not singular to the s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. Europe had constructed an international order from three hundred years of conflict.
It threw it away because its leaders did not understand the consequences when they entered World War I—and though they did understand the consequences of another conflagration, they recoiled before the implications of acting on their foresight.
The collapse of international order was essentially a tale of abdication, even suicide. Having abandoned the principles of the Westphalian settlement and reluctant to exercise the force required to vindicate its proclaimed moral alternative, Europe was now consumed by another war that, at its end, brought with it once more the need to recast the European order.
Their residue would continue, perhaps most consequentially in some of the countries to which they were brought in the age of discovery and expansion. Every continental European country with the exception of Switzerland and Sweden had been occupied by foreign troops at one time or another.
It became obvious that no European country including Switzerland and Sweden was able any longer to shape its own future by itself. That Western Europe found the moral strength to launch itself on the road to a new approach to order was the work of three great men: Konrad Adenauer in Germany, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy. At a moment of greatest weakness, they preserved some of the concepts of order of their youth.
They had to cope first with another division of Europe. In , the Western allies combined their three occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany.
Russia turned its occupation zone into a socialist state tied to it by the Warsaw Pact. Germany was back to its position three hundred years earlier after the Peace of Westphalia: its division had become the key element of the emerging international structure.
France and Germany, the two countries whose rivalry had been at the heart of every European war for three centuries, began the process of transcending European history by merging the key elements of their remaining economic power.
For the first decade of the postwar period, the course of its national leadership would be crucial. Patrician in style, suspicious of populism, he created a political party, the Christian Democratic Union, which for the first time in German parliamentary history governed as a moderate party with a majority mandate. In , he brought West Germany into the Atlantic Alliance. So committed was Adenauer to the unification of Europe that he rejected, in the s, Soviet proposals hinting that Germany might be unified if the Federal Republic abandoned the Western alliance.
This decision surely reflected a shrewd judgment on the reliability of Soviet offers but also a severe doubt about the capacity of his own society to repeat a solitary journey as a national state in the center of the Continent. It nevertheless took a leader of enormous moral strength to base a new international order on the partition of his own country.
The partition of Germany was not a new event in European history; it had been the basis of both the Westphalian and the Vienna settlements. What was new was that the emerging Germany explicitly cast itself as a component of the West in a contest over the nature of international political order.
This was all the more important because the balance of power was largely being shaped outside the European continent. For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe.
The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe. America had helped restart the European economy with the Greek-Turkish aid program of and the Marshall Plan of In , the United States for the first time in its history undertook a peacetime alliance, through the North Atlantic Treaty.
The European equilibrium, historically authored by the states of Europe, had turned into an aspect of the strategy of outside powers.
The North Atlantic Alliance established a regular framework for consultation between the United States and Europe and a degree of coherence in the conduct of foreign policy. After the shock of two devastating wars, the Western European countries were confronted by a change in geopolitical perspective that challenged their sense of historical identity.
The international order during the first phase of the Cold War was in effect bipolar, with the operation of the Western alliance conducted essentially by America as the principal and guiding partner. What the United States understood by alliance was not so much countries acting congruently to preserve equilibrium as America as the managing director of a joint enterprise. The traditional European balance of power had been based on the equality of its members; each partner contributed an aspect of its power in quest of a common and basically limited goal, which was equilibrium.
The Cold War international order reflected two sets of balances, which for the first time in history were largely independent of each other: the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the internal balance within the Atlantic Alliance, whose operation was, in important ways, psychological. European countries built up their own military forces not so much to create additional strength as to have a voice in the decisions of the ally—as an admission ticket, as it were, to discussions regarding the use of the American deterrent.
France and Britain developed small nuclear forces that were irrelevant to the overall balance of power but created an additional claim to a seat at the table of major-power decisions. The realities of the nuclear age and the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union sustained the alliance for a generation. But the underlying difference in perspective was bound to reappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall in The fall of the Berlin Wall in led rapidly to the unification of Germany, together with the collapse of the Soviet satellite orbit, the belt of states in Eastern Europe with an imposed Soviet control system.
Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development. The nations of Eastern Europe, suppressed for forty years some longer , began to reemerge into independence and to regain their personalities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the emphasis of diplomacy. The geopolitical nature of the European order was fundamentally transformed when there no longer existed a substantial military threat from within Europe. The Atlantic Alliance, it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia—even perhaps including it—was now broached as a serious prospect.
In the face of a direct threat, international order had been conceived of as the confrontation of two adversarial blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity.
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