I appreciate your concerns. Real internationalism is one of the most difficult terrains of politics, and actually I have to laugh about the naivity of my understanding of it as a student youth. The Dutch Socialist Party tends to be practical and diplomatic in its approach - can we do something that will do real good? The party ran into a spot of bother with the government of Belarus, as I recall - they would not accept a member as part of an EU delegation to Belarus. The EU parliament has bouts of fairly ridiculous "resolutionary socialism" or "resolutionary liberalism", where they call on other states to be more democratic or liberal, i.e. attempt to assert moral force in that sense, without much knowledge of local sensitivities ("so you would like us to be more democratic? That's nice, as if we didn't have enough problems on our hands"). Generally speaking, real internationalism comes about only if you can show that you can really help solve a problem for another country or citizens thereof.
J.
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Received on Wed Dec 17 16:40:41 2008
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