ITALY

ITALY
Corriere della Sera, Milan, Jan. 16: The position of the European Union in the new cold war (with Iran) is an open question.
This battlefield will decide who has the central power in the 21st century. It will not be the United Nations, which cannot even agree to stop the genocide in the Sudan or to reform the grotesque human rights commission ... The United States, whose technological power is half a century ahead of Europe's, remains dominant.
War and peace
It is therefore crucial to understand whether Europe will be speaking the German of (Angela) Merkel, critical of the U.S. but from the point of view of an independent ally, or that of (Gerhard) Schroeder, making deals and agreements with (Vladimir) Putin. In the first case, the world will be ruled by a democratic coalition and the U.N. will have a significant role again. In the second case, there will emerge an Earth of 2050 populated by two billion young Muslims with China and Moscow on the brink of war ... Europe can tip the balance between war and peace.
BRITAIN
Financial Times, London, Jan. 18: Like waves crashing on a seawall, another attempt to free up the provision of port services looks likely to dash itself on the rocks of the European Parliament later today. Despite having agreed in recent years to liberalize virtually every other area of European transport -- airlines, road haulage, shipping routes and even rail freight -- the European Parliament appears set to throw out a draft directive on port services more decisively than it did last time in 2003.
For the measure is not only now opposed by leftwing parties and the dockers' unions. It has also lost some of the rightwing backing it had in 2003, partly because of united opposition from British MEPs to a measure that they feel ignores the different ownership structure of their country's ports.
Ports are the conduit for nearly 90 percent of the European Union's external trade. They therefore need to function efficiently, and increasingly they have. They are now more efficient overall than, for instance, U.S. ports which are still largely dominated by the longshoremen's unions. But there are black spots of resistance to competitive market forces, especially in France. So the Brussels Commission has come up with proposals to require port owners to let companies compete to provide port services ranging from piloting ships to handling cargoes, and to prevent state aid enabling public operators to compete unfairly with private ones.
Local monopoly
One big problem, however, is that this draft directive is essentially tailored for continental Europe where ports are usually owned or controlled by state or regional bodies that are also responsible for investment, and not for Britain where most ports are now entirely in private hands. The complaint of the UK port owners is that the directive could force them to let other companies use facilities that they themselves paid for. It is true that ports in the UK as everywhere else are a local monopoly. But unlike most other EU countries, the UK is an island with lots of ports that compete against each other. So a directive chiefly aimed at creating competition within ports may be irrelevant to a country with competition between ports.
Even if its current proposal dies today, the Commission will probably have yet another go at creating an EU ports policy. If so, it must meet the concern -- which is not limited to Britain -- about port owners getting an adequate return on their investment.
JAPAN
Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo, Jan. 16: The 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva is the only organization in the world set up on a permanent basis for conducting multilateral negotiations on disarmament.
Yet, discussions at the conference have remained stalled, and it has produced no tangible results for nearly 10 years.
The biggest obstacle is the way business is carried out at the conference. The decisions at its meetings are made on the principle of unanimity, causing the conference to get bogged down by a single dissenting vote.
If the Conference on Disarmament cannot put its act together on its own, alternative approaches must be sought.
There are down-to-earth alternatives, such as the General Assembly of the United Nations, which makes decisions by a majority vote, taking over the disarmament negotiations from the Conference on Disarmament.
Treaty talks
For instance, why not conduct talks on the treaty prohibiting the production of weapons-grade nuclear materials at the General Assembly?
Such a treaty would work not only to restrain the military buildup of nuclear powers but also hold in check the nuclearization of non-nuclear powers. Since such a treaty would be in the interest of many countries, compromises may be reached depending on the conditions.