Friday, October 06, 2006

Blogspotter Bildt new minister for Foreign Affairs in Sweden

Carl Bildt, fellow blogger and blogspotter as well as former Swedish Prime Minister, has a new job. He is the minister for Foreign Affairs in the new centre-right coalition government.

After leaving the Prime Ministership, he had a string of international jobs in the Balkans, begining with the job as the EU special representative to the former yugoslavia, Co-Chairman at the Dayton Peace Conference, High Representative in Bosnia Herzegovina and as Kofi Annan´s special envoy for the Balkans.

He´s also one of the signatories of the new ICG appeal for a relaunching of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He, togheter with Jimmy Carter among others was an observer at the parliamentary elections in Palestine in late January. He´s been somewhat critical of the way Washington been handling the region since the establishment of the Hamas government:

¨And Washington seems to be lost. There has not been much of coherent and long-term policy visible there since the Hamas victory in the Palestine Authority elections in January. It’s all been reaction to events – and reactions often without much of long-term purpose.

One has not been explicitly supporting everything coming out of Israel – but neither has there been much of a serious policy effort to fend off the deterioration that, the one way or the other, was in the cards. Policy has been seriously and dangerously drifting.

And now the guns of July are blazing.¨

The swedish foreign policy is in the best possible care. Bildt will probably continue the traditional way of searching for consensus in swedish foreign policy. EU will be even more accentuated as the main forum for Sweden on the global arena. He made a point of pledging allegiance to the founding idea of the postwar european project by stating the importance of the EU in bringing about peace, reconciliation and freedom in the world.

Congratulations and the very best of luck!