Excerpts of editorials from newspapers around the world:
Asahi Shimbun
Asian trade negotiations
TOKYO — Japan is about to begin talks with ASEAN as a whole, including Vietnam and four other countries with which Japan has not yet had bilateral talks. Japan and Indonesia have agreed to begin trade negotiations separately. In the run-up to trade talks with those countries, Japan should not set a bad precedent by signing a poor agreement with Thailand.
China has already taken an aggressive stance by liberalizing imports of some agricultural products from ASEAN countries. China’s strategy is to win over other Asian countries by opening up its huge market of 1.3 billion people to those countries.
Japan should take advantage of its own strengths. To realize wide-ranging cooperative operations with other countries, Japan should offer cooperative programs that will enhance the other parties’ competitiveness.
If Japan, an advanced industrial country, intends to have its trading partners swallow a bitter pill, it should set an example by taking it first.
A meaningful free trade agreement should be sought to realize an “East Asia Community” Japan aims at creating.
Aftenposten
Pope Benedict XVI
OSLO — The selection of Joseph Ratzinger as pope has been met with both joy and resignation. Joy because Ratzinger, the new Pope Benedict XVI, is respected, learned and clearly capable. … Resignation because he is seen as a man of yesterday.
Benedict XVI wants reconciliation with all churches, and dialogue with all religions, right and needed bridge-building in a globalized world. If we are to judge by his past, he will also carry on the late pope’s conservative view of women and homosexuality, his hardheaded opposition to contraception and abortion, as well as his determined defense of celibacy.
Questions like these put the church at odds with widespread beliefs in the West.
Corriere della Sera
Europe and the Balkans
MILAN, Italy — Proud of being the biggest and most passive exporter of democracy in the world, Europe has not changed tactics with its neighbors. … From Croatia, to Bosnia, to Serbia-Montenegro, to Macedonia and Albania, they all have a possibility of entering the [European] Union if, and when, the respective governments have satisfied precise conditions of legality and of democracy. … But the point is to avoid that the Balkans become once again a turbulent area, if not a war zone, in the middle of the EU.
Europe has already done something. … But everyone knows that the most important challenge arrives now, with a name that is not very reassuring: Kosovo.
It is clear that the international community, with Europe as a leader, has decided to intervene. Peacemakers are already visualizing a formal opening of negotiations between June and September. But the road is covered with land mines, and in the Balkans this expression has often had a literal sense.
Mail and Guardian
’God’s Rottweiler’
BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa — Britain’s Guardian newspaper remarked this week that the election of Pope Benedict XVI, formerly German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “will clamp the cold hand of foreboding round the hearts of all who care about the developing world.” Indeed. It was also a bitter disappointment for forward-looking Catholics who want their church to contribute to the material upliftment of the world’s hungry, homeless, ragged and disease-afflicted billions, rather than merely minister to their immortal souls.
Nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” and “the Panzer Cardinal,” Ratzinger comes out of Catholicism’s most intellectually rigid, Eurocentric and authoritarian-hierarchical traditions. Believing the church has an absolute monopoly on truth, these denounce all other perspectives as false and all internal reform initiatives as “relativism.”
The cardinals’ conclave made a safe choice, but one that betrayed the clear majority of the faithful.
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