'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'We have never before been so keenly aware that in this world of ours we need cooperation as intimate as that among the cells of one body.'

-- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in an April 3, 1952, speech before Congress (right), as quoted in ch. 66 of Present at the Creation (1st ed. 1969), the memoir of Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State (prior post). The Dutch monarch was the 2d woman to address a joint session of Congress. (credit for Life magazine photo) The 1st had been her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, in 1942. Juliana's statement serves to remind that neither global interdependence, nor globalization, is a new phenomenon. Nor, indeed, resistance to same. For Juliana's speech fell short of its intended purpose, to persuade a protectionist Congress to aid Europe's postwar reconstruction by easing U.S. restrictions on international trade. As Acheson put it:

[H]er words did not soften opposition to imports of Dutch cheese.

On August 6

On this day in ...
... 1942, Wilhelmina of the Netherlands became the 1st reigning queen to address Congress. The Dutch monarch (right), who had been living in exile in Britain since Nazi Germany overtook her country in 1940, declared to a joint session of the U.S. legislature that although her people

'see their families go without what they most need in food and clothing, their workers enslaved by the oppressor, ... "No Surrender" remains their constant motto.'

... 1990, acting pursuant to Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Security Council adopted Resolution 661, which imposed an embargo against Iraq and Kuwait. It thus forbade U.N. member states from "the import into their territories of all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait," as well as transactions between member states' nationals and those 2 countries. (map credit)

On August 28, ...

... 1913, the Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina opened the Peace Palace (right) at The Hague. Administered by the Carnegie Foundation, today the building is home to a number of international institutions, including the International Court of Justice.
... 1963, in what a Washington, D.C.-based reporter called "the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen," more than 200,000 women, children, and men marched for civil rights. Leaders met at the White House with a welcoming President John F. Kennedy. Among the speakers who followed a performance by Paris-expatriate-American Josephine Baker at the Lincoln Memorial was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , who delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, a video of which is posted below.

On June 15, ...

... 1907 (100 years ago today), 44 states came together at the Hague for the Second International Peace Conference, convened by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (left) at the urging of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Among the issues to be discussed at the conference, which would continue through October 15, was establishment of a mechanism for peaceful settlement of disputes.
... 1992 (15 years ago today), the U.S. Supreme Court held in United States v. Alvarez-Machain that the fact that U.S. law enforcement agents had effected the U.S. court appearance of a Mexican physician by means of a cross-border kidnapping did not bar his prosecution on federal criminal charges. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for a majority that because the U.S.-Mexico extradition treaty did not forbid forcible abduction, it did not prohibit it, and, moreover, that the method of securing presence at trial did not offend constitutional due process. Dissenting on both scores, Justice John Paul Stevens also argued that the act was contrary to international law. The case drew formal objections not only from Mexico, but also from the United States' neighbor to the north, Canada.