Siam's mid-nineteenth century King Mongkut, at least as the king was portrayed in Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam and later in stage and film versions of the story as The King and I, found many aspects of geopolitics to be a puzzle. Had he lived another hundred years or so, he could have added Cyprus to his list of "puzzlements." The Cyprus puzzle, known more generally as the Cyprus Problem, has defied solution for decades since the middle years of the twentieth century.
The superpowers, the great powers, the feuding Cypriot populations, the heritage countriesùGreece and Turkey, the European Community, and especially the United Nations have expended enormous resources in efforts to develop a solution to the Cyprus puzzle that is acceptable to all parties. Not only have all of these efforts to reach an acceptable solution come to naught, the resistance by the Cypriot populations and the heritage countries to suggested appears to intensify as time passes. Rather than bringing the parties closer together, international efforts to solve the Cyprus puzzle seem instead to draw the knot even tighter.
One problem with third party efforts to develop a solution to the Cyprus problem may be that all of the third parties, with the exception of the United Nations, continually pursue their own objectives in their proffered solutions to the Cyprus puzzle, as opposed to dealing strictly with issues central to the values and objectives of the two Cypriot populationsùthe Greek Cypriots, who now control the widely recognized state the Republic of Cyprus, and the Turkish Cypriots, who now control the Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognized only by a handful of states.
Two highly divisive forces at play globally in the contemporary period are nationalism and ethnicity. While these forces are not confronted by all states, no settled global region is immune from problems stemming from these forces. Such problems are exac...