http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182659 Protesting used to mean turning up on cold, rainy days with a badly-made placard and hoping others would be there too. It was a serious, if sometimes fruitless, business that often ended up with complaints against the police, fellow protesters and the way of the world. But in the past decade, a new wave of organisations has emerged. They have taken the arguments online, making involvement much easier – and a lot more social, in a digital way.  Dot-orgs such as Avaaz, MoveOn and 38Degrees have sprung up apparently from nowhere, launching campaigns about the Iraq war, the environment, whales, bees, Burma, Syria and everything else you can imagine.  Advocates believe the process will revolutionise social activism for a new age, and change the way we think about protest and political involvement. Critics say it will never be anything more than a waste of time, a chance for the idle – the ‘slacktivists’ – to pose as real activists.  It all began in a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley, California in 1998. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the married digital entrepreneurs famous for inventing the flying toaster screen-saver, were complaining about the planned impeachment of Bill Clinton over his sexual misadventures in the White House. They overheard a nearby couple having the same conversation. A few days later, they emailed a petition to a hundred or so friends calling on Congress to censure Clinton and ‘move on’. Within a week, it had 100,000 signatures. Within a month, more than 300,000, according to Wired magazine.  MoveOn failed to stop the impeachment, though Clinton was acquitted and remained in the White House. But Boyd and Blades had the technological know-how and the money to continue after George W. Bush succeeded him. They had sold their software company for $14 million in 1997. MoveOn turned its membership’s attention to environmental and civil liberties issues. But it was the Iraq war which proved the fund-raising possibilities of digital activism. Boyd and Blades decided to publish an anti-war advertisement in The New York Times. In three days, they had raised nearly half a million dollars. A key recruit to MoveOn was a young radical named Eli Pariser. Alarmed by the turn of events after September 11, 2001, Pariser sent an email urging a restrained response. ‘Pariser woke up one morning to find 300 email messages in his inbox,’ according to The New York Times. Pariser was to become excutive director of MoveOn and high priest of the movement. MoveOn brought together traditional activist tools with electronic and digital protest and a democratic, grassroots feel tied to high-profile events. In the ‘Virtual March on Washington’, more than a million Americans sent electronic messages to their congressional representatives and senators. Opponents of war could find each other quickly on the web, and organise to e-mail, call, or meet up. It didn’t take months to get together.  It was an exciting and motivating prospect for any-one who wanted to become involved in social activism. The post-September 11, Bush-Blair era was a good time for young progressives to get together globally. The dot-com crash of 2000-2001 may also have had a positive impact, as the dot-orgs were flooded with job applicants and donations of old computers and office equipment.  MoveOn inspired others. In 2005, GetUp! was founded in Australia by Jeremy Heimans and David Madden. It described itself as ‘a new independent political movement to build a progressive Australia’. It ran a campaign to bombard Australian senators with emails that said: ‘I’m sending you this message be-cause I want you to know that I’m watching.’ Avaaz, ultimately the largest and most global of the dot-orgs, also came out of MoveOn and its alumni. Individual co-founders included Ricken Patel (Avaaz’s Canadian executive director); Tom Pravda, a former British diplomat; Tom Perriello, who had worked as a legal adviser to the UN and related bodies in Sierra Leone, Darfur and Afghanistan and later became a US congressman; Pariser, formerly of MoveOn; Andrea Woodhouse, formerly of the United Nations and the World Bank; and Australians Madden and Heimans.  38Degrees, the next in the family, was launched in May 2009 as a British parallel to GetUp! Founders included Ben Brandzel, formerly of MoveOn; Gemma Mortensen of Crisis Action; Paul Hilder, also of Avaaz; and Benedict Southworth of the World Development Movement.  Most of these people had worked with government or international organisations abroad. Madden had served as an army officer, and worked for the World Bank in East Timor and the UN in Indonesia. Heimans had worked for McKinsey. Others had been with NGOs. Patel, for example, had been with Internation-al Crisis Group in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan. Several had been at elite academic institutions: Madden and Heimans at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; Woodhouse and Pravda at Balliol College, Oxford; Patel had been to both.  Early funding for some of the groups came from George Soros, the currency trader and international investor, lending credibility to a kind of ‘Progressive International’ conspiracy theory. But this charge doesn’t stand up. Avaaz liberated itself from large external funding quickly, and now relies entirely on members.  Meeting those named quickly reveals some commonalities. They are all passionate internationalists. They tend to be pragmatic about means: government, NGO, private sector – they are not doctrinaire. They have faith in technology – but only as a means.  The tools have varied, but there is one that is key: blast e-mail, based on their large address list and techniques polished by the direct-marketing industry. They test campaigns rigorously on sections of their member base, to see which fly and which fail to catch on. They test the wording of e-mails and subject lines using ‘A/B testing’ – sending out two versions of an appeal, and seeing which version spreads most rapidly. The track opens (was the e-mail opened?) and clicks (did the reader click through to the petition or fundraiser?). Their aim is to get campaigns to go viral, and spread rapidly. The wording of each e-mail is carefully scrutinised: they use inclusive, rousing language (‘let’s show the rich and powerful that we won’t be shut up!’) and images with impact.  There are some grand claims for the movements. As The New York Times said: ‘Dot-org politics represents the latest manifestation of a recurrent American faith that there is something inherently good in the vox populi. Democracy is at its purest and best when the largest number of voices are heard, and every institution that comes between the people and their government – the press, the political pros, the fund-raisers – taints the process.' The organisational model is light, decentralised and cheap. In 2011, Avaaz recorded income of $6.7 million, which included $890,000 on salaries (about 13 per cent) and $184,000 on fundraising. Its offices were two crumbling rooms above Pret A Manger, close to Union Square in New York. Avaaz is a low-overhead organisa-tion with high operational leverage (it does a lot with not much money and not many employees), and high fundraising leverage (it raises a lot of money without spending much).  It has what in the tech business is called scaleability: it grew very rapidly indeed without needing to in- crease staffing or infrastructure. Other large NGOs are keeping a close eye on Avaaz in particular; partly from fascination, partly from envy.  That doesn’t mean the dot-orgs attract uncritical admiration. Much of the criticism of these movements has come from the Left, which sometimes sees them as a way for the idle and unthoughtful to feel radical.  ‘The trouble is that this model of activism uncriti-cally embraces the ideology of marketing,’ wrote Micah White, a US social activist and writer, in the Guardian. ‘It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus, everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into clicktivism.’ Malcom Gladwell, author of books on social psy-chology including The Tipping Point, dismissed internet activism as incapable of getting things done.  ‘Social networks are effective at increasing participation – by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires,’ he argued in The New Yorker.  ‘Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority . . . Because networks don’t have a centralised leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?’ Both White and Gladwell see this as a betrayal of protest.  Adherents of the model say the critics fail to see the revolution. ‘Anyone who has read a newspaper or watched a news programme over the past year should understand that while these things may start exploding through networks online or on mobile phones, they lead to earth-shaking social change in governments and corporations, as well as hearts and mind,’ says Paul Hilder, formerly of Avaaz and 38Degrees, and now with Change.org.  ‘The discussions that took off in the coffee shops and pamphlets of 18th-century Europe and America weren’t just talktivism. That early public sphere was the crucible of revolutions that defined constitutional orders that have spanned centuries. The exciting thing is that today’s transformations may in time prove to be on a similar scale.’ For many people, the apotheosis of the digital activism trend – and its excesses – was provided by the Kony 2012 campaign, a video on YouTube directed against Joseph Kony, the murderous head of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, that went viral in March. The video was the fastest growing social video campaign ever, attracting more than 100 million views in six days. It brought global attention to a serious issue, on a scale previously only associated with the likes of singer Susan Boyle.  The NGO Invisible Children, which led the campaign, attracted brickbats along with the praise – people who saw it as facile, misleading and even dangerous. ‘Invisible Children has turned the myopic worldview of the adolescent – “if I don’t know about it, then it doesn’t exist, but if I care about it, then it is the most important thing in the world” – into a foreign policy prescription,’ wrote Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub, two international lawyers, at the website of The Atlantic. They spoke for many.  Most had mixed opinions – admiration for the scale but not the content. ‘Maybe Jason Russell’s web-based film Kony 2012 . . . can’t be considered great documentary-making. But as a piece of digital polemic and digital activism, it is quite simply brilliant,’ accord-ing to Peter Bradshaw, film critic of the Guardian. But, he added, it was ‘partisan, tactless and very bold’ and could be seen as just ‘a way of making US college kids feel good about themselves’.  This argument will be worked out over the next few years. Some of the early fights went to the critics; the online brigade have had the last few rounds, though. Technology is moving on and apparently buttressing the dot-orgs, not the naysayers. The Arab spring protests and the ‘colour revolutions’ all relied on technology – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – as instruments of coordination, communication, campaigning and action. Governments responded, stepping up efforts to block, intercept, fake and censor. And others are using the same technologies: petitions, surveys and blast e-mails are increasingly part of the armoury for any activist or political organisation. The political bat-tlefield is increasingly digital. Other organisations are emerging that have similar tactics if different profiles, and are adapting the tools of online activism. Even Downing Street does e-petitions these days  The dot-orgs are also growing up and moving beyond an online-only presence: indeed they would say that online was never the point. In Syria, Avaaz provided cameras and satellite communication gear to help the opposition to get its story out. This isn’t coincidence. Patel’s movement may for many people symbolise technology and geekdom, but Patel is much more interested in what technology can actually achieve. The organisation has for some years experimented with the use of new technologies to help activists communicate, broadcast, witness and report atrocities and bring in intervention.  It would be surprising if the tools the organisations use now didn’t become mainstream. ‘In a decade from now, I look forward to a time when networked campaigning will have become much more pervasive and everyday, rather than exotic,’ says Hilder. ‘We’ll all be involved in hacking the world into better shape, from the supply chains of the companies we buy from to our own behaviours. The power balance between citizens and institutions will be much more equal, as will the balance between citizens and elites.’ And this is the key to understanding the goals and trajectories of the dot-orgs. Perhaps the most signifi-cant thing about them is their style and the causes they champion: increasingly global, trans-border, and outside the traditional framework of political parties. By reducing the barriers to participation, Avaaz, MoveOn, Getup!, 38Degrees, Change.org and the others are bringing in a generation that feels a desire to get involved in world affairs, but which conventional structures couldn’t handle. International negotiations, global corporate power-plays, vast environmental challenges, clamp downs by government thugs – these are all things that seem too far removed from our lives for us to affect, but the dot-orgs want to bring you into them. For those who subscribe, it is a heady sense of involvement, and a window into a world of possibility. The solutions can sometimes seem simplistic, but the aspiration – to inform public opinion across borders and to engage in search of a better world – is mobilising millions: at least as far as their keyboards, and that really is something.  http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182659 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:16:59 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182664 What would happen if we suddenly lost access to the internet? What if the online services we have come to rely upon were unavailable? And is this too far-fetched or a real possibility?  Regimes in countries such as Burma, Nepal and Iran have suspended or severely limited internet service at politically advantageous moments. The 2011 Egyptian revolution is the most recent and dramatic example of a government isolating an entire country from the internet. It happened in late January when, after several days of mass protests across the country, authorities made phone calls to the handful of internet service providers. Within minutes Egypt had disappeared from the internet, and mobile phone service was drastically reduced.  The revolution was facilitated in part by information and communication technologies – the internet, mobile phones, social networking sites etc – which the government severed with ease. Though the blackout lasted for five days, it did not stop the protests. In fact by closing off all virtual means of expression, it may have encouraged people out on to the streets to voice their discontent.  People around the world are asking if the same thing could happen in their country. As the internet has spread and become more complex, shutting it down at a global level has been made almost impossible. The underlying infrastructure is sufficiently widespread, interconnected and resilient to nudge such an idea into the realm of science fiction.  Yet it is clearly possible for a government to exert varying degrees of control over the internet connections that cross their country’s border. Duplicating the Egyptian blackout in a country such as the United States or Britain is technically possible but highly unlikely for several reasons:  First, there are practical barriers to a blackout, as the internet infrastructure in most countries is almost entirely owned and operated by the private sector. Egypt has a relatively small number of mobile phone and internet service providers, making the blackout a simple affair. Countries with more competitive or independent telecom sectors are more resistant to attempts – be it from hackers or the government – to shut down, filter or otherwise meddle with the internet. Although complicity with repressive regimes is bad for business, telecom companies are often under legal and contractual obligations to comply. Any deviation could result in forfeiture of contracts, operating licences or long-term investments in the country.  Second, the political costs – domestic and international – would be high, particularly in countries with even vaguely democratic governments. Preventing access to the internet would be perceived as highly repressive and a denial of a service that is increasingly considered to be a human right. It would also be likely to inflame anti-government sentiment and galvanise protesters.  Third, the economic damage would be immense. For this reason – more than any other – a blackout is highly unlikely, particularly for an extended period. All organisations that rely on the internet would be forced to suspend business. Financial institutions would be unable to trade with the outside world, businesses would be isolated from supply chains, and any remaining lines of communication would be swamped as e-mail ground to a halt.  Even under extreme circumstances the Egyptian government could only sustain the blackout for five days. In many countries the internet is a core component of the critical national infrastructure, and there are fewer and fewer alternatives to the services it provides. Take it away – even through the use of legitimate emergency powers – and trouble will ensue.  For these reasons and others, a complete internet blackout is unlikely in most countries around the world – democratic or not. A localised ‘solution’ is more probable, as in August, 2011, when the San Francisco transit agency turned off mobile phone service at several stations to limit communication between people protesting against the police shooting of a homeless man. In the aftermath of last summer’s riots in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said that his government was looking at ‘whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services’ – by which he meant Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger. In both instances, cooler heads prevailed as public criticism mounted and unfavourable comparisons were drawn with countries such as China and Russia.  The lesson here is that governments of all kinds are willing to consider or implement drastic measures to stay in power, albeit in different ways according to varying political norms. Fears of hackers or cyber terrorists disabling or degrading the internet are over hyped. In reality the greater danger comes from misguided, short-sighted or reactive government policies. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182664 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:34:45 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182667 This promises to be a very political year. Elections are taking place in many of the most economically powerful and geopolitically significant countries following last year’s wave of mass protests.  Shifting public opinion – perhaps at its most volatile for decades – will play a crucial role in the year ahead and beyond as the relationship between government, business and society re-balances. With declining public trust in government and a strong ap-petite to unseat those in power, the potential for change through the ballot box – or via unrest in the streets – is high. Forecasting electoral outcomes may prove more challenging than usual because of the shifting socio-economic and political context in which new actors and ideas are vying for the support.  Historical comparisons are not much help. After all, many advanced economies are experiencing the longest period of low growth in decades, bringing with it stagnating living standards and rising unemployment. With so much at stake, understanding the political context will be more important than picking winners.  The majority of those who triumph will have limited room for manoeuvre and be obliged to march down a path of fiscal tightening, or risk downgrades and the wrath of the bond market. In these circumstances politics in the advanced economies is better explained along debtor v creditor lines, rather than traditional concepts of left and right.  For most leaders, staying as close as possible to the pre-crisis status quo will be the best they can achieve, while resisting the structural reforms that markets and rating agencies demand or the changes the public craves. Disappointment seems inevitable, given this disconnect between market and public expectations. With the leaders of many of the world’s most powerful countries struggling to maintain support amid the economic downturn, there could be an increased focus on short-term populist, nationalist and protectionist policies instead of comprehensive long-term reforms.  A prolonged period of declining living standards could provide fertile ground for more radical alternatives over time. Among the key political outcomes evident in recent months is the politicisation of fiscal and budgetary issues by the Right, historically more concerned with immigration and culture.  Capitalism and democracy have prevailed, but budgets, benefits and taxation are the new political battlegrounds.  History suggests that major reforms are rarely attempted in the aftermath of a crisis. The 2007-2009 global financial maelstrom seems unlikely to prove an exception. In the past governments may have been tempted to indulge in fiscal loosening in the run-up to an election. Today budgetary constraints make the notion of ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’ through fiscal largesse a remote prospect for most leaders. In this environment, the potential for self-inflicted policy failure remains the most significant risk, though muddling through is the most likely outcome. Before 2008, politics was not a major influence on stock markets; now it forms one of the key drivers. Resolution of the current political uncertainty, particularly in the eurozone, could help improve company and investor sentiment, prompting job creation and inventory replenishment as well as providing more immediate relief by narrowing bond spreads and reducing borrowing costs. Yet between the upcoming French elections, new Greek elections, the pending Irish referendum, heightened tensions in the Middle East and the prospect of four years of legislative gridlock in Washington, there are numerous sources of political risk in the months ahead that will increase uncertainty precisely when investors and citizens are looking for decisive action from their leaders.  Business is as globalised as ever, but politics remains firmly national. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182667 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:43:50 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182661 Clinton’s impeachment MoveOn began in 1998 with a campaign to prevent the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The group had a one-sentence petition – Congress must immediately censure President Clinton and ‘move on’ to pressing issues facing the country – which half a million people signed. It failed: Congress impeached Clinton in November, though he was acquitted. 2003 Iraq war  MoveOn had its most dramatic period of growth before and during the US-led invasion of Iraq. It circulated an anti-war petition calling for ‘No War on Iraq’, which was delivered to members of Congress before a crucial vote, co-ordinated letter-writing campaigns, helped form the Win Without War coalition, and launched a controversial TV commercial. In February 2003, it sponsored a ‘Virtual March on Washington’. The war went ahead anyway. Burma regime Avaaz was founded in 2007, and one of its earliest campaigns was over anti-regime protests in Burma and the crackdown that followed. Nearly a million Avaaz members signed an electronic petition, and thousands donated more than $325,000 in four days. Much of the money went on technology to help the opposition ‘break the blackout’ on the media. The group collaborated with the older and bigger Open Society Institute. Global climate Avaaz, 38Degrees, and GetUp! all campaigned to get agreement at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference. They worked together with other organizations, in part through the TckTckTck group for climate action. The conference failed; it generated some scepticism about working with other groups in this way, and about electronic activism as the only lever.  Uganda gay rights  Avaaz mounted a campaign against anti-gay legislation in Uganda in 2010 that would have made homosexuality punishable by death. Its petition attracted more than 450,000 signatures and the Bill was dropped. It was revived in modified form last year, with some key provisions – including the death penalty – removed. Murdoch’s empire Avaaz and 38Degrees ran a series of campaigns against Rupert Murdoch and his corporations, over the News of the World and his ambition to buy out BskyB, the satellite broadcaster. These included internet campaigning, but also leafleting and street actions. Their campaign helped to mobilise and give shape to opposition to Murdoch. The News Corporation takeover proposal for BSkyB was withdrawn and the News of the World closed down.  Syria Avaaz was slow to move into Arab politics, though it had campaigned actively in Israel. But it reacted quickly to the Arab Spring, raising money and providing backing for protest movements, giving them satellite phones and other communication equipment. It focused on Syria with petitions and financial support. Avaaz claims to have delivered more than $2 million of medical equipment to the worst affected areas to keep underground hospitals going as well as setting up a network of more than 400 citizen journalists across the country. It has also helped smuggle in foreign journalists. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182661 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:23:27 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182662 Molly Solomons, 26, social activist My name is Molly. I have a full-time job working for a homeless charity, I pay my taxes, I have a brother with autism and come from a single-parent family. I have been involved in organising protests for the past year against the unnecessary cuts that are being enforced by the coalition. UK Uncut takes direct action against the cuts. Our protests are based around creativity, civil disobedience and realistic alternatives to the cuts such as clamping down on tax avoidance by big businesses and stopping subsidies to the banking sector that caused this crisis. Our movement is non-hierarchal, as we believe that the current model of western leadership is corrupt, undemocratic, patriarchal and will cause global unrest to continue until it changes. We believe Vodafone has dodged £6 billion in tax. My mum lost her job because of the cuts. This is not fair, plain and simple, and that is why I organise protests to go into Vodafone shops and demand they pay their tax – to have my voice heard, feel a part of the movement opposed to these cuts and feel an enormous sense of empowerment as I stand up for a fairer society, for my family and for our futures. Yevgenia Chirikova, 37, environmental activist Five years ago I was walking in the Khimki forest, in Moscow’s green belt, when I saw red markings on the trees. The forest was going to be chopped down to make way for a toll highway from Moscow to St Petersburg. I had not been involved in politics – I run a small business with my husband – but I felt I had to stop this. I believe the road does not need to go through the forest, and that the contract is corrupt. We managed to get the bulldozers stopped, but since Putin’s ‘re-election’, things have got much worse. The bulldozers have now returned to work. An environmental activist who was arrested for protesting against development of the Black Sea coastline now faces five years in jail. Foreign governments should not be congratulating Putin. They should pass laws like the Bill before the US Senate in honour of Sergei Magnitsky – the lawyer who died in jail after exposing a $230 million tax scam involving senior tax and interior ministry officials – to ban corrupt Russians from entering the country or using US banks. We cannot change anything at the top, but we can start from the bottom, by getting honest people elected to local councils. Atiaf Alwazir, 32, political activist  I knew early on that the fight for freedom came with a heavy price. My grandfather was executed for his participation in the failed revolution of 1948 calling for the rule of law through the creation of a constitution. My father and uncles were imprisoned at a young age and have been in exile for years from Yemen while continuing their political activities.Given my family history, it was inevitable that I would pursue such a path. Anyone who sees the mass corruption, poverty, gross inequality, and injustice in Yemen would do the same.Since the beginning of the revolution in January 2011, I have been deeply involved in calls for change through various means. First, by participating in the peaceful movement as a citizen journalist/blogger where I am documenting and analysing the current situation in my blog and contributing to media outlets. Second, I am involved in the local Support Yemen video advocacy campaign to promote social justice. Finally, my colleagues and I are working to start a library in the Old City of Sana’a as a space for young people to expand their knowledge, enjoy cultural activities, and gain vocational skills. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182662 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:25:43 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182655 The market economy model invented and practised by the West is no longer working. The East is growing with such speed that it threatens to obliterate the West. Such warnings as these are often delivered in discussions of capitalism in crisis and the rise of the East. But in pursuing prosperity, we are all following the western model. Here there is no East v West divide. In fact we are all West. China is the dominant country in the eastern camp in such discussions. Its huge economic success during the past three decades is singularly due to the adoption of a market economy. Deng Xiaoping’s genius was to recognise that the Chinese were a people particularly suited to the market economy. The Chinese don’t follow a religion. They pour all their energy into making their family prosperous by working hard, saving as much as they can, and trying their best to educate their children. It turns out that these are just the traits needed to drive a thriving market economy. China and a number of other Asian economies have proved this. So what has caused such anxiety in the West? One factor is that there has been a shift in the terms of trade between the West and East in the past few decades. Once, a computer made in a western country could be exchanged for 10,000 pairs of socks made in China; today it can be exchange only for about 500 pairs. Today a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 320 can still be exchanged for about 20 million pairs of socks made in China, but China may soon be able to produce its own planes. This trend in altering the terms of trade, while unfavourable to the West, is inevitable and irreversible. Neither has politics served the West well during the past decade. In the face of domestic and international challenges, politicians chose asset or debt bubbles to assuage citizens’ pain instead of making the tough adjustments needed to reposition their economies. When the bubbles burst and adjustments became imperative, most parts of the West were experiencing a prolonged period of weak political leadership. Hence the malaise we see today. Watching the rapid and sustained growth in the East, some in the West argue that China practises a different type of market economy because it has a big state-owned sector and a strong government. In my view, it is rather meaningless to compare the growth rate of the Chinese economy, whose GDP per capita is only $4,500, to those of western countries. China clearly will not be able to sustain such a high growth rate when its development level approaches that of the West. But I do think the Chinese economy would be healthier if its state-owned sector was not so large. A strong government suits China well at this stage of its development. It reduces transaction costs significantly in sectors such as infrastructure. Its strong government also happens to be a pretty wise one, as it has consistently avoided financial crises and class warfare that plague so many western countries.  The West cannot adopt China’s particular form of government, however. There is a 2,000-year history of strong central government and, more recently, 150 years of political chaos behind the current Chinese government model. The West doesn’t have this. But, in my view the West does not have to alter its political system in any fundamental way. Liberal democracy is a tried and true system that unleashes creativity and protects prosperity. The present dysfunctional politics in the West largely has to do with a long period of complacency, not the political system. As the citizens have woken up to the realities of life, politicians will have to behave responsibly very soon. The “all-West” world augurs well for everyone. All the West has to do is to cut some welfare spending, save and invest more, and better educate its young people. There is evidence that these changes are already beginning to happen.  The West’s superiority in technologies, design and luxury goods, clean environment, higher education, and healthcare is still formidable. China may be able to produce a competing model of the Boeing 737 by pulling together the country’s resources, but it is inconceivable that it could produce a Boeing 787 or Airbus 380. There is no reason for the West to panic and abandon what has worked well for centuries.  As China and other countries in the East move up the income ladder, their imports from the West will increase exponentially. All a country in the West has to ask itself is: ‘Do I make some products that the East absolutely wants?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, then it can rest assured. For the countries in the East, their citizens will continue to work harder and save more than their counterparts in the West due to their lower level of income. As a result, these countries will enjoy a labour cost and capital availability advantage for years to come. They can look toward to more prosperity in the future because access to international markets and technologies is relatively open in today’s globalised world. So why is there so much gloom? Isn’t this the world we all want? http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182655 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:17:54 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182656 Diplomacy has had a poor run this century. Syria is just the latest example of how two sloppy doctrines, the War on Terror as fashioned by George W. Bush and the Liberal Interventionism of Tony Blair, have led to an unintended consequence: it has become harder to negotiate the compromises needed to end conflicts. This is in part because these two concepts encourage all sides to dig in and resist compromise. Kofi Annan’s new diplomatic mission appears to be bumping up against this. Encouraged by Nato support to Libyan rebels, Syria’s opposition, despite being on the losing end of a military struggle with the Assad regime, continues to anticipate outside support to reverse that. So no need to negotiate with a regime that had ruthlessly killed thousands of civilians. On the other side, like so many Arab regimes since 9/11, President Bashar Al-Assad has been quick to hide behind that last defence of dictators, that its opponents were terrorists. From Cairo to Bahrain, this has been trundled out as the excuse for oppression. For Assad, the fact that he is not granted this excuse by western critics is seen as more a matter of double standards than facts on the ground. So, cynically echoing American claims since 2001, he has insisted there is no negotiating with terrorists.Kofi Annan, as UN and Arab League negotiator, needs to pick his way through these doctrinal landmines. Rightly, he has focused on a clear sequence: stop the fighting, allow humanitarian access, and then pursue a political negotiation to find a path for Syria’s future. In Syria’s case, ending violence is a more necessary pre-condition for negotiation than in most. This is because Assad’s continuing support from a substantial minority of his countrymen stems from his manipulation of the fear of terrorist violence and chaos if he falls. As leader of an Alawite Shia minority regime with secular, Christian and merchant allies, fear has been the glue that has held them together against a Sunni majority. Once guns are put down and it is possible to reduce the beleaguered defensiveness of his supporters and show them that they have a future with their rights protected in a post-regime future, the president’s biggest card is gone. Unchecked, the conflict will metastasise across the region. Qatari and Saudi Arabian support for the rebels will lead regime allies, including Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, to step up their trouble-making.The regime may have reason to prefer a ceasefire and dialogue to its current crackdown. Despite its military superiority, all but its blindest stalwarts know its days are numbered. The degree of opposition from Arab neighbours, other than the Shia regimes in Iran and Iraq, the western determination to force accountability for the crimes against Syria’s own citizens, offset admittedly by support in the UN Security Council from an increasingly embarrassed Russia and China, is not a scenario that in today’s world regimes come back from. The web of international human rights and formal as well as social media exposure has provided a form of global accountability not there in 1982 when the President’s father was able to get away with a similar crackdown.For the would-be survivors in the regime there are three choices: opportunistic defections to jobs abroad; for the braver ones, publicly joining the opposition; or a negotiated settlement that allows them a Syrian future. Such a settlement will require Annan to negotiate several further minefields left behind by recent international behaviour. The first is that the Chinese and Russians have to be coaxed out of their post-Libya funk. The blatant stretching of the UN Security Council resolution – from protecting civilians from Gaddafi to successfully pushing for bloody regime change – has left Beijing and Moscow wary of collaboration and so effectively a prop to Assad. This is damaging both countries’ broader standing in the region. It is also threatening their longer term interests in Syria when the inevitable change does come. Russia particularly, which has close ties to the top levels of the Syrian government, has much to gain from a negotiated solution that maintains a share in power for at least parts of the current establishment.We need to seize hold of the unfashionable idea that diplomacy can do what Nato, arms supplies, intervention or outside bluster cannot do: ease Syria through to a democratic, law-based future. But to do that, there needs to be a united international community that together forces both sides to sit down around Kofi Annan’s negotiating table and compromise. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182656 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:25:24 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182728 The era of the Fourth Generation of Chinese Communist Party leadership is coming to an end. Hu Jintao as Party Secretary and President, and Wen Jiabao as Premier, have presided over an era in which China’s economy has increased in size by 40 per cent. As a factory of growth, the People’s Republic of China of President Hu and Priemier Wen has been one of the marvels of the world.  Hu Jintao’s contribution has been to maintain consensus within the Party elite at a time of great social change. To have maintained a unified Party line despite the CCP’s history of fractures and infighting is no mean achievement.  On the negative side, the outgoing leadership has not managed to repair the deep inequalities in modern China. This is a country with 35 dollar billionaires, but 150 million people living below the poverty line of $2 a day, and 24 million people malnourished. Despite making the reduction of inequality a priority when they came to power in 2002, China is, according to the Gini coefficient – an internationally accepted measure of inequality – a more unequal society today than it was in 1984. In terms of politics, this has been an era in which little meaningful reform has taken place. Village elections have not been developed to township level; there are still limited means by which people can participate in decision-making, and the Party remains opaque and controlling.  Whoever gets promoted at the Communist Party Congress in October, the process needs to produce three things: it has to appear well-planned and seamless; it has to build a group of leaders who are able to work together, whatever their private differences; and it has to give these leaders domestic and international legitimacy. Chinese leaders are marked off in generations, with Mao Zedong leading the first, Deng Xiaoping the second and Jiang Zemin the third. This, the transition to the Fifth Generation, is the first time that a leadership change has happened in China without the involvement of a political strong man. Hu Jintao, for instance, was widely seen before 2002 as being Deng Xiaoping’s choice despite the fact that the patriarch had died in 1997. This time, there is no commanding figure whose support carries real weight.  For a system in which risk and uncertainty are unwelcome, this leadership transition involves more variables than previous ones. Hence the care with which the Party is preparing for the Congress, and the cautious nature of policymaking and political behaviour in Beijing at the moment.  Candidates for power The people well placed to be promoted at the 18th Congress in October have some common characteristics which set them apart from their predecessors. They are less dominated by technocrats, with more social scientists, lawyers and political scientists among them: Li Keqiang, for instance, who is likely to be the next premier, has a degree in law; Xi Jinping, who is the front runner to be party secretary and replace Hu, has a PhD in social sciences; and there are also literature and language graduates.  They have no strong military links. None has served in the army, and only one, Xi Jinping, has connections to the armed forces through his work as the private secretary of a senior military leader in the 1980s. They are highly educated, with many having doctorates or at least master’s degrees. Despite this, very few of them have studied or lived abroad. They are better communicators than most of the current Standing Committee of the Party’s Politburo, and they are far less likely to remember the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, when China nearly imploded, and which left such a mark on Hu Jintao and the people around him.  In addition to this, they have all been through a long training process, either as leaders of provinces, or central ministries. Their mindset has been framed by a China that has only been getting wealthier and stronger. They have far less political capital than their predecessors. And around each contender for a leadership position there are networks, emanating from their family, organisations they have been associated with, provinces they have worked in and state-owned enterprises in which they have been active. It is through the strength of their networks that they have attained a position from which they can be elevated to the highest levels of party power.  The pressure for reform This year marks a potential sea change in policymaking priorities. Since 1978, the objective stated by every leader has been economic growth. This is the area in which the party gets judged. The Fourth Generation of leaders has maintained this, placing stability and the building of a more prosperous society as their key goals. However, since 2001 Chinese society has grown increasingly contentious. There were nine million petitions to the central government in 2009. Some estimates in China say that there are as many as 180,000 mass incidents each year. Disputes about land rights and the payment of pensions have caused much of this unrest. China is currently in ferment, with huge social complexity.  We are likely to see in the future a leadership having to deal with far thornier issues of social reform and change. While the overarching macro economic policy framework is set out in the 12th Five-Year programme that will run from 2011 to 2015, there is likely to be a shift in the handling of legal reform in order to deal with social unrest more efficently. The role of civil society, which is becoming increasingly important in delivering the services that government once dealt with, needs clarifying and to be given proper legal status. And there needs to be reform of the Communist Party’s own internal governance.  We will see an era in which, as China becomes a middle-income country by 2020, it will need to deliver social and political structures to stave off internal instability. In 2010, the Chinese government said that it spent $93 billion on internal security – $1 billion more than its publicly stated national defence budget. This level of spending suggests a state often at odds with its own people.  In terms of specific policies, the new leadership will have to look at possible fiscal rebalancing between the centre, which raises most taxes, and provinces, which are spending them. The current arrangement maintains power in the centre, but means that decisions about the healthcare and education budgets of provinces thousands of miles from Beijing are decided by the central bureaucracy with little knowledge of local conditions. With an ageing population, fewer people of working age, and a highly fragmented national system, pensions are another area in need of reform. Social welfare is also critical to reassure the rising middle class about access to healthcare and education, so they can become western-style consumers rather than perpetual savers. A final issue is tax reform. Most of central tax comes from state-owned enterprises, with private individuals contributing only six per cent of the tax take. The development of an economy in which Chinese people become taxpayers will have a profound impact on people’s views of their citizen status. Three future scenarios There are three broad scenarios for the future. The first, which is preferred by the Party, is gradualism, in which China over 20 to 30 years develops its economy to such an extent that it is able to deal with the challenges outlined above. The second is crisis-led change, some-thing that has occurred many times in China’s history, with explosions of revolt and widespread chaos. Certainly Chinese leaders take the threat of crisis seriously. Finally, there is the scenario in which the new leadership, within two to three years, undertakes quick and bold reforms. We have to remember that in 1978 not a single western commentator foresaw the changes the Chinese government was about to make in its Reform and Opening Up policy. Perhaps we are about to see a new leadership make similar bold strides.  Of course, the risk of this going wrong in a society as complex and large as China’s cannot be overlooked. But from many directions, Chinese policymakers are talking about the need for reform. The question for the new leadership as it settles in is: does it have the political will to approach these complex issues, many of which will involve profound changes in society?   How the new leadership is chosen The transition to a Fifth Generation of leaders started in 2007 when new figures were promoted into the Standing Committee of the CCP, with the clear intention of grooming them for the highest slots at the next Congress. The new members include Xi Jinping, who is expected to be the next party leader, and Li Keqian, who is likely to be premier.  One of the functions of the Party Congress is to vote in a new 350-strong Central Committee, which in turn votes in a full Politburo of about 24 members, and the Standing Committee. This currently has nine members but could increase to 11 in October.  For this year’s Congress, seven of the current nine members of the Standing Committee are to stand down, as they are aged 68 or over, the standard retirement age. In the central leadership, we are likely to see a 70 per cent turnover in all key positions.  The changes agreed at the Congress will be followed by government appointments announced at the annual National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, next spring. Military and provincial government changes will take place over the next two years. This leadership transition is a long process, taking up to three years to complete. 80 Million Party members 350 Central Committee 24 Politburo 9 Standing Committee http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182728 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:57:42 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182729 In December the eyes of the world were turned to the fishing village of Wukan in Guangdong province. Angered by illegal land grabs, the villagers drove out local officials and Communist Party chiefs and faced down a police siege. To some it seemed that revolution was brewing.  But instead of the expected police crack-down, after 11 days of siege the Communist Party authorities relented, ordered an investigation into the villagers’ complaints and sided with them.  Inside China what happened in Wukan was a source of inspiration. For some, the decision by the Communist Party to back down showed that the government was finally willing to reform in the face of unrest.  For others, it was confirmation of the widely held belief that while local officials are often venal, the party’s top leaders still have the wisdom of Solomon – if you can attract their attention. Even more surprising was the promise that villagers of Wukan would be allowed to elect their local council in a free and fair poll. In principle, villages have this right, but in practice, the result is always decided by the party hierarchy. Images of the Wukan ballot box circulated through the Chinese internet, often with a simple message attached: ‘I support’.  Zhang Nong, a businessman in Beijing, wrote on his microblog: ‘Wukan is not Beijing or Shanghai. It is not a major city where we might say that those of culture are numerous and few are illiterate. It is a tiny fishing village.  ‘But the villagers have begun to vote, governing themselves. Does this not tell us that Chinese in other areas can do this too? I want to ask everyone why they can’t.’  In the end, on March 4, Lin Zuluan, the leader of the Wukan village rebellion, was elected as head of the village. But questions remain whether this is a harbinger of democracy or just clever crisis-management.  I was one of the first foreign reporters to reach Wukan in December, and recently I returned to the area. There is plenty of anger around, as villagers and farming communities bear the brunt of China’s dash for industrial growth. In the village of Haimen, about two hours’ drive from Wukan, between 30,000 and 80,000 villagers – depending on who you ask – smashed police cars and blocked a main road in pro-test at industrial pollution. Some said they had taken their cue from Wukan.  Another nearby village, Wanggang, rose up in January for a similar reason to Wukan: corrupt local officials had stolen from the village fund, they said. But the uprisings in Haimen and Wanggang have had very different outcomes to Wukan. In Haimen, at least three people were still in detention three months after the unrest, according to villagers who said the authorities had threatened to imprison anyone who talked about what had happened.  Unlike in Wukan, the root of the complaint in Haimen is environmental. The government wants to build a second, giant, coal-fired power station outside the village. But residents believe the effluent from the first plant is poisoning their water and triggering unusually high rates of cancer.  ‘Life here cannot get any worse,’ said one fisherman. ‘There are no fish, just look at the water. Our catch has fallen by 80 per cent and we are left sitting here, waiting to die. Some of us are actually starving and that is no exaggeration.’  Caixin, a Chinese magazine, said tests had shown that concentrations of lead, zinc and nickel, possibly from coal ash, exceeded national standards in the sea water. Since the protest, plans for the second plant have been suspended, but not terminated. Construction workers are now employed at the first plant, adding two additional generators. Villagers do not believe the government will back down. The project is worth $900 million, and more than $30 million has already been spent.  ‘The difference between Haimen and Wukan is that Haimen does not have a strong protest leader, like Wukan,’ said Fu Ronghua, an NGO researcher. ‘Other villagers fail to stand firm and united for a long time, or when under pressure.’ In the second protest village, Wanggang, a government team is investigating grievances, and the former party secretary has been suspended. ‘The government has not detained or threatened us, and we are not worried about a crackdown, we are only worried they will not solve our complaints,’ said Li Zhikai, 37, an activist. ‘Lots of villages have recently gone on protests to try to win more benefits for themselves. We want to keep our heads up and fight for our rights.’ There are many reasons why the Wukan protest succeeded and other failed, said Zhang Jiancheng, 26, one of the village’s leaders. ‘Our village is full of Chinese from Hong Kong who know how to use the media. We were really united and supported Lin Zuluan – the rebel turned party secretary – as our leader. And the rich people in the village were not involved, so there was no rich-poor divide. We had a clear target and we were all in it together.’ Wukan has laid a blueprint for other villages to try to follow, including one for holding credible elections. But ultimately Wukan’s legacy may be symbolic. Other villages have seen their protests fail for lack of unity and focus, and because villagers can often be placated by a combination of compensation and intimidation.   The fall of Bo Xilai Charisma is in short supply among modern Chinese leaders, but Bo Xilai, the Communist Party boss of the inland megacity of Chongqing, has it in spades.  He courted publicity with an anti-corruption drive. To please the older generation, he made the 32 million people of the municipality of Chongqing join in sing-alongs of ‘red songs’ from the Mao era.  To western observers, Bo seemed a dead cert for a place in the Politburo Standing Committee, the heart of Chinese power. But in a party which values consensus and preserving the status quo, he stood out.  On March 15, a one-line statement on the website of the People’s Daily announced his dismissal and thus the end of his glittering career.  It is said that the chain of events which led to his dismissal began when he learned that his family was being investigated for corruption.  According to reports on the internet, he is said to have fired his police chief and right-hand man, Wang Lijun, who then sought refuge in the US consulate in Chengdu. No one can be sure what information about his boss Wang handed over to the US diplomats. That uncertainty alone would have been enough to destroy him. Much has been made of Bo’s leftist leanings, his revival of Mao-era songs and ideology. Since his toppling, the ‘red’ songs have largely stopped, and some Maoist websites have been blocked by the censors. But Bo gave the impression of a man playing to the crowd, rather than a genuine ideologue. Perhaps it was this, his popularity, that worried his colleagues. With such a shining star on the Politburo Standing Committee, perhaps China’s next generation of leaders was concerned about a future challenge to its authority. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182729 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:17:58 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182730 There is an old Southeast Asian saying: ‘We are like the grass beneath two elephants. We will be crushed underfoot regardless of whether they fight or make love.’ This saying is much repeated these days now that the United States and China are in open competition in the Asia-Pacific region.  In January, President Obama announced a new focus on the region. Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ‘Let’s just talk straight realpolitik. We are in competition with China.’ All over the Pacific, she said, China is trying to ‘come in behind us and come in under us’.  Militarily, there have been announcements of new deployments of US troops around the region, including marines rotating through Darwin, Australia, and more collaboration between American and Australian air forces, allowing the US another access point in to the disputed South China Sea region.  Many neo-realists are saying that a fast-rising China, which sees a bigger role for itself in the region, is not comfortable with America’s moves as these restrict its room for manoeuvre. This is not a new analysis of the region. But things are different this time.  First, China and America are no longer confined to raw power rivalry. The US is, and China is increasingly becoming, concerned with global issues which require a response from those claiming to be major powers. As a result, China and America will have to show that they wish to be partners in ways that benefit the region as a whole.  By taking advantage of American and Chinese desires to engage in the region, Southeast Asia can become a champion of non-traditional security issues such as water resource management and countering climate change – issues that must be solved by collective action among states. These are not the traditional ‘hard security’ domain of the neo-realists.  Environmental projects are already leading to Sino-US cooperation in the region. In 2010, America launched the Lower Mekong Initiative, a cooperative gesture funded by the US government for effective management and equitable use of the Mekong. China, which controls the headwaters of the river, was propelled to do something in return to show its responsibility for trans-boundary affairs.  In its initial response, China has become a bit more open to the Mekong River Commission, an inter-governmental body made up of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam that manages the great river. China is not yet a member, but it has been sharing some information with other riparian states about the operations of the hydro-electric dams upstream in the wet season. Certainly, more will be expected of China in the future. Secondly, if either China or America become too overbearing, they face the risk that smaller nations will turn to the other players in the region, such as India, also a rising power with its ‘Look East’ policy. Finally, Southeast Asian states working together can achieve certain things that cannot be done by either China or America despite their limitless reserves. Asean, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, is proving to be an increasingly important venue for quiet, regional problem-solving and co-ordination.  The larger networks forged through the Asean Regional Forum (ARF) have become the primary security and foreign policy discussion forum for the region. With its preventive diplomacy measures, the ARF can provide good offices, mediation, prior notification, and early warning about potential flashpoints to member countries as well as to China and America.  The sinking of the South Korean navy ship Cheonan in 2010, the US joint military exercise with South Korea in the Yellow Sea, and China’s recent activities in the South China Sea have all been discussed in ARF meetings. Times have changed in Southeast Asia. Smaller nations have a hard-earned, well-rounded and complex understanding of geopolitics in the region. They are talking to each other and, increasingly, working together. And, in many areas, they have common goals.  The elephants aren’t going to be able to blithely stampede through. It is not a grassland anymore, it should be regarded as a mature forest. Successfully navigating it takes consideration of local concerns, knowledge, respect, and true partnership. The era of naked power rivalry is over. It is a time of equitable and mutually beneficial alliances, not forced allegiances. The elephant that understands this first, and best, will have the edge. In the meantime, Southeast Asia will continue to have more options than some people imagine. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182730 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:26:26 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182733 Is the nation state dead? If you look at the patterns of activity in the world – travel, commerce – it is between cities. Once you harmonise regulations and open borders, those who control borders matter less. Sovereignty matters less. As a result of state action, cities have been given centre stage. They are going to take full advantage of it and become ever more autonomous actors. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the state. But we have moved from a world of about 60 to 70 states after the Second World War to more than 200 today. They are not all going to be equally successful. Most of the post-colonial world is made up of fragile states with no legitimacy. So we have to ask which states work and which don’t. Those that are failing will need to be co-governed by different sets of actors – domestic, corporate and international. The world is going through a systems change – a once in a thousand year event – driven by technology. Apple is sitting on a billion dollars, and it doesn’t have any debts, unlike Greece.  So big cities can break away from their hinterland? Much as I love Boris Johnson, I don’t think the Mayor of London can go and negotiate trade agreements with China. Already China is very good at splitting apart the EU into countries and unmasking the differences in their positions. If you were to start to fragment Europe even further, China would have a field day. Size still matters. Even as someone who appreciates the nuances and subtleties and national characters of different European countries, I can still say to any European country, none of you matters individually. What does that mean for Britain? Britain has absolutely no global systemic impact. It only has impact through the European Union and through alliances – through Brussels for commercial integration and trade negotiation, or militarily through Nato. That is the full extent of Britain’s systemic relevance.  I spend a lot of time with people from the Foreign Office and Downing Street and we ask ourselves: what are the seven or eight countries Britain should focus on. That is the sum total of Britain’s meaningful foreign policies.  At any given time, this country can only focus on a maximum of 10 countries and try to have a meaningful impact on how they reach their decisions, domestically or internationally. That’s very small.What countries are those? It varies. The list includes: other core European countries like Germany and France; Libya is a new one; Saudi Arabia; Russia; India, where Britain is trying to figure out how to connect with its former colony; and China where you are trying to have a strategy focus on currency trading. You may be exploring other countries like Brazil now that it exports more than Britain does. You may ask how do we relate to Indonesia because it is growing very fast. That’s purely aspiration.  Today, Britain cannot shape Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan and lot of other places in crisis, not even Iraq and Afghanistan where you have committed thousands of troops. You have to be honest about how much a medium-sized country can achieve. You didn’t put America on the list? The US-British relationship is based on a mutual interpenetration, demographically and commercially. But the British people should understand that their dependence on Europe is far greater than their dependence on America. The symbolism of the special relationship with America pales in comparison with the reality of dependence on Europe. Emotions must not be allowed to obscure the reality that you are very much a European country. What changes will emerge from our current crisis? Over the past 10 years our environment has been characterised by lack of trust – particularly in politicians. That has a chance of being corrected. Not because we will suddenly start trusting each other. On the contrary, we will take the very intrusive steps that will allow us to verify what others are doing. And, therefore, trust will be based on data and not just on whim. There will be new accounting standards and mutual oversight and monitoring of government regulators. It will take time. Eventually we will get there. Do you mean more information will stop us making the same old mistakes?  The biggest mistake we can make is great power conflict. We have repeated it every century, and we will absolutely repeat that mistake, probably in the next couple of decades. Conflict between America and China? It will be more complex, as all great power conflicts are. If you make a list of all the countries that America tries to label as rogue states and another list of every country that China provides financial, diplomatic or military backing to, it’s the same list. There are no coincidences here. Proxy tension has already begun. It will draw in Sunni states and Shia states, Europe, Russia and India. It’s too simple to boil it down to a US v China situation. What about financial crisis? There will always be bubbles. Lots of people are saying we are returning to a tech bubble right now. Property in many emerging markets is already a bubble, and there are bubbles of currencies, such as the Brazilian real. The question is which bubbles have macro, systemic global impact like the US housing bubble. If there is a housing bubble in India, it wouldn’t really hurt anyone outside that country. Can campaign groups change the world? When you look at certain issues – climate change or the anti-slavery movement – these things don’t have their origins in far-sighted decision-making by government. There is a tremendous role for public pressure. We have always existed in this multi-actor milieu in which norms are not prescribed by governments alone. So it is all to the good, even if it is a chaotic marketplace of ideas. Do you believe in the super-empowered individual as a motor of change? This term is overused. Bill Gates is a super-empowered individual by any measure. But it’s on the back of corporate wealth, not for the sheer force of his idea, as in the cases of Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa. So there are certain power bases on which their authority rests, whether financial or otherwise. In the age of technology and mass communications there will be more. They may have a flash impact, like Justin Bieber, or a lasting one, like George Soros, whose impact is sustained, decade after decade. Angela Merkel seems to rule Europe. Is she a super-empowered individual? She is just a head of government who takes her job seriously. She is the right woman at the right time.  The real super-empowered individual in Europe was Jean Monnet. Merkel has the constitutional and structural foundations to exert her will, or the will of her voters, across the European stage, but Jean Monnet had to build the foundations of the new Europe in the 1950s with no institutions in place. Is it right for the European Central Bank to force austerity on Italy and Greece? What we are seeing now is the 1990s happening all over again, with an internal set of states rather than an external set of states. In the 1990s, post-Soviet regimes went through a process of Europeanisation. Under EU influence there was wholesale eradication of old laws, lustration, bringing in new laws, new governments – all of what political scientists call upward compliance. Now the target countries of this process just happen to have been members of the EU for decades.  I’m not going to say it’s all OK. But democracy has delivered the buck-passing of the Greek governments. If that’s what you mean by democracy, I’ll take technocracy over populist democracy any day of the week. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182733 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:40:04 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182761 President Obama marked the Persian New Year festival of Nowruz in March 2009 with a video message to the people of Iran, offering ‘a future where the old divisions are overcome’. Such a process, he said, will ‘not be advanced by threats’ but through engagement would be ‘honest and grounded in mutual respect.’ In exchange, President Obama hoped for a less bellicose and more responsible Iranian government – at least in its rhetoric – and a practical path through the increasingly difficult nuclear issue. So far no tangible progress has been made in resolving the Iranian nuclear situation. Although it was in the mid-1990s that the Iranian nuclear programme first began to occupy the minds of western policymakers, it was President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in January, 2002, that was the game-changer. In it he connected Iraq, North Korea and Iran as an ‘axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world’, saying that ‘by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger’.  Iran observed the subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 – ostensibly over the issue of weapons of mass destruction – and the impact of sanctions on North Korea; Iranians fear that President Obama has kept the same list and that they are next. Actions and rhetoric seem to be reaching a fever pitch reminiscent of the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq: assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists; cyber attacks through ‘worms’ such as Stuxnet; reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency; the rehashing of old Western intelligence; talk of military action and time running out; and pleadings from around the world for restraint. If the intention was to make Iran feel beleaguered, then the strategy has been a great success. If the intention, however, was to ensure that Iran does not develop a military nuclear weapons capability, then we may be witnessing yet another catastrophic mismanagement. Iran’s reaction has not been just to remonstrate, delay and deceive. Despite – or perhaps because of – sanctions, Iran announced in September that the Bushehr nuclear power station is now operational and connected to the grid. Even though there were previous attempts to block this enterprise, Bushehr is no big deal; this reactor is not a military installation and will provide much needed energy for Iran. It is Iran’s uranium enrichment programme that has vexed the United States and its allies. Most nuclear reactors operate with low enriched uranium. For the most part this means uranium enriched so that 3-4 per cent of the fuel is the useful uranium-235 isotope. For some reactors – primarily research reactors – this enrichment is as a high as 19.75 per cent. Above 20 per cent, we refer to it as highly enriched uranium. Enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons would usually be above 90 per cent. However, numbers can be deceptive. Because of the way uranium is enriched, it requires very little extra effort to go from reactor grade to the concentration needed for a nuclear bomb. Several other states have uranium enrichment programmes, including Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Russia, Pakistan, Britain and the USA. Eight of these are acknowledged possessors of nuclear weapons and have developed highly enriched uranium for military programmes. Other countries – such as Israel – are thought to have done so in the past. In February, 2012, President Ahmadinejad announced a number of scientific breakthroughs, including the use of domestically fabricated fuel (just under 20 per cent enrichment) in the Tehran research reactor and the installation of new, more efficient centrifuges.  The frustration felt in the IAEA is palpable. In January and February this year, IAEA officials visited Tehran but made no progress and were not allowed access to the military complex at Parchin, although Iran has since announced that access will be granted under certain conditions. Iran has notched up an impressive set of achievements for a country under international sanctions. It has tripled its monthly production of 20 per cent enriched uranium thanks to four new cascades at Fordow, and 15 additional centrifuge cascades have begun operating at Natanz.  So is there any room for optimism? President Obama has criticised ‘loose talk of war’, a statement which was welcomed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. On March 8, the European Union agreed to restart talks with Iran within the P5+1 format, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.  Perhaps one of the ways out is to discover what ordinary people think. The Saban Centre, a Washington think tank, recently carried out a survey of Israeli jews that shocked most pundits with the unexpected finding that 65 per cent would prefer neither Israel nor Iran to possess nuclear weapons, and would choose a nuclear-free Middle East. In Iran, support for the nuclear programme may not be as great as the government claims. Although polls carried out by the Iranian Students’ Polling Agency – which comes under the Ministry of Higher Education – need to be treated with caution, a 2010 survey of Tehran residents showed that public support for Iran’s nuclear programme may have declined since 2008. In that two-year period, the poll showed that favourable opinion towards the programme had decreased from 45.2 to 22.1 per cent. In addition, 41 per cent said the administration had done a ‘poor job handling the nuclear case’, an opinion held by only about 21 per cent 2 years earlier.  These results differ from those of foreign polling organisations, but the trend still indicates declining support for the nuclear programme. A Gallup poll, conducted by telephone from a call centre outside Iran and published in February, showed that only 40 per cent of Iranians were in favour of developing nuclear weapons, while 57 per cent supported a civilian nuclear programme (whereas in 2010, a Rand survey had this figure at 87 per cent). Almost one quarter of respondents refused to respond. As for the authorities, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa in 2005, saying that that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.  Let’s hope that we can take the Supreme Leader at his word. There is not much hope of progress during the partisan rhetoric of the US election campaign. But if President Obama is re-elected in November, is it too much to imagine that he could, as he promised in 2009, reset this relationship? http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182761 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:38:59 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182763 Anybody familiar with the Iranian economy – whether before or after the recent US and EU sanctions were stepped up – will be sceptical of simplistic judgments. Despite record oil revenues, Iran’s economy has continued to be plagued by high unemployment and double-digit inflation. According to the latest official estimate, inflation is at 20 per cent and is likely to rise after the recent sharp depreciation of the rial. Unemployment was officially 14.6 per cent in 2010, with women and young people disproportionately affected. Twenty three per cent of those aged between 15 and 24 were unemployed during 2006-09.  With its administration criticised by friends and foes alike for lack of transparency, official Iranian data are received with suspicion. For instance, after a three-year gap, Iran’s Central Bank has only just released standard macroeconomic indica-tors. Data released selectively and in stop-start bursts inevitably meet with incredulity, and the latest growth estimate of 5.8 per cent for 2010 (6.1 per cent for non-oil GDP) is no exception. Analysis of Iran’s economic policy is further complicated by intense factional politics and an intricate labyrinth of decision-making, ratification and oversight. At the same time, a veneer of official probity and populist jargon sits oddly with widespread patronage, a spate of banking scandals, record non-performing loans and highly skewed concentration of wealth.  Such weaknesses give comfort to proponents of sanctions. For them, Iran appears to be a textbook case for success: it can only be a matter of time before the economy is on its knees. Partial evidence for this comes from the foreign exchange markets where the Iranian currency fell by more than 50 per cent in a few months after new sanctions against the Central Bank were introduced. Optimistic claims periodically appear in the press and US official statements. As early as January 2011, Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, claimed to a student audience in the UAE that ‘the sanctions are working’, judging by ‘a slowdown in Iran’s nuclear progress’. The political corollary of this is that since sanctions are ‘clearly hurting’, they present the best hope of averting a military confrontation. It is hard to predict the dynamics of the negotiations. But there are many reasons why sanctions are unlikely to deliver the blow that could force Iran to abandon or compromise on its nuclear ambitions. First, although the sanctions are harsh and increasing in severity, other economies have managed to defy even harsher economic pressures in the past. Gary Hufbauer, the veteran sanctions analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, believes that Iran can still ‘scrape by’ as long as it can find buyers for its oil, despite the payment difficulties. Those who expect imminent collapse overlook the resilience of Iran’s economy. Iran has a relatively diversified and self-reliant economy and a history of dealing with sanctions dating back to the 1980s. Moreover, a decade of high oil prices has helped build up its foreign reserves. According to the Chairman of the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Yahya Ale-Eshagh, early this year these reached $120 billion, with another 907 tons of gold stashed in the Central Bank. Second, if sanctions were judged by the harm they could cause to the population at large, their success would be a foregone conclusion. An array of restrictions on banking, shipping, insurance, ports, trade, commodities and energy transactions and ventures have already severed or complicated many of Iran’s commercial ties to the rest of the world. With the noose tight-ening, there are already reports of shortages in essentials such as medicine and incidences of panic buying. Similar sanctions against Iraq under Saddam Hussein pushed millions below the poverty line, increased infant mortality and stepped up the brain drain. Third, the case for sanctions often rests on an implicit assumption of a clear relationship between the economic and political cycles: economic sanctions cause hardship and this in turn is the catalyst for political change. However, this flies in the face of evidence: both the Arab Spring and Iran’s 1979 Revolution followed periods of relative prosperity. There is no shortage of countries under sanctions whose target administrations survive – North Korea, Zimbabwe and Cuba, to name a few.  And here lies the ultimate flaw in sanctions: applied as a form of collective punishment, they penalise the victims of the target regimes as much as their perpetrators, who become adept at deflecting the worst impacts and use the spectre of external threat to suppress internal dissent. As Gary Sick, an astute Iran analyst, has remarked: ‘Sanctions do not persuade dictatorial regimes to abandon projects that they think are central to their security and survival or even their self-image’. Sanctions may allow President Obama a chance to avert war for now, but by hurting the Iranian people, they also highlight the contradictions of a policy which was until recently couched in terms of friendship and amity with ordinary folk in Iran. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182763 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:48:59 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182765 Two elections, distinct yet with striking parallels, took place in March. On March 2, Iranians were reported to be dutifully casting their ballots in a parliamentary election, having been exhorted by their leaders to vote in unprecedented numbers not only to erase the bitter memories of the contested 2009 presidential poll, but to ‘smack the face’ of their enemies.  A few days later, Russian voters were likewise urged to send a message to those foreigners who would like to divide Russia by voting (ideally) for Vladimir Putin. One election was parliamentary and the other presidential, but they were both exercises in political theatre, in which the middle classes were absent, the grateful poor voted en masse, the opposition protested, and fraud was alleged. Here, of course, we must distinguish between the official opposition – allowed to run but with little real chance or indeed desire to win – and the genuine opposition, which is effectively disbarred. In Iran, for example, while it was reported that the opposition boycotted the poll, the cause of this boycott was that none of their candidates were allowed to run. In both cases, the elections delivered the figure of 65 per cent, comfortably close to a two-thirds majority. In Russia, with only 22 per cent of the votes counted, Putin declared victory, claiming some 64 per cent of the entire tally, a figure that would decline to 63 per cent the next day, though with a resounding 65 per cent turnout. (Putin’s margin of victory, and the manner in which it was announced, bore a remarkable similarity with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s in 2009, complete with allegations of fraud). In Iran, the authorities announced a turnout of 64 per cent two hours before the polls closed although, unlike in 2009 when the count itself was extraordinarily rapid, on this occasion details of the successful candidates were not immediately available. There was only one slip. A relaxed head of the elections commission, Soulat Mortazavi, said on an election programme that turnout had been just above 34 per cent before swiftly correcting himself and adhering to the script that had been outlined some weeks earlier by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative in the Revolutionary Guards (‘polls indicate that 60-65 per cent of the public will participate’). The prediction was later confirmed to have been uncannily accurate by Fars News, the Guards’ preferred media outlet, which on February 29 forecast a 65.5 per cent turn-out. It had also predicted Gholamreza Hadad-Adel, the father-in-law of Khamenei’s son and putative heir, Mojtaba, would garner the greatest number of votes in Tehran and therefore be in lead position to become Speaker of the new Parliament. That, too, appears to have come true. The elites in Iran and Russia have long developed an intimate political relationship founded on economic interest and a mutual antipathy for the West. But the parallels in these elections suggest a script being developed and applied. Sixty-five per cent has, by all accounts, become the new 99 per cent favoured by dictatorships of the past. Sixty-five per cent passes the credibility threshold for a new educated public, and for prying foreign journalists. On a good day the government claims a decisive victory, on a bad day there is sufficient political dead space for an opposition to exist and protest. Cleverly spun, this 35 per cent simply exists to reinforce and legitimise the 65 per cent that turned out and/or voted for a particular candidate. It creates the fiction of plurality. Moreover, the state does not have to prove the integrity of the elections; the state is innocent until proven guilty – a right it does not grant its own citizens. There is even room to acknowledge a measure of fraud on the basis that it would not affect the overall result. The Iranians are arguably not as well practised as the Russians, which has led them to adhere to the script more clumsily – the Russians for example avoided the temptation of revealing the percentiles beforehand.  So what might be the consequences for Iranian politics? In policy terms, not much at all. There was no real contest to be had, and not much of a clash of personalities between Ahmadinejad and his one-time patron Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Although some have suggested that Ahmadinejad is the more moderate, the difference was so slight as to be indistinct. Consequently many Iranians, already disillusioned by the experience of 2009 and the repression that followed, were hard-pressed to generate any enthusiasm for politics. What was perhaps more striking was that many of Ahmadinejad’s supporters, finding that their preferred candidates had now likewise been barred from running, declared that they, too, would boycott the election. Moreover, some key ideological allies of the Supreme Leader were found it difficult to get excited. This left the state with a dilemma because it desperately needed a high turnout, not only to wipe away the stain of 2009 but, more immediately, to prove to themselves and the outside world that the Islamic Republic remained robust and popular. Their first approach was to try and generate enthusiasm through the promotion of multiple political platforms. Given the absence of any serious policy differences, the fact that people would have to choose between factions that supported Ahmadinejad and those that supported the Leader was not a promising start for those charged with cultivating excitement. No amount of renaming of factions could persuade people that they were being asked to participate in anything more than a charade. So desperate did the situation become that Ayatollah Khamenei decided to issue a fatwa which said that voting was a religious duty. Failing that, the state resorted to the propaganda tool of choice: nationalism. In a remarkable broadcast on Iranian TV, martial music with overtones of the popular nationalistic anthem O Iran, overlay a series of images from contemporary Iranian history with special focus on the resistance and sacrifice of the Iran-Iraq War. The message, reinforced by officials, was that this election was fundamentally about national unity and resistance to the West. The final act in this political production was to anticipate any criticism by announcing the desired result (in this case a high turnout) well before anyone had time to review the data. Unlike Russia, Iran had no independent monitors on the ground. We will probably never know the actual turnout, but we can be relatively confident that popular enthusiasm was a shadow of its former self. For the governing elite, the reality is of less importance than the impression created. As anticipated, Iranians were far more pre-occupied with their economic difficulties and the upcoming festivities for the Persian new year. Khamenei, for his part, will be relieved that this latest test has been passed and if, further emboldened, he now moves to abolish the office of president altogether, (a prospect he has suggested), it may be the last ‘election’ he will have to endure for some time. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182765 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:59:50 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182766 In a YouTube clip I keep replaying, a young Iranian woman dressed all in black as a ninja runs towards a wall, skips a good few paces up it – yes, up the wall – and flips full circle through the air, landing back on her feet. She is one of an estimated 3,000 women who are training as ninjas in Iran. Over the past few years, Iranian women have been turning to martial arts in droves. To understand why, we need only recall the dismay of Iran’s Olympic women’s soccer team, which turned up to play a qualifier match in Jordan last June only to be disqualified because they were wearing hijabs. Fifa, international football’s governing body, would not take into account that these hard-working athletes were forced to wear the hijab by their government, and their dream was shattered. How cruel is fortune that they played football in Iran and not Hounslow like that lucky Asian girl in Bend It Like Beckham. She didn’t know just how good she had it. Imagine the frustration of an athlete whose participation is barred by injury – and then imagine the frustration of an athlete barred from playing because Fifa believes an item of clothing she is forced to wear represents a choking hazard. There is a metaphor for Iranian women in this – people don’t learn to walk up walls without a reason. They are tired of being choked by 30 years of restrictions imposed on them by an oppressive Islamist system. ‘The preacher of the Friday prayer has called the sending of female athletes abroad a sin, according to the Qur’an, and regards their participation at international competitions as prostitution and the beginning of fornication.’ This bit of crackling radio news features in Kick In Iran, a documentary that follows 23-year-old Sara Khoshjamal Fekri, the first female Iranian proponent of Tae-kwondo to qualify for the Olympic Games. The film charts Khoshjamal’s relationship with her female trainer Maryam, as they bid for gold at the 2008 Beijing Games. At one point in the film, a male journalist is seen putting to Khoshjamal that her chosen sport does not suit the ‘gentle’ character of women. ‘I’m not gentle,’ she replies.  I asked the film’s director Fatima Abdollahyan why she thinks Iranian women are turning to martial arts. ‘It’s a way to focus sexual energy and it empowers them when it comes to men,’ she said. ‘They condition themselves physically and feel better about their bodies – more powerful – and this can translate into words, so they stick up for themselves in day-to-day situations.’ Anyone who takes part in a sport, understands its powerful effect on the mind. The endorphines released when I go for my morning run set me up for the day. Sports give your mind clarity and strength as well as a firm bottom. While female cousins in Iran are not allowed to pull on an old ‘Frankie Says Relax’ T-shirt and shorts and do a lap of the park, martial arts allows them to practise indoors away from prying eyes. The feeling of being strong in your body is an enormous confidence boost, which is crucial in a country where the government is intolerant of your gender and kicks you down. With womens’ participation in sport not being socially acceptable, it’s a hard decision to become a female athlete in Iran. Yet athletics is a brilliant pastime in a society where there is virtually no nightlife. Women in Iran are not allowed – they’re just not allowed. This was one of my early stand-up lines and, in essence, remains true. Iran’s regime doesn’t like women. While clips of young women dressed up as Japanese assassins, chopping bricks in two may make quirky viewing on YouTube, the ‘gentle sex’ in Iran is taking its sport seriously – and kicking back. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182766 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:05:59 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182759 History does not repeat itself, according to Mark Twain, but it does rhyme. That observation comes to mind when one compares Syria 30 years ago, ruled by a ruthless dictator, and Syria now, ruled by an equally ruthless dictator. The first, Hafez Al-Assad, enforced his rule with mass murder, was never held accountable for it, and died in bed, of pulmonary problems. The second, his son Bashar, is faithfully copying his father’s methods. But now, unlike then, government brutality is documented by internet-savvy witnesses whose videos provide shocking evidence for all the world to see. That has prompted a rising chorus of predictions that Bashar will be held to account. But every day that sees Syrians dying while the world watches suggests there is a sizeable dose of wishful thinking in forecasts of the dictator’s exit. Before making the case for scepticism, a look at how history rhymes. On February, 2, 1982, an army raid on a hide-out of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood sparked fighting throughout the city of Hama. The government responded by surrounding Hama with tanks and artillery and blasting the densely-populated centre in a 27-day assault that killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people. The operation, led by Hafez Al-Assad’s brother Rifaat, ended a four-year campaign of assassinations and bombings by Sunni Muslims intent on breaking the tight grip on power of the Assad family and the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam. (Alawites account for about 12 per cent of Syria’s population.) In 2012, Bashar is using the tactics of his father to rout dissidents in Homs and other cities. Then, as now, the government labelled its foes terrorists.  Coverage of the 1976-1982 shadow war, which included several attempts to assassinate Hafez Al-Assad, had been subdued. It became more subdued after the Damascus government made clear that Western correspondents based in Beirut would have to pay a price for ignoring threats about the consequences of filing ‘biased accounts’. I became an object lesson on June 6, 1980, when a man using a pistol with a silencer shot me in the back in front of the house of the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent, Tim Llewellyn. He was withdrawn shortly after. He, too, had received death threats.  The 1982 carnage went largely unnoticed by the world. Syria’s Arab neighbours remained silent, reaction from Washington was muted. Three decades later, US leaders were slow to grasp how closely Bashar Al-Assad was following in his father’s footsteps. It took Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, 106 days and more than 1,300 Syrian deaths to change her description of Bashar from ‘reformer’ to a ‘leader who has lost legitimacy’. That was in July. Since then, the body count has been rising relentlessly and reports of atrocities have stoked widespread condemnation. But outrage alone doesn’t topple dictators, even less a dictator who feels that he has the upper hand militarily. Prospects for a speedy political solution look bleak even though Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General named Special Envoy to Syria, is continuing his peace-making mission. Now, it requires rose-tinted glasses to foresee an arrangement that would provide for Bashar to step down as a first move towards democratic transformation, one of the key points of a UN Security Council resolution vetoed by Russia and China on February 4. Though both countries have expressed concern about the ceaseless bloodshed, neither has budged from opposition to what they see as a Western cru-sade, using the UN as a tool for toppling unfriendly regimes.  So what may be next? Reconciliation is not on the table, not after four decades of repression, torture and violation of human rights. Assad and his loyalists in the Alawite-officered military and in the Alawite-dominated security apparatus – set up with the help of East Germany’s Stasi – know that agreeing to genuine reforms would lead to trials and executions. ‘It would be unrealistic to expect the president and those around him to voluntarily step down,’ in the words of Nikolaos van Dam, author of The Struggle for Power in Syria, a slim volume first published in 1979, that has become required reading for scholars of the country. ‘He is not going to sign his own death warrant.’ Among van Dam’s scenarios for Syria’s future: ‘The continuation of the present dictatorship in ever more difficult circumstances for both the regime and the population…’ http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182759 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:21:16 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182758 In Libya, many positive signs are emerging from the debris of battle. A year on from the uprising that would end Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s repressive regime, civil organisations are mushrooming, political parties are being formed in the run-up to fresh elections and journalists in the newly liberated media are beginning to ask hard questions of officials and aspiring politicians. But much remains to be done, in particular with regard to security, justice and human rights. Hundreds of heavily armed militias, mainly composed of former opposition fighters, continue to operate outside any legal framework and in defiance of orders from the National Transitional Council to disband or join the army and security forces. The transitional authorities have so far been unable or unwilling to hold militias to account for widespread abuses – including unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, and revenge attacks. Gangs have targeted entire communities, forcibly displacing residents and looting and burning their homes to make it impossible for them to return. Victims have mostly been suspected Gaddafi loyalists and sub-Saharan African migrants accused of involvement in the former regime’s repression. But more recently detainees accused of minor offences such as stealing or drinking alcohol have been mistreated in the same way. Others are detained simply to extort money or property from them.  The National Transitional Council has been plainly unwilling to risk losing political capital by enforcing the law in relation to opposition fighters who committed war crimes against known or suspected Gaddafi loyalists or African migrants. Indeed, not a single effective investigation has been carried out.  Such impunity has increased instability, with militias increasingly challenging the transitional authorities, refusing to transfer detainees to state custody, to hand over or even register weapons, or to relinquish control of key installations. Trust in institutions and their legitimacy depends on their ability to deliver the services they are supposed to provide. With the judiciary largely paralysed and in the absence of an authority able to hold militias to account, many people are left feeling they have no recourse to justice. Not surprisingly, some are turning to militias to solve problems that should be settled in courts of law. Others are joining militias hoping to reap political and material benefits which derive from the use of force. The gradual consolidation of militia rule has been an impediment to the establishment of the rule of law, an issue for too long neglected by the National Transitional Council and its supporters in the international community, notably the countries which participated in Nato’s military operations. The latter missed the opportunity to press for greater respect for human rights earlier in the conflict, when their support was crucial and when abuses were on a smaller scale and corrective measures could have been enforced more easily.  The Libyan transitional authorities face momentous challenges on many fronts, but this is no excuse for inaction on human rights. Concrete measures must be urgently undertaken to get the judiciary back to work and to ensure that it does so effectively and impartially. Unless abuses committed by all sides before, during and after the conflict are investigated and the perpetrators held to account, it will not be possible to restore confidence in the judiciary. So-called judicial parallel and unaccountable structures set up by militias should be disbanded immediately. As efforts get under way to integrate former fighters into the army and security forces, it is crucial that robust vetting and screening mechanisms are put in place – both by the National Transitional Council and by those countries providing training and support to the Libyan security forces – to ensure that those who committed, ordered or condoned human rights abuses are excluded from posts that would allow them to repeat such crimes.  Efforts are also needed by the international community, especially through the UN Support Mission in Libya, to invest in both capacity-building and support for local authorities while also strengthening the mission’s human rights monitoring capacity. The latter is most urgent, as exposing and challenging abuses by all-powerful militias remains a difficult endeavor for new civil society organisations, who fear reprisals or of accusations of anti-revolution bias. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182758 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:12:56 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182757 While other projects in the City have been mothballed, construction on the 310-metre skyscraper, which shoots up from Victorian railway arches in Southwark, has charged through the economic slump. It will offer 27 floors of offices (as yet, unleased), 10 luxury flats (as yet, unsold), and a 200-room five-star hotel and spa. The recession-defying Shard owes its existence to the Qatari royal family. In 2008, when the original British backers ran out of cash, the Qatar Investment Authority, the government’s sovereign wealth fund, pumped millions of pounds into the Shard, securing an 80 per cent interest, then valued at £2 billion. ‘It’s difficult to get speculative development finance for any buildings – that’s been the case post-Lehmans,’ said Damian Corbett, of estate agents Jones Lang La-Salle. ‘The Qataris have been very good to the market.’ The Qatari royal family does not have a monopoly on iconic London buildings: Gulf neighbour Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia counts the Savoy among his investments. The Dorchester is owned by Brunei Investment Agency.  Bush House, home to the BBC World Service, has been owned since 1989 by a Japanese property company, a reminder of the time when Japan, before its long slump, was buying up assets around the world.  But while other sovereign funds have parked their money in more anonymous commercial buildings, Qatar has been drawn to the most high-profile properties. The Shard joins Harrods, the Canary Wharf tower, One Hyde Park, and the US embassy building in Grosvenor Square in furthering what Qatari Diar, the property investment arm of the emirate’s sovereign wealth fund, refers to on its website as its ‘sphere of influence in London’. Among the group’s current projects are the Shell Centre, behind the London Eye, and the ‘East Village’, a residential development in London’s Olympics headquarters. The prominence of the projects is not just physical: the family’s ownership of Chelsea Barracks has allowed it access to the British establishment, putting Qatari Diar’s chairman, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al-Thani, in the position of being able to grant the Prince of Wales a favour, and ease his ‘sinking heart’ by reconsidering controver-sial £3 billion plans to develop the site. The decision led to an £81 million legal dispute between Qatari Diar and its co-developer, Christian Candy.  Experts have suggested that the desired returns on Qatar’s investments are not solely financial. Dr Kristian Ulrichsen, a Research Fellow at the LSE, said that by investing in London property, the emirate was seeking to re-brand itself and diversifying its security through soft diplomacy. Qatar was a British protectorate until 1971. Most members of its royal family spent parts of their youth in London, or went to Sandhurst. They are therefore familiar with Britain’s top brands – and want to buy association with them. ‘This high-profile, iconic acquisition of global brands fits into their strategy to get everyone to talk about Qatar,’ said Dr Ulrichsen. ‘But it’s also a diversification of security. They realise that the more embedded they become in people’s consciousness, the harder it will be for people not to come to their aid if anything happens in the Gulf." Shard 80 per cent-owned by entities backed by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, 20 per cent-owned by London-based developer Sellar Property Group 310 metres Cost: valued at £2 billion in 2008 Canary Wharf Tower (One Canada Square) Owned by Canary Wharf Group Plc, which is majority owned by Songbird Estates, whose investors include Qatari, Chinese and other interests  235 metres Cost: £500 million to build in 1991 Heron Tower (110 Bishopsgate) Owned by Heron International, a UK-based property development company 202 metres (230 metres including mast) Cost: £500 million Tower 42 (formerly NatWest tower) Owned by Nathan Kirsh, South African businessman 183 metres Cost: bought in December, 2011, for £282.5 million Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) Owned by IVG Immobilien AG, German real estate company, and Evans Randall, the Mayfair investment firm 180 metres Cost: sold for £630 million in 2007 O2/Millenium dome  Owned by Anschutz Entertainment Group, USA 50 metres (to top of dome) Cost: part of a £600 million development London Eye Owned by Merlin Entertainments Group Ltd, British operator of amusement parks  135 metres Cost: £70 million to build in 1999 50 metres (to top of dome) Cost: part of a £600 million development Battersea Power Station  Controlled by creditors of Real Estate Opportunities, a vehicle of Irish property magnates John Ronan and Richard Barrett who bought it in 2006 but could not develop it 103 metres Cost: £400 million in 2006 http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182757 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:58:06 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182756 Thirty-one years ago François Mitterrand became the only left-wing president of France’s Fifth Republic, and set off on the path of Socialism in one country, with dramatic consequences. This spring, the current Socialist standard-bearer, François Hollande, is set to repeat his predecessor’s victory, and promises to set off tremors similar to those we saw in 1981. The parallels are evident. Mitterrand faced an increasing unpopular centre-right incumbent Valéry Giscard d’Estaing whose administration was caught in the economic downturn provoked by an oil price crisis. Hollande is riding high in the polls against another incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been battered by economic troubles and who, according to the polls, suffers from record levels of unpopularity, though his statesmanlike handling of the killings in south-west France by the gunman Mohamed Merah last month has helped to bolster his presidential image.  The President’s poll ratings for the first round of the presidential election on April 22 have edged up. But he still faces the problem for the second round two weeks later that he has a relatively small ‘reservoir’ of votes from unsuccessful first round candidates whereas Hollande can count on backing from a wider range of voters.  Like Mitterrand, Hollande heads a party that is hungry for victory after long years out of power. As in 1981, the Socialists promise radical change. On a television show, he said that he does not like rich people and has added that ‘my real adversary in this campaign is the world of finance’. That makes Hollande, an amiable figure with whom one can imagine having a companionable dinner in his rural fiefdom in the Corrèze department, unusual among Europe’s left-wing leaders in challenging the orthodoxy of austerity. He has set out an unabashed programme of domestic expansion and state spending while pledging himself to a 75 per cent marginal tax rate on incomes of more than €1 million.  He has promised to boost state spending by €20 billion by 2017, create 60,000 teaching posts and 150,000 subsidized jobs for young people. That is to be paid for by higher taxes for the wealthy, a tax on financial transactions and a 15 per cent rise in taxes on bank profits, a ban on stock options and trading in ‘toxic’ financial instruments, plus caps on bonuses. By the end of a five-year term in the Élysée presidential palace, Hollande says he could bring France’s budget deficit back on target as the economy booms and austerity is re-placed by expansion. Vitally, Hollande says he will re-negotiate the euro-zone fiscal pact to spur growth whatever the Germans think. The prospect of a clash with Berlin does not worry him, not at least while he is in campaigning mode. Such is Germany’s concern that, in an unusual gesture in Franco-German relations, Chancellor Angela Merkel has come out in support of a French candidate – Sarkozy – and declined to meet Hollande on a recent visit to Paris; well, the Socialist candidate responded, when I am president she will have to see me. There may be a fair measure of campaign bravado in all this and some observers expect Hollande to knuckle under to the consensus if he gets to the presidential palace after the second round of the election in May. But that is not a foregone conclusion, He has set out his stall unambiguously with the enthusiastic backing of his own party which may prove difficult to disown – left wing Socialists are openly highly critical of German policy as is the breakaway leftist politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon who has attracted big crowds with his call for a ‘citizen’s revolution’.  Those who remember the early Mitterrand period recall that his reflationary policies led to inflation, a rising trade deficit and two devaluations. The president had to change tack and enlist West German help. But France does not seem in a mood to heed the lessons of history.  In part that is because, for all his speeches and television interviews, Sarkozy has not convinced the electorate that it has to reform the economy – a task made all the more difficult by his relatively modest delivery of the reforms he promised when elected in 2007. In part it is because of the attachment the French feel for the benefits which have accrued to them over the decades of high state spending when the government could plunge ever deeper into debt – and are reluctant to accept the colder world now engulfing them.  Nor surprising perhaps for a country which has not had a balanced budget for four decades and where growth is flat. State spending amounts to 54 per cent of GDP and state debt stands at 85 per cent of GDP with some analysts forecasting that it could rise to 95 per cent by 2014 – and that is before the impact of a Hollande expansionary programme is felt.  But it is also because the equation which Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer forged in the 1960s has broken down. Under successive French presidents and West German – then simply German – chancellors, Paris provided political leadership while Bonn and then Berlin supplied the economic muscle. The deal was often not quite so clear-cut, but the political role of France continued to be vital.  Now, France remains very important but Merkel steps out in front of Sarkozy. The basic relationship in Europe has shifted, and the French cannot be expected to welcome it, even if they can do nothing about being the second leg in the ‘Merkozy’ duo. Speculation that the Chancellor would campaign for Sarkozy proved unfounded but her open support for him may be a double-edged sword given French susceptibilites – and the President’s call for tougher controls at EU borders has caused concern in Germany. Hollande’s pledge to stand up to Berlin and insist on renegotiation of the eurozone agreements therefore plays into a nationalist stream that also plays a significant part in the appeal of the National Front which is credited with around 16 per cent of the first round vote in the polls. Could this spur President Hollande on to an outright clash with Merkel – a pro-growth French policy colliding with belt-tightening directives from Berlin?  The realities of European politics, the habit of seeking fudges and papering over cracks, argues against any such confrontation. Hollande, who has spent his career as a backroom organiser and has never held government office, does not naturally fit the role of a 21st century Joan of Arc riding out against the forces of austerity. France’s weakening economic position, especially compared to Germany, should act as a further brake together with major question marks over whether his expansionary programme can actually be implemented. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182756 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:47:50 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182755 At a meeting in Frankfurt to mark the end of Jean-Claude Trichet’s presidency of the European Central Bank, Helmut Schmidt offered perhaps the clearest geopolitical perspective on the currency crisis from a leading German politician. ‘For 200 years we Europeans made up over 20 per cent of the world’s population; we now account for no more than 9 per cent, and in 40 years time we will account for just 7 per cent. Each individual EU member state will then represent only a fraction of 1 per cent. And in the same year, 2050, all of Europe together will account for just one tenth of global value added.’ He predicted that ‘perhaps in less than two decades, we will have three global currencies: the US dollar, the euro and the Chinese renminbi. ’When German o† cials speak in private, they leave no doubt that Berlin shares Schmidt’s perspective on the diminishing weight in the world of individual European nation states, even their own, although it is arguably the one EU country able to survive in an increasingly competitive global economy. They are also well aware of the central place of the single currency in the argument. A Europe and a Germany without the euro would be much weaker. In Britain, this sense of vulnerability is largely absent. Like France, Britain has yet to accept that, before too long, it will be at best a nation state with a medium-sized economy in a world of giants. As a result, British observers have consistently under-estimated the depth of Germany’s political commitment to the eurozone. Seen from Berlin and Paris – but not from London – European integration has always been primarily a political, not an economic, project. Since the spring of 2010, the threat of a contagious European sovereign debt crisis has been viewed largely from the perspective of economists and financial market participants. As a result, too little attention has been paid to the far-reaching initiatives which have been launched in the European Union and the euro area. These include the fiscal treaty which is now moving towards member state approval. All the steps are aimed, at least in part, at strengthening and deepening the European Union as well as stabilising the single currency. The political opportunities the sovereign debt crisis has presented have not been wasted, although it is still too early to be confident their ambitions will be fulfilled. Overlooked too, especially in Britain, has been the geopolitical perspective, which Germany, by far Europe’s strongest economy, has brought to the crisis-management strategy. This lack of understanding is not surprising: Germany is wary of advertising its longer-term perspective. Chancellor Angela Merkel knows full well that too much apparent enthusiasm for bailing out eurozone countries will tend to alienate domestic voters. It will also encourage debtors such as Greece to take even more risks at the negotiating table and demand more money for less economic reform. The efforts made to capitalise on the crisis include initiatives to strengthen the fiscal discipline of the Stability and Growth Pact, especially for eurozone members, and the establishment of minimum standards for national fiscal frameworks including the introduction of national debt brakes. A new euro area crisis management regime has been created with the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Stability Mechanism, the latter due to be operational in July of this year. Finally, a far-reaching reform of financial market oversight has been introduced, and is now operational. Some of these initiatives will prove less convincing in practice than on paper. There are, moreover, as there have been since the 1970s, continuing and very deep fissures between France and Germany on the functioning of European economic co-operation. Germany remains under global, not just European, pressure, to boost economic growth and share more of its hard won gains in competitiveness with its frailer neighbours, including France. On this score, critics of Germany should note that, driven finally by domestic consumption, the German economy could be heading for a boom once the cyclically weak first half of 2012 is over – a silver lining on an otherwise dark horizon. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182755 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:35:57 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182754 Two great shifts in the way we make things occurred in the 20th century. After the First World War, Ford and General Motors introduced the age of mass production and, in the middle of the century, Japanese companies such as Toyota pioneered the flexible, just-in-time approaches that underpin manufacturing today. Now, with high and volatile commodity prices, forward-looking companies sense that the economics of production may be about to alter again. But is it possible to go that one step further, and develop business models that deliver more value while using fewer materials? Thirty years ago, Walter Stahel set out the case for a ‘closed loop’ or ‘circular’ economy. To keep resource use within sustainable levels, he argued, products would need to be more durable and, where possible, repaired rather than replaced. The result would be a large volume of resources cycling within the economy. Many jobs would be created to help collect and re-work worn-out goods. Circular economy thinking has been around for years. A century ago the wooden crates used to ship factory parts were turned into the floors of Ford’s Model T motor car – an early example of ‘upcy-cling’, the process of adding value to an existing product before resale. Dieter Rams, perhaps the most influential designer of the last century, applied similar principles to his work at Braun and Vitsoe. Rams’ universal shelving system, a design classic that hit shops in 1960, is modular, adaptable, repairable and built to last a lifetime. Yet a trip to any high street store is a reminder that today, the vast majority of products on the market are produced so that they can be priced as cheaply as possible. Quality is sacrificed, product life is short and limited attention is given to where discarded products end up. Regulations in some countries force companies to take back old electronic equipment, but this is rarely seen as a way of making money. Until now, planned obsolescence has proved a much more profitable model than sustainable design. The reality in today’s economy is that natural resources are mined and extracted, turned into products and then discarded. Each year the European Union produces half a tonne of waste per person. Germany, the leader in recycling, still sends half of its waste to be incinerated or to landfill. In other countries a much larger share goes to the dump. So what explains the growing interest in the circular economy in corporate boardrooms? Many will have noted that the concept has been given a substantial boost in China’s 12th Five-Year Plan. In developed countries, too, resource efficiency has shifted from an environmental issue to one that is seen as critical to long-term competitiveness.  This has put the spotlight on new business opportunities – analysis by McKinsey suggests that manufacturing companies in the European Union could save $630 billion a year by 2025 by adopting circular economy approaches. It also raises the spectre of tougher regulations. Many of these factors, however, would have also applied in the 1970s, another period of high and volatile resource prices. Technology is the game changer. For the first time, it is now possible to accurately track the use of resources right along the supply chain. As pioneering companies are demonstrating, these costs can be incorporated into the heart of business systems – and added to profit and loss statements. Better information on resource flows can be used by companies, their suppliers and customers alike, to cut waste and make better use of resources. Technology is also changing the way that products are made. Breakthroughs in digital design, automated manufacturing and innovations involving the materials used have opened up the landscape of sustainability for designers. Coca-Cola introduced a 30 per cent plant-based, 100 per cent recyclable plastic bottle into some markets in 2011, while B&Q, the DIY specialist, has raised the possibility that it may not sell anything at all in future, focusing on rental instead. Some technologies pose a more fundamental challenge to today’s manufac-turing approaches. 3D printing may soon allow mainstream consumers to customise and ‘print’ their own products at relatively low cost – reducing the need for transport and avoiding wasteful manufacturing pro-cesses. The internet has allowed whole categories of products to move from the physical to the virtual – although on the flip-side it is driving the growth in elec-tronic products. The circular economy will remain a niche concept unless companies believe that consumers are ready to play their part. But there are signs that the public is seeking new and more sustainable forms of consumption – as long as it is at the right price. Companies are experimenting with business models that build long-term relationships with the consumer. Like the mobile phone, a range of products from washing machines to music are now being offered on a pay-as-you-go monthly basis rather than for sale. There are now half a million members of car-sharing schemes in North America (up from 2,500 in 2000), and they drive 30 per cent less than when they owned their own car. The circular economy is an old idea whose time may have arrived. Now the question is: which companies will have the inspiration to become the Fords and the Toyotas of the 21st century?   Road ahead for the car Modular design: Car parts can be made so that they are easier to replace and repair – not just to their original performance, but up to the latest high-efficiency designs. Customers need an incentive to take advantage of these resource-saving opportunities, however.  Car sharing: Early schemes enabled others to take a ride in your car during rush hour, reducing costs and taking traffic off the road. These have flourished online in the past decade. In recent years, another model has emerged: the pay-as-you-go car, as offered by companies such as Zipcar in the United States and Europe. Electric vehicles: Electric vehicles can transform the use of fossil fuels in transport. The high up-front cost of batteries and limited mileage have prompted interest in new business models, from the battery-swapping approach of BetterPlace, to rental arrangements that spread the cost to the customer. Car-free cities: If new cities or residential areas are designed to make the private car unnecessary, people will readily use communal rapid transport. But this has to start with the right urban design. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182754 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:21:16 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182753 ‘You know Tony, you deserve the Garter for this . . .’ The voice of Ambassador Oleg Troyanovsky, grandest of Soviet apparatchiks, cut across the hubbub of the Security Council to offer Sir Anthony Parsons, British Permanent Representative at the UN, his most perceptive bouquet of the day. Who could have expected an old communist to show such detailed knowledge of British orders of chivalry? Security Council Resolution 502, demanding immediate withdrawal of all Argentine forces from the Falkland Islands, had been adopted, with mandatory force. Most UN resolutions matter little, and many not at all. This one was an exception. For a British government reeling from its failure to foresee the invasion, humiliated by the Argentine coup de main, it was a lifeline. More important, it provided the moral, legal and diplomatic bedrock for British military action in the months that followed. Britain’s allies in the European Community, the US and the Commonwealth did not share the British position on sovereignty. But if diplomatic efforts failed, the resolution offered a platform for Britain to take back the islands within a framework of international law and general acceptance – if not enthusiasm.  Troyanovsky, of all the members of the Security Council, understood this. He sat to Parsons’ right, according to the alphabetical order of the delegations – this was then the USSR. To Parsons’ left was Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the US representative, whose record of mischievous cultivation of Argentine officers made her a less than enthusiastic colleague. Neither she, nor the new-ish French representative, who should have been the natural allies of Parsons in the Council, had quite understood the sig-nificance of events as they unfolded. But Troyanovsky knew.  The problem at the UN was that a majority of the Security Council delegations favoured the Argentine position on sovereignty – there were numerous General Assembly resolutions spelling out the UN orthodoxy that this was a residual colonial problem and implying that it must be settled speedily in favour of Argentina. The two arguments that played best in the UK were therefore of no use in New York: we might be clear and unequivocal about our own sovereignty claim, and we could also be eloquent about the right to self-determination of the Islanders (“Paramount”, according to Mrs Thatcher, only slightly misquoting the UN Charter). But we in the UN delegation knew these arguments would cut no ice in the formal proceedings of the Council. The only argument that would hold water there was that one party to a recognised dispute had tried to settle things by force. When Parsons first received the intelligence that an Argentine force was on the point of taking the islands, he saw with brilliant clarity the only way this local diplomatic war could be won. Somewhat frustrated for much of his time in New York, he became through the Falklands crisis the old fashioned hero whom his favourite author, Conrad, would have invented: the man prepared by his whole previous life for his personal moment of truth.  Parsons went for a high-risk strategy of leadership from the front. With the support of the Foreign Office, he called a formal meeting of the Security Council even before it had been confirmed that the Argentines were on their way (‘We’ll look a bit funny if they are lost in the fog between Buenos Aires and Stanley,’ he observed on the way to the Council).  He got a unanimous statement out of the Council, telling each of the parties to exercise restraint in the South Atlantic. This represented a last-ditch attempt to persuade the Argentines back from the brink – their UN diplomats were still finding it difficult to believe that their own government would do anything so reckless as invading. But by now the die was cast. We embarked on a diplomatic campaign by turns sober and dramatic, disciplined and improvised.  The Argentine strategy was clear. To delay action in the Council so that their occupation of the islands became an irreversible fact, with the British too demoralised and isolated to be able to respond. The US was agnostic at the top (President Reagan described the islands as 'just a bunch of rocks'), and badly split further down (Secretary of State Haig emotionally backing the British but significant players such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, also a cabinet member, and Thomas Enders, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, seen by many in the State Department as essentially pro-Argentine). The Europeans were unprepared. The non-aligned group which then dominated the UN did not much like the Argentines, but their collective instinct was anti-colonial.  While the Argentines aimed to defer discussion till the arrival of their Foreign Minister, Nicanor Costa-Méndez, Parsons forced the pace. Brushing aside the suggestion that he wait until a minister could be despatched from London, he immediately circulated a short draft resolution which was moderately worded but contained the crucial points that the Argentines should withdraw, and that there had been a breach of the peace, making this a Chapter 7 resolution relating to international peace and security, not a Chapter 6 draft on peaceful settlement of disputes. This was critical, ultimately giving the resolution mandatory status rather than establishing it as a starting-point for endless negotiation. There followed 72 hours in which Parsons and his team hardly slept. Regaling the Council with his choicest rhetoric, he excoriated the Argentines for their brutality and their braggadocio. His evident sincerity and eloquence had a strikingly persuasive effect on all audiences that mattered, from cynical UN diplomats and hardened Secretariat officials to the British politicians watching at home, and to a fascinated US public opinion. This was the start of what turned out to be the first round-the-clock television war, as CNN had only just been launched.  We needed nine votes in the Council. We could rely on the US, we had to assume, notwithstanding Mrs Kirkpatrick’s personal position. We hoped for French support, not knowing at first that President Mitterrand was going to do us proud – France still held a number of overseas possessions which could be jeopardised if this crisis came out wrong, and he seemed to take a chivalrous delight in doing justice to his old foe Margaret Thatcher. We had the bad luck that the only two other European nations with which Britain had territorial disputes – Ireland and Spain – were serving that year on the Council. We had by good fortune one Latin American on our side – Guyana, which felt threatened by one of its neighbours in another residual territorial dispute. But we could write off Panama, China, the Soviet Union and Poland. That meant we needed at least four votes and possibly five from a mixed group of pacifist Japan; Jordan – friendly but bruised by fresh violence in Lebanon; and three anti-colonial but pragmatic African countries – Togo, Uganda and Zaire.  The battle between the Argentines and their proxies and ourselves for those votes, in New York, in capitals and at Non-Aligned caucus meetings, almost deserves a monograph for each of the countries above. My most melodramatic memory is of how the Jordanian vote swung minute by minute from positive to negative then possible abstention, as Ambassador Hazem Nuseibeh in New York appeared to recommend in favour, the Foreign Minister overruled him and then seemed to instruct him to vote against. In one of the most breathtaking procedural coups imaginable, Parsons demanded and secured a brief delay before the vote was taken – in the first instance so that the draft resolution could be reprinted with the bracketed words (Islas Malvinas) added to the title of the Resolution ‘Question of the Falklands’. The real reason was to gain time for Mrs Thatcher to talk to King Hussein.  Unfortunately communications had broken down between Amman and New York, and I found myself conducting a reluctant Dr Nuseibeh up and down obscure staircases in the winding passages of the UN Secretariat to get him to a phone to hear directly what his government had decided. Unknown to me, the usual connecting doors were shut as it was a Saturday. We raced around in circles until I found myself perched on a chute in the UN car park as a heavily perspiring Dr Nuseibeh begged for a brief time out, lit up a cheroot in his magnificent gold cigarette-holder, and chuckled that this was beginning to feel like a real-life James Bond movie. In the event – as far as we could see – Amman never gave him the final confirmation of instructions that he was seeking. But when the Council reconvened, ten arms went up in favour of the resolution, including Jordan, Ireland, Japan, and each of the three African delegations. Panama voted against and there were abstentions from Spain, China and Poland. Most crucially, the Soviet Union abstained. Britain had its mandatory resolution. SCR 502 was as important as Parsons foresaw in protecting our position in the subsequent negotiations under UN Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar, and in making it possible for the Pentagon to supply the hardware Britain so desperately needed when, after the failure of negotiation, it came to war.  There were momentous stories to follow, in the military feats, the tragic human cost of the conflict, and the wider implications for what happened to Argentina and Latin America in the course of the 1980s. But Ambassador Troyanovsky never spoke a truer diplomatic word than in his old-fashioned compliment to Sir Anthony Parsons that day. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182753 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:36:51 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182649 This year three of the permanent members of the UN Security Council – the US, France and Russia – are holding elections, while a fourth, China, is embarking on its once-in-a-decade leadership transition. All over the world governments are having to deal with an increasingly volatile public opinion.  Last year the Arab people rose up. The same wave, less powerful but still unpredictable, is now spreading. There is no new revolutionary ideology behind this wave. What we have now is a digital culture which means that new ideas – such as the Occupy movement’s ‘We are the 99 per cent’ – take off globally.  Our cover story looks at one of the transforming aspects of the new vox populi, the web-based campaigns that are blurring the old distinctions between Left and Right. Like it or not, this is the future of political engagement.  Even China, with its minutely choreographed leadership change, is not immune. As Kerry Brown writes on page 16, China’s new generation of leaders will have to be politicians, not technocrats, to meet the challenge of a public opinion swayed by social media.  Amid rising talk of a pre-emptive strike against Iran, Patricia Lewis writes that Iranian public opinion is turning away from the government’s nuclear ambitions.  We are delighted to have a column by Dr Xinghai Fang, who has taken time off from running the Shanghai Office of Financial Services to assure the West that China’s rise does not mean the inevitable decline of the developed countries. On page 6 he offers some simple advice on how to compete with the rising powers.  http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182649 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:59:26 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182653 Shrinking Presidents Sir - Aaron David Miller (‘Why greatness eludes Obama’ Feb/March) lays out a cogent argument for the absence of ‘greatness’ in our political leaders, but ends up emphasising less their abilities than the lack of the right environment; it is not the absence of great individuals, but of dire events in America’s recent history. I might argue that, at least in part, this has been because either our leaders have not let matters deteriorate as in the past (the Great Depression v the 2008 downturn), or because America and Americans are now more resilient.  Given the rising complexity, faster reaction speeds and plethora of communications channels today, the job is also perhaps getting harder. It could be that today’s circumstances require a different type of leader. President Obama has been accused by his opponents and by some within his party of ‘leading from behind’, or indeed, of not being a leader at all. I would suggest that the problem could be with us. In business, a chief executive would be applauded for a management style that defines problems, empowers his or her staff to find solutions, chooses the best of these, and then trusts the staff to implement them. This is demonstrably Obama’s style. The best managers are those who encourage others to believe the solutions were theirs in the first place, not those whose egos demand that they should always be right. This, too, is his style. Maybe, rather than suggesting President Obama should change, we might want to consider that a lower-key approach, one that recognises the ‘greatness’ of America but doesn’t feel the need to impress this on everyone else, is the right path for today. Perhaps President Obama is offering us a new image of greatness, one more appropriate for today’s world. Xenia Dormandy, Senior Fellow, US Role, Chatham House    Childish gibe  Sir - Congratulations on the Feb/March issue. Almost all the articles are excellent: informative, and well written by well chosen authors. But your interview with Niall Ferguson raises some questions. To give him three pages goes too far. Do readers of The World Today really want to read his childish gibe about leaving Oxford because ‘British historians are supposed to write about kings’, or his exhumation of Nicholas Ridley’s paranoid drivel about EMU being ‘a German racket to take over Europe’?  Roger Morgan, Former deputy director of studies and Council member, Chatham House    Sir - Perhaps Niall Ferguson is living in the past: ‘I was quite isolated in Oxford – British historians are supposed to write about kings’. Before your readers, or their offspring, start looking elsewhere, they should visit the Oxford University faculty of history website (www.history.ox.ac.uk). A lot seems to be going on that must have escaped Mr Ferguson’s notice.  David Bentley, Associate Fellow, International Law, Chatham House   Send your comments to letters@theworldtoday.org http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182653 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:55:27 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182654   Revolutionary fervour is hard to come by in Moscow these days. If one drops by the Jean-Jacques café or Mayak, once unofficial headquarters of the protest movement, a visibly shrunken group of activists and media types is discussing whether ‘the revolution’ died with Vladimir Putin’s victory in the March 4 presidential elections, the enthusiastic expressions gone from their faces.  This is not the case with the faces of portfolio investors in Russia. They are smiling as they anticipate Putin’s triumphant return to the Kremlin in May. The consensus is that Putin’s third term will mean more ‘business as usual’ – albeit with a slightly different composition of government. Both the activists and the investors are wrong. Russia has changed irreversibly and the question is only how long and how smooth the decline of the current political regime will be.  Events unfolding since the massively rigged State Duma elections brought tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow are a classic example of a legitimacy crisis. This became palpable after the September 24, 2011, announcement that Vladimir Putin was planning to return to the presidency. I remember very distinctly how the ‘Is Uruguay still taking immigrants?’ mood soon gave way to an ‘It’s our country!’ sentiment.  When Putin was publicly humiliated for the first time by the audience’s booing at a martial arts match last November, Alexei Navalny, the blogger turned anti-corruption crusader, wrote in his online diary: ‘This is the beginning of the end’. This happened three weeks before the first in a series of rallies, held at Bolotnaya Square, Moscow, made headlines around the world. I think Navalny’s remark is still true. Although there will be fewer rallies, the reasons that led to them in the first place have not disappeared. Putin is still facing the growing discontent of the people I’d prefer to call the ‘independent class’, rather than the ‘middle class’ referred to by the western media. They are mostly city professionals aged between 20 and 50 who have learnt to live in the new, sometimes harsh conditions of Russia’s capitalism. They are used to making independent decisions regarding their private lives, their professional careers, their lifestyle and consumer choices. They do not need a benevolent but strict father figure in the Kremlin to ‘stabilise’ the country for them. They are just fine stabilising their lives themselves. What they do lack is the ability – though not the formal right – to make a free political choice.  Not all of us are on the take Curiously, many of these ‘independents’ are not private entrepreneurs or bohemians, but civil servants sick of the corrution of the Putin system. An acquaintance, the deputy head of a department in the Moscow Mayor’s Office, told me he was stunned to see his colleagues go to opposition gatherings en masse. ‘Not all of us are on the take,’ he said. ‘We have eyes and ears and are as disgusted as everyone else. Many of us want to make careers in a normal, transparent fashion. It’s our fight too.’  The problem the Kremlin faces is that it cannot use either bribery or intimidation to quell this mood. Bribery won’t work because the demands of the protesters are not economic. And intimidation doesn’t allow much scope because fear is gone from Russian society. Only an Alexander Lukashenko-style wave of repressions could buck the trend. For this the Kremlin has neither the resources nor the stomach.  Count on forgiveness  While the opposition doesn’t appear to have one leader whom everyone would support, in fact it has. Mikhail Khodorkovsky , the jailed former tycoon, is the only public figure in Russia who has the sympathies of both westernising, Right-leaning liberals and the gradually evolving and modernising Left. For the former, he is the icon of Russian capitalism and a relentless critic of Putin; for the latter, he is the only Russian oligarch who, through his long stint in prison, has redeemed the real and perceived sins of Russia’s controversial privatisation of the 1990s.  More importantly, Khodorkovsky is consistently challenging the Kremlin on moral grounds, decrying the cynicism and the mistrust of value-based politics that the Putin era has brought with it. This is something that opposition supporters clearly identify with. It may seem like a long shot, but the former billionnaire is the closest example Russia has to a Nelson Mandela or a Vaclav Havel. His Dostoevskian plight is so Russian in style that I can almost visualise him walking through the Kremlin gates.  Khodorkovsky himself has chosen a different novel as a reference for his situation – Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, whose hero is falsely imprisoned, escapes and takes vengeance on his persecutors. With his now famous statement ‘I am no Count of Monte Cristo, I will not seek revenge’, Khodorkovsky may eventually provide the best opportunity for Russia’s current leaders to make a graceful exit.     http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182654 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:09:40 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182734 America - Theories of why American politics are more partisan than ever abound, but there is little real analysis about why this has occurred or how it can be bridged. Will the US still be able to deal with its economic and other domestic challenges? How close is the US to everything grinding to a halt? Russia & Eurasia - Russia’s working age population looks certain to drop from approximately 101 million to 90 million by 2030. What are the implications for the economy and Russia’s desire to be a leading world power?  - The impasse between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh remains; yet Azerbaijan is spending so much on defence that within around ten years it will be in a position to take it back by force. What can be done to avert war? - Despite a xenophobic backlash, Russia and Kazakhstan are raising tens of billions of dollars leasing farmland to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation members. What does this mean for the region’s long-term future? Global Health - Media coverage of the growth of antimicrobial resistance is piecemeal and fails to give the big picture, perhaps because the threat seems too long away and is misunderstood. How can attention be better focused? - How sustainable is the current health aid model and how can we move to substantial rather than incremental growth in food aid? Coverage centres on the struggle to get more donations for developing countries and corruption, but seldom discusses the need for a next-generation model. Africa - Humanitarian NGOs and the private sector often don’t get on. Yet development in Africa cannot happen without the private sector. If Western companies withdraw, rising BRIC countries’ private sectors with lower standards will step in. Companies need NGOs’ support to make their investments more secure. How can this relationship be improved?  - The Central African Republic is the size of France with a population of 4.5 million, yet it attracts very little international interest. Few countries engage with it, yet a number of armed groups operate there, including Joseph Kony’s LRA. What does this marginalisation say about international approaches to governance, security and economic development in the region? Middle East - Unrest in Saudi Arabia plus continuing protests in Bahrain reminds us that monarchies are not immune to demands for change.  - Significant changes are underway within Hamas. It is trying to get out of Syria and is working on improving relations with Jordan and Egypt, which both have peace treaties with Israel. Will they quietly push for talks between Israel and Hamas?  - Yemen is critical to future security in the Gulf region and very under-reported. Energy, Environment - After the crisis at Fukushima, Japan is gradually shutting its reactors, with the last two due to close soon. This sudden loss of nuclear capacity is leadng to an increase in imported fossil fuels, particularly gas, and an aggressive energy efficiency and management programme. With public attitudes hostile to nuclear power, how many of the 50 reactors will be re-opened, and what is Japan’s energy future? http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182734 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:46:55 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182668 The Pirate Party is Europe’s fastest-growing political group. How come? I started the party in 2005, out of frustration with politicians not understanding the damage they were doing to our communications infrastructure with the Data Retention Directive. This allows EU member states to store citizens’ telecommunications data, and allows police to access details such as IP addresses and the time of every e-mail, phone call and text message sent or received. I put up the Pirate Party website and thought: I’ll grow this organically, but it spiked. I became a public figure overnight. I thought: this is my chance to change the world for the better. I took out a huge loan, quit my job and founded the party. What do you do as chief evangelist? After leading the party for five years, I started to stagnate, so I stood down. I travel and meet people and discuss ideas. Is the Pirate Party an inherently Swedish phenomenon?  There is a Swedish back-story. Everyone in Sweden had a very fast internet connection long before other parts of the world. When you give that kind of technology not just to nerds, but to everyone, it kick-starts a public discussion on how this technology can and should be used. Once you have a large proportion of the population engaging in an activity, and understanding what it’s about, change starts to happen. How did you capture the youth vote? The younger generation knows that they have the freedom to express any idea to anyone on the planet, and let the ideas battle it out themselves online. There is a generational shift, at around 40 years of age. If you look at people over 40, when they have a problem, they tend to mentally browse their address book, pick one or two people, contact them and expect a reply. If you are below 40, you will broadcast the problem to everyone in your address book, and everyone around them, and expect to get a reply – you have no idea from whom.  You gain followers through a ‘swarm’ technique. Is this the model for political parties of the future?  In building a swarm, you grow to tens of thousands of activists by having friends speak to one another and you can’t do that by just advertising and having a one-size-fits-all message. If you have a successful initial splash, which I had, then you’ll have hundreds of activists saying: ‘Give me something to work with.’ Those couple of hundred will be your bootstrap to the next wave of activists, which will be their friends, and their friends, in turn, and so the swarm will keep growing. Your party claims followers in more than 50 countries. Are parties becoming more trans-national?  As the internet arrives, countries become less and less relevant. Of course, there is still a language barrier. But people don’t really care what country another activist is in; we’re just helping to secure freedom of expression ... no matter where people are from.  How can governments harness the internet? That’s not hard – it’s just a matter of listening to problems. But most governments are not prepared to give up the privilege of censoring the internet. We have had a gatekeeper culture for the past 500 years. Once there was only one gatekeeper: the Catholic Church. Then the printing press broke its monopoly. The internet is the largest equaliser mankind has invented: the voice of a nine-year-old schoolgirl in Paraguay with a laptop has the same weight as mine, a white man in a rich part of Europe.  TV attack ads are a feature of the US presidential race. Are these old-fashioned political tactics relevant? I threw out my TV 15 years ago. The generation coming out of their teens don’t watch TV. They get their information differently. Could the Pirate Party achieve a majority? Not currently, but if you look at the trajectory of the Green parties, that’s the model for the Pirate Party’s next decade.  Are single-issue parties the future of European politics? Not in Britain, which has a first-past-the-post system. But in countries with proportional representation, yes. If you look at the three major political movements in Europe, they all started out as a single-issue protests. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182668 Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:53:50 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182737 Last November, Silvio Berlusconi vanished from the Italian political scene as if in a puff of smoke. One minute he was there, the next minute gone: it was like Mrs Thatcher’s departure, but without the tears. He had dominated Italian politics, in and out of office, for the previous 20 years. Suddenly, all that remained was a Cheshire Cat-like grin. The new regime of Mario Monti resembles a very violent hangover cure. We tend to think of the Italians as pleasure-loving epicureans without a puritanical bone, but they also have a less well-known appetite for masochism, which at the moment is being indulged on a daily basis.  The people of Italy would never vote for an Italian equivalent of Thatcher, even if such a person were culturally conceivable, and Professor Monti’s arrival at Palazzo Chigi was as close to a coup d’etat as you can get without pointing a gun at anyone.  But after the years of bingeing with Berlusconi, here comes the cold shower: austerity all round. The Italians can comfort themselves with the knowledge that, unlike us, they didn’t vote for it: instead it was foisted on them by President Giorgio Napoletano. At the same time, they know they needed it. And when Professor Monti stands up in international forums, towering over the French president, welcomed far and wide as the man who has changed the game in Italy and possibly in the eurozone as a whole, it is quietly satisfying. Because certainly the man they call Il Cavaliere – the Knight – never had that effect. So what exactly is the shape of the Silvio-sized hole? What is the legacy of this man whose face was for years on the front page of every Italian newspaper practically every day of the week?  For one who has lived so much of his life in the thick of violent controversy – political, legal and personal – the most dramatic effect of his going has been on the media. At Rai 1, the equivalent of BBC One, the flagship television news programme was under the control of Augusto Minzolini, a former journalist on La Stampa, who for years had fed the Turin-based daily juicy but always flattering titbits from Il Cavaliere’s table. His reports, never clearly sourced, were the gossip of a favoured courtier who had no intention of fouling the nest. Control of Italy’s national broadcaster has always been in the gift of whoever happens to be in power, and eventually the most high-profile job in Italian journalism landed in his lap. He showed his appreciation by turning it into a grotesque parody of a news programme, downplaying or simply ignoring difficulties in which the boss was embroiled and giving another Berlusconi loyalist, Giuliano Ferrara, a regular daily homily after the news.  Soon after Il Cavaliere’s defenestration, of course, he was out, accompanied by the biggest cheer that has ever gone up from the anti-Berlusconi camp.  Silvio’s going has changed the priorities of the entire Italian press. La Repubblica, for example, the leading Roman daily, campaigned relentlessly and rather personally against him for many years: there was and remains bad blood between Berlusconi and Carlo de Benedetti, owner of the group of which the newspaper is a part. Now with equal passion it is cheer-leading for Monti and his technocrats. The Berlusconi papers, on the other hand, Il Giornale (which Berlusconi’s brother owns) and Libero, after years unctuously toeing the government line, were reborn as strident voices for the opposition.  Beyond the front pages, the changes are harder to detect because Berlusconi’s was always much more a government of rhetoric than of action: in fact it was masterly inaction, for example in the matter of pursuing tax evaders or taking on vested interests, that endeared him to so many millions for so long. Italians, so recently and incompletely unified, have always had an ambivalent attitude to their national governments, wishing them to have a respectable profile internationally without causing too much irritation or disturbance at home.  Berlusconi eventually failed on both counts, becoming a major embarrassment on the world stage and bringing the country closer to bankruptcy than it had ever been. He had to go – and when he saw the share prices of his own companies slumping because of his refusal to do so, the penny finally dropped.  But just because he has gone, it doesn’t mean he won’t be back. Mario Monti’s government is a mere inter-regnum: all the existing parties which so badly funked the challenges of reform are standing in the wings waiting their moment (the elections of 2013) to pounce. Berlusconi told the Financial Times in February that he is no longer interested in being PM, but that could change. Amazing and appalling as the idea may seem abroad, there is no certainty that the wily old crooner will not once again come out on top.  http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182737 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:54:28 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182738 After the first instalment of this column, the ubiquity of the phrase ‘fit for purpose’ was brought to its attention. A quick web trawl reveals that in the space of a few days, the London stock market, the UN Security Council, British health service reforms, New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and even modern marriage have been tarred as being unfit for purpose. Until recently, the phrase appears to have lived happily within the confines of consumer protection law and quality assurance for products and services, and outside Britain it still tends to.  The phrase entered the British political lexicon in 2006 when John Reid, the Home Secretary, made a splash by declaring that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate was ‘not fit for purpose’. Reid may not have been a very memorable Home Secretary – his critics predictably turned the phrase on him – but his linguistic legacy snowballs on. Not being ‘fit for purpose’ has become short-hand for griping about any target, particularly British institutions, which allows the critic to appear technically perceptive rather than just angry. One can wonder whether by now there are any British institutions that have been spared this judgment. There is one: after the Gulf of Mexico spill, British safety regulations for offshore oil drilling were declared ‘fit for purpose’ compared to US ones. Does this kind of management speak do justice to large, often sprawling bodies? Other than at a very general level, do these institutions have one single purpose? It is surprising that the phrase has struck a chord in Britain. It has unfamiliar echoes of ‘five-year plans’ for a people known for distrusting dogmatic schemes and somehow succeeding by muddling through. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182738 Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:58:06 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182751 Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan on the Brink: the Future of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West, Allen Lane When Ahmed Rashid’s first book, Taliban, was published in 2000, it warranted a relatively small print run. Then September 11 happened and it suddenly became an international bestseller, with the White House and Downing Street requesting copies. Pakistan on the Brink is his latest work, a collection of essays that continues the theme of his earlier works charting the rise and fall and subsequent re-emergence of the Taliban and Islamist extremism. But while earlier works contained a critique of US policy, George W. Bush and of Pakistan, this book looks at a period which ostensibly should contain grounds for optimism. In Pakistan, after the ambivalent, if not duplicitous, rule of Pervez Musharraf, a fairly elected civilian government came to power. And the new US president, Barack Obama, saw Afghanistan as the ‘good war’ which should be won, in contrast to Iraq. Combined, this should have given grounds for hope that earlier wrongs could be righted. In practice, the situation within Pakistan has deteriorated dramatically, as have its relations with the United States. Afghanistan’s future is unresolved despite moves by the West to announce the date of a ‘conditions-based’ timetable for troop withdrawal. Moves to engage with the Taliban are slowly getting underway, although as the date of departure approaches it is hard to see that the West’s leverage is strengthened when some kind of structured political process finally begins. All of the main protaganists have made errors. Reading Rashid’s account of each makes for depressing reading. In the case of Pakistan, the failure of the military high command to recognise that the threat from internal insurgency presents a greater risk to the country’s well-being than the perceived threat from India has led to numerous wrong turnings. The apparent transition to civilian rule failed to allow new policies to be formulated because both the President and the Prime Minister appear, in Rashid’s words, to be ‘terrified’ of the military. Remaining in office appears contingent on not upsetting the military.  The truth of this has been seen in recent months. Soon after setting out a bold initiative aiming to liberalise trade with India, a mysterious memo appeared, apparently seeking US support for the civilian government to counter the threat of a military coup. ‘Memogate’ led to the resignation of Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, but failed, thus far at least, to bring down the government.  US policy errors have varied. The decision to invade Iraq, and subsequently transfer both resources and political attention from Afghanistan, remains the first and foremost.  But Obama inherited a string of problems, not least the growing recognition that accounting procedures for the billions of dollars channelled to Pakistan were lax, to say the least. Fear that funding would be tightened up made Pakistan’s military wary immediately of the new president, and within months of his presidency beginning, the Kerry-Lugar Bill, under which assistance required the military to be subordinate to the civilian government, further riled them. And while Obama has a more nuanced approach to foreign policy than his predecessor, he was ‘utterly trapped’ by the Bush legacy. Perhaps the most important element in this was that policy was driven by the US military. A wide range of voices has argued for years that success in Afghanistan will require a politically-led, not militarily-led strategy. As Rashid argues, ‘the key question for the Americans before 2014 is not how many Taliban they kill but whether an Afghan state – army, police, bureaucracy, justice – neglected so badly under Bush, can be enabled to take charge of the country’. Unfortunately, this has not always been the question asked. Elections had become the key matrix by which success in intervention could be determined. The US commitment to the 2009 election in Afghanistan in the midst of insurgency was misguided, and the West continues to suffer the consequences. Vote-rigging undermined President Karzai’s domestic legitimacy. But while the US perceived Karzai to be weakened, the Afghan leader felt that he could ‘get away with anything’, given the failure of the West to hold him accountable. Where Karzai was ahead of the West was in his recognition that the solution was political. Rashid’s chapter exploring the gradual, and still incomplete, western acceptance of the need for talks, in some format, epitomises the over-arching lack of strategy and lack of vision for Afghanistan. In the same vein, the failure of the US administration to ‘detail its aims in the region beyond 2014’ has given rise to ‘speculation and conspiracy theories’. Is the US priority to stabilise Pakistan, Rashid asks. Is it to challenge Iran and China? Or to support allies, such as India and Turkey? Each position would have its proponents within the US. But policy towards Afghanistan would differ markedly depending upon which was the priority.  The current introspection in strategy has allowed more strident voices to fill the vacuum. A hearing into Baluchistan workby a US Congressional committee caused outrage in Pakistan, though actually stirred Pakistan to take some steps to reach out to Baluchi nationalists. Many Pakistanis doubt that the dismemberment of Pakistan is as far from US policy as officials claim. What is the solution? Rashid believes that the US needs to articulate its long-term strategy, and engage in a dialogue with the Taliban. Afghanistan’s government needs to become more transparent and politically-inclusive. Finally, Pakistan needs to entrench democracy and its politicians have to act more responsibly. While the wish list is correct, the odds on a convergence of good intentions would be long. Pakistan on the Brink is an incomplete history, describing a stuttering work in progress. What is apparent is that progress is painfully slow. If steps towards dialogue with the Taliban continue at the same pace, it is difficult to see a successful denouement by 2014. If there is to be a happy ending, a range of actors will need to shift their approach, and expedite political solutions. Events, on the other hand, conspire against this. The recent discovery that US forces had burnt copies of the Koran sparked violent protests across Afghanistan, and led to the deaths of six US troops, two of whom were inside the Interior Ministry, which was presumed to be secure. The situation worsened after a US soldier went on the rampage in Kandahar Province, killing 16 Afghan civilians, including children. These incidents came while the US and Afghanistan are negotiating a ‘strategic partnership’, which will presumably include some form of immunity for US military personnel; the decision to fly the perpetrator of the Kandahar massacre quickly out of Afghanistan will do little to engender trust. At the same time, the Western narrative that Afghan security forces are being built up to replace western troops has been undermined by the infiltration of the Afghan army by Taliban sympathisers. This in turn has increased distrust. None of the players – the Afghan government, the Taliban, Pakistan or the US – has agreed the scope of talks. A number of confidence-building measures remain stalled, given continued Taliban attacks on the one hand, and US reluctance to transfer Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay on the other.  At the same time, the entrenchment of democracy in Pakistan is also under threat, with the Supreme Court charging the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, with contempt of court, leaving the threat of dismissal over his head. While the case may be legally valid, its timing is avowedly political. In the 1990s the military used the President to dismiss governments; the Supreme Court’s current action certainly strengthens the hand of the military in relation to the civilian government. In sum, it is difficult to be optimistic for the future, which is a shame for, as Rashid notes, there is an ‘enormous Afghan desire for security, peace and economic development’. The same could be said for the overwhelming majority of those in Pakistan. If Pakistan and/or Afghanistan do go over the brink, Rashid’s book provides a cast list of those responsible. http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/archive/view/182751 Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:10:53 +0100 Chatham House - The World Today