by Richard Gowan | Jun 1, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Middle East and North Africa
On Saturday Bernard Kouchner showed why he’s Europe’s Coolest Foreign Minister by swooping into Nasiriya, Iraq, just after a shoot-out to offer reconstruction aid. Part of me thinks “about time” given that (as I pointed in January) French aid to Iraq has been pretty piffling to date. But this gesture provides timely proof of a trend that Daniel and I highlighted in a piece on the ECFR website on Thursday: the emergence of a new consensus in Europe on the need to do more for Iraq.
European diplomats have privately admitted for some time that they could not ignore Iraq forever. But in recent weeks, private talk has given way to public statements. A visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Brussels in April proved a catalyst: the European Commission trumpeted its desire for “an energy security partnership”.
Getting from private to public statements is a step forward. Shifting from rhetoric to real engagement in Iraq will be an even bigger one. What such engagement will look like is uncertain but parts of it are clear. More, better-targeted aid? Yes. Assisting UN mediation? Yes. Support for what Barack Obama calls a “diplomatic surge” across the Middle East? Absolutely. New troops? Not a chance.
Regular readers may faintly recall that I’ve banged on about this whole EU-Iraq thing before, picking up on a February report from the European Parliament that advocated greater engagement. It is actually one of the few issues on which the authors of this blog fundamentally disagree, as evidenced by a somewhat tipsy argument on the topic between Alex and I at Odeon some months ago. Alex thinks (as far as I can recall) that the EU isn’t relevant to Iraq, and shouldn’t try to be. Daniel and I think that it has do more, partially for humanitarian reasons but also to avoid Middle East meltdown and improve post-Bush transatlantic links.
Up until the start of this year, making this case was a rather lonely business (although I should immediately add that there have been people making it far longer than I – Richard Youngs published a great paper on the subject back in 2005, for example). But it is finally getting traction among the commentariat.
Check out Pierre Schori’s piece for ECFR and (as it’s not just people involved with ECFR that believe this stuff) this Guardian online op-ed by Berlin’s Thorsten Benner. And Guido Sternberg of SWP, also in Berlin, has said wise things on the subject for Der Spiegel online. OK, that’s not exactly a flood of commentary in favor of all-out support for Iraq, but it’s a start. I’ll keep you updated as it grows.
UPDATE: our ECFR piece has now received various comments, one of them linking to this interesting online symposium on why Iraq is a European security issue, published late last year. Good stuff.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 1, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks
As Alex notes in the post immediately below, new social networking technologies can be forces for good or evil. I’ll leave you to decide which category the EU’s new idea for a Political Facebook open to Europe’s 20,000 parliamentarians falls into:
Myparl.eu – officially to be launched in October – is a website currently under construction that aims to work along the same lines as the popular MySpace or Facebook social networking services, but in addition to linking social contacts is supposed to foster debate about legislative proposals coming both out of Brussels and from national parliaments.
The first official talks on the project, which is sponsored by the European Commission and will receive EU funds, took place in Brussels on 28 May involving MEPs and 27 national co-ordinators. Daniela Vincenti Mitchener, editor of the site, told EUobserver the project is about “creating a transnational community of ideas” and that it will alert MPs to MPs in other countries “who are thinking alike.”
The project could potentially involve up to 20,000 people, including politicians from regional governments and parliaments. Myparl.eu will put forward three main themes for debate – the future of Europe, climate change and intercultural dialogue.
by Alex Evans | Jun 1, 2008 | Influence and networks
Back in February, I wrote a couple of posts comparing the potential effects of social networking technologies. One referred to a talk by Clay Shirky which was positively ebullient about the potential of networking tools that can “aggregtate non-financial motivations … get people together outside of managerial culture and for reasons other than the profit motive” – how, in other words, they can produce coherence and order.
The other quoted a New Yorker article by George Packer which criticised the role of the blogosphere, both left and right, in framing perceptions of Iraq, which (I argued) illustrated the opposite – in other words, how participatory media can produce incoherence: chaos, disorder, cacophony, where the very idea of anyobjective truth is lost amidst the blizzard of commentary, opinion and white noise.
Against that backdrop, consider another phenomenon made possible by new networking technologies: flash mobs. By and large, flash mobs are fun, light-hearted and harmless, as when there was a pillow fight in London’s Trafalgar Square a year or two back.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ST2c2nuJP4]
But if that’s an example of the ‘Shirky side’ of flash mobs, note the news this morning of how they can have a ‘Packer side’ too. As of midnight last night, drinking was banned on London’s Underground system – so in advance of the ban, three Facebook groups organised a final cocktail party on the tube. Fun, light-hearted and spontaneous, right? Not entirely, as this report makes clear:
A night that started in a celebratory mood soon turned sour as thousands of revellers poured into London’s Tube stations. Four train drivers and three other London Underground staff were assaulted, one police vehicle was damaged and two officers assaulted and another injured. A spokesman for British Transport Police said 17 people were arrested for offences such as assault, drunk and disorderly, assault on police, public order-related offences and drug offences.
The Tube stations closed by police were Liverpool Street [see YouTube below], Euston, Euston Square, Aldgate, Gloucester Road and Baker Street. Eyewitnesses said there were nightmarish scenes on trains and in stations as thousands of drunken partygoers began fighting and vomiting as the night drew to a conclusion … The spokesman said there was a “large amount” of disorder reported to police and “multiple instances” of trains being damaged leading to them being withdrawn from service.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX_f8L-pgvA]
Here’s betting that won’t be the last time we hear about the dark side of flash mobs…
