by Richard Gowan | Jul 17, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Influence and networks
It’s ten days since seven UN troops were killed in Darfur – today, one more has been killed. In between, there have been a series of events that raise big questions about the UN’s future in Africa. First, there was the defeat of the US-UK effort to slap arms sanctions on Zimbabwe in the Security Council – notable less for China and Russia’s vetoes than the African Council members’ (pace Burkina Faso) rejection of the resolution. Then there was the ICC decision to charge Sudan’s President Bashir with genocide in Darfur – again, the most striking part of the international response has been the level of African opposition, with the AU’s “Panel of the Wise” announcing the charges could “lead to a lot of danger”.
The convergence of these events may mark a turning-point in how Africa fits into the international system. African leaders are setting limits on global governance.
For most of the last decade, the continent has been a laboratory for international institutions: it has hosted the bulk of UN peacekeepers; been the testing-ground of the Millennium Development Goals (and so the G8’s efforts to hang with Bono); and was the ICC’s focus even before the Bashir indictment. The AU has emerged as everyone’s favorite new regional institution, not least for taking on Darfur.
For quite a few commentators, myself included, it has been almost axiomatic over the last few years that better international institutions mean a better Africa. But we mostly missed the politics of institution-building: the interests and ideologies of African governments, and the limits on their desire to be subsumed into supranational organizations (hey there, EU specialists, does this ring a bell with you?). There’s been lots of talk of “African ownership” over all this institution-building, but it’s all too often hollow. In May, I was at a seminar in Berlin at which the African participants gave the phrase a kicking (check out the event report).
It was never going to be possible to keep on piling international institution on international institution in Africa. I wrote a short piece in October 2006 arguing that the UN might find itself “Out of Africa” sooner than expected – that looked silly as the Security Council went on to mandate blue helmets for Darfur, and mused about sending them to Somalia. But I may not have been so wrong. It’s too early to know whether July 2008 is a turning-point or a blip in international engagement (or interference, depending on your perspective) in Africa. But it should be the moment we start thinking what “African ownership” really means.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, Off topic, UK
Having just returned home to the U.S. after a long trip to Britain, I am naturally consoling myself with frequent readings of the expat section of the Daily Telegraph website. This appears to be designed to lull far-off anglo-nostalgists into believing that the UK is still a green and pleasant land, give or (preferably) take the odd immigrant. But all is not well: classic British dishes are dying out.
Traditional British dinners are being replaced by ‘foreign quick fixes’ as they take too long to cook. Classic dishes such as toad in the hole, bubble and squeak and hot pots are dying out are diasppearing from the family dinner table, a survey shows.
Researchers found almost one in three people now opt for pizza or spaghetti bolognese at the majority of meal times. And more than a quarter of adults polled named Italian as their favourite type of food.
However, not all British classics are disappearing as the research found that roast dinners and jacket potatoes are still firm favourites.
Kathryn Race from The Potato Council, which carried out the poll, said:
“It’s a shame to see that some of our country’s best loved foods are no longer seen on UK dinner tables – they are our heritage and something we need to keep. We are travelling the world more than ever now, and it seems we are trying to recreate the dishes we sample abroad once we get back home. Foreign foods and the ingredients needed to make those dishes are readily available in supermarkets making it far easier to cook them back at home, although this is, it seems, at a price.”
by Alex Evans | Jul 17, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, Off topic
It’s often said that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character was a source of frequent annoyance to the Kazakh government – and you can see why. But this makes the Kazakh government’s full page advert in the current Economist all the more inexplicable: for it reads like Borat wrote it.
The advert’s designed to promote Kazakhstan as an investment destination, and in particular to showcase the delights of Astana – the country’s 10 year old capital city, built in the middle of nowhere on the Central Asian steppe (“Ten years ago there was nothing here. We created everything from zero,” says Kairat Kelimbetov, the head of Kazakhstan’s presidential administration in the FT.) Now read on:
It is interesting to know, that for the first time the issue on transferring the capital to the center of this big country occupying the ninth place in the world with regard to the area, Nazarbayev raised as early as in 1992, i.e. literally a year later, after Kazakhstan became an independent country.
But only in 1994 the parliament of the country agreed with the arguments of its president. The very transfer of the capital took place 10 years ago… Economic feasibility is more than evident.
by Alex Evans | Jul 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Although plenty of people see the Guardian’s George Monbiot as an irritating gadfly (see also Gideon Rachman’s amusing account of what it’s like to work with him), I’ve long taken him seriously on climate and scarcity issues; his book The Age of Consent, in particular, contains a really excellent attempt to think through what will happen to world trade in conditions of resource scarcity.
So it was with interest that I saw on his blog that he’s officially Changed His Mind on post-Kyoto climate policy. Like me, George has for a long time been an advocate of C&C – under which countries agree a global ceiling on greenhouse gas concentrations (e.g. 350 parts per million of CO2), figure out the level of global emissions each year that will keep us below it, and then share out the tradable permits to that ’emissions budget’ on the basis of convergence to equal per capita rights by an agreed date, like 2050. But no longer. Here he is in the Guardian on 1 July:
After reading the proofs of a book by the independent thinker Oliver Tickell, to be published this month, I have changed my view. In Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse, Tickell slaughters my favourite ideas(8). He shows that there is no logical basis for dividing up the right to pollute among nation states. It gives them too much power over this commodity, and there is no guarantee that they would pass the pollution rights on to their citizens, or use the money they raised to green the economy…
Instead Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations – running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example – rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.
Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.
In some ways, I can see the attraction too. For one thing, Oliver Tickell’s proposed approach (which you can read more about here) retains C&C’s most important attribute: it starts from where we’re trying to get to, through a quantified, binding ceiling on GHG concentrations. None of the usual crap about “aspirational long-term goals” here, then.
I suspect it’s also true that it would be methodologically far easier to cap the emissions of a few thousand refineries, cement works, coal mines or power stations – the ‘upstream’ end of the production life cycle, in other words – than it would be to cap national emissions, given that totalling an entire country’s emissions involves tracking hundreds of millions of different activities (e.g. the gas I’ve just used to cook my lunch).
But while the methodological / policy end of things does look easier under Oliver’s Kyoto 2 proposal, the politics look very much more difficult. For one thing, think of the developing country equity dimensions, which China and India showed so clearly at the G8. Oliver’s proposal effectively tells Chinese steel companies that they’ll have to compete against Japanese steel companies for emission permits in an open auction – a process that in effect takes no account of their developing status, and hence does away with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Good luck with securing agreement to that.
Secondly, allocating emission rights to states may indeed entail no guarantees that these states will then pass emission rights on to their citizens, it’s true. But the fact of the matter is that it’s those states that must negotiate any global deal – and those states that must enforce domestic level compliance with the global deal, even if the deal is done as Oliver wants it to be.
All in all, Oliver’s is a smart idea – especially its focus on a relatively small number of sites – but it’s hard to see it as feasible…
by Daniel Korski | Jul 17, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, North America
After several years, the U.S government finally unveiled a new personnel cadre – the Civilian Response Corps of the United States of America – who will deploy, alongside the U.S military, into post-conflict theatres. Readers will recall that Prime Minister Brown promised a British version when he launched the UK’s National Security Strategy (although nothing seems to have happened since).
Once the hoopla dies down, the Civilian Response Corps is actually a quite modest version of what was originally in President Bush’ 2007 State of the Union Address. Then he said he wanted to “establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps”, which would
function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.
The Address came after several years of trying to establish the State Department’s post-conflict office, but was probably motivated by the-then arrival of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Baghdad, both of whom wanted not only a surge of troops, but of civilians too.
However, the Civilian Response Corps consists of federal employees, not volunteers from the private sector, state and local governments. It is, in effect, bureaucratic fat built into the system so that the U.S government has the necessary in-house capacity to draw-on. This, of course, is good. But it is hardly an amazing breakthrough. The 250 posts it funds cannot even fill 300 Iraq jobs that are due to come up next year.
Verdict: A good move. One that should encourage others – like the Europeans – to set-up a civilian reserve, as I wrote here. But far from what is needed and what should be expected after several years of work.
