Just thinking through how our society copes with climate change. One way might be to bring back national service.

Why?

1) We need to train a generation of young people how to deal with crises, whether that’s food riots, race riots, or extreme weather. They will have to be physically and mentally tough, resilient and disciplined.
2) In general, we need to instill a war-time discipline into the country if it is going to cope with a drastic reduction in our quality of life.
3) We need a bigger domestic emergency force.
4) We may need a bigger external defence force as well.

What are the arguments against it?

1) It’s the first step to a fascist military state.
2) We need experts, not amateurs.
3) We need a bigger global peacecorps, not brownshirts at home.
4) We need de-centralised innovation and spontaneous systems evolution, not goose-stepping drones.

I think the arguments for are better than the arguments against. If you want the UK to be at a forefront of a global solution to food shortages, helping other states that are failing, then you will need an even bigger armed forces.

Our country will need to become much more disciplined very quickly, and I think national service is one step towards that.

The US seems to be thinking along the same lines. Eg the Innovations in Civic Participation’s Youth Service and Climate Change initiative. President Obama also seems keen to resurrect JFK’s Peace Corps spirit. Ask not what your climate can do for you. Ask what you can do for your climate.

I wonder if this could become part of the Resilience programme which Martin Seligman developed, and which the government is now piloting in some schools in the UK.

That programme is based on the assumption of an affluent society. But it could easily be adapted to a much more Stoical sense of resilience – how to survive and stay positive, engaged and ethical in a crisis-prone society.

While we’re on the subject of climate change misery (see the two posts below), an interesting finding in Raymond Fisman and Eduardo Miguel’s ‘Economic Gangsters‘ is that in Africa, the world’s most conflict-prone region, “the risk of armed civil conflict is much more likely the year after a large drop in rainfall than in normal years.”

In the Sahel region – the area between the Sahara and the equatorial zone which takes in such beacons of stability as Sudan, Chad, northern Nigeria and Niger – climate change is expected to reduce average rainfall by 24 per cent. Much of the rain that does fall will evaporate because of higher temperatures. Fisman and Miguel reckon all this will increase the risk of conflict in the region by 15 per cent by 2080, meaning some countries will face a 1 in 3 chance of civil war EACH YEAR!

Enjoy your weekend.

The first signs of disaster are noticed by only a few doomsayers.

Newspapers profess themselves ‘distressed by the calamities that have befallen certain islands,’ but counsel awaiting more evidence before taking hasty action.

Industry reacts with fury when government indulges in what it sees as a ‘panic inspired’ reaction.

The loss of the ice caps brings breathless media coverage. “I have seen icebergs formed before, but never on anything like the scale that is taking place there,” reports one observer.

In the great ice cliffs hundreds of feet high, cracks appear suddenly. An enormous section tilts out, falling and turning slowly. When it smashes into the water the spray rises up and up in great fountains, spreading far out all around…

Very often a berg had no time to float away before a new one had crashed down on top of it. The scale was so big that it was hard to realize.

Only by the apparent slowness of the falls and the way the splashes seemed to hang in the air – the majestic pace of it all – were we able to tell the vastness of what we were seeing.

But still there is little appetite for action. The scale of the threat may be accepted by a growing number of ‘eminent but very worried men’, but the public remains sanguine. Sea level rises of two and half inches appear an anticlimax, ‘ just a very slightly higher mark on a post.’ And, after all, by the time things get really bad, won’t the ‘boffins’ have come up with a technological quick fix.

Then London’s flood defences are breached for the first time and thoughts turn to protecting those parts of Britain that can most easily be saved. The result? “Great bitterness between those who were chosen and those who looked like being thrown to the wolves.”

The second flood is worse and prompts a state of emergency (“the government had removed the velvet glove”). For a while, despite crumbling infrastructure, some kind of normality is maintained,  “seemingly through habit or momentum.” Gradually, however, lawless ‘seeps’ in.

“Failure of the emergency electricity supply one afternoon, followed by a night of darkness, gave a kind of coup de grace to order. The looting of shops, and particularly foodshops, began, and spread on a scale that defeated both the police and the military.”

From there, it is a short step to the era of mass migrations, as people make a “panicky rush to stake a claim on the high ground while there is still room there.” A fiercesome “guerrilla war between starving bands” begins.

Standard climate change-inspired, apocalyptic fiction? Sure, except for the fact that John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes was first published over half a century ago, in 1953. (more…)

Spent the afternoon at a water-park in Dubai, mainly reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road .

If there’s ever a book I don’t recommend reading in a water-park in Dubai, its Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which some unspecified ecological disaster led to the sun being covered behind dust or ashes, leaving the earth in perpetual winter. American society has broken down, most people are dead, most plants and animals are dead, and most of the survivors are marauding bands of cannibals.

In this horrendous environment, a man and his son travel a road, trying to stay alive and get south, where they hope some form of human society may have survived.

Reading it makes me wonder if the so-called ‘politics of well-being’ may be hugely presumptuous.

Geoff Mulgan said this century would be defined by the politics of well-being. Lots of others are involved in this emerging politics – Lord Layard, Richard Reeves of Demos, Martin Seligman, Oliver James, NEF, and in a small way I am too, that’s why I named my blog www.politicsofwellbeing.com

But the main idea of the politics of well-being is western societies are safe and affluent, therefore can afford to turn their attention to higher transcendent goods like inner peace and so on.

Then you read a book like The Road , or like James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia , and you wonder…

What if this century isn’t about well-being at all? What if it’s mainly about ecological disaster, food shortages, water shortages, extreme weather, burnt out fields, societies breaking down?

James Lovelock predicted that the global population will go from 10 billion to 1 billion in the next 90 years, because of food shortages and rising oceans.

If people don’t have enough food, they will eat each other. That is the grim message of McCarthy’s book. Civilisation will break down.

In this sort of situation, the question becomes ‘how can states prevent themselves from breaking down’?

They need two things – food and security. They need to be able to protect their borders from the huge amounts of people who will migrate in search of food, and from other states hunting in search of food. And they need enough arable land to make their own food.

The UK as a society, in such an apocalyptic future, would have a chance of surviving, because its institutions are strong, and its people are (one hopes) good at coping in crises and not eating each other.

But if we are facing huge food shortages in the future, then is there an argument for controlling or even stopping immigration? Partly because we can only take a population that we can support with our own land, and partly because I am not sure how a multi-cultural society copes under extreme stress…

Do you think liberalism survives climate change? Or that the open society survives climate change? I don’t think they do.

Like I said, not a great beach book…but a great book nonetheless.

I have a short piece in this month’s Prospect Magazine on the role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 21st century warfare.  The intro:

A British Reaper drone taxis across a runway in southern Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is about the size of a light aircraft. Circling thousands of feet above the ground for hours at a time, armed with deadly hellfire missiles, it feeds live pictures to the soldiers below. But while those on the ground might have just started the evening shift in Kandahar, the drone’s two-man pilot team will be watching dawn rise 7,000 miles to the west, in an air-conditioned room on Creech Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert.

You can read the rest here .

At the end of last year I offered ten foreign policy predictions for 2009.  The first prediction was about Mexico:

The world’s leading narco state will, unnoticed, dissolve into total chaos destabilising the surrounding region.

In a early January 2009 John Robb suggested that Mexico would be an essential security threat to the United States:

The narco-insurgency in the northern provinces morphs into a national open source insurgency with thousands of small groups all willing to fight/corrupt/intimidate the government. Many, if not most, of these groups will be able to power themselves forward financially due to massive flows of money from black globalization. The result will be a diaspora north to the US to avoid the violence.

Since the beginning of 2009 more than 1,000 people have been killed in drug violence. In 2008 6,290 people were killed, double the 2007 death toll.

Since 1993 the City has been known for the violent deaths of hundreds of women – ‘las muertas de Juárez’ (The dead women of Juárez). According to Amnesty International , since February 2005 more than 370 bodies have been found, and over 400 women were still missing. Most of the cases remain unsolved.

In the next three weeks the Mexican Government is sending up to 5,000 new troops and federal police to the country’s most violent city, Ciudad Juárez , where law and order is on the brink of collapse.

The EU’s attempts at finding a replacement for the bloc’s envoy in Bosnia has moved from drama to tragedy, with Emyr Jones Perry rejected alongside the latest candidate, Valentin Inzko (the Austrian ambassador to Slovenia, since you ask). Meanwhile, as James Lyon notes in the IHT,

The oft-repeated EU catechism is that Bosnia must tackle reform processes on its own, and that after the transition Bosnia’s feuding politicians will magically resolve their quarrels. Brussels assumes that the lure of EU membership will somehow induce nationalist politicians to bury ethnic agendas and pass reform legislation guaranteed to weaken their own patronage systems. They fail to note that the current trajectory will remove the last remaining international obstacles to renewed conflict.

To move out of the current funk, a serious EU envoy has to be picked who, with a US Presidential Envoy to the Balkans, can begin to charting a new transatlantic course. So here’s my initial list of nominees for the job:

Horst Teltschik, GE
Wolfgang Ischinger, GE
Jan Pronk, NL
Jean-Marie Guenno, FR
Michael Steiner, GE
Salomon Passy, BU
Des Browne, UK
Michael von der Schulenburg, GE
Soren Jessen-Petersen, DK

It is easy to find more senior candidates, but they are unlikely to take the job . So the key is to find someone strong, but willing to live in Bosnia.

The UN has just published an update to its Human Development Index (HDI), the league table that compares living standards in all the world’s countries.

At the top of the Index sits Iceland, which the UN believes has the world’s highest living standards but which most other observers think is basically bankrupt (public debt is running at over $30,000 per head). In 5th place is Ireland,  also in dire straits as foreign investors – the mainstay of the recent boom – pull out and the government runs out of money to pay off its mountainous debts.

I don’t know about you, but if I was Norwegian, Canadian or Australian, and therefore enjoying the 2nd, 3rd and 4th highest living standards in the world, the curse of the HDI would be making me very uneasy indeed.

Disgraceful comments today from Con Couglin, the Daily Telegraph’s ‘executive foreign editor’, on the release of Binyam Mohammed.

Coughlin thinks Mohammed should be sent to Pakistan – the country where he was tortured – “so he can learn what the Taliban was really like” and bring himself “up to date on the Taliban’s latest governmental practices, such as stoning adulterers to death and cutting off the limbs of those accused of theft.”

This is red meat for the Telegraph’s commenters. “The further costs of keeping this scum alive and here far outweighs any other consideration,” one writes. 

Coughlin has good sources in US intelligence, sources who have assured him that Mohamed was a highly placed Al Qaeda operative, one who confessed to his US interrogators that “he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions.” That this confession was extracted under torture doesn’t seemto bother Coughlin at all.

Most galling of all is the fact that Coughlin isn’t able even to get the details of Mohamed’s arrest right, claiming he was “he was arrested wandering around Afghanistan.” Perhaps he should read his own paper, which accurately reports that Mohamed was arrested in April 2002 in Karachi airport, as he tried to board a plane back to the UK.

(It would not surprise me at all if Mohamed is/was a low level Al Qaeda operative by the way. If he was, torture has made it impossible to prosecute him.)

The new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is out! This sturdy volume, which I helped set up in 2005-6, has chronicled the long decline of peacekeeping since then. This year’s excellent volume (now stewarded by my colleagues Sarjoh Bah and Ben Tortolani) opens on a particularly grim note:

2008 was the worst year for peacekeeping in over a decade. The largest and most visible peacekeeping operations faced serious military and political reversals. These endangered not only specific missions, but the entire global peacekeeping enterprise. No major peacekeeping provider was unaffected. The United Nations was tested in Congo and Sudan, NATO in Afghanistan, the EU in Kosovo, and the African Union in Somalia.

Today’s FT takes up the story:

United Nations military operations might have reached their limits, with the two largest peacekeeping operations stretched to breaking point in the past year, the organisation’s chief peacekeeper warns in a report to be published on Tuesday.

The warning from Alain Le Roy, under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, appears in a foreword to the annual peacekeeping survey of the New York-based Center on International Co-operation. It comes a year after the centre’s last review criticised the security council for authorising big new peacekeeping missions round the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors were overtaking their ability to deliver. [GOWAN INTERJECTS: I told you so!]

The UN is currently responsible for 18 peace missions worldwide that deploy 112,000 uniformed personnel at the cost of almost $8bn a year. “UN peacekeeping is now at an all-time high,” according to Mr Le Roy.
In the light of the near-collapse last October of the peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN’s largest, the security council has finally taken note. France and the UK have launched a review on how best to fix a system that one diplomat at the UN described as “breaking at the seams”.

We may yet save peacekeeping from strategic collapse. But can we save it from anonymous diplomats resorting to cliches?

At last, some good news from the Congo:

Negotiators for the Congolese government and a rebel group in the country’s east have reached a preliminary agreement, after talks in the eastern town of Goma. Neither side has released details of the discussion, which would only set the stage for future peace negotiations. Negotiations between the National Congress for the Defense of the People, an ethnic Tutsi rebel group operating in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Congolese government resumed last Wednesday. Following Sunday’s discussions, spokesmen for both sides indicated they had reached a preliminary agreement.

But such limited progress is rather dwarfed by this:

Western donors will begin releasing over $200m (€156m, £139m) of emergency loans to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the next three weeks to prevent the government seizing up as it runs out of dollars, according to an International Monetary Fund official. The funds are set to be released in spite of donor opposition to parts of a $9bn minerals-for-infrastructure deal that Congo has signed with China, which is holding up poverty reduction programmes financed by traditional western donors.

Congo has been hit harder and faster by the global financial crisis than other African countries owing to its heavy dependence on mining and oil, as well as the confluence of last year’s falls in commodity prices with a costly conflict in its eastern provinces.

The events have created a fiscal emergency as government revenues from tax and state joint ventures shrink, causing foreign currency reserves to plummet to just $32m by February 13 from an average of around $250m before the crisis last year, according to the central bank. In the real economy confidence has been shattered: the Congolese franc has weakened sharply against the dollar, inflation is rising, millions of people are being pushed deeper into poverty, and fears of social unrest are rising.

Brian Ames, the IMF’s country director for Congo, told the Financial Times he expected donors to begin dispersing funds at the end of this month or in early March so the government could pay for public sector imports and service its external debt. He said the IMF board would meet next month to consider a loan of up to $200m under the rapid access component of a facility designed to help countries manage the impact of “sudden and significant exogenous shocks”.

Late last year the IMF downgraded its 2009 economic growth forecast for Congo to 4.5 per cent from 11 per cent prior to the global financial crisis. The World Bank is considering providing a further $100m. An EU official said the European Union was considering a loan of €50m ($64m, £44m). “The sense of urgency is increasing by the minute,” said one western diplomat in Kinshasa.

Last year, I called the victims of the Congo crisis “victims of the first war of the financial crisis”. How many more (wars and victims) are to come?

From the Financial Times:

One of Germany’s most influential engineers has made an urgent plea to bring leading global industrialists, scientists and politicians together in an attempt to rapidly stabilise the financial system, highlighting the growing fear of tightening credit hitting supply chains. Franz Fehrenbach, chief executive of Bosch, the world’s largest car parts supplier, called for the creation of a global interdisciplinary think-tank to find ways to tackle the financial crisis.  The head of Germany’s biggest privately owned engineering group warned that the risks of further bank crashes and a meltdown of credit supply to the broader economy remained unabated and urgent action was needed to prevent that.

“We have to bring the best people in the world together to find a sophisticated and interdisciplinary solution for the stabilisation of the world’s financial markets. The approach has to be enforceable on a global basis as too many plans have been torn apart by national governments,” Mr Fehrenbach told the Financial Times.

Wait a minute: did I just see the word enforceable applied to a think-tank’s out-put?  This must be every wonk’s dream: an institution producing policy recommendations with the power of law.   This concept needs to be extended: perhaps my wittering on the failure of peace operations should be backed up a crack brigade of Indian blue helmets?  Or Alex’s musings on the food crisis reinforced by a guaranteed supply of free shrimp to anyone who puts them into practice?