by Alex Evans | Mar 27, 2009 | East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development
Earlier this week, I noted that the Daewoo land lease deal in Madagascar – under which the South Korean conglomerate secured the lease to one half of Madagascar’s arable land for, er, no money – had emerged as one of the main reasons for Madagascar’s recent coup d’etat, and that one of the first acts of the new President had been to cancel the deal.
Good for Madagascar, you might think: with luck, this will lead to food importing countries becoming a bit more intelligent about getting the politics and the social dimensions right when they negotiate such sensitive food security deals.
Or maybe not. Here’s the view of Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea’s largest newspapers:
Er… nope, words just fail me.
So instead I’ll just quote what Ban Ki-moon – South Korea’s first Secretary-General of the United Nations – said when speaking to the Korean Parliament last summer:
My friends, Korea is not doing what it must … In truth, I’m somewhat ashamed as secretary-general that Korea is not doing what it should … I hope that Korea reflects on its current standing in the world and [resolves] to contribute more to the UN’s official development assistance [ODA] and its peacekeeping activities.
Looks like he has an uphill struggle on his hands…
by Alex Evans | Mar 27, 2009 | Economics and development, Global system, London Summit
As we all know, Madonna and Justin Timberlake only had four minutes to save the world. The big question today: can Gordon Brown achieve the same in four hours 35 minutes? Sam Coates at Red Box has been looking at the London Summit timetable, and he’s come away sobered:
Leaders’ breakfast 8.30am – 9.45am
Morning session including finance ministers and central bankers 9.50am- 1.25pm
Lunch 1.25pm – 2.30pm
Afternoon session including finance ministers and central bankers 2.30pm to 3.30pm
Closing press conferences, 3.30 onwards
That adds up to 4 hours and 35 minutes of formal talks plus time spent chatting over three meals. Not much to work with: as Sam notes, Bretton Woods took all of three weeks. As Madona and Justin could no doubt tell Gordon if he were to ask them, when time is short to save the world, everything depends on the quality of the choreography.
Still, there’s no doubt that more time would be preferable. Let’s not forget Bill Lind‘s observation on the difference between the Congress of Vienna and the Versailles peace talks a century later:
In 1814, the Congress of Vienna, which faced the task of putting Europe back together after the catastrophic French Revolution and almost a quarter-century of subsequent wars, did what aristocrats usually do. It danced, it dined, it stayed up late playing cards for high stakes, it carried on affairs, usually not affairs of state. Through all its aristocratic amusements, it conversed. In the process, it put together a peace that gave Europe almost a century of security, with few wars and those limited.
In contrast, the conference of Versailles in 1919 was all business. Its dreary, interminable meetings (read Harold Nicolson for a devastating description) reflected the bottomless, plodding earnestness of the bourgeois and the Roundhead. Its product, the Treaty of Versailles, was so flawed that it spawned another great European war in just twenty years. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said from exile in Holland, the war to end war yielded a peace to end peace.
The fact that today, it’s inconceivable that leaders could spend a whole summer negotiating with each other, as at Vienna – or even three weeks, as at Bretton Woods – is a major worry. Time to brush up on your Joseph Tainter: it’s all about diminishing returns from greater complexity…
by Richard Gowan | Mar 26, 2009 | Conflict and security, Economics and development, North America
An enjoyable new policy proposal from the Christian Science Monitor:
At a time when the United States is faced with its largest economic crisis since the Great Depression, why does the US government remain committed to being the world’s most active user of economic sanctions? Given the economic circumstances facing the country and President Obama’s goal of mending the US image abroad, the US government must reevaluate its sanctions policies.
In the research I have conducted on the international response to US economic sanctions, I’ve made several surprising discoveries about the effects the sanctions have on their targets’ trade with other countries. In studying more than 100 cases of US-imposed sanctions from 1950-2000, I found that the United States’ allies have consistently exploited the commercial opportunities created by US sanctions for their own benefit.
US allies have tended to trade far more with the states it has sanctioned than other countries. Part of this is because the US has lots of commercially competitive allies. It is also because these states use their alliances with the US as political cover to shield their companies from American retaliation. In effect, this means that the US subsidizes the economies of its allies to the detriment of its own businesses.
The US sanctions against Iran and Cuba illustrate this point well. Sanctions against Iran have forced American oil companies either to do their business elsewhere or give up their trade to foreign firms. It is not a coincidence that after Halliburton was scathingly rebuked by Congress for business dealings with Iran through its Dubai-based subsidiary that the company moved its entire headquarters to Dubai in 2007.
Halliburton moved because it was more profitable for it to do business in Dubai than it was to for it to stay in the United States. When the US government prevents its companies from doing their business profitably, how can we expect them not to leave?
In a capitalist society, profits – not patriotism – keep companies afloat (at least in theory).
The conclusion: drop all U.S. sanctions and “Sell American”. You can’t fault the logic…
by Alex Evans | Mar 26, 2009 | Global system, Influence and networks, London Summit
In comments on Jules’s post on the Put People First march, the Bretton Woods Project’s Peter Chowla takes me to task for what he argued was a sloppy and unfair critique of PPF’s policy platform that I made in my own comment on Jules’s post.
Actually, Peter’s right. I said PPF had a “shockingly weak policy position: just warmed up leftovers from Make Poverty History”, and that there was almost nothing to it other than the traditional calls for more aid and less conditionality. In fact, as Peter accurately points out, there IS more to PPF’s platform than that: he cites its positions on tax havens, reform of the IMF and World Bank, Green New Deals and investing in public services, for instance.
On the other hand, I don’t think I was exaggerating that much. On some of these areas, as Peter admits, work is still underway within the PPF coalition to clarify its policy position. And I stand by my argument that PPF’s position on a post-Kyoto climate deal really is shocking: the 2 degree C temperature limit it advocates has been EU policy since 1998, and says nothing about the much more fundamental issues of (a) what this means in terms of a climate stabilisation target expressed in parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent and (b) how the resulting global emissions budget ought to be shared out.
Still, fair’s fair: it was a snippy comment, and I should have reflected PPF more accurately. But my deeper frustration with NGO coalitions like PPF remains. NGOs are supposed to set agendas; to open up new political space; to dream up big ideas about possible futures. Sure, you can’t pursue big ideas without big coalitions. But equally, what’s the point of big coalitions without big ideas?
What we have today is a situation in which civil society always seems to be one step behind the curve. Back at the time of the Make Poverty History, for instance, it was clear to anyone that wanted to see it that climate change was the coming issue in international development. Yet it was absent from MPH’s policy position; ironically, DFID’s 2006 White Paper was way ahead of where development NGOs had got to on climate. (I remember thinking at the time: isn’t this supposed to work the other way round?)
Now, the context has changed again: and again, civil society is lagging. Look around the international development landscape. Scarcity issues like energy security, water scarcity and food prices are joining climate change as defining features on the map. There’s serious cause for concern that the post-Cold War decline in conflict in developing countries may be bottoming out. The real discussion about power-shift in the international economy is finally starting. Security of supply is set to become the biggest issue in international trade (and has already led to the collapse of a developing country government.) Emissions trading holds out the potential to become the most important source of finance for development. And so on.
So where are all of these issues in the PPF policy platform? Nowhere! Instead of opening up new agendas – at a time when vast tracts of virgin political space are opening up – NGOs are staying right in their comfort zone, articulating the same policy positions as they were five years ago. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 26, 2009 | Conflict and security
David Kilcullen on the central concept of his eponymous book:
Interviewer: When did the concept of the “accidental guerrilla syndrome” really start to click?
Kilcullen: It was field observation over ten years or so, but the name came to me one afternoon near the Khyber Pass… My local escort commander pointed out to me that he and his guys were the real foreigners on the Frontier, whereas the al-Qaeda guys had been embedded there for a generation. He said no outsider could tell the locals apart from the terrorists except by accident. And when outsiders intervene to deal with the global terrorists hiding out in areas like the FATA, it turns out people get upset, and the local community coalesces around rejecting outside interference, and closes ranks to support the terrorists….
This has happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Europe – basically everywhere I’ve worked since 9/11, I have observed some variation on this pattern. I call the local fighters “accidental guerrillas,” because they end up fighting on behalf of extremists, not because they hate the west but because we just turned up in their valley with a Brigade, looking for AQ. And I calculate 90 to 95 percent of the people we’ve been fighting since 9/11 are accidentals, not radicals.”
Via Kotare.
