Prime Minister, David Cameron’s tour of the Gulf on a trade promotion mission as the Arab world is rocked by mass protests against long-lasting authoritarian rulers has provoked a debate  in Britain about whether the coalition government’s foreign policy is too focussed on trade and not enough on promoting values such as liberal democracy.

Mr Cameron’s visit was scheduled before the current unrest broke out in the region and the former PR executive in him attempted to head off potential criticism by adding a short stop in Egypt at the beginning of the tour to meet protest leaders and the provisional military government that removed Hosni Mubarak from power. 

However, this has not been an entirely successful gambit. 

The trip has attracted criticism, especially from liberal commentators, because several arms manufacturers are part of the trade delegation with the Prime Minister at the same time that the government had to revoke arms export licenses to Libya and Bahrain when the security forces there used violence against protesters. 

The nub of the criticism is that the government is trying to persuade governments in the Arab world to buy British defence equipment at the same time as London talks about the need for those governments in the Arab world to stop repressing the demands of their people for more democracy. Some commentators argue that Mr Cameron is trying to have his cake and eat it, whereas the former Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, recently attacked the coalition’s foreign policy as ‘low-grade mercantilism’. The charge is that it is too focused on trade at the expense of promoting democratic values. 

Mr Cameron has defended his approach and insisted in a speech in Kuwait and a town-hall meeting with Qatari students that you can promote trade and democracy at the same time and insisted Britain’s rules governing arms exports are among the toughest in the world. 

It looks like the upheaval in the Arab world has brought Mr Cameron’s foreign policy approach, honed in opposition, into contact with the reality of government and he is learning that he has to talk about values as much as the bottom line. 

Does this ring any bells? 

Ironically, when Tony Blair first came to power, his Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook took the opposite approach to Mr Cameron, but ended up facing not dissimilar criticism. On assuming offce, Mr Cook announced that henceforth Britain would have an ‘ethical foreign policy’, but this soon encountered charges of hypocricy and/or naivety, because of -  yes you guessed it – arms sales to authoritarian governments which didn’t square with respect for human rights and democratic values. In Labour’s case it was Indonesia’s violent attempt to suppress East Timor’s desire for independence in 1999 where British-made aircraft were used. 

On The World Tonight   this week we discussed the conflicting pressures on Mr Cameron, and the former British ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, argued that selling arms to foreign governments, under strict conditions that they will not be used for repressing their own people or attacking their neighbours, is not contradictory or hypocritical, it is a matter of judgement (as to whether those government’s will respect the guidelines or not).

But as Mr Cameron and Mr Blair before him have found out, the reality seems to be that once arms are licensed for export, it can become a political headache if that judgement turns out to be wrong.

Ever heard of spare capacity theory? It’s defined by Gregor Macdonald as:

the assumption among western bankers, policy makers, economists, and stock markets that OPEC producers can lift oil production at will, and, export all of that spare production to world consumers.

(See also this recent post on Global Dashboard, and this one from back in 2008.) There’s a lot of spare capacity theory doing the rounds at the moment, given what’s happening in North Africa and the Middle East. Libya normally produces 1.6 million barrels of oil a day (a little under 2% of global production). It’s estimated that about 350,000 barrels, or 22%, of that is now offline, and depending on how things pan out, it could stay offline for some time.

Now imagine what happens if it all kicks off in Algeria (a larger exporter than Libya of oil plus oil products). Or, for that matter, in Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia – all of which are much more significant again. That’s what has traders and futures markets spooked, and everyone looking to Saudi Arabia: as a source quoted in the FT this morning puts it,

“It is fear of the unknown. The risks are all to the upside. Saudi Arabia needs to respond.”

Saudi Arabia, for its part, insists that it can and will increase production if needed:

“Right now, there are active talks in order to implement what is needed,” the Saudi official said. He stressed that the kingdom retains spare capacity of some 4m barrels a day – more than double Libya’s entire output, which totalled 1.58m b/d in January, according to the International Energy Agency.

Saudi Arabia has not yet decided whether to increase production. If it proved necessary to produce more, “then that will happen, there’s no problem at all”, the official said.

But what if that’s not true? Gregor Macdonald argues that the extent to which markets have climbed over the past week “suggests the market is justifiably concerned about events in Libya, and the risk of more unrest to come in oil producing regions”. His conclusion:

Given the potential magnitude of this situation, I actually think its good that we can still rely on price as a means to ration supply.

True though that may be, a new oil price spike is exactly what we didn’t need on global food prices at this point. Back at the start of the year, the fact that we weren’t in the middle of an oil spike was one of the factors I drew comfort from on the food outlook. Not now…

Presumably like many of my fellow countrymen, I am writhing with embarrassment about my Prime Minister’s ugly little junket to the Middle East this week.

It is a thing of wonder that, even as the PM is accompanied by the heads of BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Thales UK, Number 10′s press briefings should insist that the primary purpose of Cameron’s trip is about “encouraging political reform”. Or that Cameron’s defence, when challenged about arms sales, is to argue that

The idea that we should expect small and democratic countries like Kuwait to be able to manufacture all their means of defence seems to me completely at odds with reality.

Right – small and democratic countries like:

• Bahrain. Last year, exports approved by the UK government included assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and submachine guns – oh yes, and tear gas and crowd control ammunition. (OK, Bahrain may not be exactly democratic. But it’s small, right?)
• Libya. Q3 2010 goods approved for export included “wall and door breaching projectile launchers, crowd control ammunition, small arms ammunition, tear gas/irritant ammunition, training tear gas/irritant ammunition … ammunition comprised £3.2m of the £4.7m million of military items licensed”
• Egypt. 2010 approved exports included “components for all-wheel drive vehicles with ballistic protection; military communications equipment; optical target surveillance equipment; components for armoured personnel carriers; components for semi-automatic pistols; and components for submachine guns”
• Saudi Arabia. 2010 exports included “armoured personnel carriers, ground vehicle military communications equipment, sniper rifles; small arms ammunition; weapon sights”; 2009 included ”CS hand grenades, tear gas/irritant ammunition and tear gas/riot control agents”

These details are courtesy of Campaign Against the Arms Trade; but in fact, as the Guardian’s Datablog shows, there’s practically no country in the region that we don’t flog arms to.

You could – if you were feeling very charitable – take the view that lots of governments were selling lots of arms to countries in the Middle East, and that no-one anticipated the wave of repression now underway. That would seem to be the underlying implication of the government’s defensive line that it has now revoked export licenses to Bahrain and Libya – as if to say, ‘Ugly business, old chap; but who could possibly have known that these regimes were so ghastly?’

But for David Cameron cheerfully to head over to the Middle East even as the shooting’s underway in countries all around him, on an arms sales junket – wow. That truly puts Britain in a class of its own.

Update: This from a press release out today from Saferworld, the conflict prevention NGO:

…in 2010, the LibDex arms fair in Tripoli saw a large proportion of the exhibition hall taken up by UK companies. Yet throughout this period there were serious questions about Libya’s status as a responsible arms importer. Libya repeatedly attempted to source orders that far outstripped its defence needs and a 2008 UN report showed that Libya sent weapons originally sold to it by Spain, Belgium and Bulgaria on to Darfur in clear breach of the UN arms embargo on the region.

And also this:

Although the UK is to be credited for revoking export licences to Bahrain and Libya, and the EU yesterday announced that it was suspending all arms trade with Libya, the fact is that many of these licences should never have been issued in the first place and, in the face of recent events, this is somewhat a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. Although the problem is not confined to Libya alone, the way exports to the country have been approached is a clear illustration of the serious flaws in how EU members’ put their own rules into practice.

Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic (who still have yet to send me a copy of their magazine two months after the subscription was paid for…).

Update: Searching through the full archive of Rumsfeld papers (online here), I find this gem from May 2003, in a memo from Rumsfeld to the President:

Mr President, we were concerned that going to war in Iraq could alienate our allies in the Gulf – today, our relationships there are stronger than ever. There was concern about the US acting unilaterally. Instead, you formed a 65-nation coalition and in the process strengthened the bonds of friendship with Britain and many other nations in Europe, both old and new.

A glass half full kind of guy, then.

Update 2: Donald shows how to do interagency cooperation in a 2002 memo to Paul Wolfowitz:

Call Condi Rice. She said to me that we have got to get the detainee mess sorted out, that nobody is able to get answers. I think she is getting this from the UK. Call her and find out what she is talking about. She always comes in with these cryptic messages as though the Pentagon is messed up, and I don’t have any idea what she is talking about.

Blimey. From the NYT - large version here.

Last week was aid to India week.  There were three pieces on the subject on the Guardian website, plus the predictable ‘why oh why’ articles in the Daily Mail and the Express , and a five minute slot on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’.  And not forgetting Andy Sumner right here on GD. But you know, I’ve read it all and I still don’t know what I think.  

Let’s leave aside the national interest argument for a minute.  Is there a development case for giving aid to India? And can we put numbers on it?

For some, the fact that one third of all poor people in the world live in India is reason enough to give it aid.  Half of all India’s children are malnourished; our money can help them, so let’s send it over.  And maybe that should be all there is to it.  But for most people, somewhere in the moral calculus of aid is the idea that some countries, as well as some people, are needier than others.

How does India fare on the scale of need at a country level?  India’s (in)famous space programme is of course exhibit A for cutting aid, and its plentiful supply of billionaires is exhibit B.  But hold on a minute.  According to Martin Ravallion of the World Bank, even if marginal tax rates on the Indian middle class were 100% this would still only provide enough money to reduce dollar a day poverty in the country by 20%.  India is not rich enough to end poverty right now with its own resources, space programme or no space programme.

India’s growth rates are also sometimes cited as a reason not to give aid.  The argument is that economic growth, forecast at nearly 9 per cent for next year, will end poverty without our help.   Sadly, not for a very long time.  Growth in India is surprisingly inefficient at reducing poverty.  A comparison between India, China and Brazil found that each percentage increase in GDP reduced poverty by 3.2 per cent in Brazil, by 0.8 per cent in China, but by only 0.3 per cent in India.   So even though the country is growing fast that doesn’t mean that poverty is going to be ending any time soon. 

So – a country that has a space programme but is still too poor to end poverty.  And a country where economic growth is firmly in the fast lane but where poverty reduction is stuck in a tailback behind a caravan.  As ever, it’s the politics, stupid.  Poverty reduction is frequently low on the list of priorities for national and local leaders. Instead, the focus is on showcasing India’s credentials as a big power – that space programme again – and on growing as fast as China, whatever the cost. 

Perhaps all the arguments against aid to India are actually arguments in favour – if India is rich and fast growing but people are still so poor then maybe aid is justified on the grounds that people need support more if their government seems less able or willing to tackle the problem.  But the aid that the UK sends to India is tiny – a fraction of one per cent of GDP.  It can’t plug the gap.  Anyway, some argue that aid can slow down political change by letting the government off the hook – though again, the amounts involved are probably too small to make this a serious problem.   On the other side of the fence, the optimists hope that aid will speed up political change and poverty reduction, by catalysing changes and showing what can be done.  That’s just as plausible.

Last week Andrew Mitchell made his choice clear. For the foreseeable future, aid to India continues.  Politicians have to take these decisions.  The rest of us have the luxury of uncertainty.

Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain. Who’s next? Yemen or Libya or… Sudan, or Angola?

The race is on for a small set of numbers to predict major upheavals. Violence begins at $7000 per person (PPP) tweets Hans Rosling noting the flare up of pro-democracy protests seem to start at that level of income in Tunisia and last year in Thailand (Egypt is a bit under US$6000 per capita). The Economist has gone for a more sophisticated ‘Shoe Throwers Index’ adding more data. Whilst the NY times special has gone much further with a full range of data for the middle east and north Africa.

What do the countries have in common? Actually seems to boil down to 5 things…

(more…)

According to the FT, the “most talked-about non-fiction book of the year” is the economist Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, more of a long essay really, which you can only get in e-book format. It’s worth reading, particularly for what it says about the politics of well-being.

Cowen suggests that we in the West are in the midst of a great economic stagnation, because all the “low-hanging fruit” of technological innovation, which drove the economic boom of the last two centuries, have already been picked. Life in 1800 was, for the average westerner, markedly different to life in 1960. Scientific advances in transport, energy, hygiene and medicine, housing, education and government made the material conditions of life significantly better for someone born in 1950 than for someone born in 1800. But the pace of technological advance slowed significantly in the last few decades, Cowen says, so that “life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953…The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack.”

Tyler Cowen? Tyler Durden more like! Kind of reminds me of that other Tyler, snarling: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Just to consider T’other Tyler’s main point – how does Cowen know how high or low the ‘fruit’ of future technological advances are? The whole point about future inventions is we don’t see the fruit at all until they fall on some genius’s head, like Newton’s apple. We can’t tell how low or high the remaining fruit is.

And Cowen doesn’t provide enough evidence that innovation has slowed. I’m not a scientist, but in the last 30 years others have decoded the human genome, come up with a totally new hypothesis about how organisms interact to preserve life on Earth, started to analyse the climate and realized we’re in danger of destroying it, begun to map the universe, made advances in analysing dark matter with the Hadron collider, invented brain scanning and made major advances in neuroscience, brought new empirical rigour to the study of wellbeing, and, um, invented the personal computer, the Internet, the kindle, the smart phone, the smart home, the smart car and all the other gadgetry of the Digital Age. To me, the present is like the Jetsons.

Despite the fact that government spending on education, health and welfare continues to rise, Cowen argues that performance in these areas is not necessarily rising and may, in fact, be getting slowly worse. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, says Cowen. The low-hanging fruit have been picked, and we’re now in an ‘ideas slow-down’. We must simply get used to annual GDP growth of 1% a year, rather than 3% – unlike the emerging markets, who can attain 6-8% growth simply by copying and disseminating ideas invented in the past by western scientists, like the car.

The Credit Crunch was really part of a broader phenomenon of over-optimism, Cowen argues. This over-optimism wasn’t just confined to investment bankers. We all thought everything would simply carry on getting better, median income would continue to grow and GDP would continue to rise – so we all bet on future growth through personal, corporate and government borrowing. But this was a mistake, based on a failure to recognize what Daniel Pink describes as “a period of truly staggering underachievement in business, technology and social progress”.

A lot of the social unrest and personal suffering of our times comes, Cowen argues, from a frustration that material progress is not continuing at its past rate, and that governments are struggling to meet spending commitments made in times of faster economic growth. He writes: “Low-hanging fruit means there are lots of material goodies to hand out, and lots of fairly easy ways to make people happier, namely by giving them more stuff. That’s not the case now, as we are struggling fiscally to make good on previous promises to Medicare and Social Security recipients, as well as bondholders.”

That’s why the politics of stagnation can be pretty acrimonious. On the Right, it can lead to the voodoo economics of tax cuts supposedly leading to greater economic growth, which Cowen thinks is one of the great delusions of our age. On the Left, it can lead to demands for greater redistribution through programmes like Medicare. But Cowen warns: “Like unfunded tax cuts, the remedy cannot be applied forever. Taxpayers in the top 5% of income already pay for more than 43% of the US government, and taxpayers in the top 1% pay for more than 27%; at some point, taking more resources from the wealthy yields diminishing returns.”

At its worst, the politics of stagnation becomes a “dysfunctional politics”, as the public coffers grow emptier, populist politicians and special interest groups attack each other, and an indignant populace used to higher government spending takes to the streets. Cowen worries about the “honest middle” of politics becoming drowned out by angry, irrational and shrill political voices (ie Glenn Beck).

And yet, all is not entirely bleak. (more…)

David Bosco has an interesting post over at FP riffing on a Reuters piece about Ban Ki-moon’s record at the UN. The Reuters article basically says that most diplomats think that Ban’s OK but that he’s no Kofi Annan. David takes exception:

I’m afraid that this type of invidious comparison is by now part of the accepted institutional history. Kofi Annan was charismatic; Ban is not. Annan had moral authority; Ban doesn’t. You get the idea. I don’t have a particular view on Ban, but I have always thought that Kofi Annan’s vaunted moral authority had a very weak foundation. In fact, I’ll go further–I don’t think he had the moral authority to get the job in the first place.

Why so?

Kofi Annan was the first secretary-general to rise from the ranks of the UN bureaucracy. Before he got the top job, he served as head of UN peacekeeping. As his Nobel Prize biography reports, “he was Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping at a time when nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed in UN operations around the world.”

The Nobel bio neglects to mention that while he was in that post, two of the most shocking episodes in UN history occurred: the Rwanda genocide and the massacre at Srebrenica. In both cases, UN peacekeeping forces were essentially eyewitnesses to genocide. The greatest portion of the blame, of course, goes to the Security Council member states that authorized weak peacekeeping forces incapable of defending civilians and that balked at bolstering them once the bloodletting started. But it is fair to say that Annan’s office did not cover itself in glory.

For all of Ban Ki-moon’s evident shortcomings, at least he doesn’t have that as part of his record.

You can agree or disagree with this assessment – I concur with David’s basic point that a near-ubiquitous nostalgia for Kofi clouds assessments of Ban’s work. Conversely, if are going to judge every UN leader by the horrors that took place on their watch, should we mention’s Ban’s association with humanitarian mega-crises in the DRC (2008), Sri Lanka (2009) and Darfur (ongoing)? Maybe so. But my main problem with this argument is that I’m wary of the whole moral yardstick thing anyway.

Annan’s strongest qualifications to run the UN were his instinctive sense of the organization’s capabilities and his political ability to charm the Clinton administration – which obviously failed to transfer to the Bush administration. Annan got hold of the UN at a time when it was in well-nigh terminal disarray after the Balkan and Rwandan fiascoes (which, in fairness, he took responsibility for while SG) and used his institutional and political skills to restore its relevance, as the 70K blue helmets attest.

And Ban? I have a piece coming out in Internationale Politik assessing his performance in similar institutional/political terms – but you’ll have to wait until April to read that. Suffice it to say that I think that, after four years in the job, he has still to get the real sense of what the UN can achieve that Annan had. Equally, it’s harder for Ban in 2011 than it was for Annan in 1999 or 2000: Annan worked in a straightforward context of American power. Mr. Ban navigates less well-charted waters.

UK aid to India is in the news again following a speech on emerging powers by UK Aid’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell at Chatham House which was carried in a range of the UK media and in the Guardian today and trailed in the FT before the speech. The temperature is rising in some parts of the UK media such the Daily Express and  Daily Mail. The later probably outraged more so because 6 months ago they were presumably briefed by aides on the axing of the India programme.

Mitchell’s take is now this – focus aid in India on the poor and poorest (side-stepping the various diplomatic elephants in the room – on the one hand aid is peanuts to India versus India is home to 450m or one in three of the world’s poor which sits uneasily with the image of an emerging world power).

Basically Mitchell’s line is ignore the contradictions and focus on the poor and poorest:

Some people – in both the UK and India – have been asking whether the time has come to end British aid to India. In my view, we are not there yet. The whole rationale for my Department is, eventually, to work ourselves out of a job. But having discussed this with the Government of India, I believe that, for the next few years, it is in both India’s interest and in Britain’s interest for us to continue our highly successful collaboration on development, not least so we can support the Government of India’s own successful programmes in the poorest priority areas.

If India doesn’t need the money why does the UK give aid to India and why does India accept?

(more…)

Daniel Batson, the social psychologist, has recently brought out what is probably his defining work on the topic he has studied for 30 years, Altruism In Humans. I bought it after hearing Martha Nussbaum rave about it when she spoke at the RSA in December. She says on the dust jacket that it’s “simply one of the most important books in our time for anyone who wants to ponder the problems and prospects of our species”. Casting my eye around Google, I think this might actually be the first review of the book. Woohoo, first! (more…)

Who is he? Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez, of course.

In 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his intention to found a new history museum in Paris. In recent weeks, he may have been cursing the memories of two of France’s lesser-known historical figures, Louis Edouard Bouët-Willaumez and Jules Ferry. Both men died over a century ago, but they are still causing Sarkozy trouble.

Bouët-Willaumez was a French naval hero who began the colonisation of what is now Côte d’Ivoire in the 1840s. Ferry was the prime minister who authorised an invasion of Tunisia in 1881. Although France renounced control over Tunisia in 1957 and Côte d’Ivoire in 1960, officials in Paris have always viewed them as important elements of the French sphere of influence in Africa. Now that sphere of influence seems to be falling apart – a strategic challenge for France that has been overshadowed by events in Egypt.

Read more about this challenge here.

Sure, everyone talks about policy coherence, joined-up thinking, connecting the dots, overcoming silos and all the rest of it. But if you want to see the real deal, form an orderly queue at the door of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. They organised a Valentine’s Day party for junior diplomats, with ‘policy speed dating’ and a chocolate fondue to lubricate the evening’s proceedings. And diplomats were only allowed to attend if they brought with them two friends from other government departments.

As campaigners start to chase down the billions that Mubarak took with him, many outsiders are trying to figure out how the Egyptian revolution came to be. During the heady three-week protests, cameras naturally focused on large crowds full of anger and hope. But were they missing something?

Creative, humorous protest.

Activists in Tahrir Square released fake press releases to major news outlets, to give them a voice in the rolling coverage. (They didn’t have highly placed Washington lobbyists of course, unlike the regime.) Before the protests started, viral jokes about Mubarak were spreading through social networks and eliminating the problem that Steven Pinker calls ‘individual knowledge vs mutual knowledge‘.

This subversive protest can’t have been too much of a secret though – even CNN had a comment.

h/t Eric Stoner

And for the 80′s fans amongst you – this classic by Chicago get’s a thematic overhaul.