Over on “The Internationalist”, a welcome new blog from CFR, Stewart Patrick argues that the G8 is back after a few years in the doldrums.  His post is entitled “‘I’m not Dead Yet’: Long Live the G8″, but the  Monty Python reference isn’t entirely ironic.  Stewart concludes that, having (i) delivered a strong call for Colonel Gaddafi to go and (ii) engendered billions of dollars in aid promises to the new Arab democracies, the G8 “retains a critical role in addressing the world’s most sensitive political challenges.”

I’m inclined to semi-agree.  The G8 did have a pretty good week, and getting the Russians to sign onto the statement on Gaddafi was a real coup for the French hosts.  Go G8!  But there are problems.  Big political statements from the G8 don’t always make a big difference.  In 2008, President Medvedev appeared to support a G8 plan for sanctions on Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, but Russia then joined China in blocking a follow-up resolution in the Security Council.  As for all those aid promises, take a look at these  skeptical posts from Juan Cole and Stephen Walt on what they add up to.

Stewart (who, we should note, is a chum) wouldn’t expect me to agree with him in full.  In his post, he argues that the good outcome from Deauville undermines arguments against the G8 that Bruce D. Jones, Emily O’Brien and I made in a paper for Brookings last week (I previously blogged about it here):

Jones, Gowan, and O’Brien reject two common arguments for retaining the G8: as a hedge against the G20’s failure, and as a “useful political club for liberal Western democracies” (the latter an argument I made earlier this week). I’m less persuaded on both counts.

There is no reason for the United States, nor its other G8 partners, to put all their eggs in one basket. And some political issues are easier to discuss—and take decisive action on—within like-minded groupings of states. The Arab spring is a case in point.

The G20’s agenda will inevitably expand, including into matters of peace and security. But this should—and by necessity will—happen organically and gradually. In the meantime, the G8 will remain one of many important cooperative frameworks in a multi-multilateral world.

To be honest, there aren’t that many differences between us. In the Brookings paper, Bruce, Emily and I were quite careful to avoid making the case for “unilateral disarmament” by the G8 (i.e. shutting up shop in the hope that this contributes to a stronger G20). We do argue that the G8 is no longer a feasible alternative to the G20 in terms of international financial diplomacy. But on the political front, we contend that neither the G8 nor the existing G20 nor the current Security Council is sufficient to handle today and tomorrow’s political and security challenges. We argue that a new range of intermediate forums involving a mix of G8 and non-G8 members will be required to handle rising tensions over energy security, resource scarcity and so forth… so maybe we’re all pragmatic multi-multilateralists now? Curses.

Two months ago the EU Council mandated a military mission called EUFOR Libya to help get aid to Libyan citizens and refugees – but only if the UN asked for help.  There was a lot of excited talk of EU troops deploying to the besieged city of Misrata.  But the UN never asked, and so far EUFOR Libya has consisted entirely and solely of a headquarters unit in Rome.  To celebrate the anniversary of the EU’s decision to approve the non-mission back on 1 April (what a symbolic date…) I’ve written a short and scaborous piece for E!Sharp about how a deployment might have gone awry:

In Misrata, where NATO warplanes were attacking Colonel Gaddafi’s ground forces, the idea of EU-flagged soldiers was a non-starter. Diplomats in Brussels might distinguish between NATO and EU-commanded European forces, but Colonel Gaddafi’s fighters were unlikely to be so discriminating. Even rebel spokesmen questioned the advisability of an EU mission, asking for more air strikes instead.

Even if European troops had deployed during a ceasefire, there was always a risk that some could be snatched by Gaddafi loyalists and held as hostages – just as European troops were seized by the Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s to halt NATO air strikes. Equally, the rebels in Misrata would have realized the media value of having European troops in their midst, and might have tried to bar them from leaving in a crisis. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which EU soldiers became stuck in Misrata as pawns in the civil war.

The EU’s commanders could have minimized this risk by ordering their soldiers to operate in Misrata’s port area, ensuring supplies came ashore, but not to venture any further. But even this would have had risks: what if Gaddafi’s forces had carried out a massacre just a few kilometers from where German soldiers were unloading food and medicines? EUFOR’s mandate and capabilities would have prevented the Germans from getting involved. The next day’s headlines would have declared a new Srebrenica.

Under those circumstances, European leaders would have been faced with an appalling choice: pull their forces out in ignominy or escalate from a humanitarian operation to all-out war-fighting. Cue blazing rows in NATO headquarters, at the EU and in the UN…

So why did the EU’s members OK this flawed mission concept at all?

European officials must have been cognizant of these risks when the idea of deploying to Misrata came onto the horizon. What were they thinking? One depressing interpretation is that the whole idea was a cynical ploy: by making an offer that the UN simply had to refuse, the EU looked good but took no risks.

This interpretation is probably incorrect, however. By most accounts, the EU Council and German government in particular were genuinely keen to “do something”, both for humanitarian reasons and to distract attention from the intra-European divisions over NATO’s air campaign. These priorities may have briefly overshadowed all the problems inherent in a Misrata operation. But that is depressing too.

It’d be a pity to waste a good crisis. As my article concludes, EU planners should take time to look closely at the political and operational assumptions under-pinning EUFOR Libya. Recognizing the flaws involved could help avoid repeating them in future.

Oxfam has just launched its new Grow campaign on food justice in a resource-constrained world. I’ve had the chance to see this campaign being put together from the inside as a consultant for Oxfam (and a new Oxfam paper by me on Governance for a Resilient Food System is available here) - and I think it’s a big deal.

For one thing, the campaign marks a major break with traditional single issue campaigning. This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.

At the same time, the campaign ploughs through the traditional line between the development and environment agendas. For all that there are obviously enormous issues of fairness and equity involved in any discussion of environmental limits, many NGOs have struggled to figure out how to approach them. But the Grow campaign tackles them head-on – as this campaign graphic shows.

Finally, this is probably the biggest development campaign since Make Poverty History. It’ll be the first time that every arm of Oxfam is working together on a single top priority campaign; over the next 24 hours, the campaign will be undertaking rolling launches in 45 different countries. At the same time, as I note in this post on the Guardian development blog, other pathfinding NGOs like WWF and ActionAid are also converging on the issue of fair shares in a world of limits.

This marks a big shift in the development agenda, and it’s crucial that this new push succeeds. Sign up now…

How national and international governance systems need to be reconfigured to meet the challenges of food security in a world of tighter supply and demand balances and increasing volatility. Report for Oxfam’s new Grow campaign by Alex Evans. (May 2011)

Download Report

Francis Fukuyama has got a lot of attention for his new book The Origins of Political Order.  He’s still so closely associated with having announced the “end of history” in the early 1990s (a complex idea that’s more often  cited than understood) people are struck that he’s decided to go back to the beginning, tracing the evolution of political order in different societies from prehistory to the French Revolution.  As I argue in a new review for The National, “this is a remarkably old-fashioned project”:

In tracing the highways and byways of human development, Fukuyama appears far more interested in probing the classics of political philosophy and sociology than current development theory. The majority of books in the bibliography date from before 2000, and the argument includes detailed discussions of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek. With some authors, this might be dismissed as a tokenistic tour through “Great Books of Political Theory”. But Fukuyama embraces such non-household names as “the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke”. As has been said of another Coke, this is the real thing.

But there are obvious differences between this book and its intellectual forebears:

Marx apparently failed to grasp huge differences between ancient Indian and Chinese societies, lumping them together under the headline of “Oriental despotism”. Weber failed to see just how far ancient Chinese society advanced.

As his dismissals of Marx and Weber suggest, Fukuyama does not treat the histories of the great Asian empires as an adjunct to “the rise of the West”. He notes at the outset that he will downplay Greece and Rome. Socrates and Aristotle make only cameo appearances. By contrast, Fukuyama treats Confucianism and Hindu thought in considerable detail.

Does this mean that Fukuyama, once associated with the Project for a New American Century, is giving up on the West? Not so. As I argue in the review, his strategy is to cast more light on non-Western societies and ideas so to emphasize the enduring strength of Western political models:

India, Fukuyama posits fairly early on, has yet to escape from the norms of its pre-colonial politics. Caste groups and kin ties were so crucial to its development – and continue to play a significant role today – that the country remains difficult to unite.

If that’s bad news for Delhi, what about Beijing? Fukuyama argues on the very last page of The Origins of Political Order that today’s Chinese system bears the hallmarks of its imperial predecessors, with power concentrated in the centre and too little accountability.

“An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership,” he argues, clearly thinking of today’s Sino-American competition, but at the same time it will always be in peril of slipping into political decay. In spite of Fukuyama’s attention to the histories of today’s Asian powers, his message is clear: if you want to get ahead in today’s global competition, it’s still best to refer to the ideas that shaped the West.

So this is good reading not only in its own right (and it’s a stimulating work of history and ideas) but also intellectual material for those who in the West who still believe that, as Barack Obama said in London, “the time for our leadership is now”…

When you want something done in your office, like fixing a broken chair, how do you go about it?  Do you go to the administrator responsible and ask nicely?  Or do you create a giant mask of the administrator, distort their features to make them look grotesque, and then hold a PR opportunity outside their office yelling that they are gambling recklessly with your work-space like pimps on a night out in Vegas?

I may be in the minority here, but I tend to go for the asking nicely approach.  Not so, one imagines, the advocacy team at Oxfam.  Or at least not if their approach to influencing the G8 leaders currently meeting in Deauville is any guide:

Veteran G8 campaigners, Oxfam, have kicked off the G8 Summit week by rolling out their famous G8 big heads for a game of bluff to demand the G8 recommit to Muskoka, L’Aquilla and Gleneagles Commitments.

Take a look at the picture above. What is all this meant to achieve?

The message for the G8 from the Big Heads for this photo shoot is: “Will they bluff on aid commitments this year? Oxfam is calling on them to reaffirm their Gleneagles, L’Aquila and Muskoka commitments, and setting out an emergency plan to deliver the overall shortfall in aid promised of $19 billion.”

Uh-huh? My guess is that the message that most G8 leaders actually take away from this sort of thing – if their aides even let them see the pictures – is a bit more like this:

Who are these twerps? Why have they made me look like a pimp? Can’t someone arrest them? Now can we return to the serious business of talking about Carla’s baby bump?

But you never know, anything’s worth a try, I suppose.

Everybody say...aaah!

Horrific new data released by the latest census in India and analysed on the Guardian’s development blog shows that things are getting worse for girls.  The ratio of girls to boys at birth has fallen from 927 girls per 1000 boys in 2001, to 914 girls per 1000 boys today.  In the worst district, the ratio is 774 girls to 1000 boys.  Usually you’d expect about 950 girls per 1000 boys. That adds up to 15 million girls not born in India in the last 10 years.

Wealth and urbanisation aren’t changing this – Mumbai’s figures are worse than the national average.  They might even be making it worse, since medical progress, through the easy availabilty of ultrasound, makes it easier to identify girls and safer abortions reduce the risk of getting rid of them.

This is a tragedy, an abuse of just about all the rights I can think of, and a pretty horrific illustration of how new technology can sometimes serve outmoded and repressive ideologies rather than contribute to their overthrow, as the technological optimists would have it. 

But it’s also, possibly, storing up big economic problems for the future – for all of us.  Research in China, where the ratio is even worse, at about 819 girls per 1000 boys, finds an interesting link between the one-child policy, the preference for boys, and high savings rates.  It goes like this: there are more boys than girls.  When the boys grow up, they are competing over the limited number of girls in the marriage market, and so their parents give them a helping hand by saving up for a nice flat, a nice car (yep, this stuff really does work, like it or not). The authors show that Chinese savings rates shot up in around 2002, when the generation where boys really outnumbered girls reached the age when they started to think about marriage, and that savings rates are higher in areas where the gender ratio is most skewed.  They argue that this effect explains about half of China’s high savings rate.

Now, as I’m sure all the well-informed readers of this blog will know, the high rate of savings in China was one of the factors causing the global imbalances which were one of the contributors to the financial crisis. 

So there you have it.  Women’s rights are good for financial stability.  Perhaps a cause that the likely first woman head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, would like to take up?

It’s G8-time again!  Sadly, not all the leaders who’ve turned up to recent G8 summits – like the guy on the right, seen at the Italian-hosted meeting in 2009 – will be able to make it to this week’s conclave in Deauville, France.  What will they miss?  Arguably not all that much, now the G20 takes precedence.  Bruce Jones, Emily O’Brien and I have a new paper out on the Brookings website about whether the G8 still matters:

On May 26 and 27, France hosts the annual G8 Summit. Although the French have prepared a wide-ranging agenda – covering everything from internet security to the Arab Spring – there is skepticism that the G8 remains relevant in the post-financial crisis world. The G20 has eclipsed it as the primary forum for financial diplomacy, while talks between G8 foreign ministers on Libya this March delivered little.

There are, however, two recurrent arguments for maintaining the G8:

* It acts as an insurance policy for its members against the failure of the G20, a risk highlighted by ill-tempered exchanges over currency issues at the last year’s G20 summit in Seoul.

* It is a useful political club for liberal Western democracies (plus or minus Russia), whereas the G20 contains a less ideologically coherent group of major powers.

This paper argues that neither of these arguments is fully convincing.

Find out why they fail to convince here.

Imagine that you ran out of money, and all your friends were nearly bankrupt.  Would you then go to the nearest outlet of HSBC or Citibank and demand to be made the branch manager, as you understand the need for an overdraft really, really well?

No, you would not.  But this is roughly the argument EU leaders are now making about why another European should head the IMF after the Strauss-Kahn affair:

Angela Merkel insisted that given the IMF’s dominant role in helping eurozone states like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal deal with massive debt problems, it makes sense for Europe to retain the position. “About the question as to why a European, I would like to answer this by saying, of course, the emerging countries have a right to one of the top positions of either the IMF or the World Bank in the medium term,” Merkel said.

“But I think that in the current situation, when we have considerable problems with the euro, that the IMF is very heavily involved in this, which points to the fact that it is possible to put forward a European candidate and that we should promote this within the community of states.” Merkel said the fact that Strauss-Kahn had not served a full term also should be taken into account.

Asked if the EU could support someone from outside the bloc, a European Commission spokeswoman, Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, said, “We believe we can identify a strong candidate in the midst of the EU.” And Ollie Rehn, European economic and monetary affairs commissioner, noted that knowledge of the European economy was one useful qualification for any candidate to succeed Strauss-Kahn.

Let us suppose that these arguments have merit.  I assume that, as a quid pro quo, the EU’s leaders would accept that:

• As the majority of UN peacekeepers are in Africa, the head of UN peacekeeping operations should be an African (not, as a recent tradition dictates, from France).
• As the three biggest recipients of WFP food aid are Sudan, Pakistan and Ethiopia, the organization should be run by a troika of officials from those three countries.
• As the wettest place on earth is Cherrapunjee in north-east India, the World Meteorological Organization should be run by an Indian, not a Russian.

No European leader would accept these arguments (although the only one I’ve heard made seriously is the one about Africa and UN peacekeeping).  Why do they imagine that the same logic should apply to the IMF?

PS: For a less bilious take on the issue, read this piece by Thorsten Benner.

From Martin Kettle in the Guardian, the eye-catching – and bizarre – idea that the Chinese are rooting for Peter Mandelson to take over at the IMF:

A more intriguing UK outsider [than Gordon Brown], in every sense – and absolutely guaranteed to have Brown chewing the carpet – is Peter Mandelson. China has asked if the former business secretary and EU trade commissioner would take the job. Mandelson is definitely interested. The coalition might be open to it too. Germany and France are another matter. Mandelson nevertheless ticks a lot of boxes.

Martin – please tell us more. After all, it’s hard to imagine a source for this story other than Mandelson himself.

No-one reads The Independent, but – even so – Downing Street is sure to be steaming at tomorrow’s front page:

Quiz time.  Who said that policy makers should be ready for:

…an experimental approach to social reform, an approach in which we try out new programmes designed to cure specific social problems, in which we learn whether or not these programmes are effective, and in which we retain, imitate, modify or discard them on the basis of apparent effectiveness on the multiple imperfect criteria available

and went on to advocate:

the general ethic, advocated here for public administrators as well as social scientists, is to use the very best method possible, aiming at ‘true experiments’ with random control groups

The answer, RCT fans, is Donald T. Campbell, a Prof at Northwestern University, writing in 1969, before many of the current crop of ‘randomistas’ were even born.  The full article, a masterpiece of intelligent writing on policy relevant research, is here. 

H/t John Appleby

H/t the Village Voice, via Vinay Gupta.

I have a short piece over at The Mark today about what Michael Ignatieff should do, now that running Canada is off the cards:

Michael Ignatieff, off to teach at the University of Toronto, is returning to the world of ideas at the perfect moment. This is not only because his bruising tenure in the Liberal party was so plainly over. Nor is it because, in his words, “the only damn thing that I can do that’s any use to anybody is to teach kids what I learned and what mistakes I made.”

It’s because some of the biggest issues he addressed in his pre-Ottawa days – when and how to intervene in foreign wars to save lives – are back at the top of the global agenda.

Ignatieff’s writings on the Balkans in the 1990s helped to shape the case for humanitarian intervention. He was a prominent member of the international commission that launched the idea of a “responsibility to protect” the vulnerable from slaughter in 2001. Even as Ignatieff lost Ontario, ideas he advocated were being implemented by NATO pilots with a UN mandate over Libya. But the Libyan war may leave those ideas in poor shape.

What can be done about this?

At this moment of strategic uncertainty, there is a need for robust new thinking about the basic strategic arguments for liberal interventionist policies and whether they still work.

This is where Michael Ignatieff could come (back) in. Readdressing interventionism would be a natural segue back into academia. He may be able to take this up in the congenial surroundings of the University of Toronto. But given the urgency of the crises involved, more may be required. Ban Ki-moon could, for example, appoint Ignatieff and a non-western statesman, such as former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, to lead a study on developments in crisis management and new models for humanitarian assistance, peacekeeping, mediation, and the use of force.

As I point out in the full article, there have been a lot of important reports on aspects of this problem recently (including the World Bank’s World Development Report and UN’s Civilian Capacity Review). But Ignatieff may be the public intellectual best able to draw the lessons from all those reports together into a coherent, resonant narrative about interventionism and conflict management day. We internationalists missed you, Mike.

Here in the UK, there’s a big media hoo-ha underway about a leaked letter from Defence Secretary Liam Fox to the Prime Minister about the UK’s foreign aid budget (see this Mail article for the full text). In it, Fox argues that the government should execute a U-turn on the promise that it made on aid spending in its coalition agreement (pdf), which said that:

We will honour our commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI [Gross National Income] on overseas aid from 2013, and to enshrine this commitment in law.

Fox, on the other hand, now argues in his leaked letter that the government should not go ahead with a Bill as proposed in the coalition agreement, as such a Bill could

…limit HMG’s ability to change its mind about the pace at which it reaches the target in order to direct more resources towards other activities or programmes rather than aid.

I’d be the first to concede that development advocates need to do a much better job of explaining why we should be spending so much on DFID (c.f. this post in March), and I also agree with the view that while Fox’s leaked letter will doubtless win him plaudits from his party’s right wing, it won’t help David Cameron’s larger agenda of ‘detoxifying’ the Conservative brand on development – where, to give credit where it’s due, Andrew Mitchell has done a genuinely good job.

(It’s also worth noting, incidentally, that by no means all opinion formers on the Tory right are with Fox on his scepticism about UK aid: Iain Dale was surprisingly supportive of DFID on LBC last night, and Conservative Home’s Tim Montgomerie noted yesterday that “I’ve witnessed first hand how British aid is saving lives.”)

But I think the “sources close to the Defence Secretary” who’ve been briefing so assiduously over the last few days make a miscalculation in framing the implicit question as a zero sum choice between aid and defence – i.e. ‘why are we spending so much in Africa when we’re slashing the armed forces even as British forces are deployed in both Afghanistan and Libya’.

As David Steven and I argued in Organising for Influence (pdf), the report on UK foreign policy that we did for Chatham House just after the election, that’s the wrong way to look at it. Instead, in an era characterised by global risks, the UK should be looking to upgrade all aspects of its international work – development, defence and diplomacy – which account between them for well under 10% of UK government spending.

Liam Fox clearly doesn’t see it this way. But it’s striking that his erstwhile US counterpart, recently retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates, manifestly does:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the Senate Budget Committee chairman at home to lobby for more money — but not for a bigger defense budget. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., revealed Monday that Gates called to ensure the broad 2010 federal budget included more State Department funding [which includes the budget for foreign aid - ed.]. 

Conrad said he was ready to propose a $4 billion reduction in international relations and foreign aid in the belief that spending money on domestic programs was more important. “They were a little unhappy or disappointed that I was cutting,” Conrad said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called to ask Conrad to change his mind, which is nothing unusual. But Gates’ call was something new, Conrad said. “I have never before in my 22 years on the budget committee had the secretary of defense call me to support the budget for the State Department,” Conrad said.

Gates said it was in the Pentagon’s interest to have a healthier foreign aid budget, Conrad said.