by Charlie Edwards | Dec 29, 2008 | Global Dashboard, Global system
- Mexico: The world’s leading narco state will, unnoticed, dissolve into total chaos destabilising the surrounding region.
- Middle East: February elections in Israel will see Binyamin Netanyahu being voted in while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be voted out in Iranian elections in June.
- Asia: H5N1 will return with a vengeance.
- Bosnia: A growing culture clash between conservative Islam and the country’s avowed secularism will result in an increase in violence in the country.
- Africa: Robert Mugabe will be assassinated.
- UK: There will be no election in 2009.
- Turkey: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will abandon further attempts to join the European Union and instead turn East and focus on regional diplomacy.
- Iraq: Elections will be relatively peaceful in much of the country.
- Somalia: The US or France will be drawn into a short, intense ground war in the South West of the country.
- Afghanistan: In May Britain will increase the number of troops in the country. In October a European deal with the Obama administration will see France, Germany and Italy do the same.
* I will happily blog when these predictions are proven wrong.
by Alex Evans | Nov 13, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, London Summit
Ahead of this weekend’s G20 summit, David and I have published a short paper entitled A Bretton Woods II worthy of the name. Key points:
– The summit is unlikely to be able to live up to its billing. Leaders do not yet understand the nature of the problem well enough to be able to implement viable solutions. However, the problem is more fundamental than a simple lack of shared awareness.
– History suggests that leaders will only think the unthinkable on institutional reform once the challenge they face has really hit rock bottom. But history also suggests that we are wrong to think that the worst of the crisis is now past, given that many past banking crises have taken five years or more to unravel.
– Bretton Woods 1 looked across the whole international economic waterfront in 1944, while this weekend’s summit will be much more narrowly focused. Leaders will make a big mistake if they try and tackle finance in isolation, given the growing impact of resource scarcity, and that 2009 is supposed to see another ambitious global deal – on climate.
– We need to recalibrate what we expect from globalization through a serious debate about subsidiarity. Where has globalization gone too far, too fast? Where do we need more integration at a global level? These were exactly the questions that preoccupied Keynes in 1933, when he weighed the relative benefits of global versus local across a range of variables. We need a similar debate today as a precursor to serious international economic reform.
– Leaders need to extend their horizons in (at least) five directions: onto longer time scales; beyond financial regulation into wider resource scarcity challenges; into other international processes, especially climate; towards grand bargains with emerging powers; and beyond government, to non-governmental networks.
Full version after the jump, or better yet here’s the pdf.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Oct 24, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, London Summit
We are now officially beginning some sort of post-credit crunch global governance feeding frenzy. We now have the following to look forward to:
– The report of a new High Level Commission on modernisation of the World Bank, chaired by former President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo;
– A UN General Assembly task force on the global financial system, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz (composition and terms of reference to be announced on 30 October);
– An EU summit on the financial crisis and reform of global financial institutions on 7 November, to prepare for…
– A G20 summit on international financial institution reform in Washington DC on 15 November (though no-one seems to have told the G20 secretariat);
– A UN Financing for Development summit from 29 November to 2 December – it’s been in preparation since last year, but Ban Ki-moon has now suggested turning it into a UN summit on the financial crisis, in NYC rather than Doha as planned (Ban says:
“I strongly believe that holding the summit at the United Nations, the symbol of multilateralism, will lend universal legitimacy to this endeavour and demonstrate a collective will to face this serious global challenge…”)
I make no claim to this being a comprehensive list (and will add to it as I find more baubles to hang on the tree). But it all invites the question: how much is really going to be achieved through all this pannelling and summitry? As Eurodad, the civil society network on debt relief, notes on its website:
Several meetings that Eurodad staff have had in recent days reveal that senior European policy makers have few precise reform proposals for this summit meeting and have not started negotiating a common EU position. Indeed smaller European countries are unhappy that they will be excluded from the 15 November meeting. The summit – with its extravagant “Bretton Woods II” billing – may reveal a very dangerous gap between expectations and delivery,
Too right. Over the summer, there were no fewer than three summits (FAO; G8: WTO) that claimed in advance that they were riding to the rescue on food prices, and which then failed to deliver anything interesting. Now it looks like we’re about to do the same on the credit crunch…
Update: Eurodad have produced a helpful FAQ on the ‘Bretton Woods II’ summit – download it here. Thanks to Alex Wilks.
Update 2: David and I have published a briefing paper on the Summit.
by Alex Evans | Oct 22, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
If you haven’t read it already, World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s speech on multilateral reform earlier this month is definitely worth a read. One of best nuggets in it is his call for “a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy” – the rationale for which goes like this:
The G-7 is not working. We need a better group for a different time. The G-20, though valuable, is too unwieldy in moving from discussion to action. We need a core group of Finance Ministers who will assume responsibility for anticipating issues, sharing information and insights, exploring mutual interests, mobilizing efforts to solve problems, and at least managing differences.
For financial and economic cooperation, we should consider a new Steering Group including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the current G-7. Such a Steering Group would bring together over 70 percent of the world’s GDP, 56 percent of world population, 62 percent of its energy production, the major carbon emitters, the principal development donors, large regional actors, and the primary players in global capital, commodity, and exchange rate markets.
But this Steering Group would not be a G-14. We will not create a new world simply by remaking the old. It should be numberless, flexible, and over time, it could evolve. Others may be added, especially if their rising influence is matched by a willingness to help shoulder responsibilities.
This new Steering Group should meet and videoconference regularly to foster group responsibility. The Deputies should have frequent and informal discussions. An active network of bilateral consultations within and beyond the group will support it. We need a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy.
It’s a timely reminder that there’s no hard and fast rule to say that multilateral cooperation has to revolve around formal multilateral organisations – and especially refreshing to hear this coming from the head of the World Bank. (And yes, he does have a Facebook page, since you wonder.)
Responses to the financial crisis over the last few weeks seem to bear out Zoellick’s point. Although multilateral cooperation has been central, multilateral organisations haven’t been: the IMF, for example, has been largely absent from the main action, and while the EU managed in the end to be at the forefront of marshalling a collective response, it was the Council of Ministers – not the Commission – that pulled it all together.
In this light, it’s perhaps ironic that while Gordon Brown has come to be seen as one of the main organisers of this non-organisationally-based but nevertheless fundamentally multilateral crisis response, his stated vision for multilateral reform is very organisationally focussed, what with emphasis on a new Bretton Woods, an enhanced early warning role for the IMF and so on.
by Charlie Edwards | Oct 13, 2008 | Off topic
Comparisons below:
1. Guangdong (113 million) Germany plus Uganda (3)
2. Henan (99 million) Mexico
3. Shandong (92 million) Philippines
4. Sichuan (87 million) Vietnam
5. Jiangsu (75 million) Egypt
6. Hebei (68 million) Iran
7. Hunan (67 million) France
8. Anhui (65 million) Thailand
9. Hubei (60 million) U.K.
10. Guangxi (49 million) Burma/Myanmar
Brought to you courtesy of the ever excellent Strange Maps
