In a recent poll, Ukrainians expressed fears for the stability of their country as a result of current political crises.
People were asked “Which consequences of the current political conflict are you afraid of the most?” With more than one answer allowed, responses included:
- Violence and disorder — 57.0%
- Anarchy — 44.4%
- Division of Ukraine into separate states — 22.6%
- Dictatorship — 21.9%
In “The Politically Incorrect Reforms of France’s New President” (Knowledge@Wharton, 5/16/07), analysts offer a number of prognostications:
- France must restructure the labor market, making unemployment less easy; France is the lone European holdout in labor restructuring.
- Newly elected president Sarkozy will have only a 2-3-year window to accomplish this reform, in the face of potentially disabling labor opposition.
- A French “return to economic liberalism” under Sarkozy could help revitalize the EU economies.
Writing in the Post, James Mann argues that China is increasingly a political model for the world, combining an authoritarian system with successful wealth creation.
He notes that the Chinese middle class is content with or at least acquiescent to the current system, indicating “that a nation’s elite can be bought off with comfortable apartments, the chance to make money, and significant advances in personal, non-political freedoms (clothes, entertainment, sex, travel abroad).”
It is not clear that the China offers a long-term model for authoritarianism, however.
- Political freedom has increased too — the “non-political freedoms” that Mann lists all used to be within the realm of politics and thereby restricted. This pattern continues, and even allows for thousands of protests a year, and — spottily — discussion of issues that fall clearly in the realm of politics.
- Mann suggests that the “business community is hardly independent of the party; in effect, it is the party, linked to China’s power structure through financial connections or family ties.” That in itself is a route to political change: Chinese business interests may be at odds with authoritarianism. For instance, to participate in global stock markets effectively, ever more Chinese will have to have unfettered access to global news flows. Business will have an interest in predictability that militates against arbitrary Party / bureaucratic interferences.
- China’s engagement with the world does constrain the Chinese political system. Consider the current scandal about tainted products. Part of the outcome is likely to be increased transparency to the outside world, and additional limits on the power of connection and money in the economy, replaced by objective criteria partially imposed by the outside world.
- The middle class continues to be trained for a more democratic system, making more decisions for themselves in more spheres, gaining access to ever-broader information streams, and glimpsing more and more alternatives to the present Chinese political model.
Recent events suggest the outlines of some scenarios for Turkey, as it faces “the rise of a more religious, conservative and often rural class seeking a place in Turkey’s hierarchy.”
- Arabian Turkey–This is the conventional fear scenario of secular Turks: as described by the Post, that once the Islamic Justice and Development Party achieves power, “it will promote political Islam and chip away at secular freedoms.”
- Freedom through Islam–In this scenario, the religiously oriented parties ultimately manage to move Turkey forward, not backward, by allowing many Turks more freedom to live out their religious identities, and bringing them fully into public life. Said one Turkish analyst, the Justice and Development Party is “a vehicle for modernization of the unmodernized.” And it could provide an alternative to the statist, hypernationalist ideology that has prevailed in Turkey since the early 20th century, which could help to defuse conflict with Turkey’s Kurds.
- The Algerian path–Fearful of an Islamic threat to secular ideology, the military moves against the Islamic parties. With peaceful paths blocked, Islamists–and some simply fed up with the old elites–turn to resistance, destabilizing the country and starting an escalating spiral of violence.
A sign of likely future directions in Iraq: a majority of Iraq’s legislators have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for an American withdrawal, the Washington Post reports.
It is, as the article puts it, a sign that “Iraq’s lawmakers are moving further away from the views of the government, particularly on the basic issue of the American presence in their country.”
It is a gradual movement: many Iraqis, including some who signed the bill, want the US to stay long enough to train Iraqi security forces, and many powerful political parties oppose setting a timetable for an American departure.
Last week the Washington Post detailed the efforts of Iraq’s Kurds to build links to the US, separate from the American relationship to Iraq.
Kurdistan’s representative in Washington is quoted as saying that the Kurds are seeking the same kind of “’strategic and institutional relationship’ that Israel and Taiwan have with the United States. ‘We are seeking the same protection.’”
The Kurdish efforts have several potential future impacts:
- “Some senior U.S. officials contend that yielding to Kurdish demands for increased autonomy could break up Iraq and destabilize Turkey, a NATO ally that is fighting a guerrilla war with Kurdish separatists.”
- The Kurds have brought in Israelis and members of the Israeli lobby to work on their behalf in Washington. This suggests a potential Israeli-Kurdish alliance that could flank the core of the Arab world but could also serve as another long-term irritant in Arab-Israeli relations.
- The pro-war organization Move America Forward and parents of American soldiers who have died in Iraq have called for ‘developing and maintaining a major U.S. military presence in Iraqi Kurdistan’ after being brought into the cause by Evangelical Christians. This tilt toward the Kurds would deeply undercut the American mission in Iraq and make it more likely that an actively hostile government or governments would emerge there — particularly ironic given that, according to a consultant involved with these efforts, the parents see Kurdistan as “a validation that their child didn’t die in vain.”