Archive for July, 2009
Icelanders and Norwegians have spoken up about joining the European Union.
Iceland is moving forward. A slim majority of the parliament have voted to support Iceland’s application, and voters are tepidly positive: 39% in a Gallup pole said EU membership “would be a good thing for their country,” while 27% said that it would be a “bad thing.”
As a very small country already in broad compliance with EU norms, Iceland is likely to move rapidly toward membership, if they so choose.
Norwegians remain more skeptical. In a recent poll, a plurality (49%) oppose joining the EU, while 39% favor it. This is a slight shift from the start of 2008, when 54% were in opposition, and 33% in favor.
Norway would also gain entry rapidly, but inclinations to independence, and oil wealth, may continue to keep them out.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
The Economist reports that the concept of “responsibility to protect” — the idea that countries have a responsibility and right to protect people when their own governments cannot or will not — is facing increased resistance at the UN.
Smaller Third World countries such as Nicaragua are leading the counterattack, characterizing the notion instead as the right to intervene — and a right which would only in practice be held by the rich and powerful. (Nicaragua’s role is yet another case of history coming back to haunt the United States, which characterized its proxy war on the Central American country in the 1980s as support for “freedom fighters.”)
The responsibility to protect may be crucial in securing a future in which human rights are broadly protected, but it will make only slow progress at best: too many small countries are suspicious that it will be only an excuse, not a principle, and too many more powerful players — including China, India, and Turkey — may be too worried that it might someday be brought up in the context of their own self-determination and human rights issues.
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This spring The Economist wrote about the extension of maritime claims to continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from land. Huge areas of ocean are being claimed, with rights to oil, metal, and seabed methane hydrates.
While some issues are being worked out amicably, the move could intensify other disputes, such as those around the multiple claims to the South China Sea.
This could also make more important a concept noted by Professor James Lee earlier this year: will islands that cease to exist due to global warming still have sovereignty based on their former existence?
He wrote:
Some remote islands — particularly such Pacific islands as Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tonga, the Maldives and many others — may be partially or entirely submerged beneath rising ocean waters. Do they lose their sovereignty if their territory disappears? After all, governments in exile have maintained sovereign rights in the past over land they didn’t control (think of France and Poland in World War II). Nor are these new questions far away in the future. The first democratically elected president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, is already planning to use tourism revenue to buy land abroad — perhaps in India, Sri Lanka or Australia — to house his citizens.
Absolute sovereignty, territorial waters, and marine exclusive economic zones are all ultimately based on land in current international law. Will a strip of the northern Indian Ocean remain Maldivian even if the islands begin to vanish? Will the Maldivians and others fund their displaced lives with the mineral rights to the waters that swallow their homes?
(Image courtesy Rappensuncle — Creative Commons use via Flickr)
A Sunni extremist takeover of Pakistan would be an immense threat to the US and hard to counter, Bruce Reidel writes in The National Interest.
Such a takeover
would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda’s capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world.
“A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future,” he writes. It would require the Taliban expanding eastward, and teaming up with the radical group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Punjab, assisted by harnessing the grievances of Pakistan’s vast impoverished classes.
A jihadist Suni emirate would face significant internal resistance, Reidel writes, including from Shia, who make up a fifth of the population. To counter potential opposition within the army, the new regime would likely create a parallel military force, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
“In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers,” Reidel suggests.
External effects would be severe:
- Pakistan would increase its influence in Afghanistan, with some of the Pashtun areas all but incorporated into Pakistan.
- Afghanistan would be split between Pakistan-backed Pashtun and their Tajik, Uzbek, and Shia opponents backed by Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian countries.
- Iran and Pakistan would face off in Afghanistan, and support separatists movements. Iran would accelerate its nuclear program in the face of the Pakistani threat.
- India and Pakistan might easily come to blows, with anti-Indian extremists in power in Islamabad.
- Israel and Pakistan would be active adversaries, but Israel would have few options for countering the distant Asian state.
- All Muslim countries would face the prospect of a newly energized radical movement using Pakistan as a support and training base.
- The United States would lack military options, and a blockade would be difficult to carry out and hard to sustain.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy)
A Chinese research group reports that 338 million Chinese are now using the Internet — some 26% of the population.
Despite its restricted state in China, the Internet is still an important driver of expanding freedom. Information circulates much more freely than in the past, and sensitive stories often travel widely before the government clamps down. And those who are determined to get around the so-called Great Firewall can do so.
Though 26% is much lower than rates in developed countries, it still means that the Internet is now well beyond the upper-middle class. The report indicates that usage is spreading in the rural population, driven by rising mobile Internet use.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy — Creative Commons license)
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace made several forecasts for Iran in the course of an interview last week with Middle East Progress:
- “The combination of oil at $60 a barrel and heightened economic sanctions is going to be much more difficult for the Ahmadinejad government to endure, I think it’s going to require the use of very repressive means to stay in power. And again, the political and economic costs of this repression are significant over the long term.”
- ” The reality is that as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and company are in power, we’re never going to reach a nuclear accord which sufficiently allays our suspicions—and Israel’s suspicions—that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.”
- “Ahmadinejad would welcome an Israeli strike in order to try and achieve the same outcome as Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran—namely to unite disparate political factions against a common threat and keep giddy Iranian minds busy with foreign quarrels.”
- “If Saudi Arabia—whose relations with Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president—were to quietly increase output in order to provoke a price drop it could prove devastating to Iran, far more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated.”
At a USAID seminar today, Dr. Deborah Brautigam of American University said that Chinese companies are beginning to be interested in conditionality standards — benchmarks such as the Equator Principles that are meant to guide global companies toward better handling of social and environment issues in emerging markets.
Chinese companies are often seen as unconcerned with such environmental and social matters in their operations in Africa, potentially undercutting progress toward getting other actors to operate responsibly.
Brautigam said that Chinese companies are beginning to study such principles; publicly traded companies are aware of the reputational risk of being seen as bad actors, and of their potential vulnerability to activism.
Meanwhile, today’s news suggests how far Chinese business has to go. A graft query in Namibia has brought up the name of the son of China’s president, Hu Jintao. The Chinese government has reportedly responded by blocking access to news coverage of the affair — directly contradicting the kind of openness and transparency which global markets will ultimately demand from Chinese business, and which Chinese companies will themselves need to be fully competitive.
(Image courtesy Social Technologies)
This week the threat of war in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds was made explicit, with the Washington Post reporting that Kurdish officials are saying that “Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region and the Iraqi government are closer to war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”
Kurdish and Iraqi army units have engaged in standoffs over the disputed border areas, where Kurdish and Arab populations mix.
Little is being done to resolve issues: Prime Minister Maliki and Kurdish President Barzani have not even spoken in a year.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
The International Crisis Group (ICG) issued a report today on Israel’s religious right and the settlements, arguing that this sector of Israeli society must be dealt with if a peace process is to advance.
The driving trend is that “national-religious and ultra-orthodox Israelis have gained influence and leverage. Entrenched in many West Bank settlements, they benefit from demographic trends: Israel’s army is increasingly dependent on their manpower and politicians on their votes.” The report goes on:
Together, the national-religious and ultra-orthodox carry weight far in excess of their numbers. They occupy key positions in the military, the government and the education and legal sectors, as well as various layers of the bureaucracy. They help shape decision-making and provide a support base for religious militants, thereby strengthening the struggle against future territorial withdrawals from both within and without state institutions.
(For more on the military, see this UPI article from earlier this month; it says that “The infiltration of the military by religious zealots has been under way for three decades, and much of the officer corps — up to 30 percent by some estimates — now consists of men from religious extremist groups.” The ICG report has more detail.)
The ICG continues:
The religious right believes it has time on its side. Its two principal camps – the national-religious and ultra-orthodox – boast the country’s highest birth rates. They have doubled their population in West Bank settlements in a decade. They are rising up military ranks.
The ICG offers a number of ameliorative measures. The most interesting is this: “While some settlers will be determined no matter what to remain on what they consider their Biblical land, here, too, ideas are worth exploring. In negotiations with Palestinians, Israel could examine whether and how settlers choosing to remain might live under Palestinian rule.”
In some sense, Israel seems to be becoming Middle Eastern: Western values are being replaced by religious and nationalist fervor. The consequences could be severe:
- A fundamentalist Israel may simply be incapable of seeking a just peace, suggesting increasingly dark prospects for the nation.
- American values and interests will diverge ever more sharply from such an Israel, straining the bonds between the two countries.
- Secular and moderate Israelis may find their country increasingly unwelcome, which could drive a brain drain that would undermine Israel’s creativity and competitiveness.
- This change could speed the estrangement of American Jews from Israel, a process that some say has already begun. And American Jewish support is the central driver of American support for Israel.
In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman predicts the rise of Turkey to great power status. “It will likely soon reemerge in its old role, as the dominant force in the” Middle East, he writes (p. 81).
Yigal Schleifer of the Christian Science Monitor provides some clues as to how that scenario might develop in recent reporting.
- Turks are importing Arab brides to rural areas, with the aid of “Turkey’s growing clout and visibility in the Middle East.” A Turk says that Moroccan brides are willing to come east because they “think Turkey has prestige, that it’s a strong country. They also trust Turkey – they know it’s a Muslim country and that we pray and read the Koran.” Turkish TV is helping to bolster the Turkish image as well. (Schleifer points out the curiosity that in this case the Internet is reinforcing polygamy, which is illegal, and widely considered backward, in Turkey.)
- Turkish officials have spoken out strongly against perceived Chinese oppression of the Uighurs, who are a Turkic people. Prime Minister Erdogan went so far as to say that “The incidents in China are, simply put, tantamount to genocide.” This of course upset China, putting Turkey in the position of deciding between pan-Turkic emotional solidarity, and its realpolitik goals.
Schleifer writes that Turkey’s strong stand against Israel’s attack on Gaza helped its image with Arabs; this suggests that if Turkey really wants to be a regional leader, it may have to distance itself from Israel — unless Israel achieves peace with its neighbors.
(Image courtesy MichalFotos, Flickr)