Europe
Modern Western European societies have had the advantage of social cohesion, cultivated on the basis of relative linguistic, ethnic, and racial homogeneity, and they made that social cohesion self-reinforcing, by pursuing egalitarian economics that ironed out class differences.
As the Greek economic crisis unfolds, it becomes clear that, by forming the European Union, Europeans may have reduced their ability to act in mutual solidarity. This is most evident in the role of Germany, which, as the largest economy, would have to be the biggest source of bailout funds. “The relatively thrifty Germans” simply don’t want to help “their more free-spending Mediterranean neighbors,” as one source put it. Germans may be generous with their fellow Germans, but spending to make up for the low productivity and early retirements of Greeks is too much.
This resembles the source of a lot of American political paralysis: diversity creates the sense of otherness, people who are too different to trust, and not worth taxing oneself for.
Greece is not part of Western Europe — it’s more Balkan and Levantine — but the challenge would grow even greater with, say, Ukraine or (Gott forbid) Turkey.
“The heaviest punishment inflicted upon Greece was the control of the finances imposed at the proposal of Germany, as the Germans had been the chief sufferers of the financial crisis.” Current news? No, an account of an 1897 crisis over Crete.[1] Plus ça change.
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[1] The Book of History, Vol. XII (New York: The Grolier Society, c. 1915), p. 5212.
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Io9 has a useful review of George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years.
We’re in for the return of Cold War politics, the rise of new dominant powers, and a full-blown space war, according to a new book. What are the chances his dire predictions will come true?
In the details, the chances are virtually nil, of course. But this book should be judged more on the broad outlines than on the scenario particulars.
Suspiciously, it is the same future that Friedman always sees: 19th-century style realpolitik, with great powers contending violently for position. That is hardly inevitable, as ideological, economic, and military factors that enabled that environment are no longer in place. Great powers have not fought each other directly for over 50 years, a gap that cannot be found in previous centuries. Indeed, a variety of factors could tip the world toward full-blown peace in coming decades.
As for the details:
Conflict will arise between the United States, which, in his view, will remain the most powerful nation on the planet, and these new players. Friedman singles out three countries, in particular, that will become the next major powers during the 21st century: Turkey, Japan and Poland, with other nations, such as Mexico, becoming far more powerful in their respective regions.
Friedman’s casual dismissal of China, India, and Brazil should raise some eyebrows. He plausibly explains why Russia might falter, but seems to drop the others either to be deliberately contrarian, or out of deep faith in the determinative power of geography.
It is geography which seems to anoint Turkey, Japan, and Poland. Turkey bears watching, as this blog has noted. As for Poland and Japan, they suffer from the same demographic malady as Russia. Poland is embedded in the pacifying embrace of Europe, and is expected to lose two million people by 2030. Japan cannot be counted out, but is also shrinking already.
How will countries fight at mid-century?
Warfare will be characterized by air forces, robotic forces and enhanced soldiers, and will rely in electrical power grids and other resources as soldiers fight across new battlefields in Europe and Asia. Space will be a vital element, as it allows for communications and the ability to watch a battlefield from a better birds eye view.
That is not a bad forecast for conflict, though other paths are possible. Some would point to nanotechnologies and biotech weapons.
As for the overall book, as Io9 suggests, it is a better introduction to “realist” thinking than an actual guide to coming developments.
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Russian-Ukrainian tensions are building. “Now, for the first time in years, the word ‘war’ is being used here, and it’s not dismissed as impossible,” Ukrainian analyst Valeriy Chaly told the Washington Post.
This is driven by specific issues, such as the Crimean issue, and by the larger Russian skepticism that Ukraine is a permanent, independent state.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Post that the debate in Moscow “is between moderates who want to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and ensure that it continues delivering Russian gas, and officials calling for a proactive strategy aimed at ’soft dominance’ over the country.”
Either path could lead to greater instability, amongst Ukraine’s divided citizenry, and between the two countries.
The New York Times reported today on tense relations between Russia and Ukraine, as “both sides resort to provocations and recriminations.”
It is the Crimean Peninsula, appended to Ukraine by Stalin but heavily populated by Russians and Crimean Tatars, “where the tensions are perhaps most in danger of bursting into open conflict,” though “both countries publicly avow that they do not want the bad feelings to spiral out of control,” Times reporter Clifford Levy notes.
The situation could worsen in next five months, as the January 2010 Ukrainian election “might cause Ukrainian candidates to respond more aggressively to Russia to show their independence,” Levy writes.
Crimea is “roughly 60 percent ethnic Russian and would prefer that the peninsula separate from Ukraine and be part of Russia” and Sevastopol, where Russia maintains a naval base, “has an even higher proportion of ethnic Russians.”
Levy writes:
Sergei P. Tsekov, a senior politician in Crimea who heads the main ethnic Russian communal organization, said he hoped that Russia would wholeheartedly endorse Crimean separatism just as it did the aspirations of South Ossetia and another Georgian enclave, Abkhazia.
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A researcher has found that fertility may go up again after countries reach a high level of development.
The pattern has long been that fertility is declining pretty much everywhere, and in the developed world is has dropped below replacement levels — about 2.1 babies per woman — in many countries.
Lower fertility has many societal, economic, and environmental benefits, but rapid fertility drops drive rapid “aging” of a society, with rising ratios of seniors to workers.
According to Rob Stein in the Washington Post, Hans-Peter Kohler found that countries which reach a high quality of life often increase their birthrates. The threshold is a human development index (HDI) of 0.9, which reflects high levels of income, longevity, and education.
Kohler speculates that the key may be social structures and employment situations that enable women both to work and have children. This would explain, he notes, why Japan has not achieved this fertility rebound, given its high level of gender inequality.
Immigration could clearly play a factor, as most developed countries (but not Japan) have greatly increased immigration in recent decades, but Kohler says it cannot account for the full effect — and this would not explain why Canada has not had such a rebound.
Sociologist S. Philip Morgan casts some doubt on the development-driven theory, telling the Post that other factors could be at work, such as ideological changes. (These two ideas are not necessarily contradictory; development is an important driver of ideological change, according to theorists such as Ronald Inglehart.)
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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.
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This week David Ignatius argued in the Washington Post that Russia is clearly declining, “a developing country trying to pretend that it is a developed one,” combining the worst aspects of free markets and command economies.
He notes that a Russian editor does not foresee true economic modernization until the economy is run by people with no memory of the Soviet system, more than a decade from now.
Ignatius cites these factors:
- Russian industrial production declined between 1994 and 2008, while “China’s grew fourfold and India’s more than doubled.”
- Russian industrial exports totaled only $32 billion last year, only 2% of the $1.4 trillion in industrial exports from the other three BRIC countries.
- While Russia is relying on energy exports, “its oil and gas production is stagnating because of corruption, underinvestment and mismanagement,” American energy consultant J. Robinson West tells him. Gazprom spends only a third of what other major oil companies spend on R&D.
- Energy and raw materials cost three to four times more in Russia than in China, and road-building costs three times more than it does in Western Europe.
Unless Russia realizes it is not rich and adopts real modernization policies, it will “end up in a mess like Venezuela, Nigeria or Angola,” a Russian economist tells him.
These economic issues are multiplied by Russia’s dire demography.
The upshot is that Russia is unlikely to be a dangerous challenger — though wounded pride and sense of grievance can still make a country dangerous.
I wrote a commentary piece for Radio Free Europe on the future of Russia.
The central points, briefly, are these:
- “Diminished democratic decision making reduces the feedback Russian society can give to the government, increasing the likelihood that popular and elite interests will diverge.”
- “A state that relies on resource extraction can easily lose the inclination to attend to other aspects of economic strength that are more stable and promising over the long term.”
- “Russia seems fixated on threats from the West. But this sense of danger is misplaced,” as “Russia faces much more plausible security threats from the south and east.”
- “No foreign power is likely to do Russia as much harm as its dire demographic decline.”
A commenter had this to say about the piece: the “author conveniently forgets about the fact that throughout the 90s Russia already tried to align with the broadly defined “West”, only to see its interests completely ignored and enemies encouraged through a very short-sighted policies of US, EU, and NATO.”
One might ask: which enemies where encouraged? Russia’s only real enemies in the 1990s were separatists in Caucasian Russia, and the West had little to do with that. Unless Russia has military designs on the former countries of the Warsaw Pact, Russia’s interests are not harmed by their joining NATO, and in any case Russia does not get to choose their fates any longer. After centuries of abuse at Russian hands, the Poles (for instance) have every right to look for protection westward. (Though continued rapid NATO expansion is not a great idea: at this point, inclusion of divided Ukraine and irresponsible Georgia would probably harm NATO more than it would hurt Russian interests.)
And Serbia was a terrible place to place one’s sympathies: Russia ignored the fact that the Serbians were engaging in savage policies in both Bosnia and Kosovo — and neither situation was triggered by the West.
Internally, Russians were in fact harmed by the so-called oligarchs, but they were Russian, and they acquired wealth and power due to choices Russians made.
My ultimate point is this: it should act on its real interests, not a emotion-driven parody of those interests.
The Somali pirates have managed to invoke the multipolar 21st century:
- The European Union is sending a force of 20 warships to patrol around the Horn of Africa, including countries such as Spain and Sweden, an unusual display of military power by the organization.
- China is also sending three warships, a striking extension of its global reach. This is likely the first time a Chinese flotilla has operated in these waters since the great fleets of Admiral Zheng He, in the early 15th century.
Image: Ben Walther (Flickr)
The Washington Post reports that the credit crisis is being used as an argument against independence for Scotland, with suggestions that Scotland would not have been able to weather the crisis on its own.
Practical factors come into play as well: with the bank bailout by the central government, “it has not been lost on Scots that the largest shareholder in Scotland’s two largest banks is now the British government.”
The pro-independence Scottish National Party, which currently governs Scotland, contents that Scottish membership in the EU would provide the kind of assistance now provided by the central government of the UK.
The article notes that only about 25-30% of Scots favor independence.