by David Steven | May 7, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system
One more post on last week’s Transformational Public Diplomacy symposium (see the others here and here), where the most incisive presentation was given by Sir Peter Marshall, the UK’s perm rep to the office of the UN in the 1980s, and now on the staff of the Diplomatic Academy of London. Sir Peter argued that:
Whereas it is traditionally thought of as the conduct of relations between sovereign states, each acting in pursuit of its own self-defined interests, diplomacy must now be increasingly regarded as the collective management of a global nexus, according to the values which we hold in common.
According to Sir Peter:
The transformation in diplomatic conditions can be summarised in the impact, individual and collective, of six factors, or vectors, – “forces which have both magnitude and direction” – namely: the transition from World Economy to Global Village; the transition from Zero-sum to Positive-sum Game in relations between states; the prominence of values as well as interests in the conduct of foreign policy, of which the well-being and the treatment of the individual everywhere is the focus; governance as well as government, implying the active participation of a large number of non-governmental entities; intense public scrutiny of this “broad band” diplomacy; and the vanishing distinction between internal and foreign affairs.
The whole is not so much the sum, as the product of its far-reaching parts. We do not just add the vectors together; we have to multiply them one by another.
Globalisation is ‘intricate’ and ‘delicate’, Sir Peter believes. It can only be managed through an outward-looking and alert diplomacy, able to cope with cascading complexity and wider participation. The new diplomacy should be increasingly public and increasingly interactive – evolving into what he calls ‘geodiplomatics’.
The alternative is a growing ‘delivery deficit’:
On the one hand, collective aspirations inspired by the potentialities of interdependence are right and proper: eg the Millennium Development Goals. But the dangers of shortfall, disillusion and recrimination cannot but be acute. A premium is set on diplomatic efficiency in both its advisory and executive aspects.
I think that’s right. Many global risk resemble slow motion car crashes, unfolding over the years to the accompaniment of much hand-wringing, but little action. How long can this last before people start losing faith in the world’s ability to collectively manage its increasingly intricate systems?
by Charlie Edwards | May 6, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa
Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to researchers at Oregon State University that the evidence points to an altogether different scenario, where the world’s 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
The Economist picks up the story:
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967 war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the deep crisis of 2002.
Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought, desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan’s west into chaos and misery. But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords (the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to steal and sell.
Water, it seems, is a source for cooperation. Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been watching each other’s water use closely for a century at least—and Egypt usually gets its way.
And who is the usual suspect that could precipitate a conflict? China. Unconstrained by World Bank diplomacy it could possibly enrage Egypt if it ever helped the Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.
Still, as the Economist notes, there are risks.
In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa’s most militaristic countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White Nile. Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.
by Richard Gowan | May 2, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Global system
It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans. With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists. But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make like rational politicians. Tomislav Nikolic, leader of the Radical Party and strongman-in-waiting, popped up the Financial Times yesterday, promising not to “jeopardise foreign direct investment”.
But to see just how rank the hypocrisy can get, take a look at the new edition of Foreign Affairs, which contains a glossy advertorial section on “Serbia’s Eurovision”(the Song Contest will be held in Belgrade on 24 May – like everyone else, I’m very much in awe of the French entry, but that’s not the point right now).
Although this appears to be from the pro-liberal camp, its first paragraph left my blood running pretty cold. Here are the first three sentences:
The 1990s were a difficult decade for Serbia and the Balkan region in general.
Well, yes. Nearly 150,000 people were killed in a series of brutal wars. “Difficult” would seem to be a rather mild adjective. Why not “tricky”?
Despite never having been part of the Warsaw Pact, following the fall of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia rapidly broke up into separate regions declaring independence, causing cultural and religious clashes that finally degraded into the Yugoslav wars.
This overlooks the considerable evidence that “cultural and religious” differences were exploited by the Yugoslav/Serb leadership in a very deliberate fashion, even if the Western media were gulled into writing about “ancient hatreds”. But, fear not, “Serbia’s Eurovision” isn’t scared to tell harsh truths:
In Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic and his controversial stand on several issues, including the opposition to the call for independence by Kosovo . . . led to UN sanctions.
Controversial? Controversial? This was a leader who even Mr Nikolic calls “criminal”, who was indicted for war crimes, and historians have shown to be the architect of the strategy that involved ethnic cleansing and Srebrenica. Yes, that might have initiated just a little bit of controversy here and there.
It is natural for liberal Serbs to want to move on from the past – and to avoid being defined by a tyrant who was, after all, overthrown by people power on the streets of Belgrade. I have total admiration for those who protested, and for those who have exhausted themselves trying to get Serbia back on its feet since.
But total denial is not a policy. This sort of prose must surely ring hollow with anyone with even the faintest memory of the 1990s – and it effectively validates the revanchist attitudes of the nationalists. Serbia should not be expected to engage in constant self-flagellation, but nor can it become a “normal” state if it buries its history in euphemisms in this fashion.
by David Steven | May 2, 2008 | Global system
Yesterday, I gave a couple of talks at a Diplomatic Academy of London conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (pdf – and read an earlier post here).
One talk drew heavily on my Wilton Park speech on evaluation (read it here), but I also spoke about technology’s impact on diplomacy. The full text is after the jump or read it as a pdf. (more…)
by Mark Weston | May 1, 2008 | Global system
A typically forthright and sensible article from former WTO head Mike Moore in the New Zealand Herald argues that we need more globalisation, not less, in response to the food crisis. He berates rich countries’ wrongheaded fuel subsitution policies – biofuels – as “a populist Green response to global warming that does the opposite of what was intended,” and argues that, while food aid to the poorest will be needed in the short term, the medium and long-term solution is more trade liberalisation and fewer subsidies.
And then, to really ram his point home, Moore adds a startling factoid, which recalls the equally memorable cartoon posted by Alex a while back: “Filling a Range Rover with subsidised ethanol takes as much “grain” as would feed an African family for a year.” Yikes. Anyone for a ban on Range Rovers?
