by Mark Weston | Dec 31, 2008 | Africa
One of Africa’s few shining lights, Ghana, is on tenterhooks as it awaits the result of an incredibly closely-fought general election. Publication of the results has been delayed, as the remote outpost of Tain in the west has yet to vote in the second round because of problems with voting materials. The national result is so tight that Tain, with just 23,000 voters, could be decisive. The poll there will open on Friday.
Ghana is important not just because it is one of very few West African countries that is not mired in corruption, civil strife and abject poverty (although there is plenty of the latter and not a little of the former if you look hard enough). It is also one of only a handful of countries on the entire continent that has regular peaceful democratic elections (it has had five since 1992). After the debacles in Kenya and Zimbabwe in the last two years, and after the recent coups in Guinea and Mauritania, it is crucial that Ghana’s poll passes off peacefully.
So far, there has been relatively little unrest, but as Chris Blattman reports, tensions are rising by the day:
My friend Naunihal sends me this dispatch, cobbled together hastily this afternoon (he urges me to tell you):
The situation is starting to look like Bush v. Gore. The election commissioner just said that the opposition leads by 23,000 votes and that there is one constituency where there was no election for security reasons which has over 50,000 votes that will vote just after new years.
But it gets messier. The incumbent party (NPP) points out that 2 big constituencies in Kumasi (its key area of support) were not included in the officially counted votes (probably because they are contested) and that it won one of those by over 51,000 votes.
In addition, they point out that in 11 constituencies in the opposition’s key area of the Volta region, NPP poling agents were thrown out and did not sign the election returns. I’ve seen the violence done to one of the party election observers – he was beaten and stoned and may lose his eye.
Right now fear is running high in Accra. Makola Market, the main market, is closed because of fear of violence. I’m getting reports right now from people aligned with the NPP, so I’m only hearing about NDC “Machomen” riding around in empty streets.
The constituency that has yet to vote for the President, voted against the incumbent party at the Parliamentary level, thus kicking out the incumbent MP. So it looks good for the opposition in that area, but everything is really too close to call.
And rumors are spreading that the election commissioner is under pressure from the incumbent government to throw things their way.
None of this is good in terms of street level tensions and legitimacy for whichever candidate gets declared.
Update: Fortunately, the election concluded peacefully, as Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party graciously conceded defeat to John Atta Mills’ National Democratic Congress. A rare example of a peaceful democratic transition, then, from one African party to another, and further evidence that Ghana really is a beacon of hope for the region. Let’s hope leaders in other parts of the continent take note.
by Charlie Edwards | Dec 31, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Two of my favourite blogs, MountainRunner and Danger Room highlight the IDF’s attempt to win over the blogosphere using Twitter and You Tube. Why? Because according to the head of the IDF’s press team: “The blogosphere and new media are another war zone, we have to be relevant there.”
The YouTube channel was created with the aim of distributing footage of precision airstrikes. Interestingly YouTube took down some of the ‘exclusive footage’ showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, but appears to have returned some of the footage due to popular demand.
Elsewhere the Israeli consulate in New York hosted a press conference on Twitter in order to answer the public’s questions regarding the situation in Gaza. How one measures the success of the twitterference is difficult but, as both Matt and Nathan point out, reducing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to tweets of 140 characters or less makes for interesting reading:
‘We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?’,
‘we’re not at war with the PAL people. we’re at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org’.
by Alex Evans | Dec 31, 2008 | Global system, London Summit, UK
Here in Britain, one Christmas present arrives a few days late each year: the declassification of Cabinet papers that are then made available to the National Archive under the ‘Thirty Year Rule‘. This year, the newly released documents are from 1978: the twilight period of Labour’s ill-fated Callaghan administration, famous for the ‘winter of discontent‘, when a torrent of industrial action meant that the rubbish went uncollected and the dead unburied.
You might suppose that it’s not the sort of anniversary that Gordon Brown will really want to be reminded of, not least given the obvious link back to Margaret Thatcher’s hugely successful election slogan of the time – ‘Labour isn’t working’ – and the fact that Callaghan’s administration had to go cap in hand to the IMF for a bailout.
But superficial similarities aside, the crucial difference between late 70s Britain and late 00s Britain is that during the former, the pendulum had swung all the way to the ‘state’ or ‘public’ end of the spectrum – whereas today, we find it right over at the ‘market’ or ‘private’ end. Robert Skidelsky, writing in Prospect this month, refers to Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s The Cycles of American History, which describes this cyclical dynamic in detail:
[Schlesinger] defined a political economy cycle as “a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest.” The swing he identified was between “liberal” (what we would call social democratic) and “conservative” epochs. The idea of the “crisis” is central. Liberal periods succumb to the corruption of power, as idealists yield to time-servers, and conservative arguments against rent-seeking excesses win the day. But the conservative era then succumbs to a corruption of money, as financiers and businessmen use the freedom of de-regulation to rip off the public. A crisis of under-regulated markets presages the return to a liberal era.
As Skidelsky summarises, the 1870s saw the pendulum start to swing towards collectivism on the back of a global depression triggered by a collapse in food prices. Most industrialised countries began to raise tariffs; social protection systems were rapidly rolled out (although not in the US). The great depression of 1929-32 accelerated the process as Keynesian economics became orthodox. But by the 1970s, the pendulum was about to swing the other way, as governments pursued “free trade abroad and social democracy at home”:
The crisis of liberalism, or social democracy, unfolded with stagflation and ungovernability in the 1970s. It broadly fits Schlesinger’s notion of the “corruption of power.” The Keynesian/social democratic policymakers succumbed to hubris, an intellectual corruption which convinced them that they possessed the knowledge and the tools to manage and control the economy and society from the top. This was the malady against which Hayek inveighed in his classic The Road to Serfdom (1944). The attempt in the 1970s to control inflation by wage and price controls led directly to a “crisis of governability,” as trade unions, particularly in Britain, refused to accept them.
Large state subsidies to producer groups, both public and private, fed the typical corruptions of behaviour identified by the new right: rent-seeking, moral hazard, free-riding. Palpable evidence of government failure obliterated memories of market failure. The new generation of economists abandoned Keynes and, with the help of sophisticated mathematics, reinvented the classical economics of the self-correcting market. Battered by the crises of the 1970s, governments caved in to the “inevitability” of free market forces. The swing-back became worldwide with the collapse of communism.
But today, Skidelsky notes, the crisis is that of conservatism:
The financial crisis has brought to a head a growing dissatisfaction with the corruption of money. Neo-conservatism has sought to justify fabulous rewards to a financial plutocracy while median incomes stagnate or even fall; in the name of efficiency it has promoted the off-shoring of millions of jobs, the undermining of national communities, and the rape of nature. Such a system needs to be fabulously successful to command allegiance. Spectacular failure is bound to discredit it.
The situation we are in now thus puts into question the speed and direction of progress. Will there be a pause for thought, or will we continue much as before after a cascade of minor adjustments? The answer lies in the intellectual and moral sphere. Is economics capable of rethinking its core principles? What institutions, policies and rules are needed to make markets “well behaved”? Do we have the moral resources to challenge the dominance of money without reverting to the selfish nationalisms of the 1930s?
There’s no doubt that these are the right questions to be asking (David and I sketched out a first attempt to marshal some thoughts on this area in a paper we published just before the G20 summit in November). As Skidelsky notes, we could do worse than to aim for Keynes’s basic stance:
In terms of our pendulum analogy, he was someone who instinctively sought an equipoise: not in the timeless equilibrium of classical economics, but in a balance in political economy between freedom and control, national and international wellbeing, efficiency and morality. He was an Aristotelian, who believed that vices are virtues carried to excess. This is a good philosophy for today.
by Alex Evans | Dec 30, 2008 | Global system, North America
Last weekend’s FT Magazine had this excellent look back at the year – 2009, that is – from Niall Ferguson. The whole thing’s worth a read (especially on finance), but the section on the US government has the ring of authenticity to it:
Obama had set out to construct an administration in which his rivals and allies were equally represented. But his rivals were a good deal more experienced than his allies. The result was an administration that talked like Barack Obama but thought like Bill Clinton. The Clinton-era veterans, not least Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had vivid memories of the bond-market volatility that had plagued them in 1993 (prompting campaign manager James Carville to say that, if there was such a thing as reincarnation, he wanted to come back as the bond market). Terrified at the swelling size of the deficit, they urged Obama to defer any expenditure that was not specifically targeted on ending the financial crisis.
In fact, though, Ferguson is remarkably upbeat about prospects for the US economy in 09. He continues:
Yet the world had changed since the early 1990s. Despite the fears of the still-influential former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, investors around the world were more than happy to buy new issues of US Treasuries, no matter how voluminous. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the quadrupling of the deficit did not lead to falling bond prices and rising yields. Instead, the flight to quality and the deflationary pressures unleashed by the crisis around the world drove long-term yields downwards. They remained at close to 3 per cent all year.
Nor was there a dollar rout, as many had feared. The foreign appetite for the US currency withstood the Fed’s money-printing antics, and the trade weighted exchange rate actually appreciated during 2009.
Here was the irony at the heart of the crisis. In all kinds of ways, the Great Repression had “Made in America” stamped all over it. Yet its effects were more severe in the rest of the world than in the US. And, as a consequence, the US managed to retain its “safe haven” status. The worse things got in Europe, in Japan and in emerging markets, the more readily investors bought Treasuries and held dollars.
While we’re on the subject of Prof Ferguson, if you haven’t been watching his six part Channel 4 series The Ascent of Money (a tie-in with his new book), then you’ve been missing out: below is the first ten minutes or so of episode 1. If you’re UK based then all of the episodes are free to download on 4OD; if you’re elsewhere and have the patience, then all of the episodes appear to be up on YouTube if you hunt around.
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uyMZhkITPWE]
by Alex Evans | Dec 30, 2008 | Off topic
Here’s what we enjoyed reading this year:
David Steven – Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-First Century is a long book written by a big brain. It offers penetrating insights into the vicious and virtuous cycles of globalization, the changing role of the state, and the alliances we need to preserve some kind of international order. Display prominently in your office, even if you don’t get round to reading the thing.
Daniel Korski – My holiday book is Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland. Powell was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and responsible for pushing through Blair’s Northern Ireland agenda. The book details the time spent working behind the scenes of the Northern Ireland peace process. At a time when the West is being encouraged to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Powell’s’ account of the steps taken to build confidence and trust among all the parties, while moving towards the main aim, is both topical and instructive.
Richard Gowan – David Milne’s America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War is a brilliant portrait of a largely forgotten figure in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow – who rose to national security adviser under LBJ – was one of the most feted economists of his era, dominating thinking about economic development in a way that Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier can still only dream of. But on entering government he went berserk, demanding more and more war against North Vietnam and filtering out all the evidence that it wasn’t working. His story, told with great concision by a rising academic star, is a powerful cautionary tale about how theorists can go horribly astray when given a sniff of power – and how people who understand economics are usually particularly ill-suited to understand violence. It wasn’t quite the best book of the year, though. That was Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, May 2008), a spell-binding and utterly unexpected tale of how the pioneer of aerial archaeology in inter-war Britain succumbed to Communism. But this a blog for wonks not archaeologists.
Julian Evans – Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (published at the end of 2007, but the paperback came out this year so hopefully it qualifies). Taylor is a great historian of ideas, in the mould of Isaiah Berlin, building vast ideas-maps stretching centuries. In this book, he excavates the roots of secularism, and asks how it has changed our experience of the world. He’s particularly interesting on the move in the 16th and 17 centuries from an animist to a scientific world view, and the parallel shift in human identity from a porous self besieged by spirits to a buffered, isolated self that is cut off from nature and nature spirits, with a measure of autonomy from the natural world, but at the cost of loneliness and separation.
Mark Weston – I am currently writing my first book, so thoughts when reading are automatically dominated by the question of whether I could have written that. The book I most wish I’d written is Exterminate All The Brutes, by Sven Lindqvist. A coruscating but poetically written critique of colonialism in Africa, it convincingly traces a link from European abuse of Africans to 20th century genocides, and also makes understandable Africa’s continued failure to recover from this “monstrous intrusion.”
As for me, I’ve got three books of the year. First is Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power, which offers an incisive and hopeful vision of where the international development might be going next. The concern for effective states that’s been a growing theme in development thinking since 2005 is very much front and centre, but coupled with emphasis on the importance of citizens getting organised – politics is as important as institutions, in other words – and long term trends, above all scarcity issues. Second, Amanda Ripley’s brilliant The Unthinkable: Who Survives when Disaster Strikes and Why, which is much the best discussion of individual level resilience I’ve seen to date.
And finally, a book from 1998 rather than 2008, but one which has lost none of its relevance in the intervening decade (and deserves a new edition in 2009): LT Evans’s masterly Feeding the Ten Billion: Plants and Population Growth. My first reaction on finding it wasn’t exactly upbeat, I’ll admit: I had already decided to call my Chatham House food pamphlet (out next month) ‘The Feeding of the Nine Billion’, so to encounter an almost eponymous book by an almost eponymous author seemed like a misfortune. But as I perused this erudite, readable and fantastically helpful tome, I realised that finding it was in fact one of my biggest strokes of luck in the project. If you’re interested in how we’ll feed a growing population at the same time as confronting the challenges of the 21st century, then this is the one must-read.
[Charlie Edwards has done his own top 10, such is the rate at which he devours tomes: you can find it here.]
