by Richard Gowan | Feb 25, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system, North America
I have a new paper out, published by FRIDE in Madrid, on the Obama administration’s approach to multilateralism. It points out that – contrary to our pleas for joined-up thinking on what international institutions should look like – the U.S. has pushed reform in a pretty ad hoc fashion:
Senior figures in the new administration had advocated a wide array of potentially incompatible options: their ideas included a stronger UN, a “global NATO”, a concert of democracies and “network diplomacy” transcending specific international institutions. The President had written of the need to boost the United Nations, but he had also praised NATO and the EU as important allies.
The administration could not continue without a hierarchy of institutional priorities for too long. It needed to find a framework for coordinating the international response to the still-boiling financial crisis – and there was a shared sense among administration members that this must fully involve emerging economic powers like China and India. In this context, one mechanism stood out as the focus for American policy: the Group of Twenty (G20).
The G20 already had momentum. President Bush had convened its first heads-of-government summit to discuss the financial crisis in November 2008. Gordon Brown was preparing a sequel for London in April 2009. British officials grumbled that the new administration was initially ill-prepared for this, but Obama was a dominant (if deliberately not too dominant) figure at the London talks.
Although the US announced that it would host the next G20 meeting in Pittsburgh in September, this success did not convince all administration officials that the forum should be their priority. Some had been irritated by the long-winded bickering of other participants, or viewed it as a crisis mechanism that would lose steam.
Nonetheless, there was a growing recognition that serious alternatives were in short supply. The administration was unimpressed by Italy’s preparations for the July 2009 meeting of the G8. Susan Rice was making significant diplomatic headway at the UN, but its flaws as a decision-making forum remained clear.
There were enthusiasts in the administration for at least mooting reforms to the Security Council and the dysfunctional UN Human Rights Council, but these options were put on hold (although US officials at least indicated a new level of openness to discussing Security Council reform seriously). Promoting the G20 took priority. The US showed its hand in September, announcing immediately prior to the Pittsburgh summit that the G20 would act as the “premier” forum for economic discussions, displacing the G8.
To summarize: the new administration came into office, looked at what was lying about, and picked up the institution that looked most useful. Bad news for the multilat-nerds, but not that surprising. While writing this paper, I read Mary Elise Sarotte’s brilliant 1989, which probes the decisions around the reordering of Europe at the Cold War’s end. Sarotte points out that there were lots of ideas for rebuilding multilateral cooperation in Europe – Gorbachev was pushing a “common European home” embracing East and West. Yet the U.S. and West Germany went for what she calls the “prefabricated” option of sticking with NATO and the EC. There were lots of reasons for this, but one was NATO was just there already (Sara Batmanglich and I recently wrote a book chapter on how this logic continued in Europe in the 1990s).
I’m not saying that we should give up thinking bold ideas for reforming multilateralism (I’m waiting for David to respond to this post, after our jolly debate on realism…) or just hoping for a bit of policy coherence someday. But I think that there’s lots of interesting work to be done looking at the dynamics of “prefabricated multilateralism”. Or should that be its absence of dynamism?
by Alex Evans | Feb 25, 2010 | Global system
Last week I noted that Britain now has fewer European Commission staffers per capita than any other member state apart from Romania. Now that the news of John Holmes’s departure as head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance has finally gone public (he’s off to replace Jeremy Greenstock as director of Ditchley in September), we’re also about to lose our only senior United Nations official.
The Times, predictably, writes this up as the latest episode in a gradual story of diminishing numbers of Brits in top UN jobs over the past few years (“Britain loses grip on power as last top post is vacated”).
From 1993 to 2005, it notes, the post of Under-Secretary General for the UN’s Department of Political Affairs (effectively ‘the UN’s Foreign Office’, one of the most politically significant bits of the UN secretariat) was a Brit – first Marack Goulding, then Kieran Prendergast. From 1999 to 2005, there was also a Brit – Mark Malloch Brown- as Administrator of UNDP, regarded as the 3rd most important job in the UN after SG and Deputy SG.
But when Malloch Brown became Chief of Staff to Kofi Annan in 2005, the UK lost the UNDP post. Then, when he became Deputy SG shortly afterwards, Britain also agreed to let DPA go elsewhere (first to an Indian, then to an American). The UK was then left with two USG posts: head of the Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance, and USG for Safety and Security. It lost the latter to an American in May last year, leaving it with just OCHA; and now, with John Holmes’s departure, it’s losing that too.
Of course, Holmes’s departure also opens up the prospect of the UN equivalent of a Cabinet reshuffle – in which the Foreign Office will be gearing up for a major push to get a Brit or two into key jobs. The UN rumour mill is already in overdrive, with early indications seeming to point towards the UK trying to get either DPA or the post of Chief of Staff in the SG’s office. Other rumours suggest that the French might want the job at OCHA, which would imply their letting go of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations – which the US is rumoured to covet, which would entail its relinquishing DPA.
What, alas, is missing in all this is much discussion about what would be best for the UN. It’s arguably a make or break moment for the organisation. It was left largely on the sidelines during the momentous changes in global governance that followed the financial crisis (from G8 to G20, IMF reform, creation of the FSB). Ban Ki-moon’s leadership has been widely criticised. The UN’s record on climate change has been challenged by the poor outcome at Copenhagen and the subsequent departure of its climate chief (another key post to watch in the impending reshuffle).
If member states, especially those on the P5, are serious about managing global risks, then they really need to start getting better at how they make appointments. It’s all very well for member states to mutter about Ban’s leadership – but who appointed him?
by Richard Gowan | Feb 24, 2010 | Africa, Influence and networks
The New Yorker has a long profile of Paul Krugman that’s worth a look. The passage that has stuck with me is not really about Krugman but one of his friends…
Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.
This could act as a metaphor for all sorts of current debates, and academia’s contribution to them, but I leave you to fill in the blanks…
by David Steven | Feb 24, 2010 | Economics and development, UK
On Tuesday (March 2nd), I am speaking at a seminar on resilience in the UK housing market.
The seminar picks up on my recent paper for the Long Finance Foundation (download it here). The argument in a nutshell:
(1) Housing is probably the biggest economic risk facing the UK – more important even than the deficit; (2) Houses are overpriced – and the fiscal stimulus appears to have reinflated the housing bubble; (3) Mortgages are sold in such a way as to play on borrowers’ cognitive biases – this is bad for many individuals, and systemically disastrous; (4) The FSA’s proposals for reform are half hearted – we’re missing a huge opportunity to rethink how people make long-term financial decisions.
On the panel to discuss the paper, Long Finance’s Michael Mainelli, BrightonRock’s Con Keating, and Channel 4’s Faisal Islam.
It’s at Gresham College at 2.30 – please come along if you can.
by David Steven | Feb 23, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnoD3NUux3M&feature=PlayList&p=kLi6BpF1IZ4[/youtube]
