by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Yale’s Jeffrey Garten thinks America needs to face up to a key fact: it doesn’t have the leverage to deal with China on its own. So, he says, it needs to partner up with others:
It doesn’t take a genius to see that America needs more help in dealing with China. That’s why we must shift from what is primarily a bilateral and at times unilateral, pound-the-chest approach to one involving more support from other key countries, many of whom are also having big problems with China, including the European Union and India.
This enhanced multilateralism must be based on at least two premises that are hard to discern in U.S. policy today. The first is that China is not just bursting on the global stage, but rather is changing the world as it does so. Put another way, we can forget about trying to force China into conforming to Western rules and institutions without allowing the country a big voice in reshaping those arrangements to serve its own needs. Secondly, the U.S. and its partners are better off compromising with China on these arrangements so long as they have rules and enforcement mechanisms. The key goal must be to encourage China to obey laws and regulations that are agreed upon.
Not sure I’m wholly convinced that Van Rompuy and his travelling circus are the missing link in getting China to be a constructive world citizen – but hey, we can dream.
by Alex Evans | Feb 17, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
If you’re a Brit working in or around the UN, you’ll be familiar with the fact that your nationality doesn’t exactly help you when it comes to applying for UN jobs – given the extent to which Brits are proportionately over-represented in the UN as it is. So you might have supposed that the same would hold true in Brussels too – right? Actually, no:
Though the UK represents 12 per cent of the EU population, its citizens make up only 6 per cent of Commission staff. Britain is now the least-well represented country in the Commission by head of population, with the exception of new-joiner Romania.
What’s going on? According to the FT, the problem has long-term roots: although a generation of UK heavy-hitters joined after Britain’s accession in 1973, they’re now coming up to retirement – and not much has been done to plan for what comes next.
“If you look at the most senior levels of the Commission, we are doing very well, there is no problem there,” said one diplomat. “But there are far, far fewer Brits at lower levels. It is still not clear where the next generation is going to come from.”
Officials point to several reasons for the declining British presence in Brussels. Fewer jobs are available, as the Commission in recent years looked to citizens from new member states for the bulk of its recruitment needs. Careers in Brussels became less appealing to graduates, many of whom opted for the City. A period of political disengagement with Europe also made civil servants doubt the wisdom of gaining experience in Brussels.
“We could have been more consistent with our encouragement,” one official admits. “Europe was perceived by some as a cul-de-sac, not the best way to further your career.”
by Alex Evans | Feb 17, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Right, hands up if you know what an Overton Window is. No? According to Wikipedia:
The Overton window is a concept in political theory, named after its originator, Joe Overton, former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:
Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; and Policy.
Or, as RealClimate put it:
In any public discussion there are bounds which people who want to be thought of as having respectable ideas tend to stay between. This is most easily seen in health care debates. In the US, promotion of a National Health Service as in the UK or a single-payer system as in Canada is so far outside the bounds of normal health care politics, that these options are only ever brought up by ‘cranks’ (sigh). Meanwhile in the UK, discussions of health care delivery solutions outside of the NHS framework are never heard in the mainstream media. This limit on scope of the public debate has been called the Overton window.
And why should RealClimate be pondering Overton Windows? Because, they say, recent weeks have seen “a huge shift in the Overton window for climate change”:
The window does not have to remain static. Pressure groups and politicians can try and shift the bounds deliberately, or sometimes they are shifted by events. That seems to have been the case in the climate discussion. Prior to the email hack at CRU there had long been a pretty widespread avoidance of ‘global warming is a hoax’ proponents in serious discussions on the subject. The sceptics that were interviewed tended to be the slightly more sensible kind – people who did actually realise that CO2 was a greenhouse gas for instance. But the GW hoaxers were generally derided, or used as punchlines for jokes. This is not because they didn’t exist and weren’t continually making baseless accusations against scientists (they did and they were), but rather that their claims were self-evidently ridiculous and therefore not worth airing.
However, since the emails were released, and despite the fact that there is no evidence within them to support any of these claims of fraud and fabrication, the UK media has opened itself so wide to the spectrum of thought on climate that the GW hoaxers have now suddenly find themselves well within the mainstream. Nothing has changed the self-evidently ridiculousness of their arguments, but their presence at the media table has meant that the more reasonable critics seem far more centrist than they did a few months ago … [Recent stories in the NYT, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and elsewhere] are based on the worst kind of oft-rebunked nonsense and they serve to make the more subtle kind of scepticism pushed by Lomborg et al seem almost erudite.
by Mark Weston | Feb 15, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
The leone, Sierra Leone’s currency, is not highly prized abroad. Nor is it especially strong compared to more established currencies: in 1978 when it broke from its sterling peg, the leone was worth 50p; buying 50p today would set you back 3,000 leones.
Sierra Leoneans with cash, therefore, along with importers of goods and those travelling overseas, are eager to get their hands on dollars, pounds or euros. Foreign diamond dealers, the legions of UN and NGO workers, local people who receive remittances from abroad, and the country’s dribble of masochistic travellers need leones in cash because there are no ATMs and nobody accepts credit cards.
If you don’t mind the 250-leone to the dollar spread, you can change money at foreign exchange bureaus or banks. But whereas the latter buy dollars for 3850 leones and sell them for 4100, the spread with Freetown’s Dollar Boys is a much more generous 4000-4050.
You can’t move more than a few yards in downtown Freetown without hearing the words, “Hello sir, change?” as a Dollar Boy accosts you, brandishing a large wad of leones or dollars. Dollar Boys are illegal, but their clients include government officials and ministers, big businesses and even banks in need of a liquidity top-up. The governor of the Central Bank sends someone onto the streets every day to find out how much his currency is worth. When I mention to Ahmed, a Dollar Boy of my acquaintance, that I’ve been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he tells me he knows the building well as he provides a delivery service to ministry officials. “Even if they wanted to, the police couldn’t stop us,” he says. “We have too many customers.”
Ahmed makes around 20,000 leones (£3.30) a day – a decent sum by local standards. On his best day ever, someone (probably a diamond dealer but he doesn’t ask questions) changed $15,000 into leones – lacking that much cash himself, he had to bring in other Dollar Boys to make up the shortfall. He delivered the money in a huge box that he carried on his head through the streets of Freetown.
Although illegal, the Dollar Boys are well organised. Each one has his own patch, or “Base” – Ahmed loiters outside a bank – and each area has its own “committee,” with one central committee overseeing all the others.
The committees, which were set up on police advice after a Dollar Boy was murdered by Nigerians a few years ago, protect their members against violence and fraud (according to Ahmed, most of those who try to exchange counterfeit money are women). They also run an insurance pool, into which all members make regular payments so that if one is cheated for a large sum or suffers a family disaster, he has a cushion against bankruptcy.
The committees have two other important roles. The first is to protect the industry’s image, by investigating customer complaints, punishing bad behaviour and weeding out bad apples. The second is to vet new entrants to the market. As in the formal sector in Sierra Leone, you can only become a Dollar Boy if you have the right connections. Incumbents collude to keep out potential competitors (too many Dollar Boys, of course, would reduce each individual’s profits). Unwanted newbies – and Ahmed reports that competition to enter the fray is fierce – are told to keep away. If they refuse, the committees take them to the police and report them for acting illegally (yes, really). The police respect the committees – many of them use Dollar Boys’ services themselves – so they are usually sympathetic.
