by Richard Gowan | May 31, 2011 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system
Over on “The Internationalist”, a welcome new blog from CFR, Stewart Patrick argues that the G8 is back after a few years in the doldrums. His post is entitled “‘I’m not Dead Yet’: Long Live the G8”, but the Monty Python reference isn’t entirely ironic. Stewart concludes that, having (i) delivered a strong call for Colonel Gaddafi to go and (ii) engendered billions of dollars in aid promises to the new Arab democracies, the G8 “????retains a critical role in addressing the world’s most sensitive political challenges.”
I’m inclined to semi-agree. The G8 did have a pretty good week, and getting the Russians to sign onto the statement on Gaddafi was a real coup for the French hosts. Go G8! But there are problems. Big political statements from the G8 don’t always make a big difference. In 2008, President Medvedev appeared to support a G8 plan for sanctions on Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, but Russia then joined China in blocking a follow-up resolution in the Security Council. As for all those aid promises, take a look at these skeptical posts from Juan Cole and Stephen Walt on what they add up to.
Stewart (who, we should note, is a chum) wouldn’t expect me to agree with him in full. In his post, he argues that the good outcome from Deauville undermines arguments against the G8 that Bruce D. Jones, Emily O’Brien and I made in a paper for Brookings last week (I previously blogged about it here):
Jones, Gowan, and O’Brien reject two common arguments for retaining the G8: as a hedge against the G20’s failure, and as a “useful political club for liberal Western democracies” (the latter an argument I made earlier this week). I’m less persuaded on both counts.
There is no reason for the United States, nor its other G8 partners, to put all their eggs in one basket. And some political issues are easier to discuss—and take decisive action on—within like-minded groupings of states. The Arab spring is a case in point.
The G20’s agenda will inevitably expand, including into matters of peace and security. But this should—and by necessity will—happen organically and gradually. In the meantime, the G8 will remain one of many important cooperative frameworks in a multi-multilateral world.
To be honest, there aren’t that many differences between us. In the Brookings paper, Bruce, Emily and I were quite careful to avoid making the case for “unilateral disarmament” by the G8 (i.e. shutting up shop in the hope that this contributes to a stronger G20). We do argue that the G8 is no longer a feasible alternative to the G20 in terms of international financial diplomacy. But on the political front, we contend that neither the G8 nor the existing G20 nor the current Security Council is sufficient to handle today and tomorrow’s political and security challenges. We argue that a new range of intermediate forums involving a mix of G8 and non-G8 members will be required to handle rising tensions over energy security, resource scarcity and so forth… so maybe we’re all pragmatic multi-multilateralists now? Curses.
by Richard Gowan | May 31, 2011 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa
Two months ago the EU Council mandated a military mission called EUFOR Libya to help get aid to Libyan citizens and refugees – but only if the UN asked for help. There was a lot of excited talk of EU troops deploying to the besieged city of Misrata. But the UN never asked, and so far EUFOR Libya has consisted entirely and solely of a headquarters unit in Rome. To celebrate the anniversary of the EU’s decision to approve the non-mission back on 1 April (what a symbolic date…) I’ve written a short and scaborous piece for E!Sharp about how a deployment might have gone awry:
In Misrata, where NATO warplanes were attacking Colonel Gaddafi’s ground forces, the idea of EU-flagged soldiers was a non-starter. Diplomats in Brussels might distinguish between NATO and EU-commanded European forces, but Colonel Gaddafi’s fighters were unlikely to be so discriminating. Even rebel spokesmen questioned the advisability of an EU mission, asking for more air strikes instead.
Even if European troops had deployed during a ceasefire, there was always a risk that some could be snatched by Gaddafi loyalists and held as hostages – just as European troops were seized by the Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s to halt NATO air strikes. Equally, the rebels in Misrata would have realized the media value of having European troops in their midst, and might have tried to bar them from leaving in a crisis. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which EU soldiers became stuck in Misrata as pawns in the civil war.
The EU’s commanders could have minimized this risk by ordering their soldiers to operate in Misrata’s port area, ensuring supplies came ashore, but not to venture any further. But even this would have had risks: what if Gaddafi’s forces had carried out a massacre just a few kilometers from where German soldiers were unloading food and medicines? EUFOR’s mandate and capabilities would have prevented the Germans from getting involved. The next day’s headlines would have declared a new Srebrenica.
Under those circumstances, European leaders would have been faced with an appalling choice: pull their forces out in ignominy or escalate from a humanitarian operation to all-out war-fighting. Cue blazing rows in NATO headquarters, at the EU and in the UN…
So why did the EU’s members OK this flawed mission concept at all?
European officials must have been cognizant of these risks when the idea of deploying to Misrata came onto the horizon. What were they thinking? One depressing interpretation is that the whole idea was a cynical ploy: by making an offer that the UN simply had to refuse, the EU looked good but took no risks.
This interpretation is probably incorrect, however. By most accounts, the EU Council and German government in particular were genuinely keen to “do something”, both for humanitarian reasons and to distract attention from the intra-European divisions over NATO’s air campaign. These priorities may have briefly overshadowed all the problems inherent in a Misrata operation. But that is depressing too.
It’d be a pity to waste a good crisis. As my article concludes, EU planners should take time to look closely at the political and operational assumptions under-pinning EUFOR Libya. Recognizing the flaws involved could help avoid repeating them in future.
by Alex Evans | May 31, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Influence and networks
Oxfam has just launched its new Grow campaign on food justice in a resource-constrained world. I’ve had the chance to see this campaign being put together from the inside as a consultant for Oxfam (and a new Oxfam paper by me on Governance for a Resilient Food System is available here) – and I think it’s a big deal.
For one thing, the campaign marks a major break with traditional single issue campaigning. This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.
At the same time, the campaign ploughs through the traditional line between the development and environment agendas. For all that there are obviously enormous issues of fairness and equity involved in any discussion of environmental limits, many NGOs have struggled to figure out how to approach them. But the Grow campaign tackles them head-on – as this campaign graphic shows.
Finally, this is probably the biggest development campaign since Make Poverty History. It’ll be the first time that every arm of Oxfam is working together on a single top priority campaign; over the next 24 hours, the campaign will be undertaking rolling launches in 45 different countries. At the same time, as I note in this post on the Guardian development blog, other pathfinding NGOs like WWF and ActionAid are also converging on the issue of fair shares in a world of limits.
This marks a big shift in the development agenda, and it’s crucial that this new push succeeds. Sign up now…
by Alex Evans | May 31, 2011 | Articles and Publications, Reports
How national and international governance systems need to be reconfigured to meet the challenges of food security in a world of tighter supply and demand balances and increasing volatility. Report for Oxfam’s new Grow campaign by Alex Evans. (May 2011)
Download Report
by Richard Gowan | May 27, 2011 | East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, South Asia
Francis Fukuyama has got a lot of attention for his new book The Origins of Political Order. He’s still so closely associated with having announced the “end of history” in the early 1990s (a complex idea that’s more often cited than understood) people are struck that he’s decided to go back to the beginning, tracing the evolution of political order in different societies from prehistory to the French Revolution. As I argue in a new review for The National, “this is a remarkably old-fashioned project”:
In tracing the highways and byways of human development, Fukuyama appears far more interested in probing the classics of political philosophy and sociology than current development theory. The majority of books in the bibliography date from before 2000, and the argument includes detailed discussions of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek. With some authors, this might be dismissed as a tokenistic tour through “Great Books of Political Theory”. But Fukuyama embraces such non-household names as “the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke”. As has been said of another Coke, this is the real thing.
But there are obvious differences between this book and its intellectual forebears:
Marx apparently failed to grasp huge differences between ancient Indian and Chinese societies, lumping them together under the headline of “Oriental despotism”. Weber failed to see just how far ancient Chinese society advanced.
As his dismissals of Marx and Weber suggest, Fukuyama does not treat the histories of the great Asian empires as an adjunct to “the rise of the West”. He notes at the outset that he will downplay Greece and Rome. Socrates and Aristotle make only cameo appearances. By contrast, Fukuyama treats Confucianism and Hindu thought in considerable detail.
Does this mean that Fukuyama, once associated with the Project for a New American Century, is giving up on the West? Not so. As I argue in the review, his strategy is to cast more light on non-Western societies and ideas so to emphasize the enduring strength of Western political models:
India, Fukuyama posits fairly early on, has yet to escape from the norms of its pre-colonial politics. Caste groups and kin ties were so crucial to its development – and continue to play a significant role today – that the country remains difficult to unite.
If that’s bad news for Delhi, what about Beijing? Fukuyama argues on the very last page of The Origins of Political Order that today’s Chinese system bears the hallmarks of its imperial predecessors, with power concentrated in the centre and too little accountability.
“An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership,” he argues, clearly thinking of today’s Sino-American competition, but at the same time it will always be in peril of slipping into political decay. In spite of Fukuyama’s attention to the histories of today’s Asian powers, his message is clear: if you want to get ahead in today’s global competition, it’s still best to refer to the ideas that shaped the West.
So this is good reading not only in its own right (and it’s a stimulating work of history and ideas) but also intellectual material for those who in the West who still believe that, as Barack Obama said in London, “the time for our leadership is now”…
