by Richard Gowan | Aug 1, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, South Asia
My recent extended growl about the parlous state of peacekeeping has been cited as evidence in a fascinating online debate among Indian security analysts on whether their army should stay committed to UN operations. This debate is significant because (i) India is consistently among the top three contributors to UN forces, along with Pakistan and Bangladesh; (ii) it is even more important in terms of hard-to-find assets like helicopters; (iii) it is suffering a run of negative publicity about how badly some of its troops behave (the fact that a lot of this snark comes from the BBC irks some in the debate, who detect post-colonial prurience).
With India’s economy growing fast, the payments it receives from the UN in return for its troops are increasingly irrelevant. So might there come a moment when India decides that blue helmet deployments no longer befit its status and interests as a great power? Yes, and the sooner the better, according to two hawkish strategists in the Indian Express in early July. Edited highlights:
More Indian troops have died in the line of their UN duties than from any other country. According to the Indian Embassy in the US, “India has risked the lives of its soldiers in peacekeeping efforts of the United Nations, not for any strategic gain, but in the service of an ideal. India’s ideal was, and remains, strengthening the world body, and international peace and security.” That the Indian government should take pride in risking the lives of Indian soldiers in the “service of an ideal” is appalling. It now serves little more than bureaucratic interests.
In order to give the issue the attention it demands, India should immediately suspend all further UN deployments. This should be followed by a graduated withdrawal of all Indian troops operating under the UN flag. There might be a case for a small, token presence, in carefully chosen theatres. It is time for India to stop seeing foreign troop deployments as “risking lives in the service of an ideal.” Rather, they should be seen as being tightly coupled with vital foreign policy objectives, like for instance, securing India’s construction crews in Afghanistan. As India’s economic interests expand globally, it is likely that the need for such deployments will increase.
You can follow the debate sparked by these comments over at Pragmatic Euphony, a blog devoted to India’s national interest. Fears of new violence ahead in the eastern Congo suggest that Indian peacekeepers may be in the headlines again this summer, as this is one of the theatres in which they are squarely on the frontline. A rapid drawdown of Indian forces isn’t imminent – New Delhi has good reasons to look responsible after (i) it took flak for helping kill off Doha (whatever the merits!) and (ii) the IAEA signed off on the US-India nuclear deal this week.
But these online stirrings may be the start of something bigger. India could well lose faith in the relevance of peacekeeping – recent violence in Kashmir and reports that Pakistan was implicated in July’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul are reminders that it has urgent problems on its doorstep to tend to. New Delhi is also deeply skeptical about all the current talk about the Responsibility to Protect (as it demonstrated during the Burmese cyclone crisis) and is liable to demand an ever-greater say in UN strategy-making if it is to stay involved. That raises the tricky question of when if ever India will get a permanent Security Council seat…
If India cut back on its peacekeepers it would be incredibly difficult to sustain big peace operations in places like the Congo. This is often obscured by (i) a lazy assumption that the South Asians will be peacekeepers forever out of habit; (ii) a focus on the views of African troop suppliers, especially in Darfur; and (iii) possibly excessive excitement about the prospect of other countries getting involved, like China. China’s peacekeeping commitments are still less than a quarter of India’s.
I’ve got yet another academic analysis of the dynamics of UN ops out, in a book on “Strategies for Peace” (don’t be put off by the lime-green cover). I wrote it ages ago, but it highlights the South Asian contribution and how UN missions rely on a global compact between three categories of state: “those in which large-scale peace operations are deployed (mainly in Africa); those which supply the bulk of peacekeeping forces (most notably in South Asia and Africa); and those that provide most of the funding for peace operations (the United States, EU members and Japan).” Lose the Indians, and that compact starts to unravel.
Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) this new article isn’t online. But it concludes along the lines of a shorter think-piece I published last year about developing a new strategic consensus that all those involved in UN ops can buy into if they are to keep on keeping on… a consensus, I infer from the Indian online debate, that should be couched in interests not ideals.
UPDATE: check out Pragmatic Euphony’s interesting riposte to this post here.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Global system
Over the past few months, China’s given a few lessons in how not to do public diplomacy, whether it’s nationalist students abroad or Party officials at home. Orville Schell has a piece in this week’s NYRB that’s worth a look for some of the backstory, exploring a sense of persistent historical humiliation that he argues is central to modern China’s self-image.
It all began, he argues, with 19th century colonial humiliations such as the Opium Wars. More recently, when the Treaty of Versailles gave Germany’s concessions in China to Japan, the expression “wuwang guochi” – “never forget our national humiliation” – became a popular slogan.
And so it went on. When the PRC was founded in 1949, Mao said “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We…have stood up.” When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, Jiang Zemin said that “the occupation of Hong Kong was the epitome of the humiliation that China suffered in modern history”. And in 2001,
…the National People’s Congress even passed a law proclaiming an official “National Humiliation Day.” (However, so many historical dates were proposed that delegates could not agree on any one, and thus, no day was designated, although one of the leading candidates is now September 18, the day in 1931 that Japan began its invasion of Manchuria.)
And so we come to the Olympics. Already, Schell argues, the protests that disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch have played straight into the humiliation narrative:
While patriots from other countries would doubtless also have felt affronted by the sight of such a potent symbol of their nationhood under assault, the response of many Chinese to these confrontations revealed in dramatic fashion how sensitive China still was to foreign insult. What these Chinese at home and abroad chose to see on television was not oppressed Tibetans seeking a redress of grievances, but China again under siege and again being demeaned in the most public of ways.
Part of the root problem, he continues, is that: “for much of the past hundred years Chinese themselves have also been engaged in a series of assaults on their own culture and history”. At first, it was Chinese reformers “denouncing traditional Confucian culture” at the start of the 20th century. Then it was the nationalists who came under attack, with Chiang Kai-shek and his wife seen as too westernized and American. Then came Mao and the Cultural Revolution, followed by Deng Xiaoping “to perform yet another act of demolition, this time on Mao’s revolution itself”. Schell concludes:
The cancellations of these successive efforts at self-reinvention have left Chinese with an uncertain sense of cultural or political direction. The country has tended to swing from one experiment to another, seeking refuge in a series of large-scale, but never definitive, makeovers. It is therefore perhaps understandable that a more robust sense of cultural and political self-confidence has remained elusive.
So, partly in shock, and partly in disappointment, China responded to the demonstrations against its Olympic torch with incensed outrage, rejecting any suggestion that its own actions could have contributed to, much less have ameliorated, Tibetan demands … what made these demonstrations against the torch such an affront to so many Chinese was the way in which they intruded just when they had allowed themselves to imagine that their national identity might actually metamorphose from victim to victor, thanks to the alchemy of the Olympic Games.
Problem is, as I first noted back in November last year, so much could go wrong with the games themselves – making the torch disruption look like a trailer for the main feature. Let’s hope not.
by Richard Gowan | Jul 31, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
So, farewell then the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), born after the two countries ended a massive war in 2000 and gently put down by a sorrowful Security Council on Wednesday. It won’t really be missed, as it wasn’t one of the coolest missions out there. It was one of the last old school, peacekeeping-equals-troops-stuck-between-two-states-that-had-a-big-war operations left in Africa, an anomaly in the age of peacebuilding-as-changing-the-DNA-of-the-country.
And closing it down was the only option, as the Eritreans had cut off its fuel supplies through their territory last December, forcing a troop withdrawal this February. The remarkable thing about UNMEE is that it stayed in place so long, as the Eritreans began to bugger about with it in December 2005 and never really let up. Their excuse was that Ethiopia has refused to comply with international rulings on the delineation of the border with the UN was meant to monitor, so why bother?
Eritrea had a point. But its behavior towards UNMEE has been an important part of the trend towards greater resistance to UN missions that I blogged about earlier in July. One UN staffer responded to my post, which argued that Darfur is now a textbook for anti-UN spoilers, by pointing out that “the Eritreans provided the Sudanese with a wonderful case study in how to ‘red team’ a UN mission through de facto withdrawal of consent by removing critical mission enablers [that’d be the helicopters, etc.] and not honoring Status of Forces Agreements”.
So Eritrea has earned its place in the roster of UN failures (a sign that the UN will probably be back there sooner or later, as in the DR Congo, Central African Republic and maybe Somalia). The Eritreans are trying to be reassuring that this doesn’t mean war with Ethiopia straight away, but given that they managed to pick a fight with tiny Djibouti recently, I wouldn’t get too relaxed. Last month, I suggested in an op-ed for ECFR that the way out of this impasse is to enlarge the context by several orders of magnitude, addressing East Africa’ problems en bloc:
There is a need for an international drive for a regional security conference that could hammer out a credible framework for resolving border disputes, guaranteeing peace agreements and rehabilitating rebel groups. The African Union and UN should take a political lead. The U.S. (which sees East Africa as a front against terror) and China (which buys its raw materials) must join in. The EU could play a role in coordinating conditional financial support to back up the deal-making.
All rather grandiose, and observant readers may wonder how this proposal squares with my recent warning against “piling international institution on international institution in Africa”. My answer would be that such a conference, involving horizontal negotiations between African governments, may be the best Plan B when trying to impose security frameworks from New York stops working.
by Alex Evans | Jul 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
No-one quite wants to pronounce the patient dead just yet (US Trade Representative Susan Schwab: “This is not the time to talk about collapse … the US commitments remain on the table”; unnamed EU source: “It’s clearly not a success. But no one will want to say that it’s the end of the round”) – but it’s hard to see much sign of life either, especially after all of Pascal Lamy’s talk of this being the final, final, final deadline.
It’s ironic that at a point when all the talk is of how high food prices are, the issue on which the talks foundered was a mechanism designed to protect developing countries from low food prices. ICTSD explains:
The ’special safeguard mechanism’ would allow developing countries to raise tariffs beyond bound levels, in principle to stall inflows of cheap imports that could displace farmers. The issue neatly splits the interests of import-sensitive developing countries and competitive farm exporters, including those in the developing world: the former want to have recourse to protection, the latter want predictable access to overseas markets.
One of the main sticking points has been whether, and by how much, countries should be allowed under the SSM to impose safeguard duties in excess of current (i.e., pre-Doha) tariff ceilings. The G-33 bloc of developing countries, which includes China, India, and Indonesia, insists that this may sometimes be necessary for safeguard duties to have the desired effect, i.e., protecting farmers.
Or there’s the pithier version from another unnamed official, this time in the IHT:
It risks becoming a totemic issue: subsistence farming versus commodity exports.
That is, in some ways, the long and the short of the issue that led to the talks’ collapse, though needless to say there were many other sticking points too – and it’s another illustration of how debates over agricultural trade are increasingly split into divergent schools of thought. For fans of liberalisation – like the US – the logic is straightforward. With food prices as high as they are, there’s never been a better time to get rid of import tariffs – so why the hell should China and India want to be able to raise them even higher than they were before Doha?
China’s approach, on the other hand, is rooted in concerns about resilience and security of supply in a period of volatility and turbulence: hence its desire to maximise access to imports while at the same time protecting its internal agricultural sector, in which smaller farmers predominate. (While smallholders are inevitably at risk from dumping, they can also be extremely productive in the right circumstances: IFAD cites the example of Vietnam, which has gone from being a food-deficit country to being the world’s second largest exporter of rice – largely thanks to development of the country’s smallholder sector.)
It looks like there will be no further talks until towards the middle of next year, after elections in the US and India – even then, things are likely to be tougher than now given rising protectionist sentiment around the world. Also worth noting that the collapse of the talks – and in particular the acrimony between the US and the two key emerging economies – doesn’t exactly augur well for progress in climate talks.
If you want the full play-by-play, Alan Beattie’s post-mortem is where to go, and ICTSD will have the full details up on their site tomorrow.
by David Steven | Jul 29, 2008 | UK
Take a two-party system. Drop it into a multi-connected, media frenzied world. And what you get is a system with two steady states and dramatic swings between the two.
When you’re in, you’re in big time. Everything goes your way. But once you’re on the slide, it’s a one way trip to the wilderness. This is the world of disruptive politics – where it can be better to lose well, than even to try to win.
Disruptive politics has one imperative: to change the terrain on which political battles are fought. The disruption results from the opponent’s inability to react. He fights the old battle and is utterly hapless as a result. You know what he is thinking, can predict how he will react, and anticipate his every move with ease.
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had instinctive mastery of disruptive politics. Neither was an intellectual colossus nor did they emerge from a vacuum. But, somehow, they had the skill to weave the threads of what was possible into a cloth that had a magical power to mystify their opponents.
The game was up for the Tories when Blair announced he was ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’ Yet many Conservatives still believed they could win the 1997 election. They simply didn’t believe that Blair was who he said he was or believed what he said he did. They were still in denial four years later, fighting ‘Phoney Tony’ – their own chimera – rather than the real Prime Minister. Thatcher had previously bewitched Old Labour just as successfully.
In the US of the 80s and 90s, Reagan and (Bill) Clinton sowed similar confusion. For two elections, Democrats fought a George Bush of their own invention. Next Hillary battled an Obama who didn’t exist. Now McCain is doing the same thing. Obama is a flip flopper. No, he’s a lightweight. Wait, did I tell you the one about him ignoring the troops?
It took Margaret Thatcher’s fall to snap the Labour vanguard out of its trance. The second Gulf War has had a similar effect on the Tories. It’s like a return to sobriety – time to rebuild in the cold light of day. The Democrats, meanwhile, were saved by a Deus ex machina. The candidate from nowhere who will, I believe, win convincingly in November and should go from there to a resounding victory in 2012.
So where does this leave the Labour Party? Has it lost both this election and the next one? Well, that depends on what it tries to do now.
Faced with a superior force, the most important thing is to control the manner in which you lose. (Think of how an effective insurgent melts away when a conventional army marches into town – all the better to regroup and seize back the momentum when the time is right).
Should Gordon Brown step down (and I have no opinion on whether he will or should), then the overriding focus of his successor should be to take the party into opposition in good shape.
That means:
- Calling a general election as quickly as possible (while you’re still in a honeymoon period).
- Aiming to win the campaign, even if there’s little chance you can win the vote (you want to go into election day on the up).
- Arriving on the opposition benches with momentum on your side and morale high.
What you shouldn’t do:
- Hold onto power to the bitter end (by which time the press are already speculating about your successor).
- Lose the campaign and the vote (doing worse than the pundits predicted).
- Arrive in opposition fit only to tear yourselves to pieces for the next five years.
It’s a tough course to take and one that will need selling to the party faithful. After all, the faithful would often prefer to die in a ditch than live to fight another day.
