Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
On Saturday, I wrote about the black mood that’s gripping Pakistan, with many here asking whether the country faces a descent into chaos.
So, how serious is the threat?
Very, if you believe the 2007 Failed States Index, which places Pakistan twelfth, only a couple of points behind its neighbour, Afghanistan. The country was 36th in 2005.
Pakistan’s decline is unsurprising. It sits on the modern world’s key geopolitical, religious and ethnic fault lines. Any country that borders Afghanistan, India, China and Iran is in for a hard time. Add in disastrous domestic politics and a dose of counter-productive international meddling and you’re left with a toxic brew.
But three less obvious drivers have caught my eye during a visit here. Each of these ‘hidden drivers’ (I use the term loosely) suggests ongoing trouble for the country, even if its geopolitical problems begin to ease.
First, there’s the country’s rotten demography – or more accurately the interaction between its demographics and rotten policy. Last week, I met Durre Nayab, a demographer at Pakistan’s Institute of Development Economics whose work draws heavily on the research of my sometime co-author, the economist David Bloom.
Bloom’s work (summarised here) demonstrates the demographic dividend countries can collect while they have young populations. This dividend, he has shown, accounts for around a third of the East Asian economic miracle. But it is only on offer if countries can educate their workers, employ them productively, and give them opportunities to save. At present, Pakistan does none of these things.
Durre Nayab:
The demographic dividend is inherently transitory in nature. Due to lack of prior planning, Pakistan has wasted the first 15 years of the opportunity demography has offered it…Time is running out to put appropriate policies in place, the absence of which may result in large-scale unemployment, [and] immense pressure on health and education systems.
In short, a socio-economic crisis may take place making the demographic dividend more of a demographic threat.
Then add the second hidden driver – the growing impact of scarcity on the Pakistani working and middle classes.
Pakistan’s newspapers, at the moment, are full of complaints about rocketing food and energy prices. The price of flour has more than doubled in recent times, a situation the government is trying (and failing) to control. Electricity is also in short supply, due to a failure to build new power stations in line with rising demand. A World Bank report published a few days sums up the situation.
Pakistan is one of the most water stressed countries in the world, and water resources are depleting rapidly. With its water infrastructure in poor condition… Pakistan has to invest around Rs60 billion (US$1 billion) per year in reservoirs and related infrastructure over the next five years. In the energy sector, the country will face severe power shortages of around 6,000 megawatts by 2010. Similarly, inefficiencies in the transport sector cost the economy between 4-5 percent of GDP each year.
The report is extremely pessimistic about Pakistan’s ability to correct these deficits.
Three factors are causing this problem. First, there are global factors in play, as my colleague Alex Evans has extensively documented. Energy prices are high; food and oil prices are now linked; and water scarcity is certain to increase. Climate change adds another layer of threat, both globally and within Pakistan (recent electricity shortages have been partly been down to a lack of water for hydropower).
Second, there is the Pakistan government’s total failure to develop infrastructure. More people, rising living standards, and falling prices for energy-hungry appliances have all increased demand for energy, but rulers have failed to respond to clear warnings of trouble ahead. Instead, the government is engaged in what will surely prove to be a futile attempt to keep prices low through subsidies and controls. The country is already struggling to pay its fuel bills, with the government budgeting for an oil price at less than 70 dollars per barrel, and suffering as it heads ever higher.
And finally, there is the impact of unrest, instability and out-and-out sabotage. John Robb highlights the potential damage that this type of tax can do to a fragile economy in his book, Brave New War (drawing on this analysis by James Harrigan and Philippe Martin). “Singular terrorist events (black swans), such as 9/11, do not affect city viability,” Robb writes. “The costs of a singular event dissipate quickly. In contrast, frequent attacks (even small ones) on a specific city can create a terrorism tax of a level necessary to shift to a [lower] equilibrium.” In other words, the city will be out of kilter – literally not worth living in – until it shrinks.
This effect may be underway in Pakistan’s urban centres, and possibly in the country as a whole, as insurgent attacks combine with political instability and sheer unrest to erode the country’s infrastructure. According to the Daily Times:
Violence has grown in the cities most hit by load-shedding and outages. Karachi and Hyderabad are the two cases in point. After the assassination of Ms Bhutto on December 27, there was anger and fury which vented itself on public property. Not all of the protesters were the workers of the PPP. Some were common criminals looting banks, but a large number were ordinary citizens habituated to violence through Karachi’s most cruel period of power outage in the summer of 2007.
And finally, a third hidden driver: the worrying role being played by the Pakistan army, once a source of national stability and pride. It is no secret that the army has hollowed out many, if not all, of the country’s political institutions, but less well understood is its growing economic dominance, a phenomenon excellently explored in Ayesha Siddiqa ground-breaking recent book, Military Inc – Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (allegedly banned in Pakistan, but I found a copy on sale in a Lahore hotel).
The army, Siddiqa reports, controls bakeries and banks, fertilizer plants and television channels, shopping malls and motorway toll booths. It is also a massive land owner, co-opting state land and acquiring private land, sometimes by coercion. And of course, it can use its political and military might to protect its investments, while using its wealth to gain permanent autonomy from civilian control.
The growth of the military’s economic empire… was parallel to the increase in the organization’s political power and influence in national decision-making. As the military consolidated itself into a class, it gained greater confidence to exploit national resources and acquire greater opportunities, which benefited it as an institution and also filled the pockets of the senior generals…
The crystallization of these economic interests is a major determinant to the future of democracy in the country.
So you have an army that is engaged in banditry…hordes of alienated young people…an economy that is vulnerable to scarcity and disruption… in a country that is already prey to many other stresses. It’s a sobering outlook. For a couple of years, I suppose, the country can continue to muddle through. But corrective action is now desperately needed.
After all, you never know which straw is the last one until you hear the camel’s back snap.
Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that it was to do with geography and biodiversity; David Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that it was all about culture and values. Now, reports Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun, a new book – After Tamerlane, by John Darwin – sets out a more ambiguous case:
Mr. Darwin wants to show that Europe’s hegemony, which began in the late 18th century and crumbled after World War II, was the result of a contingent historical process, not the manifestation of some superior essence. Invoking Edward Said, Mr. Darwin attacks the “orientalist” assumptions behind Western historiography. “The European path to the modern world should no longer be treated as natural or ‘normal,’ the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world should always be measured,” he writes. “Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities — indeed, many modernities.”
Yet reading “After Tamerlane,” with its panoramic yet fine-grained view of six centuries of world history, it is by no means clear that Mr. Darwin has achieved his revisionist purpose. The clearest lesson of “After Tamerlane,” in fact, is that there were not “other modernities,” equally valid competitors with the West’s, which might have resulted in a different, more equal distribution of global power. On the contrary, it is precisely because modernity was Western — because it came flying the flag of England or France or America or Germany or even Russia — that it was so challenging and unsettling to the rest of the world. Non-Western civilizations were never at leisure to formulate their own visions of modernity, because they were desperately trying to stay afloat in the whirlpool caused by the West’s rapid progress. As even Mr. Darwin writes, “Being modern was not an absolute state, but a comparative one,” and it was Europe that always offered the term of comparison.
For Darwin, Kirsch says, history is all about empires. “Our current assumption that empires are “abnormal,” Mr. Darwin writes — that only the nation-state is a really valid form of government — must be discarded if we are to understand the history of Europe and Asia.”
Crucially, Mr. Darwin helps us to see European expansion as a dynamic system, in which commerce, politics, and culture reinforced one another. Non-Western empires were faced with an impossible dilemma. To join the modern world system meant ceding political autonomy to Europe, accepting a subsidiary place in the global economy, and jeopardizing local structures of authority and belief. On the other hand, refusing to join meant facing financial coercion or armed force from the European powers. Over the 19th century, the British in particular managed to strongarm their way into positions of dominance around the world, whether as outright colonial sovereigns, as in Africa and India; de facto rulers, as in Egypt, or bullying profiteers, as in China. Attempts to resist were met with concentrated fury: When the Islamic “Mahdist” movement rebelled against British rule in Egypt, in the 1880s, the British commander Lord Kitchener not only crushed the rebels, he disinterred their leader’s corpse and threw it into the Nile. “A word from Queen Victoria,” Mr. Darwin writes, “was needed to stop him using … the skull as an ashtray.”
So what brought Europe’s imperial hegemony to an end? For Darwin, the answer in a word is: disunity.
“The most vital prop of Europe’s primacy in Eurasia,” Mr. Darwin argues, “had been [the European powers’] determination not to fight each other.” When that determination failed, so too did the financial and cultural premises of European imperialism. In telling the story of the last 50 years, Mr. Darwin is on more familiar ground, and his analysis of the Cold War is fairly conventional. He ends “After Tamerlane” on a cautious note: Despite the current unipolarity of American power, he writes, history demonstrates “Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules.” This final judgment — so general as to be a truism, yet fruitful as a reminder of the diversity of history — reflects both the strengths and the weaknesses of Mr. Darwin’s book.
The BBC and Globescan have just published another of their epic, 34 country opinion polls, this time looking at perceptions of economic globalisation. They found that majorities (of an average of 64%) in 27 out of 34 countries agreed that the benefits and burdens of “the economic developments of the last few years” have not been shared fairly.
Intriguingly, though, if you agree with that statement, your analysis of whether that unfairness results from globalisation proceeding too quickly or too slowly is likely to depend on whether you live in a developed or a developing country:
In developed countries, those who have this view of unfairness are more likely to say that globalization is growing too quickly – especially in France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, and Germany (and to a lesser extent Britain and the US). In contrast, in some developing countries, those who perceive such unfairness are more likely to say globalization is proceeding too slowly. These include Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and the countries of Central America.
The survey adds that “the view that globalization is growing too quickly is especially widespread in Egypt (77%), UAE (77%), Australia (73%), China (72%), Spain (68%), and France (64%)”. Here’s the full report.
Tim Johnson’s China Rises blog has this video of chaotic scenes outside a southern China rail station in the midst of China’s winter storm. As Tim says, “it’s eight minutes long. But you’ll see scenes you won’t see on the television news”. (Hat-tip: Blake Hounshell.)
Also at ForeignPolicy.com, Blake’s buddy Drew Kumpf offers a tabulated comparison of how China’s winter storm shapes up against Hurricane Katrina. It’s much lower in terms of fatalities (60 versus 1,353), and damage ($7.5 billion vs. $96 billion) – but rather larger in terms of evacuees (1.7 million vs. 1.1 million), homes damaged or destroyed (1 million+ vs. 300,000) and troops deployed (500,000 vs. 50,000).
