by Alex Evans | Jan 3, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Martin Wolf opines in his blog that his last column of the year is possibly also his most important of the year. He’s right. His subject: prospects for civilisation if we move to a zero sum world economy. His premise:
We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely. How long might such a world last, and what might happen if it ends?
For Wolf, the two issues that might trigger the end of a non-zero sum world economy are climate change and energy security. You might argue for casting the net a little wider, to include water scarcity, agricultural yields, fisheries depletion and population – and their interconnections with each other and with energy and climate – but the basic analytical frame is still right.
Wolf leaves his readers in no doubt about what he thinks is at stake: “fossilised sunlight and ideas have been the twin drivers of the world economy. So nothing less is at stake than the world we inhabit, by which I mean its political and economic, as well as physical, nature.” For Wolf, you see, “a zero-sum economy leads, inevitably, to repression at home and plunder abroad.” He explains –
In traditional agrarian societies the surpluses extracted from the vast majority of peasants supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of military, bureaucratic and noble elites. The only way to increase the prosperity of an entire people was to steal from another one. Some peoples made almost a business out of such plunder: the Roman republic was one example; the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, who reached their apogee of success under Genghis Khan and his successors, were another. The European conquerors of the 16th to 18th centuries were, arguably, a third. In a world of stagnant living standards the gains of one group came at the expense of equal, if not still bigger, losses for others. This, then, was a world of savage repression and brutal predation.
In a positive sum economy, on the other hand, all of this changes.
Democratic politics became increasingly workable because it was feasible for everybody to become steadily better off. People fight to keep what they have more fiercely than to obtain what they do not have. This is the “endowment effect”. So, in the new positive-sum world, elites were willing to tolerate the enfranchisement of the masses. The fact that they no longer depended on forced labour made this shift easier still. Consensual politics, and so democracy, became the political norm. Equally, a positive-sum global economy ought to end the permanent state of war that characterised the pre-modern world. In such an economy, internal development and external commerce offer better prospects for virtually everybody than does international conflict.
And this is why climate change and energy security cause him such shudders. For:
“…the biggest point about debates on climate change and energy supply is that they bring back the question of limits. This is why climate change and energy security are such geopolitically significant issues. For if there are limits to emissions, there may also be limits to growth. But if there are indeed limits to growth, the political underpinnings of our world fall apart. Intense distributional conflicts must then re-emerge – indeed, they are already emerging – within and among countries.
The response of many, notably environmentalists and people with socialist leanings, is to welcome such conflicts. These, they believe, are the birth-pangs of a just global society. I strongly disagree. It is far more likely to be a step towards a world characterised by catastrophic conflict and brutal repression. This is why I sympathise with the hostile response of classical liberals and libertarians to the very notion of such limits, since they view them as the death-knell of any hopes for domestic freedom and peaceful foreign relations.
The optimists believe that economic growth can and will continue. The pessimists believe either that it will not do so or that it must not if we are to avoid the destruction of the environment. I think we have to try to marry what makes sense in these opposing visions. It is vital for hopes of peace and freedom that we sustain the positive-sum world economy. But it is no less vital to tackle the environmental and resource challenges the economy has thrown up. This is going to be hard. The condition for success is successful investment in human ingenuity. Without it, dark days will come. That has never been truer than it is today.
Now that is a column. I’ll post a proper comment on it in the next couple of days. But for now, just reflect on how rare it is to see a heavyweight commentator prepared seriously to consider the implications of a scenario in which the uncertainties on energy and climate change go against us.
Wolf’s narrative here – on both problem and solutions – is situated at the ‘civilisation’ level. It’s impossible to think intelligently about either the causes of a zero sum scenario, or about potential paths through it, without thinking hard about our capacity as people to take collective decisions; the risks if we fail to use that capacity effectively; our conception of the good life and the values that underpin it; and the question of whether we can recognise that in a situation of scarcity, interdependence and equity become the same thing.
In other words: Wolf’s solution narrative is commensurate with his problem narrative (c.f. David and my discussion of this in Climate Change: the State of the Debate).
What a refreshing change from the legions of climate hacks who use the same hair-raising problem narrative as Martin Wolf – and then tell you that all you need do is turn off lights, recycle and remember not to leave your TV on standby.
by Alex Evans | Jan 2, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
With the death count now well into the hundreds, and the number of Internally Displaced People from the Rift Valley alone placed at 70,000 by the Kenyan Red Cross, decision-makers at aid agencies must be wondering whether they’re hallucinating. As Richard Dowden quotes a Kenyan friend: “But these things don’t happen in Kenya!”.
As if to prove the point about Black Swans, Kenya has erupted just as the eyes of the world were focused exclusively on Pakistan. A scan of media reporting before polling took place shows that the prevailing mood among opinion formers was upbeat: few saw this coming. The Times‘s take on 27 December, for instance, was cheerful:
For many observers, the very fact that the race is so close run is a sign of how far Kenya has come in 15 years of multiparty democracy. An incumbent has never before faced a credible challenge.
Even on the day of the election itself, when rumblings from Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement were becoming audible, the picture seemed to be broadly positive. Here’s the IHT:
So far the election period has been relatively peaceful, with a few scattered bursts of violence but no widespread turbulence. Foreign election observers, including the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, have praised the process, saying it was free and fair, though at times a little chaotic.
“At times a little chaotic” neatly sums up the international community’s attitude to Kenya until now. ‘True, it’s endemically corrupt’, went the standard line, ‘but it’s stable: in spite of everything the state more or less works’. Often, Kenya was invoked in the same breath as Tanzania or Zambia, as an example of a ‘ruminant’ rather than a ‘vampire’ state. Rather than being of the purely blood-sucking variety, the argument went, the corruption in Kenya was of the sort that gave something back – producing fertile ‘manure’ in the form of infrastructure projects and so on.
But as Richard Dowden – one of the few commentators who can claim to have provided ample warning of risks in Kenya – noted yesterday, “Kenya has been a catastrophe waiting to happen”.
Kenyan politics are more than a lucrative game of musical chairs for the elite. They are the most vicious and tribalised on the continent. Politicians often address their own people in coded language. “It is our turn to eat!” is a phrase they often use. It means that it is the turn of our ethnic group to rule — and loot as much as we can.
The issue of spoils politics, and donors’ attitude to it, is at the very heart of the conundrum that Kenya now poses to the international community. It’s been a while since President Mwai Kibaki has been a ‘donor darling’, but there’s no doubt that that’s exactly what he was after his election victory in 2002. His subsequent relapse into clientelism and patronage politics is entirely consistent with the ‘passionate-love-affair-followed-by-fall-from-grace’ archetype that aid agencies seem unable to resist – whether with Museveni in Uganda, Meles in Ethiopia, or (dare one recall), one Robert Mugabe.
When the dust has settled and the wash-ups and lessons-learned exercises get underway in earnest, there will be two central questions for donors. One: what’s the role of aid in fragile states? Is it actually helpful to spray vast volumes of cash into directly into governance systems fundamentally based on patronage, in the form of budget support? And two: what is donors’ theory of influence in such states? If they can recognise that the problem is not to do with individuals like Kibaki or Odinga, but is instead systemic, then what can donors do to change that system – or at least avoid propping it up? For what it’s worth, here’s an attempt to answer those questions that I made back in May last year.
Happy new year.
by Mark Weston | Nov 29, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before – a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” – but not usually when the eyes of the world are watching how the nation responds to Kurdish unrest.
Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the power to override Supreme Court decisions – if it did, the pragmatic Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an would quickly throw the case out. Banning the DTP, which the Supreme Court claims is “based on blood and takes orders from the terrorist organisation of the PKK,” would be self-defeating. The party has been weakened by the rise of Tayyip’s AKP, which swept the board among Kurds in the 2007 general election, relegating the DTP to a bit part even in its traditional strongholds of Diyarbakir and Bingol. Silencing it now, Erdo?an knows, can only fan Kurdish resentment:
“Everyone should be able to freely express themselves through constitutional and legitimate means in a democratic environment,” he argued this week. “The climate of freedoms is an enemy of violence and terrorism…So let’s maintain pluralistic democracy and strengthen the climate of freedoms in order to secure the ultimate result in the struggle against terrorism…All experience shows there is no other way out.”
The latter is a reference to Turkey’s failure to snuff out earlier Kurdish rebellions using force. OK, the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 calmed things down for a while, but most of the underlying causes of his people’s frustration remained. It was only a matter of time before some of them regrouped, and the recent troubles show the battle for hearts and minds, as the Prime Minister acknowledges, is far from won. “Let’s look together,” he urges, “for ways of winning over the people instead of alienating them.” Sadly, his plea is likely to fall on deaf ears.
by Mark Weston | Nov 22, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
OK it’s Haaretz, a left-wing rag, but hey. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an, they argue, is the pick of today’s rum bunch of global leaders. Without him, “belligerent Iran, medieval Saudi Arabia or shaky Pakistan (caught in the calipers of sinister madrasas and a state of emergency) would be setting the tone.” Haaretz even parades Tayyip’s charms before a sceptical European Union, warning:
“You have 70 million Turks in your court, Europe. Instead of embracing Turkey, you are sending it scurrying hither and yon. Instead of proving that this is not a matter of ego, prejudice and xenophobia, you are humiliating the very sane alternative that Turkey represents.
“As though the Turkish democracy is the only one that’s not perfect, the only one whose laws are flawed and in need of amendment – the only one violating civil and human rights.”
The latter point echoes a letter I wrote to the FT in September bemoaning the double standards surrounding Turkey’s EU accession, but Tayyip might be useful for Israel as well as Europe. As a friend of the country but also a respected and devout Muslim, could he be just the man to act as honest broker with the Palestinians?
by Mark Weston | Nov 16, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
The humble headscarf has become a key symbol in the simmering debate over Turkey’s secular future. In August this year it nearly brought down the government when the army opposed Abdullah Gul’s presidential bid because of his scarf-toting wife. The liberal middle classes of Istanbul and Izmir cite the AK Party’s apparent support for the garb, which although seen on every street in the country is banned in public buildings, as evidence of its Muslim fundamentalist intentions.
I spoke to a number of these critics when the AK Party first came to power in 2002. They predicted that it would try to turn Turkey into an Islamic theocracy. Even though the party’s manifesto promised to uphold secularism, its murky past persuaded the urban elites that it was lying. The party’s leader Tayyip Erdo?an, for example, was once locked up for inciting religious hatred in a poem he read at a public meeting. The offending verse? “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks.” Nothing too vindictive in there, you might think, but he deliberately omitted a verse praising the army (who are a sensitive bunch) and his final stanza, “our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom,” is admittedly a bit scary.
Turkey looks no more Islamic today than it did five years ago, however. The headscarf is still banned in schools, universities, the courts and government offices (Tayyip doesn’t even take his bescarved wife to official functions). The country has taken steps to get into the EU (despite the latter looking increasingly like an exclusively Christian club). And the generals – the staunch defenders of Ataturk’s secular legacy – remain powerful. (more…)
