by Alex Evans | Mar 12, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
As if to prove the point I made back in January about Ban being the ‘scarcity SG’, given his interest in climate change and water scarcity, here’s a piece of his on food prices from the Washington Post today. What he thinks needs to be done:
First, we must meet urgent humanitarian needs. This year, the World Food Program plans to feed 73 million people globally, including as many as 3 million people each day in Darfur. To do so, the program requires an additional $500 million simply to cover the rise in food costs. (Note: 80 percent of the agency’s purchases are made in the developing world.)
Second, we must strengthen U.N. programs to help developing countries deal with hunger. This must include support for safety-net programs to provide social protection, in the face of urgent need, while working on longer-term solutions. We also need to develop early-warning systems to reduce the impact of disasters. School meals — at a cost of less than 25 cents a day — can be a particularly powerful tool.
Third, we must deal with the increasing consequences of weather-related shocks to local agriculture, as well as the long-term consequences of climate change — for example, by building drought and flood defense systems that can help food-insecure communities cope and adapt.
Last, we must boost agricultural production. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has rightly noted that there is no reason Africa can’t experience a “green revolution” of the sort that transformed Southeast Asia in previous decades. U.N. agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development are working with the African Union and others to do just this, introducing vital science and technologies that offer permanent solutions for hunger.
by Richard Gowan | Mar 5, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
Exciting news from Kosovo. As I reported on Monday, Serbia tried to strengthen its claim to to the province by “reclaiming” a railway there – i.e. it sent two trains down the line. Well, information just in proves that you can burn border posts and/or the U.S. embassy, but nobody messes with UNMIK Railways:
The United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) today reasserted control of a rail line in northern Kosovo, a day after Serbian Railways had challenged its authority over the stretch. Joachim Rücker, the head of UNMIK and the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said that the intervention of UNMIK Border Police “reverses the challenge to UNMIK’s authority that occurred yesterday when Serbian Railways illegally sent two of its trains south of Leshak/Lešak.”
In a statement issued in Pristina, Mr. Rücker noted that about 9.35 a.m. today UNMIK Border Police at the Leshak/Lešak train station informed a representative of Serbian Railways that their train would not be allowed to travel south, and Serbian Railways complied. The envoy stressed that “any movement south of Leshak/Lešak by Serbian Railways is a clear challenge to UNMIK’s authority . . . and will not be tolerated.”
I know this is important really, but I’m left wondering what would happen if Scotland were to declare UDI and Gordon Brown attempted to assert his authority by sending a Virgin Express north of the border. It would doubtless be stuck in Manchester due to leaves and Britain would fragment accordingly…
by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t put its reviews online, I thought I’d extract a few paragraphs here. These deal with what strikes me as the most interesting and least discussed element of the (generally badly reviewed) book: Bolton’s obsession with the political uses of jokes…
Mr. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by the UN. For them, “the United Nations to this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing countries.” Bolton now sets out to disillusion “those who still think glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago.” His volume may be a first in international relations literature: a book explicitly intended to sour childhood memories.
To achieve this he hauls us through some highly involved descriptions of diplomatic negotiations enlivened by the breaking of confidences, ad hominem attacks on most other participants, and a lot of jokes. Curiously, the most interesting element of the entire project may be the jokes. We already know quite a lot about the humor of the Bush administration – Bob Woodward has revealed, for example, that the president finds flatulence funny. Mr. Bolton is more interested in verbal repartee, and from time to time he is genuinely witty. Describing a visit by George Clooney to New York to discuss Darfur before the Security Council, he notes that the actor was swarmed by female staffers, “providing humility lessons, and therefore character-building, for the rest of us.” However, he is best at skewering those he dislikes with harsh humor, and he knows it, often returning to the same victims (such as his British and Swedish counterparts at the UN) again and again.
This fascination with comedy is clearly essential to his understanding of how diplomacy works. Mr. Bolton has often been presented as a devotee of power politics, seeing little beyond interest, influence and advantage. This book does not dispel that view. But humor seems to act as a guide to how these forces work. He explains how he gained advantage over a senior German official in a meeting on Iran by noting that he inspired “general merriment”, while his adversary only “joked lamely” and then responded “dourly” to Bolton’s comedic success.
Contrary to his stated intentions, Mr. Bolton has not produced a book that will appeal to those suffering belated qualms about whether their trick-or-treating was misguided – it would be utterly ludicrous to believe that anyone without a sad obsession with multilateral diplomacy is going to care one iota whether Mr. Bolton bested largely unheard-of diplomatic rivals in the humor stakes. But for those of us who are burdened with that unfortunate obsession, this is a treasure-trove.
And if that doesn’t make you want to buy it, what will?
by Alex Evans | Feb 16, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI Journal on risk, threat and security in the UK. It’s not hard to see why their piece has aroused such passions:
The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity. That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate. This is a problem worsened by the lack of leadership from the majority which in mis-placed deference to ‘multiculturalism’ failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism. The country’s lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without.
Media comment on the Prins / Salisbury story – which was extensive – was cast along predictable lines. The Daily Mail covered the story as “Multiculturalism is making Britain ‘a soft touch for terrorists'”; the Telegraph splashed it on the front of the paper too. Equally predictably, a comment piece in the Guardian derided the RUSI article as “a glaring example of just how wrongheaded Britain’s political thinking has become” – and its authors as “ranting old colonels”.
It’s tempting, when watching one of these tedious set pieces, to mutter “a plague on both your houses” and retreat back to to blogging about more interesting subjects (like sputniks). But then again, isn’t that what Yeats seems to warn against in The Second Coming?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Admittedly, Yeats’s own idea of “the centre” was not far from from that of Gwyn Prins and Robert Salisbury. (The “best”, for Yeats, refers to the values of Europe’s ruling class in 1919: God, King, and country. The “worst”, on the other hand, were Germans and Russians, plus French and Irish revolutionaries. Were Yeats alive today, he’d doubtless be with Prins & Co. on the subject of multiculturalists.)
But today, you can read Yeats’s poem differently: as a warning against culture wars where each side lurches progressively further towards extreme positions, motivated by outrage that the other side is doing the same thing.
Perhaps the most vivid example of this was the ‘positive feedback loop’ seen in debate over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 (now in the process of reigniting again): fundamentalists on both the religious and the secular side of the fence fanned the flames of the dispute, leading to polarisation of more centrist parts of the debate and an exponential amplification of the debate’s ‘shrillness quotient’.
So – can we break out of the cycle? Or are we doomed to ‘mere anarchy being loosed upon the world’?
(more…)
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 12, 2008 | Influence and networks
Mary Dejevsky is beside herself in today’s Independent. Apparently the UK is no longer punching above its weight on the international stage.
Cast an eye over the holders of key international jobs, hang around at an international conference or two, and you could be forgiven for wondering where the Brits have gone. There was a time, long after the sun had set on the Empire, when the British still strutted the world stage. If they had the grace not actually to monopolise the very topmost jobs, they commanded respect as the policy-makers, drafters and negotiators who helped the world go round. They could be apposite and witty at the same time, and they knew how to get things done. Even a decade ago, Britons seemed to pop up all over the place in influential positions, keeping the country truly on the global map.
It is hard to date the beginning, or the end, of our retreat, but the return of Mark Malloch Brown, then Deputy Secretary General, from the United Nations to join Gordon Brown’s “government of all the talents” might be seen as a moment when we pulled up one of the last drawbridges linking us to the outside world. Similarly, the retirement of Sir John, now Lord, Kerr, after serving as Secretary General of the Convention drafting the European Constitutional Treaty.
So what prompted Mary to be so downcast about the UK’s role on the global stage?
The absence of senior Britons from international gatherings is becoming conspicuous. At the Munich security conference last weekend – perhaps Europe’s premier defence gathering – it was noted that this was the first time in 40-plus years that no Briton spoke from the platform. What was that about our diplomacy “punching above its weight”?
Why is this?
- There may be a host of reasons why Britons are putting themselves about less abroad. The proliferation of international talking-shops is surely one. A-list dignitaries can be choosy. (or indecisive)
- A more prosaic explanation could be social change. In today’s British Cabinet an unusual number of senior ministers have young children. (changing nappies in the hindu kush is a nightmare I’m told)
Insightful.
She also worries we don’t have enough people in the upper echelons of international organisations – which are being snapped up by… you’ve guessed it… the French!
The European Central Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund are all headed by members of the French technocratic elite. Britons are nowhere to be found at the apex of these organisations, which have at least as much clout as the more hidebound diplomatic and security groupings.
But in a world with English as the universal means of communication, a world linked by the internet and mobile phones, does the nationality of international civil servants and conference speakers really matter?
It does matter. They see competition between countries to attract the best entrepreneurs, the best managers and the highest earners. They see competition to notch up the best educational standards and give the next generation an advantage in the global market. National placings in all manner of league tables are keenly studied.
This is why it matters that no Briton is even deputy head of a major international institution and no Briton speaks from the platform at an international forum. It shows an aloofness, and perhaps a diffidence, presaging a future in which we British will punch well below her weight.
Tea anyone?
