From Tiananmen to Hong Kong via Timisoara

 

July 10, 2020

First, as a responsible major country, China stands upright with honour. We never strong-arm others, never seek supremacy, never withdraw from commitments, never bully others, and never complain. The word ‘coercion’ has nothing to do with China.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying, October 2019

If anyone cares to listen to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s vehement reaction against any country objecting to what is currently happening in Hong Kong, they will notice that Chinese authorities are basing their rebuttals on the principle of non interference in China’s internal affairs.

For seven decades, the affirmation of non interference in a country’s internal affairs has been one of the pillars of China’s foreign policy. Look closer, however, and the much-trumpeted principle means that other nations are forbidden to comment on Chinese internal policies, but Chinese officials on the other hand feel free to intervene in other countries’ internal affairs, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Starting with 1964, Zhou Enlai prodded socialist leaders from the Soviet bloc to rise in revolt against Moscow’s territorial grab after World War II. Ceausescu fell for it and started claiming back Bessarabia, which Romania had lost in 1940 before the communists came to power.

Also during the sixties, the CCP tried to force Albania to enter into an anti-Soviet, pro-Chinese alliance together with Yugoslavia and Romania, according to the memoirs of the late Enver Hoxha, Albania’s former Stalinist leader.

In 1971, taking advantage of the uncalled for visit to Beijing of Australia’s Labor leader of the opposition, the same Zhou Enlai swiftly used the unhoped-for opportunity in order to attack Australia’s alliance with the United States, which he compared to China’s alliance with the USSR. The ANZUS Treaty has been under attack by the Chinese ever since.

As we all know , communism was foreign to the political traditions of Central and Eastern European countries. After WWII the communist regimes came to power there under the occupation of Red Army troops. In 1989 Mikhail Gorbatchev was intelligent enough to recognise that such a political arrangement was no longer desirable or sustainable. Accordingly, after he ordered the Red Army troops to withdraw, the communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe were toppled one after another by pro-democracy movements.

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe emboldened pro-democracy forces in China to occupy Tiananmen Square and ask, in their turn, for the democratization of political life. After a few weeks of indecision, the Chinese communist leadership asked the PLA to crush the demonstrators, killing hundreds in the process.

Thus from June to December 1989, China was the only communist state that dared to use the army against its own people. To be sure, this was a very unenviable position to be in. This is the reason why the Chinese leadership decided to grossly interfere in Romanian internal affairs, attempting to prop up the Ceausescu regime. At the end of November 1989, a Chinese Politburo member touched down in Bucharest, offering support and military aid to the Romanian dictator.Consequently the Romanian revolution was the only one in Europe where the army was used against the demonstrators, Tiananmen-style. The bloody events led to the execution of the presidential couple. (At the time, the couple’s execution in Romania was extremely well received by Chinese protesters and students )

In truth, no amount of police repression, book burnings or imprisonment of pro-democracy dissidents can make democratic aspirations go away. Such aspirations are, indeed, truly universal and no nation who refuses to democratize could be considered civilized, regardless of its economic status or number of boots on the ground. By resisting democratic reforms, the Chinese leadership is in fact keeping their country outside the ranks of civilized nations, and in a league with other dictatorships from Africa or Asia. This is the reason why the only respectable people in China these days are the pro-democracy dissidents and militants.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that Chinese authorities’ meddling in other countries’ internal affairs has diminished in intensity. To give but one example, since 2012 they have created a 16+1 group from ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe plus a few from the Western Balkans. (This is the political component of the Belt and Road infrastructure project.) Eleven countries from the group are full EU members and China’s diplomatic initiative is a grave interference in the Union’s internal affairs. As the 1989 Timisoara repression proves, we can safely assume that Beijing is prone to extend its support to radical nationalistic and anti-democratic political parties within this group of countries.

This is one of the many reasons why EU officialdom is more than entitled to act in support of Hong Kong dissidents and the Uighur minority, in accordance with the fundamental values the European Union was built upon. In future, they should make it clear to China’s henchmen that they are fully expected to respect the democratic aspirations of the Chinese people, for the benefit of China and the international community as a whole. Any lesser reaction to the current events in Hong Kong can be construed as kowtowing to China in exchange for elusive economic gains.

Why the EU is Wrong about US Criticism of the W.H.O.

 May 20, 2020

This week’s World Health Assembly videoconference did nothing but provide an opportunity for China to take center stage in the debate about the handling of the coronavirus pandemic and for the United States to be paraded as the villain of the piece. As matters now stand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the proposed “review” shifting the responsibility for the spread of the virus from the country that should have contained it in the first place, namely China, to the many nations who were caught by surprise and seriously destabilised by it.

I understand EU diplomats’ commitment to multilateralism. But this time they went too far in giving a platform to a communist regime and a Marxist WHO boss to attack the US, which until now have contributed 75 percent of the organisation’s budget and had created practically all multilateral institutions, including the United Nations after WWII.

Now more than ever, there is a great need for Western solidarity in dealing with the issue of WHO reform if further pandemics are to be avoided. Siding with China and the WHO against US criticism is therefore a losing approach to actually solving matters. No Western diplomat should endorse WHO attacks against the US Administration, since the agency’s largest financial contributor is entitled to freely criticise it when it performs poorly.

This is not to say that the US tendency of withdrawing de facto from most UN key positions in recent years is a good strategy. The latter has created an opportunity for China and its supporters in developing countries to grab the key posts at the FAO, the WHO and other UN agencies, thus rendering these otherwise important UN bodies ineffective (the WHO management of alerts during the current pandemic is a case in point). These days it seems that to get a top job at any UN agency, it is more important how well-connected the candidate is in Beijing than how competent the person really is.

Whilst I agree that the WHO needs to rapidly get rid of Tedros and his team before any meaningful review can take place, permanently cutting the organisation’s funding and abandoning it altogether would be highly counterproductive for the US and for the world as a whole.

Instead, the US can make its crucial financial contribution to the WHO conditional upon approving who gets to be its next directors, as long as the selection is made from trustworthy countries such as Australia, South Korea or Greece, since they have proven their credentials in managing the response to the current pandemic.

EU Diplomacy's Munich 2.0 Moment

 

May 9, 2020

European diplomatic traditions, which are some of the most illustrious in the world, have not prevented the External Action Service from writing one of the most inept letters I have ever read. After months of China’s diplomatic bullying, aimed at changing the pandemic narrative in its favour, is this ill-conceived message addressed to the Chinese leadership all that the best diplomatic experts within the EU have been able to come up with ? To add insult to injury, the EU officials have even accepted the letter to be censored by Beijing before its publication, deleting any reference to the fact that the pandemic started in China.

Diplomatic intimidation was not invented by the Chinese. The Nazis used it before them. Just before the start of the second world war, this type of bullying made Neville Chamberlain bow to Hitler’s demands in order to achieve – in his view – “peace with honour”.

Pushing back against Chinese bullying, however, is the only reasonable course of action of any country and self-respecting diplomatic establishment. From my personal experience working for Chinese bosses, I also happen to know that taking a firm stand against their bullying is the only way to deal with the representatives of a nation that has recently achieved economic success, but is still haunted by a huge inferiority complex. Trying to appease Chinese bullying or to ignore it will not make it go away, but will only lead to more serious bullying in the future.

To give but one example, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for an international inquiry into the origins and handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His initiative has prompted a furious attack by the Chinese ambassador to Canberra, who by now is used to treating Australia like a de-facto Chinese colony. He used the media to threaten that Chinese consumers could stop importing Australian beef and wine. This type of threat echoes the Davos speech of a Chinese official this year, who claimed that the United States will not do anything to counter China’s recent belligerence because his country is the biggest market for American hamburgers outside the USA.

“If you give China an inch, they will take a mile. And if you succumb to bullying and intimidation, you can expect only one more thing: more bullying and intimidation. It’s going to be a question not simply of what is Australia saying about what’s happening in China: it’s about China trying to dictate what’s happening in Australia.” (Dr Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the UN Security Council, in Financial Review, November 2019)

The Chinese amhassador’s assertion that his country’s consumers might decide not to buy Australian beef in the future is also directed against the Chinese middle class. These are the biggest consumers of beef in the country, and if the communist party decides for some reason to stop importing it, they will have to revert to a more traditional, pork-based diet. In other words, the communist party seems as displeased with Australia as they are with the restless Chinese middle class, who have nevertheless made the fatal error of putting their future prosperity into the hands of the communist officials.

The EU , on the other hand, is China’s biggest export market and this fact alone gives it a lot of clout, a temporary disruption in supply chains notwithstanding.

This is why appeasing China’s offensive diplomatic behaviour makes so little sense.

Instead, EU diplomats should intensify calls for an independent inquiry into the handling of the pandemic and declare at least a few Chinese diplomats in Europe persona non grata after their unwarranted offensive behaviour in Paris or Stockholm. Anything else will be construed by the communst regime in Beijing as proof of Western democracies’ inherent weakness. Indeed, like the Nazis before them, their entire propaganda machinery rests on proving to the population how strong China’s communist government is and how weak Western democratic governments are by comparison.

Naturally, no European country wishes to confront China, which is fair enough. However, by appeasing its diplomats’ bullying and ignoring its shameless propaganda, the EU is making a huge error, one which is already being put to good use by the continent’s “ideological competitor”.

Chinese Diplomacy and the Wuhan Virus

 March 31, 2020

“The geography of infectious disease is important because, as living organisms, pathogens—that is, the bacteria, viruses, and other microparasitic entities that cause disease—all have histories linked to time and place. Every widely distributed disease originated as a local outbreak.” (Monica H. Green, “Climate and Diseases in Medieval Eurasia”, 2018)
 

 

One of the most sickening aspects of the current pandemic is the way Chinese diplomats are trying to bully everyone into not calling the Covid-19 the “Wuhan virus”. From a scientific point of view, asigning to Covid-19 a geographical location for its place of origin makes a lot of sense. The Ebola virus, for instance, was thus named from the river in Congo where the epidemic started. For scientists and for the public, knowing where a viral outbreak or pandemic originated is essential for identifying and combating its root causes. This is the reason why I side on this issue with Mike Pompeo and not with the die-hard Marxists in China or in the West.

My professional intuition also leads me to suspect that the few weeks’ delay in anouncing the new epidemic and in taking adequate measures to contain it did not occur as a result of incompetence on the part of Chinese communist authorities, as initially believed. After all, if they had really wanted to nip the outbreak in the bud, they would have immediately followed international protocol and called the WHO or the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The latter was instrumental in insulating the world against the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa a few years ago (2014) and in containing it within the first week when it was spreading to Nigeria. But at that time, the Nigerians called the CDC within the crucial first days of their Ebola outbreak.

In hindsight, it looks to me as if high-ranking communist party officials saw in this outbreak the perfect opportunity to spread it around the globe via the Chinese tourists travelling abroad in their millions in early January. For a Stalinist like President Xi, the possibility of provoking the general crisis of capitalism – a veritable obssession for devout Marxists – was probably too hard to resist. He and others in his party also knew perfectly well that the West would be caught quite unprepared for a pandemic, as most of its medical supplies are still manufactured in China.

Unfortunately for the Chinese communist leadership, the resolve of mainly conservative Western governments to spend big money in order to help their people and businesses survive the pandemic was something it did not count on. The Great Depression from the inter-war period had been made worse by Western nations’ unwillingness to pump money into their broken economies. That error gave Stalin an enormous propaganda advantage, and Marxists in the West opportunities to massively infiltrate governments and media organizations.

This time around, despite their recently acquired economic clout, the Chinese communists blew it miserably. Instead of falsely blaming the Americans for the outbreak, they should admit that their population’s diet has something in common with that of the Congolese. Indeed, the Ebola and the Covid-19 zoonotic viruses are a direct result of their people’s fondness for eating roasted monkeys, fried bats, pangolin meat and the like.

The EU is today the most heavily-affected continent outside China, with Italy and Spain registering an unbelievably high 10 percent mortality rate. Chinese tourists’ fascination with Spain and Italy prompted many of them to visit in their thousands, spreading the virus as they did so. As the EU had never been dependent for its prosperity on Chinese tourists, however, this pandemic will make European officials think twice about granting visas to such potential disease-carrying guests in future.

The way the outbreak was handled in the first instance by the Chinese communist authorities has all but ruined China’s standing and international reputation. As neither Italian, Spanish or British families can bring the victims back to life, there is nothing Chinese diplomats can do to ever make the world trust them again.

Liberal Democracy as a Dictatorship of Minorities

 Making sense of the direction of the evolution of societies has always been a challenge among philosophers and social scientists alike. Before tackling the subject of liberal democracy, viewed here as a dictatorship of minorities, it is fair to say that so far, we do not possess a clear understanding of where societies are heading. 

In the 19th century, German philosopher Hegel proclaimed the "end of history". Closer to our time, Francis Fukuyama announced his own "end of history", which he believed to be characterized by the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy .

Although after 1989 the number of democracies surpassed other types of political systems (authoritarian, communist) for the first time in history, the fact is that today the majority of them are not liberal, but electoral democracies, as Dani Rodrik has pointed out in a recent study.

For any democracy - whether liberal or electoral - to function, however, a compromise between its players should be reached, that protects the rights of minorities, as well as those of the majority.

As opposed to electoral democracies, which are biased towards protecting the political rights of the majority of their citizens, liberal democracies are biased towards protecting and enlarging the rights of minorities within a given society. 

Rare as they are, liberal democracies appeared in the West in a specific context in which the owners of capital - or "the rich" - had succeeded in gaining or retaining political power with the support of a limited number of voters. Thus in 19th century France, after 2 revolutions (1789 and 1830) only citizens who earned a certain amount of money were allowed to vote. They made up about 1 percent of the country's population. The rest of the citizens, as advised by prime minister Guizot at the time, had "to get rich first" if they wanted to participate in the political life of the country. 

By restricting the right to vote through a variety of methods, the nascent elites of Western liberal democracies were thus able to deny political rights to the many for a long time, as well as to avoid any responsibility for the social havoc that capitalist development played during the first century or so of its existence.

Gradually, especially after the first world war, liberal elites were forced to concede voting rights and participation in political decisionmaking to the majority of the population, including women.

For a few decades after the second world war, the balance of power inside most Western nations shifted in favour of majorities, whose working and living conditions improved dramatically. Politicians representing voter majorities were then able to impose heavy taxes on the profits of the rich, sometimes as high as 90 percent, where there were none at the beginning of the 20th century.

The rich minorities' reaction was slow in coming but, through its consequences, it had devastating effects on the living standards of the majority of voters in Western nations. Through the adoption and promotion of neoliberal economic policies pioneered by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, the "1 percent" minority in society were able to reverse earlier policies of high taxation and, during the following decades, to diminish taxes back to levels unseen since the early 1900s.

It is fair to say at this point that if such a trend continues unchecked, Western business elites will end up paying no tax at all.
To achieve such an objective, the rich minority employed a variety of electoral tactics as well. First and foremost, they coopted all the leaders of mainstream (or majority) political parties and turned them against their own constituents (Clinton and Blair are the first to spring to mind here).

Second, they have all but destroyed the trade union movement in the West, which was the backbone of the political parties of the left and instrumental in obtaining favourable compensation for labour from the owners of capital.

The third and most peculiar way of advancing the political agenda of the rich minority has been by joining forces with leaders of other minorities, who had hitherto faced discrimination by majorities. Think here the LGBT community, some albeit not all ethnic minorities, and women.

If towards the end of the 20th century the rich minority exercised its control and promoted its agenda via the outright purchase of mainstream politicians on both sides of the political isle, over the last decades we observe a tendency to promote to power leaders who are either childless (think here Merkel or Juncker); who belong to the LGBT community (like in Serbia or Luxemburg); members of the billionnaire elite (Berlusconi, Trump); or selected members of ethnic minorities. Together, these minorities can display signs of becoming quite dictatorial when their agenda is challenged by majorities, prompting some to call this phase in the evolution of liberal democracies "totalitarian capitalism".

In hindsight, it should be admitted that majoritary democracies have historically been less than tolerant of the rich or the LGBT minority. Until a few decades ago, homosexuality was shunned in most Western countries and on occasion, its members were under threat of being prosecuted and imprisoned. Similarly, the heavy burden of taxation imposed on the rich minority during the '50s, 60s and 70s could be construed as more of a penalty of being wealthy than as a truly fair level of taxation. No wonder such policies bonded the members of these minorities together and determined them to use any means at their disposal - primarily money - to keep majorities in check and out of power.

The fight between these minorities and the majority has now spilled out into the streets, as the main institutions in our democracies, including parliaments, have ceased to work as they were supposed to. Far from liberal democracy  becoming the norm in the world, what we are witnessing these days is the withering away of established liberal democracies. Even in the West, the latter  are being replaced, one after the other, by electoral democracies catering to the rights of the majority. Repeatedly labeled "populists" or "illiberal" , the new breed of politicians spearheading this movement is here to stay and to expand both influence and power.

This time around as society evolves however, majorities should strike the right balance. As they restart making gains in prominence and power, they should avoid imposing punitive taxation levels on the rich, or promote anti-LGBT legislation, cater to racists and so on. After all, the rise of the neoliberal breed of leaders was a consequence of the errors made in the past by the politicians representing the majority of voters in Western societies.

Italy and the Euro

 

June 17, 2018

The change of government in Italy calls into question the German leadership of the European Union, which was myopic at best.
Italy has never benefited from the introduction of the euro. Its GDP per capita after the introduction of the common currency has stagnated. German-imposed austerity measures and the lack of solidarity among member countries in the euro club have contributed to transforming a once-promising monetary initiative into a fiasco. The common currency was supposed to bring prosperity and unity among its members. Instead, it brought misery in the South and pitched countries against one another (Joseph Stiglitz).
Sadly, nobody within the EU expects Germany to live up to the fact that it should have done much more to avert the euro crisis or to help countries in deep financial trouble. President Macron’s valiant efforts at reforming the Union and its common currency are likewise being torpedoed systematically by the German chancellor, who had lost touch with reality a long time ago and looks set to become the Union’s gravedigger.
In the current political climate, nationalists are gaining power in one member-state after another and xenophobia is on the rise. Such developments can only spell doom for the embattled Union, already weakened by Brexit and the debt crisis. Unfortunately, many economists or political analysts are not optimistic when it comes to the EU’s chances of overcoming its current woes. One can only hope that they are wrong and that the worst – i.e. the implosion of the Union – could still be avoided.

A Bad Case of Ottomanism

 February 22, 2018

When the AKP Islamic Party came to power in Turkey at the turn of the century, the event was saluted by many specialists as a victory for political Islam. For an entire decade, Turkey became a model of Islamic democracy envied by many in the Arab world. The 2011 revolutions were ignited by the hope that other Islamic societies might achieve the level of economic development and political stability that characterized the AKP rule in the first years in power.
Not anymore. The AKP moderates – such as former President Abdullah Gul, or former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu – were sidelined or brutally dismissed from office in a power-grabbing exercise that consolidated the authority of a single individual, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, over both the party and the country as a whole.
One of the most unsettling consequences is the 180-degree change in Turkey’s foreign policy. During the first 10 years of AKP rule, the then Foreign Minister Davutoglu – a noted professor of International Relations – crafted a policy called “zero problems with the neighbours”. He initiated dialogues with the Kurds, the Greeks and other neighbouring countries, and tried his best to make Turkey a respectable regional player in Asia and in Europe.
This enlightened foreign policy has been all but abandoned a few years ago in favour of military interventionism in Iraq, then Syria, as well as an unwise increase in tensions with both Russia and Greece. The revival of Ottomanism by President Erdogan is nothing new, in a country subjected to authoritarian rule. The use of history in order to elicit widespread popular support for government policies and to shore up one-man rule has been tried countless of times before in many other countries around the world. What makes Turkey’s Ottoman nostalgia particularly dangerous is the fact that it takes place at a point in time when the Middle East is a war zone and the European Union is practically unable to defend its borders. By unleashing hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees onto European shores, Erdogan has proven to many an EU political leader that his intentions towards Europe, and particularly towards Greece, are at least as bellicose as his rhetoric.
This turn of events in Turkey brings thus to a sad conclusion an experiment with political Islam that had started as very promising, but may yet end up in disaster.