The E-G8 Deauville Summit

 May 31, 2011

As a regular user of internet services as well as a content provider, I was very interested in last week’s e-G8 summit. The idea of bringing together the chieftains of the internet industry and the world’s most powerful political leaders seems a step in the right direction. The internet as a platform and applications such as social media have an awesome power to help people network,educate themselves and even promote major political change, as the unfolding events in the Arab world illustrate. As always, however, along with great power comes great responsibility.

If during the ’90’s hopes of a new frontier in business development via e-commerce have somewhat evaporated in the wake of the dot com bubble, academic research, political awareness or activism and some areas of the mass-media have benefited enormously from the IT revolution.

This is not to say that all is well in the virtual world. The relative absence of adequate regulation protecting personal data and the confidentiality of communications / business transactions is sapping users’ confidence. The fact that executives of internet companies resist the introduction of minimal norms and regulations governing further development of services proves that neoliberalism is still affecting the mentality of many – albeit not all – in the business community. J.A. Schumpeter, the noted Harvard economist otherwise known for his professional admiration of American corporate achievements, was nevertheless in favour of the introduction of laws and regulations governing innovations and business development in general. To make his point, he used an analogy from the car industry, demonstrating that automobiles have been able to reach ever-increasing speeds only after being equipped with adequate brakes and safety features, which had to be developed first.

As matters now stand, however, intellectual property rights are trampled upon by “content farms”, children are exposed to pornography, and governments, from the US on down, can unlawfully obtain data from personal emails and have access to confidential files on a regular basis. As a consequence, the cyber world looks more as if it were governed by the laws of the jungle than those of civilised states protecting their citizens from harm or legal abuse.

One issue that has not been discussed so far at e-G8 is the hegemonic position achieved by the United States due to its status as the global communications hub. In the long run this has to be addressed in a way that could relieve the national security concerns of European, as well as Asian governments. As the recent financial crisis has shown, America’s position as the centre of both global finance and global communications by no means guarantees the integrity and smooth functioning of the two systems, on the contrary.

The EU’s political leadership also has to investigate why the invention of the internet by local specialists was not followed by a development of applications for it. Lack of technological savvy is surely not one of the reasons. It’s a sad spectacle to witness the fact that even the most mundane applications such as operating systems for PC’s and leading edge word processors, not to mention search engines or efficient email services come from the United States. Instead of endlessly dragging Microsoft through the European courts, it might prove a better idea to provide financial and tax incentives to interested European e-entrepreneurs or existing IT corporations to develop home-grown IT products for the 500-million strong European market.

From an international relations perspective, “the real problems of the post-cold war world would not be challenges for hegemony, but the new challenges of transnational interdependence” (Joseph Nye Jr, The Changing Nature of World Power). The political leaders of the G8 proved that they are aware of this fact. It is now up to the executives of the internet industry to grasp it and live up to their many responsibilities. (sources: Dow Jones newswires, WSJ, France24)

Saving the UN from Slaughter

 April 1, 2011

UN Resolution no.1973 authorising the humanitarian intervention in Libya could rightly be considered as one of the Security Council’s most important decisions to date. It came at a crucial moment in the multilateral organisation’s history, when the UN’s very existence was threatened by US unilateralism, as advocated by a cohort of American IR experts led by Anne Marie Slaughter, former director of strategy and planning within the US State Department.

The Slaughter offensive against the UN reached its peak in 2008 with the launch of the Princeton Project. Its aim was to replace the UN with a tamer organisation, more pliable to US foreign policy objectives, namely the Concert of Democracies. The latter was supposed to authorise US initiatives, including the use of force, in a manner which best suited the US’ hegemonic agenda.

As the Libyan conflict erupted, alas, Ms Slaughter no longer worked for the State Department. Undaunted, she opened a Twitter account and tried to help Mrs Clinton, her former boss, garner worldwide grass roots support in favour of a unilateral NATO intervention against Gaddafi.

Realising the danger the UN was facing, France and Great Britain asked the Security Council to authorise a humanitarian intervention in Libya. Russia and China, traditionally committed to multilateralism and to solving international crises within the UN framework, have abstained from the vote, thus paving the way for the adoption of resolution 1973.

This latest triumph of multilateralism over US unilateralism is, however, only part of the story. The Arab uprisings have helped focus the attention of Mrs Clinton and her team away from South East Asia. The State Department’s diplomatic drive in Asia last fall, aimed at inaugurating a containment policy directed against China, has now all but fizzled out. One of the collateral victims of that policy has been key Clinton ally and fellow China hawk Seiji Maehara, the Japanese foreign minister, who resigned on March 6. He leaves behind a legacy of dramatically increased Sino-Japanese tensions, which have brought bilateral relations close to boiling point some three months ago.

The UN has proved its usefulness in a crisis by authorising the humanitarian intervention in Libya quickly. The situation on the ground in Libya, however, is far less promising, as the rebels lack military training and coordination, whilst the allied bombings have so far failed to impress Gaddafi.

NATO: hunting mozzies with the cannon

 March 26, 2011

Since the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Union is the only global actor which has enshrined in its constitution the obligation of member countries to abide by United Nations norms and resolutions, affirming in no uncertain terms the Union’s commitment to multilateralism.

After the US intervention in Iraq, the EU adopted the European Security Strategy (ESS) in 2003, which has among its objectives the promotion of security in the Union’s “neighbourhood” to the east and to the south. The same document identifies five key threats to security, one of which is state failure, as is currently the case in Libya.

Even if its External Action Service has been slow to take centre stage this spring, the EU has a military architecture of its own, which includes COPS (Political and Security Committee – a veritable “operations centre” of the Union in case of conflict); a military committee made up of chiefs of staff of individual member countries (CMUE); as well as the Union’s own military command, headed by a four-star general. The latter coordinates a 100,000-strong FRR (Rapid Action Force / Force de Réaction Rapide) and includes 400 fighter jets and 100 warships. Moreover, Article 44 of the Lisbon Treaty allows the Commission and COPS the option of mandating a group of member countries to carry out military missions on behalf of the whole Union. This is what informally happened after the adoption of UN resolution 1973 concerning Libya, at least in the first week of the intervention, when France and Britain were in the lead.

Whilst the European humanitarian intervention in Libya would have been sufficient to guarantee the safety of civilians in Benghazi, NATO’s leadership is sure to only complicate matters. The US, as its leader, is already militarily involved in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2003, it intervened in Baghdad unilaterally, without a UN mandate. The current US national security doctrine still maintains the Bush Jr. – era commitment to unilateral action, which is a worry in most capitals around the world. The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and of the US Navy in Bahrain does not make the US a selfless participant in the military action against Libya.

To be sure, NATO was designed as a military alliance against a much more powerful enemy, the Soviet Union, and not for fighting in a Mediterranean country of only 6 million inhabitants. Any military strategist would easily agree that you don’t need a cannon to hunt mosquitoes. By insisting on taking command of the operations, Washington and some of its European allies are stunting the evolution of the European Defence and Security policy. Moreover, the whole Western bloc now stands open to accusations of undertaking military operations not for assisting Libya, but to further its strategic objectives and interests in the region.

The European political leaders who gave in to the US’ relentless campaign to hand over the command of operations in Libya to NATO have thus hurt European interests, as well as those of countries in the Mediterranean region. This will become apparent in the weeks to come, as NATO was not designed for conflicts in this region and for small-calibre enemies like Gaddafi. In actual fact, it seems the American insistence to put NATO in charge was not motivated primarily by concern for the Libyan people, but by a willingness to prevent Europeans from operating an autonomous foreign and security policy in their own neighbourhood. If anything, this episode highlights NATO’s obsolescence, as it struggles to find an adequate role for itself in the 21st century.

America's Arab Policy Quagmire

 January 31, 2011

At the start of his presidency, Barack Obama spoke about his administration’s intentions to mend fences with the Islamic world. In hindsight, we might be forgiven to think that he meant Kenya’s Islamic community and not the Arab one. The plight of Arabs living in US-backed authoritarian states does not seem to get the same kind of attention at the White House as Indonesian Muslims, for example. It is, unfortunately, in the Arab world that the United States has made its biggest foreign policy errors and blunders outside of Latin America.

The desperate protesters taking to the streets of Cairo or Sana hope to force out of office two presidents viewed as pivotal to US securitary concerns in the Middle East. They have nothing to lose : their leaders are corrupt and inefficient, their freedoms do not really exist except on paper and their countries have failed a long time ago to care for their interests, instead of those of the US and its Israeli allies.

The US foreign policy in the Middle East has revolved around two objectives. The first is ensuring America’s oil supplies, hence the US military presence and support for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The second one is supporting the state of Israel and guaranteeing its existence against incredible geopolitical odds, hence the close relationship established between the US and Egypt. Since September 11, 2001, a third US objective has been that of fighting Islamic extremism, which has become a convenient excuse for propping up Arab political dinosaurs in Egypt, Yemen or elsewhere in the Middle East. The way these objectives have been put into practice, however, has come at the expense of ordinary Arabs, which these days see themselves deprived of jobs, basic foodstuffs, human rights or a future for their children. It was, therefore, only a matter of time until the militarised and securitised regimes friendly to the United States or Israel came to an end.

The European Union countries, on the other hand, have been trying to alleviate the hardships of the Arabs. Millions of young Arabs have established their second home in France, Italy, Spain or even Germany. Their hard currency remittances, the European investments in Maghreb or Palestine or outright European financial assistance have mitigated the hardships inflicted on the Arabs by insensitive US foreign policies. Not anymore. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, EU nations have been forced to adopt unpopular austerity measures, fight illegal immigration and cut back on foreign aid packages. Accordingly, the worsening global economic situation has laid bare the incapacity of most US-backed Arab governments to provide for their citizens or to treat them in a humane and lawful fashion.

The authoritarian leaders currently being contested by protesters in the streets have been given all the US military assistance required to keep them in power for decades. In Mubarak’s case, such assistance amounts to no less than 1.5 billion dollars per annum. Ali Saleh of Yemen gets 250 million dollars for his army and security apparatus. Meanwhile, poverty-stricken Egyptians or Yemenites find it hard to feed themselves or their families, and in some cases they do not have a decent supply of water.

This Jeffersonian US foreign policy has lately been sugar-coated with some misleading Wilsonian trappings, but its essence has remained the same for a long time. Even among the US foreign policy elite, Arabs are thought to be uninterested in democratic values, which explains its support for authoritarian Arab rulers.

Fortunately, as the example of Turkey proves, Islamic societies are not incompatible with democracy. Slowly but surely, Arab intellectuals have come to realise that electing their political leaders freely and removing them when they fail to provide adequate leadership for their countries is a better alternative to the current political arrangements.

American political leaders are quick to criticise the autocratic regimes of Russia or China, but they are slow in conceding that the US’s Arab foreign policy is now in shambles. Nor does their protégé Mubarak get his countrymen’s message straight: his solution to the protesters’ call to resign was to appoint his chief spymaster, Omar Suleyman, as vice-president and change the government. These window-dressing measures continue to be contested in the streets by ordinary Egyptians and leading intellectuals alike. To be sure, the appointment of Suleyman, who is the Mubarak regimes’ interface with the US and Israel, is an indication of how strong the ties between Washington and the octogenarian president really are.

As much as he would like to, President Obama cannot invoke enlightened Wilsonian ideals and support hugely unpopular Arab regimes simultaneously. If anything, he could turn to another fellow Nobel prize winner, Mohamed El Baradei, for inspiration, who is living proof that not all the prize’s recipients are undeserving.

EU: A Question of Priorities

 December 21, 2010

After hearing daily about the problems experienced by the EU’s common currency, austerity measures and the like, one might be forgiven for being inclined to believe that the crisis and its ugly aftermath are the most important issues confronting us all. In fact, the most disquieting development, as suggested by a recent poll published by The Economist, is our lack of optimism in our collective future. Whilst a majority of Chinese, Brazilians or Indians, for example, are listed in the poll as optimistic about their future, only about a third of industrialised countries’ inhabitants express similar views.

One reason for this is, of course, the gap in economic performance. The Chinese, Brazilian or Indian economies are growing, on average, at a respectable rate of 8 percent per annum, as compared to a sluggish 2.5 percent for the US or 2 percent for the EU. Furthermore, within the Western group of nations, countries like Ireland and Greece are now experiencing their third year of negative growth, while Spain’s economic growth goes neither north, nor south. Ill-conceived or too drastic austerity measures are compounding the economic woes of many nations, with no end in sight for cutbacks in the provision of public services, however vital some of these are.

Optimism and the strong economic performance displayed by the 3 heavyweights of emerging countries should, however, come as no surprise. The same Economist statistics mention the fact that whilst US students’ performance is below the OECD average, the Chinese score consistently higher in maths, physics and most other subjects. Moreover, as the working population in the US, Japan and the EU is ageing, the BRIC countries with the exception of Russia have a youthful, dynamic and growing workforce. The number of college students in China has quadrupled lately and in order to avoid unemployment among them, the country’s leadership has been sending thousands of newly-qualified job-seekers to further their studies abroad at the state’s expense…

The EU could have avoided most of these problems as well, as the 12 recent entrants are known to have a young, well-qualified workforce. The education systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland or Romania, to mention but a few, consistently produced high achievers in maths, physics, chemistry, biology – areas where some of the EU’s education establishments are weak. Unfortunately, the main potential beneficiaries of their talents and skills – countries like Germany, Britain or France – have made it hard for applicants from Central and Southeast Europe to fill available positions, by protecting their job markets even as they are experiencing serious skill gaps.

To add insult to injury, the newly-adopted austerity packages are also targeted at the education systems of EU countries, big or small. Last summer, the UK’s conservatives have decided to treble university admission fees. At the other end of Europe, a Romanian conservative government has cut 40 percent of the health budget and froze the already inadequate sums allocated to education, while leaving untouched the budgets of the country’s seven secret services. This comes on top of the 25 percent cuts to doctors’ and teachers’ salaries voted this summer. Teacher-bashing on public television has become president Basescu’s sport of choice, as if the country’s economic problems are expected to vanish regardless of how much Romania spends on educating its workforce.

To be sure, any politician worth this name should have avoided proposing or voting for cutbacks in health and education. No civilised society, East or West, can hope to function, let alone prosper, in the absence of a decent health system or by depriving itself of the benefits normally associated with a quality education system. This is a point that both the IMF and EU officials should have emphasized when they mandated member countries to reduce public spending and adopt austerity packages. As matters now stand, however, teachers and doctors are lumped together with perennial tyre kickers and spongers who bloat the payrolls of many EU member countries. By looking the other way and getting their priorities wrong, the same officials are as guilty as the national politicians that were directly responsible for such cuts. (sources: The Economist, The Guardian, EVZ, Capital.ro)

Other People's Secrets

 December 7, 2010

The secret US intelligence files and diplomatic correspondence released by WikiLeaks have not stirred my interest enough to read them in detail. To me, most of them are other people’s secrets. Important as some of these might be, I find it somewhat indelicate to take advantage of the opportunity of studying them this way.

At this point in time, I cannot say for sure whether the military intelligence official who leaked the files is a hero or a villain. I guess it all depends on where one stands on these issues. From the point of view of the Washington establishment the man is, understandably enough, the scourge of the earth. For political leaders around the world and even for the public at large, the revelations contained in the leaked documents are an eye-opener, when they aren’t downright shocking.

What is more interesting is Washington’s official reaction to the publishing of the documents. For a number of years now, American intelligence officials and their people around the world have been involved in the massive gathering of all sorts of information. Billions of dollars are being spent to enable organisations such as the NSA, CIA and others to peek at the private lives of ordinary citizens of allied countries, without their knowledge or consent.

Take, for example, Sweden’s case. This fall, Swedish intelligence officials have discovered that the US embassy in Stockholm has installed electronic devices that allows it to monitor the phone conversations of locals, all in the name of US national security. A few years back, a Greek employee of Vodafone from Athens committed suicide, after being required by his company to illegally tap the phone conversations of Greek ministers. Every day, millions of emails, faxes, calls and harmless transactions are being monitored by the Echelon system. The privacy of electronic correspondence in the Western world has ceased to be sacrosanct for a long time now, and this is but a small part of US intelligence gathering operations squarely directed against ordinary citizens of allied countries or their governments…

Intelligence gathering operations against countries outside the Western world are even more intense. Some time ago, China’s former president Jiang Zemin had sent his presidential Boeing to be serviced in the United States, only to find it packed full with hidden listening devices on arrival. Social networks like Twitter or Facebook are extensively used to destabilise less-than-friendly regimes like the one in Iran. Satellite surveillance of phone calls and sensitive installations in such countries have become routine, resulting in driving many such activities underground in order to avoid detection.

These are but a few reasons why I consider the US’ official attitude to the leaks as highly hypocritical. When a country, superpower or not, is prepared to go to such lengths and expense to spy on citizens’ lives, correspondence and phones, it should expect to get a taste of its own medicine in return.

Worse still, the documents portray the US as a paranoid superpower, one whose officials trust no-one, friend or foe. Mrs Clinton instructs her personnel to gather biometric data, phone numbers, credit card details and miscellaneous dirt on foreign leaders and diplomats. Her actions bring to mind Elena Ceausescu’s bugging of ministers’ houses and her sick interest in their sex lives, private conversations and bank accounts. In true American style, Ceausescu himself invested huge amounts of badly-needed cash to install sophisticated telephone exchanges in every county, capable of monitoring the phone conversations of all Romania’s citizens. (Meanwhile, the country’s economy was going to the dogs…) Indeed, what’s the difference between the dictator’s paranoid hunger for other people’s secrets and the United States’ insatiable appetite for similar kind of data ? By the look of it, the difference is only one of scale.

In this poisoned atmosphere, I, for one, have largely given up using the phone to communicate with friends and family for some time now. If one can’t have a private conversation, why have one at all ? I’ve been through this absurd situation only once before – during the Ceausescu years. I had never expected,however, that this time around the people responsible for trampling upon our collective rights to privacy would be the officials of a country calling itself “the beacon of freedom and democracy”.

Hungary Bucks Austerity Trend

 

November 30, 2010

In 1956 the Hungarians rose in revolt against the excesses of Soviet communism. During the 1980’s, the Hungarian society was already making the transition to what we now call the post-Soviet era and its communist politicians opened the country’s borders to East German refugees fleeing to the West . These days, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have rallied the Hungarian public opinion against the excesses of a global economy gone astray, introducing additional taxes on global players operating in Hungary.

The so-called “crisis taxes” were introduced in order to narrow Hungary’s budget deficit. The novelty of these extra taxes, which will raise 520 billion Ft (or 2.67 billion dollars), lies in the fact that they are levied exclusively on banks, energy companies, the telecom and the retail sectors. Thus the telecom tax is expected to bring an extra 61 billion Ft, the energy sector to contribute with 70 billion Ft, whilst the retail sector to kick in 30 billion Ft. Introduced for a limited period of three years, the new taxes will help the Hungarian government avoid IMF / EU bailouts or the imposition of unpopular austerity measures, now very much in vogue in most European Union countries.

When communism fell, Hungary found itself without home-grown tycoons or, to use a Marxist cliché, a “capitalist class”. The void was filled by global companies, which during the 1990s acquired large chunks of the Hungarian economy via privatisations. After years of upsetting state authorities with their peculiar ways of syphoning off profits abroad and minimising their tax bill (by methods which I have described in my Asian crisis ebook), they are now called upon by the Orban government to give something back. Companies like Vodafone (telecommunications), Tesco (retail), Gaz de France or E-On (energy) and the banks will thus pay the bulk of the new “crisis taxes”. Needless to mention, Orban’s crisis policy enjoys huge public support.

To be sure, this is an unheard-of – even if fully justified – approach to raising the extra money needed to close the country’s deficit gap. Unlike the European conservative group of parties, of which Fidesz is a member, the Hungarians have decided that this time around it should be the rich global companies, and not the poor, that have to foot the bill for the damage caused by the financial and economic crisis. Why, even socialist governments in power in some EU countries – notably Greece or Spain – were strong-armed into adopting neoliberal austerity measures, which have sent their economies into the red, generated widespread unemployment and affected the incomes of millions.

During a recent state visit to Malta, Orban has declared that the measures undertaken by his government have brought back “national self-confidence” and that the 7 percent budget deficit inherited from his socialist predecessors will be cut to 3.8 percent next year. He has also told his Maltese host that an economic recovery happening only on paper, that does not reduce unemployment, is not worth having.

In many ways, Orban’s approach in dealing with the ill effects of the economic crisis is as revolutionary as the Imre Nagy – led uprising against the Soviets. Fortunately, Hungary is now a member of a different union, and Brussels is unlikely to send the tanks rolling into Budapest, although a speculative attack on the forint cannot be ruled out. Whilst neighbouring countries like Romania are unnecessarily subjecting their citizens to austerity measures which have been judged by experts as both unwise and much too savage, Orban and his team are cushioning the Hungarian nation against economic destitution. However salutary though, Orban’s novel way of solving his country’s budget woes is going to be lost on Bucharest politicians, who over the past three decades have developed the unhealthy habit of vampirizing their own conationals. (sources: The Economist, The Malta Independent, Magyar Hirlap, The Budapest Sun)