Category Archives: Rest of the World

Britain’s new foreign policy approach

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As regular readers of this blog will know, my single biggest worry about the Conservative party taking office in the UK was the prospect of arch-eurosceptic William Hague taking over the Foreign Office (the man who, as leader of the party back in 2001, ran a last-ditch general election campaign on the slogan “7 days to save the pound”).

Hague has repeatedly rattled his sabre in the direction of the EU, making numerous references to “repatriating” powers from “Brussels”, and often seeming to believe numerous Europhobic myths about the way the EU operates.

After 13 years of a supposedly pro-EU government which repeatedly refused to constructively engage with our continental partners, my fear has been that the incoming Conservative government (even with the tempering effect of their more pro-EU Liberal Democrat partners, led by former Commission official and ex-MEP Nick Clegg) would pull the UK even further from Europe’s heart. This, I am certain, would be disastrous – both for Britain and for the EU itself, but mostly for Britain.

Today, Hague is giving his first major speech since becoming Foreign Secretary. So let’s have a quick look at some of the highlights – especially in relation to Britain’s future policy towards the EU. It must be said, there were a few pleasant surprises…

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First Europe, then… the world?

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A few vague thoughts towards predicting a new global geopolitics:

Globalisation has been the undeniable trend of the last half century.

As transportation and communication technologies have advanced, the world has got smaller. You can now get from London to Australia in a day where, two hundred years ago – at the height of the nation state – it would have taken several times that to travel from London to Edinburgh. A century ago, most goods in your local shop would have been local to your (more or less) immediate area – even with the expansion of 19th century Empires and the arrival in Europe of affordably-priced exotic fruits and out-of-season vegetables, delivered via early refrigerated ships. Now we have to go to specialist shops to get local produce – and local today often means little more than “from the same country”. As for the interconnectedness of the global economy, we have had the ultimate proof over the last year as recession has spread around the world.

Communities arise due to a combination of proximity and common interest – the latter more often than not following the former.

Up until the dawn of the steam age, most modern nation states were highly fragmented, with much autonomy among the further-flung regions. The steam train – and later, the telegraph – enabled more effective administration over longer distances, and so nation states became more coherent as entities.

The proximity of most peoples on Earth has, over the last half century – since the advent of the Jet engine and, more recently, the virtual proximity made possible by the internet – likewise become ever closer. The ability to administrate over far larger areas has similarly increased. Where two centuries ago – as the French national identity was beginning to solidify post-Revolution and under the auspices of Napoleon – it would have taken a week to travel from Paris to Marseilles, there is now nowhere on Earth that you cannot get to in a week, no matter your starting point. Two centuries ago it took six days to travel from London to Edinburgh; a century ago it took six hours; now you can get from London to New York in six hours.

At the same time, with the globalisation of the world economy, previously disparate communities – separated by many hundreds of miles as well as by language and culture – are now economically interconnected via the a combination of the complexities of global finance and the fact that their local shops are full of goods from other countries.

New technologies lead to new identities.

It is possible over the last few centuries to demonstrate that advances in travel and communication technologies have led to consolidation and centralisation of governance structures, as it has become ever easier to manage large areas from a central capital. At the same time, shared identities have arisen, as previously disparate communities (sometimes nominally already under the same administration, but usually for all practical purposes largely independent of each other) have suddenly found themselves in the same boat. Scottish and Cornish become British; Normans and Savoyards become French; Milanese and Sicilians become Italians. Old identities are retained, but the new proximity provided by innovative technologies allows a top-down governmental and bottom-up social coming together.

The EU was, at its birth, backward-looking – yet accidentally stumbled upon an idea far ahead of its time.

The EEC was formed in the 1950s not as a reaction to new technology, but as a means of preventing the violence that so often ensued from the clashing interests of nation states. It was the dawn of the jet age, the year (1957) that Sputnik’s launch heralded the even more advanced era of the space age – yet the advances in transportation and communication that the jet engine and satellite were in the process of bringing about were barely on the radar of the EU’s founding fathers.

Nonetheless, the coming together of the previously competing states of a continent to pursue shared interests was to be made far easier by these new technologies. In 1920, to travel from London to Athens took days. By 1960 it was a matter of hours. Europe had shrunk. The EEC was formed just on the cusp of this new shrinkage, and so was in an ideal position to capitalise on the possibilities that the new technologies provided.

Approaching the present.

With the arrival of the internet, the world has shrunk yet again – only this time only socially/culturally, as we can chat away to people of any nation from the comfort of our front rooms. But as long as the physical transportation of goods over the internet remains impossible, for physical commerce we remain reliant on 20th (and even 19th) century technologies.

This places a geographical limit on effective economic interaction – at least when it comes to the exchange of day-to-day goods. If it takes more than a few hours to transport your goods from A to B it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth, especially with rising fuel prices. Large organisations may be able to trade over far larger distances – using economies of scale to make sending a refrigerated container ship packed with New Zealand lamb halfway round the globe make financial sense – but for the small business (as most businesses are), local trade remains the most effective. The arrival of the railway and the aeroplane expanded the geographical limits of the small business’s economic potential, but we have yet to advance much beyond these limits, set now for more than half a century.

The geographical limitations of (economic) communities.

In practical terms, if a journey of more than a few hours is too long to be economically viable for small businesses, then the geographical limit of most small businesses is more or less continental. At the same time, the EU has done a good job of continuing the work of postwar reconstruction and improving Europe’s transportation and communications infrastructure, ensuring that the EU area is one of the most effectively interconnected on earth – rivalled only by the United States of America, which has the added advantage of a) having been a coherent nation state for 90 years before the EEC came into being, and b) working with a pretty much blank canvas.

But this is a minor issue – there is a far more compelling reason why socio-economic communities today still have geographical limits: time zones. It may well be possible to travel to the west coast of America in half a day, and to speak to someone in Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco at any time. But we still cannot get over the fact that there is an eight hour time difference between London and LA.

With office hours generally running from 9am to 6pm, we have a nine-hour window for normal economic activity. Working with a company on America’s east coast while based in London is feasible – the five-hour time difference allows a four-hour overlap, with the Americans starting work around 2pm London time – but working with a company based in Seattle presents problems, with only a one-hour shared office window. For effective working, you need to be able to communicate with colleagues pretty much all the time – losing more than about four hours every day from the nine hour working day will lead to growing inefficiencies. The technology exists to communicate with people on the other side of the world – but the fact remains that when you contact them, they may well be asleep.*

The continental United States is spread over four timezones. From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe is also spread over four timezones. The same goes for Latin America. Africa is spread over five. Asia and Australasia are rather more spread out – yet if you take South East Asia through to eastern Australia, the time difference is only four hours again, yet covers Australia, Japan, the Phillippines, Indonesia, Thailand and most of China.

These are, geographically-speaking, all entirely practical economic units. Any small businessman on the east coast of America can easily trade with one on the west without needing anything much in the way of complicated planning. A shopkeeper in Portugal can phone a supplier in Turkey, and know he will be able to sort out his orders that same day – possibly even take delivery the same day, if he phones in the morning. But for someone in London to order a vital part from Japan, there remain serious practical difficulties – the nine-hour time difference compounded by a 12-hour flight time. By the time the Japanese supplier has got the message and sent the part, two days might well have passed – which in business terms can prove disastrous.

Today.

So now, by accident at least as much as design, Europe (or, at least, Western Europe) is, in terms of its infrastructure and and geography, about as coherent and sensible a socio-economic unit as most nation states were two centuries ago, before the arrival of the railways and telegraph – if not more so.

Having been working on coming together for longer than other parts of the world, the EU’s institutions, procedures and structures are further advanced. Yet they were not originally planned with the aim of taking advantage of new technologies – but of preventing the conflicts of earlier ages. The overriding feature of the way the EU currently works is the perennial clash between the institutional attempts to find compromises between conflicting national interests (the need for unanimity on substantial changes), and structural fluff designed to flatter the national egos (the hang-on of old school diplomacy that is the veto).

The big fear of the old developed (national) economies over the last decade has been the rise of the new economies of China, India and – to a lesser extent – Brazil. These nationally-focussed concerns have been passed on to the EU – the organisation’s member states have been trying to use the EU as a way of maintaining strength through numbers against the newcomers on the global scene. Technology has allowed for greater pooling of resources and more efficient ways of working, enabling the EU’s member states to maintain the hope that they can compete against the vast potential of India and China – a potential based largely upon those two countries’ huge populations and geographical areas, which on both counts rival those of continents.

Looking to a continental future?

Yet now there are signs of yet more new developments. In the last couple of weeks, two potentially hugely significant events took place – both of which took their inspiration from the European Union, and both of which recognise that continental-scale organisation (or, at least, organisation across several – but not more than four or five – timezones) is both desirable and practical.

First, in Latin America, the members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) decided to adopt a single currency – the SUCRE – explicitly modelled upon the euro. (And before you dismiss ALBA as made up of piddlingly insignificant countries, let’s not forget that the EU started out with just six member states, all still recovering from a devastating war, and three of which were tiny. Let’s also not forget ALBA’s more significant neighbours, who will be watching developments with interest.)

This was swiftly followed by fresh moves by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a regional bloc – including an EU-style common market and, potentially, a euro-style single currency.

Yes, ASEAN can also be dismissed as being made up of a bunch of relative lightweights – its most significant members probably being Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, hardly global major players. But this new move shows far greater ambition – having been proposed by Japan, backed by China, and potentially including Australia, New Zealand and even the United States down the line. Any economic bloc including China and Japan among its members is a force to be reckoned with.

A new age?

And so we may be on the cusp of a major shift in global geopolitics and the structuring of the global economy. If these two new continental blocs get off the ground, the EU will have continental competitors for the first time. And the member states of the EU, until now using the benefits of membership to give themselves an economic advantage on the world stage, will find it even harder to compete as individuals.

Of course, timezone practicalities as well as national egos could still prevent the ASEAN plan from ever coing to fruition, but even a smaller-scale version of an Asia-Pacific version of the European Union would herald a major shift in the way the world works.

The upshot? The EU could well be about to shift from being a nice idea to being an absolute necessity.

* Yes, larger organisations can work on a 24-hour basis – but most businesses are not larger organisations. And for an economic community to benefit the most people within it, its advantages must be accessible to everyone without having to stay up all night.

Looking to the future

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In a sign that everyone’s begun to realise that we’ve already hit the limit of economically-viable countries (if there is such a thing in the current climate) to join the EU, and following the lead of Sarkozy with his Mediterranean Union, it looks like Brussels is finally taking a more realistic attitude towards the old Soviet sphere.

Because, let’s face it, Armenia, Azerbaijan, (especially) Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have very little of benefit to offer the EU in economic terms bar their strategic importance for the transportation energy supplies. They need to be kept sweet, certainly – but it seems that lessons have finally been learned: if you make promises you have no intention of honouring, resentment will build (cf. the growing euroscepticism of Turkey, repeatedly rebuffed since the carrot of membership was first dangled). Worst case scenario, you may end up having to make good with the promises and hand membership to countries – like Romania and Bulgaria – that simply aren’t ready for it.

This newly revamped Eastern Partnership is an overdue heir to the old Phare scheme, which did so much to prepare the 2004 Central and Eastern European accession countries for membership. If done right, it could bolster goodwill towards the EU among these near neighbours. It may, if we’re lucky, help bolster their flagging economies and strengthen their nascent democracies (or even help make democracy more likely in the dictatorship of Belarus). If done badly, it will breed only resentment – not just among the countries themselves (annoyed at being denied the chance for full membership), nor even in Russia (irritated at her old sphere of influence being infiltrated once again), but also among current EU member states (thanks to fears of a sudden influx of migrants from these regions).

It’s hard not to think that Bulgaria and Romania got rather lucky. They’ve only been in the club for a couple of years, and arguably fail to live up to a number of the Copenhagen criteria for membership. If this apparent new tendency to look to “partnership” arrangements as an alternative to full membership had been devised back when Romania and Bulgaria were first being considered as applicants, a lot of fuss could have been saved.

We’re also, perhaps, beginning to see signs of future EU ambition. The EU’s already expanded its partnerships beyond the scope of Roman Empire. These new models of relationships – the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership – could yet spread further: to Central Asia, further south in Africa, perhaps to South America via the EU enclave of French Guyana, possibly even to the Middle East and South East Asia.

For those who dream of a future of global free trade agreements, these moves – with their suggestions of trade partnerships and opening up of markets – are surely a promising sign that the EU is beginning to head in the right direction? Such partnerships could never have been negotiated (arguably imposed) by just one nation acting alone – but the collective bargaining power that the EU’s vast market has brought has given the organisation a genuinely powerful ability to broker such deals that should, in the long term, benefit everybody concerned.

I’ve never bought in to the idea that the ultimate goal of the EU is that mythical superstate. Instead, if you believe that global free(ish) trade is desirable – and if you’re going to go really utopian and over the top – it’s surely aiming for something along the lines of Star Trek’s Federation? Why, after all, aim for a common market on just one continent? If a common market is a good thing, surely it should be expanded globally?

Overly ambitious? Probably. But this sort of partnership agreement formed (or forced through?) by a pre-existing coalition is certainly a rather more realistic route to such an end goal than individual nations all bickering among themselves. If you want to see just how effective that sort of system can be, just have a gander at the increasingly ineffective United Nations or its League of Nations predecessor.

The Union for the Mediterranean

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Launched officially today, and I’ve yet to work out what it’s all for (bar an ego trip for Sarkozy and a jolly for various heads of state, that is).

Mark Mardell has the handiest overview I’ve found so far – and also doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of it. Wikipedia is, as ever, useful if taken with a pinch of salt – largely thanks to the overview of the controversies and squabbles that have marred its birth.

One thing that is fun, however, is to compare the map of this new international club with that of the Roman Empire at its height…

The Union for the Mediterranean vs. the Roman Empire

So, we’ve got Germany, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, the Canary Islands, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, a bit more north African desert and Scotland; they’ve got northern Cyprus, Switzerland, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, bits of Moldova, bits of Ukraine, bits of Dagestan and Chechnya, and Iraq.

I think I can safely say that we win.

Iraq and the need for the left to move on

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(Originally published on The Sharpener)

The Euston Manifesto, officially launched today, proclaims itself as a way forward for “the left” – and is again defended by one of its writers, blogger and Manchester University Professor Norman Geras, over on the Guardian’s website.

Fine – a laudable aim. The British left has needed a way forward ever since the gang of four split the Labour party, a problem only compounded by the fall of the Soviet Union and Tony Blair’s careful guidance of the party towards the centre ground. The British left has to seriously reconsider its approach to the promotion of socialist ideals, and to what parts of the old left-wing obsessions are likely to be acceptable to the electorate in this post-Thatcherite age of rampant capitalism.

Obsessing over the Iraq war achieves none of this. M’colleague Garry has covered one part of the problem, but there’s another, broader one: the Iraq war is an irrelevance to the left’s attempts to revitalise itself after a quarter of a century of what amounts to a repeated defeat of left-wing ideology in successive British elections. It is an irrelevance to what the drafters of the Euston Manifesto profess to be their main aim.

Was Ken Livingstone elected Mayor of London first time around because he’s a socialist? Bollocks – it’s because we all knew it would piss Tony Blair off, and the candidates from the other two main parties were crap. Was George Galloway elected at the last general election because he was a socialist? Likewise bollocks – that was about the Iraq war and the government’s response to terrorism, not his economic beliefs.

This is the real crisis of the British left, not Iraq: the irrelevance of socialism to the modern political system. On the economic front, the right has won, and the left has little chance of a resurgence.

So where to next? Is the launch of a manifesto seemingly based on the Bartlet Doctrine from the fictional West Wing President’s second inaugural address seriously the best the British left can come up with – a wishy-washy, well-meaning but utterly impractical belief in international humanitarian interventionism? What about domestic policy? What about left-wing strategies for helping the poor of THIS country, which used to be what the British left was supposed to be all about?

The Iraq war has happened, whether you agreed with it or not. None of its western instigators are going to face prosecution. So get over it already.

The current insurgency is not thanks to the illegality (or otherwise) of the war. It’s due to the instability that removing a dictator who ruled an articifically-constructed country packed with internal religious and ethnic tensions was bound to produce (even if not necessarily to quite these extremes). If anyone with power had listened to Lawrence of Arabia after the first world war we’d never have been in this mess.

Take away the presence of foreign armies, what is happening in Iraq now is what happened in Yugoslavia after the fall of communism. That was another artificial construct of a country held together through the fear of the state, and fear of the state alone. Once the power of the state was destroyed, in both Iraq and Yugoslavia the suppressed intenal tensions rose to the fore.

Whereas other former Soviet or dictator-run states managed a peaceful transition to post-dictatorship existence (notably Czechoslovakia, peacably dividing itself along cultural lines into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), in many others similar tensions to those of Iraq continue, from Ukraine’s (now apparently failed) Orange Revolution to east Germany’s resentment of the west of the country, the Baltic states’ ongoing difficulties in accepting their Russian minorites as their own to Spain’s post-Franco problems with the Basque seperatists, the partition of India after the British Empire withdrew to the continuing problems endemic in the ex-Soviet central Asian states, mostly held together purely through fear and force by post-communist dictatorships.

The thing that has to be accepted is that Iraq is filled with numerous different cultural identities, split on loosely geographical lines. The most obvious are Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish. The logical solution is to divide the country between the three, and create three new states – ignore the oil factor, that can be solved through negotiation or creating a loose alliance between the three along the lines of the devolved United Kingdom. The chaos and bloodshed of the partition of India could, under the supervision of an international force, be avoided – as long as all three groups were able to gain from the partition.

But when it comes to the ongoing arguments in the west – especially in Britain and America – even these incredibly vague generalisations seem continually to be ignored, with the whole debate over the situation in Iraq divided purely into “pro-war” and “anti-war” camps, both of which repeatedly misrepresent the other and assume that only their interpretation of events is correct.

Me? I don’t care for either. I didn’t support the war, nor did I oppose it. I simply realised that I didn’t know enough about an incredibly complex situation to form a viable opinon. I still don’t – largely thanks to having got thoroughly bored of the whole thing before the invasion officially started and having changed the channel whenever Iraq news has come on for at least the last two years – which is why I so rarely discuss the bloody thing.

What I do find incredibly irritating is when people from either side start generalising about people’s attitudes towards the Iraq situation. The Euston Manifesto is a prime case in point, in that it misses the point entirely – despite having been written by a bunch of people who are obviously intelligent and whose obsessions with Iraq means they know far more than I.

The point about the divisions on the left is not that there is a pro- and anti-war split. It is that the left as a whole has somehow lost the overarching socialist ideology which once held it together. Although there are still a few Marxians knocking around – including a few of the contributors to this site – the majority of the people who currently make up the left no longer have any real unifying political ideology.

The Euston Manifesto proclaims itself an attempt to provide a framework for this much-needed new left-wing ideology. But while Eustonite Oliver Kamm’s ideas of anti-Totalitarianism may – in the broad sense – be laudible, and while the Bartlet Doctrine may sound fine on TV, for any new codification of what it means to be left-wing in Britain in the early 21st century to be successful, it has to tackle issues in Britain, not in distant countries of which we know nothing.

After all, if anyone really cared as much about Iraq as the Eustonites seem to think, there’s surely no way in hell Labour would have been voted back into power a year ago. So why do they feel the need to bother? All they are doing is focussing on a single symptom of the left’s fragmentation, not the disease as a whole.

Two dictators gone in the same day

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Hurrah, etc.

One supported by America throughout his time in power, one persecuted by America for half a century.

But there aren’t any double standards, oh no…

(And yes, I know Musharraf hasn’t gone, and it was only parliamentary elections – but it’s hopefully the beginning of the end at least. Assuming that losing him’s a good thing in such an unstable region, of course… Hmmm… Maybe I should rethink this one…)

Burma / Myanmar

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If you haven’t noticed, where have you been? A mass movement in favour of democracy in a country ruled by a military junta for the best part of half a century is on the brink. Whether it will be crushed with guns and batons or march on to victory, it’s far too early to say.

None of us can have a real effect, but signing this petition will, at least, register your support for those risking their lives for what they believe – something I doubt many people reading this will ever have had to do.

(Hat tip Rachel, who has more details, and Abdul-Rahim for the reminder in what’s been a long and busy day…)

Oh, the irony, etc.

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That dear Mr Blair (today’s his final full day in office, don’tchaknow?) has outright rejected a referendum on the new EU treaty is no surprise.

What is rather entertaining is the sheer gall of the man, arguing that a referendum campaign “would suck in the whole political energy of the country for months”.

This, of course, from the man who took two and a half years to finally announce the date for his resignation (tomorrow! Huzzah!) after the initial hints, prompting a solid 31 months of constant media speculation and petty distractions from the business of government, as both government figures and the opposition have jostled to gain the most from his departure.

Do you think he says that sort of stuff on purpose, or is he genuinely too dense to see the double-standards?

Meanwhile Blair seems to be about to be given a new job sorting out the mess in the Middle East, much like a less likeable British Jimmy Carter. That should keep him nicely out of the way (though not – what a shame – necessarily out of harm’s way) for a few years. As long as he doesn’t get his grubby, incompetent mitts on the proposed EU presidency, I honestly couldn’t care less.

Gordon Brown, meanwhile, must really love Tony right now – this new EU treaty business looks to be the nastiest problem Blair could possibly have left him with. Unless, of course, we manage to invade Iran or North Korea in the next 24 hours…

Nosemonkey does climate change

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As the G8 seems to be trying to focus on cutting emissions and the like, I’m going to set out my take on climate change, point by point. I imagine it’s different to what most people would expect, what with me being (very vaguely) a centre-left liberal – and I’m genuinely intrigued to know what it is I seem to be missing that makes me go against the current consensus.

Here’s how I see it:

1) The long view

a) The climate, the world doesn’t work to mankind’s timescales. Eons mean nothing – you have to look at hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years to genuinely detect trends.

b) We still have polar ice caps and glaciers in many mountain ranges, therefore we are still, by definition, in an ice age.

b) Check out the global temperature history charts – we’re currently on the upturn in average temperature after a period of extreme coolness. Warming is to be expected when an ice age is coming to an end.

2) The mid-range view

a) Accurate records of earth’s temperature have only existed since the 18th century (thanks to Gabriel Fahrenheit and, to a lesser extent, Anders Celcius).

b) This was during the “Little Ice Age“, a period of increased coolness that lasted several hundred years (less than the blink of an eye in glacial terms), until the mid-19th century.

c) This means that when we’re told “it’s the hottest since records began”, you may as well say in June that “it’s the hottest since February”. Of course it’s (on average) hotter than it was during a cold spell which we’ve now come out of.

d) There was also a “Medieval Warm Period“, with some (unscientific) evidence of higher than average temperatures similar to those of the mid-20th century. Who’s to say we’re not entering another one of those.

3) The short-term view

a) Scary charts like this one make it look like the earth is warming rapidly, and that this warming started in the mid-19th century, when industrialisation was beginning to peak.

b) This ignores the long and mid-term views: this chart is more like it, but even that doesn’t give a fair indication, as the world works in cycles of tens of millions of years, not mere centuries. Correlation with the expansion of industrial emissions does not equal causation.

4) However…

a) Even if you dismiss the upturn in global temperature since the Industrial Revolution as coincidence, surely pumping loads of nasty chemicals into the atmosphere and ocean can’t be good, and it would be a very good thing for us to cut down on pollutants.

b) The cleaning up of the London fog / smog after the 1956 Clean Air Act seems to show mankind can have an effect. (Although some evidence suggests the fog was declining anyway, plus London is situated at the bottom of a rounded valley, helping to create a microclimate that trapped pollutants, so is hardly analogous with wider environments.)

c) Carbon dioxide emissions have indeed risen a lot since the Industrial Revolution, to levels higher than ever seen before (as far as we can tell). The chart could look scary – until you notice the remarkable regularity of the sudden increases in Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere approximately every 100 thousand years. The last one of which was approximately 100 thousand years ago… (We don’t, by the way, have any way of telling the Carbon Dioxide concentration in the atmosphere further back than that – and all those figures come from within the current ice age, from gas trapped in the polar ice caps. See this chart for a handy comparison of CO2 and temperature fluctuations during this ice age, from long before man had invented the coal fire…)

5) However number 2…

a) None of this means that climate change ISN’T happening, as some opponents of the global warming lobby claim. If anything, it provides additional evidence that it is.

b) It does, however, cast doubt on the claims about the CAUSES of climate change – at least as far as I’m concerned. Where’s the proof that industrialisation has really caused the current warming, when we were probably due a rise in temperatures anyway, and when – as we’re still in an ice age – the only logical way for the Earth’s temperature to go is up?

6) So what should be done?

If you take climate change to be a very long-term phenomenon, caused by regular cyclical variations in the Earth’s temperature and atmosphere caused for reasons we can barely guess at (much like the probably overdue polar switch)…

We could spend lots of time and money cutting carbon emissions and taxing cars and planes – hell, it certainly can’t hurt. Helping the energy companies to find some genuinely viaible alternative fuel sources would be nice and all.

But in reality there’s not a lot we can do bar damage limitation – at some point the current ice age is going to end no matter what we do. At that stage, the Earth’s average temperature is going to rise by as much as 10 degrees (over the course of a few centuries, most likely). That would make pretty much the entire area between the tropics uninhabitable, and destroy the majority of the world’s current breadbasket – not to mention the sea-level rises caused by the complete melting of BOTH polar ice caps.

This has happened many times before, and when it happens again, we’re screwed, many millions of people are going to die, the world we know will be utterly changed, and there’s precisely nothing we can do about it.

So hell, might as well enjoy the cheap flights while we can, eh? Especially as oil’s bound to run out fairly soon to boot (a finite supply being used up at ever-increasing rates? Doesn’t take a genius to work it out… Remember when Britain used to have coal?)

Go on then, someone show me why I’m wrong – or is it just my word against Al Gore’s?

Update: Catching up on my blog reading, this is very interesting – a series of profiles of respected scientists who deny the supposed consensus on climate change (via). This one, on the role of Carbon Dioxide, is of particular interest, as far as my own doubts are concerned, largely due to step 3′s summary of the reason for picking on man’s activity as the cause of the current apparent rise in temperatures:

No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.

And therein lies my problem – as I’ll no doubt elaborate in the comments a bit later. We simply don’t know what caused the Earth to warm up in the past, nor what caused C02 levels to rise and fall on a 100,000 year cycle. Until we know the past causes, how can we possibly predict the future consequences? – not least in a system as complex as the atmosphere, so notoriously difficult to predict that it’s well nigh impossible to accurately say what the weather will be like next week, let alone in a hundred years.

(It also reminded me of a post from a year ago, Merrick on why “carbon offsets are a fraud”, which is well worth a read, though Merrick would doubtless disagree with the main thrust of this post…)

Spain: absolute bastards

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You see, the thing about the EU is that it’s first and foremost supposed to promote and facilitate free trade. Of course, as not every country in the world is a member of the EU, what it’s ended up being is a kind of free trade area. (Only not a perfect one, obviously, thanks to the vagaries of cross-border economics, the lack of a pan-EU single currency and such like.)

But one of the biggest, most damning criticisms of the EU is that the Single Market amounts to little more than a customs union, a zone of economic protectionism for EU member states, which is doing more than pretty much anything (well, bar the Common Agricultural Policy, perhaps) to screw the chances of developing nations to grow their own international trade and compete on the global stage.

Well, too little too late, perhaps, but in recent years the EU has been making some vague noises as if it’s going to try to rectify this situation. Most of which, it must be said, have been due to external pressure, such as the recent battle with China over EU restrictions on clothing imports, or the discussions with the US a year or so back, during which the Americans offered to drop their agricultural subsidies to US farmers if the EU would likewise drop the CAP. (Thanks to France’s reliance on the current CAP arrangements, unsurprisingly this cut no dice. But had the deal gone ahead, lefties world wide would have ended up in the amusing position of having to revise their hatred of George W Bush, because if that proposal had been accepted then it would have done more to alleviate global poverty than pretty much any agreement ever… Heads would doubtless have exploded in confusion.)

The major reason for this change of protectionist heart is that the World Trade Organisation has also ruled that the EU’s current elaborate system of deals with non-EU countries (largely the “ACP countries“) is illegal. Dubbed “preferential trade agreements”, they were largely (if unconsciously) modelled on the deals France got in at the EEC’s foundation to allow former French colonies access to European markets, but have the added benefit of artificially stabilising prices. Fine for rich European nations – cheaper food. Rather worse, however, for poor African farmers, desperately trying to find a market for their meagre goods.

So, thanks to the WTO, all these preferential trade agreements have to be replaced with “economic partnership agreements” (EPAs) by the end of this year. The idea, coming out of the Cotonou Agreement of 2000, is to gradually remove all the trade preferences and barriers that have developed between the EU and the 80-odd ACP countries over the last 30 years, to allow much more free economic development, and a much more equal trading partnership. And, to ensure that the WTO doesn’t get annoyed again, the EPAs will be available to every developing nation in the world.

With only a few exceptions, such as arms and munitions (and, I believe, sugar and rice for some reason), this will finally begin to create a much more free system of global trade, and – hopefully – begin to allow less developed countries to get a few benefits from globalisation for a change.

BUT.

Thanks to Spain (and the EU’s continued veto system, which the failed constitution was to rectify) the entire deal could be screwed, because our Iberian friends have seemingly only just realised – seven years after the Cotonou Agreement was made – that, erm, Spain grows a lot of bananas, and so do quite a few of the developing nations that the new EPAs are being set up with.

Yes, yes it does seem like Spain may have completely missed the point of “free trade” here. But they are also threatening to use their veto if they don’t get some kind of exemption for bananas (elections next year, and they don’t want to risk losing the farming vote). This will, of course, open the floodgates to every other EU member state to start demanding revisions and exemptions for their own pet products. Which will, of course, defeat the whole object of the thing.

Still, I have a solution. Scrap nation states’ vetoes. Scrap nation states. Scrap elections. Appoint me first President for Life of the European Union, and I’ll sort everything out. It’s the only way we’re ever going to get anything done, by the looks of things. The EU needs countless reforms, both major and minor, but every time it looks to be getting somewhere some uppity member state starts getting all selfish on us, usually for electoral reasons, and screwing everything up.

It can’t just be me who’s getting annoyed with this childishly petty short-termism of our dear elected representatives, can it? These new arrangements could have a massively beneficial impact on some of the poorest countries in the world, but because a few over-subsidised farmers in the Canary Islands may be unable to compete on a level playing field, Spain’s prepared to sign the death warrant for countless poor subsistence labourers throughout the third world. I mean, I’m not much of a one for all this “Live8″ and “Make Poverty History” nonsense, being far too cynical for all that, but really: what a bunch of absolute bastards.

Blair’s foreign policy: the aftermath

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(Originally published on The Sharpener)

Professor Victor Bulmer-Thomas, in his last briefing paper as Director of non-profit foreign policy analysts Chatham House, is suitably damning of our dear foreign policy obsessed PM – with a few nice little digs to boot:

“In Blair’s case, of course, the focus on foreign policy may have been accentuated by the difficulty of playing a leading role in the management of the UK economy, where the Chancellor of the Exchequer has held sway for so long.”

Me running a Europe-focussed blog, however, I’ll ignore (most of) the stuff about The War Against Terror, and head straight to the bits on British relations with the EU which, as Bulmer-Thomas notes, were pretty much the only aspect of foreign policy in which Blair had shown any interest before becoming PM – and that largely because Europe was a good stick with which to beat the disunited Tories back in the mid-90s. Blair did, after all, start moderately well – treading a fine line between reticence to commit fully to an EU (and a Euro) which was not quite right, while making definite steps towards closer participation:

“The Amsterdam Treaty, signed in June 1997, provided an opportunity for Tony Blair to demonstrate that Britain would once again play a constructive role in the European Union, while at the same time holding out the prospect of eventual British membership of the Eurozone. The decision in 1998 to sign into UK law the European Charter of Human Rights was seen in the rest of Europe as a very positive step. The claim that Britain would be at the heart of Europe no longer rang hollow. Furthermore, Blair followed up these promising first steps with a crucial summit with President Chirac at St Malo in 1998 in which the foundations of European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) were laid on the basis of Anglo-French military cooperation.”

Ah – the St Malo Summit… Remember that? Nope – and neither does anyone else. The vague promises of an Anglo-French military alliance – to coincide with British agreements to reconsider EU-wide tax policy and the rebate – have never been heard of since and, nine years on, the tax and rebate issues have yet to be solved to anyone’s satisfaction.

(Another nice little reminder of Blair’s brilliant ability to say one thing in public and then piss off and do the precise opposite – though not overly relevant to Anglo-European relations – is of the old “ethical foreign policy” of the early Blair years, which included ehtically breaking UN arms embargoes to supply arms to African civil wars and refusing to extradite mass-murdering dictators to face trial… Nice chap, our Tony…)

And then comes 1999 and Kosovo – Blair being the guy who pushed for carpet-bombing to save civilian lives (nice one, Tone – bombing hospitals to save lives). In a tough situation in which something had to be done, he had the balls to step up, but still – was that the best he could come up with? Still, as the Chatham House report notes,

“This was a momentous decision for two reasons, both of which appealed to Blair. First, it committed NATO for the first time in 50 years to offensive action; and, secondly, it demonstrated how force could be used against a sovereign country with a degree of legitimacy without the support of the United Nations.”

And we all know how THAT precedent has ended up being used in the last few years… First, however, our Tony thought it was time to elaborate, and test his new version of international law a bit further:

“The rationale of the Kosovo campaign was subsequently set out by the prime minister in his Chicago speech in April 1999, while the war itself was still raging. In essence, this established the conditions under which Britain would support humanitarian intervention against a sovereign power with or without United Nations support… It was, in retrospect, a naïve speech with little or no reference to history that was unduly influenced by European failures in the Balkans before Blair came to power. However, the speech set the tone for the next few years and provided the intellectual case for the military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000.”

(As another brief aside, does this little passage from that Chicago speech sound familiar? – “Just as I believe there was no alternative to military action, now it has started I am convinced there is no alternative to continuing until we succeed… Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider.”)

And then into The War Against Terror proper:

“[Blair's] desire to show empathy with the United States in its moment of grief was entirely understandable. However, his failure to try to coordinate a European response was regrettable… it gave the distinct impression that Europe was incapable of forming a geo-strategic view, that bilateral relations were the only ones that counted… Up to this point, the divisions within the European Union over policy towards the United States were not so severe that they threatened to disrupt the march of the European project… The problem Blair faced was not how to maintain European unity in the face of a threatened US preemptive

war.”

How did he do it? He didn’t. That simple. Since 2001/2, France and Germany have become ever closer, Britain ever more sidelined on the fringes of the EU. Even the arrival of ten new member states in May 2004 – affording an unprecedented opportunity for Britain to shift the EU balance of power back in her favour by getting the newcomers on her side – was not enough to do the job. Blair and co utterly failed to take the European initiative, and this failure was almost exclusively down to the utterly unnecessary distractions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hell, if Blair had focussed more on Europe in the run-up to expansion, the entire EU project could – just could – have seen itself reshaped on more British lines by now… As Bulmer-Thomas goes on to note, in fact:

“The European dimension of Blair’s foreign policy has been particularly difficult to manage since the Iraq invasion.”

But here I also have a quibble with the report’s interpretation: “Blair can take credit for the fact that Britain is no longer the outlier when it comes to Europe”? Where on earth did they get that impression from? Precisely nothing that Britain has proposed in the last few years has had any chance of success in the EU without the support of other, less disgraced countries. And even then, very little gets done the Blair way, from his attempts to force ID cards on us via Brussels to attempts to solve the ongoing EU budget fiasco.

Blair, the report effectively concludes, gambled it all on sucking up to the big boy, and has gained nothing of substance in return:

“The root failure… has been the inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice – military, political and financial – that the United Kingdom has made.”

And this is what it always comes down to, for me. What, exactly, has been the benefit of British participation in The War Against Terror? What have we gained? We know what we’ve lost – any kind of standing in the Middle East, any kind of respect in Europe or ability to influence the EU agenda on significant issues without being thought of as the agents of the US (as with the recent airline data transfer situation, where Britain continued to act bilaterally with Washington, agreeing to all their demands, while the rest of the EU was desperately trying to put up a united front).

If you support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because you believe they were the right thing to do, fine. But of what benefit have they been – or are they genuinely likely to be – to Britain? And, at the same time (and please try to avoid accusations of anti-Americanism) – what have we gained from our ever-closer close relationship with the US over the last few years?

As the report notes, “No British government – indeed, no European government – can afford to distance itself from both the United States and the European Union at the same time”, yet under Blair we have leaned so much closer to the US that our EU ties are wearing thin. Without those ties, we are of no use whatsoever to the US. After all, Blair’s principle role after lending our support to Bush post-9/11 was to gain military backing for US ventures in the Middle East. In this, Blair pretty much failed – at least, with the EU countries that mattered. The Anglo-French military agreement of St Malo in 1998 was but a distant memory, and without French support, official UN backing for the invasion of Iraq would never happen.

“A closer relationship with Europe is not only a requirement of British foreign policy, it is also likely to be urged on Britain by future US presidents. A government such as Law and Justice in Poland does the United States no favours by combining a strong Atlanticist streak with Europhobia. What US governments want is a European Union that can make a real contribution to the international political and security agenda, and any European government with the diplomatic skills to deliver EU support will be hugely appreciated.”

In other words, nothing has changed in half a century. This is precisely what Eisenhower wanted Churchill to agree to do back when the initial talks over the foundation of what has become the EU were happening.

And whoever succeeds Bush as President will know one thing above all else – the US needs more high-profile allies on the international scene who, unlike the likes of Russia and Saudia Arabia, can also be held up as great examples of the benefits of democracy and the rule of law. Whoever can deliver those will quickly usurp Britain’s position as America’s favourite European pet. Neither Brown (with his reputation across the Channel as leaning towards Euroscepticism) nor Cameron (with his foolish decision to withdraw Tory MEPs from the leading centre-right group in the European Parliament, leaving them with only fascists and fruitcakes for partners) look likely to have the skills that will be required to keep the fine balance working – especially as Blair will have left that balance deciedly skew-wiff by the time he finally gives up office.

Yep, we’ve supported The War Against Terror. We’ve helped oust a vicious dictator in Iraq and a bunch of barbaric psychopaths in Afghanistan. But, purely from the perspective of the British national interest, was the weakening of our international standing really worth it?

Depending on the long-term outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush and Blair may well be right when they claim that history will judge them to have done the right thing. But will history be so kind when the aftermath of Blair’s obsessions with crises further afield results in Britain being both sidelined in Europe and abandoned by her erstwhile American ally thanks to this loss of influence?

The military coup will be blogged…

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(At least until they shut off the net in an hour or two…)

Stirling work from Bangkok Pundit, 2Bangkok, Thai-Blogs, and ignore the pink hearts and multiple exclamation marks, Gnarly Kitty is also putting in a good, stream-of-consciousness show.

Once again, the blogs have more rapid updates than most of the news channels.

Update: Go on then, this is meant to be a Europe-focussed blog. Have a something about the Hungarian riots – Pestiside being quite probably spot on.

Wed update: New Bangkok Pundit liveblog, another liveblog at Brain Farts, and Austin Arensberg has more from the scene in multiple posts, while Jonah has aftermath photos of normality and soldiers on the streets.