Category Archives: Rest of the World

Koizumi and dictators

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Considering that Japan’s own Tony Blair, Junichiro Koizumi, is due to step down as Prime Minister in a few weeks, it’s hard to know what impact his current sucking up to murderous Central Asian dictators will have on the constitutionally pacifist nation’s future foreign policy.Nonetheless, the fact that any supposedly liberal, westernised democracy would even consider attempting to build closer relations with the perpetrators of last year’s Andijan massacre, or a state which routinely employs threats of bottle-assisted anal rape in an attempt to silence political opponents, is concerning to say the least.

Update: More in-depth analysis of Koizumi’s trip from the always top-notch Registan (and part 2, and again) and neweurasia.

Sensible terrorists

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Psycho terrorists acting sensibly? What the hell is the world coming to? The best possible move Hezbollah can make – publicly accept the UN ceasefire plan so that Israel looks unreasonable. And then when rockets continue to be fired south across the border and Israel responds in kind, it can all be blamed on a few bad apples and Israel slagged off even more. Top bit of PR, nutty Islamic killer dudes!

Blair, Brown, Cameron and the future of British international relations

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One of the perennial problems for an aspiring UK Prime Minister is the need to juggle domestic popularity with workable international relationships – especially with our EU partners. Because if you’re seen to suck up too much to the French and Germans, the rantings of the eurosceptic press combined with a public all too willing to believe that the EU is the root of all evil will swiftly ensure a massive drop in domestic popularity. (Sucking up to the US, meanwhile, seems fine.)

Over the last few years Gordon Brown has done a fairly decent job of giving the impression that he thinks the EU is a bit of a disaster. Be it his famous “Five Economic Tests” over joining the Euro (so famous that no one can ever remember what they are), which promise to keep the UK out of the Eurozone for the forseeable future, or occasional rants about how other EU countries should follow his wonderful example when dealing with all things fiscal, his slagging off of the EU and other EU countries seems to have been calculated to create a domestic image of a sensible, rationally sceptical figure, unwilling to leap headlong into the tepid waters of further EU integration without having tested them first.

In contrast to Blair’s disastrous management of his relationship with the EU – where domestically the Prime Minister looks like a rabid Europhile, willing to give away the rebate and God knows what else, yet our EU partners see him as one of the biggest obstacles to any settlement – Brown has relitively successfully cultivated an image of euroreticence in an attempt to avoid being attacked for europhilia. This has, of course, ensured that our continental partners are not particular fans of the Chancellor – they admire his abilities, but find him personally a difficult man to work with.

With Bush not able to remain in the Oval Office for more than another couple of years, Britain’s relationship with the US could well dramatically change by the next General Election. No one has any way of being able to suck up to the future President before November 2008, and will not be able to risk alienating any of the candidates just in case. As such, the one constant in our international relations over the next few years will be the EU – so any future Prime Minister would be a fool not to try and forge their own personal alliances.

David Cameron’s plans are still being formulated, but show some promise – Gordon, as of yet, appears to have no foreign policy objectives at all. This may sound like a blessed relief after the best part of a decade with Prime Minister who seems to care more about what people overseas think than those of us who are his electorate, launching wars and jetting off all over the world on expensive jollies like there’s no tomorrow, but it’s hardly feasible for Prime Minister to ignore international relations to the extent Brown seems to have done. Yes, he’s fairly well up on British trading relations and the economy – but without the personal relationships with other heads of state he’ll never be able to get anything done.

Say what you like about Blair – through a combination of arrogant self-belief and sucking up to the US he’s managed to build himself an international reputation that puts him on the level only of Thatcher and Churchill in terms of Prime Ministerial profiles. Whether it’s Brown, Cameron or some wild card who follows him in to Number 10 as PM, they’re going to have a tough time maintaining the insanely prominent position Blair has occupied on the world stage during his time in office.

So is it a sign of imminent movement on the Labour leadership front that Gordon has dispatched his most loyal minion to Brussels to start buttering up the bureaucrats? While Gordon’s been starting to stick his oar in to issues of terrorism and civil liberties on the domestic front, this is the first real sign of him making a move on the international scene. Has the countdown begun on Brown’s long-awaited move?

The oddness of international law

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The oddness of international law (part 234): Montenegro’s independence has finally allowed the country to conclude a peace treaty with Japan. Europe’s newest state had technically been at war with the land of the rising sun since the 1904-05 Russo-Japan War – in much the same way that the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed and Russia were supposedly in a state of war from 1853 to 1966 (when a Soviet official and the mayor of the town formally ceased hostilities, the latter supposedly asking his commie counterpart to “Please tell the Russian people that they can sleep peacefully in their beds”).

Remember that Make Poverty History nonsense?

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Remember all that guff at Live8 and the G8 summit last summer – all the Geldof and chums self-congratulatory, self-promoting heartfelt appeals, all the Blairy-fairy rubbish about saving starving Africans?

Well, it’s had precisely tit all impact – aid groups are predicting death tolls of upwards of 11 million over the coming months as vast swathes of central/eastern Africa head into the spring after two years without rainfall.

They have no food, no water, and no hope. They are already dying, and it hasn’t even begun to get REALLY hot yet.

Time to help out, folks:

  • Red Cross Horn of Africa Bulletin
  • Christian Aid East Africa appeal
  • Oxfam Food Crisis appeal

    • The G8, EU, Africa, the CAP

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    (and a bit on the BBC’s supposed bias)

    As a G8 sideshow, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson today gave a speech in Edinburgh on living standards in Africa, how they will be affected by current EU reforms, and what needs to be done to help the continent pull itself out of poverty. Nothing especially major considering what’s going on up the road in Gleneagles (not that that’s likely to achieve much either).

    The important bit, however, was his admission that “in our current EU sugar reform, one developing country’s gain may well be another’s loss.”

    Cut to the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News (supposedly a Europhile institution that the sceptics always get het up about for its bias). A report on the impact of EU sugar quotas. A (nearly) word-for-word transcription:

    “The EU reforms will set [this farmer's] family back a generation. But it is not just him. The whole of Swaziland will face devastation… Swaziland’s biggest industry faces ruin, as do the thousands of farmers who depend on it.”

    This all accompanied by images of extreme, near-subsistence poverty, and African farmers with those dead, hopeless eyes staring at the camera, desperate. All deliberately set up to make the viewer react with “what a bunch of bastards – how could they do this to these poor, poor people?”

    This report was obviously aimed at the G8 meeting, and our Tony’s main push for more help for Africa. But it strongly – very strongly – suggested that the EU is responsible for more than its fair share of poverty in the continent. Not only that, but it was stated explicitly that the EU is making the situation worse in Swaziland with no “buts” involved – even though it is easily arguable that the EU’s current reforms will actually help Africa as a whole, even if hurting some countries.

    Yep, the BBC’s pro-EU alright.

    The rest of Mandelson’s speech, though in places riddled with a level of hypocricy the likes of which is rarely seen (I mean, “it is not for want of EU effort to help Africa trade”? bollocks, Mandy) is worth a look, even if more interesting stuff is happening elsewhere.

    He does, amidst the nonsense, have some valid points:

    “33 of the 46 sub-Saharan African countries enjoy full quota and tariff free access to European markets, including for all agricultural goods, under the EU’s “Everything But Arms” initiative for Less Developed Countries… Already EBA has had positive results. Exports to Europe of the range of products that benefit have risen by 100% in 3 years, whereas they had fallen by 11% in the previous ten years… Thirteen sub Saharan countries are not classed as LDCs and do not enjoy that full and free access, including Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. They do however enjoy a privileged trading relationship with Europe as ACP countries. 88% of their agricultural exports to Europe enter tariff and quota free.”

    There are also a few interesting suggestions of how to go forward, though I’m not convinced about “aid for trade” – sounds too much like “oil for food”, and we all know how THAT ended up…

    Still, Mandy’s figures won’t convince many. Not least if you read this report from the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs:

    “‘Rich countries have never been richer, yet they have never given less; they give half as much in aid as they did in 1960. Increasing their aid to the levels needed – as they promised to do in 1970 – would cost them the equivalent of a cup of coffee a week for each of their citizens. The price of not doing it will be measured in millions of lives,’ Oxfam’s head of advocacy, Jo Leadbeater, said in statement on Tuesday.

    “In 1970 the leading nations agreed that 0.7 percent of the GDP of their states would be devoted to aid. This undertaking was reaffirmed at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and again at the UN International Conference on Financing for Development at Monterrey in 2002.

    “To date only five countries have managed to reach that target: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Six others have pledged to do so by 2015: Belgium, Britain, Finland, France, Ireland and Spain.”

    The top aid-givers may all be European (even if Norway isn’t part of the EU), but their decisions to give are not thanks to any EU strategy.

    Still, aid’s not necessarily the way forward – I’m still trying to work out where I stand on this one, though am beginning to lean further and further towards (almost) free trade as the best solution. When it comes to aid, it’s the whole “give a man a fish” argument all over again. From that same report:

    “There appears to be broad consensus that more aid is essential if Africa is to get ahead, but a series of arguments put forward by the International Monetary Fund contends that there is no strong evidence that aid boosts economic growth and, hence, no reason to suppose that aid reduces poverty either.

    “Co-authored by IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan and a colleague, Arvind Subramanian, two papers on aid maintain that while projects may do good, they have unseen side effects that eventually hurt those they are intended to help.

    “The authors point out that aid flows inadvertently push up a country’s exchange rate, damaging exporters; aid projects that hire local workers are bidding up skilled wages, again damaging the export firms that hire from the same labour pool.”

    Whereas free trade, of course, could see African farmers exploited by big multinationals for meagre pay. But at least they’d be getting paid. Meanwhile, European farmers, now too expensive (as they already are) would likely more and more go bankrupt, unable to compete.

    Without some continuation of subsidies for farmers to enable them to maintain the land, vast swathes of European countryside would turn to wasteland, slowly returning to nature as 6,000+ years of agricultural cultivation slowly merges with the wilderness.

    This is (sort of) what the current CAP reforms claim to aim to prevent (they’re no longer subsidising farmers to produce food, technically it’s now to maintain the land – and no, I’m not convinced either). But they still shut out the competition, and poor farmers outside the EU still suffer as a result.

    It’s a tricky one, and no mistake. Certainly too tricky to sort out over a few drinks in Scotland. But if this meeting is taken merely as groundwork for the World Trade Organisation shindig in Hong Kong in December, it’s just possible that the cogs could begin to whirr in the right direction. Only just, mind…

    “The greatest thing that’s ever been organised…

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    …in the history of the world, probably”

    Thus spake Chris Martin of Coldplay at Live8 just now, and so perfectly summed up the inanity of the thing.

    This is an intelligent chap. An intelligent chap with a good history degree from one of the best universities in the country. And yet he’s happily spouting hyperbole in a vain effort to make people think that a bunch of pop stars no one’s ever heard of and a handful of washed-up legends belting out tedious music of a Saturday afternoon is actually going to change anything.

    Why didn’t they charge for tickets, exactly? Whose bright idea was it, precisely, to hope that people would be guilt-tripped into donating cash by this pointless series of concerts? Who seriously thought that the focus of this mindless exercise would be on its nominal reason for existing – African poverty – rather than the behind-the-scenes spats and gossip about the stars?

    The more they spout nonsense, over-exaggerating how significant these little shindigs are, the less impact it will have. The more people think “oh, it’s really doing well and raising awareness and stuff”, the less likely they’ll be to actually get off their arses and do anything themselves.

    And if you believe the “x amount of cash will feed a family for a year” things, just how many families could the people prancing about on the telly have fed if they went to the bank rather than poncing about in the park?

    If you believe their adverts, in the time it’s taken for me to type this 180 children have died of poverty.

    Nations Reunited?

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    The invasion of Iraq saw the UN in both good and bad lights. Kofi Annan doggedly trod a middle path in an attempt to appease the American desire for conflict, so the eventual condemnation he dished out had real moral authority (something the Americans helped consolidate with Colin Powell’s laughable attempt to present the Iraqi situation in the same uncompromising way as Adlai Stevenson did the Cuban Missile Crisis). However, French gamesmanship with the proposed American resolution and subsequent accusations of corruption against Annan’s family have somewhat besmirched the UN’s record.

    And now, at last, to the point: the UN has announced plans for“the most sweeping changes in its history”. This New York Times article puts the motivation for such changes down to “bruising division over the Iraq war” leaving the organisation “feeling ill-equipped to meet modern challenges represented by terrorism, failed states, nuclear proliferation, poverty and violence.” Bruising division is certainly correct but ultimately the “challenges” to the UN remain the same: how to deal with permanent Security Council members who, with their veto and, in the case of the US, Russia and China, impressive military strength, can pretty much ignore any resolution they choose.

    The proposed big shake up here is the expansion of the Security Council from 15 to 24, either by introducing a mind-bendingly complicated system of temporary members, or by increasing the number of permanent members – likely candidates are Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Egypt and Nigeria or South Africa (according to the NY Times). This really boils down to so much PR guff. Though better regional representation is desirable, the back-room politics would remain the same, with stronger nations trying to bribe weaker nations to vote their way or, ultimately, just ignoring the final outcome if it does not suit them. If there is a way around this particular obstacle, this report has not found it.

    Of more practical interest is the serious condemnation of the bureaucracy, both in terms of the UN as a sprawling gravy train for diplomats and of the decadence of certain of its bodies (a specifically quoted example is Cuban and Libyan membership of the Human Rights Commission). These subsidiary bodies are where the UN has the potential to do most good but stories of scandal and corruption have left them weakened and under as much attack as the ‘talking shop’ of the General Assembly.

    As with the EU, it’s difficult to predict the future of the UN, but while the former is on an upward path to warm and sunny climes, the latter is drifting gradually downward, paid lip-service (if that) in geopolitical terms and constantly sniped at by members for whom its decisions are inconvenient. This would not be altered by any of the ‘big changes’ proposed. However, the noble and optimistic ideal at the heart of the UN remains, and a sweeping set of open institutional reforms could help restore confidence in those areas where it actually does good work.

    UN-decisive

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    Even people like me who think the UN is a superb institution agree that it needs to be reformed. I agree that it failed in the Balkans, and I’d suggest it’s currently failing in the Sudan. Expanding the Security Council is the current proposal – whether this will work, or just ensure that there are even more potential vetoes on any UN action, and thus that it becomes as ineffectual as certain Americans seem to think it is already remains to be seen.

    Either way, it is about time that Japan and Germany were considered for permanent places on the Council. They are two of the largest economies in the world, and both have direct experience of being caught up in internal madness which has led to lots of death and destruction. The insight this might allow into future conflicts and the need for intervention could be invlauable.

    Nonetheless, I can see where former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is coming from when he says “It’s not in Germany’s interest to take part in every important decision over war and peace around the world and be responsible for the consequences” – after all, look at the consequences facing Britain and the US after intervening in Iraq…

    And while it seems only the Germans have a problem with Germany joining, Japan’s potential membership is not so popular. the Japanese have been singularly unsuccessful in convincing their neighbours that they are no longer the same country that viciously invaded, raped, burned and gassed their populace during the 1930s and 1940s. Plus there’s the slight problem of the Japanese Constitution which, though not quite so much of a sacred document as its American counterpart (on which it was heavily based) is nonetheless avowedly pacifist. How can a pacifist nation make a useful contribution to a council whose purpose is to decide on military intervention?

    More confusing still is the inclusion of Brazil and India on the list of nominees. Include India, Pakistan will be pissed off – hardly a good idea after the on-off nuclear standoff in the Indian sub-continent of the last decade. Include Brazil, there is another country with a permanent seat (after China and, depending on who you ask, Russia) with a horrendous record of human rights abuses.

    The UN needs to reorganise, that’s for certain, but this whole thing sounds rather like it hasn’t been properly thought through, or considered for long enough. A bit like my last post, now I come to think about it…