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The UNSC has 15 members, five permanent and ten elected. The elected members are chosen for two-year terms, staggered so that five members leave every year.

Let’s take the 2008 members and look who recognizes Kosovo’s independence.

Permanent members

United States (yes)
Russia (no)
China (no)
France (yes)
Great Britain (yes)

Members for 2007-8

South Africa (no, and probably won’t)
Indonesia (no, and certainly won’t)
Panama (no, though they don’t seem to care much)
Belgium (yes)
Italy (yes)

Members for 2008-9

Burkina Faso (yes, just recently)
Libya (no, because President Qaddafi says so)
Vietnam (definitely no)
Costa Rica (yes — was one of the first)
Croatia (oh yes)

So, the current Council is split almost perfectly — 8 in favor, 7 against. It’s also a pretty even split in terms of intensity; on both sides, there are some countries who feel strongly about the issue and some who don’t much care.

To get something out of the UNSC — like, for instance, a resolution recognizing Kosovar independence, either explicitly or by amending UNSC 1244 — requires a 2/3 majority: 10 votes. So, Kosovar independence is not going to be on the table this year. In fact, at the moment, the Council is bogged down considering whether to accept Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s recommendation that the UN get ready to reduce its mission there.

Which is not to say that nothing is happening. There’s been a subtle shift in the last month or two. Here’s what the SC-watchers at Columbia University have to say:

Both Serbian President Boris Tadic and Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu addressed the Council during the open debate. The Serbian representative attended under rule 37 of the Provisional Rules of Procedure of the Security Council (this provides for a member to participate in discussions where its interests are affected) and the Kosovo representative under rule 39 (this allows the Council to invite someone to provide it with information). Over the months, there has been greater Council acceptance procedurally of direct Kosovo participation. In June there was no opposition to a Kosovo representative participating in an open meeting, unlike in December 2007. At that time the US and Europeans had wanted the Kosovo representative to be able speak in an open debate but Russia was opposed.

So, they’re now allowing the Kosovar President to address the SC openly. That’s tiny, micro-incremental progress, but it is a step forward.

But that’s about all that’s likely to happen this year. The SC is pretty much deadlocked. So nothing will happen for the next six months.

And then? Well, then it gets interesting. We lose that middle group, 3 noes and 2 yeses. That leaves a 6-4 split, with the yeses needing 4 votes from the 5 new members to prevail.

Is this possible? Well, the elections are by region. For 2009, there will be one open slot from Africa, one from Asia, one from Latin America/the Caribbean, and two from “Western Europe and others”. So far, Austria, Iceland and Turkey — all recognizers — have announced their candidacies for the two Western European seats. (Yes, in the UNSC, Turkey is part of Western Europe. Don’t ask.) Other candidates may yet step forward — the elections aren’t until October — but since the majority of Western European countries support Kosovar independence, right now it looks like those seats will cast “yes” votes.

And the other three? Well, there’s a sub-rotation in Africa that is due to give the seat to an East African country this year. So we’re probably looking at Ethiopia, Uganda, Djibouti, someone like that. Most of these countries have ethnic separatist movements of their own, and so are unlikely to favor Kosovar independence. (In this context, it’s worth noting that Serbian President Boris Tadic visited the annual summit of the African Union yesterday, thanked its members for their support on Kosovo, and asked that they continue to do so.)

The Latin American seat is, at the moment, wide open. There was a very bitter dispute in 2006 between Venezuela and Guatemala, which may become an issue again this time. Not many Latin American countries currently recognize Kosovar independence, but then most of them haven’t had much reason to think about it.

And the Asian seat? Well, the only country that has expressed an interest so far is… Iran. Which would be interesting for reasons that go well beyond Kosovo. (Iran is a “no”, BTW.) Iran got elected once before, back in the 1950s, but the Islamic Republic has never been a serious candidate before. There will surely be other candidates; possibilities include perennial candidate Japan (yes), India (no), Malaysia (no) and the Philippines (maybe).

So, next year’s UNSC is up for grabs on this issue. They’ll almost certainly have eight votes favoring Kosovar independence, will probably have nine, and might perhaps reach ten.

Of course, as we all remember from that one boring class in high school, at a certain level this doesn’t matter, because permanent members have a veto. The Russians can always crush any resolution that favors Kosovar independence. So Kosovo won’t take a seat in the UN for many years to come.

But at another level it matters a lot, because if that happens then it will drastically transform the terms of the debate. It’ll no longer be “the UN doesn’t recognize Kosovo”; it’ll be “the UN would recognize Kosovo, except for the Russian veto.”

So, Kosovo-watchers will be keeping one eye on the UN elections in October.

(Meanwhile, the number of countries recognizing Kosovo continues to creep slowly upwards. It might reach 50 by the end of this year. Is that a lot or a few? Well… that depends. Another post, perhaps.)

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First, there’s some interesting discussion of why birthrates are varying so much across Europe — lowest in the post-Communist East and the Mediterranean countries, much higher (though still low by world standards) in France and Scandinavia. One demographer gives this plausible-sounding answer:

[There] would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world — expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world.

By “traditional mind-set”, he’s talking about things like men helping with housework, dependence on an extended family for child care, and the social status of women generally. The article unfortunately lacks a comments section, but they do make some interesting points.

Second, there’s a fascinating discussion of how some East German cities are thinking about handling population decline. The East has been hit by a triple whammy — low birthrates, little immigration, and significant emigration to the West — which in some regions has reduced population by 20% or more in the last 15 years, with still more shrinkage soon to come. One novel response:

One day in March, I was standing on a platform at the top of a smokestack attached to a defunct sausage factory in the German city of Dessau, looking out on a ragged urban landscape: derelict factory buildings, brick homes and shops, a railroad track snaking through a swath of grass and dirt. Even the brilliant spring weather didn’t improve the view. But the bearish middle-aged man beside me was full of enthusiasm. He waved an arm expansively, indicating a distant tree line. “From here you see that the city is embedded in a protected nature area,” he said through an interpreter. “We will bring that into the city.” Listening to Karl Gröger, director of the city’s department of building, is disorienting; where local politicians are supposed to cheer development, he was standing in the midst of his city’s industrial infrastructure and saying, in effect, “Someday all of this will be wilderness.”

They’re going about it methodically, and the first steps have already been taken:

“We said to the government of Saxony-Anhalt, ‘Shrinkage is a completely new phenomenon,’ ” Akbar told me. “We have to look for new ways to deal with it.” According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better. The plan that Akbar’s team came up with was for 18 cities in the region (two cities now share one government) to submit to an exhaustive process of review and soul-searching under the direction of Bauhaus planners and, by the year 2010, to come up with long-term redevelopment strategies appropriate to each — to find a way for each city to shrink constructively.

Dessau itself, Akbar said, had two distinctive features. One, as Karl Gröger indicated from the sausage-factory lookout, is that it is surrounded by protected national forest. The other is that it has no historic town center (80 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II) and thus no core. The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.” The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.

Erasing streets and flats to make parks, meadows and trees: there’s an interesting image.

In theory, something like this ought to be happening all across Eastern Europe, Spain, Italy and Greece. Most of these countries are going to lose 20% or more of their population in the next 30 years. And the loss won’t be spread evenly; some regions within these countries will continue to grow, while others will lose 50% or more. Someone should be thinking about this.

Brief googling doesn’t provide more information on the German program, though, and not a thing anywhere in Eastern Europe.

Readers: anybody know anything?

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The US, Russia and China can be expected to top the medal charts in the Olympics, as usual, but Croatia had already triumphed over two of the Great Powers – England and Russia – in qualifying before beating Austria and Germany last week. Up next: Turkey, the former Ottoman Empire.
Most of Europe got a, er, kick out of Croatia’s victory over Germany last week, in what everyone was too polite to call the Group of the Third Reich. We could all feel sorry for Poland once again as Germany beat them with two goals from a player born in Poland, Lukas Podolski. More surprising was the sense of joy when hard-working Austria levelled the match against Poland in the final minute, an emotion brought on in part by the dismay at seeing co-hosts Swit-zerland get knocked out the night before by a last-minute Turkish strike.
Still, it wouldn’t be Europe if there weren’t some quarrelling and quibbling over arcane regulations. The Irish No “dramatised the inability of European leaders to persuade citizens of the benefits of complex documents that most find impossible to understand” as the Financial Times put it.
Ruud van Nistelrooy’s opening goal against Italy showed that most fans are unaware of some rules that govern the common project.
There was more of the same ahead of the France-Italy match as millions tried to work out the permutations based on the outcome of that encounter and the simultaneous Holland-Romania game, as everyone wondered whether Holland would pervert the competition rules to suit its own interests.
The second round throws the question of who’s In and who’s Out into stark perspective. France will be less enthusiastic about new EU member Romania after failing to beat them in the so-called Group of Death. Croatia’s defeat of Germany, on the other hand, sparked by 20-year-old Ivan Rakitic, is enough to guarantee them a welcome across the rest of the Continent. The long-standing question of whether Turkey should be In our Out looked to be resolved with 15 minutes to go against the Czechs, before the Turks over-came all odds and their own ambivalence to get themselves definitively In.
This is one European project that will go ahead without France, and, quite possibly, Germany. France are decidedly Out, having been too loyal to ageing stars, a policy that nearly also cost Italy a place in the next round.
In the quarter-finals Germany may not be able to cope with the vibrant Cris-tiano Ronaldo, still only 23, while Spain can count on 22-year-old attacking midfielder David Silva and the creative skills of the even younger Cesc Fabre-gas. Whoever wins out of Russia and Sweden will struggle to cope with Hol-land’s youthful exuberance. In this European project at least, if not the now stalling wider one, it’s youth and new ideas that bring success.

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