Category Archives: Political issues

After Osama

Posted on by
2

Juan Cole sets the stage:

Usama Bin Laden was a violent product of the Cold War and the Age of Dictators in the Greater Middle East. He passed from the scene at a time when the dictators are falling or trying to avoid falling in the wake of a startling set of largely peaceful mass movements demanding greater democracy and greater social equity. Bin Laden dismissed parliamentary democracy, for which so many Tunisians and Egyptians yearn, as a man-made and fallible system of government, and advocated a return to the medieval Muslim caliphate (a combination of pope and emperor) instead. Only a tiny fringe of Muslims wants such a theocratic dictatorship. The masses who rose up this spring mainly spoke of “nation,” the “people,” “liberty” and “democracy,” all keywords toward which Bin Laden was utterly dismissive. The notorious terrorist turned to techniques of fear-mongering and mass murder to attain his goals in the belief that these methods were the only means by which the Secret Police States of the greater Middle East could be overturned.

I’ve got to think the European militaries will be done with Afghanistan about as fast as is practicable. How much civic and NGO engagement remains afterward is an open question. The Schröder government in Germany may have said that the country’s security began in the Hindu Kush, but surely there are ways to secure Germany without soldiers in Afghanistan.

European support for new democratic governments in the Arab world will not be simple, given troubled colonial histories in some places and populist worries about Islam in others. Nevertheless, Europe has much to offer in both managing transitions and models of pluralist democracies that remain true to their varied national and religious backgrounds.

Ron Asmus, RIP

Posted on by
2

Ron Asmus, a key person in the 1990s enlargement of NATO and a tireless advocate of better European and transatlantic relations, died on Saturday, April 30. He was 53.

The Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog writes:

He was a discreet, wise and sympathetic presence in the region, in Washington DC, and in West European capitals for two decades, explaining to jittery ex-communist politicians that volume and frequency of public utterances does not correlate with effectiveness, to American officials and politicians that the goal of “Europe whole and free” still required patient and detailed work, and to West European leaders that a security grey zone in the east would be as bad for them as it would be for those consigned to it.

Just so.

He will be much missed, even among people who barely knew him, and his efforts missed among people who knew him not at all.

Royals

Posted on by
12

When I look out my window, I see no bunting and no sign of any street party. We’re all republicans round here, then. If I were to take a trip into town, to where the royal wedding procession is going to be, I’d likely find a ratio in the order of 3:1 of foreigners to Brits. Still, it’s a morning for reflection. Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris argues (and surely only for the sake of argument) that the monarchy is a good thing. Let me reflect on that for a moment. Er … no. The monarchy isn’t a good thing. Here are my reasons.

1. The monarchy is not politically neutral. Even if the monarchy isn’t explicitly of the political right, whether in custom or belief, royal arrangements and traditions are such that they can be taken advantage of by the ruling party. Best advantage from them is had by a right wing ruling party. Neutral royals with a minimum of clout would have made sure that former Labour prime ministers remained on the wedding guest list, and were visible on the day. Neutral royals would have insisted that the wedding cause only a minimum of disruption to national life. Instead, the wedding is happening on a Friday and the government has declared it a holiday. It certainly looks as though the British Conservatives have an interest in our stopping work to watch what’s going on with the royals; if the monarchy were politically neutral, the ruling party wouldn’t bother much with them. As it is, we find David Cameron saying things like this.

2. The monarchy is illiberal. The royal wedding explicitly promotes the norm of marriage: that’s obvious. But the monarchy as a whole also promotes the norms of heterosexuality, male primogeniture, patriarchy, religious worship, military service, and – last but not least – fixed, titled status distinctions. All of these norms are bound up together in a picture of an ‘ideal life’, as lived by one family. This goes against the liberal idea that we each have a right to choose which values to take up, and which to drop. Titles and status aside (any head of state will have a title and high status) we can ask whether the royal family could at least display a pluralism of values. Could there be a openly gay Prince of Wales and an avowedly atheist Queen Mother? I think the answer is no, and not because that’s what the Windsors are like: I don’t think any family, royal or not, is capable of a pluralism of values to the degree that’d be needed. Compared to the society within which each is embedded, all families are small, insular and parochial. As a consequence, it’s doubtful that a liberal society can tolerate the very notion of an exemplar family. Yet this is what the British monarchy is usually taken to be.

3. The monarchy does something terrible to the Metropolitan Police, who seem to think today is all about the nation coming together to celebrate. In fact, they’ve announced their intention to firmly sit on anyone who looks as though they’re doing something other than celebrating. This, of course, is not how they should be carrying on: a liberal polity would make this clear to them.

4. The monarchy encourages us to accept class divisions. This goes along with the illiberalism, but there’s also clearly something up with the whole spectacle of the monarchy. It’s not just that the royals are rich and upper class, it’s that we seem content to gaze on their wealth and high status. Ordinarily, you might think to ask: why don’t the houses in my street look more like Buckingham Palace? Why aren’t my circumstances better? And is there something I can do about it? If you’re having a royal wedding street party today, you’re probably not thinking any of that: you’re bound up in the spectacle. And that might be the idea. Chalk one up for the thesis of false consciousness.

5. The monarchy discourages human flourishing. Prince William and Kate Middleton are young, active and attractive. In the royal wedding, we see two people in their prime making plans to spend their lives together. Setting the issue of chauvinism of physical appearances aside for a moment, why shouldn’t we celebrate what we see? Well, one national newspaper said that if Kate Middleton hadn’t gotten engaged to whom she did, she would have spent her life in “peaceful anonymity”. But why should that be so? Why couldn’t Kate Middleton have an accomplished life in her own right, and a famous life at that? The monarchy promotes the idea that some people are to receive certain rewards while the rest of us get to watch. This goes beyond simple allocative unfairness. William and Kate’s material blessings are conditional on their acceptance of extraordinarily rigid career constraints. These two people simply won’t get to do the things of which they’re capable, yet they’re to be considered high achievers nonetheless. Their failure is to count as success. This can’t be considered an encouragement of human potential. Specifically, William will be doing token military service for a few more years: after that, he’ll be attending state and establishment social events. He’ll occasionally attend the openings of public works, which could be seen as a limited positive. Kate will be having kids: in fact, she’ll be spending her life in “peaceful celebrity”.

6. The monarchy is excessive. No country with a presidency would close the streets and line them with soldiers for the marriage of the grandson of the serving president. It could all be done with very much less.

7. The monarchy does something terrible to the British media. Have you seen?

Update: I didn’t intend to single out heterosexuality as the norm promoted by the royal family; something has to go first in the sentence order, after all. But it seems to have gotten the attention over here.

Update 2: Here’s a video of Charlie Veitch getting arrested in Cambridge the day before the royal wedding. He was released 23 hours and 45 minutes later, without charge. It turns out that the Metropolitan Police co-ordinated its efforts with other police forces to make a series of pre-emptive arrests (around a hundred?). They detained others on the day of the wedding itself. Altogether, the arrests seem to have been a tactical move aimed at keeping would-be protestors in custody during the wedding, with police powers to detain people without prosecution as the means. However, if no law is being upheld and no crime is being prevented, the effect is simply to stifle expression of public dissent. This is wholly inconsistent with the democratic right to freedom of expression. Since the arrests were regionally co-ordinated, it’s reasonable to assume that the tactic was decided on by police at a high level. It’s also reasonable to assume that they were acting with the connivance of the British government. If that’s so, then the British government has in fact adopted a policy of suppressing dissent. It seems confined to street protest so far. I’m not sure they’d dare push it much further, but we’ll see. Who knew that they cared so much about royal weddings?

Update 3: And here’s another video, this time of the Metropolitan Police doing their thing in support of freedom of speech, in Soho Square, on the day of the wedding. Soho Square is quite some way from the Mall, incidentally. But six guys with a guitar and a megaphone: a threat to the regime? Really?

Elsewhere

Posted on by
Reply

* The new president of Kosovo is the youngest, the first woman and the first non-partisan person to hold the post. She will also be the last selected by the present method of parliamentary election. Her election by the parliament breaks a deadlock and averts a potential political crisis. Atifete Jahjaga, who will turn 36 on April 20, is a western-trained policewoman and had been deputy director of the Kosovo police force. According to the deal that brought her to office, future presidents will be elected directly, and the first such election will be held within six months. People who know more about Kosovo than I do are kindly invited to weigh in.

* This long post on Bulgaria’s shrinking population coins the phrase “demographic bailout.” It’s an interesting look at a corner of Europe and a set of problems that tend not to find a wider audience. Population changes and their implications have long been an AFOE theme, ably explicated by Edward. Some of his views on Bulgaria are here, here and here.

* LiveJournal, which is the key platform for Russia’s blogosphere, has been under recurring DDoS attacks in April (LJ responds). It’s not at all clear who is behind the attacks, with accusations and counter-accusations quickly turning into a hall of mirrors. What has become clear is that an important element of Russia’s civic discourse is vulnerable.

* Speaking of Russian discourse, the country’s current chief of the armed forces’ general staff, Nikolai Makarov, spoke at the General Assembly of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences and apparently delivered quite a take-down. As one expert characterized the speech, Makarov said “the various military academies and institutes continued studying the old wars, assuming that in the future, the Russian military would be called upon to fight World War II yet again, and what’s more, do it with World War II era technology and tactics.” (The Academy’s director is a WWII veteran.)
Makarov took the Russian military’s shortcomings in the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 as impetus for significant reform, and has argued that Russia largely slept through the last 20 years of military advances. Furthermore, he foresees an army in which conscripts would make up no more than 15% of the forces. That would be an epochal change in Russian military culture. Interesting developments to follow, even if you aren’t living in a place that felt the sharp end of Russia’s armed forces recently. (h/t LGM)

Finalité Revisited

Posted on by
16

Shortly after the big round of EU enlargement in 2004, I took a look at future prospects for enlargement. At the time, I called prospective members, “largely a collection of the poor, ill-governed and recently-at-war.” Most of them are much less recently at war, many of them are better governed, and almost all of them are less poor, yet for all but a few prospects for EU accession seem to me more distant than in 2004.

What has happened?
Continue reading →

Panning back to Egypt…

Posted on by
5

A couple of weeks ago, the big question had ceased to be “Will there be a revolution in Egypt?” and had become “Will it matter?” The revolutionaries had demonstrated that they could endure, could divide the Army from the government and the security state, and had eventually succeeded in chasing the president out of power. But would this mean lasting change? Wouldn’t it just imply the creation of a new ruling elite, or a permanently-temporary military junta? The grey lineup detailed here were in charge, issuing statements about going back to work. This piece from David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal sketches it out, and reveals far more than it means to.

It’s easy to sketch the scenario in which Egypt blows it. The army could maintain control behind a façade of democracy and protect elites who benefited from the growth produced by significant economic reforms that Mr. Mubarak blessed. Four things have to go right for Egypt to seize the moment.

First, the young protesters of Tahrir Square have to keep the pressure on the military. A lot depends on which way they go. If they’ve been soured by privatization that engorged the cronies, will they demand the security and subsidies of the state over the risks, competition and dynamism that comes with a vibrant private sector? In short, do they want government jobs? Or a shot at being hired—and maybe fired—by an entrepreneurial company?

Of course, the policies those elites benefited from are precisely the ones he goes on to advocate, and the ones that the IMF recommended and Mubarak implemented. Wessel alludes to this further down the piece but never quite manages to say that the Egyptians hated them so much they overthrew the state. Also, although he compares Egypt with Poland after communism, he doesn’t seem to be aware that a major factor in Poland’s revolutions (1981 and 1989) was that the state got huge international loans it couldn’t pay back.

Anyway, so that was one scenario – the military guarantees some constitutional change but keeps the political economy and the power-structure Mubarak left.

It doesn’t seem to be working. Mohammed Fadel has a good rundown of the Army’s (and the Muslim Brothers’, and the 2005-era middle class dissidents’) efforts to put pressure on strikers, their eventual failure, and some of the economic ideas circulating among the revolutionaries. Apparently, the military has eventually been induced to open talks with the real trade union movement as opposed to the yellow unions that were part of Mubarak’s system. You can read their negotiating position at guess who’s.

But perhaps the best news of all isn’t economic. Here’s some incredible reportage of an incredible and very significant event – the crowds take over the headquarters of Central Security in Alexandria, and start salvaging the secret files the spooks were trying to destroy.

I wouldn’t bet on the holy-of-holies in Cairo lasting much longer – Hossam el-Hamalawy has already been down to his local station with his Canon EOS 5D and his angry mob. Guess what, that’s full of files as well.

In 1989, something similar happened – when it looked like the post-Wall East German government might be stabilising, and that it felt confident enough to tell the public that it was going to retain the Stasi although under a new name, people invaded the organisation’s offices to secure the key assets of any secret police force, the files. It was the end, really; there could be no more hoping for some sort of patched-up afterlife for the basic structure of the DDR. This time there was much more violence, and the spook toys included a sinisterly large stash of Viagra – the Stasi did a fair amount of drug dealing as part of its efforts to raise hard currency, but nothing with those implications.

There probably weren’t many documents like this one in the files at the Normannenstraße either.

The upshot includes the resignation of Mubarak’s last prime minister. In an almost uncanny echo of East Germany, he went on TV not long before the crowds moved into the secret police stations, to defend the institution of Central Security. Just like Hans Modrow did, and with exactly the same effect. His exit was announced via the Egyptian Army’s facebook profile.

His replacement is profiled here – Essam Sharaf, significantly, is both a candidate endorsed by the revolutionaries and a participant in the revolution himself, as well as apparently enjoying a good reputation with the workers’ movement as far back as 2006.

And it’s one jet airliner, for ten prisoners…

Posted on by
4

One thing that is perhaps being overlooked by people discussing whether or not it would be wise to impose a no-fly zone over Libya is exactly what such a zone would set out to prevent. When it was first suggested, it was inspired by the general horror that the Libyan government was having crowds of civilians strafed by its Sukhoi 22 close-support aircraft. However, especially since several Libyan Air Force crews defected to Malta and to the revolution, air activity has turned out to be much less significant in what is beginning to look like a classical West- or Central-African civil war, based around Toyota pickups and 23mm Russian anti-aircraft guns and mercenaries paid with the money from exporting some mineral or other. You know the one.

It’s fairly well known that Libya sponsored several of the key warlords of 90s West Africa – Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, and several others originally met up in Libyan-funded training camps. Interestingly, not only did one of the versions of Jetline International base itself in Tripoli and trade aircraft back and forth with two of Viktor Bout’s companies, but Gaddafi’s government maintains an impressive airlift capacity. As well as the two flag-carrier airlines, Libyan Arab and Afriqiyah, whose names track the changing priorities of foreign policy, the Air Force operates a semi-commercial cargo wing, Libyan Arab Air Cargo, with a fleet of Ilyushin 76 and even two enormous Antonov-124s, some of very few such aircraft owned outside the former Soviet Union.

I’ve put together a Google spreadsheet of transport-type aircraft with Libyan operators, sorted so that currently active aircraft are at the top, and generated URIs to look them up on Aerotransport.org, for subscribers, and on JetPhotos.net, in the two right hand columns.

There are a total of 180 airframes, of which 118 are active. It’s probably worth noting that there was a report that top managers at Afriqiyah had resigned rather than take part in Gaddafi’s war effort, and constant rumours of mercenaries being lifted into airfields in the southern deserts.

The upshot of this is that logistics, rather than tactical air power, might be the most important factor in Gaddafi’s efforts to defeat the Libyan revolution/win the Libyan civil war. Rather than engaging in combat, the aim might instead be blockade, as a complement to the international financial sanctions already in place. (A ship has recently been stopped in British waters carrying large quantities of freshly printed Libyan currency.)

On the other hand, it also adds complexity and risk to the whole issue. There are still plenty of people who want to leave Libya, and British government-chartered airliners are ferrying some of them from Tunisia to Egypt. It would be a bad business, to say the least, to shoot down an Il-76 full of refugees. It could be better to try to cut off the supply chain at source by grounding Libyan aircraft elsewhere in the world, although this requires the cooperation of those states who are still willing to let them recruit on their territory. Further, imposing a blockade also implies a responsibility for the survival of the civilian population. Sending aid to eastern Libya has already been suggested, of course.

For a little extra, the Russian Demography blog, venturing well out of its usual beat, notes that the Libyan Government’s Dassault Falcon 900EX business jet, 5A-DCN, took a trip to Minsk recently. Its ICAO identifier, useful with virtual-radar sites, is 018019. There are various things the regime might find useful in Belarus – mercenaries, again, small arms (although they don’t appear to be short of them), and perhaps least disturbingly, impunity. (Hat tip.)

(Cross posted from TYR)