PARIS – No sooner did US President Barack Obama welcome home American troops from Iraq and laud that country’s stability and democracy than an unprecedented wave of violence – across Baghdad and elsewhere – revealed the severity of Iraq’s political crisis. Is that crisis an unfortunate exception, or, rather, a symptom of the failure of Obama’s Middle East diplomacy, from Egypt to Afghanistan?

Upon taking office, Obama set four objectives in the Middle East: stabilize Iraq before leaving it; withdraw from Afghanistan from a position of strength and on the basis of minimal political convergence with Pakistan; achieve a major breakthrough in the Middle East peace process by pushing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements; and open a dialogue with Iran on the future of its nuclear program. On these four major issues, Obama has clearly achieved little.

With regard to Iraq, since George W. Bush’s presidency, the United States has strived to exert a moderating influence on Shia power, so that the country can create a more inclusive political system – specifically, by passing a new law on sharing oil-export revenues among the Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities. Unfortunately, the precise opposite happened.

Kurdistan has embarked on a path toward increased autonomy, while the Sunnis are increasingly marginalized by a sectarian and authoritarian Shia-dominated central government. This has implications for the regional balance of power, because Iraq is growing closer to Iran in order to offset Turkey, which is seen as protecting the Sunnis.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s remark during a recent trip to Washington that he was more concerned about Turkey than Iran exposed the huge gulf between Iraq and the US, which now appears to have lost all significant political influence on Iraqi affairs. Indeed, in a disturbing development, the US decided not to play its last remaining card in dealing with al-Maliki: arms sales.

There can no longer be any doubt that the occupation of Iraq was a huge strategic defeat for the US, because it ultimately served only to strengthen Iran. Yet Obama lacks a medium-term vision to deal with the seriousness of the situation – an oversight that, sooner or later, will cost the US dearly.

One of two things will happen: either tighter containment of Iran through sanctions on oil exports will produce positive results and weaken Iran, or containment will fail, leading the US inexorably toward a new war in the Middle East. It is not unlikely that some in US foreign-policy circles regard the deepening Iraqi crisis as a building block in constructing the case for military intervention in Iran.

But Obama is nobody’s fool. He has registered the US Congress’s hostility toward Iran and the desire to confront the Islamic Republic militarily. He believes, however, that he can avoid extreme solutions; in diplomacy, anything can happen, and the worst-case scenario is never guaranteed.

The problem is that Obama has a strong tendency to overestimate America’s ability to influence weaker actors. What is true for Iraq is also true for Afghanistan: Obama can pride himself on having eliminated Osama bin Laden, which was undoubtedly a success, but one that failed to address the root of the problem. Despite a 10-year military presence, involving the deployment of more than 100,000 troops at a cost of $550 billion, the US still has not succeeded in creating a credible alternative to the Taliban. Worse, its political alliance with Pakistan has frayed.

Indeed, US-Pakistan relations have regressed to their level before September 11, 2001, a time marked by deep mutual distrust. Pakistani leaders obviously bear a heavy responsibility for this state of affairs. But if the US has been unable to involve Pakistan in resolving the Afghanistan conflict, that failure simply reflects America’s refusal to give the Pakistanis what they wanted: a shift in the regional balance of power at the expense of India.

Pakistan, accordingly, froze cooperation with the US, because its leaders no longer saw much to gain in fighting the Taliban. The risk is that when the American withdrawal from Afghanistan begins – a process that has just been brought forward to next year, from 2014 – the US will again seek to impose sanctions on Pakistan, an unreliable nuclear state that will react by strengthening ties with China and deploying Islamist terrorism.

Obama also sought to use America’s influence to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of his strategy for the broader Middle East. He initially thought that by pressuring Netanyahu to freeze settlements, he would succeed in reviving the peace process. But he was quickly and skillfully outmaneuvered by his ally, who knows how important the Israeli issue is to US domestic politics. By putting Obama at odds with the rest of the US establishment, Netanyahu forced him to retreat.

In 2009, Obama envisioned a settlement of the conflict through the strong commitment of the international community. In 2011, he asserted that only both sides’ willingness could ensure a successful outcome. Clearly, the US cannot do much to resolve the conflict.

There is no overarching explanation for Obama’s successive Middle East failures, but there are a few factors worth considering: the increase in the number of asymmetrical conflicts, in which the traditional use of force is largely ineffective; increasingly blurred lines between difficult allies and intransigent adversaries; and major political differences between a centrist US president and a Congress that is dominated more than ever by extreme ideas.

But Obama himself bears a large part of the blame. Contrary to what one might think, he does not have a real strategic vision of the world – a shortcoming reflected in his quick capitulation in the face of opposition to his proposals. Obama often has a plan A, but never a plan B. When it comes to conducting a successful foreign policy, plan A is never enough.
Zaki Laïdi is Professor of International Relations at Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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NEW YORK – The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of “funk,” or loss of nerve. The British had stopped believing in their own empire. They simply lost the will, in Rudyard Kipling’s famous words, to fight “the savage wars of peace.”

In fact, Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which exhorted the white race to spread its values to the “new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child,” was not about the British Empire at all, but about the United States. Subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” it was published in 1899, just as the US was waging a “savage war of peace” of its own.

Chaudhuri had a point. It is difficult to sustain an empire without the will to use force when necessary. Much political rhetoric, and a spate of new books, would have us believe that the US is now in a dangerous state of funk.

For example, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney likes to castigate President Barack Obama for “apologizing for America’s international power,” for daring to suggest that the US is not “the greatest country on earth,” and for being “pessimistic.” By contrast, Romney promises to “restore” America’s greatness and international power, which he proposes to do by boosting American military force.

Romney’s Kipling is the neo-conservative intellectual Robert Kagan, whose new book, The World America Made, argues against “the myth of American decline.” Yes, he admits, China is growing in strength, but US dominance is still overwhelming; American military might can still “make right” against any challenger. The only real danger to US power is “declinism”: the loss of self-belief, the temptation to “escape from the moral and material burdens that have weighed on [Americans] since World War II.” In a word, funk.

Like Chaudhuri, Kagan is an engaging writer. His arguments sound reasonable. And his assessment of US firepower is no doubt correct. True, he has little time for domestic problems like antiquated infrastructure, failing public schools, an appalling health care system, and grotesque disparities in income and wealth. But he is surely right to observe that no other power is threatening to usurp America’s role as the world’s military policeman.

Less certain, however, is the premise that the world order would collapse without “American leadership.” France’s King Louis XV allegedly declared on his deathbed: “Après moi, le déluge” (After me, the flood). This is the conceit of all great powers.

Even as the British were dismantling their empire after World War II, the French and Dutch still believed that parting with their Asian possessions would result in chaos. And it is still common to hear autocratic leaders who inherited parts of the Western empires claim that democracy is all well and good, but the people are not yet ready for it. Those who monopolize power cannot imagine a world released from their grip as anything but a catastrophe.

In Europe after World War II, Pax Americana, guaranteed by US military power, was designed “to keep the Russians out and Germany down.” In Asia, it was meant to contain communism, while allowing allies, from Japan to Indonesia, to build up economic strength. Spreading democracy was not the main concern; stopping communism – in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas – was. In this respect, it succeeded, though at great human cost.

But, now that the specter of global communist domination has joined other fears – real and imagined – in the dustbin of history, it is surely time for countries to start handling their own affairs. Japan, in alliance with other Asian democracies, should be able to counterbalance China’s growing power. Similarly, Europeans are rich enough to manage their own security.

But neither Japan nor the European Union seems ready to pull its own weight, owing in part to decades of dependency on US security. As long as Uncle Sam continues to police the world, his children won’t grow up.

In any case, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, “savage wars of peace” are not always the most effective way to conduct foreign policy. Old-fashioned military dominance is no longer adequate to promote American interests. The Chinese are steadily gaining influence in Africa, not with bombers, but with money. Meanwhile, propping up secular dictators in the Middle East with US arms has helped to create Islamist extremism, which cannot be defeated by simply sending more drones.

The notion promoted by Romney and his boosters that only US military power can preserve world order is deeply reactionary. It is a form of Cold War nostalgia – a dream of returning to a time when much of the globe was recovering from a ruinous world war and living in fear of communism.

Obama’s recognition of America’s limitations is not a sign of cowardly pessimism, but of realistic wisdom. His relative discretion in the Middle East has allowed people there to act for themselves. We do not yet know what the outcome there will be, but “the greatest country on earth” cannot impose a solution. Nor should it.
Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at Bard College, and the author most recently of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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CANBERRA – Although the relationship between China and the United States is critical to Asia’s future, this does not mean that the region will become a Sino-American duopoly. The concept of a “G-2” is never going to fly in Asia.

To begin with, excluding China, Asia’s combined GDP is roughly equivalent to that of the US, and it vastly exceeds that of China. Furthermore, Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy, while economies like India, South Korea, Indonesia, and Australia are growing rapidly.

Under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s direction, Indonesia is on the cusp of becoming a $1 trillion economy. With a population approaching 250 million, the country’s annual GDP growth has been consistently above 6%. At this rate, Indonesia is likely to emerge as one of the world’s top six economies by 2030.

Moreover, most of these dynamic emerging economies are also robust democracies and are committed to open economic policies. Indeed, free-trade agreements (FTAs) are expanding across the region.

Australia and New Zealand’s FTA with South East Asia, for example, which is now in force for all 12 signatories, creates a free-trade area embracing more than $3 trillion of regional economic activity. Australia is also concluding an FTA with South Korea, and is involved in similar negotiations with China, India, and Japan. Negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership at the 2011 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Hawaii reflected the pursuit of such opportunities by other countries in the region.

From a global perspective, Asia’s economic dynamism is impressive: Asia accounted for less than 20% of global GDP 30 years ago, whereas the US represented 30%. But, within the next five years, Asia will constitute nearly one-third of global GDP, with the US share falling to less than one-fifth.

Nonetheless, both continental and archipelagic Asia remain beset by unresolved territorial disputes over areas such as the Korean Peninsula, the East and South China Seas, the Taiwan Straits, the Thai-Cambodian border, and Burma’s restive border regions. Each of these conflicts could undermine the prosperity that the region has built so far.

Indeed, while Asia is home to all of the world’s hopes for the twenty-first-century global economy, it is handicapped by all of the rigidities of an almost nineteenth-century set of territorial and security disagreements. Although some of these disputes are intrinsically internal, there is an interest across Asia in collectively charting a common course on some of the region’s seemingly intractable problems, lest they spiral out of control.

Moreover, Asia has been demonstrating democratic progress, as well as a strong interest in expanding its economic openness (both internally and externally). The region is also acknowledging the need for national sovereignty, whereby countries do not have to fear outside interference with domestic politics. Finally, across the region, there is a pervasive desire to avoid polarization into Chinese and American blocs. Instead, countries in the Pacific region are attempting to build the institutions and the habits of cooperation that will enable all of us to collaborate in addressing individual security challenges as they arise.

But can the dissonant values, aspirations, and interests of the US, China, and the rest of Asia be reconciled in the decade ahead? Or do we face a future defined by strategic drift, ideological conflict, and irreconcilable interests? I firmly believe that Sino-American conflict is not inevitable, and that it would undermine the interests of all parties, as well as their fundamental values.

A step in the right direction, albeit an imperfect one, was taken with the establishment of the G20. China, India, Korea, Indonesia, and Australia, along with Japan, now sit at the same table to deliberate on global financial regulation, financial imbalances, and the global recession. So far, China has played a significant and constructive role in this forum. In fact, without China, the global economy would not have recovered as rapidly as it did from the most recent crisis.

As China seeks to take its place in the global order, it has increasingly sought to enhance its global leverage by cooperating with other emerging economies – the other “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) – in major global negotiations. The BRICS’ regular meetings and cooperation at multiple levels are likely to be a continuing feature of the international system. But, with the exclusion of the US, this does not provide a common platform to deal with shared policy challenges in Asia (or, for that matter, elsewhere).

In his recent book On China, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues for the development of a Pacific Community. In 2011, a good start at following through on this vision was realized at the East Asia Summit in Bali, where, for the first time, China, the US, and the region’s other principal players gathered around a table to deliberate their interests. It was a historic opportunity to begin forging a common vision for Asia’s future.

The task today is to craft what future historians might call a Pax Pacifica – a peace that will ultimately be anchored in the principles of common security, and that recognizes the realities of US and Chinese power, without turning the rest of the region into collateral damage should the Sino-American relationship deteriorate.
Kevin Rudd is Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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HELSINKI/JOHANNESBURG – The world is on an unsustainable path, and must urgently chart a new course forward, one that brings equity and environmental concerns into the economic mainstream. To do so, we must put sustainable development into practice now, not in spite of the economic crisis, but because of it.

Our challenges today are many. Economies are teetering, ecosystems are under siege, and inequality – within and between countries – is soaring. Taken together, these are symptoms that share a root cause: speculative and often narrow interests have superseded common interests, common responsibilities, and common sense.

As Co-Chairs of the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, we have been asked by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to work with 20 of the world’s most eminent leaders in grappling with these issues. Our task is clear: propose how to provide greater opportunity for more people with less impact on our planet.

A quarter-century ago, the Brundtland report, named for former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, called for a new paradigm of sustainable development. It stated that durable economic growth, social equality, and environmental sustainability are mutually interdependent. Human well-being depends on their integration.

We are convinced not only that this concept is sound, but also that it remains more relevant than ever. Now we need to put theory into practice by moving sustainable development into mainstream economics and making clear the costs of action – and inaction – today and in the future.

By 2030, as the human population swells and appetites increase, the world will need at least 50% more food, 45% more energy, and 30% more water. Our planet is approaching, and even exceeding, scientific tipping points. This has serious implications for how we manage the global commons – and for reducing poverty: if developing countries are to realize their legitimate growth aspirations, they will need more time, as well as financial and technological support, to make the transition to sustainability.

Yet we remain optimistic. Representative democracy is now the world’s dominant form of government. Advances in science have given us a better understanding of climate and ecosystem risks. Billions of people are connected by technologies that have shrunk the world and expanded the notion of a global neighborhood. We believe that we can summon the wit and the will to choose our future, rather than have it choose us.

The greatest risk lies in continuing down our current path. In 2030, a child born this year will come of age. We cannot mortgage her future to pay for an inherently unsustainable and inequitable way of life.

So, how do we begin to tackle the massive challenge of retooling our global economy, preserving the environment, and providing greater opportunity and equity, including gender equality, to all? The Panel’s report, Resilient People, Resilient Planet, offers suggestions.

First, we need to measure and price what matters. The marketplace needs to reflect the full ecological and human costs of economic decisions and establish price signals that make transparent the consequences of action – and inaction. Pollution – including carbon emissions – must no longer be free. Price- and trade-distorting subsidies should be made transparent and phased out for fossil fuels by 2020. We also need to build new ways to measure development beyond GDP, and propose a new sustainable development index by 2014.

Second, we must put science at the center of sustainability. We live in an era of unprecedented human impact on the planet, coupled with unprecedented technological change. Science must point the way to more informed and integrated policy-making, including on climate change, biodiversity, ocean and coastal management, water and food scarcities, and planetary “boundaries” (the scientific thresholds that define a “safe operating space” for humanity). To see the big picture, we propose a regular Global Sustainability Outlook that integrates knowledge across sectors and institutions.

Third, we need to provide incentives to take the long view. The tyranny of the urgent is never more absolute than during tough times. We need to place long-term thinking above short-term demands, both in the marketplace and at the polling place.

Limited public funds should be used strategically to unlock greater private investment flows, share risks, and expand access to the building blocks of prosperity, including modern energy services. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals – aimed at, among other things, halving global poverty by 2015 – have served us well. Governments should develop a post-2015 set of universally applicable Sustainable Development Goals that can galvanize long-term action beyond electoral cycles.

Fourth, we should prepare for a rough ride ahead, because extreme weather, resource scarcity, and price volatility have become the “new normal.” We need to strengthen our resilience by promoting disaster risk reduction, adaptation, and sound safety nets for the most vulnerable. This is an investment in our common future.

Fifth, it is crucial to value equity as opportunity. Inequality and exclusion of women, young people, and the poor undermines global growth and threatens to unravel the compact between society and its institutions. Empowering women has the potential to reap tremendous benefits, not least for the global economy.

Ensuring that developing countries have the time – and the financial and technical support – to make the transition to sustainable development ultimately benefits all. Promoting fairness and inclusion is the right thing to do – and the smart thing to do for lasting prosperity and stability.

No expert panel, including ours, has all the answers. But if we work together, we can help to steer our world onto a safer, more equitable, and more prosperous course. We call on leaders across all sectors of society to join us. The need is urgent; the opportunity, enormous. Let us seize it.
Jacob Zuma is President of the Republic of South Africa. Tarja Halonen is President of the Republic of Finland. They serve as Co-Chairs of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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NEW YORK – Nothing illustrates better the political crosscurrents, special interests, and shortsighted economics now at play in Europe than the debate over the restructuring of Greece’s sovereign debt. Germany insists on a deep restructuring – at least a 50% “haircut” for bondholders – whereas the European Central Bank insists that any debt restructuring must be voluntary.

In the old days – think of the 1980’s Latin American debt crisis – one could get creditors, mostly large banks, in a small room, and hammer out a deal, aided by some cajoling, or even arm-twisting, by governments and regulators eager for things to go smoothly. But, with the advent of debt securitization, creditors have become far more numerous, and include hedge funds and other investors over whom regulators and governments have little sway.

Moreover, “innovation” in financial markets has made it possible for securities owners to be insured, meaning that they have a seat at the table, but no “skin in the game.” They do have interests: they want to collect on their insurance, and that means that the restructuring must be a “credit event” – tantamount to a default. The ECB’s insistence on “voluntary” restructuring – that is, avoidance of a credit event – has placed the two sides at loggerheads. The irony is that the regulators have allowed the creation of this dysfunctional system.

The ECB’s stance is peculiar. One would have hoped that the banks might have managed the default risk on the bonds in their portfolios by buying insurance. And, if they bought insurance, a regulator concerned with systemic stability would want to be sure that the insurer pays in the event of a loss. But the ECB wants the banks to suffer a 50% loss on their bond holdings, without insurance “benefits” having to be paid.

There are three explanations for the ECB’s position, none of which speaks well for the institution and its regulatory and supervisory conduct. The first explanation is that the banks have not, in fact, bought insurance, and some have taken speculative positions. The second is that the ECB knows that the financial system lacks transparency – and knows that investors know that they cannot gauge the impact of an involuntary default, which could cause credit markets to freeze, reprising the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ collapse in September 2008. Finally, the ECB may be trying to protect the few banks that have written the insurance.

None of these explanations is an adequate excuse for the ECB’s opposition to deep involuntary restructuring of Greece’s debt. The ECB should have insisted on more transparency – indeed, that should have been one of the main lessons of 2008. Regulators should not have allowed the banks to speculate as they did; if anything, they should have required them to buy insurance – and then insisted on restructuring in a way that ensured that the insurance paid off.

There is, moreover, little evidence that a deep involuntary restructuring would be any more traumatic than a deep voluntary restructuring. By insisting on its voluntariness, the ECB may be trying to ensure that the restructuring is not deep; but, in that case, it is putting the banks’ interests before that of Greece, for which a deep restructuring is essential if it is to emerge from the crisis. In fact, the ECB may be putting the interests of the few banks that have written credit-default swaps before those of Greece, Europe’s taxpayers, and creditors who acted prudently and bought insurance.

The final oddity of the ECB’s stance concerns democratic governance. Deciding whether a credit event has occurred is left to a secret committee of the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, an industry group that has a vested interest in the outcome. If news reports are correct, some members of the committee have been using their position to promote more accommodative negotiating positions. But it seems unconscionable that the ECB would delegate to a secret committee of self-interested market participants the right to determine what is an acceptable debt restructuring.

The one argument that seems – at least superficially – to put the public interest first is that an involuntary restructuring might lead to financial contagion, with large eurozone economies like Italy, Spain, and even France facing a sharp, and perhaps prohibitive, rise in borrowing costs. But that begs the question: why should an involuntary restructuring lead to worse contagion than a voluntary restructuring of comparable depth? If the banking system were well regulated, with banks holding sovereign debt having purchased insurance, an involuntary restructuring should perturb financial markets less.

Of course, it might be argued that if Greece gets away with an involuntary restructuring, others would be tempted to try it as well. Financial markets, worried about this, would immediately raise interest rates on other at-risk eurozone countries, large and small.

But the riskiest countries already have been shut out of financial markets, so the possibility of a panic reaction is of limited consequence. Of course, others might be tempted to imitate Greece if Greece were indeed better off restructuring than not doing so. That is true, but everyone already knows it.

The ECB’s behavior should not be surprising: as we have seen elsewhere, institutions that are not democratically accountable tend to be captured by special interests. That was true before 2008; unfortunately for Europe – and for the global economy – the problem has not been adequately addressed since then.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

MOSCOW – Nonviolent revolutions do not always remain nonviolent, as the examples of uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Syria in the Arab Spring have shown. But peaceful movements for regime change often do succeed. They have toppled illegitimate rulers, as with the post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, and ended apartheid in South Africa, for example, or, before that, the Jim Crow system in the American South. Non-violent movements broke British rule in India and Malawi, and brought down authoritarian regimes in Chile, the Philippines, and Portugal.

On the surface, most of these cases seem so different from present-day Russia as to be irrelevant to the success or failure of the current protests against Vladimir Putin’s continued rule and the protesters’ call for free, fair, and competitive elections. But which differences are important?

The immediate outcomes of nonviolent movements for political change are not decided by macro-factors such as levels of education, unemployment, or the presence of a modern middle class. After all, civil resistance has succeeded in poor, backward countries, like India, and failed in rich, educated ones, like the Gulf states.

Nor do short-term windows of opportunity play a decisive role: no serious economic crisis was needed for Chileans to oust General Augusto Pinochet, and Panama’s Manuel Noriega survived a massive nonviolent protest movement, despite crippling economic problems and divisions within the ruling elite.

Recent research by the sociologists Erica Chenoweth, Maria J. Stephan, and Sharon Erickson Nepstad shows that one factor more than any other determines whether nonviolent struggles succeed: protesters’ decision to adopt nonviolence itself. Indeed, Chenoweth and Stephan have shown that peaceful protests are more than twice as likely as violent confrontation to bring about complete or partial regime change.

But the outcome of civil resistance also depends on the precise methods used. Challenging the regime’s legitimacy and withholding skills and material resources from it are important, as is creating free spaces for dissent and maintaining the movement’s unity and clarity of purpose. Most importantly, as Nepstad has shown, a protest movement aimed at regime change needs to win over critical parts of the police and armed forces.

Conversely, a government that secures the unconditional loyalty of its troops will be able to crush even the most sustained popular protests. Yet it can do so only at the cost of much bloodshed, and a half-hearted or ineffectual crackdown makes the protesters’ triumph much more likely.

Given this, what are the prospects for Russia’s current protest movement? So far, it has gotten many things right. It has focused on a single demand: fair elections. It has united liberals, communists, nationalists, and otherwise apolitical citizens in a broad coalition, despite these groups’ mutual disdain and a colossal potential for rifts.

Like the 2000 Serbian uprising against Slobodan Miloševi?, the Russian movement has produced an astonishing upsurge in grassroots creativity and political wit. A good example is the recent “nano-protest” in the Siberian city of Barnaul, where police officers were forced to write up a report on a group of Lego figures brandishing slogans. These toy protests have now spread to other cities.

To circumvent biased reporting on state television and bridge the huge distances between Russian cities, the protesters have used decentralized means of communication such as social networks. High-speed Internet connections have penetrated remote corners of Russia in recent years, and blogging services such as LiveJournal have been prominent for a decade. Thus, the Internet plays a more important role than it did in Iran’s abortive Green Revolution or during the Arab Spring.

Nonetheless, Russia’s size could become a liability for the protesters if things come to a head and, say, Putin refuses to accept a defeat in the March election. While there have been regular protests in cities from Stravropol in the south to Khabarovsk in the Far East, only Moscow and Saint Petersburg have seen true mass demonstrations. As in Serbia in 2000 or Ukraine in 2004, where demonstrations played out mainly in the capital cities, Russia’s metropolises have long been hotbeds of dissent. Unlike Serbia and Ukraine, however, provincial protesters would be unable to come to the rescue in case of a showdown.

In the Philippines in 1986, Ferdinand Marcos’s tanks were stopped by nuns and small children. In the fall of 1989, East German soldiers joined their fellow citizens in the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall. But, during the same year in China, protesters in Beijing were crushed by troops from Inner Mongolia who didn’t understand Mandarin and had no sympathy for big-city dwellers.

While army units or riot squads (OMON) stationed in Moscow are too disgruntled by the recent police and military reforms to participate in a bloody clampdown, special-operations forces from the provinces, staffed with veterans of the Chechen war, might cherish the excitement of sticking it to the Moscow fat cats. Likewise, army officers from poorer regions are more grateful for the salary hike that Putin’s United Russia party announced, with much fanfare, shortly before the recent Duma election.

But, while some parts of the security apparatus might support an initial crackdown, violent repression would be difficult to sustain. That means that Putin would be well advised to heed the protesters’ demands and call new and fair parliamentary elections. If he opts for violent confrontation, the short-term outcome will be decided by the loyalty of the armed forces. His long-term fate, however, would be much grimmer.
Mischa Gabowitsch is a research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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PRAGUE – The death of Václav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, has been marked with mourning around the world. For his friends, the loss is overwhelming, but we all take comfort from the fact that his courage and his ideas helped to change our world for the better, and are still continuing to do so.

Throughout his life, Havel was an unconquerable fighter for freedom and human dignity. He was the leader of the Velvet Revolution, which brought communism to a peaceful end in his homeland, a dissident intellectual who, by his unswerving conscientiousness and disciplined, down-to-earth idealism, led his compatriots in their struggle to overcome the totalitarian mindset in the years after they regained their freedom. Indeed, that mental liberation remains a living, essential part of Havel’s legacy.

But Havel not only changed his society and Europe; he also set an example for all who struggle for freedom. That his words and ideas are now finding resonance not only in Europe, but also in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere attests to the cogency and rigor of his vision. Each day, it seems, the power of the powerless is confirmed anew.

Havel’s stress on truth, and on not collaborating in lies, may have been the deepest core of his thought. It is truth that makes us free. And our power as free people arises from our refusal to consent willingly to lies. The powerful cannot force us to lie, except by altering our minds.

Havel was undoubtedly a deeply thoughtful person, a citizen of the world, troubled by humanity’s indifference to its own future. His constant refrain, in and out of power, was to ask: “What kind of future should we be aiming for?”

It was in this context that in 1997 he co-created the highly successful series of international conferences, Forum 2000, which have addressed topics ranging from the state of democracy, rule of law, and human rights to interfaith dialogue, environmental sustainability, and the media’s role in modern society.

Later, he helped to establish the Shared Concern Initiative (SCI), an open and informal group of representatives of various cultures, historical backgrounds, religions, and traditions that sought to prick the world’s conscience whenever and wherever the cause of liberty and justice demanded it. It was always Havel’s belief that solidarity in the face of evil was the best – indeed, the only viable – path, because freedom is best promoted with a common voice.

That is why Havel and we, other SCI members, repeatedly campaigned for justice, security, and human dignity for all, or addressed issues such as the abuses perpetrated by the military regime in Burma (Myanmar), leprosy as a human-rights problem, politically motivated murders in Russia, abuses by Kremlin forces in the Caucasus, and the deteriorating state of democracy in Ukraine. SCI members have promoted the idea of overcoming the impasse in Middle East peace negotiations by addressing matters – such as the problem of freshwater resources – that are amenable only to multilateral negotiations, and reacted to the 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan by calling for concerted international aid.

Perhaps this is the key legacy that Havel has left our world: an active global conscience. Each of us is responsible for our civilization; we cannot turn our backs and avert our eyes when freedom is stifled. Because we all enjoy the benefits of globalization, Havel taught us, we must all also strive to make this world a freer, safer, more just, more environmentally sustainable, and more democratic place for everyone.

We – indeed, the entire world – will always remember Václav Havel for the courage and modesty with which he defended human values. We are pledged to carry on Havel’s work as the worthiest possible memorial to his life and our friendship. We ask all of you to stand with us as we continue to be guided by his example, and to implement his ideas, in our complicated, globalized world.
H.R.H. Prince El Hassan bin Talal is chairman and founder of the Arab Thought Forum and the West Asia-North Africa Forum; H.H. the Dalai Lama; F. W. de Klerk is former President of South Africa and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Andre Glucksmann is a philosopher and essayist; Vartan Gregorian; Hans Küng; Michael Novak; Yohei Sasakawa is President of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation; Karel Schwarzenberg is Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic; Desmond Tutu is Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Richard von Weizsäcker is former President of the Federal Republic of Germany; Grigory Yavlinsky is Chairman of the Russian United Democratic Party Yabloko. All signatories are members of the Shared Concern Initiative.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

BERKELEY – This year began with a series of reports providing tantalizing evidence that economic recovery in the United States is strengthening. The pace of job creation has increased, indicators for manufacturing and services have improved, and consumption spending has been stronger than anticipated. But it is too early to celebrate.

Output growth in the US remains anemic, and the economy continues to face three significant deficits: a jobs deficit, an investment deficit, and a long-run fiscal deficit, none of which is likely to be addressed in an election year.

Although output is now higher than it was in the fourth quarter of 2007, it remains far below what could be produced if labor and capacity were fully utilized. That gap – between actual and potential output – is estimated at more than 7% of GDP (more than $1 trillion).

The output gap reflects a deficit of more than 12 million jobs – the number of jobs needed to return to the economy’s peak 2007 employment level and absorb the 125,000 people who enter the labor force each month. Even if the economy grows at 2.5% in 2012, as most forecasts anticipate, the jobs deficit will remain – and will not be closed until 2024.

America’s jobs deficit is primarily the result of inadequate aggregate demand. Consumption, which accounts for about 70% of total spending, is constrained by high unemployment, weak wage gains, and a steep decline in home values and consumer wealth. The uptick in consumption in the last months of 2011 was financed by a decline in the household saving rate and a large increase in consumer credit. Neither of these trends is healthy or sustainable.

With an unemployment rate of 8.5%, a labor-force participation rate of only 64%, and stagnant real wages, labor income has fallen to an historic low of 44% of national income. And labor income is the most important component of household earnings, the major driver of consumption spending.

Even before the Great Recession, American workers and households were in trouble. The rate of job growth between 2000 and 2007 slowed to only half its level in the three preceding decades. Productivity growth was strong, but far outpaced wage growth, and workers’ real hourly compensation declined, on average, even for those with a university education.

Indeed, the 2002-2007 period was the only recovery on record during which the median family’s real income declined. Moreover, job opportunities continued to polarize, with employment growing in high-wage professional, technical, and managerial occupations, as well as in low-wage food-service, personal-care, and protective-service occupations.

By contrast, employment in middle-skill, white-collar, and blue-collar occupations fell, particularly in manufacturing. Hard-pressed American households slashed their savings rates, borrowed against their home equity, and increased their debt to maintain consumption, contributing to the housing and credit bubbles that burst in 2008, requiring painful deleveraging ever since.

Three forces have driven the US labor market’s adverse structural changes:

·         Skill-biased technological change, which has automated routine work while boosting demand for highly educated workers with at least a college degree.

·         Global competition and the integration of labor markets through trade and outsourcing, which have eliminated jobs and depressed wages.

·         America’s declining competitiveness as an attractive place to locate production and employment.

Technological change and globalization have created similar labor-market challenges in other developed countries. But US policy choices are responsible for the erosion of America’s competitiveness.

In particular, the US is underinvesting in three major areas that help countries to create and retain high-wage jobs: skills and training, infrastructure, and research and development. Spending in these areas accounts for less than 10% of US government spending, and this share has been declining over time. The federal government can currently borrow at record-low interest rates, and there are many projects in education, infrastructure, and research that would earn a higher return, create jobs now, and bolster US competitiveness in attracting high-wage jobs.

President Barack Obama has offered numerous proposals to invest in the foundations of national competitiveness, but Congressional Republicans have rebuffed them, claiming that the US faces an impending fiscal crisis. In fact, the federal deficit as a share of GDP will shrink significantly over the next several years, even without further deficit-reduction measures, before rising to unsustainable levels by 2030.

The US does indeed face a long-run fiscal deficit, largely the result of rising health-care costs and an aging population. But the current fiscal deficit mainly reflects weak tax revenues, owing to slow growth and high unemployment, and temporary stimulus measures that are fading away at a time when aggregate demand remains weak and additional fiscal stimulus is warranted.

At the very least, to keep the economy on course for 2.5% growth this year, the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits proposed by Obama should be extended through the end of the year. These measures would provide insurance to the fragile recovery and add nothing to the long-run fiscal gap.

So, how should the US economy’s jobs deficit, investment deficit, and long-run fiscal deficit be addressed?

Policymakers should pair fiscal measures to ameliorate the jobs and investment deficits now with a multi-year plan to reduce the long-run fiscal deficit gradually. This long-run plan should increase spending on education, infrastructure, and research, while curbing future growth in health-care spending through the cost-containment mechanisms contained in Obama’s health-reform legislation.

Approving a long-run deficit-reduction plan now but deferring its starting date until the economy is near full employment would prevent premature fiscal contraction from tipping the economy back into recession. Indeed, enactment of such a package could bolster output and employment growth by easing investor concerns about future deficits and strengthening consumer and business confidence.

Painful choices about how to close the long-run fiscal gap should be decided now and implemented promptly once the economy has recovered. But, for the next few years, the priorities of fiscal policy should be jobs, investment, and growth.
Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org
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BERLIN – German Chancellor Angela Merkel should be happy nowadays: her party’s approval ratings aren’t bad, and her own are very good. She no longer has serious rivals within the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), while the left opposition is fragmented into four parties. Her response to the European crisis has prevailed – or at least that is the impression that she conveys, and that most Germans believe. So everything is fine and dandy, right?

Not so fast. Two issues could complicate Merkel’s re-election bid in the autumn of 2013. Domestically, her coalition partner, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), is disintegrating. Even if the FDP survives the next election (which is by no means certain), the current coalition is unlikely to retain its parliamentary majority, leaving Merkel increasingly dependent on the Social Democrats (SPD). While this need not matter to her too much as long as she retains the chancellorship, in Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD’s leader, she faces – for the first time – an opponent whom she would underestimate at her peril.

But the real danger to Merkel is external: the European crisis. If she is unlucky, the crisis will come to a head at the start of the German election year, and all previous calculations could be moot, because, despite Germans’ frustration with Europe, the electorate would punish severely those who allowed Europe to fail.

The European Union’s economy is sliding into a severe and, in all likelihood, long-lasting recession, largely self-inflicted. While Germany is still trying to banish the specter of hyperinflation with strict eurozone austerity measures, the EU crisis countries are facing a real threat of deflation, with potentially disastrous consequences. It is only a question of time – no longer very much time – before economic destabilization gives rise to political instability.

Hungary, where democratic backsliding appears to be taking hold, provides a foretaste of a Europe in which the eurozone crisis and deflation persist. The mood in the Mediterranean EU members, as well as in Ireland, is heating up, owing not only to the tightening squeeze of austerity, but also – and perhaps more importantly – to the absence of policies that offer people hope for a better future. The explosive nature of current trends, which point to eventual re-nationalization of sovereignty from the bottom up, is greatly underestimated in Berlin.

The crisis has now reached Italy and is threatening to spread to France. With Mario Monti’s premiership, Italy has mobilized its best people, and neither Italy nor Europe will get a better government for the foreseeable future. If Monti’s administration is toppled – either in parliament or in the streets – the EU’s fourth-largest economy could come crashing down. Monti is urgently calling for help. Where is it?

Developments in France (the second-largest eurozone economy) should also not be underestimated in this presidential election year. If a majority of the French come to believe that a course of action is being imposed on them from outside – and by Germany, no less! – they will respond with traditional Gallic stubbornness.

What is at stake is less the election’s outcome than the margin between President Nicolas Sarkozy and the far-right National Front leader, Marine Le Pen – and whether she overtakes him to qualify for the second-round run-off against the Socialist candidate. While she would be unlikely to win the presidency, she could reshape and realign the French right. For that reason, a Sarkozy debacle would drastically reduce his Socialist successor’s room for maneuver on European policy, fundamentally altering France’s position in Europe.

But, while the French election’s outcome will hinge to a crucial extent on European crisis politics, Germany’s government acts as if this were none of its concern. Instead, the main – almost exclusive – topic in Berlin is the upcoming election. And the central question is not, “What needs to be done now in the interest of Europe?” Rather, it is, “How much can people in Germany be expected to accept – in particular, how much honesty?”

No one will act in a way that jeopardizes their electoral prospects, at least while there are still alternatives. So it is conceivable that Germany is not at all interested in a serious effort to resolve Europe’s crisis, because that would mean taking big risks and investing a lot of money.

The CDU-FDP coalition prefers to sugarcoat the situation by convincing themselves of an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy, abetted by those in the European crisis countries unwilling to perform and reform and whose only purpose is to make the Germans pay. So far, Merkel’s coalition is like someone driving against traffic, dead certain that everyone else is going the wrong way.

Europe’s disintegration has already advanced much further than it might appear. Distrust and national egoism are spreading rapidly, devouring European solidarity and common purpose.

Institutionally, Europe has been on the right track since the last summit, but it threatens to disintegrate from the bottom up. To save the euro – which is essential, because the European project’s fate depends on the success of monetary union – Europe needs action now: in addition to indispensable austerity measures and structural reforms, there is no way to succeed without a viable economic program that will assure growth.

That won’t come cheap. If Merkel’s government believes that paying lip service to growth is enough, it is playing with fire: a euro collapse in which not only Germans would be badly burned.
Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader in the German Green Party for almost 20 years.

Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org

TOKYO – China’s behavior during the recent presidential election in Taiwan demonstrates that its leaders have learned some lessons, if only the hard way. They have learned that China can have a greater impact on Taiwanese voters through trade and making people feel richer than by threats – even threats to fire missiles – which had been China’s electoral tactics in previous Taiwanese elections, particularly when a pro-independence candidate looked popular enough to win.

Indeed, fearing the popularity of Lee Teng-hui, who ran in the 1996 presidential election on a pro-independence platform, China’s People’s Liberation Army actually fired missiles close to the nearby coast of Keelung. But this saber rattling backfired. Lee won.

The presidential election on January 14 was the first of the transfers of power in China and Taiwan that will take place this year. Later this year, China’s President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will be succeeded by men chosen by the Communist Party long ago. Avoiding new tension with Taiwan appears to have been a calculated decision by China’s leaders as they begin their own – perhaps not yet fully settled – changing of the guard.

For almost two decades, Taiwan’s presidential elections have attracted global attention not only for the robustness of Taiwan’s democratic culture, but also for the perennial question of whether the winner would seek formal independence for Taiwan. This time, Tsai Ing-wen, the woman nominated by the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), mounted a late charge on the Kuomintang incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou. But China did not bluster as Tsai surged in the polls.

Instead, China did all that it could do boost Ma, who has presided over a massive increase in economic ties with the mainland. For example, China provided cheap airplane tickets to roughly 400,000 of the one million Taiwanese living on the mainland to enable them to return home to vote. Given that Ma won by 800,000 votes, this tactic may not have been decisive, but it most likely played a considerable part in determining the outcome.

Paradoxically, the strong performance of James Soong Chu-yu of the People First Party, which split from the Kuomintang, helped Ma by giving voters a second alternative to him. And America’s quiet instructions to all candidates to avoid nationalist provocation undoubtedly also played a role in dampening tension with China – another factor that probably benefited Ma.

As part of China’s new “soft” approach to Taiwan, Wen emphasizes “conceding interests” to Taiwan. In Taiwan’s south, long a DPP stronghold, that approach appears to have paid off. The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) between China and Taiwan has enabled farmers and fishermen in southern Taiwan to prosper by selling agricultural and fisheries products to the enormous Chinese market, and the Kuomintang received higher support in the region than in past elections.

Of course, promoting economic interaction with Taiwan is not China’s ultimate goal; unification is. China’s government appears to believe that Ma’s victory is a step in this direction.

But economic integration is one thing, and political integration quite another. After experiencing the benefits of democracy and freedom of expression, Taiwanese are unlikely to want to settle for anything less than the open society that they have today. Indeed, with increased contact between Taiwan and the mainland, ordinary Chinese could begin to envy the modern democracy that the Taiwanese people have built – and spread the idea of an open society to the Chinese mainland. Ma’s role in his second term should be to serve as just such an evangelist for democracy in China.

Well aware of this “danger,” China is implementing five policies. The first is to expand the ECFA, so that more Taiwanese companies feel its benefits. Second, and similarly, China will try to shake up the DPP’s base by further targeting the commercial interests of Taiwanese farmers and fishermen in the south. Third, China will emphasize common Chinese culture in order to reduce Taiwanese fear of unification. A fourth goal is to win over young legislators elected during this presidential election. Finally, China will seek to prevent the use of the name Taiwan and force the international use of the awkward name “Chinese Taipei.”

But the greatest issue affecting cross-strait relations is the Chinese economy itself. Signs of decline in China’s economy, which has racked up double-digit growth for decades, would affect all of its Taiwan policies. When Shanghai stocks fell by about 20% last year, Taiwanese stocks fell by a similar amount almost simultaneously – proof of how synchronized the Chinese and Taiwanese economies have become. China will not be able to get its way if the profitability of this synchronization breaks down.

So, will Taiwan become more like the mainland, or vice versa? To ask that question is to reprise a debate that was heard when Hong Kong and Macau reverted to China, but that is seldom encountered nowadays. Whether serious moves toward unification change that fact will depend on the effectiveness of China’s soft-power approach, which cannot be limited only to the attractiveness of its economy if it is actually to succeed.
Yuriko Koike is Japan’s former Minister of Defense and National Security Adviser.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

NEW YORK – The future of capitalism is again a question. Will it survive the ongoing crisis in its current form? If not, will it transform itself or will government take the lead?

The term “capitalism” used to mean an economic system in which capital was privately owned and traded; owners of capital got to judge how best to use it, and could draw on the foresight and creative ideas of entrepreneurs and innovative thinkers. This system of individual freedom and individual responsibility gave little scope for government to influence economic decision-making: success meant profits; failure meant losses. Corporations could exist only as long as free individuals willingly purchased their goods – and would go out of business quickly otherwise.

Capitalism became a world-beater in the 1800’s, when it developed capabilities for endemic innovation. Societies that adopted the capitalist system gained unrivaled prosperity, enjoyed widespread job satisfaction, obtained productivity growth that was the marvel of the world and ended mass privation.

Now the capitalist system has been corrupted. The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system, however, is not capitalism, but rather an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.

In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”

The costs of corporatism are visible all around us: dysfunctional corporations that survive despite their gross inability to serve their customers; sclerotic economies with slow output growth, a dearth of engaging work, scant opportunities for young people; governments bankrupted by their efforts to palliate these problems; and increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of those connected enough to be on the right side of the corporatist deal.

This shift of power from owners and innovators to state officials is the antithesis of capitalism. Yet this system’s apologists and beneficiaries have the temerity to blame all these failures on “reckless capitalism” and “lack of regulation,” which they argue necessitates more oversight and regulation, which in reality means more corporatism and state favoritism.

It seems unlikely that so disastrous a system is sustainable. The corporatist model makes no sense to younger generations who grew up using the Internet, the world’s freest market for goods and ideas. The success and failure of firms on the Internet is the best advertisement for the free market: social networking Web sites, for example, rise and fall almost instantaneously, depending on how well they serve their customers.

Sites such as Friendster and MySpace sought extra profit by compromising the privacy of their users, and were instantly punished as users deserted them to relatively safer competitors like Facebook and Twitter. There was no need for government regulation to bring about this transition; in fact, had modern corporatist states attempted to do so, today they would be propping up MySpace with taxpayer dollars and campaigning on a promise to “reform” its privacy features.

The Internet, as a largely free marketplace for ideas, has not been kind to corporatism. People who grew up with its decentralization and free competition of ideas must find alien the idea of state support for large firms and industries. Many in the traditional media repeat the old line “What’s good for Firm X is good for America,” but it is not likely to be seen trending on Twitter.

The legitimacy of corporatism is eroding along with the fiscal health of governments that have relied on it. If politicians cannot repeal corporatism, it will bury itself in debt and default, and a capitalist system could re-emerge from the discredited corporatist rubble. Then “capitalism” would again carry its true meaning, rather than the one attributed to it by corporatists seeking to hide behind it and socialists wanting to vilify it.
Saifedean Ammous is a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University and Foreign Member of Columbia University’s Center for Capitalism and Society. Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, is Director of the Center.

Copyright: Project Syndicate/ V4 Aid Project, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

NEW YORK – One of Iraq’s only working filmmakers, Oday Rasheed – whose brilliant film 2005 Underexposure followed a group of characters in Baghdad after the United States-led invasion in 2003, and whose new film Qarantina is now premiering – is in Manhattan. The glamorous settings in which he is now showing Qarantina – a screening at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, and in the private homes of American directors and stars – could not be further removed from the violence-riddled context of his daily life.

In Baghdad, Rasheed has gained fame – and notoriety – by seeking to inspire a new generation of Iraqi filmmakers and other young artists. Qarantina is one of only four feature films completed in Iraq in the past 12 years. A member of a collective called Najeen (Survivors), Rasheed is part of a vanguard of younger artists, writers, and filmmakers whose work attests to their commitment to art in the midst of crisis.

It is startling to see him walk into a New York living room: his demeanor is quiet and dignified. An air of solemnity envelops him. He has experienced unthinkable trauma, and is still exposed to it. “Of seven close friends I had growing up,” he tells me, “five are dead.” One was recently murdered by a gunshot to the head while he was standing in his kitchen.

Some days, he says, “you wake up and the radio or TV reports five car bombings,” leading to a kind of claustrophobia – part of the subject matter of his film. I noted that he might be experiencing post-traumatic stress from the loss of his friend. “I have had that – have done that already,” he smiled.

Rasheed is just turning 40, and his life reflects his country’s dramas: part of what has been called a “lost generation” of Iraqi artists and intellectuals, he and his friends were isolated for years by sanctions. But he also describes the Saddam years as an era in which, while there was no freedom, intellectuals had room to maneuver, as long as they “knew what to leave alone.”

He lived through the US-led invasion during a formative time in his creative life – he was writing for television and engaged in film criticism and commentary while trying to survive bombardment, looting, and chaos. But he also had to maintain his intellectual integrity.

When the US military sought to showcase the fact that a filmmaker was at work in occupied Iraq, Rasheed was swept to a formal dinner in one of Saddam’s former palaces in the Green Zone, attended by senior US officials and military contractors – an invitation that one would not want to receive, and would not be able to turn down.

Now Rasheed reflects on his country’s turn toward religious extremism: he describes a pre-invasion Iraq in which women were professionals and fairly emancipated, whereas now women wear headscarves under pressure, “for a peaceful life.” His friend, a young Iraqi actress named Zahra Zubaidi, had to flee the Middle East after having played a rape victim in the Brian de Palma film Redacted; she has since emigrated to New York.

Constant intimidation by religious extremists and political factions is the intellectual’s fate in Iraq today. And yet Rasheed refuses to be discreet: “Everything I believe, I believe in it,” he says. “I cannot lie or not answer the questions.”

Rasheed is in New York mainly because it is the location of his next film, which “deals with the influence of the US contractors after the invasion of Iraq, not only on the lives of Iraqis, but also on the life of the US.” As for Iraq today, Rasheed says, “I do not think that Americans are indifferent to what happened and what is happening, but the daily details of cruelty do not give them either the time or the energy to think about larger issues.”

Indeed, Rasheed notes that at every US screening of his film, audiences need to apologize before they begin to relate to Rasheed as a filmmaker rather than as a representative of his country. “Personally, I do not ask anything; I’m here to clear up some confusion by the medium of film.”

Iraq, ravaged by war and now shaken daily by violence, is known as the most intellectually inclined of the Arab countries. As Iraqi and other Muslim intellectuals in the region often repeat: “Books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.”

Here is hoping that Raheed and his colleagues continue to build up an Iraqi culture that is vibrant and free; and here is hoping that the relationship of US and international audiences to Rasheed goes from one of expiation to one of engagement with his work. His embrace of the right to his truth, which is the artist’s task, is nonetheless remarkable, given that he is working in an environment in which part of the creative process involves trying to stay alive.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

NEW DELHI – With the stage set for secret talks in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban, US President Barack Obama’s strategy for a phased exit from war-ravaged Afghanistan is now being couched in nice-sounding terms that hide more than they reveal. In seeking a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, Obama risks repeating US policy mistakes that now haunt regional and international security.

Since coming to office, Obama has pursued an Afghan strategy that can be summed up in three words: surge, bribe, and run. The military mission has now entered the “run” part, or what euphemistically is being called the “transition to 2014.”

The central objective is to cut a deal with the Taliban so that the US and its NATO partners exit the “graveyard of empires” without losing face. This approach – aimed more at withdrawing forces as soon as possible than at ensuring enduring peace and regional stability – is being dressed up as “reconciliation,” with Qatar, Germany, and the United Kingdom getting lead roles in facilitating a settlement.

Yet what stands out is how little the US has learned from the past. In critical respects, it is beginning to repeat its own mistakes, whether by creating or funding new local militias in Afghanistan, or by striving to come to terms with the Taliban. As with the covert war that the US waged in the 1980’s in Afghanistan against Soviet military intervention, so, too, have short-term interests driven US policy in the current overt war.

To be sure, any leader must work to extricate his country from a protracted war, so Obama is right to seek an end to this one. But he was not right in laying out his cards in public and emboldening the enemy.

Within weeks of assuming office, Obama publicly declared his intention to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, before he even asked his team to work out a strategy. A troop surge that lasted up to 2010 was designed not to rout the Taliban militarily, but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. Yet, even before the surge began, its purpose was undercut by the exit plan, followed by a publicly announced troop drawdown, stretching from 2011 to 2014.

A withdrawing power that first announces a phased exit and then pursues deal-making with the enemy undermines its regional leverage. It speaks for itself that the sharp deterioration in US ties with the Pakistani military has occurred since the drawdown timetable was unveiled. The phased exit encouraged Pakistani generals to play hardball. Worse, there is still no clear US strategy on how to ensure that the endgame does not undermine Western interests or further destabilize the region.

The US envoy to the region, Marc Grossman, has already held a series of secret meetings with the Taliban. Qatar has been chosen as the seat of fresh US-Taliban negotiations in order to keep the still-skeptical Afghan government at arm’s length (despite the pretense of “Afghan-led” talks), and to insulate the Taliban negotiators from Pakistani and Saudi pressure. Meanwhile, even as a civil-military showdown in Pakistan compounds Washington’s regional challenges, the new US push to contain Iran threatens to fuel greater turbulence in neighboring Afghanistan.

In truth, US policy on the Taliban, at whose birth the CIA played midwife, is coming full circle for the second time in little more than 15 years. The Clinton administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, fostered narcotics trafficking and swelled the ranks of Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism. With the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, however, the chickens came home to roost. In declaring war on the Taliban, US policy came full circle.

Now, US policy, with its frantic search for a deal with the Taliban, is about to complete another orbit. Indeed, the Qatar-based negotiations highlight why the US political leadership has deliberately refrained from decapitating the Taliban. The US military has had ample opportunities (and still has) to eliminate the Taliban’s Rahbari Shura, or leadership council, often called the Quetta Shura because it relocated to that Pakistani city.

Yet, tellingly, the US has not carried out a single drone, air, or ground strike in or around Quetta. All of the US strikes have occurred farther north, in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, although the leadership of the Afghan Taliban and of its allied groups, like the Haqqani network and the Hekmatyar band, is not holed up there.

Like the US occupation of Iraq, the NATO war in Afghanistan will leave behind an ethnically fractured country. Just as Iraq today is, for all intents and purposes, ethnically partitioned, it will be difficult to establish a post-2014 government in Kabul whose writ runs across Afghanistan. And, just as the 1973 US-North Vietnam agreements were negotiated after the South Vietnamese regime was shut out of the talks, the US today is shutting out the Afghan government, even as it compels President Hamid Karzai to lend support and appears ready to meet a Taliban demand to transfer five incarcerated Taliban leaders from Guantánamo Bay.

These negotiations, in which the US is seeking the creation of ceasefire zones to facilitate its forces’ withdrawal, can only undercut the legitimacy of the Karzai government and bring the Quetta Shura back to center stage. But Afghanistan is not Vietnam. An end to NATO combat operations will not mean the end of the war, because the enemy will target Western interests wherever they may be. America’s fond hope to contain terrorism regionally promises instead to ensure that Afghanistan and Pakistan remain a festering threat to regional and global security.
Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

ADDIS ABABA – Sustainable development means achieving economic growth that is widely shared and that protects the earth’s vital resources. Our current global economy, however, is not sustainable, with more than one billion people left behind by economic progress and the earth’s environment suffering terrible damage from human activity. Sustainable development requires mobilizing new technologies that are guided by shared social values.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has rightly declared sustainable development to be at the top of the global agenda. We have entered a dangerous period in which a huge and growing population, combined with rapid economic growth, now threatens to have a catastrophic impact on the earth’s climate, biodiversity, and fresh-water supplies. Scientists call this new period the Anthropocene – in which human beings have become the main causes of the earth’s physical and biological changes.

The Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel has issued a new report that outlines a framework for sustainable development. The GSP rightly notes that sustainable development has three pillars: ending extreme poverty; ensuring that prosperity is shared by all, including women, youth, and minorities; and protecting the natural environment. These can be termed the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainable development, or, more simply, the “triple bottom line” of sustainable development.

The GSP has called for world leaders to adopt a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, that will help to shape global policies and actions after the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Whereas the MDGs focus on reducing extreme poverty, the SDGs will focus on all three pillars of sustainable development: ending extreme poverty, sharing the benefits of economic development for all of society, and protecting the Earth.

It is, of course, one thing to set SDGs and quite another to achieve them. The problem can be seen by looking at one key challenge: climate change. Today, there are seven billion people on the planet, and each one, on average, is responsible for the release each year of a bit more than four tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This CO2 is emitted when we burn coal, oil, and gas to produce electricity, drive our cars, or heat our homes. All told, humans emit roughly 30 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere, enough to change the climate sharply within a few decades.

By 2050, there will most likely be more than nine billion people. If these people are richer than people today (and therefore using more energy per person), total emissions worldwide could double or even triple. This is the great dilemma: we need to emit less CO2, but we are on a global path to emit much more.

We should care about that scenario, because remaining on a path of rising global emissions is almost certain to cause havoc and suffering for billions of people as they are hit by a torrent of droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and more. We have already experienced the onset of this misery in recent years, with a spate of devastating famines, floods, and other climate-related disasters.

So, how can the world’s people – especially its poor people – benefit from more electricity and more access to modern transportation, but in a way that saves the planet rather than destroys it? The truth is that we can’t – unless we improve dramatically the technologies that we use.

We need to use energy far more wisely while shifting from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. Such decisive improvements are certainly possible and economically realistic.

Consider the energy inefficiency of an automobile, for example. We currently move around 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms of machinery to transport only one or just a few people, each weighing perhaps 75 kilograms (165 lbs.). And we do so using an internal combustion engine that utilizes only a small part of the energy released by burning the gasoline. Most of the energy is lost as waste heat.

We could therefore achieve huge reductions in CO2 emissions by converting to small, lightweight, battery-powered vehicles running on highly efficient electric motors and charged by a low-carbon energy source such as solar power. Even better, by shifting to electric vehicles, we would be able to use cutting-edge information technology to make them smart – even smart enough to drive themselves using advanced data-processing and positioning systems.

The benefits of information and communications technologies can be found in every area of human activity: better farming using GPS and micro-dosing of fertilizers; precision manufacturing; buildings that know how to economize on energy use; and, of course, the transformative, distance-erasing power of the Internet. Mobile broadband is already connecting even the most distant villages in rural Africa and India, thereby cutting down significantly on the need for travel.

Banking is now done by phone, and so, too, is a growing range of medical diagnostics. Electronic books are beamed directly to handheld devices, without the need for bookshops, travel, and the pulp and paper of physical books. Education is increasingly online as well, and will soon enable students everywhere to receive first-rate instruction at almost a zero “marginal” cost for enrolling another student.

Yet getting from here to sustainable development will not just be a matter of technology. It will also be a matter of market incentives, government regulations, and public support for research and development. But, even more fundamental than policies and governance will be the challenge of values. We must understand our shared fate, and embrace sustainable development as a common commitment to decency for all human beings, today and in the future.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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CAIRO – “Whatever the majority in the People’s Assembly, they are very welcome, because they won’t have the ability to impose anything that the people don’t want.” Thus declared General Mukhtar al-Mulla, a member of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Al-Mulla’s message was that the Islamists’ victory in Egypt’s recent election gives them neither executive power nor control of the framing of a new constitution. But General Sami Anan, Chief of Staff and the SCAF’s deputy head, quickly countered that al-Mulla’s statement does not necessarily represent the official views of the Council.

So, one year after the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, who, exactly, will set Egypt’s political direction?

The electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing and the Salafi parties, which together won more than 70% of the parliamentary seats, will give them strong influence over the transitional period and in drafting the constitution. But they are not alone. Aside from the Islamists, two other powerful actors will have their say: the “Tahrirists” and the generals.

Tahrir Square-based activism has not only brought about social and political change, but also has served as the ultimate tool of pro-democracy pressure on Egypt’s military rulers. Indeed, while the army, the most powerful of the three actors, still officially controls the country, there is little confidence in the generals’ commitment to democracy. “The SCAF are either anti-democratic….or some of their advisers told them that democracy is not in their best interest,” says Hazem Abd al-Azim, a nominee in the first post-Mubarak government.

If the generals do not want democracy, nor do they want direct military rule à la Augusto Pinochet. So, what do they want? Ideally, they would like to combine the Algerian army’s current power and the Turkish army’s legitimacy. This implies a parliament with limited powers, a weak presidency subordinate to the army, and constitutional prerogatives that legitimate the army’s intervention in politics.

The minimum that they insist on is reflected in statements by Generals al-Mulla, Mamdouh Shahim, Ismail Etman, and others. That would mean a veto in high politics, independence for the army’s budget and vast economic empire, legal immunity from prosecution on charges stemming from corruption or repression, and constitutional prerogatives to guarantee these arrangements.

The new parliament and constitutional assembly will have to lead the negotiations with the SCAF. But, given that any successful democratic transition must include meaningful civilian control over the armed forces and the security apparatus, the SCAF’s minimum demands could render the process meaningless.

The veto in high politics would include any issues that touch on national security or sensitive foreign policy, most importantly the relationship with Israel. With an Islamist majority in the parliament promising to “revise” the peace agreement with Israel, tensions over foreign policy are likely to rise.

The independent military-commercial empire, which benefits from preferential customs and exchange rates, no taxation, land-confiscation rights, and an army of almost-free laborers (conscripted soldiers), is another thorny issue. With the Egyptian economy suffering, elected politicians might seek to improve conditions by moving against the military’s civilian assets – namely, by revising the preferential rates and imposing a form of taxation.

Immunity from prosecution is no less salient. “The Field-Marshal should be in jail now,” screamed the elected leftist MP, Abu Ezz al-Hariri, on the second day of the new parliamentary session. When Mahmoud Ghozlan, the Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson, proposed immunity (known in Egypt as the “safe-exit” option), he faced a wave of harsh criticism.

Pressure from the United States has also influenced the SCAF’s decision-making. “The military establishment receives $1.3 billion from the US….They are very sensitive to US requests,” according to Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who lobbied the Obama administration to support the revolution in January 2011.

But most of the SCAF’s pro-democracy decisions have come as a result of massive pressure from Tahrir Square. This includes the removal of Mubarak, his trial (and that of other regime figures), and bringing forward the presidential election from 2013 to June 2012.

Two other factors are equally, if not more, influential: the status quo inherited from the Mubarak era and the army’s internal cohesion. With few exceptions, the SCAF’s members benefited significantly from Mubarak’s regime. They will attempt to preserve as much of it as possible.

“The sight of officers in uniform protesting in Tahrir Square and speaking on Al Jazeera really worries the Field Marshal,” a former officer told me. And one way to maintain internal cohesion is to create “demons” – a lesson learned from the “dirty wars” in Algeria in the 1990’s and Argentina in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

In particular, Coptic protesters are an easy target against which to rally soldiers and officers. Last October, amid an unnecessary escalation of sectarian violence, state-owned television featured a hospitalized Egyptian soldier screaming, “The Copts killed my colleague!” The systematic demonization of the Tahririst groups, and the violent escalation that followed in November and December, served the same purpose.

Despite everything, democratic Egypt is not a romantic fantasy. A year ago, Saad al-Ketatni, the Muslim Brotherhood leader, would never have dreamed of being Speaker of Parliament. The same applies to the leftists and liberals who now hold around 20% of the parliament’s seats.

If 2011 witnessed the miracle of Mubarak’s removal, a brave parliament’s institutional assertiveness, coupled with non-institutional Tahririst pressure, could force the generals to accept a transfer of power to civilian rule (with some reserved domains for the army establishment) in 2012. What is certain is that this year will not witness a return to the conditions of 2010. Egypt may become stuck in democratization’s slow lane, but there will be no U-turn. The hundreds of thousands who marched to Tahrir Square on the revolution’s anniversary will guarantee that.
Omar Ashour is a visiting scholar at the Brookings Doha Center and Director of Middle East Graduate Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is the author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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NEW YORK – Ten months ago, the United Nations Security Council, with no dissent, authorized the use of “all necessary measures” to protect civilians at imminent risk of massacre in Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. Those lives were saved – and, if the Security Council had acted equally decisively and robustly in the 1990’s, so might those of 8,000 others in Srebrenica and 800,000 in Rwanda.

I and many others hailed the agreement to intervene in Libya as the coming of age of the responsibility to protect (“R2P”) principle, unanimously embraced by the world’s governments in 2005. Its core idea – countering centuries of treating sovereignty almost as a license to kill – is that states must protect their own people from genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. If they manifestly fail to do so, the international community has the responsibility to act – by persuasion, if possible, and by coercion, if necessary.

Now, ten months later, the Security Council is paralyzed over Syria, unable to agree not only on the extreme step of military force, but even on lesser coercive measures like targeted sanctions, an arms embargo, or referral to the International Criminal Court. That inaction comes despite a death toll of well over 5,000 and an outlook even worse than in Libya early last year.

The hesitation partly reflects the very different geopolitics of the Syrian crisis: potentially explosive regional sectarian divisions, no Arab League unanimity in favor of tough action, a long Russian commitment to the Assad regime, and a strong Syrian army, which would make any conceivable military intervention difficult and bloody.

But there is more to it than that. Security Council consensus about when and how to apply R2P, so evident in February and March 2011, has evaporated in a welter of recrimination about how the NATO-led implementation of the Council’s Libya mandate “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” was carried out.

Leading the critical charge have been the “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Their complaints are not about the initial military response – destroying the Libyan air force’s infrastructure, and air attacks on ground forces advancing on Benghazi. Rather, they object to what came after, when it rapidly became apparent that the three permanent Security Council’s members driving the intervention (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) would settle for nothing less than regime change, and do whatever it took to achieve it.

In particular, concerns have been raised that the interveners rejected ceasefire offers that may have been serious, struck fleeing personnel who posed no immediate risk to civilians, and attacked locations that had no obvious military significance (like the compound in which Qaddafi’s relatives were killed). More generally, the Western powers, along with Arab states like Qatar, comprehensively supported the rebel side in what rapidly became a civil war, ignoring an explicit arms embargo in the process.

The US, the UK, and France are quick with some answers. Protecting civilians in areas like Tripoli that were under Qaddafi’s direct control, they argue, required overturning his regime. If one side was supported in a civil war, it was because a regime’s one-sided killing sometimes leads civilians (as in Syria) to take up arms to fight back (and to recruit army defectors). Moreover, military operations cannot be micromanaged with a “1,000-mile screwdriver.” And a more limited “monitor and swoop” concept of operations would have led to a longer and messier conflict in Libya, which would have been politically impossible to sustain in the US and Europe, and likely would have produced many more civilian casualties.

These arguments all have force, but the US, the UK, and France resisted debating them in the Security Council, and other Council members were never given sufficient information to enable them to be evaluated. Maybe not all of the BRICS are to be believed when they say that more common ground could have been achieved had a better process been followed. But the Western powers’ dismissiveness during the Libyan campaign did bruise them – and those bruises will have to heal before any consensus can be expected on tough responses to such situations in the future.

The better news is that a way forward has opened up. In November, Brazil circulated a paper arguing that the R2P concept, as it has evolved so far, needs to be supplemented by a new set of principles and procedures on the theme of “responsibility while protecting” (already being labeled “RWP”). Its two key proposals are a set of criteria (including last resort, proportionality, and balance of consequences) to be taken into account before the Security Council mandates any use of military force, and a monitoring-and-review mechanism to ensure that such mandates’ implementation is seriously debated.

Initial reaction among the US, the UK, and France was almost contemptuous: one could almost hear their leaders sneering, “These countries would want all of those delaying and spoiling options, wouldn’t they.” But that attitude has begun to soften – as it must. Brazil, for its part, has indicated willingness to refine its proposals to make them more workable and broadly acceptable.

Renewed consensus on how to implement R2P in hard cases may come too late to help in Syria. But everyone understands that the alternative to Security Council cooperation is a return to the bad old days of Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo: either total inaction in the face of mass atrocity crimes, or action outlawed by the UN Charter. After all that has been achieved in the last decade, such an outcome would be heartbreaking.
Gareth Evans, former Australian Foreign Minister and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is the author of The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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NEW HAVEN – Long the most fragmented nation on earth, China is being brought together like never before by a new connectivity. Its Internet community is expanding at hyper speed, with profound implications for the Chinese economy, to say nothing of the country’s social norms and political system. This genie cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. Once connected, there is no turning back.

The pace of transformation is breathtaking. According to Internet World Stats, the number of Internet users in China has more than tripled since 2006, soaring to 485 million in mid-2011 – more than three times that in 2006. Moreover, China’s rush to connectivity is far from over. As of mid-2011, only 36% of its 1.3 billion people were connected – far short of the nearly 80% penetration rates seen in South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

Indeed, with the cost of connectivity falling sharply – China’s mobile users are expected to surpass PC users by 2013 – and, with urbanization and per capita incomes also rising sharply, it is not unreasonable to expect China’s Internet penetration rate to cross the 50% threshold by 2015. That would be the functional equivalent of adding about three-fourths of all existing Internet users in the US.

Nor are the Chinese casual and infrequent Internet users. Consistent with what the social-network theorist Clay Shirky has dubbed a society’s penchant for unlocking the “cognitive surplus” embedded in net-based activities, survey data from the China Internet Network Information Center suggest that Chinese netizens log an average of 2.6 hours per day online – a full hour longer than the average 15-49-year-old Chinese citizen spends watching television.

China’s microblogs, or social networks, where usage tends be most intense, were estimated to have approximately 270 million users as of late 2011. And there is plenty of upside. Worldwide, about 70% of all Internet users currently engage in some form of microblogging, which is the fastest-growing segment of the Internet. In China, this share is just 55%.

When it comes to analyzing China, it is always easy to get carried away with numbers – especially those driven by the country’s sheer size. But the real message here concerns the implications of connectivity, not just its scale.

A key implication is the Internet’s potential to play a significant role in the emergence of China’s consumer society – a critical structural imperative for a long-unbalanced Chinese economy. With connectivity comes a national awareness of spending habits, tastes, and brands – essential characteristics of any consumer culture.

The consumption share of China’s economy, at less than 35% of GDP, is the lowest of any major country. Surging Chinese Internet usage could well facilitate the pro-consumption initiatives of the recently enacted 12th Five-Year Plan.

The Internet could also enable freer and more open communications, upward mobility, transparent and rapid dissemination of information, and, yes, individuality. China’s leadership has been increasingly vocal in raising concerns about growing inequalities that might otherwise hinder the development of what they call a more “harmonious society.” Online connectivity could be a powerful means to help China come together and achieve this goal.

Finally, there is the Internet’s potential as an instrument of political change. That is hardly an inconsequential consideration for any country in the aftermath of last year’s Arab Spring, which was facilitated in many countries (especially Tunisia and Egypt) by network-enabled mobilization.

While reform of China’s single-party state has always been viewed as an important objective in modern China – from the so-called Fifth Modernization of Wei Jinsheng in the late 1970’s to recent speeches by Premier Wen Jiabao – meaningful progress has been limited. Is this likely to change as China embraces the Internet?

China is no exception in requiring leadership, accountability, and responsiveness as conditions of political stability. Its rapidly expanding Internet community has repeatedly raised national awareness of tough local issues. This was especially evident in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, ethnic violence in Xinjiang in 2009, and the high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou in 2011.

As the Arab Spring demonstrated, the Internet can quickly transform local incidents into national flashpoints – turning the new connectivity into a potential source of political instability and turmoil. But that has been the case only in countries ruled by highly unpopular autocratic regimes.

By contrast, China’s leadership is viewed with a much greater degree of public sympathy. Their quick and direct response to the recent incidents in Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Wenzhou are important cases in point. Senior Party leaders – especially Premier Wen – were quick to lead an empathetic national response that was largely effective in countering the outpouring of concern expressed on the Internet.

None of this is to deny the dark side of the Chinese Internet explosion – namely, widespread censorship and constraints on individual freedom of expression. China’s “SkyNet” team (rumored to be greater than 30,000) is the largest cyber police force in the world.

Moreover, while China is not alone in censoring the Internet, self-policing by many of the nation’s largest portals amplifies official oversight and surveillance. Recent restrictions on microbloggers – especially denial of access to those who use untraceable aliases – have heightened concerns over Chinese Internet freedom. Such restrictions, of course, cut both ways – potentially limiting personal expression, but also constraining disguised and reckless vigilante attacks.

Filtered or not, a long-fragmented China now has a viable and rapidly expanding network. The power of that network – especially insofar as economic, social, and political change is concerned – is hard to predict. But connectivity adds a new dimension of cohesion to modern China. That can only accelerate the speed of its extraordinary development journey.
Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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NEW DELHI – Will 2012 prove to be a year of renewal for India, or another annus horribilis? No country progresses unerringly, but India cannot afford another politically and economically torpid year like 2011. For India, last year is a year best forgotten.

India has been so deeply mired in political paralysis that the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen recently said that the country has “fallen from being the second best to the second worst” South Asian country, and that it is currently “no match for China” on social indicators. This is a damning comment on a country that held such promise just a short time ago.

In early January, the American social critic James Howard Kunstler described India as “a nation with one foot in the modern age and the other in a colorful hallucinatory dreamtime.” Kunstler’s view is harsh, but perhaps prophetic: India’s “climate-change-related problems are doing heavy damage to the food supply. Their groundwater is almost gone. The troubles of the wobbling global economy will take a lot of pep out of their burgeoning tech and manufacturing sectors.”

Indeed, suddenly, India’s economy has begun spinning out of control. Last year, the country’s GDP growth slowed, manufacturing plummeted, and inflation and corruption grew uncontrollably. Elected and unelected government officials alike, including cabinet ministers, members of parliament, and civil servants, were implicated in corruption scandals. The situation triggered recollections of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s fraudulent call for a state of emergency in 1975, when she ruled by decree for 21 months, suspending elections and civil liberties.

The population’s outraged response to these events was visceral, and previously unknown figures such as the anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare rallied thousands of Indians in meetings across the country to protest against government corruption. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government floundered, the opposition vainly sought to gain the upper hand.

But, to ordinary Indians, this political gamesmanship appeared to be merely a farce – the blind pretending to lead the unsighted. Perhaps for the first time ever, India’s government failed to enact even a single piece of legislation, much less undertake any economic reforms, restore price stability, or address widespread civil disorder.

As the Indian business analyst Virendra Parekh has observed:  “The second fastest-growing economy in the world now has the unenviable distinction of having the fastest falling financial markets in Asia.” Moreover, “the fortunes of the rupee are….tightly linked with the euro, which is in the throes of an existential crisis…” This has resulted in another, albeit unintended, consequence: “Unscrupulous politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, who have stashed their illicit wealth abroad, are bringing some of it back,” passing off the money as export earnings. Where corruption has been absent, incompetence has replaced it.

Furthermore, weaknesses in agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and governance have all contributed to India’s current crisis. For example, approximately a quarter-million Indian farmers have allegedly committed suicide over the last 16 years, despite unprecedented economic growth.

This statistic begs the question of why India continues to import foods and oils that could be produced domestically. Solutions offered by organizations such as the US-India Business Council or USAID do not address the problem’s roots, and the crisis will most likely continue in 2012. It is imperative that India invest in its agriculture, not only for economic reasons, but also because it is central to the country’s culture.

Another concern is nuclear power. In 2008, the United States and India agreed to a civil nuclear deal that would allow India to expand its nuclear-power capability. In 2010, India’s parliament passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, a precondition for activating that agreement. But, following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, safety concerns surrounding nuclear power are large and mounting.

Local farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists have spent months protesting a planned six-reactor nuclear-power complex on the plains of Jaitapur, south of Mumbai. In April, the protests turned violent, leaving one man dead and dozens injured. India will certainly see more anti-nuclear clashes in 2012.

At the heart of India’s current malaise is a paradox: rapid growth in real income has not been matched by genuine advances in living standards. If the country’s fundamental problems are to be addressed, India needs a government with the determination, integrity, and intelligence to meet the complex demands of modern governance in the twenty-first century.
Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister, is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
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