Civ 9

Catalan International View A European Review of the World

The Arab world in turmoil

Articles by Carme Colomina, Marc Gafarot and Fèlix Martí

Issue 9 • Spring 2011 • € 5

Africa in the aftermath of the financial crisis

by Gerard Padró

What lessons in fiscal sovereignty can Europe learn from the US?

by Francesc-Roger Martí

Fukushima: the globalisation of a nuclear crisis

by Pere Torres

Interview

Joan Margarit by Eva Piquer

Cover Artist: Miquel Rasero

SECTIONS: Europe · America · Africa ·Asia · Greeen Debate · Interview · Opinion Business & Economics · Barcelona Echoes · Science & Technology · Universal Catalans A Short Story from History · The Artist · A Poem

Green & Red Editor

Víctor Terradellas

6......... Good NEEWS / Osama erased?

by Francesc de Dalmases

To Our Readers

Francesc de Dalmases

vterradellas@catmon.cat Director

director@international-view.cat Art Director

Contents

7......... A new Mediterranean for the 21st century

by Víctor Terradellas and Roger Albinyana

The Arab World in Turmoil

Quim Milla

8......... The Arab world in turmoil

Marc Gafarot

12........ Egypt: the distance between hope and reality

designer@international-view.cat Head of International Relations

marcgafarot@catmon.cat

Editorial Board

by Marc Gafarot

by Carme Colomina

Martí Anglada Manel Balcells Enric Canela Àngel Font Anna Grau August Gil-Matamala Montserrat Guibernau Guillem López-Casasnovas Manuel Manonelles Fèlix Martí Arcadi Oliveres Eva Piquer Ricard Planas Vicent Sanchis Pere Torres Carles Vilarrubí Vicenç Villatoro

18........ Old interpretations and new events

Chief Editor

40........ The open wounds of the Second World War

Judit Aixalà

Language Advisory Service

by Fèlix Martí

Europe

22........ Berlusconi’s ‘weak strength’

by Sandra Buxaderas

26........ EU agricultural policy facing global challenges

by Ricard Ramon-Sumoy

America

30........ What lessons in fiscal sovereignty can Europe learn from the US?

by Francesc-Roger Martí

Africa

34........ Africa in the aftermath of the financial crisis

by Gerard Padró

Asia

by Natàlia Boronat

Nigel Balfour Júlia López

44........ The paradox of growth: wealth without welfare

Coordinator

Green Debate

Maria Novella Webmaster

Marta Calvó Cover Art

Miquel Rasero

The reproduction of the artwork on the front cover is thanks to an agreement between Fundació Vila Casas and Fundació CATmón Executive Production

by Iris Mir

48........ Fukushima: the globalisation of a nuclear crisis

by Pere Torres

Interview

52........ Joan Margarit

by Eva Piquer

Opinion

60....... What did we want universal justice for?

by Anna Grau

Business & Economics

66........ Intergenerational equity in a warming planet

Headquarters, Administration and Subscriptions

Fonollar, 14 08003 Barcelona Catalonia (Europe) Tel.: + 34 93 533 42 38 Fax: + 34 93 319 22 24 www. international-view.cat Legal deposit

B-26639-2008 ISSN

2013-0716

by Joaquim Silvestre

72........ A boycott of secession

by Modest Guinjoan

Barcelona Echoes

78.......

Barcelona: city of conferences

by Jordi Fexas

Science & Technology

82 ........The current European aerospace industry

by Jordi Barrera-Ars

Universal Catalans

86........ Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra

© Edicions de la Fundació CATmón. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, protocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Edicions de la Fundació CATmón.

Printed in Catalonia by

A Poem

Imgesa

94........ Who dictates the words when I am speaking to you?

Published quarterly

by Marc Gafarot

A Short Story from History

90....... ‘Garbo:

The Man Who Saved the World’

The Artist

92........ Miquel Rasero

by Maria-Mercè Marçal

Catalan International View

Editorial Board Martí Anglada Former foreign news editor at TV3 (Catalonia television). He has been foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Italy and Great Britain (1977-1984) for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and United States correspondent for TV3 (1987-1990). He has also been an international political commentator. His latest book is Afers no tan estrangers (Not So Foreign Affairs) published by Editorial Mina (part of Grup 62).

Manel Balcells (Ripoll, 1958). Doctor specialising in orthopaedics, traumatology and sports medicine. Holds a degree in Health Management from EADA and is a member of a number of scientific societies. In his distinguished career in the health sector he has been medical director of Granollers General Hospital (Barcelona); both director and secretary of Coordination and Strategy for the Department of Health of the Generalitat de Catalunya; councillor for the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society; and consultant for the Catalan Hospital Consortium. Since the 27th of December 2006 he has been president of the board of directors of the Private BioRegion Foundation of Catalonia.

Enric Canela (Barcelona, 1949). Holds a Chemistry degree from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB, 1972) and a PhD in Chemistry with Biochemistry as his specialisation. Lecturer at the UB since 1974, he is professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and head of the department of the same name in the Biology Faculty of the UB. He collaborates in research on intracellular communication and theoretical biochemistry. He regularly publishes in scientific journals of international renown. Between 1991 and 1995 he was vice-president of the Catalan Biology Society. He has been president of the Society for Knowledge since September 2007. Since June 2007 he has been patron of the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) for the Spanish state.

Àngel Font (lleida, 1965). Holds a degree in Chemical Sciences from the Universitat de Barcelona and a diploma in Business Management from EADA Business School. Began his career in an environmental engineering company and subsequently joined Intermón Oxfam where he held the post of coordinator on projects in Latin America, fund-raising and public relations and assistant to the director general. Since 2000 he has been director of the Un Sol Món (One World) Foundation financed by the Caixa de Catalunya (savings bank) where he runs projects for social housing and employment for disadvantaged groups as well as the development of microfinance in Spain, Latin America and Africa. Àngel Font is a member of the Cooperation Council of the Generalitat de Catalunya and was the first vice-president of the European Microfinance Network. He carries out teaching duties related to the management of non-profit organisations at a number of business schools.

Anna Grau Journalist and writer. From 1991 to 2005 she worked as a political journalist in Barcelona and Madrid, where she was the correspondent for the Avui newspaper and numerous programmes for TV3, Catalunya Ràdio, Ràdio4 and COM ràdio. In 2005 she left for New York, where she currently works. Author of El dia que va morir el president (the Day the President Died), Dones contra dones (Women Against Women), Endarrere aquesta gent (Reject These People) and the essay Per què parir (Why have a baby?).

August Gil-Matamala Has been a practising lawyer since 1960, specialising in the fields of criminal and labour law. He has taken part in numerous cases in defence of people on trial for their demands in favour of people’s rights, as well as hearings before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Gil-Matamala fought the first successful case against the Spanish state for the violation of basic rights. He is a founder member of the Commission for the Defence of Individual Rights of the Col·legi d’Advocats de Barcelona (the Barcelona Bar Association) and the Catalan Association for the Defence of Human Rights, which he presided over from its foundation in 1985 to 2001. Gil-Matamala has also been president of both the Fundació Catalunya and the European Democratic Lawyers organisation. In 2007, coinciding with his retirement, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross, the highest honour awarded by the Catalan government).

Montserrat Guibernau Professor of Politics at Queen Mary College, University of London. Holds a PhD and an MA in Social and Political Theory from the University of Cambridge and a degree in Philosophy from the Universitat de Barcelona. She has taught at the universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Barcelona, the London School of Economics and the Open University. Guibernau has held visiting professorhips at the universities of Edinburgh, Tampere, Pompeu Fabra, the UQAM (Quebec) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Currently she holds a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics. Montserrat Guibernau is the author of numerous books and articles on nationalism, the nation-state, national identity, and national and ethnic minorities in the West from the perspective of global governance.

Guillem López-Casasnovas (Menorca, 1955). Holds a degree in Economics (distinction, 1978) and Law (1979) from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB). He obtained his PhD in Public Economics from the University of York (UK, 1984). He has been a lecturer at the UB, visiting scholar at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (UK), University of Sussex and at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Stanford (USA). Since June 1992 has been full professor of economics at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where he has been vice-rector of Economics and International Relations and dean of the School of Economics and Business Science. In 1998 he created the Economics and Health Research Centre (CRES- UPF), which he directed until recently. Co-director of the Master’s in Public Management (UPF-UAB-EAPC). In 2000 he received the Catalan Economics Society Award and in 2001 the Joan Sardà Dexeus Award. He is also a member of the Menorcan Institute of Studies, The Catalan Royal Academy of Medicine and a distinguished member of the Economists’ Society of Catalunya. President of the International Health Economics Association and since 2005 one of the Spanish Central Bank’s six independent Council members.

Manuel Manonelles Political commentator specialising in international relations, human rights and democratisation processes. Currently director of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, Barcelona. He has been special advisor to the Co-chair of the UN High Level Group for the Alliance of Civilisations, as well as advisor to the coordinator of the Secretariat of the World Forum of Civil Society Networks (Ubuntu Forum), which is a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum. He has been an international electoral observer and supervisor for the OSCE and the EU on many occasions, and has participated in several international intergovernmental and non-governmental processes.

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Catalan International View

Fèlix Martí Former president of the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (Pax Romana), from 1975 to 1984; director of Catalonia magazine (1987-2002), a publication printed in four different languages, aimed at disseminating Catalan culture; director of the UNESCO centre of Catalonia (1984 to 2002) and later its honorary president (from 2003). From 1994 to 2002 he was editor of the Catalan editions of the yearly reports of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, L’Estat del món (The State of the World) and Signes vitals (Vital Signs). He promotes the Declaration on Contributions by Religions to a Culture of Peace, signed by leaders of the great religious traditions in 1994. President of the Linguapax International Institute from 2001 to 2004 and honorary president thereafter. Wrote his memoirs Diplomàtic sense estat (Diplomat Without a State), published by Edicions Proa in 2006. Was awarded the UNESCO Human Rights Medal in 1995 and the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross) in 2002.

Arcadi Oliveres (Barcelona, 1945). PhD in Economic Science, lecturer in the Department of Applied Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and president of the organisation Justícia i Pau ( Justice and Peace). He is also president of the Catalan Council for the Promotion of Peace, the International Peace University Foundation of Sant Cugat del Vallès, the Federation of Internationally Recognised Catalan Organisations (FOCIR) and the Easy to Read Association. He is an expert on North-South relations, international trade, external debt and defence economics and also lectures on aid and development for a number of master’s and PhD programmes.

Eva Piquer (Barcelona, 1969). Writer and journalist. Works for the Avui newspaper where she coordinates the cultural supplement and the culture section. Has been a lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a New York news correspondent. Won the 2002 Josep Pla prize for her novel Una victòria diferent (A Different Victory). Also author of several books, including La noia del temps (The Weather Girl), Alícia al país de la televisió (Alice in Television Land) and No sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva (I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive).

Ricard Planas (Girona, 1976). Journalist, art critic and cultural promoter. Studied Philology and the History of Art at the Universitat de Girona. In 1999 he founded the magazine Bonart, dedicated to the contemporary art scene in the Catalan Countries. More recently he created and directed the Catalan art fair INART in 2005 and 2006. Has worked as the curator for exhibitions by important artists such as Arranz-Bravo, Lamazares, Formiguera, Cuixart, Ansesa and Grau-Garriga. Ricard has collaborated with Ona Catalana, Catalunya Ràdio, iCatfm and Onda Rambla radio stations. Has also worked for the Diari de Girona, El Punt and El Mundo newspapers, among others.

Vicent Sanchis (València, 1961). Holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In his career as a journalist it is worth highlighting that he has worked and collaborated on many publications and with numerous publishers; he has been editor and director of El Temps magazine; director of Setze magazine, the Catalan supplement of Cambio 16; and director of the newspapers El Observador and Avui. He has also excelled as a scriptwriter and director on different TV programmes. At present he is president of the editorial board of Avui, content director of Grup Cultura 03 and vice-president of Òmnium Cultural. Vicent is also lecturer in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Universitat Ramon Llull de Barcelona.

Pere Torres Biologist and environmental consultant. After some time spent on research (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), he joined the Government of Catalonia in 1991. He was in turn secretary of the Catalan Inter-university Council (1991-1993), head of the Environment Minister’s staff (1993-1995), general director of Environmental Planning (1995-2000) and secretary for Regional Planning (2000-2003).

Since 2004 he has done consultancy work in public management, sustainability and land use planning and has been a regular contributor to the International Institute for Governability and the Cerdà Institute.

Carles Vilarrubí (Barcelona, 1954). Businessman. He is currently Executive Vice-President of Rothschild Spain Investment Bank, specialising in key mergers and takeovers in the financial sector on an international scale. President of CVC Grupo Consejero, an equity and investment advisory firm, with a portfolio of shares in consulting and service companies from the world of communications, the media, marketing, technology and telecommunications. President of Doxa Consulting Group, independent consultants on technology, media and telecommunications, leaders in the sector and with a presence in Spain and Portugal. He is a member of the advisory board of the Catalan confederation Foment del Treball Nacional (National Employment Promotion) and patron of the Fundació Orfeó Català - Palau de la Música. He has also been a member of the governing council of ADENA WWF (World Wild Fund for Nature), and sat on the boards of the Fundación Arte y Tecnología, Fundesco and Fundación Entorno. He is also member of the F.C Barcelona.

Vicenç Villatoro (Terrassa, 1957). Writer and journalist. Holds a degree in Information Sciences. Former president of the Ramon Trias Fargas Foundation.

As a journalist he has worked for numerous organisations. He was the editor of the Avui newspaper from 1993 to 1996 and head of the culture section of TV3. Between 2002 and 2004 was director general of the Catalan Radio and Television Corporation. He has contributed to a range of media companies, such as Avui, El Periódico, El País, El Temps, Catalunya Ràdio and COM ràdio. As a writer he has written a dozen novels. Currently he is the president of the Institut Ramon Llull.

Francesc de Dalmases (Director) (Barcelona, 1970). Journalist, logistician and consultant in humanitarian aid and cooperation and development. Has been president (1999-2006) of the Association of Periodicals in Catalan (APPEC); coordinator for the delegation to the Spanish state of European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (1995-1999); coordinator for the third conference of the CONSEU (Conference of European Stateless Nations) (1999); and coordinator for the publication Europa de les Nacions (1993-1999). Has acted as a foreign expert in aid projects in such diverse locations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mexico, Guatemala and Morocco. He is a member of the Cooperation Council of the Catalan government.

Víctor Terradellas (Editor) (Reus, 1962). Entrepreneur and political and cultural activist. President and founder of Fundació CATmón. Editor of Catalan International View and ONGC, a magazine dedicated to political thought, solidarity, aid and international relations. Víctor has always been involved in political and social activism, both nationally and internationally. The driving force behind the Plataforma per la Sobirania (The Platform for Self-Determination) as well as being responsible for significant Catalan aid operations and international relations in such diverse locations as Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Pakistan and Kurdistan. Currently he is General Secretary of International Relations for the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party.

Catalan International View

5

Green & Red

by Francesc de Dalmases

Good NEEWS

In the 7th edition of the Catalan International View we suggested a new acronym for the European nations who are on the path to self-determination: NEEWS (New Emerging European Western States). The same edition also contained an interview conducted in the Scottish Parliament with Alex Salmond in which he offered his view of the future. He stated that, ‘it’s time for Scotland to take more responsibility in the world’ and his words could not have been more prophetic. In the May 5th elections, the Scottish National Party achieved an absolute majority in Scotland, reelecting Alex Salmond as prime minister for a second term. He has announced that he will go ahead with the referendum on sovereignty during the current term which ends in 2016. It is worth noting the British government’s reaction to the election results. The Scottish Secretary of State, Michael Moore stated that they would respect the free democratic choice of the Scottish people. The exercise of the democratic right to decide continues in a Europe which wishes to recognise its national diversity.

Osama erased?

Barack Obama represented a desire to change and transform the image the United States presents to the world. The speech he made in Cairo shortly after taking office and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role during the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are good examples of such a desire. It was therefore somewhat surprising to hear of the operation carried out by US navy SEALS in which an unarmed Bin Laden was shot and killed with at least one bullet to the head. The fact that the alQaeda leader had confessed to numerous, brutal attacks that resulted in thousands of victims is no excuse for his summary execution. Those of us who criticised the illegal kidnappings and arrests in Guantanamo and the ensuing military tribunals have observed with disappointment how the military action in Abbottabad ruled out the possibility of an arrest followed by a fair trial that would have drawn the necessary line between barbarity and civilisation. Now more than ever we should call on democratic states for the commitment, support and respect for international law, legal processes on an international scale and in particular their commitment and adherence to the International Criminal Court’s rulings.

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Catalan International View

To Our Readers

A new Mediterranean for the 21st century

by VĂ­ctor Terradellas and Roger Albinyana In the first ever article published in Catalan International View, in the spring of 2008, we highlighted the need for a publication that is open to dialogue, analysis and international investigation. We also argued that it should come from Catalonia, a European nation located in the Mediterranean.

We wish to remind ourselves of this today because this year we have been witness to changes and transformations in different parts of the Arab world and these changes have effects which could be key to the future of the Mediterranean.

On its southern shore we have witnessed how the slow but positive evolution underway in Tunisia and Egypt is in contrast to the tribulations and horror occurring in Libya. However, it is undeniable that all three scenarios demonstrate a desire for change and transformation and an authentic self-determination process that sets its sights on a democratic, just and free future.

The northern shore cannot be indifferent to these changes because it was an accomplice to the previous state of affairs.

The Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi regimes have to be seen as the result of the connivance of a West that protected them for years with the excuse that they are the lesser of two evils.

Nowadays we must take note of, evaluate and consolidate the new role adopted by the European Union and the Obama administration in these events. It is a new stance which, for the first time since the processes which ended colonialism, grants

the desires of the majority a privileged position in their respective societies.

Such political changes do not happen from one day to the next, especially if we want them to last. For this reason, we in the North should appreciate them and provide them with economic and political support in order to secure new spaces in which democracy can flourish in the South. Simultaneously the North needs to admit to the errors committed in the past in which it employed geopolitical and geostrategic excuses which have shown to be mistaken.

It is a good moment, therefore, to nominate Catalonia and its capital Barcelona as the headquarters of the Mediterranean Union, a unique organisation that brings together 43 countries from both shores of the Mediterranean. The institution made a promising start but within a short space of time it was the victim of neglect and invisibility. Last February its secretary general, Ahmad Masadeh, resigned just one year after having taken office, citing the continual difficulties and stalemate the institution faces as a result of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict.

We must call on the supporters and members of the institution to meet their responsibilities and grant the Mediterranean Union the role and the power that it warrants. This is especially important at this time, since the construction and the definition of the Mediterranean of the twenty-first century will be key to the future of Europe and the world as a whole.

Catalan International View

7

The Arab World in Turmoil

The Arab world in turmoil

by Marc Gafarot*

Photos by Francesc ParĂŠs

The Arab world is in a state of turmoil and is undergoing significant transformations brought on by a growing wave of popular uprisings. Various governments in the region are subject to ever-increasing levels of popular protests as the direct result of years of authoritarian government, high levels of corruption and low levels of social mobility. It is clear that the economy does not sufficiently satisfy the people’s aspirations.

Citizens from all walks of life are protesting in order to call for freedom, democracy, better opportunities and new faces heading their governments. Until now the ritual has been a familiar one in these low-level dictatorships: the tedium and isolation coming from a lack of prospects and a feeling of nausea produced by seeing the same old faces in power. Israel and the US were easily used by the local governments as scapegoats.

Now, however, the story could be beginning to change or at least to involve new elements. One element of this new era could well be intangible: only a much freer Arab world can achieve peace with Israel. Up until now greater political freedom was synonymous with Islam. In this new era this will have to change. Will it? The situation remains unclear, but this time the revolts do not come from Islamic radicals, nor are they inspired by what is taught in the madrassas.

As with most of these cases everything began with an unfortunate isolated incident. A young man set fire to himself when he saw he was condemned to a life of injustice and desperation. A seemingly futile act which surprisingly lit the fuse on a powder keg of intergenerational tension that had accumulated within people who up until then had been treated like lepers by their leaders and who were finally able to once more raise their heads.

As a result, on the 14th of January, the Tunisian revolution managed to topple Ben Ali, who ended up fleeing the country with his family in tow. Numerous subsequent demonstrations led to a rupture between the old regime and the people who had held power in recent decades that proved greater than it had appeared at first sight. Tunisia has demonstrated the strength of mass mobilisation, gloriously bridging the gap between the Bedouin world and (post) modernity. It has used social networks to expand and has gone from socioeconomic demands to a call for political and moral change. It is a movement 8

Catalan International View

originating from the people in countries where the forces of modernity were only present as an afterthought and solely for a fraction of the elite. It is an impressive, qualitative leap that is nonetheless unpredictable as it will require a great deal of vigilance as to who or which groups end up holding power. Taking it for granted that these revolts are synonymous with democratic reform and progress is not only naive, it is irresponsible and shows a lack of understanding of countries which were born out of turmoil and which have remained immersed in it until the present day. It is likely that radical Islamism has still not spoken its last since, admittedly, their organisational capabilities and ability to act is generally far superior to any other organisation or group in the Arab world. The organisational nature of the current uprisings, which has caught Arab autocratic regimes unawares and which has made the success of some of them possible, could be their downfall if they remain unchanged and these groups do not become genuine organised structures

The Arab World in Turmoil

with politico-bureaucratic abilities. It is vital that they expand towards other elements in society which perhaps until now have not formed part of the frontline, but which could and should help to win the peace. Concluding the era of peace with insurrectional values would be a price which may well be paid by various future generations.

Egypt is a different situation. For some time now the land of the Nile has been witness to a growing climate of conflict, whether of a social or political nature. Since 2004, workers’ protests have been on the increase, these have been accompanied by numerous mass demonstrations by groups such as judges and lawyers, accusations of electoral fraud, the suppression of opposition leaders and an apparent social tension following increases in the price of staple foods such as bread. It appears that bread ends up changing everything. The Egyptian revolution, like the Tunisian, has given wings to a vibrant mass of the younger generation, who via Facebook and Twitter have managed to bring together a large number of Egyptians and to carry out the largest and longest protest in the country’s recent history. So far they have accomplished the ‘impossible’: Mubarak has agreed not to stand for re-election and his son will not succeed him. Nevertheless, his declarations have not pacified

large segments of society, thus threatening the stability Egypt has achieved up to this point. In spite of the key role played by the military a certain degree of chaos and conflict on the streets has been unavoidable. We must closely follow developments of this key Arab state and any implications it has for a new era of relations between the Arab world and the state of Israel. Putting this global hotspot in order is crucial to world peace.

Will this be the start of a democratic spring in the Arab nations? Or are they merely cosmetic changes?

After the fall of Mubarak, Gaddafi’s Libya has been the next country to host a significant popular uprising, which in turn has led to higher levels of repression by the regime. It has provoked violent scenes which have left the international community perplexed as they ask themselves how such a man as Gaddafi can end up at the head of a nation of such delicate strategic importance. In fact the Libyan leader possesses an almost chameleonic capacity to adapt himself that is as great as his pretensions of grandeur and his lack of scruples when it comes to shedding blood.

It is also shocking how the international Catalan International View

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The Arab World in Turmoil

community has repeatedly forgiven the antics of this megalomaniac (I refuse to accept the need for oil as an excuse) who according to the circumstances has been a Pan-Arabist, African, socialist and social-justice leader, while always being a populist demagogue. Gaddafi is like the coronel in the story by García Márquez who has no one to write to him and has ended up as a bad impersonation of himself.

In other times, the man known as the Guide of the Revolution nationalised the oil wells; brought water from large aquifers under the Sahara to coastal towns, built homes, schools and hospitals; paved the streets and allowed more freedom for women. Unfortunately, Gaddafi’s hunger for power overtook his concerns for his people.

He wished to be the new Nasser and tried to unify the Arab world with himself as leader. However, Libya was seen as insignificant by other Arab nations, while Gaddafi was seen as inexperienced, impulsive, unabashed, unpredictable and egomaniacal. They have never taken him seriously, leading to his increasingly outrageous, erratic behaviour which continues to this day.

Parallels with the fall of the Berlin Wall are inevitable, certainly, but they are also exaggerated As it is the Libyans have tough decisions ahead of them: a choice between peace and rebellion, between putting a despotic regime on trial or condemning it to a negotiated exile. At some stage the UN, or powerful nations working unilaterally, will have to lend the unfortunate Libyan people a hand.

The current mandate (resolution 1973) outlines the necessary measures for protecting the civilian population from attacks by coronel Gaddafi’s forces and tellingly mentions the fact that the new 10

Catalan International View

Libya must be designed and made by the Libyans themselves. Foreign powers such as France may be tempted to think otherwise. The Arab League’s involvement provides the legitimacy necessary for the use of force, under the auspices of the United Nations. For the time being these actions do not include the deployment of ground troops since Iraq is still too present in the global imagination. Nevertheless, a broad ‘interpretation’ of the resolution does not rule out more hostile action towards Gaddafi if he should continue to cling to power at whatever cost to the civilian population.

For decades European and American policies in the region have placed stability and the control of Islamism above democracy and human rights.

The current paradigm shift in the Arab world highlights a need to re-evaluate these policies. The US administration and some European governments appear to have learnt lessons from the events in Tunisia. President Obama was followed a short time later by some European leaders in lending support to the democratic aspirations of the Egyptians and other Arab nations.

Nevertheless, their pronouncements are couched in terms of ‘wait and see’, or in other words the classic prudence of politicians.

At present there are major questions still waiting to be answered. Will Tunisia’s transition consolidate itself as democracy? Which way will Egypt go? What future awaits Libya? And what will become of Bashar Al Assad’s Syria? Syria is a different matter altogether and its geopolitical situation deserves a rigorous study in which the competing roles of the Alawi minority and the Sunni majority need investigating. More importantly, whose side will other ethnic groups, the Kurds, Christians and Syrian Arameans take?

For the time being Syria has not escaped from this so-called ‘Arab Spring’

The Arab World in Turmoil

as citizens from the various communities have taken advantage of the situation by holding protests calling for an end to such suposedly temporary situations as the state of emergency which dates from 1963. When faced with rising tensions the regime has been quick to promise changes. Similar intentions were expressed and up till now not respected by Bashir himself over ten years ago at the time of his election. For this reason we must remain vigilant of any transfer of instability to the Lebanese wasps’ nest from its northern neighbour and how this might affect the always difficult equilibrium in a country where the wounds of the civil war are still wide open.

In the case of Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s role will be key to development in the Saleh regime. It is a regime which for many has its days numbered following more than three decades of power.

Bahrain and Oman are other points we will have to follow, as is the Iran of Ahmadinejad where more and more commentators foresee new, growing instabilities in the hitherto unshakeable, fearful regime of the mullahs.

We will have to keep asking ourselves whether these popular uprisings will continue to affect other countries in the region. What will the international reaction be if this were to occur? Will it be the start of a democratic spring in the Arab nations? Or are they merely cosmetic changes?

Since the riots began in Tunisia, the international political world has not missed the opportunity to label these popular movements as groundbreak-

ing in this region that reaches from the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf. Parallels with the fall of the Berlin Wall are inevitable, certainly, but they are also exaggerated and are instances of lazy journalism in their over-simplicity. The Arab Spring is a somewhat unfortunate title, since the events in Prague had unpleasant consequences, although they did serve to create an ounce of hope which even the tanks could not crush.

The world has changed since then, but perhaps not sufficiently for the Arab nations who now seem desperate for democratic change, new horizons and opportunities and the search for new leaders less under the spell of Nasser or the Koran and more concerned for what their people say and feel. Up until now their search has been lost among the harsh, arid desert tracks. *Marc Gafarot

Holds a degree in Humanities from the Universidad de Navarra, an MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool. As a journalist and political commentator he has worked from London for Bloomberg LP, in Latin America for Summit Communications and served as a Parliamentary Adviser at the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. Gafarot is currently Head of International Relations for Catalan International View. He has written a book on Flanders and Federalism in Belgium called ‘La mort de Bèlgica? La gradual i pacífica emancipació flamenca’ (The Death of Belgium? The Gradual and Peaceful Flemish Emancipation) and co-authored The Student’s Guide to European Integration.

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The Arab World in Turmoil

Egypt: the distance between hope and reality

by Carme Colomina*

Cairo’s Tahrir Square has become a symbol. The symbol of a popular uprising. A peaceful protest which, in only three weeks, dispensed with thirty years of dictatorship, obliging the old oligarchies to change the politics of the largest country in North Africa and to begin to review their most recent past. Egypt’s fragile transition is becoming consolidated despite the shadows of major threats.

States and societies which until now have been under the rule of dictatorships are closely watching the transitions that have begun in Tunisia and Egypt. They are countries with shared structural ills: high levels of unemployment and corruption and a lack of freedom. The flame which was ignited in Tunisia was the beginning of a democratising process of no return on a regional scale. Revolution or evolution?

Are we witnessing the end of autocratic regimes or political reforms reluctantly granted following popular pressure and with the aim of holding on to power?

Hosni Mubarak’s fall is not the end, it is only the beginning. Like Egypt, the Arab world has lost its fear. Ahmed Driss, Professor of International Relations at the University of Tunisia is convinced that, ‘the process is irreversible but not necessarily towards the same model’, and Egypt, as a regional power, has a key role to play in the impact a peaceful transition in this country of 80 12

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million inhabitants could have on other states, from North Africa to Saudi Arabia, the world’s number one oil producer.

Europe has lost one of its favourite dictators, one who made peace with Israel while it made the most of its role as a strategic regional power, influential in the Arab world. The iron hand against radical Islam and a generous host of European ministers and heads of government with all-expenses-paid holidays in the Red Sea. The European Union accompanied him almost to the end, employing suitably empty diplomatic language. The President of the United Sates, Barack Obama, applied pressure to the point where Mubarak’s closest advisors made him see it was time to go. Nevertheless, ‘the Pharaoh’ had begun to fall long before that fateful Friday 11th of February when he left Cairo in silence, headed for his residence in Sharm el Sheik, while hundreds of thousands took to the streets of

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the nation’s largest cities calling for his downfall.

Mubarak’s sentence started to be written in November 2010 following fraudulent legislative elections and the constitution of a suspect parliament. It was to be the catalyst for widespread discontentment in a society that was tired of an octogenarian regime which was only interested in defending its own interests via the state apparatus, businesses and the security forces, and which was headed by an aged dictator who was preparing the groundwork for power to be transferred to his son Gamal. The ubiquitous image of Mubarak continued to look down on the Egyptians from the enormous billboards all over town, where for some time the dictator had ceased to age, without realising that his people had begun to abandon him. Hosni Mubarak, a man who had survived six assassination attempts, was toppled by the peaceful mobilisation of his people.

The old dictator is out of the picture today. The law has begun to act against corruption and against Mubarak, his son Gamal and some of the most hated figures of the regime, such as the former head of the interior ministry and the public head of the bloody police repression. Six months ago, Hosni Mubarak was the unchallenged ruler of Egypt, and his son Gamal was assumed to be the heir-apparent. Today, the old president is detained in hospital, while his heir is a prisoner at Tora Farm, the country’s most notorious prison. Justice has accelerated a review of the recent past, in part because the provisional military government found it necessary to placate protesters (who continue to challenge its reform) by taking severe action against the ancien régime.

A three-sided game

The most difficult factor for the military council is controlling the rate of reforms, in order that they ease the Catalan International View

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pressure that continues to emanate from Tahrir Square while being slow enough to satisfy the majority of Egyptian society. Their credibility could be damaged if they continue to play off all sides. The Supreme Council, an institution run by septuagenarians, has symbolically signed up to Facebook to make its official announcements, while it continues to play a key role in guaranteeing the country’s stability and the success of the transition.

Hosni Mubarak’s fall is not the end, it is only the beginning. Like Egypt, the Arab world has lost its fear The army has played a key role in the transition. They supported Mubarak’s regime for decades and he himself is from the military. However, they ensured the safety of the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and have ended up leading the transition. During the revolt the Egyptian armed forces formed part of a strange triangular relationship between the dictatorship, the people and their own interests. The Egyptian army is one of the largest in the world with almost one million members and military spending which represents some 3.4% of GDP. Egypt is the world’s second largest receiver of military aid. Last year alone the United States gave more than two billion euros to the Egyptian government, mostly in the form of military equipment. It is an injection of money which on more than one occasion has served to feed corruption.

With the regime mortally wounded, economically paralysed and abandoned by its Western allies, Hosni Mubarak, while still president, appealed to another military figure, general Omar Suleiman, in a frustrated attempt to please the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians who filled Tahrir Square every day. During the most violent days 14

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of the revolution, the military played a strange role. While its tanks theoretically ensured security in Tahrir square, hundreds of paid instigators entered the area of peaceful protests in order to provoke 48 hours of random violence against the demonstrators and a witchhunt against the international press.

The soldiers impassively witnessed at first hand the most violent face of the regime, which led to tens of thousands of dead and wounded.

Finally, however, the very same army became a guarantor of a transition to democracy. Mubarak left power in the hands of a military council directed by general Tantawi, a former defence minister who is known as ‘Mubarak’s dog’.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has until now been faithful to the promise to oversee a transition process towards free elections. Since Tantawi took power, the entire government has been replaced, to the point where no representative of the old regime remains. Constitutional reform is underway with a diverse group being responsible for its confection, including a representative of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Leadership required

The largest revolt in Egypt’s recent history has not had a leader at its helm and the transition needs to create the spaces and the time needed for the creation of new political parties and leaders capable of articulating democratic answers. The social, political and religious bridges which were built in Tahrir Square in the heart of the revolt were only made possible by the absence of a name or a movement to monopolise the popular uprising to overthrow Mubarak. This same popularity has so far persisted in the transition process.

The army insisted from the start that it was not taking power in order to hold onto it. However, doubts as to who will be the leaders of a new democratic

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Egypt have still not been resolved.

Elections are planned for next August, but right now if there is one organised, respected movement throughout the country it is the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, who, while not obtaining a majority, could garner between 20% and 30% of the votes from the Egyptian population. Historically, Mubarak’s former Western allies have feared an Islamist government. This was the hand Mubarak was able to play for decades in order to guarantee international support while he kept the Muslim Brotherhood illegal.

The Muslim Brotherhood was born in 1928 as a movement designed to fight British colonialism. There followed years of violent, clandestine struggle and internal differences which have dragged on until the present day in which the old guard and the younger generation debate the democratic option. They were a minority in Tahrir Square. They hold a prudent, discrete place in the pluralistic transition process, while they deal with their own internal tensions between conservatives and reformists, between rural and urban areas and the capital. Since the Muslim Brotherhood is not a homogenous movement, its own ideological and generational transition is another process which needs to be closely followed as the changes shake the old structures of the Arab world.

In a referendum held at the end of March, millions of Egyptians approved amendments to the constitution, a big step forward in the slow, army-guided process of reforms to democratic elections as early as September. It was the first vote in decades whose outcome was not a foregone conclusion. The ‘yes’ to the amendements received 77% of the votes. The referendum divided the Egyptians into those who said the reforms would suffice for now and others who said the constitution needed a complete overhaul. Among those in

favour are the Muslim Brotherhood, and remnants of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.

The referendum was the first challenge to the heterogeneous unity of the crowds in Tahrir Square.

A youthful rebellion

The old regime was unaware that Egypt had changed and the army council in charge now is forced to be aware of this new country’s reality. Some 60% of the Egyptian population are less than 30 years old. Many of the youngsters who headed the protests are the fruit of a demographic boom that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid and the end of the eighties. They are a youth which has grown up to possess expectations that these politically and economically outmoded autocracies have been unable to fulfil. The number of young people enrolled at university in Egypt and Tunisia has reached 30% and 40% respectively, compared with 8% and 14% in 1990. The access to new technologies has created a new collective conscience.

A shared space in which to hold a debate. Young Tunisians and Egyptians have talked about politics and their social preoccupations for years. Everyone knew this (as Wikileaks has confirmed), but no one expected the spark Catalan International View

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that would transfer the debate from the virtual network to the network in the street. Thanks to social networks the youth organised the first demonstration in Tahrir square, the great historic centre which commemorates the ‘Liberation’ of 1952. According to the Egyptian writer Alaa al-Aswany, ‘they hadn’t thought about a revolution… even in their wildest dreams’. Nevertheless, the injustice, the repression and the lack of prospects for a large part of the population had created this ‘revolutionary moment’, as al-Aswany describes it. Half of the Egyptian population survives on less than two dollars a day. According to various international organisations, the unemployment rate stands at 22% and increases in the price of food have put more pressure on the poorest segments of society.

The Egyptian revolution has also been a women’s revolution. They make up almost half the population, but in Tahrir square they were in the minority.

In spite of this they have been present and visible. For some time now, young women have participated in the social and political debates that have taken place on the Internet. Many of them spent the night in Liberation square alongside their friends or husbands during the 18 days the revolt lasted. There were both veiled and unveiled women, mothers and groups of adolescents.

They have taken part in the debates, the demonstrations and also want to play their part in this transition.

Protestors from different sectors such as the legal profession, intellectuals, the unemployed and students came

together in what is the physical centre of the capital city. Tahrir was the epicentre of a revolt that rocked the entire nation, setting in motion a transition process and the construction of more democratic institutions. The square continues to be an enormous meeting place from where pressure is applied on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in order that change is not stopped. Politics is taking place on the street. Shortly after Essam Sharaf was named the new prime minister he appeared in Tahrir square. He is a longstanding member of the regime, but he has the reputation of being an honest man and is one of the figures which the freedom movement hoped for during the transition. Sharaf, microphone in hand, told the thousands of protesters, ‘my legitimacy depends on you’. Egypt’s democratic future was born, and it is still being legitimated in Tahrir square.

The people keep their faith, but the process is controlled by the army: a strong and powerful Egyptian army dictating the tempo of this long road to democracy, facing preassure from protests, the threats of a new wave of sectarian violence and the uncertainty of all the political upheavels in the region. The Egyptian revolution has still not ended.

It continues on the streets and within the institutions. In the efforts of justice to clean up its act and call for those guilty of what happened in the past to be held responsible. It still needs the commitment of an international community that propped up corrupt and violent regimes out of a misunderstanding of realpolitiks.

*Carme Colomina A journalist specialising in the present day European Union. She has been with Catalunya Ràdio for more than fourteen years, where she has been the Brussels correspondent, head of the International Section and News sub-editor. She is a member of Team Europe of the European Commission for Catalonia and the Balearics and the Catalan branch of the European Journalists Association. Currently she works for different media organisations and workshops on communication and the European Union.

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Tel. +34 977 757 473 · +34 977 756 265 • Fax +34 977 771 129 Camí Pedra Estela, 34 • 43205 Reus (Baix Camp) www.demuller.es

The Arab World in Turmoil

Old interpretations and new events

by Fèlix Martí* Photos by Francesc ParÊs

Recent events in North Africa have surprised both politicians and the public at large in the West. No one was expecting significant changes in societies which seemed doomed to exist under authoritarian political structures, with corrupt regimes and a lack of social mobility that was justified by a fear of religious radicalism. These popular revolts cannot be interpreted with reference to simplistic ideologies. They were not following a prepared script, conventional leadership or a pre-planned strategy. What one can safely say is that we witnessed the mobilisation of many people from diverse backgrounds, with the young taking a pronounced role, with everyone seeking economic justice, freedom, political honesty and the dismantling of a state apparatus of repression. We witnessed an exemplary fight for human dignity that had been ignored by dictators who had monopolised power and wealth for decades.

The clear objective of the uprisings is insufficiently recognised and acknowledged by commentators accustomed to always detecting the interested parties, hidden agendas and insurmountable odds. They do not believe that Arab countries can produce a movement which is genuinely in favour of human rights and the rights of all minorities.

They fear that those who will benefit from the overthrow of the dictatorships will inevitably be Islamic groups of a violent, fundamentalist nature. They predict that no progress will be made by women. They believe that not only will they be unable to establish democratic 18

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systems and the rule of law but that neither will they respect the autonomy that is due to civil society. They are afraid that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will turn into a full-scale war.

In North Africa, as in many other parts of the world, what we can see is the emergence of a new sensibility that wishes to leave behind the inertia that has condemned humanity and the majority of peoples to live as victims of unjust structures from a political, economic and cultural point of view. In the end globalisation may make prosperity, democratic procedure and the respect for human rights universal.

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A stronger architecture of international institutions may also allow for the protection of the environment and the peaceful settlement of conflicts, including the management of international armed forces and a rational disarmament.

One of the positive consequences of the events in northern Africa should be a review of the priorities of the international policies of Western states.

The behaviour of democratic governments could be labelled cynical since they have ignored the criminal aspects of dictators in their business dealings with them. Now is the time to

remember that powerful states act as accomplices to a global financial system which has become more important than the political order. In terms of the future, parliaments and governments have to establish a framework and the rules which regulate economic power.

Calls for democracy in North African states should be made with humility on behalf of societies that are content with low intensity democracies: bailing out banks on the brink of collapse while failing to adequately protect the unemployed, making political parties which represent political minorities illegal, utilising TV networks as the tools of Catalan International View

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political parties, establishing linguistic and cultural hierarchies and so on.

In the West numerous articles have been published calling for the monitoring of the revolts in countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The correct response would not be one of monitoring, but rather of sincere and coherent partnership. Military aid seems reasonable in situations such as Libya where a dictator is waging war against his own people. Such an opinion has been expressed by pacifist Western leaders such as Jordi Armadans, director of the Peace Foundation, based in Barcelona. Western nations should not be suggesting any kind of political guardianship or attempt to regain economic privileges.

All of the Mediterranean countries will have the opportunity to create an effective partnership in the cultural, economic and political fields. The collaboration will work if a dialogue of equals is established, if basic values are shared and if economic interests can benefit both parties.

In North Africa we can see the emergence of a new sensibility that wishes to leave behind the inertia that has condemned humanity to live as victims of unjust structures Neither Europe nor the United States should be afraid of the democratic evolution of other countries. Globalisation should serve to confirm the uni-

versality of some of the promises made during the Enlightenment which were not immediately met throughout the world.

Currently technology makes this possible. What is not viable, however, is a dualistic world divided by a political space which is ruled by liberty and fraternity and another space on the fringes of democratic values. Nor is it acceptable to have a world divided by opulence and misery. The revolutions in North Africa highlight the desire of millions of citizens to break away from the dualisms of which they have been the victims. One day the citizens of Iran, Russia, China and other small human communities that wish to liberate themselves will join them.

For now we should celebrate the process which has only just begun in North Africa and the Middle East. In this part of the world the future is open. One should not agree with approaches which condemn these revolutions to reproducing neo-colonial models of dependency, to accept old or new imperialism, of not being able to overcome tribalism or of becoming obstructed by cultural or religious traditionalisms which are incompatible with human rights. They are approaches which explain the past of their peoples but which are not sufficiently relevant to understand the present or to imagine the future. New events must be interpreted without prejudice. Near and far countries can contribute to the success of political movements whose evolution is hard to foresee and they ought to encourage them without scepticism and with effective solidarity.

*Fèlix Martí Former president of the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (Pax Romana), from 1975 to 1984; director of Catalonia magazine (1987-2002), a publication printed in four different languages, aimed at disseminating Catalan culture; director of the UNESCO centre of Catalonia (1984 to 2002) and later its honorary president (from 2003). From 1994 to 2002 he was editor of the Catalan editions of the yearly reports of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, L’Estat del món (The State of the World) and Signes vitals (Vital Signs).

He promotes the Declaration on Contributions by Religions to a Culture of Peace, signed by leaders of the great religious traditions in 1994. President of the Linguapax International Institute from 2001 to 2004 and honorary president thereafter. Wrote his memoirs Diplomàtic sense estat (Diplomat Without a State), published by Edicions Proa in 2006. Was awarded the UNESCO Human Rights Medal in 1995 and the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross) in 2002.

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Europe

Berlusconi’s ‘weak strength’

by Sandra Buxaderas*

Democracy and the rule of law are in trouble in Italy. Not only is its prime minister Silvio Berlusconi one of the richest businessmen in the country and the owner of three of the main TV channels: he is also passing laws from which he personally benefits, while neglecting Italy’s growing economic challenges. The centre-left opposition is divided and lacking credibility, while the country’s international image is seriously affected.

Nevertheless, something is slowly starting to change.

International media and public opinion often ask themselves why Silvio Berlusconi is still in power in Italy.

Do Italians not realise that with his endless brushes with the law, the sex scandals and public gaffes he is seriously damaging Italy’s prestige abroad?

Don’t they see that he’s bending the judicial and economic systems to serve his own interests? Have they been dazzled by his overwhelming control over information on TV? In fact, more than 70% of Italians do not actually vote for Berlusconi. His best result was a decade ago, in 2001, when he obtained 29.43% of the votes.

Even in the last general election, of April 2008, when he ran with Gianfranco Fini in the newly formed Freedom Party (PdL) and obtained 37.6% 22

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of the votes, experts calculate that Fini attracted his usual 10-12% share, so Berlusconi in fact only garnered around 21-25%.

On that occasion, the centre-left opposition obtained exactly the same result as the PM’s party with a 37.6% share of the votes. However it was fragmented and some parties failed to get enough votes to enter Parliament.

Nevertheless, what really tipped the balance in Berlusconi’s favour was his coalition with the ever-growing Northern League of Umberto Bossi.

It is not true, therefore, that Italy is completely bewitched by the charisma of this 74 year-old man who has dominated the country’s politics since 1994.

It is true that he does not have a majority in Parliament, but this is partly due

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to the coalition: and more recently, his critics claim that he has even bought off some 30 opposition MPs, offering money or other favours.

His personal and political position is far less stable now than in the past.

The Catholic Church and the business community, two of the main pillars of the Italian establishment, are showing signs of growing discontent. And, for the first time since 2008, polls show that if elections were held right now, the opposition could beat the government coalition.

Since the beginning of the year, Berlusconi has suffered two main judicial drawbacks. The Constitutional Court abolished part of a bill meant to bury his three pending trials, the Mediaset, Mediatrade and Mills cases, on

charges of fraud and corruption. He has also been charged with having sex with an underage prostitute, Ruby, and abusing his office by, applying pressure on the police to release her following her arrest on charges of theft.

One may think that the Ruby case and the news about all-night orgies in the prime minister’s villas would have led to thousands of defections among Catholics, something that would explain Berlusconi’s descent in the polls.

After all, half of the voters who say they go to mass every Sunday, about one in three Catholics in Italy, declare they vote for him. But such a hasty conclusion would be premature. Polls indicate that while some of Berlusconi’s voters are not satisfied with his moral behaviour, they do not necesCatalan International View

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sarily change their voting preferences as a result. Even the Vatican has not publicly abandoned its political ally; it has called for a renewed sense of ethics in Italian political life, but then it asked the same of the judiciary, who Berlusconi demonizes as being lead by ‘a bunch of communists’ who want to overthrow him.

The international media and the public often ask themselves why Silvio Berlusconi is still in power in Italy It seems that, Catholic Italy is less strict on its leaders’ private behaviour than voters in Protestant countries.

Berlusconi has always served the interests of the Catholic hierarchy, and he continues to do so. He stresses he will never allow homosexual weddings or even civil unions; he will not ease divorce proceedings, he promotes and supports Catholic schools and institutions, and he sides with the Vatican on bioethics. However, it is clear that the Catholic hierarchy would be relieved if Berlusconi were to be replaced by a more sober right wing leader, and it seems to be silently working in that direction.

Italian industry also looks fed up with the prime minister’s poor support.

Emma Marcegaglia, president of Confindustria, the Italian employer’s federation, warns that the lack of action is seriously damaging the economy, so a change in political leadership could be necessary. ‘We shall check if the Government is capable of carrying out the economic reforms which are needed. If not, other choices should be made: we cannot wait any longer’, she says. With the prime minister’s hectic night-time activities in mind, she adds, ‘There’s a non-positive image of our country. I always say when I’m abroad that there’s another Italy, the one that goes to sleep 24

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early and wakes up early; the one that works, produces, and commits itself ’.

Even the Governor of the Italian Central Bank, Mario Draghi, has begun to criticize the Government.

He says that the economy in Italy has hardly grown in the last 15 years’, roughly spanning the same period as the Berlusconi era. ‘Brave reforms are needed’, he claims.

The economy is clearly a key issue for Berlusconi’s voters. If the media tycoon has dominated political life all these years, explains Roberto D’Alimonte, former professor at Standford and Yale, currently at Luiss University in Rome, it is because he convinced the majority of self-employed workers and managers of small and medium companies in Northern Italy that he would never raise taxes. Many other experts agree that the leftist Government of Romano Prodi made a big mistake by announcing a heavier tax burden.

The question is extremely sensitive in a country that bears one of the highest tax rates but also one of the largest public debts in the world: 118% of GDP. Italians pay, but the state, in return, delivers poor infrastructure, while public investment in welfare, family and research is among the lowest in Europe.

Berlusconi’s government has made an effort to contain its debt and reduce the public deficit, but at the same time, it has adopted fiscal amnesties. Berlusconi himself has been charged for evading taxes. Tax evasion in Italy accounts for more than 8% of GDP, and putting a stop to it, notes Draghi, is the real way to soften the tax burden.

Thus, Italy’s public finances have deteriorated. The government has been forced to levy new taxes on popular items, like cinema tickets. It has decided on a 25 billion euro cut on expenditure over the next two years, although it imposed half of the burden on regional and local governments. These govern-

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ments run key competences such as health, transport, environment, culture and business incentives, and their situation is now critical. The Northern League has promoted a bill to give them a high degree of fiscal autonomy, but it comes at the worst moment for them. Governors and mayors have announced more taxes to stop the bleeding of their budgets.

This is happening at a time when the OECD has announced that Italy is now the country with the third-highest tax burden. Only in Sweden and Denmark do people and enterprises pay more, but the state benefits they receive in return are incomparably higher.

Polls show that only half of Berlusconi’s supporters vote for him because they like him as a leader (some 17% of the Italian population). The rest mostly support his fiscal promises and want to prevent the left from taking power, out of a fear they will raise taxes.

But if under Berlusconi’s rule the tax burden gets worse, will they keep voting for him?

If the opposition fails to perform better in the polls, it is mostly because it has a serious credibility problem. The main party, the Democratic Party (PD) has had three leaders in just two years.

The latest is Pier Luigi Bersani, shows weak leadership. For instance, he said not to have a position on a recent referendum meant to change the working rules at FIAT, Italy’s main industrial company. Voters do not really know what to expect from a PD government.

Another factor that makes it difficult to build an alternative is that the Italian electoral system benefits big coalitions constructed around a strong

party. The opposition has problems in building alliances, as it is too heterogeneous: the PD is still too weak, and it would be hard to bring together the conservative Catholic Pier Ferdinando Casini, the post-fascist Gianfranco Fini and the leftist Nichi Vendola. It needs to be seen whether the opposition is able to keep growing in the polls, as it has done lately. The race is still on: 4 out of 10 Italians are undecided.

Berlusconi looks safe in the immediate future, but his aim of ending his term in 2013 is far from certain Right now, Berlusconi’s immediate future seems to lie mainly in the hands of his ally Umberto Bossi. The leader of the Northern League currently supports him because Berlusconi has promised to lead Italy to a greater degree of federalism. Nevertheless Bossi’s party is deeply divided, since a great deal of its leaders consider that now that Berlusconi is getting more and more unpopular, it is the right time to let him fall. Will they still support him once the federalist bills have been passed?

Berlusconi looks safe in the immediate future, but his aim of ending his term in 2013 is far from certain. He is still in power, and he keeps promoting laws for his own benefit: he has already approved 18 during his various mandates and many more are in the pipeline. However he is no longer the undisputed master of Italian politics. As the sociologist Ilvo Diamanti puts it, Italy is, ‘on the edge of change’.

*Sandra Buxaderas A journalist based in Rome. She covers Italian and Vatican current affairs for the Catalan daily Avui and Rac1 radio station, and writes a blog on Italy. She has been the EU and NATO correspondent for Avui, Rac1 and El Temps in Brussels. She has also worked for the Spanish weekly Tiempo in Madrid, Público newspaper, Spanish National Radio and COPE Radio in Barcelona and Mallorca, among other organisations. She was the head of International Communications for the Foreign Affairs Secretariat of the Catalan Government. Buxaderas is founder and former president of Aasara, a charity which helps street children in India.

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EU agricultural policy facing global challenges

by Ricard Ramon-Sumoy*

The European Union has recently initiated a debate on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the period 2013-2020. Being one of the most ‘Europeanised’ policies (which accounts for more than one third of the EU budget), its reform is likely to become one of the most significant European political debates in the coming years.

Since the 80s, the CAP has undergone a very clear evolution: the original policy was interventionist, focused on price support through market mechanisms; this approach resulted in important agricultural surpluses which were to boost CAP expenditure in the 80s. After 1992, with the MacSharry reform, market mechanisms were reduced and replaced by direct payments per hectare or per animal; the next step came after 2003, with the new reform which shifted direct payments towards decoupled payments which were no longer associated to production.

As a result, the current agricultural policy is a market-oriented policy: 90% of all EU subsidies are decoupled from production; the gap between EU and world prices has decreased; export subsidies are a marginal instrument (with less than 1% of total expenditure) and stocks destined for intervention have 26

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also strongly declined. Currently, the key driver to production decisions in the EU is the market, not the subsidies.

Food supply and price volatility

According to the latest projections, the world’s population will grow to 9.2 billion in 2050, hence the need to increase agricultural production by 70%.

Indeed, feeding the world becomes an urgent global priority and food security once more regains its strategic role. Although food availability and Europe’s capacity to meet its needs are taken for granted, the current global context forces the EU to maintain its production capacity and contribute to global food demand.

At the same time, we cannot forget that the EU is the world’s leading exporter of processed and high value added agricultural products, and that the food and drink industry represents

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about 14% of manufacturing industry employment and 14.5% of manufacturing turnover. Without a strong agricultural sector, the EU would not be able to maintain its leading role in the food sector. Furthermore, eating habits are also changing in the emerging countries, and this involves not just a growing demand for meat and dairy production, but also of processed value added products.

In the last three years, the agricultural sector has already experienced two high price spikes caused by a combination of factors on the supply and demand side. Certainly, agricultural markets have always been characterised by a certain degree of variability, due to strong seasonal production patterns and the structural difficulties of adjusting supply to changes in prices and demand. However, the volatility of the price of agricultural commodities has

recently increased to unprecedented levels, with very negative effects on the food supply in developing countries. A few months ago, the FAO Food Price Index for February 2011 stood at a record high since its inception in 1990.

Due to the seriousness of the situation, the food supply and the high volatility of food prices are once more high on the international political agenda. It is clear that the required exchange of information on food stocks, or a sound regulation of the financial markets dealing with agricultural commodities can only be achieved via a comprehensive dialogue hosted by the international institutions.

Growing price volatility has also had very negative effects on European farmers: higher prices for agricultural commodities do not necessarily result in higher incomes for farmers, since their margins are usually squeezed by Catalan International View

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increased costs. In fact, in recent years, the EU’s agricultural income has experienced an important decline, and some sectors such as the dairy producers have experienced a very deep crisis.

Furthermore, recent price fluctuations have confirmed the need to improve the functioning of the food supply chain: when agricultural prices increased, consumer food prices followed accordingly; however, when agricultural prices decreased dramatically, consumer food prices continued to increase for a time. This problem in the speed of the price transmission along the food chain showed a need to rebalance the distribution of the added value along the chain: the bargaining power of the agricultural producers needs to be reinforced vis-a-vis the industry and distribution via the establishment of collective contracts that would guarantee fair and stable prices for the producers.

Feeding the world becomes an urgent global priority and food security once more regains its strategic role Environment, climate change and rural areas

Agriculture and forestry cover 77% of the European territory (47% and 30% respectively) and play a key role in providing environmental public goods to the whole of society. These public goods, whose supply cannot be secured through markets, include agricultural landscapes, farmland biodiversity, climate stability and resilience to floodings, droughts and fires. This situation is particularly relevant in southern Europe, where the abandonment of agricultural activity has important effects on biodiversity decline, flooding and forest fires. In countries like Spain, where 25% of agricultural land falls under the protection of the Natura 2000 network, the 28

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linkage between agricultural activity and the preservation of environmental values is particularly relevant.

Natural resources are not unlimited and there are still many domains where their sustainable management needs to be strengthened: this is the case for water quantity (agriculture is the main source of water consumption in many countries), water quality (despite the reductions in fertiliser consumption) and soil protection. Also, although greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector have decreased by 20% since 1990, there are still important steps to be taken.

Taking into account forecasts on the impact of climate change in European agriculture, many European regions will face significant changes in the conditions for farming activities (mainly droughts and extreme weather conditions). This will involve changes in agronomic practices and may require new investments.

Last but not least, the new agricultural policy should also pay attention to the need for a territorial balance: agriculture is no longer the main driver of economic development in most rural areas; however, its disappearance could have significant negative consequences for many regional economies as is the case for several regions in the new member states. Agriculture plays a key role in the development of new activities like the food processing sector or rural tourism and as such it needs to be preserved. In general terms, the social and economic transformations which affect the European rural areas require appropriate policy instruments to guarantee a balanced and sustainable local development.

Towards a fairer and more efficient agricultural policy?

Taking all these elements into account, the European Commission has already outlined the main drivers of the

Europe

new reform. The detailed proposals will be presented in the second half of 2011, and the political agreement between member states and the European Parliament should be reached in 2012.

Firstly, the system of decoupled payments will surely have to be maintained but with important changes as regards their distribution: the new subsidies will have to be released based on objective criteria and targeted on the new priorities. In addition, the new financial support should be focused on active farmers, thus excluding people or entities without a direct relationship to farming. A threshold to the subsidies received by individual farms would also contribute to better targeting since large landowners may not need the same level of income support as small and medium farms.

Secondly, in order to improve environmental performance, direct payments could also be organised in a new way, based on a basic premium plus a specific ‘green’ incentive in order to promote agro-environmental practices.

In parallel, specific actions to fight and adapt to climate change and preserve natural resources would be co-funded by the EU and the member states within the rural development measures.

Specific support would also be provided to the agricultural activity in regions with particular natural handicaps.

Thirdly, there is a need to preserve market intervention measures, in order to fight increasing market volatility and confront future crises. Specific actions to improve the functioning of the food

chain (via collective contracts between farmers and industry) and new instruments in risk management are also required.

Despite limited budgetary resources and the current crisis in public finances, member states should not ignore the strategic role of the agricultural sector Indeed, the degree of ambition of the new policy will depend on the final outcome of the on-going negotiations for an EU multiannual financial framework for the 2014-2020 period.

Although the CAP is sometimes perceived as an ‘expensive policy’ (when examining its significant share of the EU budget), we should not forget that, in reality it accounts for less than 0.5% of Europe’s GDP. Despite limited budgetary resources and the current crisis in public finances, member states should not ignore the strategic role of the agricultural sector and the need to have appropriate resources to confront effectively the new emerging challenges.

The final outcome of this new CAP reform will have long term impacts on the whole of European society (not only on farmers and the rural population) and will serve to shape the new European model of sustainable growth that will emerge from the current economic crisis.

*Ricard Ramon-Sumoy Programme Manager at the European Commission (Directorate General for Agriculture and Rural Development), specialised in the implementation of the rural development policy. Previously, he was Policy Officer for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries at the Representation of the Government of Catalonia at the EU and adviser in EU Affairs at the Patronat Català Pro Europa.

He holds a degree and an MA in Political Sciences and Public Administration from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and an MSc in European Politics and Policy from the London School of Economics (LSE). He has been a researcher and lecturer on EU policies at the UAB and the École Supérieure de Commerce de Dijon.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and should not be attributed to his affiliated institution)

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America

The case for fiscal sovereignty: what lessons in fiscal discipline can Europe learn from US states?

by Francesc-Roger Martí*

Virtually no state program in America has been immune from the pain of budget-slashing in the last three years. While ‘spend now, pay back later’ may still be the name of the game in Washington DC, states have been closing budget gaps worth $430 billion since the recession began. States have self-imposed laws that require balanced budgets, which force them to be pragmatic about their fiscal situation. By linking spending to raising revenue and internalizing the cost of debt, American states offer an interesting paradigm of self-imposed fiscal constraints. Despite the pro-cyclical nature of such severe fiscal austerity, the market-induced discipline displayed in state budgets can also provide valuable lessons for fiscal reform in Europe.

During the same period of fiscal distress, European governments have scrambled to institutionalize mechanisms that instil long-lasting fiscal discipline. The intergovernmental debate has predictably centred on a top-down imposition of constraints on borrowing, with the end result reflecting political gamesmanship, rather than conscientious budgetary planning. Conversely, American states have tended to manage debt responsibly without top-down controls, precisely because they are exposed to its costs. What is particularly attractive about the US model in our current crisis is that it provides an endogenous market-based fiscal discipline mechanism, as opposed to a political ‘food fight’ between different levels of government.

The link between state sovereignty and fiscal responsibility

Contrary to the idea of unitary or ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty, the United States has always relied on a concep30

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tion of divisible sovereignty. In fact, the states’ prerogative to legislate on all matters within their jurisdiction predates the US Constitution and can be considered an inherent attribute of state territorial sovereignty. Although the Constitution vested external sovereignty at the federal level, its Tenth Amendment also confirmed state sovereignty over most internal matters, including relatively unregulated control of its fiscal affairs.

Nevertheless, for this legal framework to translate into effective marketbased fiscal discipline, certain practical conditions are also needed. First, a state must have access to its own tax base and the ability to set its own tax rates. This ensures that spending is linked to the raising of funds. Second, sophisticated and diverse debt capital markets have to be in place to ensure market incentives function properly.

With more than 50,000 issuers and wide-ranging credit structures, there is nothing quite like the US Municipal Bond market. The pressures exerted by

America

the ‘muni’ market are largely responsible for all states except Vermont having in place statutory balanced-budget requirements. These rules are viewed favourably by bond market participants and thus reward states with lower borrowing costs. Last, in order to avoid the moral hazard problem, there has to be the realistic expectation that the federal government will not bail out states. In the US this notion is reinforced by the historical precedent of state defaults.

Though state defaults are relatively uncommon, the last example being Arkansas in 1933, a number of localities and counties have defaulted in the last few decades. Perhaps the most famous municipal default in recent times was Orange County, California in 1994, which was a result of its foray into the derivatives market.

Without fundamentally altering this framework, the federal government has gradually established a limited role in state fiscal affairs. For example the ‘dormant’ commerce clause in the Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to grant Congress broad powers in regulating ‘interstate commerce’ and, by extension, the economic welfare of the nation as a whole.

Under this legal doctrine, the federal government could step in if a state’s fiscal policy was creating a burden on the economy of other states. The Federal Government has also shown its willingness to assist states with significant

stimulus funding during recessions and on an ad hoc basis, with the Recovery Act of 2009 being the latest example.

The federal government has also had a pivotal role in developing the municipal bond market, by granting these securities exemption from federal taxes.

In addition, the federal government shares responsibility with states over social insurance programmes.

Contrary to the idea of unitary or ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty, the United States has always relied on a conception of divisible sovereignty Nonetheless, the federal government’s role is not always welcome.

Federal agencies often establish burdensome regulations, such as strict environmental standards, without reimbursing states for the additional costs.

These ‘unfunded mandates’ are a significant source of expenditure growth for state and local governments. In addition the matching grant structure of some social insurance programmes, such as Medicaid, is also problematic.

These matching grants have become a political predicament for states in fiscal distress: when reductions in state Medicaid spending are needed to balance the budget, an even greater amount of matching federal dollars is lost as a result.

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America

The problem of decoupling taxes and spending

Contrary to the US model, nonsovereign fiscal structures are common in a number of decentralized European systems. Germany, Russia and Spain are examples of regimes with overcentralized tax policy and decentralized spending. The lack of alignment between the level of government that spends and the level that controls taxation dilutes fiscal responsibility. This in turn creates a pattern of inter-institutional conflict in the process of allocating revenues, as well as potential imbalances of payments.

On a fundamental level, such a mismatch between a regional government’s spending powers and its lack of control over its tax base creates a democratic accountability problem. In such a scenario, all levels of governments spend without having to respond to the taxpayers. In a proper budgetary decision-making framework, taxation plays a key role as a constraint to spending.

After all, it is through tax policy that public decision-makers can weigh the correct prices for the services they want to provide. Thus, a fiscally sovereign government that wants to pursue a more aggressive spending policy will have to raise taxes, and potentially face electoral consequences.

In a system where tax policy and credit markets do not serve as budget constraints, top-down imposition from higher levels of government becomes the norm In order to be truly fiscally sovereign what matters is the ability of a regional government to legislate tax rates and allocate revenue. A number of non-sovereign regional governments in Europe have nominal control over revenue sources or tax collections, but negligible effective control over 32

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tax policy. In Spain’s Common Fiscal Regime, for instance, ‘ceded taxes’ are nominally revenue sources for regions, but in practice are introduced, regulated, and administered at the whim of the central government. By contrast, German Länder do have their own tax agencies, but cannot individually legislate significant tax policy. This lack of revenue autonomy explains the existence of excessive borrowing by the Länder. To compound the problem, decisions by the German Constitutional Court requiring federal bailouts of Länder create a significant investor moral hazard. In addition, the assumption that a central government will bail out regional governments means that the debt credit markets will not perform the disciplining role they have in the American federal system. This creates a ‘raid-the-commons’ dynamic in which all levels of government provide services beyond efficient levels.

In a system where tax policy and credit markets do not serve as budget constraints, top-down imposition from higher levels of government becomes the norm. The imposition of such fiscal restrictions creates a framework for political bargaining between different levels of government. The EU’s Stability and Growth Pact or Spain’s Budgetary Stability Law, are examples of such arrangements. Such a scenario is heavily influenced by the political gamesmanship at the central government level, creating situations where some regions exploit others in the name of interregional equity. Catalonia’s severe imbalance of payments and resulting loss of competitiveness reflect such an outcome.

When gap-closing actions are needed during times of economic recession, the dilution of fiscal responsibility creates political opportunities for more powerful levels of government to ‘offload’ austerity measures onto regions. ‘Central politics’ often

America

produces the outcome of draconian fiscal constraints on less powerful levels of government. In making these topdown impositions, the central government attempts to assuage bond market participants while minimizing its own responsibility for the system’s profligate fiscal practices.

Fiscal sovereignty as a check on the size of government

Fiscal sovereignty can act as an efficient check on the size of government. Public-choice literature has often described government actors as innately seeking to maximize the size of their budgets. Budget maximization can serve a variety of purposes, including the enhancing of one’s power and influence through larger staffs, as well as outright political patronage. Contrary to the crude view that ‘more levels of government create more spending’, public choice literature has repeatedly suggested that decentralization can be used to constrain the size of government (Brennan and Buchanan, 1980).

Through closer, more accountable government, local taxpayers can decide if they are paying the correct price for the services they are receiving. Crucially, this accountability can only work when regional governments rely on their own taxation, thereby allowing taxpayers to make the linkage between local services and local taxes.

To be sure, American states have been going through severe fiscal troubles of their own. There have been headlines lately about the long-term lack of solvency of state pension funds as well as the rapidly rising costs of health programmes. Some states, such

as Illinois, have stopped paying bills, and others have instituted furloughs for their public employees, as is the case with California. However, even in the worst of fiscal circumstances, fiscal sovereignty has forced states to make hard choices. As we speak, no fewer than 17 states are considering legislative proposals to ensure the long-term viability of their public employee pension system. Wisconsin, for instance, has even made the bold proposal of restricting the collective bargaining rights of public employees in order to reign in soaring pension costs. Despite its imperfections, what is interesting about the American fiscal system is that states, as sovereign entities, are forced to fully confront the consequences of their decisions. Europe would do well to learn some lessons as it sets about reforming its fiscal institutions. *Francesc-Roger Martí

Political analyst and specialist in intergovernmental fiscal relations for the Office of the Mayor of New York City. As part of the Mayor’s budget staff, he participates in negotiations at the State and Federal levels on a broad range of fiscal matters. His prior professional experience includes work at the US Senate, the European Parliament, as well as a Washington DC political consultancy, Fenn Communications. He holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and a Political Science degree from Vassar College.

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Africa

Africa in the aftermath of the financial crisis

by Gerard Padr贸*

It is fair to say that the economic performance of African countries in the last fifty yeara has been disappointing, with very few exceptions. The average country in Sub-Saharan Africa had a similar level of income per capita in the mid 1990s as it had at the time of independence, a couple of decades earlier. Human development indicators such as infant mortality or life expectancy have also stagnated under both the lack of economic development and the scourge of HIV-AIDS. Africa is also the continent in which civil wars and coups have been most prevalent, and lower level violence, from crime to ethnic strife, plagues the life of many people. In addition, this region stands to be most affected by the ravages of climate change, as many areas are expected to become more arid and weather patterns less predictable. One can be forgiven, therefore, if a look at the overall picture seems discouraging.

The overall picture, however, also provides some reasons for hope, particularly if one focuses on the last decade and a half. In most of the last fifteen years, African countries have on average grown faster than the rest of the world in terms of income per capita.

Given their low income levels, this might seem a natural product of convergence and not a reason to celebrate, but it should be noted that this was not the case in the previous three decades, where with few exceptions such as Mauritius and Botswana, the continent had been lagging behind. From Ghana to Kenya, and from Lesotho to Angola, one can now find across the continent countries that, at the aggregate level, seem able to generate economic growth in a sustained way. The region continues to display a huge degree of heterogeneity, however. Even among the countries that seem to be gaining economic mo34

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mentum, the forces behind this process and the strategies pursued are very varied. This complicates the task of predicting whether such economic gains will continue in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Institutional change

It makes sense, then, to take a step back and see if anything fundamental has changed in the political economy of these countries that might have given support to economic progress. The answer is that, at least on the surface, the working of political institutions seemed to change quite dramatically during the last decade of the twentieth century. While at the time of independence, most countries started their political lives as democracies, authoritarian tendencies soon became apparent all over the continent and asserted themselves throughout the 1970s. This au-

Africa

thoritarianism took on different forms.

While in some countries such as Kenya or Gabon the polity evolved towards a stable one-party rule, in other countries such as Ghana or Nigeria, military strongmen became military rulers, with greater or lesser stability. Unfortunately, with extremely few exceptions, the effective workings of these governments were similar. Narrow elites at the top of the political pyramid managed to appropriate large sums extracted by introducing distortive policies such as overvalued exchange rates, financial repression, marketing boards for cash crops, tariffs and licensing regimes.

In other countries, reliance on natural resources made the appropriation of funds by elites even easier.

These elites used this newfound ability to siphon resources out of the state not only to enrich themselves, but also to build enlarged patronage

networks that cemented their hold on power. Regional strongmen and the military were thereby co-opted into the ruling regime, and the structures of the state were used to buy stability at the cost of efficiency. For instance, in most African countries the proportion of wage expenditure to total public expenditure was high, at the same time as the provision of all kinds of public services was extremely poor. Ethnic favouritism in the allocation of these prized public jobs, together with the total neglect of outlying areas in favour of the cities also contributed to the cauldron of social tensions that in many countries resulted in coups, rebellions, and longstanding civil wars.

This situation began to change in the early 1990s and by the end of the decade democratic change had affected almost each and every country in SubSaharan Africa. Several hypotheses Catalan International View

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Africa

have been proposed to explain this change. Some scholars suggest that this process was nothing more than the impact on Africa of the world-changing events of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist bloc.

This had a direct effect through the loss of support for nominally communist leaders and rebels, but also an indirect effect through the emboldening of a population that, tired of suffering under kleptocratic dictators, decided to follow the example of countries in Eastern Europe. Another indirect effect also had an international element: with the disappearing threat of a communist takeover, Western democracies changed from giving wholesale support to African dictators, to exerting pressure in order that they introduced elections and refrained from violent repression. A different, but by no means contradictory, explanation suggests that the financial needs of African states in the late 1980s and 1990s made them incapable of keeping the patronage networks that were cementing their autocratic hold on power. When these autocrats went to the international community for additional funding they found that the West now tied political conditions to additional loans.

From Ghana to Kenya, and from Lesotho to Angola, one can now find countries that, at the aggregate level, seem able to generate economic growth in a sustained way The introduction of democratic politics changed the policy outlook in many countries. For the first time in decades, a degree of real political competition at the top meant that the most egregious forms of economic distortion were no longer rational. The lifting of these constraints is a major reason behind the new-found economic growth, as with democracy comes a 36

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higher degree of policy stability and a banishment of the worst excesses of kleptocracy. If these political gains can be consolidated, then we would expect that the policy environment in Africa will become less and less of a hindrance to entrepreneurship.

However, more than a decade after this wave of democratizations, we have also learned that good institutions need to do more than bring people to the voting booth. They need to ensure that the population’s needs and preferences enter the political discourse in an effective way. In many countries, personalistic and clientelistic ways of conducting elections and politics ensure that this is not the case, and mounting evidence shows that private goods and outright vote-buying dominate discourse, as opposed to public goods and service delivery. This might explain why in many countries the newfound economic growth has not been translated into improved human development indicators. In some cases, due to the lack of effective checks and balances, elections become winner-takes-all affairs that lead to violence, as in Kenya or Cote d’Ivoire. Clientelistic elections are also not conducive to real accountability, and hence it is not clear that they have reduced corruption in any but the most excessive cases. The fact that the Mo Ibrahim foundation has declined to award its prize for excellence in African leadership for the last two years is an indicator that democracy has not brought about generalized good governance throughout the continent.

Since the financial crisis does not particularly impact this process of political evolution in Africa, the economic evolution that stems from it should not be under threat. Rather, to keep it alive the opening up of African politics needs to be protected from the authoritarian tendencies that previously derailed the first decades of independence in these countries.

Africa

China in Africa

Some commentators argue that a new player is implicitly changing the way politics and economics are conducted in Africa, and that it might serve to damage the incipient democratic norms in the continent. This new player is China. It is certainly difficult to argue against the new importance of China as an economic partner in Africa: from an almost non-existent base in the early 1990s, China surpassed the United States and the European Union as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. The lion’s share of China’s imports from Africa is taken up by the natural resources it needs to fuel its rapid economic growth, and oil has accounted for more than 90% of this value in most recent years. China has been investing heavily in mining and exploration contracts all throughout the continent and its presence is particularly strong in countries such as Angola and Sudan.

This presence has prompted concerns about the politically negative influence that China might be exercising on these countries. Indeed, the Chinese approach to trade and natural resource extraction explicitly separates economic from political issues. The uncomfortable demands for political openness that African leaders face when they trade or search for financial support in the West are conspicuously absent when such relationships are discussed with China, for obvious reasons.

Western companies complain that this asymmetry is what has led to the huge increase in mining rights for Chinese companies.

While this might be the case, the truth is that Chinese companies have a number of other advantages with respect to Western competition. China’s enormous trade surplus is a source of cheap capital for Chinese companies.

Moreover, as opposed to Western companies, China tends to pay in kind. The

number of presidential palaces, roads, train links and airports that Chinese construction companies have built in Africa in the last few years is staggering. For example, each and every single football stadium used in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana was built by a Chinese construction company. While the welfare gains of football stadiums might be debatable, there is little doubt that better roads, airports and train links are vital to the development of African economies. Therefore, by offering payments in infrastructure as opposed to cash, a trading relationship with China might simply be more advantageous to the African partner than the usual traditional trade with the West.

Critics focus on the cases of Sudan and Angola to substantiate their claims that this trade has negative consequences. Indeed, China started investing heavily in Sudan after most Western companies left due to an embargo brought about by its government’s terrorist links. Similarly, Angola rejected a Western loan when anti-corruption measures were added to it and China moved swiftly to offer very advantageous loans linked to oil exports. However, critics forget that with the exception of Sudan, all oil exporting countries in Africa export at least as much oil to the West as they do to China every year. It is therefore difficult to argue that Chinese influence is the main reason behind the political situation in these countries. At the end of the day, countries rich in natural resources tend to find it particularly difficult to reach political development no matter who their trading partners are: Nigeria and the Gulf countries are good examples of oil based economies that after long years of mostly trading with the West are very far from perfect democracies.

Another criticism of China’s approach to Africa is that it is simply reCatalan International View

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enacting the same old trade relationship that Africa had with the West.

Raw materials are exported to China and processed manufactures are imported which are outcompeting domestic producers. This is compounded by the fact that Chinese construction and extraction companies are accused of importing labour from China and are therefore giving little in the form of jobs and training to the locals. In some countries such as Zambia, this economic logic has generated widespread resentment against the Chinese pres38

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ence and some riots have taken place.

The conspicuous lack of transparency as to the number of Chinese labourers (or in the natural resource deals, for that matter) does not particularly help change such views.

In any case, it seems clear that overall China’s emergence as a major trading partner has been a powerful force behind Africa’s increased economic growth in the last fifteen years. The tremendous demand for natural resources that has been generated by growth in Asia has overturned a long secular

Africa

downward trend on commodity prices that burdened many African economies until the mid 1990s. Moreover, given the sluggish growth affecting the United States and the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it has certainly been a blessing to Africa that its largest trading partner is back to double-digit growth. This, more than anything else, might be the best help that African countries will receive to shake off the effects of the financial crisis.

Challenges for the future

In a recent interview, the president of Coca-Cola South Africa, the largest of Africa’s private employers, described what he thought were the most important obstacles to African economic growth. They can be summarized in the notion of trade costs.

These costs are of two types, geographical and human-made. For the geographical costs, much better infrastructure is necessary. To this day, and despite the recent wave of Chinese construction, the road and train networks remain woefully inadequate and in need of constant maintenance. This lack of infrastructure is also present in agriculture, where investment has historically been very low and where some recent successes in Ghana, Malawi and Kenya show that returns can be extremely high.

The human-made costs refer to trade barriers across countries that, after years of negotiation and multilateral initiatives, still remain in place. Not only are tariff barriers high but the lack of harmonization in the regulation of goods and services across countries make producing across borders an extremely costly proposition. Address-

ing this issue is a first order necessity because the vast majority of African countries are too small to rely solely on the viability of their internal markets.

Cross-border mark-ups can be as high as 70% due to delays and tariffs, which makes exporting non-viable for small and medium enterprises. As an example of the inefficiencies such frictions induce, the president of Coca-Cola stated that avoiding border crossings is the main reason they have set up production plants in several countries.

While the financial crisis might have had an impact on Africa to some extent, it has not derailed the process of political opening and the growing relationship with the fast growing countries in Asia such as China and India. This growing relationship will go some way towards addressing the shortage of infrastructures in Africa, and the process of political development should help in finding the political will to address the problem of trade barriers between countries. As a consequence, there are reasons to hope that the signs of economic progress that have been present in the continent since the mid 1990s will continue to bear fruit in the next decade. Indeed, five of the ten countries expected to grow fastest in 2011 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The West should support the process of political development and increased accountability as much as possible. This includes finding ways to help improve service delivery to the population while avoiding the hollowing out of government agencies. And of course, eliminating trade barriers to products originating in Africa would be a most welcome and useful gesture.

*Gerard Padró Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is an affiliate of BREAD and a faculty research fellow at the NBER. He holds a PhD in Economics from MIT. He is interested in the political economy of developing countries and has published work on the ethnic underpinnings of dictatorships and on civil war.

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Asia

The open wounds of the Second World War

by NatĂ lia Boronat*

Russia and Japan’s territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands was revived at the end of 2010 following a visit by the head of the Kremlin, Dmitri Medvedev, to the archipelago. The first ever visit by a Russian president led to a wave of declarations and accusations from the leaders of both countries, reminding us that the Soviet Union (and subsequently Russia as its successor) and Japan have never signed a peace agreement officially ending the Second World War. The Russian president’s daring visit has been interpreted as a show of force by the Kremlin as it takes care of every corner and inhabitant of this enormous country. Nevertheless, a sector of the Russian public believe that before challenging the Japanese with a show of force there are far more pressing problems to deal with. These include the progressive impoverishment of the population, the corruption which affects all areas of everyday life and the terrorist attacks which occur daily in one Russian city or another in the south of the country.

The Kuril Islands are volcanic in origin and extend in a chain spanning some 1,200 kilometres between the south of the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula and the north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, dividing the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. They are of great geostrategic importance for Russia. The four islands in the south to which Japan lays claim (which according to them do not form part of the 40

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same chain) house military bases and defence systems, while the straits that separate the islands are an important means for the Russian navy to reach the sea, especially in winter, since they do not freeze over. If they were to form part of Japan they would become international waters.

The 10,000 or so inhabitants of Kunashir, Iturup, and Shikotan and the uninhabited Habomai Archipelago, live in harsh economic conditions. They mostly make a living from fishing, selling their catch on the continent. There are gold and silver reserves on the island and there are thought to be offshore oil and gas reserves.

The Russians arrived on the Kuril Islands in the eighteenth century.

They were inhabited by the indigenous Ainu, who were promptly included on the map of the great Tsarist Empire.

However, Russian colonisation was also accompanied by Japanese expansion throughout the territory. The first Russian-Japanese agreement on bor-

Asia

ders and trade was signed in 1855. It established that the border between the two countries passed between the Urup and Iturup islands, which is the area currently disputed by Tokyo. Later, the Treaty of Saint Petersburg was signed in 1875, which declared that the Kuril Islands were to become Japanese, while Sakhalin Island was to be Russian. Following the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905 the southern end of Sakhalin Island came under Japanese control until World War Two. For Japan the islands represent their ‘Northern Territories’, illegally occupied by Russia when the Soviet army invaded at the end of World War Two in agreement with the Allies, following Japan’s surrender on the 2nd of September 1945, when the Japanese who lived there had to flee.

Due to post-war disagreements and the start of the Cold War between the capitalist and communist blocs, the Soviet delegation walked out of the 1951 San Francisco Conference. As a

result the USSR never signed the peace agreement with Japan that would have brought international recognition of Moscow’s sovereignty over the islands.

Russian experts believe that Josef Stalin missed a golden opportunity, since the ownership of the islands would have become formally legalised, whereas now there is no international document that confirms that the territory is Russian. Everything is based on declarations made at the Yalta Conference, at the end of the Second World War, which was to have formed the basis of a peace treaty between Japan and the USSR and which was never signed.

In 1955 Moscow missed another opportunity when the Soviet leader of the time, Nikita Khrushchev, agreed to return two of the four islands with the signing of a peace agreement. However, in 1960 he lost his temper with the Japanese and broke his promise.

At the end of September 2010, the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, returned from Shanghai, from where Catalan International View

Ostrov Shikotan (or Shikotan-to) is a volcanic island at the southern end of the Kurils.

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he had taken one of the most important decisions during his time in office, the removal from office of the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, after losing confidence in him. Medvedev was ready to take the second significant step of his presidency by travelling to the Kuril Islands. The visit was subsequently cancelled as the result of bad weather, but the promise made to the 10,000 inhabitants of the Kuril Islands of an upcoming visit by the head of state set alarm bells ringing in Japan, who warned that such a visit would be undesirable and would threaten bilateral relations. The head of the Kremlin was reluctant to give in to Japanese threats. Failing to visit a territory which Moscow considers to be Russian would have been seen as a sign of weakness.

Japan is Russia’s number two trading partner in Asia after China On his return from Vietnam on the 1st of November 2010 Medvedev spent nearly four hours on Kunashir Island and promised its inhabitants investments and tourism. The head of the Kremlin, who toured the island in a Japanese Nissan, did not make any political remarks referring to Russia’s ownership of the islands during his visit. A few hours later he posted some photographs on Twitter with the caption, ‘What a lot of pretty places there are in Russia!’.

The visit further enraged Japan: the Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, branded the trip as ‘extreemly unfortunate’, while the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Seiji Maehara, declared it, ‘offended the pride of the Japanese people’ and temporarily withdrew his nation’s ambassador from Moscow. Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, branded the reaction ‘unacceptable’ and stated that the head of the Kremlin would visit the rest of the islands.

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Following Medvedev, a series of Russian dignataries visited the disputed islands with the objective of ‘developing the Kurils and attracting investment’, according to the Russian president in a declaration made in early February.

Nevertheless, Moscow has not forgotten that Japan is Russia’s number two trading partner in Asia after China.

Trade between the two nations totalled 30 billion dollars in 2008, compared to 4 billion in 2005. As a result, the majority of statements made by Russian leaders about the islands also mention the need to sign a peace agreement between Moscow and Tokyo in order that the two nations can become strategic partners.

Every 7th of February since 1982, Japan has celebrated Northern Territories Day, commemorating the 1855 agreement that established the border which Tokyo wishes to challenge. The 2011 celebrations were particularly controversial, coming as they did a few days after the Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdiukov’s visit to the military bases on the Kurils. An ultranationalist group burned the Russian flag outside the Tokyo embassy and Prime Minister Naoto Kan branded Medvedev’s visit to the islands ‘an unforgivable insult’.

The United States was unable to keep out of the accusations flying between Moscow and Tokyo and the State Department’s official representative, Philip Crowley, made public the Whitehouse’s position when he declared that it recognises Japan’s sovereignty over the islands and supports efforts by Moscow and Tokyo to reach a peace agreement.

The former Russian deputy foreign minister and Academy of Sciences expert in international relations and the global economy, Georgi Kunadze, believes that now, ‘there is no chance of an agreement being reached’ because

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the Japanese position is inflexible and they refuse to accept any condition or alternative other than the return of all four islands. According to Kunadze, Russia has shown a willingness to negotiate a return of two islands.

The Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs, Seiji Maehara, admitted in an interview in Moscow last February that, ‘in terms of our relations with Russia, it can be said that the post-war period has still not ended, because Tokyo considers that, ‘the four islands in the north historically form part of Japanese territory’. Maekhara believes that the level of economic relations and technological collaboration between the two islands is much worse than it could be and is convinced that there is a certain reluctance to cooperate with Russia until such time as Moscow returns the four islands.

Many Russian analysts consider that in reality Russian and Japanese leaders are not that concerned by the polemic that has surrounded the Kuril Islands in the last few months. They also believe it will not threaten economic relations and that the politicians

have revived the controversy with a lot of hot air as a show of force to impress their electorate.

Alexander Mesheriakov, an expert on Russian-Japanese relations, believes that the reason why Tokyo has been so insistent on recovering the Kuril Islands in recent months is in order to divert attention away from the previous Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s frustrated attempts to change the location of an American military base and demonstrate to his people that the country is politically independent.

As for Russia, Mesheriakov believes that visits to the Kurils by senior Russian leaders in recent months are a means to, ‘demonstrate the strength and firmness of their principles because these trips are really just theatrical gestures which change little’. He thinks it would be better to undertake concrete projects in order to develop these islands which have been rather backward, thus improving the inhabitants’ living conditions. However, according to Mesheriakov, Russia is only interested in this area from a military perspective. *Natàlia Boronat

She holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in Slavic Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona. Since 2001 she has spent most of her time in Russia.

She worked in St. Petersburg as a Catalan lecturer at the State University and in the tourism industry. She now lives in Moscow, where she works as a freelance journalist for different Catalan media organisations and reports on the current situation in the post-Soviet arena.

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The paradox of growth: wealth without welfare

by Iris Mir*

The Han River flows through the South Korean capital of Seoul, carrying with it an influx of the vitality that characterizes the hardworking South Korean society. The country was rebuilt after the Korean War through hard work and the authoritarian leadership of the dictator Park Chung-hee at such speed that the nation’s economic growth is considered ‘the miracle on the Han River’. Like the very Han River itself which crosses the capital that was at the centre of this miraculous development, ‘growth-first’ policies crossed the country until they made South Korea the 15th largest economy in the world. Nowadays the Han River is a beautiful, quiet part of Seoul with a pleasant riverside promenade. Nevertheless, until its renovation, Seoulites had turned their backs on the river for years in the same way that South Korea ignored the consequences of growth-first policies and state intervention. The renovation of the Han River has made Seoul a better city, improving its citizen’s quality of life. Now the government of South Korea has realized that the time has come to face up to the consequences of miraculous growth and the need to overhaul the economy.

Both South Korea and Japan have long been used as examples of rapid, successful economic development.

However, the lack of balance between ‘growth-first’ and ‘quality of life’ has led South Korea and Japan to the current serious demographic crises they are both facing, which might put an end to the reputation earned from the path they have followed until now. With a population growth of 0.26 and -0.24 respectively both countries are facing a serious decrease in fertility rates.

These two Asian countries not only share miraculous growth but also similar conservative values that come from their Confucian tradition (based on traditional family values) which helped create a corporatist country run by men with the family (the wife) as social provider. Japan’s economic slowdown contrasts with South Korea’s economy, which enjoys an advantageous position due to economic reform and policies that have fostered competition. However, if Seoul does not actively encourage gender equality it risks losing this position and facing the same fate as Japan.

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The need to find measures to fund recovery following March’s 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the devastating tsunami which followed have revealed Japan’s main problem: an economy that has a declining number of tax payers to fund care for a growing number of elderly. The situation was so fragile that facing up to the consequences of the disaster will worsen prospects of economic growth. With the highest level of debt for an industrialized country (200% of GDP) Japan’s initial plans of growth and economic recovery are now focused on relief operations and rebuilding damaged infrastructure in order to restart exports and production after the disasters that left 28,000 people dead or missing and 150,000 homeless. It is the country’s worst crisis since World War Two but Japan has vowed that the nation will recover strongly from these disasters as they have done in the past. Nevertheless, the great earthquake happened at a time when Japan’s economy was severely suffering the consequences of a poor welfare state and a serious demographic crisis that combined are likely to hamper recovery

plans unless conscious reforms are implemented. ‘We must build a new future’ were the words of Prime Minister Naoto Kan in an address to his fellow citizens a few weeks after the disasters.

A plea that is unlikely to have effective results due to the lack of a real commitment to solve what the 19th April editorial of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun considers ‘the problems of the nation’s deteriorating fiscal health and the fraying social safety net’. Reconstruction measures like the announced emergency budget and an eventual rise in consumption tax are likely to affect the already weak prospects of economic growth. On one hand, pensions will suffer because the emergency budget will come from funding initially planned for pensions. On the other, raising taxes might suffocate the economy due to the already grey population, negative population growth and the likely serious decline in the number of tax payers. Asahi Shimbun, in its 3rd April editorial, urged Kan ‘to show a reassuring commitment to tackling the raft of important policy challenges facing the nation, while dealing with the current crisis’. With funds being used for reconstruction instead of institutional reforms and the implementation of policies that help create a stronger welfare state, thus increasing the number of tax payers in the long term, the Japanese government will suffer serious economic difficulties. Kan’s call for a new future should have gone further, dealing with reconstruction while rethinking the current system.

In South Korea, state intervention, networks of groups with shared interests and big family companies helped preserve the system of an economy driven by exports, with the country becoming one of the largest producers of ships, electrical appliances, automobiles and memory chips. Such a hierarchy where all areas of the economy are dictated from the top has been possible

thanks to what is considered to be the state’s strategic intervention, enhanced by the conservative values of the networks of groups with shared interests.

During the decades of dictatorship the authoritarian developmentalist state established the structure that was to prevail in the subsequent South Korean democracy established in 1998. At that time the South Korean economy was severely damaged by the Asian financial crisis and the new government had to deal with democratization and economic challenges. All told, this led to an expansion of democracy based on conservative values where social ideals and conservative ideals were interlinked. This is exemplified by the experts Chung-in Moon and Sunghack Lim ‘The Confucian cultural tradition bred the prevailing consensus on corporate goals, cultivating dense social and policy networks that were nurtured by trust and close cooperation between the state and the private sector’.

South Korea sees its own reflection in Japan’s current situation, well aware of the effects that a serious situation such as Japan’s negative population growth might have on their economic growth. A significant indicator Catalan International View

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of where South Korea might be heading and how likely it is to reach Japan’s low levels are gender inequalities and the difficulties that women find in reconciling work and family. According to the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, South Korea ranks 104th while Japan ranks 94th (Spain is 11th). The UN’s Gender Empowerment measure is also significant. South Korea ranks 61st and Japan 57th (Spain is once again 11th). These figures show us the highly likely possibility of a dark future for South Korea given that it shares similar values and a market and social structure with Japan but with bigger gender inequalities that pose greater difficulties when it comes to women having children and being part of the workforce needed to sustain the country. Moreover South Korea’s underdeveloped pension system reinforces the role of women as providers of care to elderly family members.

The demographic crisis is the result of what has become an explosive formula in the long term. Growth-first policies led the country to enforce birth control from 1960 to 1985 out of a fear that overpopulation would jeopardize economic growth. This is a trend the government has been persistently trying to change since the year 2000.

However, they have encountered difficulties because with modernity the opportunities for women to be part of the labour market have increased considerably, leading them to choose to either pursue their professional career or have children; trends that were not present in the past. Furthermore, South Korea has a record of remarkably low social expenditure with a total social service expenditure of just 7.5% while the OECD average stands at 21.1%.

During the G20 Summit in Seoul in November 2010 the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled ‘The Economic miracle is over, now what?’.

The article’s main idea was that ‘the old 46

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formula doesn’t work in 21st century Korea’. The ageing population, the low birth-rate, changes in the traditional family structure and the incorporation of women into the labour market are jeopardizing a system where the family is expected to be the provider of social services instead of the state.

Growth and progress are not working in these two Asian countries. Their respective breadwinner societies have resulted in behaviour that might seem strange and exceptional in other countries. The ‘goose mothers’ phenomenon is an increasing tendency in South Korea. Poor levels of English resulting from the extremely strict and demanding educational system is reinforcing women’s role as a carer. They go abroad with their children as ‘goose mothers’, since they are too young to be without them while they are educated in countries such as the United States, Canada or New Zealand. This practice further reinforces women’s role as housewives and the father as the breadwinner once they are married. Society has changed, but stereotypes and norms have not.

Thus mothers, instead of staying at home to take care of the family, go abroad with their children, causing families to live apart for years. In Japan, labour shortages due to strong anti-immigration policies, the prospects of serious negative population growth, and the failure of the government to provide solutions to the current population needs have led high-tech companies to look to creative ways to fill the gap left by the inefficiency of the system to act as a carer. They do so with an extravagant formula: the designing of robots that take care of the elderly. The lack of nurses and the fact that women go to work instead of staying at home to take care of the family is made up by robots.

It is a solution that might be of great use if it were to be used to improve the services already provided by the government. However, given that Japan

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does not provide social care, robots might take over, despite the elderly’s reluctance to be taken care of by such devices.

South Korea’s labour force is not large enough to sustain the country and changes have to be made in the state welfare system in order to bring women, the young, and the elderly into the labour market. South Korea needs to break the vicious circle that has allowed corporatists, men and families to run the country. To do so it would not be enough to simply implement pronatalist or employment policies because the system would keep on repeating the pattern. South Korea needs to rethink its welfare state so that, by improving people’s quality of life and promoting equality of opportunities among its citizens, they will manage to successfully reconcile work and family and increase the country’s labour force.

By overhauling the economy from the bottom up and promoting equal opportunities similar to those of the Scandinavian countries, South Korea would be able to avoid the catastrophic scenario that the figures seem to suggest. The South Korean government knows that by encouraging the participation of women in the labour market through the increase of childcare services, eliminating practices that create job insecurity among women and introducing policies that reconcile work and family, women will be able to play an important role in maintaining economic growth. An important step forward is that Seoul is aware that the country has an ‘underutilized pool of highly educated women’, as the government affiliated think tank

Korean Development Institute (KDI) has declared. Encouraging the equal employment of women would have two paramount positive outcomes for the country’s society and future economic development. On the one hand the workforce would increase, while on the other, women would no longer have to choose between taking care of their family and having children or pursuing a professional career. This would result in an increase in the fertility rate.

Encouraging equal women employment would have two paramount positive outcomes for Korean society and its future economic development As mentioned above, pronatalist policies have been enforced since the last decade to counteract birth control policies during the years of major economic growth. Although Japan is also encouraging births, the difference between Tokyo and Seoul is the goal of such actions. Several experts, as well as official voices, have pointed out South Korea’s commitment to changing its society into a more equal one with policies and the institutionalization of social services that will free South Korean women from the burden of being the carers of both the children and the elderly; and to allow them to equally and actively participate in the benefits of the economic growth they have miraculously achieved. The key factor is whether the conservative political arena, business elites and large family run enterprises will allow such a dramatic change in society to happen. *Iris Mir

Iris Mir holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universitat Ramon Llull (Blanquerna Faculty of Communication Sciences). From 2006 to 2010 she lived in Asia working as a freelance journalist for different Spanish media outlets covering the China-Asia Pacific region, while based in Hong Kong and Beijing. She has also worked as a correspondent for the Catalan radio station COMRàdio and the Catalan magazine El Temps.

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Green Debate

Fukushima: the globalization of a nuclear crisis

by Pere Torres*

As I write these lines, it is still not known how the nuclear crisis which Japan is experiencing will end.

Every day we continue to watch a handful of technicians in their titanic struggle to avoid a major disaster.

The news arrives at breakneck speed. The objective difficulty of obtaining reliable information means that any piece of information, any rumour, any opinion is amplified and takes on an importance it does not truly have. As a result, we are hanging on every word that emerges from a complex of six reactors situated on the Tohoku coastal plain, in the north-east of Honshu, the island on which are located Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima.

As we await news of the current crisis, the anxiety produced by the word ‘nuclear’ means we quickly forget its causes and its other effects. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves of its background: a magnitude 9 earthquake, followed by a tsunami with waves of up to 38 metres that reached 10 kilometres inland. This double natural disaster devastated an extensive area of the island on which the Fukushima nuclear power stations are located. All the evidence indicates that the power stations held up structurally but that they lost their cooling capacity. What is more, the state in which the region finds itself, with some 30,000 deaths, if the missing are added to the bodies which have been recovered, and the damaged infrastructure, greatly limits efforts to respond to the accident. This led to the core overheating, a hydrogen explosion, a fire, cracks in the containment walls, the pools of used radioactive fuel rods to overflow, the leaking of contaminated water into the sea, an escape of radioactive gas into the atmosphere and so on. I repeat that, as I write these lines, the outcome of the crisis is still unknown, but it is already clear that it occupies second place in the ranking of nuclear accidents.

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It is a case which will undoubtedly be very influential. Indeed its influence has already begun. So far the most significant example is the electoral defeat of the CDU in the Baden-Württemberg regional elections, a state which they had held since 1952. They suffered such a setback due to an alliance by other parties who have elected a representative of the Green Party to the presidency. Commentators agree that Japan’s nuclear crisis has had a big part to play in this historic change.

Nevertheless, its biggest and most lasting influence will be seen in the energy policies of the majority of countries. Many have already said they will rethink their position on nuclear power, and the European Union has organised strength tests on all nuclear power stations throughout the continent.

What changes can we expect? It is a complex question and as a result the answer needs to be carefully thought out.

In order to address it we shall separate the issue into its three main elements: the technological, the sociological and the political. Let us begin with the first.

Although it may show a lack of sensitivity on my part, I would say that from a technological point of view the Fukushima accident has not changed

Green Debate

anything. We already knew that nuclear power stations are high risk facilities.

We knew that the security measures they adopt never provide a one hundred percent guarantee that in certain circumstances they would not fail. We knew that, should an accident occur, there would be a race against time to prevent a nuclear meltdown and the subsequent escape of radioactive particles into the atmosphere or into the water. We knew all this and the accident has only served to confirm our understanding. The risk is inherent to this form of energy (which does not mean that other forms of energy do not also have their own related risks).

We also knew beforehand that reactors become more vulnerable with age (a material defect), and the level of attention to safety standards declines over time if no accidents happen (a human defect). In conclusion, and without any desire to minimise the extreme gravity of the accident, from a purely rational point of view, the Fukushima disaster has not changed anything.

On the contrary: it has highlighted the enormous difficulty in restoring the cooling system when the entire electrical supply infrastructure has been disrupted, in this case due to the tsunami.

For this reason, experts in public security have pointed out that Fukushima shows that a nuclear power station can be attacked without reaching its most delicate parts. Destroying the cooling system is sufficient. It is worrying, but does not form part of a plant’s operational security, but rather its security against terrorist attacks.

Getting back to the question in hand. There have been no changes in the technological component. What about the sociological element? Here we can observe many changes. Opponents to nuclear power can be found in many countries, which has been one of

the major factors in slowing its spread.

Obviously there are exceptions. France for example is the clearest example and at the same time the most successful.

This combination of social unease and political uncertainty could be responsible for the premature end of the nuclear renaissance Arguably the most reliable study on public opinion was carried out by GlobeScan Incorporated for the International Atomic Energy Agency: ‘Global Public Opinion on Nuclear Issues and the IAEA’. Although dating back to October 2005, its results clearly show the views of people in 18 countries some 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster. The study included industrialised countries, oil-producing countries, developing countries and others with a lower level of developCatalan International View

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Green Debate

ment. It also gathered data from all the continents.

In spite of some local variations, the basic position can be summarised by three figures: 34% were in favour of maintaining the use of existing power stations without building more, 28% were in favour of building more and 25% wanted to shut down the new ones as early as possible.

At present there are some thirty countries with nuclear power stations (the majority of which have plans to build more) and some fifteen more with plans to join the list, some of which are surrounded by controversy, as is the case of Iran. Indeed, before the Fukushima accident the world was experiencing a so-called nuclear renaissance which began at the start of the twenty-first century. Let us highlight some of the factors which encouraged it: • The growing awareness of a need to replace oil, due to price increases, problems derived from energy dependence and as part of the fight against climate change, led to alternatives being examined. Proponents of nuclear power underlined its advantages in light of the above factors, as did supporters of renewable energy.

• Technological developments in new generations of power stations, with the third currently in operation and the fourth in progress, which increase productivity and safety.

• The new, massive and growing demand for energy in developing countries, which could find nuclear power to be the quickest way to satisfy their needs.

• The appearance of a large number of scientists, economists, planners, entrepreneurs, union leaders and so on who abandoned their habitual silence in order to openly speak out in favour of this source of energy.

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Nevertheless, the outcome of this renaissance has so far been very limited.

Before the Fukushima accident, some countries had opted to prolong the lifespan of their nuclear power stations from forty to sixty years (Germany, the United States, Spain). Others had announced a review of restrictive policies (Italy), while another group had presented plans for new projects, the majority of which are still very much at the preliminary stage.

Obviously, critics of nuclear energy have re-emerged, and have legitimately used the situation to remind a more receptive, sensitive public of their arguments following the shocking news emerging from Japan.

Before the accident, however, the rebirth of nuclear power was not very fruitful. Why was this? In order to understand why this was the case we have to examine the third element of our analysis, politics. There is one underlying fact: the construction of nuclear power stations without the involvement of public administrations is impossible.

These installations require an enormous initial investment, which is recovered very slowly. Therefore, it is not an attractive project for investors who wish to see quick returns. For this reason, anyone who wishes to develop nuclear power looks to the public authorities for support. This even happens in a country such as the United States with its dislike of government interventionism in the economy: at the start of 2010, the Obama administration authorised a public loan of eight billion dollars for one of the construction companies involved in building two nuclear power plants. It did so under a law created by the Bush administration in 2005. In other countries the circumstances may change. In France, for example, the majority of nuclear power stations belong to Electricité de France, which was a public company until recently.

Green Debate

Public authorities also have the responsibility of finding a solution to one of the industry’s greatest weaknesses: the management and safe storage of radioactive waste, not only due to its inherent toxicity but also because of the danger of it falling into the wrong hands and being used to fabricate a socalled dirty bomb.

Obviously, the political stand on nuclear power is very sensitive to public opinion. A case in point is Angela Merkel’s rapid reaction to the Fukushima accident where she shut down German nuclear plants with the same type of reactor. From a rational point of view the decision was unfounded: it was extremely unlikely that the reactors would suffer an earthquake followed by a tsunami of the same intensity as the Japanese one. Nevertheless, the German chancellor’s eyes were firmly fixed on the seismograph of public opinion and its repercussion on the elections which were held shortly after. A few days later, the European Commission announced that all nuclear power stations in its member states would have to undergo stress tests to determine their future.

This combination of social unease and political uncertainty could be responsible for the premature end of the nuclear renaissance. Governments may be more reluctant to invest in this form of energy as a consequence of the public’s fear. They may also tighten security requirements to a point which makes the industry economically unviable.

Time will tell, but every major nuclear accident (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl) has had such an effect.

Those who call for nuclear power to be abandoned point to the fact that in reality it only supplies some 5-6% of the world’s energy and it can be easily replaced by renewable energy sources.

However, these were promoted as a substitute for something else: oil, specifically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, a rapid abandonment of nuclear power will lead to a delay in the fight against climate change, which is another major threat to humanity.

in both developed and developing nations it is the energy model itself which is outdated. It needs to be thoroughly reviewed and revised We should ensure that the Fukushima accident does not distract our attention. In both developed and developing nations it is the energy model itself which is outdated. It needs to be thoroughly reviewed and revised. The decision should be made as to what should be done about nuclear power in this context. Trying to deal with the energy problem in a piecemeal fashion, as if the parts did not form a whole, is an error with lasting consequences. We need political courage on a national and international level to address this question and its implications in order to provide a coherent and effective answer. This may be another outcome of the Fukushima effect: such disasters prevent reasoned debates that we have been postponing for far too long.

*Pere Torres Biologist and environmental consultant. After some time spent on research (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), he joined the Government of Catalonia in 1991. He was in turn secretary of the Catalan Inter-university Council (1991-1993), Head of the Environment Minister’s staff (1993-1995), general director of Environmental Planning (1995-2000) and secretary for Regional Planning (2000-2003). Since 2004 he has done consultancy work in public management, sustainability and land use planning and has been a regular contributor to the International Institute for Governability and the Institut Cerdà.

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Interview

Joan Margarit ‘This is the best time in history to be a small nation in Europe’ Interviewed by Eva Piquer*

Photos by Xabier Miquel Laburu

Joan Margarit (Sanaüja, Lleida, 1938) is the most-read living Catalan poet. A retired architect, he writes poems in Catalan and Spanish. His works have been translated into English, Russian, Hebrew, German, Portuguese and Euskera. Although his work has received recognition for some time now, he says that the best prize is to be found while constructing a poem. ‘I write for the instant of writing, to love people I don’t know through my verse. Immortality will take care of itself as I won’t be around’. In 2002 he dedicated an entire collection of poems to his daughter Joana, who was born with a congenital illness from which she eventually died aged 31. ‘Will I cease to be with you because you’re no longer here?’, the father asked while the daughter was dying. Having the chance to speak with this illustrious poet is always a privilege.

‘Humanity goes in circles’, you said a short time ago. We neither move forward nor backward?

In some areas I think we are moving forward.

For example, nowadays the West says ‘no’ to war.

In the West it’s never been so difficult to lie to the youth and they’ve never been so convinced that wars lead nowhere. During World War One they tricked the youth with patriotism and hymns. I believe that humanity in the West has made some progress. I don’t mean heating and telephones, the technical means are irrelevant. However, I suspect that the men and women of a hundred thousand years ago were the same as me, thought the same as me, had the same problems as I do, knew the same things I do and suffered the same as I do. I could have written them a poem and they’d have understood it the same as you would. When I think about these people I see that we’ve been going round in circles. I wonder whether the ‘progress’ I see is simply a lack of perspective. I’ll die without knowing if it’s true, but I won’t die without trying to find out.

Is the Internet irrelevant as well?

We’ve magnified the consequences. The Internet reflects reality to a greater or lesser extent. You can find anything that exists in the real world on the Web. I prefer to look in the real world rather than the virtual world. The Internet hasn’t allowed me to reach any important place that I wouldn’t have been able to get to before. We shouldn’t reject it: I feel sorry for writers that still go around with a typewriter, but I refuse to say that the Internet is the new world brain. It is what it is, nothing more.

It’s like the telephone: it’s a great invention, but ninety percent of conversations are of no interest, they lead nowhere and do nothing for humanity. So 1% of conversations are important? Sure, but in the Stone Age 1% of things were important too, these are things that allowed the human race to progress.

We’re in the middle of an economic crisis...

It may well be that it’s the first time that the youth have seen the wolf ’s ears, but those of us of

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Interview

a certain age have already seen them a few times before. Our forebears had to put up with far worse things. Before me every generation went through a war. How can you expect me to feel worried about a recession? My parents went through a war, and some parents lived through two wars, the Civil War and the Second World War. Before that there were the Carlist Wars. And before that the Napoleonic.

We’re the first who haven’t been through a war. We should get things into perspective, we shouldn’t cry over an economic recession.

Does poetry come into its own in times of crisis?

There are always moments of desperation in which even people who don’t believe in God end up praying. Fear makes them pray. But that doesn’t count. To pray when you’re in danger and to read poetry when there’s a crisis doesn’t help much.

What’s important is being consistent; human beings only work with consistency. The romantic idea that we operate on grand gestures is false. The things that count are the result of a process of being consistent. Sometimes what gets passed on to posterity is the final spark. But without a sense of consistency behind it the final spark isn’t anything.

The idea that inspiration only comes when you’re working is true in every discipline.

In the West it’s never been so difficult to lie to the youth and they’ve never been so convinced that wars lead nowhere Abroad you’re seen more as a Catalan poet or a Spanish poet?

For the English I’m without doubt a Catalan poet. They translate me directly from Catalan. The Israelis translate me from Spanish. I’m a bilingual poet, it can’t be helped. I’m not bilingual out of choice but due to circumstances. A short time ago I went to a recital in Badajoz, in the heart of Spain, and I had to start by explaining that I don’t write in Catalan just to piss them off, if you’ll pardon the expression. There is an incredible lack of culture in Spain: they understand that someone may be blond or brunette, tall or short, but they don’t understand that languages are like hair colour and that respect for everyone’s language has to be total and absolute.

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They think that we can choose, that if we Catalans speak Catalan it’s just to be difficult or stubborn.

It’s amazing that they can be so uncivilised about something so fundamental. A lack of culture is dangerous when it’s like this, related to fundamental things. Not knowing what Goethe did when he was young isn’t dangerous; but not knowing that a language is a mental structure and is a lot more than just a whim, is very serious.

In the opening speech for the festival of the patron saint of Barcelona you said: ‘maybe the time has come for us to radically change our relationship with Spain’. Why has the time for independence come now?

It’s a hunch, a feeling I have. The world has changed. The great empires had their moment and now in Europe is the time of the small, powerful nations, such as Holland and Switzerland. Now is the best time in history to be a small nation in Europe. If we let our country loose, with the structure it has and the resistance it has, it could go far. A lot further than while tied to a Spain that resists shedding itself of a lack of culture, of hate, of old ghosts, of ancestral resentments. The Spain with which I would live is increasingly more of a minority as a model. When my Spanish friends heard my speech, they said to me: ‘if you manage it, let us know, we’ll come and join you’. When you see the state’s two main political parties your heart sinks.

You also said: ‘I don’t know what we’ll be tomorrow, but today the only thing that can unite us all (of whatever language we speak) is a Catalonia in Catalan’.

To start with we have to get behind one language, but we have to be a lot more careful with other languages than others have been with ours.

The English historian Tony Judt once said that if Catalonia was an independent country it would be among the richest in Europe. It’s clear that I might be wrong when I say that now is the right time to break away from Spain. But those who say the opposite might also be wrong.

One always runs the risk of being wrong...

Yes, in everything. Zero risk doesn’t exist. You’ll never find a good poem in the middle of the table from where it can’t fall off: you’ll find it on the edge, just about to fall. For poetry ridicule is the abyss.

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Interview

With a poem you have to get as close to it as possible without falling into it. If you don’t get close the poem is boring. The poet knows that they’re fighting in order not to be ridiculed, but that they have to get dangerously close. This is true of everything in life.

You say that in life there comes a time when one has to take an important decision and that there are only two paths: love or fear.

If you choose the path of fear, it’s too late. Fear is nothing more than the lack of love. Choosing love is a risk, but without risk there’s no life. The first thing you need to know about your job or your way of life is to know which trap you can fall into. Otherwise you’re lost. In this life we can fall into many traps. In the emotional arena, for example, every couple needs to know what their trap is: that if they don’t get close to it, boredom, nothingness follows. Without traps life wouldn’t be worth living...

And what if at the end we discover that we’re wrong, that we haven’t chosen the right path?

Then too bad, as there’s no way back. I don’t like giving recitals for the old who go to university.

When you’re old the time for learning is over. Life is cruel, and just to round it off we have to put on hot poultices at the end! If the end has any sense or worth it’s that there aren’t any poultices. When you’re old you have to get blood out of a stone: from what you know, from what you’ve done and from what you’ve learnt, you can still get a lot more out of it. This is the great thing about this age. When you’re old you can study Russian, but you won’t learn anything. You have to make the most of the little French you know. In life there’s no going back, some capacities wane. On the other hand, you gain much more sophisticated ones.

Do we become freer as we get older?

If you’ve done what you needed to, yes. You are responsible for your actions to a very high degree.

Your life is 90% in your own hands, so long as a world war doesn’t come along and you end up in a concentration camp.

In what way are the young enslaved?

The demands of youth are innumerable. You have to learn, to do, to have children, have a girlfriend, break up and so on... that’s why we old

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people say we wouldn’t choose to be young all over again. But you need to know how to make the most of every age. If you decide to have a go at wild, passionate sex when you’re 80 you might be mistaken: the problem isn’t that you’re 80 years old, but rather that it’s not the right time any longer.

You claim that culture comes before freedom.

Yes, freedom without culture is nothing.

‘La llibertat és una llibreria’ (liberty is a bookshop), goes a line from one of your poems.

It’s a way of saying that freedom is culture.

Without culture there’s no freedom.

In another of your poems you say that it is in the final phase of life when ‘love coincides in the end with intelligence’.

If you haven’t got it wrong, yes. If love and intelligence coincide at any age it’s in old age. This doesn’t happen in your twenties.

Does love give meaning to life?

To human life, yes. Love is the only thing worth dying for.

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Has poetry made you a better person?

More than anything, Joana made me a better person. I don’t know if I’m a good person, but I’m sure I’d be much worse if it hadn’t been for Joana.

Without a doubt.

Does one ever get over the death of a child?

Get over it in the sense that one gets over a broken leg, no. When a child dies you never walk the same again. The closer you get to death the less you fear it, it must be to do with your hormones, but seeing your child die isn’t something you foresee.

It’s as if you have your leg amputated: from then on you have a leg missing. On the other hand, if your mother or father dies of old age it’s like breaking your leg: after a while you end up walking like you did before. When a child dies you continue walking, but with a leg missing.

Aside from making you a better person, did Joana make you a better poet?

Yes, of course. The person who introduces you to the world of love helps you in every way. That’s why choosing the path of contempt is so bad. There are people that do everything out of contempt and end

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Interview

up with nothing. Behind one layer of contempt they need another to cover up the first. It’s awful.

How should we educate our children so they end up choosing the right path?

We have to speak to them systematically about all the paths towards love. We have to teach a child that contempt leads nowhere and that admiration leads to love. We don’t realise it but the culture of contempt is taking over everything, it’s spreading dangerously. If you show contempt for someone or something move away as fast as you can. The contempt will soon turn against you. Finding something to despise is like blowing bubbles, anyone can do it. Finding the path of deep admiration is much harder. Instead of complaining about Carner or Maragall, which is easy, find a poet to admire. Say to yourself: ‘What a poet that Dylan Thomas was, let’s see if I can read him in English’. This admiration will lead you to love him. The path to admiration is the path to love; the path to contempt is the fool’s path. It’s the path of hatred, the wrong path.

Have you ever felt undervalued?

No, because it depends on you and not on other people, it depends on your own integrity. It’s unlikely that the fact someone undervalues you can affect you if you’ve led an honest life, learning a profession to the best of your ability, wanting to do everything well and constantly making peace with yourself. It’s always possible a bird might mess on you as you walk down the street, but you go to a fountain and wash it off. It’s not easy for them to make you feel undervalued if you follow the path you believe you have to follow. We’re weak, of course. If they catch you and stick you in a concentration camp, eventually they’ll turn you into an animal. Otherwise, art sorts itself out: what’s left is what’s left. No critic or denigrator can stop it.

But time doesn’t always do justice. There must be a lot of artists who have never been discovered.

I don’t believe it, there are too many of us looking. There are millions of people desperately searching for truffles in a forest. 90% of them are found.

So 10% of them are lost? Sure, but the Library of Alexandria was burned to the ground too.

Have critics seen things in your work that you weren’t aware of?

No, never. My friends, readers and other poets, yes, but critics, never. The critics are mortally wounded; they have something rotting inside them which makes what they do useless. Critics are condemned to disappear because they carry destruction within themselves: they are either an executioner of the very thing they criticise, or a frustrated executioner of the very thing they criticise. If you look at what critics have said throughout the ages and then look at the artists that have lasted there’s a certain mismatch.

Finding something to despise is like blowing bubbles, anyone can do it.

Finding the path of deep admiration is much harder If you can’t trust the critics, how can a poet know if they’re a good poet or not?

You’re good if you have readers. If you don’t, you’ve got a problem. If Ken Follet has a large readership don’t criticise him: there’s a reason. Maybe you’re not interested in him, but within your area of interest don’t criticise a writer who has readers.

Don’t criticise someone who reads Ken Follet, just go and look for Neruda. How can a reader know if a poem is good or not? You have to read a poem and if you feel the same after reading it, if it hasn’t affected you it’s a shame. If the poem ends up becoming a part of you, then there’s no doubt: it’s a good poem.

You once told me: ‘if you don’t understand a poem it’s the poet’s fault’.

Yes, and I also said that anyone who reads a newspaper can read a poem. But a poem requires more effort than a newspaper, it doesn’t give anything away. A poem gives you more than a newspaper, which is why it needs more of an effort. Playing the piano is more difficult than listening to the piano. When you read a poem you’re playing the piano. Being a good reader of poems is a lot harder than being a bad poet. What you can hear at the moment is Barenboim playing Beethoven’s sonata 32. Reading a poem is a lot like being Barenboim.

The poem, a poet and a reader are like the music, the composer and the musician. The reader of a poem is the musician, not like the person who goes to listen to a concert and who has the freedom to fall asleep-

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Interview

when you read a poem your mind doesn’t have a chance to wander: if you do you break the spell.

How can a reader know if a poem is good or not? If the poem ends up becoming a part of you, then there’s no doubt: it’s a good poem You say that poetry is more like music than literature.

Sometimes, yes. And sometimes poetry is like science. Poetic inspiration is a lot like scientific inspiration. When Galileo corrected Aristotle as to how objects fall, the truth arrived as a flash of inspiration. It’s like discovering the truth through poetry. On the other hand, if we think about how poetry treats its forebears, it’s similar to literature.

I’ve never seen a scientist or someone who designs structures with the works of Galileo on their bedside table. Nowadays any architecture student knows how a flying buttress works far better than Galileo. But a poet does have Homer on their 58

bedside table, like the well-read person who has Quixote. Poetry brings us closer and further from music, science and literature, which means it’s neither music, science nor literature. It’s a mistake to think that poetry is a literary genre. This mistake manifests itself in phenomenon such as the awful way in which poetry is taught, which is left up to literature teachers, when 80% of literature teachers don’t read poetry.

Should poetry be taught in school?

Yes, but it has to be taught well. If not, then it’s best it’s left alone. The teaching of poetry is a lot like the teaching of music. Literature teachers teach them the metre. It’s like being asked for your train driver’s licence when you catch a train. Children need to know how to read poems, not write them.

And if someone wants to be an artist and finds out they aren’t suited to art?

Yes, it’s a risk. Art isn’t democratic, it’s harmed a lot of people. Whereas an engineer or someone who calculates the stresses on a structure or any other profession has a guarantee that if you work hard you’ll be better off at 50 than at 20, art doesn’t

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Interview

have that guarantee. But for a true artist it’s worth running such a risk.

Has architecture made you happy, apart from earning a living?

Yes, it has given me a place in society. And when in November I’ve been in a house that’s about to fall down and I’ve been able to make sure that people without any resources can spend Christmas in the house, I got a great deal of satisfaction.

One of the universal monuments that we have in Barcelona is the Sagrada Família. As an architect you’ve followed its construction closely...

Me and my partner have been doing it for thirty years. If the Sagrada Família had fallen down I’d have gone to prison. It won’t fall down, but in a city with twenty parallel streets that all lead to the same place, it’s a bit much that they’ve made the

high-speed train line pass directly underneath the Sagrada Família. The Sagrada Família is amazing.

Those who say that it’s not Gaudí’s project should go and see it. It couldn’t be the work of anyone but Gaudí!

What do you admire most, beauty or intelligence?

I hope to find them together. As Socrates said, there’s no such thing as a good idiot, I believe there’s no such thing as an intelligent building that’s ugly. I don’t believe that Hitler was the result of intelligence. When Ben-Gurion founded the state of Israel he said, ‘our only salvation is to apply our intelligence to the desert’. It’s a phrase which neatly explains what life is all about. Israel is 80% desert: either we apply intelligence to the desert or we’re finished. Life is 80% desert: either you apply your intelligence to it or you’re lost.

*Eva Piquer Writer and journalist. Works for the Avui newspaper where she coordinates the cultural supplement and the culture section. Has been a lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a New York news correspondent.

Won the 2002 Josep Pla prize for her novel Una victòria diferent (A Different Victory). Also author of several books, including La noia del temps (The Weather Girl), Alícia al país de la televisió (Alice in Television Land) and No sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva (I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive).

Authentic Catalan cuisine +34 934 874 765

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Opinion

What did we want universal justice for?

by Anna Grau*

On the 5th of February 2011 the news that George W. Bush had suspended a trip to Switzerland hit the headlines. Human Rights Watch claimed it was out of fear of being arrested and accused of torture, especially since in his recently published memoirs Decision Points (number four on The New York Times booklist at the time of writing), Bush made himself out to be personally responsible for having authorised the practice of waterboarding on prisoners at Guantanamo.

The Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón (whose work led to Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998) had already warned some time ago of the need for the former US president to stand trial alongside half a dozen members of his administration, including Donald Rumsfeld. As a direct result of Garzón’s activities in the Pinochet Case, the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is extremely careful not to travel to a foreign country in which legal complications could emerge. He once left Paris in a hurry when a French public prosecutor threatened to question him about the desaparecidos (the Missing) in Chile. He cancelled a visit to Brazil to avoid a case brought by the descendants of René Schneider, a general who was kidnapped and assassinated by the instigators of the Chilean coup.

There are those who ask how it is possible that the United States is still not subject to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. The court was created in 2002, largely at the behest of the US. It had been spoken about since 1945, the year in which the United Na60

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tions was founded and the Nuremberg Trials were held.

Recently it has been possible to see a documentary about the Nuremberg Trials for the first time in the United States. It is filled with fascinating, previously unseen material. Nuremberg, Its Lessons For Today, was filmed in 1945

by Stuart Schulberg, a journalism student who, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, dropped everything in order to enlist and do whatever was required of him. He was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) to make propaganda war films. His commanding officer was the director John Ford.

In Nuremberg, Its Lessons For Today we see images of the concentration camps, some from the original Nazi archives which were originally felt to be too ghastly to be shown in public. The enormity of the Holocaust was just beginning to emerge. The film alternates these images with the cross examination of Nazi chiefs before the tribunal. We see how some of the accused attempt to excuse themselves of these

Opinion

outrageous crimes by claiming they had no knowledge of them, and others that they knew it but they had never dreamt that things would go so far, that very few of them had an overview of the abuses and so on. One of them even asked for pity: ‘if you, who didn’t expect anything of Hitler, have been shocked to find out what he’s capable of... imagine how I feel!’.

Many people would be tempted to smash them over the head with a baseball bat on hearing this. Nevertheless, it’s possible that this was one of the most sensible, humane declarations of the whole Nuremberg Trial. Sometimes things are just like this: what happened to the Germans with the Nazis happened with the Soviets and the Stalinist purges, and it has happened with the Americans at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Nuremberg’s major

falling is in imagining that cruelty has borders, which it does not, or that it can be left behind by a superhuman effort of civilisation and will, which it cannot. Even during the supposed greatest triumph of justice one cannot let down one’s guard. While the infamous Dr. Mengele’s experiments on Jewish prisoners were tried as crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, the United States had a secret programme underway to inoculate 1,500 Guatemalan citizens against venereal disease.

I say this without any feelings of Anti-Americanism. On the contrary, I admire them. No country in the world is free from shame. If the crimes and corruption of the US are more obvious it is partly due to the degree of openness of democracy in this country, which although not constant, at certain moments can be surprising. We could Catalan International View

Inaugural session of the International Court of Justice on the 18th April 1946, in the Peace Palace in The Hague (The Netherlands).

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almost say that America’s greatness can also be measured in terms of its capacity for scandal. The war drums had yet to cease following Watergate and the Congress and the Senate initiated the most brutal and merciless witch-hunt that any country has ever subjected its intelligence community to.

There are those who ask how it is possible that the United States is still not subject to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction

[1] http://www.currenthistory.com/Article. php?ID=859

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Aside from the miseries of the Pinochet period they investigated possible attempts by the CIA to assassinate five foreign heads of state, including Fidel Castro in Cuba and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Indeed, the outcome was so toxic that President Gerald Ford implored senators and congressmen not to make their conclusions public, for the good of the nation.

They ended up being published in the New York based counter-cultural magazine the Village Voice. Compare this to Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech railing against Stalin excesses: extremely famous, but secret.

Nevertheless, the United States has never subjected itself to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction. Ever.

Why not?

Clearly the easiest answer would be: because they are hypocrites. International, public hatred is fine for the Nazis at Nuremberg, for the Serbian Milosevic or the president of Sudan.

But for Bush or Kissinger? No way!

That the International Criminal Court can be seen as the law of the strong and as a tool of imperialism is not a new idea. Recently, however, Professor Omar Encarnación, a political scientist at Bard College has examined this theory with particular insight in the pages of Current History1.

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Professor Encarnación reviewed all the worldwide attempts that have been made to establish a universal legal system and draws the conclusion that they have all failed up until now for a similar reason: there are many more drawbacks than advantages.

This has been especially poignant in Africa, which in recent years has witnessed some of the most monstrous genocides in history, without an astonished international community reaching an agreement as to how to technically address the phenomenon. How to reach the masses with paternal advice as to how to punish the guilty, by forcing Uganda to abandon the death penalty for its worst war criminals, when it is routinely carried out for common criminals in the United States.

Intuitively we tend to think that there is an idea of good and absolute justice with which we are all in total agreement and which we all wish could be imposed. We should not see it as our sovereignty being diminished, but rather as our protection against the horror advances. Up until now, however, there has been no way for this consensus to manifest itself. Everyone sees very clearly that it is thoroughly just in other countries, but in one’s own country the nuances and exceptions (social conditions, political conditions, and so on) emerge. For this reason it is much easier for a Spanish judge such as Garzón to teach the Chileans lessons as to how to judge their dictator for having made people disappear than investigating what happened to those who disappeared under ours. Leaving to one side the peculiarities of Garzón’s cases, which always seem more suited to newspapers or movies than the courtroom. Perhaps the Spanish are not the best equipped to offering others their advice on historical memory.

Indeed, more than we realise? If we listen once more to the voice of the independent expert Professor Omar

Opinion

Encarnación (who aside from being a student of American foreign policy is an expert on the Spanish Transition) we find surprising results. It turns out that the Academy (not the fascists who killed Federico García Lorca; not the Communists of Paracuellos del Jarama; not those interested in playing games with their inheritance and responsibilities) which is to say political science, agrees with the diagnosis that Spanish democracy’s success comes from not being too insistent on getting even. A rush to turn the page.

Those that chose this alternative did so at a time when they were scared to death. Supposedly we now have a different generation which is not conditioned by the trauma of the war or the abasement of the dictatorship. It is also supposed (even the psychoanalysts agree!) that wiping the past clean, uncovering hidden crimes and sins, punishing those responsible and sanitising them, and at the very least calling things by their name, will at least make us free and help us to conjure up the horror. One imagines that looking our Catalan International View

The Nuremberg Trials (Germany, 1946).

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history in the face is the best guarantee that we do not need to repeat it.

Once more, intuitively perhaps we wish to think so, but practical experience does not accompany us. At all.

Has it served to rekindle a passion for historical memory to take on a new serenity, a more just vision? With our hearts on our sleeve, no. Not only do grudges and grievances emerge that once appeared buried. More significantly a craze for rewriting history emerges. To reinvent. First there were decades of the Francoist vision of the world, of the ‘glorious crusade’ and of ‘Caudillo (Great Leader) by the grace of God’. Subsequently democracy arrived and millions of people did a 180o turn. A lot of people who, to put it delicately, had spent their entire lives on the passive right, suddenly developed a historical memory which was magically and sentimentally on the left, of an immaculate left, that would not allow any anti-democratic excess or any error (even those which led to the war being lost). Many of those who now call for the unearthing of bodies from one side would not be prepared to unearth those of the other side. The passion to clarify (and punish) continues to be subjective and selective.

One imagines that looking our history in the face is the best guarantee that we do not need to repeat it Professor Encarnación believes that absolute justice does not prevent crimes against humanity from being repeated, especially when it seeks to be universal, which is to say abstract and delocalised.

This is partly because no one feels that external justice really involves them, less so when it is imposed. Everyone feels that their case is different and special. For the same reason, no international criminal court or commission 64

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for historical memory has ever helped the internal reconciliation of countries which have been through experiences such as those experienced by Spain or Chile. On the contrary, the degree of democratic realignment has more often than not been measured in terms of amnesia, as is demonstrated in the Spanish case.

So, what should we do? Renounce an ideal of a civilisation that fights to move forward instead of going round in circles? Sit and wait for the next Holocaust?

For those who would feel bad about this happening, knowing you’re not alone is always a comfort. The neocons who pushed Bush into the Iraq war, not so much for the oil or the American military lobby, but from an absolute moral conviction that right was on their side, suffered a similar disappointment. That the United States had to reaffirm their moral superiority by toppling Saddam Hussein (who was objectively speaking a bloody tyrant) and that refusing to do so as a result of careful calculations or an aversion to risk was unbefitting of people with principles.

From the traditional standpoint of the Euro-left it is not easy to swallow, but the neocons were idealists. Very much so. Either because of religion or because they came from a left that was even further to the left than that which seeks to judge them. Some of them had protested against those who in their day protested the Vietnam War, for considering that it wasn’t a form of pacifism, but a form of ‘I don’t give a damn’. Of not living up to America’s mission of liberating and redeeming.

Enlightened, arrogant and mad? If one considers the results the answer is clear. However, the same could be said of the 3,000 American volunteers who in 1937 formed part of the Lincoln and Washington brigades to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s up-

Opinion

rising. Incensed by their government’s non-interventionist policy, which led them to stamp passports of the time with ‘not valid for travel to Spain’, they decided to travel anyway, illegally. The vast majority had no military training and the communist cadres gave them none. They almost failed to provide them with weapons. Instead they were often sent on suicide missions to cover the advance or retreat of troops that were considered more valuable. It is no surprise that out of the 3,000 who left, barely 1,000 returned. Many of them were ready to reenlist when the United States finally entered the Second World War. In their own country they realised that no one wanted them to wage war (they were labelled as PA: premature

anti-fascists) except for Wild Bill Donovan. Who was Wild Bill Donovan?

The founder of the OSS and ideologue of the forerunner to the CIA. A mixture of James Bond and a pre-neocon. He was alone in facing up to the FBI, Congress and the president of the United States in defending the Lincolns: ‘I’ve been with these men in the trenches, I’ve been with these men in the midst of the mud, and they are among the best soldiers America has ever had’. Especially the handful who were helping the Allies in North Africa who asked for permission to enter Spain. They wished to wage a guerrilla war against Franco.

They didn’t want the Normandy landings to bypass the Iberian Peninsula.

They were never heard of again.

*Anna Grau Journalist and writer. From 1991 to 2005 she worked as a political journalist in Barcelona and Madrid, where she was the correspondent for the Avui newspaper and numerous programmes for TV3, Catalunya Ràdio, Ràdio4 and COM ràdio. In 2005 she left for New York, where she currently works. Author of El dia que va morir el president (the Day the President Died), Dones contra dones (Women Against Women), Endarrere aquesta gent (Reject These People) and the essay Per què parir (Why have a baby?).

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Business and Economics

Intergenerational equity in a warming planet

by Joaquim Silvestre*

The average level of human welfare has greatly improved since the industrial revolution (although possibly with an increase in contemporaneous inequality). One can believe that this upward trend may continue in the future, mainly through progress in the standard of living in poor countries following the successful Chinese experience. However, economic development has adversely affected natural environments, with negative effects on human welfare, such as the public health hazards created by the pollution of water and air. Public policy has successfully addressed air and water quality problems in the first world, but much has yet to be done in developing countries.

Climate change

More recently attention has been focused on global climate change caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mainly CO2, and its negative effects on the welfare of present and future generations. Pollution and GHG emissions are instances of what economists variously call public bads or externalities: when they affect the welfare of many people they cause unregulated markets to fail.

In the words of Nicholas Stern (2008), ‘greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are externalities and represent the biggest market failure that the world has seen’.

Active public policy, including international cooperation, is then required.

The greenhouse gas principle, well understood since the 1960s, has stimulated an extensive and difficult area of research in climate science. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007, contained in the fourth assessment report or AR4, is the most recently completed one; AR5 is still underway) express the scientific consensus on observations, models and predictions. According to the IPCC reports, anthropogenic GHG emissions have caused a 0.70C increase in global mean temperatures since the industrial revolution, and are 66

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projected to keep rising. High global temperatures will in all likelihood cause major changes in natural environments and the extinction of a large number of species. They will affect human welfare with frequent extreme weather episodes like the lethal one witnessed

by Western Europe in 2003, droughts and desertification. More importantly, higher sea levels caused by the melting of ice masses on firm land will adversely affect living conditions in coastal areas, where an increasing proportion of people live.

The adequate modelling and forecast of climate change is subject to major uncertainties. A key parameter is climate sensitivity, defined as the increase in temperature associated with a doubling of CO2 concentrations. In addition, carbon cycle models include a feedback effect: higher temperatures in turn intensify natural GHG emissions from the oceans and permafrost. There is a high degree of uncertainty as to the values of the parameters and the functional forms of these relations.

Climate science is not the only area of uncertainty relevant to policy-making: there are uncertainties as to the technological possibilities of reducing GHG concentrations (what the literature calls mitigation), as well as to the

Business and Economics

possibilities of preserving human welfare in a warmer planet (adaptation).

Intergenerational welfare criteria

When an economist wishes to evaluate policy, they first seek an understanding of what is feasible and what is not. Second, they adopt a notion of individual welfare. Then they judge feasible states by social welfare criteria which are based on the individual welfare of society’s members.

A first criterion of social welfare is efficiency, which can be precisely defined by the impossibility of finding an alternative state that makes everybody better off (or at least, some people better off without making anybody worse off ). However an efficient state may be extremely inequitable: a second set of criteria addresses the equity issue.

Humberto Llavador of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), John E. Roemer of Yale University and I have

for some time engaged in theoretical and empirical research on intergenerational equity in the presence of global warming (see the references below): much of what follows is based on this work. In order to abstract from intragenerational issues, let us postulate for the time being a representative world citizen in each generation. It would be naive to think that efficiency issues cannot be present in this context: there can be alternatives that improve the welfare of both the present and future generation, and there is always the issue of efficiently allocating the resources devoted to a given generation. But mitigation efforts will typically impose net costs on earlier generations for the benefit of later ones. Thus, equity across generations is a salient welfare issue when dealing with climate change.

The intergenerational welfare criterion most frequently used by climate change economists is discounted utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, in its original, Catalan International View

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Business and Economics

undiscounted version ( Jeremy Bentham, 1789, John Stuart Mill, 1848), proposes the maximization of the sum of the individual utilities, unweighted because ‘each individual must count as one, and none as more than one’. (See Jon Elster, 2008.) However, in intertemporal economics it is common to ‘discount’ the utilities of future generations, spuriously extrapolating the idea that individuals, and financial markets, are impatient: even in the absence of inflation or risk a euro received today is worth more than one euro to be received one year from now. Discounted utilitarianism extends this notion by viewing the utility of a person born in the future as socially less worthy than that of one born today: a person born in the future ‘counts for less than one’, We find discounted utilitarianism unacceptable, at least for the large discount rates commonly used. William Nordhaus (2008), for example, adopts a utility discount rate of 0.015 per year, so that the utility of a person born one hundred years from now counts less than one fourth as much as that of one born today. (The math gives (1/ [1+0.015])100=0.2256<1/4). Should the latter be penalized just because they were born later? A person’s date of birth is certainly beyond their control, and they bear no responsibility for it.

Granted, a small discount rate could be justified by the uncertainty surrounding the existence of future generations: Stern (2007), for instance, bases a utility discount rate of 0.001 per annum on this notion, a rate one order of magnitude smaller than the rates used by mainstream discounted utilitarians.

Discounted utilitarianism is less popular outside the economics profession: other scientists, social and natural, as well as civic discourse, often appeal to sustainability criteria. ‘Strong’ sustainability requires the current generation to leave the same natural resources for future generations that it received 68

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from earlier generations. Since some of these resources are exhaustible, the literal application of this concept faces insurmountable difficulties. Accordingly, it has been replaced by a weaker version, which requires development to meet ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

(Brundtland Commission, see United Nations General Assembly, 1987.)

One possible interpretation of the weaker notion is to require that all generations reach the same level of welfare, and that this common level be the maximum achievable: let us call this the sustainable human welfare criterion.

It roughly matches John Rawls (1971) maximin principle, i.e., the maximization of the welfare of the worst off person, because maximizing the utility of the worst-off generation may well require that all generations reach the same utility level. (It should be noted however that Rawls did not apply his maximin principle to the intergenerational equity problem.) This is the first social welfare criterion that we have adopted in our work.

Alternatively, society may seek a sustained positive rate of utility growth, an aim which does not disagree with the Brundtland Commission sustainability notion if we include the improvement over the quality of life of its predecessor among the ‘needs’ of a generation.

But guaranteeing a positive growth rate for future generations will require the first generation to reach a standard of living lower than one it would enjoy under the sustainable human welfare criterion, and it is not obvious how one can justify the sacrifices of the worst-off first generation for the sake of improving the already higher welfare levels of future ones. Recall that we ignore intragenerational inequality, thereby depriving economic growth of its potential to alleviate contemporaneous poverty.

One might argue that parents want

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their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they do, and, hence, welfare growth might be supported by all parents. An alternative justification for altruism towards future generations appeals to welfare growth as a public good: we may feel justifiably proud of mankindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent gains in, say, extraterrestrial travel, or average life expectancy, and wish them to continue into the far future even at a personal cost.

Indeed, there is an asymmetry in the way we feel about contemporaneous vs. temporally disjointed inequality: a person in a poor country may not wish to sacrifice her utility for the sake of improving that of a person in a richer country, while at the same time she may willingly make some sacrifices for the benefit of yet-to-be born individuals who will be richer than she is.

We define the sustainable human development criterion by the maximization of the standard of living of the first generation subject to guaranteeing a given rate of growth for all future generations. Of course, if the postulated rate of growth is zero, then it reduces to the sustainable human welfare criterion defined above.

Quantifying the standard of living

How should we measure the individual standard of living? I have used the expressions individual welfare, utility and standard of living interchangeably, and so far I have been vague as to their meanings. A crude measure, often used in the economic analysis of climate change (see Joseph Aldy et al., 2010), is GDP per capita, which can be viewed as an index of individual consumption. Nordhaus (2008) and Stern (2007), among others, appeal to a concave function of individual consumption, and refer to it as the utility function. But we are interested in a comprehensive notion of the standard of living of a person, which we trust it

also depends on other variables beyond the consumption of goods and services.

Accordingly, we adopt a multivariate utility function with the following four arguments: (i) consumption; (ii) education, which modifies the value of leisure time to the individual; (iii) knowledge, in the form of societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stock of culture and science, which directly enhances the value of life, in addition to any indirect effects through productivity, via improvements in health and life expectancy, and because an understanding of how the world works and an appreciation of culture are intrinsic to human well-being, and (iv) the quality of the biosphere, which is valuable to humans for its direct impact on physical and mental health.

The investment in knowledge and in education may sustain the welfare of future generations subject to global climate change Our approach follows the spirit of the Human Development Index (HDI) produced by the United Nations Development Program, which considers three dimensions, namely (a) life expectancy, (b) education, and (c) consumption. Because education and knowledge enhance the capacity to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, their inclusion in the standard of living index is particularly appropriate in light of the uncertainties surrounding the intensity and effects of climate change.

The compatibility of human development and climate stabilization

In a hypothetical world of perfect, certain knowledge, one could compute the solution to the problem of maximizing the adopted social welfare criterion subject to the completely Catalan International View

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REFERENCES Aldy, Joseph E., Alan J. Krupnick, Richard G. Newell, Ian W. H. Parry, and William A. Pizer (2010). ‘Designing Climate Mitigation Policy’, Journal of Economic Literature 48 (4), 903-934.

Bentham, Jeremy (1789).

An introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London: T. Payne & Son. Elster, Jon (2008). Reason and Rationality, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007).

Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.

Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Llavador, Humberto, John E. Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre (2010a).

‘Intergenerational Justice when Future Worlds are Uncertain’, Journal of Mathematical Economics 46 (5), 728-761.

Llavador, Humberto, John E. Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre (2010b).

‘A Dynamic Analysis of Human Welfare in a Warming Planet’, http:// pantheon.yale.edu/~jer39/ climatechange.html.

Llavador, Humberto, John E. Roemer and Joaquim Silvestre (2010c).

‘North-South Convergence and the Allocation of CO2 Emissions’, http:// pantheon.yale.edu/~jer39/ climatechange.html.

Mill, John Stuart (1848).

Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, London: John W. Parker.

Nordhaus, William D. (2008). A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options

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known feasibility constraints, and then recommend the GHG emission path found in the solution. The real-world uncertainties alluded to above make this approach unrealistic, yet there is wide agreement as to the need to stabilize GHG concentrations. The target of an eventual temperature increase not exceeding 20C emerged as a focal point, no doubt subject to a degree of arbitrariness, in the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP 15, see the Copenhagen Accord, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2009). According to the AR4, this target might be achieved as long as CO2 concentration does not exceed 450 parts per million (or ppm: it was 280 ppm in the preindustrial period, and 384 ppm in 2006), although more recent research suggests that 450 ppm may be too high.

Our work does adopt the 450 ppm target. We take the values for the economic variables, and the resulting level of welfare in the US in the immediate past as given reference values and asks: is it physically possible to design paths for future economic variables that satisfy the 450 ppm target, while human welfare either stays constant (sustainable human welfare) or grows forever at a steady rate (sustainable human development)?

The operative word is ‘physically’: our research abstracts from the real-world constraints induced by institutions, incentives, markets and fiscal systems discussed, for example, by Aldy et al.

(2010). Of course, any pragmatic mitigation program must take into account US political conditions, the influence of oil producers and the complications of multilateral, international bargaining. Nevertheless, as a crucial first step one should analyze what could be done within the limits imposed by physical and economic fundamentals.

Our research suggests an affirmative answer: utility levels higher than the referential one can be sustained, Catalan International View

even when maintaining a positive, moderate rate of growth for all successive generations, while the path of CO2 emissions agrees with the 450 ppm target. Not surprisingly, higher rates of sustained growth require a lower utility for the first generation on the proposed path, but the trade-off is small, and the first generation reaches a utility level higher than the reference value. The most important change that we propose is the doubling of the fraction of labour devoted to the creation of knowledge, while keeping the fractions of labour allocated to consumption and to leisure close to the reference values.

Higher growth rates require substantial increases in the fraction of labour devoted to education, together with moderate ones for labour devoted to knowledge and for the investment in physical capital.

We should note that the utility growth along the proposed paths may be based on improvements in the social stock of knowledge and in education, rather than in an increased consumption of produced goods, and that higher growth rates may require minor decreases in the amount of labour-time devoted to the production of consumption goods and to leisure.

North vs. South

The previous discussion completely abstracts from intragenerational issues by postulating a single, representative world citizen in each generation, calibrated by US data. But our research program also contemplates the equitable distribution of global GHG emissions between developed countries, the North, and developing ones, the South, as well as international cooperation aimed at allowing the South to converge in welfare with the North. What sacrifices will this require from the North?

We calibrate the North after the US and the South after China. The initial stocks of physical capital and

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knowledge, and the initial level of education, are radically lower in the South, but we assume that technology is freely transferable, and that knowledge created in the North also benefits the South. (Knowledge has the character of a global public good). Besides postulating a given path for global emissions and a steady state rate of welfare growth, as in the above discussion, we also impose the horizon of year 2075 for the convergence of welfare between the representative individuals of the North and the South. (The population is larger in the South). Hence, the South has to grow faster during the transition period in order to catch up with the North, but once in the steady

state both the North and the South reach the same level of individual welfare and grow together. In a Rawlsian spirit, we aim at maximizing the welfare of the worst-off generation, namely the first generation in the South, subject to all physical constraints and to the above stipulations.

Our results show the compatibility of the following desiderata: (1) Global CO2 emissions follow a conservative path that leads to the stabilization of concentrations at 450 ppm. (2) The North and the South converge to a path of sustained growth at 1% per year in 2075. (3) During the transition to the steady state, the North also grows at 1% per year while the South’s growth rates are markedly higher. (4) The welfare level of the first generation in the South is noticeably higher that the reference level (defined as the actual welfare level of the immediate past in the South).

The transition paths that we propose require a drastic reduction in the share of emissions allocated to the North, large investments in knowledge, both in the North and the South, as well as very large investments in education in the South. Indeed, the evolution of education in the South imposes the most stringent constraints during the transition period.

In summary, our results, undoubtedly subject to many caveats, support a degree of optimism by providing prima facie evidence of the physical possibility of tackling climate change in a way that is fair both across generations and across regions of the world while allowing for positive rates of human development.

on Global Warming Policies, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Stern, Nicholas (2007).

The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Stern, Nicholas (2008) ‘The Economics of Climate Change’, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 98 (2), 1-37.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2009).

Conference of the Parties, 15th Session Copenhagen Accord, http://unfccc.int/ resource/docs/2009/cop15/ eng/11a01. pdf#page=4.

United Nations General Assembly (1987). Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future.

Document A/42/427.

*Joaquim Silvestre Professor of Economics at the University of California. He holds a degree from the Universitat de Barcelona and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Microeconomic Theory, Public Economics and Experimental Economics.

He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Economic Association and Member of the International Association for the Study of Common Property.

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Business and Economics

A boycott of secession

by Modest Guinjoan* Photos by Xabier Miquel Laburu

Never in modern history has Catalan secession been as present in people’s minds as it is at present. Never before has secession as an objective been so openly discussed in the political debate. Sometimes in explicitly and unequivocal ways, while in others in a more discrete and probably tactical form, within the ideology of political parties and other organisations.

Aside from the secession prospects, the other issue surrounding Catalonia’s political future consists of deepening regionalisation and the negation of any distinguishing features with respect to the rest of Spain. Both independentistes and regionalists are growing and becoming increasingly visible, no doubt, in response to the growth of the secession movement.

The dichotomy of a Catalonia as a Spanish region or as a new European state is well established and will not cease, on the contrary, the population’s acceptance of one alternative or the other is increasingly clear. The improvement of economic information as to the structural effects and defects of Catalonia’s position vis-a-vis Spain, has been a key stimulus of the discussion.

Secession in two dimensions and with two positions

Simplifying the situation in order to facilitate an analysis, we can confirm that positions as to the desirable political future for Catalonia are based on two foundations, the cultural and the economic. Taken in the broadest terms, 72

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it should be easy to fit into one or the other aspects such as language, income, tradition, history, the business system, infrastructure, national character and world view, to mention just a few of the aspects that may characterize Catalan society.

Also simplifying, as noted above, we can identify two strands of opposing thought: those who propose secession for Catalonia (the independentistes) and those who propose a strengthening of the Catalan region (the unionists).

The independentistes position is fuelled by both cultural and economic elements, seeing them as systemic. The unionist’s position is fundamentally based on arguments belonging to the cultural realm. They possess few economic reasons, presumably because the data on the aggregate level is rather dispiriting: an annual fiscal imbalance of 9-10% represents a huge contribution to solidarity, while it involves an implicit impoverishment for Catalonia. However it is difficult to support with rational arguments and economic calculations such as solidarity. People’s feelings are an entirely different mat-

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ter. Fortunately, in order to avoid any doubt, Catalonia’s fiscal relationship with Spain has been widely studied and documented on an official basis by both Catalonia (the Department of the Economy and Finances) and Spain (the Ministry of the Economy and the Treasury). Subsequently, it has been forcibly brought to the general public’s attention thanks to the media.

If we only examine secession from the point of view of the fiscal imbalance, it is an open and shut case: Catalonia would be better off. Nevertheless, there are other, lesser known economic aspects beyond the deficit which fuel speculation as to the viability of secession, not only among unionists, but also within the general public.

The first mistake relates to the size of the Catalan economy. Specifically, there is a belief that a small state might not be viable in the international economic framework. It is a weak ar-

gument since some of the most competitive and prosperous countries in the world include European nations of a similar size (Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Holland), thus leaving little room for doubt. Moreover, there is evidence that not only is globalisation not an obstacle but rather that it facilitates the appearance and consolidation of new states. In fact, the debate as to whether the size of the Catalan economy is a limiting factor in its viability seems a little naive.

If we only examine secession from the point of view of the fiscal imbalance, it is an open and shut case: Catalonia would be better off Another argument, which is not as clear-cut as the above, is that secession would generate what is known as a ‘border effect’, a limiting factor on Catalan International View

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exchange and progress arising from the fact that trade within regions within a state is greater than the same regions with other regions belonging to other states, even when they are geographically very close. This is an economic field that has been and is being studied, but so far with results too variable to draw conclusions. In terms of applying it to an independent Catalonia it would be necessary to introduce exceptions to the theory that might alter the nature of the exercise. Take the unstoppable reach of globalisation, the hard-tobreak economic ties between Catalonia and Spain or the unavoidable dependencies, to underline some of the variables with major changes which will have a clear impact on trade flows between different countries, in spite of the ‘border effect’.

In the same economic context and specifically regarding commercial exchange, there is another aspect that has not been studied, at least rigorously, that would allow some conclusions to 74

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provide a solid basis for discussion.

Specifically I refer to the consequences for the Catalan economy if there were to be changes in the amount of trade between Catalonia and Spain as a result of deliberate action to reduce commercial flow.

Why the need to study trade?

In terms of fiscal imbalance, it appears clear that Catalan secession would bring, ceteris paribus, an increase in income for the Catalan population in a quantity equivalent to the volume of the transfer of resources: the ‘cost of solidarity’ with the rest of Spain. However, in terms of the results that would emerge from changes in the modification of trade between Catalonia and Spain, there is no data, no evaluation of the consequences arising out of changes in Spain’s political and social reaction to a possible secession process.

Without the market approach in the analysis of a hypothetical secession, the arguments to defend Catalonia’s

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viability are seriously biased. In what follows I address the main assumptions that drive the study of the impact ‘Sense Espanya. Balanç econòmic de la independència’ (Without Spain. The Economic Balance of Secession).

If a country maintains a high level of imports and exports this highlights a specialisation of production and international competitivity. Simultaneously this specialisation means it also requires a high level of imports from specialised countries, thereby generating a flow of trade. In this sense Catalonia is a very open economy that has historically been a leader in trade within Spain and abroad.

Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that for most of the world’s economies the major client for most businesses is the country itself, which is to say, the businesses and consumers belonging to the same political/ administrative space. For Catalonia, at present this space is the Spanish state.

In the case of an independent Catalonia, the Spanish state would move from being a client in an internal market to become a client in an external market.

The change in status would have great political and administrative consequences, but once more, ceteris paribus, it will not necessarily have an economic consequence since the difference between one situation and the other is simply administrative, with a low economic content. This is especially true if we make some assumptions which I feel are significant: • Catalonia would become a full member of the EU right from the start, • the transition process would be completely peaceful, and • the legal framework within which the production system would operate would be similar to or better than the current one.

Making these assumptions, the business uncertainties are minimized.

How to achieve this situation is another question, as is the ‘who’ and the ‘when’. I have no doubt that this country is more than capable of doing so. The people’s will to do so is another issue.

When Catalan business people broach this subject, their main area of uncertainty is how trade with other economies will be affected by a secession process. How will our clients react? Will they stop buying from us?

Will they continue to buy from us in the same way? Will we continue to buy from them in the same way as up to now?

For most of the world’s economies, the major clients for most businesses are the businesses and consumers belonging to the same political/administrative space The economical consequences of a secession process on trade with foreign markets would be as relevant as the implicit correction of the fiscal imbalance with Spain. While the latter affects income, trade affects the basis of the generation of income, that is entrepreneurial activity. Consequently it affects thousands of employers and tens of thousands of workers. Hence the importance of an analysis of this aspect of the process.

A key variable in the secession process is determining where opposing reactions would emerge that may produce negative consequences for trade.

The most plausible hypothesis is that the opposing reaction will centre on the side which stands to lose most, i.e.

Spain. There are no objective economic reasons to assume that other countries in the world would change their trade patterns with respect to the Catalan market. Indeed it is rather an attractive market, with more than 7 million consumers and a powerful entrepreneurial base. If secession is achieved by democratic means no political reprisals Catalan International View

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should be expected from other states.

Neither should we expect reprisals from businesses.

The exercise we have carried out is focused on the form and the extent of a reaction by the Spanish economy when confronted by secession. There will inevitably be a reaction, at the very least for practical reasons: it would mean the end of a net income which some put at 22 billion euros per annum. This is a lot of money for the state’s coffers and its disappearance would impoverish the whole of Spain to some degree. On the other hand there is a political motive, a reaction against a rebellious region, which most likely would occur on different levels, ranging from state-level structures to the public. Although the population as a whole might not participate, a part of it would.

In the exercise on commercial trade which we propose, unlike the fiscal imbalance, it appears that any Spanish reaction against Catalonia would necessarily have a negative effect on the Catalan economy due to the existence of a trade surplus. It is worth considering the types of reactions and their potential in order to best assess their impact on the economy.

Possible reactions

Three major forms of theoretical possibilities of reactions with consequences for trade between Catalonia and Spain that might arise: • An embargo: seeking the prohibition of trade or of doing business with Catalonia, in order to isolate the country. Embargoes usually seek the agreement of many countries. Historically it is an act of war. We do not believe that it need be considered, not because Spain would be unwilling, but because it would be difficult for it to find international support.

• Blockade: an attempt to prevent resupplies. It is considered a part of military action.

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• Boycott: the stopping of trade to achieve certain goals. Although the most typical form is when consumers boycott companies, businesses and institutions can also practice such behaviour against businesses from another country. In this case, one cannot rule out that as a reaction to a boycott of Catalan products by the Spanish market, the Catalan market might decide to boycott the Spanish market in return.

If we imagine that the process towards secession takes place in a negotiated, peaceful way, the first two possibilities are effectively ruled out, even more so in the historical period in which we find ourselves, where we form part of a democratic European space. Although the transition may prove to be negotiated and peaceful, this does not mean that it will be free from conflict, but that rather this conflict is debated and resolved around a negotiating table.

On the contrary, the third possibility could easily occur; it would only require a favourable state of public opinion. It would not require weapons, it would only be necessary for people to make their buying decisions with the intention of punishing or of changing behaviour, even if it involves companies that have nothing to do with the political process, as was demonstrated in episodes such as the boycott of Catalan products in general, and of cava in particular, in 2005.

The effects of a trade boycott

Until recently, the analysis of the effects of a boycott of Catalan products motivated by a process leading to secession has been based more on intuition than on actual data. This intuition pointed towards disastrous effects for Catalan businesses given 1) their high level of dependency on the Spanish market and 2) an exaggerated reaction on behalf of said market, which would cease to buy any Catalan products.

Business and Economics

The recent study ‘Without Spain.

The Economic Balance of Secession’ is dedicated to analysing the economic impact of a boycott on the Catalan economy. The authors, Guinjoan and Cuadras Morató (2011) present the figures for trade and taxes between Catalonia and the Spanish state, review the theory behind a possible boycott, examine specific case-studies and analyse what economic consequences emerge from an input-output analysis using data relating to Catalonia in

2005 (Cuadras Morató and Guinjoan, 2011)1. At the end of the book they conduct a balance of hypothetical secession, considering the costs which would arise from a boycott balanced against the benefits of eliminating the fiscal deficit.

The conclusion reached is that the balance is positive. Thus if one takes the economic viability of a future Catalan state as their starting point, it is difficult to declare oneself to be against it.

1 Els efectes econòmics d’un boicot comercial als productes Catalans [The Economic Effects of a Trade Boycott on Catalan Products].

Working paper, UPF.

*Modest Guinjoan Holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the UAB, he is a managing partner of the consulting firm Barcelona Economics, an associate professor of the Department of Economics and Business at UPF, a former director of CIDEM, the author of numerous books and articles for journals, and writes opinion pieces for the economy pages of Avui and La Vanguardia newspapers.

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Barcelona Echoes

Barcelona: city of conferences

by Jordi Fexas*

The beauty of Barcelona may not move mountains in the same way that faith may do, but it does manage to move rivers of people who, for many different, yet powerful reasons, arrive in this city that is so Mediterranean and innovative and which lives on a permanent honeymoon with creativity. Barcelona is entering a new phase where it will have to leave behind the effects of the recession. It will do so by being one of the top five cities in Europe in which to do business, the second in terms of international meetings and the number one city in terms of quality of life for employees, for the thirteenth year in a row. It is no surprise that with these triumphs up its sleeve the capital of Catalonia is facing the future with intensity and optimism for a future with new, vibrant horizons. It is a future marked by technological preparedness and also by excellence in its services.

Continuing an examination of international rankings, Barcelona has the following credentials: it is the fourth European city in terms of infrastructure according to FDI Magazine; third in terms of the city as a brand; the sixth in terms of receiving foreign investment and also sixth in scientific output.

All in all this encourages the spirit of a city that, in spite of the crisis, is maintaining its competitiveness thanks to its economic diversity and its support for innovation, creativity and knowledge.

Barcelona must be able to adapt itself to this new environment and project itself with a renewed dynamism towards a future where it can become the great undisputed capital of the Mediterranean. It is an objective which has always existed for our city and which is currently closer than ever. The next stage calls for Barcelona to put into effect policies which will attract new clients and investors (strengthen78

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ing the Euro-region, creating jobs and economic growth, investing in infrastructures such as the Mediterranean corridor and developing new sustainable activities for the future). Not only should Barcelona continue to do what it already does very well, it also has to open itself up to innovation, thus consolidating a city that combines beauty, attraction and entertainment with technology, industry and services. It should do so as part of the high quality brand that one has come to expect from the Catalan capital.

For example, Barcelona could become an international leader in the audiovisual sector, communication and information technologies, medical technologies, design and the energy sector, thanks to a combined commitment from the public and private sectors. Technological institutes, businesses, academia and public bodies all have a part to play that could be of the

Barcelona Echoes

The old and the new in 22@Barcelona.

first order. Barcelona Airport (El Prat), one of the top ten in Europe, handled nearly 30 million passengers in 2010, an increase of some 6.5% with respect to the previous year. International users have increased by 8%, exceeding 17 million. Intercontinental routes have also witnessed a notable increase with a growth five times that which was experienced in 2005. Recently two new intercontinental routes have been inaugurated that allow Barcelona to connect directly with Sao Paulo and Miami. Meanwhile, some 3.5 million passengers leave or arrive at the port in ferries or cruise liners, representing an 8% increase on 2009. Container rail traffic to the port grew by 75% in 2010 compared with the previous year. This is not all, since recent studies indicate that both the port and airport could see a significant rise in these figures.

With the worst aspects of the recession over, one of the sectors that is

experiencing growth is tourism related to meetings and conferences. Currently, with the prospect of an economic recovery, in particular for certain countries in the north of Europe, this sector has once more regained the position it occupied three years ago and it is consolidating itself as a sector which will show strong growth in the years to come. This year saw an upturn in the number of professional meetings, once more reaching 2007 levels. Figures released by the Barcelona Convention Bureau are very revealing: the number of meetings held by professionals in 2010 showed an increase of over 15% on 2009 figures. Another figure that is clearly on the rise is the 7.1% increase in the number of delegates who came to Barcelona. In 2010 the Ciutat Comtal [â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;City of Countsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as Barcelona is also known] hosted a total of 2,138 meetings and over three hundred conferences with a total of some 616,833 Catalan International View

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delegates. This increase in the number of meetings is mostly due to the big increase experienced by the convention sector as a result of greater incentives, which increased by 18.8%. The Catalan capital holds second place in a global ranking of cities which organise international meetings. The city has such a strong attraction among businesspeople and executives that 50% of the tourists that come to Barcelona are here on business.

Barcelona Airport handled nearly 30 million passengers in 2010 The Mobile World Congress has had an economic impact exceeding 200 million euros. Barcelona, thanks to its own merit and tradition aspires to become the permanent home of this congress from 2013 to 2017. If it makes the grade it will be among the finalists to be the ‘Mobile World Capital’ and thus host the Mobile World Congress from 2013 to 2017. This will involve competing against other great cities of the world such as Paris, Munich and Milan. Barcelona’s Mayor Jordi Hereu is clear, ‘Barcelona is closer to becoming the Mobile World Capital and accomplishing this ambitious goal for the city’. Barcelona has successfully held this prestigious conference since 2006.

This year the previously held record number of participants was exceeded with some 60,000 participants from over 110 countries. This underlines the success and consolidation of the city as a top organiser of such events.

As for urban tourism, Barcelona is a leader in Europe, an obvious strong point for the city in these complex times. In 2009 Barcelona was the number two city in the EU in terms of the provision of hotel rooms.

In spite of everything it appears as if we are at the start of a new cycle.

There is a global increase in demand 80

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for products and services, international tourism is on the rise and cities with adequate infrastructures and a plan for business are beginning to grow. The great trade fairs and conferences, many of them full of international visitors, find Barcelona irresistible. Visitors can find several cities in one. For example Barcelona offers a stimulating environment for entrepreneurs while also catering to those who seek a place for rest and relaxation. In addition, there are a wide range of cultural offerings of a high quality which serve to add value to the activities the visitor can enjoy.

Returning to the conference sector, this is key to break the seasonality of tourism in Barcelona, following the boom in tourism the Catalan capital has experienced in recent years. Both national and international businesses and organisations find in Barcelona and its surroundings a wide variety of installations and services destined for the celebration of congresses, conventions and incentive packages. It gives the city a real competitive advantage over other parts of the world which are less prepared for the organisation of events. Furthermore, the Barcelona Province Convention Bureau programme is dedicated to the promotion of the province of Barcelona as the host of a range of events, by providing the organisers with infrastructure such as exhibition halls, auditoriums, country houses, castles and unique venues, as well as a range of accommodation and a wide variety of services including a free consultation service. Catalan companies and institutions are also able to take advantage of these meetings to broaden their network of international contacts without leaving the capital.

Following a recovery of the excellent position Barcelona achieved before the recession, once more a bright future beckons for the city in the trade fair and conference sectors. Barcelona holds an excellent position among the

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leading European urban tourism destinations. Currently it sits in second place in terms of the organisation of trade fairs and conferences according to the International Congress Association (ICCA) and has some 300,000 square metres of specially built spaces to accommodate such events. The city was rated second by event organisers of Conferences and Incentive Travel, with London taking first place A wide variety of cultural offerings increases the value of a city which wishes to share its high level of quality of life with those visitors who, we must not forget, often return to Barcelona whether for business or leisure tourism.

All these factors combined make Barcelona an excellent gateway to the Mediterranean, with its diversity of goods and services. The accessibility of all areas of the city, whether by public or private transport, enhances the city’s ability to take care of its visitors.

Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, one of the major business and

industrial centres in southern Europe and the centre of the Mediterranean Euro-region which is considered one of the great economic and logistic hubs of southern Europe with a population exceeding 15 million inhabitants.

Barcelona’s multicultural and cosmopolitan spirit is clearly explained by the fact that approximately 18% of its residents are foreigners. Barcelona has always tied modernity to tradition and currently sees the world of conferences as its calling card for the way it presents itself to the world: a city which is open to the world, that is cultured and entrepreneurial. This is how Jordi Clos, president of the Association of Barcelona Hotels, sees the city and he expresses it thus: ‘the hotel sector, like all industries, has suffered greatly from the recession, but Barcelona has had the crucial support of the tourism sector, while trade fairs and conferences have played an important part in making Barcelona what it is today’.

*Jordi Fexas (Barcelona, 1966). He holds a degree in Contemporary History from the UB, specialising in Anthropology and African History and conducted doctoral studies at the Institut d’Història JVV(UPF). He has a wide range of experience in the private sector. He has also worked as an anthropoloigst, conducting fieldwork in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a journalist he has contributed articles in numerous magazines dealing with contemporary issues. He is currently Igman-AS’s Head of Projects in the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Science and Technology

The current European aerospace industry and future challenges

by Jordi Barrera-Ars*

The term ‘aerospace’ covers all conveyances which move through the air and/or space as well as their associated facilities. Some general characteristics of the aerospace industry are the presence of long-term projects, their high cost and high value and the profound influence they have on civilization. The 12th of April saw the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. The period leading up to this event and its subsequent effects led to a turning point for the global space industry and stimulated a development period of high value technology, leading to a wide range of spinoff products used in our everyday life, such as scratch-resistant lenses and golf balls with pitted surfaces.

This mammoth effort could only be achieved by unified powerful nations.

Hence in our globalized world, European countries sometimes work as part of a team and sometimes work in competition with the rest of the world.

It is worth mentioning some industry figures in order to illustrate this point: Airbus’ flagship A380 superjumbo has its origins in a project that began in 1988 and had its inaugural flight in 2005. That’s nearly 17 years of development with an estimated cost of €11 billion mainly involving four European countries. It is currently making a difference between those long-haul companies who have it and those who do not.

Another striking example of European cooperation is the development of the Ariane 5 launcher. The project was begun in 1988 with the first successful commercial mission taking place in 1999. Its development involved all of Europe at an estimated cost of about €6 billion. Its popularity has made it the most used launcher for commercial satellites and forcing its competitors to provide more services such as shared 82

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launch capability in order to compete.

This has revolutionized the space market facilitating access and thereby once more increasing the role of space technologies in our everyday life.

Nowadays Europe has a strong aerospace industry with European companies leading their particular fields.

Future technology projects are being developed but they will have to face various upcoming difficulties.

Although Airbus already manufactures in China, in cooperation with China Aviation Industry Corporation, it will still have to compete against the growing number of manufacturers in Asia. While these countries are still trying to develop their industry and satisfy their needs with current technology, the European industry is trying to develop cutting edge technologies in order to take advantage of its privileged position. The leading manufacturer, a subsidiary of EADS, is trying to differentiate its products by developing the A350 which is an attempt to introduce ‘green’ concepts in the air transport field. It is commonly assumed that

Science and Technology

being environmentally friendly should be an opportunity and not a stumbling block. This is certainly the time to make such changes. Airbus is studying nonconventional types of aircraft, such as a blended wing body or ducted propellers, in order to lead the field in the future. Both concepts meet the demands of the green movement by addressing some of the biggest concerns in aviation: reducing fuel consumption and noise shielding.

The role of the military cannot be ignored when talking about the aerospace industry. Historically they have been the aerospace companiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; best customers. The Eurofighter has been launched as the new generation European fighter aircraft despite only being made in Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy. It is a multirole combat aircraft with the aim of reducing dependency on American fighters, and was originally intended to replace the French Mirage. However, France finally decided to withdraw from the project to pursue its own, resulting in the Dassault Rafale. The ongoing Libyan con-

flict has shown the capabilities of both fighters, thus encouraging competition in the fighter market. Saab, Dassault and Eurofighter GmbH are aiming to land the 126 plane order from India by out-competing Boeing, Lockheed Martin, from the USA, and Mig, from Russia. This contract involves the possibility of large financial rewards for the manufacturers, and their respective countries, along with the resulting impact on job creation and new technological developments.

The Airbus A380 superjumbo.

Nowadays Europe has a strong aerospace industry with European companies leading their particular fields As is apparent, the aerospace industry is closely related to governments and their decisions. Nevertheless, one of the characteristics of the civil aeronautical industry in Europe in recent years has been its supposed independence from government, putting it in direct and fair competition with similar Catalan International View

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companies (mainly Boeing for the time being) in other continents.

However, one of the fields that still needs to become more politically independent in Europe and be exploited further is the space industry.

Some years ago the global space industry was totally dependent on governments due to the fact that it is a strategic industry, it has extremely high costs and thanks to the patriotic benefits that derive from it. This was the route chosen by the country which is typically seen as the most advanced in space technology, the United States of America. The politically-driven space industry is constantly moving forward but its low speed works against the high productivity one would expect from such a high quality workforce.

Bureaucracy and political changes either slow projects down, as is the case with the Galileo programme, or may even totally terminate them as happened with the European manned space programme, Hermes. In Europe this effect is even worse than in other one-nation-countries as the different territories that are part of the European Space Agency (ESA) have to agree on some of the projects. The United Kingdomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s re-entry into some of them, with the recent foundation of the UK Space Agency, has added another layer to the discussions. Nonetheless this collaboration has lead to the establishment of a private sector in Europe.

The industry is led by Thales space and Astrium, both subsidiaries of bigger aerospace groups, who are currently managing the biggest space programs promoted by ESA in terms of design and manufacture. Arianspace, which is a world leader in launch services with Ariane 5 as the jewel in the crown, is The new medium launcher VEGA.

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preparing to receive the new medium launcher VEGA which has its maiden flight scheduled for July 2011. This new launcher would give Europe the capability of launching small and medium satellites at a reasonable cost and without having to turn to non-European technology.

Aside from public input, fortunately, the European space companies receive commercial contracts as well.

Geostationary communications satellites are the core of this business which nowadays is one of the most economically viable space sectors. The operators of this type of satellites have increased in recent years and the sector is experiencing a revival due to new contracts for replacements for the communications satellites launched between 1998 and 2003, which came to be known as the Golden Age. Another sign of the thriving market in Europe is the announcement that the European broadband operator Avanti PLC has been selected to lead a study funded

by ESA to support the definition of a new broadband project. Avanti currently owns one satellite in operation, Hylas 1, with Hylas 2 expected to be launched in early 2012. The study has highlighted increasing interest in this market and the European operatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; potential to take advantage of it.

Finally, one of the main issues that the aerospace industry will have to face is the retirement of the first generation of aerospace engineers who have led all of the projects up to now and who

40% of space engineers will have retired within ten years. This offers a golden opportunity for graduates but presents a challenge to the industry in terms of maintaining the highest levels of quality, productivity and competitiveness established the aerospace industry in Europe. Some people estimate that around 40% of space engineers will have retired within about ten years, with a lower figure for other aerospace fields. While this offers a golden opportunity for graduates wishing to enter the industry it also presents a challenge to the industry in terms of maintaining the highest levels of quality, productivity and competitiveness. *Jordi Barrera-Ars

(TorĂ , Catalonia,1988). Is currently studying in the United Kingdom a Master in Astronautics and Space Engineering after being chosen for a double degree programme between the Polytechnical Universty of Catalonia (UPC) and Cranfield University and being awarded with the Centennial Scholarship by the Royal Aeronautical Society. He spent his early university years in Terrassa studying aerospace engineering where he was leading a studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s society in order to implement a more practical approach for the engineering studies, promoting student projects, some of them awarded in international competitions, technical visits and a more close collaboration between the industry and the students. Being involved in several student organizations, such as EUROAVIA, the European Association of Aerospace Students, and the UK branch of the organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), has been internationally active participating, and organizing some of them, in several congresses, symposiums and projects around Europe.

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Universal Catalans Curated by Marc Gafarot

Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra The son of a tailor and member of a distinguished family of painters from Perpignan, Jacint Rigau was born in Perpignan on the 18th of July 1659 when the vila rossellonesa was still part of the Hispanic monarchy. He was baptised in the ancient cathedral of Sant Joan. In his early years Jacint Rigau was an apprentice to Antoni Guerra el Vell a mediocre painter from Roussillon.

He later moved to Montpelier, where he learnt the techniques of van Dyck and the Dutch and Flemish painters who were to have a major influence on his work; after spending four years in Lyon, where he perfected a style now clearly influenced by the Dutch painters, Rigau arrived in Paris in 1681, where he adopted the Gallicised name Hyacinthe Rigaud; the following year he won a competition at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture with his painting Cain Constructing the City of Anoka. This award led him to receive the renowned Prix de Rome given by the Sun King to young, promising artists to allow them 86

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to spend a time in Rome. However, Rigau was by then totally bewitched by the court of Versailles and decided to decline the honour.

It appears as if his decision was not a bad one as he began an unstoppable journey which led him to become the most important portraitist in the court of Louis XIV. In 1687 he became a member of the Royal Academy as a portrait artist, and in 1700 he also joined as historical painter; Rigau subsequently became assistant teacher (1702), teacher (1710) and rector (1733) of the Royal Academy. In 1709, the community of Perpignan, which since the time of Maria of Aragon, daughter of Ferran of Aragon had had the exclusive right to ennoble its citizens, awarded Jacint Rigau the rank of burgès honrat. Finally in 1713, Louis XIV gave him a title; Louis XV, for whom he also worked as a portrait artist, made Rigau a member of the Ordre de Saint-Michel in 1727. In a world of majestic, but measured classism, Rigau introduced and triumphed with the

Universal Catalans

grandeur of his portrait, unequivocally baroque, with influences of Rubens and van Dyck and the art of Mediterranean countries.

Aside from portraits he also made forays into the so-called historical painting as can be seen in his magnificent Christ on the Cross. The glory of Louis XIV needed this painter from Roussillon, who it is said often regretted having lived so far from the places

where he was born and grew up. As so many figures in our history, his life contained inconsistencies between the path it took and his personal affiliations.

Once he became the Louis XIV’s court painter he was faced with the irony of having to immortalise with his brush the people and events which most contributed to Catalonia’s defeat during the War of the Spanish Succession.

When Louis XIV commissioned Catalan International View

Self-portrait in a turban, 1698, Perpignan, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud.

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Louis XIV King of France and Navarre by Jacint Rigau (1701), his most famous work.

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him to depict the different phases of the siege of Barcelona, the two elements of Rigauâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity (Catalan by birth and French by adoption) were brought into violent contradiction and underwent a certain degree of conflict.

Nevertheless, we can say that thanks to his masterful historical engravings, we can have an idea of the savagery of the Catalan International View

cruel battle which befell Barcelona, the fiercest of all, and that fatal day of 11th of September 1714 when Catalonia was to lose all its national rights, except for the dignity of total resistance until the very end.

The works of Jacint Rigau are principally found in the Louvre and the Rigau Museum in Perpignan.

A Short Story from History Curated by Manuel Manonelles

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Garbo: The Man Who Saved the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The above is the somewhat exaggerated title of a 2009 documentary about one of the key figures behind the success of the Normandy landings and, consequently, the Allied victory in the Second World War. It tells the story of Joan Pujol, a Catalan who operated as a double agent in the service of the United Kingdom throughout the 1940s. For his English spymasters his codename was Garbo, while he was known as Arabel to the German secret service.

Pujol was born in Barcelona in 1912. He took part in the Spanish Civil War, first for the Republicans and later on Francoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side. The experience was to affect him deeply, turning him once and for all against totalitarianism in general and Nazism in particular.

Once WWII had begun, Pujol contacted the British authorities in Madrid on numerous occasions in order to offer his services, but he was ignored. As a result he contacted the German secret services, passing himself off as a Spanish civil servant who was a fanatic supporter of Na-

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zism who had to travel to the United Kingdom on official business. He offered the opportunities this imaginary visit provided him with in support of the National Socialist cause. In spite of initial resistance he was accepted.

However, instead of heading for England, Pujol went to Lisbon. From there he began to send the first reports of his supposed activities in the island to his German handlers. He used nothing more than his own imagination and the information about England he was able to obtain from tourist guides, magazines and books (timetables and train fares and so on) he was able to consult in public libraries in Lisbon.

In Lisbon he once more contacted the British, who, finally, took him seriously; especially when he showed them the material he had received from the Germans (the invisible ink being of particular interest) in order to conduct his communications. He was finally accepted and in April 1942 the British sent him to London. There he joined the ranks of the MI5 (the British internal security and counterespionage service) and began to work with agent Tommy Harris. For two and a half years they sent over three hundred reports outlining the development of a supposed network of twenty-seven agents and sub-agents (all entirely fictitious) which the Germans took to be real.

Indeed they even came to consider it was their most important infiltrated spy network on British territory.

In a skilful and complex operation, Pujol and MI5 inundated the Germans with information, often superfluous, sometimes invented and in some cases

real. Over time this increased Arabel’s prestige within the German High Command. It is likely that some of his reports were sent directly to Adolf Hitler’s office.

This served to pave the way for Pujol’s masterstroke as part of Operation Fortitude. Garbo’s reports were a key element in a complex intelligence operation directed at convincing the German army that the Normandy landings were a diversionary tactic while the Allies prepared a supposedly bigger operation aimed at the Pas de Calais. It was a complete success. The German High Command obliged Rommel’s troops to remain in the Calais area to await an attack that never came, while the Allies advanced and consolidated their positions in Normandy.

Nevertheless, the most surprising element is that the Germans never suspected Pujol of being a double-agent.

They even awarded him the Iron Cross and a significant economic reward which, ironically ended up financing some MI5 operations! At the end of the conflict he was decorated with the Order of the British Empire, becoming the only person to have received both awards. For his own safety, Pujol officially ‘died’ in Africa in the late 40s.

However, in the 1980s, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, a team of British investigators located Pujol, thanks to more than a decade of research. He was alive and living in Venezuela, where he had rebuilt his life in total anonymity. Only then his existence was made public and he travelled to Europe where he was received at Buckingham Palace, partici-

pated in the commemoration ceremonies and was able to visit his birthplace, Catalonia. Joan Pujol died in Venezuela in 1988 where he was buried.

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The Artist

Miquel Rasero

I did that drawing when I was about to turn twenty. At the time I wanted my work to make each day a new adventure.

I had no plan, although things were getting serious. Could any connection be established between my drawings and what was happening to me? I do not think I was very realistic, but it was perhaps the only way out I had to hand, before being shipwrecked… I had probably seen things by Bacon, maybe Munch’s The Scream.

I do not remember when I first came across Songs of Death by Georg Trakl, but in his short biography I found the magic aura which at that time made me think I was not alone in the world. This also happened with other texts in which a misfit could find ways out via creation, anguish, pain… I was looking for tools for survival.

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The Artist

I see The Architect’s Dream from 1998 and a drawing from 1975 as if they were only one of many return journeys where chronology has disappeared, where the experience of each step has changed but not the registers that cross them, the human touch that unites the circus clown with the architect. While the clown hides behind a complex weave of symbolic registers, between the magic sarcasm of Ponç and the expressionist scream of Munch, the figure which really stands out is the one who asks us in amazement how to get out of there and throw himself into the world, free from the restraints that hold him back. The place where my gaze really coincides with yours is not only the open mouth, struck dumb perhaps by the colour of anguish, but the hand that crosses space and, as if it were a window, timidly grasps at the exterior… Does he feel excluded from the world?

I take another step and wonder if it is not really the other way around and, since he fears us, does he also fear holding out his hand to us?

Glòria Bosch

Espai Volart will hold a Miquel Rasero exhibition from the 14th April to the 25th June 2011.

Espai Volart Carrer Ausiàs Marc, 22 08010 Barcelona Tel. 93 481 79 85 Fax. 93 481 79 84 espaivolart@fundaciovilacasas.com Catalan International View

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A Poem Curated by Enric Bou Chair in Hispanic Studies, Brown University (Providence)

Who dictates the words when I am speaking to you?

Maria-Mercè Marçal Who dictates the words when I am speaking to you?

Who is imbedding me with gestures and grimaces?

Who speaks and does for me? It is the Impostor.

She inhabited me without me Knowing it Until you came along. Then she sprang Out of I don’t know what attic, like a ghost, And possessed me like a despotic lover Moving me like a puppet in a sideshow.

In the mirror I often get a glimpse of her Salvaged from I don’t know what heap of ashes.

Pay no attention to her when She speaks to you, Even though She usurps my voice and face.

And when you leave, if she blocks the door With her loving and ruthless body You must slay her with no regret whatsoever.

Do it for me as well and in my name: She’s too deep down inside me and I wouldn’t Be able to hold myself back from the threshold of suicide.

(Translated by Sam D. Abrams)

Maria-Mercè Marçal (Barcelona 1952-1998) wrote a ‘Divisa’ which can be read as a personal definition. She mentions three gifts of fate: having been born a woman, of having working-class origins and being a member of an oppressed nation. In later life she would add a fourth gift, which proved decisive for her career - her enthusiastic engagement with lesbian sexuality. Her linguistic renovation and experimentalism, her ability to embrace Anna Akhmàtova or Marina Tsvetayeva’s poetry, which she translated, takes her beyond Feminism, Surrealism, or wholehearted Nationalism. Her work expresses a dialectical relationship between wandering and being wrong, as a way of giving voice to women excluded from male chauvinistic language and representation of reality. The experience of maternity was a crucial one, which she elaborated in poetic form in Sal oberta [Open Salt] (1982), and also in La germana, l’estrangera [Sister, Stranger] (1985).

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