Global Brief #9 by Louis Fishauf Design Ltd.

The Glendon School of Public and International Affairs | L'École des Affaires Publiques et Internationales de Glendon

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WINTER 2012

FINANCIAL FUTURES FINANCIAL BEYOND MONEY FUTURES MOSHE A. MILEVSKY BEYOND MONEY MOSHE A. ALGÉRIEN MILEVSKY PARADOXE MILOUD CHENNOUFI

PARADOXE CURING CHAVEZ ALGÉRIEN AND VENEZUELA MILOUD CHENNOUFI

TOWARD A CANADA-RUSSIA

ROGELIO

PEREZ-PERDOMO

AXIS IN THE

CURING CHAVEZ RETOUR DE LA AND VENEZUELA MAFIA EUROPÉENNE ROGELIO PIERRE VERLUISE PÉREZ-PERDOMO

ARCTIC MICHAEL BYERS

RIGHTS AND THE ARAB SPRING RETOUR DE LAWRENCE LA MAFIA M. FRIEDMAN EUROPÉENNE PIERRE VERLUISE NEZ À NEZ FEEDING THE HORN OF AFRICA AS DUTY RIGHTS AND THE JAMES RADNER VS ARAB SPRING JOHN W. McARTHUR LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN EPIGRAM

IMAGINING

DOUGLAS GLOVER

SOUTH ASIA

RÉUNIFICATION DES DEUX CORÉES D'ICI 2047? BARTHÉLÉMY COURMONT NEZ À NEZ FEEDING THE HORN OF AFRICA AS DUTY JAMES RADNER VS JOHN W. McARTHUR EPIGRAM DOUGLAS GLOVER CDN $7.99 ISSN: 1920-6909

IN 2047 RAMESH THAKUR

FRAMING&GAMING SPACES, THEATRES AND DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL RELATIONS CRISIS MAPPING

RAYMOND, HOWARTH & HUTSON

J O H N KAY N E W C O M PA N I E S A N D O L D A DVA N TAG E S

GERMANY'S RESPONSIBILITY IN EUROPE

JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

MAREIKE KLEINE

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF DEFENDING POLITICAL BLOODSPORT

HANS KUNDNANI

S P Y I N G 2.O A N D A L L T H AT

CDN $7.99 | ISSN: 1920-6909

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Where will we be in 2022? Or better still, in 2047?

EDITORS’ BRIEF

Could anyone, in 1912, have known what was about to come?

COVER ILLUSTRATION: GORDON WIEBE

John E. McLaughlin reflects on the far-from-certain future of intelligence in our third Feature. Miloud Chennoufi of the Canadian Forces College explains why, in the midst of the falling dominoes of the Arab Spring, Algeria – still recovering from the disappointments of an earlier ‘spring’ – remains a paradoxical outlier. And finally, Ramesh Thakur of the Australian National University imagines what South Asia as a region will look like in the year 2047 – a century after Indian and Pakistani independence. In Tête à Tête, GB speaks with John Kay of the Financial Times about the future of competitive advantage and profits in international business. Michael Ignatieff, professor and former Canadian Liberal Party leader, tells us what we can expect of political contests a decade out. In Query, Stanford Law School’s Lawrence M. Friedman explains why human rights – even in the context of the Arab Spring debates – ought not to be seen as essentially ‘Western’ in nature, but rather as an outgrowth of the modern condition. Barthélémy Courmont of South Korea’s Hallym University, for his part, asks whether the two Koreas – new leader in the North or not – will finally be reunited by mid-century. In Nez à Nez, James Radner of the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance squares off against John W. McArthur, formerly of Millennium Promise, on the question of whether advanced countries have a positive duty to help feed the people of the Horn of Africa. In The Definition, we enquire into the character and magnitude of Germany’s peculiar responsibility in and for Europe: Mareike Kleine of the London School of Economics, Jan Techau of Carnegie Europe and Hans Kundnani of the European Council on Foreign Relations weigh in. In Strategic Futures, Helen Stacy of Stanford University, Leonid Kosals of the Moscow Higher School of Economics and David Scheffer of Northwestern University’s School of Law assess the consequences, by the year 2022, of the still-embryonic, but nonetheless growing trend of high-profile international human rights prosecutions. In Situ reports come to us by Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo from Caracas, Venezuela, where President Chavez convalesces and a new presidential election looms; and by Pierre Verluise from Florence, Italy, where the multiple crises in the EU ‘shadow’ – as it were – the resurgence of Europe’s mafia. GB also insinuates itself into the Cabinet Room of Jamaica’s brand new government under Prime Minister Portia SimpsonMiller. Douglas Glover closes the book in Epigram. Enjoy your Brief. | GB

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hat will the next decade or two in international affairs look like? Who knows, really. And if we really undertook to know, where would our analysis even start? But truth, as it were, has never been the enemy of the interesting. More seriously still, the difficulty of finding truth – in this case, of predicting the future – has never been reason enough for geokrats – readers of GB – to foreclose on the need to frame, divine and indeed approximate different possible (strategic) futures. To be sure, the very act of suggesting and arguing these different futures – in politics, geopolitics, business, culture and science – itself conduces to the creation of strategic culture: a nimbleness in one’s view and assimilation of the world in its infinite dimensions and permutations. And it is perhaps this strategic culture that, in the end, better prepares the strategist for the inevitable surprises and shocks of tomorrow than some ‘right answer’ issuing from a future-predicting algorithm. The Winter 2012 issue of GB mines the brains of top thinkers in different fields in order to score some interesting volleys about the kind of worlds that await us in the years ahead. What, for instance, will international competition look like? Where will it take place? What will be the issues and stakes? Who will play? And who – if anyone – will provide and enforce the rules of the game? Finally, how stable is the game itself? Moshe A. Milevsky, Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business, York University (Toronto), leads off the issue in the One Pager by positing the onset of 21st century barter systems to replace paper currencies – in some countries, at least – in which people have ever-diminishing confidence. In our lead Feature, Nathaniel A. Raymond, Caitlin N. Howarth and Jonathan J. Hutson – variously of Harvard University, the Satellite Sentinel Project and the Enough Project – argue that the hyper-modern crisis mapping capabilities that underlay many of the political actions in the Arab Spring and even the recent ‘Russian Winter’ are in desperate need of ‘industry’ standards and a dose of professionalism. University of British Columbia scholar Michael Byers then makes a counterintuitive case for strategic alignment – at least on a one-off basis – between Arctic powers Canada and Russia in order to advance key common legal claims; in the event, largely to counter the claims of the US. Former CIA Acting Director

N O. 9

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER Irvin Studin

WINTER 2012

D E PA R T M E N T S

MANAGING EDITOR Sam Sasan Shoamanesh ART DIRECTION Louis Fishauf Design ASSISTANT EDITORS

Michael Barutciski, Marie Lavoie JUNIOR EDITORS Nevena Dragicevic, Iulia Hanganu, Farheen Imtiaz, Milos Jankovic, Avalon Jennings, Jaclyn Volkhammer, Bronwyn Walker ASSISTANT PUBLISHER Ernest Chong WEB MANAGER Aladin Alaily VIDEOGRAPHER Duncan Appleton WEB DESIGN Dolce Publishing PRINTING RJM Print Group ADVISORY COUNCIL

Kenneth McRoberts (Chair), André Beaulieu, Tim Coates, David Dewitt, Paul Evans, Drew Fagan, Dan Fata, Margaret MacMillan, Maria Panezi, Tom Quiggin Mailing Address Global Brief Magazine Glendon Hall, Room 301 Glendon Campus, York University 2275 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M4N 3M6, Canada Tel: 416-736-2100 ext. 88253 Fax: 416-487-6786 General Enquiries, Feedback & Suggestions globalbrief@glendon.yorku.ca Subscriptions globalbriefsubscriptions@glendon.yorku.ca Advertising globalbriefadvertising@glendon.yorku.ca Article Submissions: globalbriefsubmissions@glendon.yorku.ca Global Brief® is published quarterly in Toronto, Canada by the Global Brief Society in partnership with the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs. The contents are copyrighted. Subscription Rates One year (four issues) for CDN $38. Two years (eight issues) for CDN $72. HST or GST applies only to purchases in Canada. Shipping and handling charges apply only to purchases outside of Canada. PM Agreement No. 41914044 ISSN: 1920-6909

EDITORS’ BRIEF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ONE PAGER

Moshe A. Milevsky | Financial futures beyond money. . . . . . . . . . . 5 IN SITU

Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo | Curing Chavez and Venezuela. . . . . . . . . . 6 Pierre Verluise | La mafia et la crise de l’euro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 TÊTE À TÊTE John Kay | Global business and profits in 2030. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Michael Ignatieff | The state, politics and political tradecraft . . . . . . 52 QUERY Lawrence M. Friedman | Is the Arab Spring about ‘Western’ rights? . . . 40 Barthélémy Courmont | Les deux Corées réunies d’ici 2047?. . . . . . . 50 IN THE CABINET ROOM Dusan Petricic | Jamaica’s new team needs a world record . . . . . . . 25 NEZ À NEZ James Radner vs. John W. McArthur Advanced countries have a duty to help feed the Horn of Africa. . . . 56 THE DEFINITION “Germany’s responsibility in Europe is...” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 STRATEGIC FUTURES “Consequences of international rights prosecutions by 2022?”. . . . . 62 EPIGRAM

Douglas Glover | The future is red in tooth and claw. . . . . . . . . . 64

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Glendon School of Public and International Affairs The Glendon School is Canada’s first bilingual (English and French) graduate school of public and international affairs. It combines a comprehensive bilingualism with a focus on both public and international affairs. Adopting a global perspective, the School explores the relationship between public institutions and their larger environment. Its purpose is to advance research on public and international affairs; provide a high-quality bilingual master’s programme; and offer innovative professional development programming. L’École de Glendon est la première école bilingue d’affaires publiques et internationales au Canada. Établissement d’études supérieures unique en son genre, l’École est axée sur le bilinguisme anglais-français et spécialisée à la fois dans les affaires publiques et les affaires internationales. On y explore, dans une perspective mondiale, les relations entre les institutions publiques et le contexte général dans lequel elles fonctionnent. Le mandat principal de l’École consiste à faire progresser la recherche sur des questions d’affaires publiques et internationales, à offrir un programme de maîtrise bilingue de grande qualité ainsi qu’un programme de développement professionnel novateur.

www.glendon.yorku.ca/gspia

F E AT URES

CRISIS MAPPING NEEDS AN ETHICAL COMPASS The global heroics of digital dissidents and witnesses now demand global standards BY N. RAYMOND, C. HOWARTH & J. HUTSON

TOWARD A CANADA-RUSSIA AXIS IN THE ARCTIC Canada and Russia should unite to support a common position in advancing Arctic claims BY MICHAEL BYERS

SPYING 2.0 AND ALL THAT New questions, paradigms, risks and worlds for the intelligence profession and its political clients BY JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

LE PARADOXE ALGÉRIEN DU PRINTEMPS ARABE La mémoire d’un printemps raté pèse sur l’esprit collectif des Algériens. À Alger, le calme règne PAR MILOUD CHENNOUFI

IMAGINING SOUTH ASIA IN 2047 A region-wide compact and community will have turned South Asia into a peaceable, prosperous commonwealth BY RAMESH THAKUR

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Financial Futures Beyond Money Deteriorating trust in paper currencies may well usher in a return to a more sophisticated version of the pre-money world of barter BY MOSHE A. MILEVSKY

who need one- and two-cent stamps to make up the difference. At the same time, the Postal Service gets to keep clients’ money – money it needs – while clients keep the stamps in their drawers for the next decade. All parties are winners, which is critical for true financial innovation to flourish. Other countries, such as Canada, New Zealand and Singapore, offer similar stamps. Exhibit three: A number of leading private US universities have implemented similar plans – not with stamps, but with academic tuition units. Prospective parents and grandparents are able to lock in the cost of an Ivy League education – years and possibly decades in advance.They pay a fixed price now, and ‘Junior’ – possibly unborn – can enroll at Harvard in 2022. No need to worry about whether the stock or bond market will swallow their education savings account, for the education has already been paid for. None of this is trivial. Of what use is a dollar, euro or peso when one is not certain what it will actually purchase in terms of goods and services? If one does not quite trust inflation statistics – that is, if inflation indices are subject to convenient manipulation, or if one’s purchasing patterns differ from those of the mythical ‘average’ household – what can an inflation-linked bond really buy? Business schools always teach that a dollar, euro or yen is worth more today than it is tomorrow. And yet, at this moment, we also struggle with what that same currency is actually worth today. Large transnational producers and manufacturers have long been able to lock in the cost of goods like soybeans, corn or crude oil dozens of years into the future. Why not services? We might foresee a time when nursing homes, assisted living facilities, drug companies, chiropractors, gerontologists and even undertakers will offer future contracts on their services. Note the emphasis on industries and professions that appeal to an ageing population (a reality most peculiar to advanced countries). An ageing population – that lives or will soon live on fixed-income pensions or, indeed, no pensions at all – has the most to lose from deteriorating confidence in fiat currency and the governments that stand behind them. And this ageing population will push companies and brands to create an alternative medium of exchange, and perhaps to bypass the central banks altogether. | GB

Moshe A. Milevsky is Associate Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University (Toronto), and Executive Director of the Individual Finance and Insurance Decisions (IFID) Centre.

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ven Nobel laureates in Economics have had difficulties explaining the economy of late. Witness some of the fathers of the euro, modern derivative pricing, and efficient market theory – Mundell, Merton, Scholes, Markowitz, Sharpe: all ennobled and emasculated. Perhaps the future can be found in the very distant past – prior to the advent of credit default swaps (CDS), collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO) and double inverse exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This would be a return to the world before money, when barter was the way of doing business; that is, the days when one person was good at numbers, and the second at painting, such that the first did the numbers of the second, and the second painted for the first. Exhibit one: Witness the informal, but computationally sophisticated bartering system that has emerged among the recent economic ruins of Greece. The fear has been that, upon pulling out of the euro, the government would forcefully convert bank deposits to a greatly devalued drachma. With austerity measures, it seems that Greece is revisiting its ancient roots: barbers trade with accountants, and shoemakers with doctors. Sound impractical for the 21st century? Perhaps not in a world that is socially networked. In the universe of financial products, one might imagine individuals saving up units of account – for retirement or other purposes – that eventually entitle them to goods and services. Exhibit two: A few years ago, the US Postal Service – an institution that itself might not be around in a decade – started offering what is called a ‘Forever Stamp.’ Although the cost of mailing a first-class letter in the US is currently 45 cents – and grows by approximately one cent per year – a ‘Forever Stamp’ comes with no fixed monetary value. The stamp – effectively a financial derivative – entitles the holder to one unit of service, in perpetuity. The holder can use the stamp to mail one first-class (one ounce, or 28.3 gramme) letter anywhere in the US, at any time (forever). Pay the 45 cents today, and regardless of what it should cost to mail a first-class letter next year or 10 years hence, the cost of the service is locked in. For the Postal Service, this is not as big a gamble as one might expect. First, by not having to print new and costly stamps every time that the price goes up, it saves in printing costs for the millions of people

ONE PAGER

Curing Chavez and the Prospects for Venezuelan Health

IN SITU

The 2012 presidential election portends not only a verdict on Chavez and his revolution, but also a major national discussion about the rebuilding of the country’s institutions ROGELIO PÉREZ-PERDOMO reports from Caracas

P Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo is a professor of law at the Universidad Metropolitana of Caracas, and a visiting professor at

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Stanford Law School.

resident Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan revolution – variously ‘Bolivarian’ and ‘socialist’ – are going through a rough time. After months of rumours and a long absence in Cuba in July of last year, the President announced that he had undergone two surgeries, that a cancerous tumor had been extracted, and that, having undergone chemotherapy, he was in the process of recovery. Officially, Chavez has been cured of his cancer – something he attributes to Jose Gregorio Hernandez, a Venezuelan physician who died in 1919. (Hernandez is considered to be a saint by most Venezuelans – even if he is not officially recognized as such by the Vatican.) Perhaps the numerous public prayers – all conducted as theatrical political shows – also contributed to the turn of events in Chavez’s favour. Chavez’s illness and cure have been treated as state secrets. He was treated in Cuba in order to avoid any news leaks related to his disease, and there is no information on the type of cancer that he had or on the organs affected. Of course, the President is taking great pains to show that he is cured. The official slogan of the revolution, “Fatherland, Socialism or Death,” – once so visible in official places – has been discarded due to the mention of death. The new slogan simply reads: “Venceremos” (“We Will Triumph”). Chavez’s cure is his triumph over death, and indeed the triumph of the country and of socialism, of both of which Chavez is the personification. He has been President for 13 years, and is working hard for a new six-year term. The presidential election is in October 2012 and – to be sure – Chavez’s triumph over the illness has become part of an early electoral campaign. Rumours about Chavez’s health have not been calmed by all of these declarations, slogans and claims of a miraculous cure. Within his own party, tensions are visible because the principal leaders see themselves as rightful successors – even if they cannot run for office while Chavez is still around. “Chavism without Chavez” has been considered a heresy because Chavez has made himself a God-like figure – indispensable for the success of the revolution. The 2012 election was moved up from the

traditional December date to October by the National Electoral Council (itself dominated by Chavistas). The decision may well have been motivated by the President’s health issues. The political reality on the ground is that no other individual from his party could win a presidential election. The 13 years of Chavez’s presidency have been a mixed bag. There has been a renewal of the national fight against poverty and exclusion: medical and educational services and food have been brought to people who were once forgotten or ignored in a democracy that defined itself more in terms of electoral contests than by inclusiveness and social justice. The negative side of all of this has been the destruction of national institutions – including the judiciary, the civil service and electoral institutions – and the economic structure of the country. A great deal of previously privately owned farm land has been taken over by squatters with the support of government. Many businesses have been expropriated by the government – often without compensation to the owners. Public debt is alarmingly high – especially at a time when government revenues have increased due to elevated oil prices. Unemployment (unofficially) is also high – even if official figures show otherwise, as anyone benefiting from state subsidies is considered to be ‘employed.’ And labyrinthine regulations, including price and exchanges controls, have not stanched inflation – highest in all of Latin America. The Venezuelan state now manages many important businesses: electricity, telecommunications, steel mills, cement, glass-making, coffee processing and hotels, among many others. The private sector is tightly controlled, shrinking and fearful. State management is so plagued by cronyism and corruption that workers are actively opposing the expropriation of businesses that employ them. Investments in industrial and physical infrastructure are paltry. The results are predictable: shortages of many products – from food and cement to automobiles – sporadic provision of electricity, market speculation and widespread social malaise and anomie. If the country’s economic problems are serious, then the social situation is not markedly better. The homicide rate – now among the highest in Latin

America – has grown enormously . Kidnapping has become a common crime. Drug trafficking is on the rise, and some important drug lords – now in prison – boast of official support from high-ranking government officials. A justice of the Supreme Court is now on the run from corruption charges. President Chavez has not been shy about naming or visiting his international friends: the Castro brothers, Ahmadinejad, Lukashenko, Mugabe and even the departed Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. To Chavez, all of these international actors are ‘brothers.’ Chavez even called Gaddafi the Libyan Bolivar, and gave him a replica of Bolivar’s sword. In return, Chavez received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tripoli. Domestic opposition to the Chavez regime is active. Since 2006, the opposition has been unified in an electoral coalition, and in 2010, it received the majority of votes in the parliamentary election – even if the victory was not reflected in the number of seats in the National Assembly. The opposition has agreed to hold a primary election in February 2012 in order to choose a candidate for President of the Republic. The contenders for this candidacy – among whom the top three (Henrique Capriles Radonski, Pablo Perez and Leopoldo Lopez) are young and energetic – and the various political parties have shown a firm commitment to support the candidate elected in the primary. Even if the Chavez campaign once again made extensive use of public resources and explicit pressure and monetary ‘gifts,’ the results of the 2012 election would not be predictable. Chavez is normally a vigorous campaigner, but he will likely not have much energy this time round. Last winter, some polls showed that about one-third of the Venezuelan population supports Chavez, one-third supports the opposition’s still-to-be-determined candidate, and one-third is still undecided. (Of course, ‘undecided’ in an authoritarian political system can mean that one is fearful of expressing an opinion to a stranger who says that she is a pollster.)

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / FERNANDO LLANO

must rebuild its institutions. A large militia – the armed branch of Chavez’s political movement – has developed in parallel to, and parasitically on, the professional army (itself very much dominated, at the highest ranks, by Chavez’s adherents), resulting in frictions between the two bodies. The autonomous universities, whose students and professors have generally actively opposed the regime, have been subjected to severe economic restrictions. The judiciary is no longer an independent body, and civil servants have been replaced by courtiers and political activists. Landowners and businesses are likely to seek the return of expropriated properties or monetary compensation from future governments. And important transnational enterprises have brought Venezuela before international courts or arbitration tribunals. Bref: The reconstruction of the Venezuelan state and the conservation of national social peace will be enormous tasks. Going into the 2012 presidential election, the country might be said to be suffering from a grave and complex illness. And we do not know whether Venezuelans can count on another miracle cure from the saintly Jose Gregorio Hernandez. | GB

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez with incoming Defence Minister Henry Rangel Silva, right, at Silva’s swearing-in ceremony, January 2012.

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uestion: If Chavez is defeated electorally, will he or his successor hand power over to the opposition? Adan Chavez, his brother and one of those aspiring to succeed him, has already indicated that revolutionaries should use force to defend the revolution. In his view, the revolution cannot depend on an election. Leopoldo Lopez, a popular opposition figure and contender for the February primary election, was administratively disqualified from holding elective positions; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered this disqualification reversed. Although the National Council of Elections sanctioned his participation in the election, the Chavez-controlled Supreme Court has stated that the Inter-American

Court’s decision is “unenforceable.” Government lawyers insist that the disqualification will hold if Lopez is elected. And so the electoral destiny of Venezuela is not at all clear. Chavez’s people are not inclined to respect electoral results, and yet Venezuela has a democratic tradition – meaning that resistance would be stiff were this tradition overturned. Still, worries for the future do not end there. The new government – whether Chavista in character or formed from the ranks of Chavez’s opposition – will face an extremely delicate domestic situation. The country

TÊTE À TÊTE

Whither and Whence Global Business and Profits by 2030? GB discusses competitive advantage, the wealth of firms, and the theatres in which they will compete with the Financial Times’ most worldly philosopher Conversation with JOHN KAY

John Kay is a columnist with the

GB: Over the next 10 to 15 years, what will international business competition look like? What will be the stakes, and who will be the major players?

Financial Times. His most recent book was Obliquity (Profile Books, 2010). He currently chairs the Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision-Making.

JK: One has to start by asking what has changed. There are two big changes that are likely to continue to play themselves out. The first would be the change that arises as a result of bringing many more people into the market economy. The world is potentially talking about a market sector of the global economy that is several times larger than what we had experienced up to the 1980s and 1990s. The second continuing trend is the extent to which value-added in manufacturing – the value-added in economic activity generally, as it were – depends less and less on the actual physical content of products, and more and more on what people add to it with their skills and capabilities. This obviously has big consequences for the structure of business in the rich West: business clearly becomes more global, but it also becomes more and more specialized for both companies and countries. Inequality widens in rich countries because the labour force that is introduced into the global economy competes strongly in commodity-type activity, and much less at the top. One therefore sees more and more firms and groups of firms within countries moving into market niches. This movement comes with big pluses and minuses – depending on what business you are in. If you have material that comes with irreproducible competitive advantages, then you benefit from this process. If you do not, then you lose.

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GB: Will the nature of competitive advantage change over the next couple of decades?

JK: Not in a fundamental sense – and not very much. I have in the past described competitive advantage as resting on three or four groups of factors whose common characteristic is that they are relatively distinctive to the individual firms and groups of firms that hold them; that is, they are hard for people to reproduce, and remain hard to reproduce even after people realize the benefits that they create for the firms that enjoy them. The categories of competitive advantage typically include brands and reputation; strategic assets like access to particular

resources and groups of resources that other firms have difficulty accessing; and also innovations of various kinds – even if innovations are always fragile sources of competitive advantage, because innovations are easily replicable. A large category of competitive advantage is also what I have called ‘architecture,’ which has to do with the structure of relationships within a company, between the company and its suppliers, and between a company and its customers. The main categories of competitive advantage that I have mentioned remain valid today and tomorrow – even if the particular sources of competitive advantage within these general categories will change over the next 10 or 20 years, just as they have changed every decade or two in modern business history. GB: Will certain countries, types of industries, types of firms, or even cultures be influencing competitive advantage and changes in competitive advantage over the next couple of decades? JK: I am not sure. If one looks at how sustainable these kinds of sources of competitive advantage are, and looks for them on a national basis, one finds that different countries tend to have different categories of competitive advantage. One looks to the US as the constant fount of innovation that has really been the main source of business innovation for the Western world for a century. This is likely to remain the case – for reasons embedded in American history and culture in a way that cannot be easily reproduced either in Europe or in Asia or anywhere else. American competitive advantage has rested very largely on innovation and innovation-related activities. In Europe, competitive advantage is more diverse in source. To be sure, there are, for example, the German and Swiss competitive advantages in precision engineering and specialty chemicals. Competitive advantages will truly arise from having a workforce that has taken levels of scientific education down to wider swathes of the population. And, of course, these sound like vulnerable sources of competitive advantage in a world in which the education systems of Asian countries seem as capable of generating these kinds of capabilities as Western countries.

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF JOHN KAY

GB: What is the future of profit? How will it be understood and framed over the next 10 to 15 years?

had the slogan: “We make nothing but money.” They did not make very much of it in the end.

JK: One of the very large issues – particularly for the US and the UK – is that we have let the financial sector in these countries really get out of control. The sector has become a monster that is almost threatening to devour real business. We have an excessive financial orientation for essentially large listed companies. I have been talking about the strength of business consisting in the building of competitive advantage. And yet we have seen far too much of the idea that running businesses is about financial engineering or about mergers and acquisitions. This is what we may term ‘meta-portfolio management,’ in which managers see themselves as managing portfolios of businesses, just as fund managers see themselves as managing portfolios of shares. I hope that we have gotten over the peak of this financial approach to business, but I am very far from confident in this. I also fear that we are in for a series of further and possibly more acute financial crises in North America and Western Europe – crises that are closely bound up with the developments that I am describing. For me, successful business – including profitable business – is, in the long-run, about focussing on building competitive advantage.

GB: Why do you think that is?

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GB: Do you see any pronounced evolution by Western or even Asian firms in favour of a social motive for business, in addition to a profit motive?

JK: It depends on what you mean by social motive for business. I think that the business of business is business, by which I distinguish it from doing good, on the one hand, or simply making money, on the other. That, for me, is the critical element: to find the balance between these two. Not only do I think that business is not there to do good, but I am very suspicious of business that would have doing good as its objective. Having said this, the business that is actually purely about profit is not very successful in the long-run. Recall that Bear Stearns famously

JK: A business that is about nothing but making money was in the end torn apart essentially by the greed of its own employees. In the end, the idea of making money for shareholders is not something that is going to make anyone jump out of bed in the morning to go to work. But that, of course, is what we actually need if we want to build products that people value in the long-run. GB: What does that state of affairs depend on? Is it leadership, culture, regulation, competition or indeed other events and forces? JK: I do not think that you can achieve it by regulation. We exaggerate the role of leadership, because we have tended to believe – in the last 10 to 20 years – in the role of the heroic CEO. This heroic CEO is an overstated feature of business. In the end, success is a feature of the culture of the organization itself – a culture that is very hard to create. That goes back to this key issue of competitive advantage in business depending on finding things that are characteristic of the business, that are hard to replicate, and that remain hard to replicate even after people understand the benefits that they generate for the company that has them. That is why the cultures of successful businesses are typically developed over generations. They are not things that are created by leaders holding events with lots of fancy visuals and music. GB: What will be the evolution of the relationship between firm and state – over the next 10 to 15 years – in the West and beyond? JK: The largest regulatory imperative is to get the financial sector under control. That, in itself, is an element of getting rid of what some people call our version of crony capitalism – a capitalism in which there is too strong an association between the interests of large firms and the purposes of regulation. For me, there is some confusion in being ‘pro-market’ and ‘pro-business’ in the face of the fact that many of the interests, and much of the evolution, of the market economy are articulated through the eyes of the established large firms in an industry. We know that, while some of the innovations and changes that make our economies dynamic come from large firms, the bulk of these generally comes from outsiders and newcomers.That has certainly been the history of the industry that has generated the most change in the last couple of decades – the information technology industry.

GB: What should be the education of business leaders and practitioners over the next 10 to 15 years? JK: They should know less about finance, and more about a great many other things. I am thinking back to classical university education. The job of a great university is not to teach people about business as such, but rather about how they ought to think about the issues that they will face in business. That is an entirely different agenda from the present one in many realms of business education. GB: Do you see the future of international business as being anchored increasingly in the Asian theatre, or is it still the American-European theatre that will matter?

the capacity of politics to mess things up (see the Feature article by Miloud Chennoufi on the Algerian paradox in the Arab Spring at p. 34). GB: What will be the evolution in corporate boards and board-CEO relationships over the next 10 to 15 years? JK: That is a British and American issue – and particularly an American one. It is essentially the problem of self-aggrandizing CEOs. That has to be brought under control not just from the narrow perspective of running corporations better, but also because this kind of behaviour is capable of threatening the whole legitimacy of capitalism and the market economy. GB: What behaviour in particular?

JK: We have essentially added an Asian theatre to the American and European theatres. We had a market economy that had approximately a billion people in it. We now, potentially, have a market economy that has three billion people in it. That is a big change. GB: But is the Asian plane overstated by contemporary analysts, or is it really the big add-on among the international theatres for the foreseeable future? JK: I think that, just in terms of numbers, it has to be the big add-on. But people are perhaps overly sanguine about that at the moment. We talk not just about India and China, but also about Brazil and Russia, and these are countries in which politics has messed up economic development for two centuries or more. At the moment, they seem to be somewhat freed of their political handicaps, but I think that we are overconfident that this will remain true forever. GB: Do you have views about the magnitude or importance of other economic theatres like Eastern Europe and, say, Africa and the Middle East?

GB: We talked about different geographic theatres. What about specific future industrial products or services as theatres of competition? JK: The distinction between service and manufacturing becomes very artificial in the world that I was describing earlier; that is, when most of the valueadded of a product is not the physical content of a product, as it were. At core, though, this really is a crystal-ball question, and we do not really know which of the various incipient technologies that we have are actually going to be the ones that take off into commercial products in the next 20 or 30 years. If you look back into people’s histories of trying to project these things, they have mostly gotten them pretty badly wrong. GB: What does a retreat from the hyper-financialization of business you describe look like? (See the Tête à Tête interview with Michael Ignatieff at p. 52.) JK: I would not necessarily go with much tighter regulation. I am much less concerned with the size of companies than with their scope. Should we go back to a world with silos instead of financial conglomerates? We have specialist institutions performing particular functions, and they are smaller for that particular reason. They are not smaller because we are imposing size constraints as such. And that would essentially take us back to a financial system that is simpler and more focussed on the specific needs of the non-financial economy. In this sense, I am saying something that is not very different from Eliot Spitzer (see the Tête à Tête interview with Eliot Spitzer about the break-up of large investment banks in GB’s Fall 2011 issue). | GB

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JK: For Russia and Eastern Europe, there are a variety of different stories. You have parts of Eastern Europe – much of Poland, or the Czech Republic – that are essentially places that were torn away from the mainstream development of Western Europe, and that are now moving themselves back into it. That is a different matter from places further east that were never part of that pole of economic development at all, and that would be moving into a market economy and really a modern industrial society for the first time. I am not sure that we have done a terribly good job of handling that transition. In Africa and the Middle East, I know that GB regularly talks to people who understand the politics of these areas much better than I do. But to repeat an earlier theme, in talking about places like India and China and other emerging theatres, we should never underestimate

JK: Executive remuneration – most of all; that is, the extent to which people are diverting the resources of corporations for their own individual benefit.

I have been talking about the strength of business consisting in the building of competitive advantage. And yet we have seen far too much of the idea that running businesses is about financial engineering or about mergers and acquisitions.

Nathaniel A. Raymond is Director of Operations for the Satellite Sentinel Project, and is based at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Caitlin N. Howarth is a Harvard Kennedy School student and human security analyst for the Satellite Sentinel Project. Jonathan J. Hutson is Director of Communications for the Enough Project, which provides field reports, policy analysis and communications strategy for the Satellite Sentinel Project.

n 2011, civilians using communication technologies to obtain information and to coordinate political action defined the year more than any other development in foreign affairs. Time magazine chose “The Protester” as its 2011 Person of the Year, noting how last year’s protest movements made use of Twitter hashtags and digital platforms in order to share imagery and map locations, and to spread their messages around the world. Individuals using smartphones and social networks helped to spark and sustain the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in North America, as well as the Russian Winter that gripped Moscow. Maps displaying near real-time data collected from the ‘crowd’ aided the response to a devastating earthquake in Japan. And DigitalGlobe’s commercial satellites monitored violence along the border between Sudan and South Sudan, allowing Harvard analysts as part of the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) – funded by actor and activist George Clooney and the charity Not On Our Watch – to capture evidence of war crimes hours after alleged mass atrocities occurred. For example, SSP documented the razing of towns and villages and the bombardment of civilians in Sudan’s border areas of Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile state. These new uses of crowd-sourced data, the rise of social networking, and the integration of geographic information systems with satellite imagery have not only transformed rapid responses to political unrest and natural disasters, but have in fact begun to fundamentally alter the very nature and arc of the emergencies themselves. And yet the continuing rise of crisis mapping – the rapid deployment of the aforementioned capabilities to identify and mitigate threats to vulnerable populations – as a global, transformational force began only a few years before the tumultuous events of 2011. Ushahidi, a crowd-sourced platform for placing reports received by text message and email on a map, was launched during the 20072008 election-related violence in Kenya. By fusing data from mobile phones, the Internet and digital maps in near real-time, Ushahidi aided both civilians in harm’s way and policymakers several time zones removed from the chaos as they attempted to make sense of events. Crisis mapping also helped to inaugurate an era in which information communication technologies in the hands of both large crowds and small groups of experts are shaping

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NEEDS AN ETHICAL COMPASS

The recent global heroics of digital dissidents and witnesses betray a larger kink in their armour – a desperate need for standards and professionalism BY NATHANIEL A. RAYMOND CAITLIN N. HOWARTH & JONATHAN J. HUTSON

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ILLUSTRATION: GORDON WIEBE

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These new uses of crowdsourced data, the rise of social networking, and the integration of geographic information systems with satellite imagery have not only transformed rapid responses to political unrest and natural disasters, but have begun to alter the very nature and arc of the emergencies themselves.

and reshaping the world more quickly, kinetically and emphatically – one could argue – than nuclear weapons did during the Cold War. This is a cause for celebration and also concern. For the evolution of this digital toolbox – part crowd sourcing, part field reporting, part social media, part digital cartography, and part data mining – has to date outpaced the development of widely accepted doctrine for responsible use thereof. And crisis mappers, who already commonly use a set of digital platforms and tools, now urgently need a shared set of ethical and technical standards for how to use these safely and strategically. In other words, crisis mappers require an ethical compass. As mentioned, the work that this sector does is vital – even groundbreaking – and will only grow to be more crucial. However, because of the remote places

and exotic situations in which many crisis mappers operate, their work is consistently precarious and often dangerous. Crisis mappers are this era’s first responders, as it were, but they operate – it must be conceded – without the benefits of standardized training, technical benchmarks, field-tested equipment or peer-reviewed codes of ethics. In particular, there is an urgent need to create shared mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation, guidelines for guaranteeing the safety of informants, and frameworks to hold practitioners responsible for adherence to ethical and technical standards that, to be sure, first need to be written. More than simply lacking a code of ethics or an accrediting body, no mediator has been designated to convene and organize the crisis mapping community – along with other key stakeholders – in order to build these standards and reach a reasonable degree of consensus. Moreover, the field is at present more accountable to its private and public donors than to the communities of people that are directly affected by the data it enables and creates. Crisis mapping is no longer just about aggregating tweets from election observers and participants in political protests, or placing dots on a map to describe an earthquake in Haiti or a tsunami in Japan. It is increasingly about going head-to-head with hostile intelligence and security services intent on obstructing, co-opting and distorting the data that crisis mappers gather (see the Feature by John E. McLaughlin on the future of the intelligence craft at p. 28). In these new, tense circumstances, the consequences of action, inaction and indecision all carry weight. When violent regimes assume that the world is watching, they do act differently – and crisis mappers must prepare for that reality. As crisis mappers seek to report existing and emerging threats, they often risk inadvertently creating new perils for those whom they strive to help. As such, some of the pressing questions facing the field of crisis mapping that have yet to be answered in a generalizable way include: What information should be shown publicly, and when and how should it be shown? When should it not be shown? Do crisis mappers sometimes unintentionally provide bad actors with very useful intelligence? Are at-risk populations endangered by sharing information with crisis mapping initiatives and/ or social media – even when this is done remotely and with the use of encryption? What happens to vulnerable civilians if crisis mapping data is wrong? What happens to them if the data is right? What responsibility does the crisis mapping community have to report and share mistakes transparently? If crisis mappers are the first to spot an emerging threat, then what is the most ethical and effective way to alert people on the ground who may be in

imminent danger? How can sensitive data be kept more secure from hackers? When is the level of risk to vulnerable populations – or to the crisis mapper – too high to engage in crisis mapping? Who is ultimately accountable for measuring, evaluating and mitigating these risks? How can evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity best be documented and preserved for possible use in future domestic and international prosecutions?

There is an urgent need to create shared mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation, guidelines for guaranteeing the safety of informants, and frameworks to hold practitioners responsible for adherence to ethical and technical standards that, to be sure, first need to be written. Hutu soldiers and civilians who had perpetrated the genocide. The refugee camps – most notably the Goma camp in Zaire – became places where Hutu forces involved in the genocide were able to rearm and regroup, while being fed by the international aid community. The Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda (JEEAR), which was undertaken by donor governments from November 1994, was a watershed moment for the humanitarian community. The JEEAR found grievous failures in the technical standards, coordination and – most of all – ethical guidelines available to humanitarian actors responding to the crisis. It was out of one of the humanitarian community’s darkest chapters that the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response, known as the Sphere standards, emerged. The Sphere standards set forth what populations

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xperience delivers answers to some of these questions, but crisis mappers are not the only ones learning from the events of 2011. As the ongoing unrest in Iran, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria and other theatres shows, repressive governments have not had to work hard in order to figure out where some of the most crucial open-source data comes from during a crisis. While organizers and crisis mappers adapt to overcome intentionally blacked-out phone systems, unsecured servers and disabled power grids, despots are adapting, too. In Sudan, armed forces under surveillance by SSP try to hide by camouflaging, covering or concealing their vehicles soon after their position is revealed. In 2011, for example, helicopter gunships captured by DigitalGlobe satellites at a particular airbase in Sudan took off and were apparently moved elsewhere within three hours of one report’s release – and this on the same day that the Sudanese government twice denounced the project. Eyewitness accounts gathered by the Enough Project for SSP, combined with details in a UN report, led SSP to uncover the alleged concealment of a mass grave under a water tower – an apparent effort to escape remote and ground detection. In Syria, protesters paid a brutal price when intelligence teams connected names to faces shown in video footage. In Egypt, social media accounts were traced, and Facebook’s anti-pseudonym policy came under fire as a security hazard. These tactics are hardly new – as any human rights advocate in Myanmar can confirm – but they have a clear chilling effect on those in the field and would-be allies from abroad. Mapping the locations of even the most innocuous human actors, such as the World Food Program distribution points or the clinics of Médecins Sans Frontières, can attract the violent attentions of armed actors. Crisis mappers learned that lesson well when Pakistan-based Taliban forces threatened to attack foreign aid workers responding to the 2010 floods and food crisis. Indeed, the more crises are mapped, the more sophisticated armed actors will become at evading monitors and distorting crowd-sourced information. By way of response, there is only one recommended

course of action: the field of crisis mapping must quickly and comprehensively develop widely accepted technical standards, professional ethics and centres of excellence for learning and evaluation. This must be done before people who are at risk suffer harm due to a dangerous mismanagement of data. If, however, crisis mappers do not develop a set of best practices and shared ethical standards, they will not only lose the trust of the populations that they seek to serve and the policymakers that they seek to influence, but, as discussed below, they could unwittingly increase the number of civilians being hurt, arrested or even killed without knowing that they are in fact doing so. In the field of humanitarian aid, the flawed response to Africa’s 1994 Great Lakes refugee crisis – spawned by the Rwandan genocide – provides a clear example of what can happen when a profession fails to mature in a proactive manner. The Rwandan genocide caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee Rwanda to neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania and Burundi. Among those who fled were thousands of

affected by disasters have a right to expect from humanitarian agencies in terms of protection, assistance and life with dignity, as well as universal minimum standards for water supply, sanitation and hygiene promotion, food security and nutrition, shelter, settlement and non-food items, and also health services. The standards are published in multiple languages, and are broadly accepted by the humanitarian sector as a whole. Crisis mapping must not wait for its ‘Goma moment’ to arrive before choosing to self-regulate. Given that crisis mapping is a realm in which NGOs, affected communities, individuals, academic institutions, governments, donors and corporations all play a role, an inclusive process is needed to first identify the stakeholders in this field. The crisis mapping community then needs to deliberate, adopt, trans-

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If crisis mappers do not develop a set of best practices and shared ethical standards, they will not only lose the trust of the populations that they seek to serve and the policymakers that they seek to influence, but they could unwittingly increase the number of civilians being hurt, arrested or killed, without even knowing that they are doing so.

late and widely disseminate its own versions of the Humanitarian Charter and the Sphere standards, and it needs to encourage their practice by stakeholders. The humanitarian aid agencies that responded to the Great Lakes crisis in the mid-1990s largely knew the identities of the other actors in their field. Yet many crisis mappers may not even know that the work that they do is considered crisis mapping. The field’s stakeholders can only be convened when there is an agreed and widely shared definition of crisis mapping and the crisis mapper. Only then can there be a start to the hard work of establishing which laws, treaties, rights and obligations should inform and bind the professional and volunteer crisis mappers. When creating the Humanitarian Charter, the humanitarian aid personnel drew upon the aspirations of the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, codes of ethics regarding humanitarian impartiality, and other cornerstones of international humanitarian law in order to shape their efforts. In the case of crisis mapping, similar

legal precedents and academic pedagogy do not yet exist. For example, it is yet to be formally determined whether vulnerable populations have an inalienable right to certain forms of information from NGOs, governments and corporations about threats to their lives and livelihoods. When Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, described the Internet as “an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights,” he emphasized its role in facilitating free speech. But the Internet is not only a place to organize people and project ideas – it is also the world’s portal for learning about threats to human security. Even if there is no ‘right to the Internet,’ access to information – leading to decisive action in order to mitigate these threats – can be a question of life or death. It must also be determined whether experimental projects that use satellite surveillance, crowd sourcing and interactive map-making in new ways during a crisis constitute human subjects research, and thus require institutional review board approval and oversight. What may sound like an esoteric academic concern is a very tangible concern, as mappers struggle to find an appropriate balance between acts of rescue and acts of research and development. Correspondingly, governments, donors and corporations – those that control access to satellites and cell phone grids, and also the servers that capture and communicate crisis data – must understand and comply with any binding legal obligations either to protect or release crisis data, especially individually identifiable information. Currently, they do so either unevenly or not at all, because these rights and obligations have not been specifically articulated or codified. These varying levels of transparency and resistance make it difficult for first responders – cloud-based or on the ground – to deploy rapidly and effectively without having to reinvent their information streams for each crisis. When action is at a premium, time spent negotiating access to data carries a cost in human life. The availability and application of new technologies has indeed brought about a brave new world – but bravery and novelty are not enough. A regime intent on displacing, detaining and killing its own people never stops at the first sign of resistance. It learns, adapts and grows bolder. This new world of crowd sourcing, social networking, remote sensing and data fusion must be more than courageous, innovative and well-meaning – it must be educated, ethical and as able and prepared to evolve as the forces and actors against which it works. We would be very wise to capitalize on the 2011 triumphs of crisis mapping through the development of comprehensive standards and ethics. If the field does not do so, these triumphs may quickly turn into tragedies in the months and years ahead. | GB

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Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. Most recently, he was visiting professor at Novosibirsk

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State University.

nlike the Antarctic, a continent surrounded by oceans, the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents. Most of the Arctic Ocean coastline belongs to the world’s two largest countries – Russia and Canada – each of which also owns territory on either side of a series of contested, and increasingly ice-free, Arctic straits. Canada considers the Northwest Passage to be internal waters. Russia takes the same view of the Northern Sea Route. Both countries recognize that the thinning and melting of the Arctic sea ice pose environmental and security risks at the same time that they create economic opportunities in the form of increased shipping and access to natural resources. Both take the view that their domestic laws provide the best bases for protecting and developing their Northern coastlines. And both face a single, common source of opposition to their claims – namely, the US. All of this should

beg the question: why have Russia and Canada not bolstered their respective positions by recognizing each other’s legal positions? The Northwest Passage is made up of a number of different possible routes between the more than 19,000 islands of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. The islands themselves have been incontestably Canadian since the UK transferred title over them in 1880, while the nearly impenetrable sea ice meant that the issue of ownership and control over the water was never discussed – until the acquisition of powerful icebreakers by the US and, more recently, the dramatic melting of sea ice as a consequence of climate change. Canada takes the view that the Northwest Passage constitutes internal waters, where the full force of its domestic law applies. Internal waters are not territorial waters, and there is no right – at international law – to access them without the permission of the coastal state. Internal waters arise in bays or along fragmented coastlines through the long-term acquiescence of other countries and/or by the drawing of ‘straight baselines’ between headlands in accordance with a judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 1951 Anglo-Norwegian Fisheries Case. The US insists that the Northwest Passage is an ‘international strait,’ according to criteria set out by the ICJ in the 1949 Corfu Channel Case – namely, that “its geographical situation [connects] two parts of the high seas and the fact [that it is] being used for international navigation.” Foreign vessels sailing through an international strait necessarily pass within 12 nautical miles of one or more coastal states, but instead of the regular right of ‘innocent passage’ through territorial waters, they benefit from an enhanced right of ‘transit passage.’ This entitles them to pass through the strait without

Why Canada and Russia should unite to support a common position against the US in advancing Arctic claims BY MICHAEL BYERS

ILLUSTRATION: JEAN TUTTLE

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coastal state permission, while also freeing them from other constraints. For instance, foreign submarines may sail submerged through an international strait – something that they are not allowed to do in regular territorial waters. On two occasions, the US has sent surface vessels through the Northwest Passage without seeking Canada’s consent: the SS Manhattan, an American owned-and-registered ice-strengthened supertanker in 1969; and the USCGC (US Coast Guard Cutter) Polar Sea, a coastguard icebreaker in 1985. Most Canadian specialists argue that these two transits are insufficient to fulfill the ‘used for international navigation’ criterion. American analysts respond that the ICJ did not specify a threshold – with some of them even arguing that prospective use is itself enough. The US position has received some support from the European Commission, which in 1985 joined the State Department in protesting against Canada’s drawing of straight baselines around its

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Canada considers the Northwest Passage to be internal waters. Russia takes the same view of the Northern Sea Route. Both recognize that the thinning of the Arctic sea ice poses environmental and security risks, and creates economic opportunities.

Arctic islands. However, the focus of the European objection was the unusual length of several of the baselines, rather than the adoption of the lines as such, or the internal waters claim specifically. Contrary to a widespread assumption, no country apart from the US has ever explicitly and specifically objected to Canada’s internal waters claim. Nor has the dispute posed a problem for Canada and the US since 1988, when the two countries concluded an Arctic Cooperation Agreement. In the treaty, the US “pledges that all navigation by US icebreakers within waters claimed by Canada to be internal will be undertaken with the consent of the Government of Canada.” In return, Canada promises to give consent whenever it is requested. The two countries also agree that “[n]othing in this Agreement [...] nor any practice thereunder affects the respective positions of the Government of the United States and of Canada on the Law of the Sea in this or other maritime areas [...].” In other words, the treaty is essentially an agreement to disagree. The Arctic Cooperation Agreement was de-

signed to manage the Northwest Passage dispute indefinitely, since shipping was restricted to heavy icebreakers by the year-round presence of thick, hard, multi-year sea ice. But climate change, which is advancing more quickly in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth, is rapidly causing the ice to thin and recede. For four of the last five summers, the Northwest Passage has been free of ice in early September and open to non-icebreaking vessels. Eighteen ships sailed through in each of 2009 and 2010, and 22 ships in 2011. It now seems possible that the Arctic could experience a complete, late-season melt-out of sea ice within the next five-plus years, and with this a permanent loss of the main impediment to shipping: the multi-year ice. Before long, the Northwest Passage could well resemble the Gulf of St. Lawrence or the Baltic Sea, where ice-strengthened vessels and icebreaker-escorted convoys can operate safely throughout the year. Another fundamental change involves the US’s attitude toward security. Since 9/11, Washington has become concerned about the possibility of terrorists using the Northwest Passage to sneak into North America, or of rogue states transporting weapons of mass destruction via the continent’s longest, mostly unguarded coastline (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin on North America’s changing luck and 21st century wars in GB’s Spring/Summer 2011 issue). These challenges would arguably best be addressed through a coastal state’s domestic criminal, customs and immigration laws – especially when the state in question is a close military and economic ally – rather than the much weaker powers available under international law in an international strait. The US Navy, however, is concerned that recognizing Canada’s claim could create a precedent for other waterways, such as the Strait of Hormuz – the international legal status of which is contested. Yet the presence of sea ice and the paucity of non-consensual foreign transits make it possible to legally distinguish the Northwest Passage from all other potential or existing international straits – apart, that is, from the Russian Arctic straits that form part of the Northern Sea Route. The Northern Sea Route stretches along the top of Russia from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has, because of climate change, also become seasonally ice-free. Thirty-two ships traversed the waterway last summer – most of them transporting natural resources from Russian ports to Asian markets. South Korean shipyards are building dozens of icestrengthened cargo vessels that will soon extend the shipping season beyond the summer months, while the Russian government is building new icebreakers to escort convoys of vessels.

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The Russian government is intent on turning the Northern Sea Route into a commercially viable alternative to the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal. In September 2011, Prime Minister Putin said: “The shortest route between Europe’s largest markets and the Asia-Pacific region lies across the Arctic. This route is almost a third shorter than the traditional southern one. I want to stress the importance of the Northern Sea Route as an international transport artery that will rival traditional trade lanes in service fees, security and quality. States and private companies that choose the Arctic trade routes will undoubtedly reap economic advantages.” There is, of course, a notable fly in the ointment: the US contests Russia’s claim that portions of the Northern Sea Route – namely, the Vil’kitskii, Shokal’skii, Dmitrii Laptev and Sannikov straits – constitute internal waters. Significantly, no other country has taken a side in the dispute, which began in 1963 when the US Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind surveyed the Laptev Sea; the next sum-

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As for the Soviet Union’s near-complete silence on the Northwest Passage, one can postulate that the Soviet government decided not to disrupt the delicate balance that allowed Canada and the US to ‘agree to disagree’ on the issue.

mer, the USS Burton Island did likewise in the East Siberian Sea. These voyages prompted the Soviet government to send an aide mémoire to the US embassy in Moscow, clearly setting out the position that the straits are internal waters. The US responded by asserting that they were in fact international straits. Then, in the summer of 1965, the US Coast Guard icebreaker Northwind approached the Vil’kitskii Straits from the west. Strong diplomatic pressure was applied by the Soviet Union – pressure that, according to one Department of State spokesman, extended to a threat to “go all the way” if the American ship proceeded into the strait. The US government responded by ordering the Northwind to turn round. A similar incident occurred in 1967, when the US Coast Guard icebreakers Edisto and East Wind retreated after being warned off by the Soviets. The opening of the Northern Sea Route to international shipping began more than two decades later when, in 1987, the reforming Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev said: “Across the Arctic runs the shortest sea route from Europe to the Far

East, to the Pacific. I think that, depending on how the normalization of international relations goes, we could open the Northern Sea Route to foreign ships under our icebreaker escort.” In September 2009, with the thick, hard, multi-year ice having recently disappeared from the Russian coast, two German container ships successfully navigated the Northern Sea Route from east to west, on a voyage that began in Ulsan, South Korea, and ended in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In November 2010, Norilsk Nickel, Russia’s largest mining company, reported that one of its vessels had completed a round trip from Murmansk to Shanghai. The 18,218-kilometre trip took 41 days, compared to the 38,785 kilometres and 84 days that it would have taken by way of the Suez Canal. In August 2011, the Vladimir Tikhonov, a 280 metrelong supertanker carrying natural gas condensate from Murmansk to Map Ta Phut port in Thailand, became the largest vessel to complete the Northern Sea Route. It was able to do so because ice conditions now allow ships to sail northward of the New Siberia Islands – thus bypassing the shallow waters between those islands and the mainland. Nevertheless, to be sure, attempts to support the use of the Northern Sea Route by foreign ships have never meant that the USSR or Russia believed that the waterway should be opened to unrestricted passage. The similarities between the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route extend beyond the common Russian and Canadian positions that argue that their respective Arctic straits constitute internal waters. In 1982, Soviet and Canadian diplomats partnered in the negotiation of Article 234 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows coastal states to exercise heightened regulatory powers over shipping in ice-covered areas for the prevention, reduction and control of marine pollution – including in terms of vessel design, construction and navigational practices – out to 200 nautical miles from shore. Article 234 legitimated the 1970 Canadian Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, which later provided a model for the Soviet Union’s 1990 regulations on the Northern Sea Route. In 1985, Canada and the Soviet Union both adopted straight baselines. The Canadian lines connect the outer headlands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The Soviet lines connect the island groups of Novaia Zemlia, Severnaia Zemlia and the New Siberian Islands to the mainland. The ICJ upheld the legality of straight baselines along fragmented coastlines and fringing islands in the 1951 Anglo-Norwegian Fisheries Case. And, crucially, on the strength of this case, as well as customary international law and UNCLOS, maritime areas

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The presence of sea ice and the paucity of non-consensual foreign transits make it possible to legally distinguish the Northwest Passage from all other potential or existing international straits.

within straight baselines today constitute internal waters of the coastal state. Also in 1985, the US sent the coastguard icebreaker Polar Sea through the Northwest Passage – prompting Evgeni Pozdnyakov, a press attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, to publicly express support for Canada’s claim: “Whether it is the Northwest Passage or the Northeast Passage does not matter. Our position is based on provisions of international law. The waters around islands belonging to a country are the internal waters of that country.” However, there is no evidence of any prior or subsequent statements of support by the Soviet Union or Russia for Canada’s position, nor indeed evidence of Canadian statements in the reverse – which is curious, given the similarities in legal circumstances. The most logical explanation for this curiosity is political in character: Canada and the Soviet Union were on different sides of the Cold War. The American opposition to Canada’s claim has always been based on wider stategic concerns – namely a felt need for maximum navigation rights worldwide. With Canadian and US security linked through NATO, NORAD and the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network (see the Feature article by John E. McLaughlin on the future of the intelligence craft at p. 28), it would already have been difficult enough for Canada to take an independent stance on the Northwest Passage issue. Taking the Soviet Union’s side in the Northern Sea Route dispute was, in the event, simply not an option. As for the Soviet Union’s near-complete silence on the Northwest Passage, one can postulate that the Soviet government decided not to disrupt the delicate balance that allowed Canada and the US to ‘agree to disagree’ on the issue. (Had Moscow come out publicly in favour of the Canadian position, Washington might have decided that Ottawa’s independent stance was no longer tolerable.) An alternative or additional explanation is that Moscow was not concerned that any foreign country would physically challenge its claim by overtly sailing through the Northern Sea Route. The risk of sparking a nuclear conflict would be too high, and the only US vessels capable of a surface voyage were lightly armed coastguard icebreakers that would be no match for the Northern Fleet. Today, with the Cold War over and the sea ice melting, environmental concerns and economic opportunities dominate the policy landscape. Russia has just been admitted to the World Trade Organization, and cooperation has arguably replaced conflict as the dominant paradigm in the North. In November 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov issued a joint statement on Canada-Russia economic cooperation. In January 2010, according to WikiLeaks, Stephen Harper told NATO Secretary-

General Anders Fogh Rasmussen that the alliance had no role to play in the Arctic because “there is no likelihood of Arctic states going to war.” Harper also said that “Canada has a good working relationship with Russia with respect to the Arctic, and a NATO presence could backfire by exacerbating tensions.” As for the current Russian prime minister, in September 2010, Vladimir Putin told a conference in Moscow: “It is well known that, if you stand alone, you cannot survive in the Arctic. Nature alone, in this case, demands that people, nations and states help each other.” Putin’s comments came just a week after the Russian and Norwegian foreign ministers signed a boundary treaty for the Barents Sea, where the two countries had previously disputed 175,000 square kilometres of oil- and gas-rich seabed. Then, in May 2011, Russia, Canada, the US, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland signed a multilateral search-and-rescue treaty – the first legal instrument negotiated within the framework of the Arctic Council. All of this has consequences for the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage. In February 2009, Alan Kessel, the senior lawyer in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, met with his Russian counterpart, Roman Kolodkin, in Moscow. According to a Russian summary of the meeting, “[b]oth sides noted a high degree of similarity in their position on the issue of international shipping in the Northwest Passage (Canada) and the Northern Sea Route (Russia) – the existing limitations that are being applied to those areas are necessary to preserve the fragile maritime environment and are in sync with the rights that UNCLOS concedes to coastal states in ice-covered areas. Both sides agreed to have more detailed consultations on this topic, including the issue of rights to historical waters in the context of the existing disputes over their status with the US.” Soviet submarines never threatened Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, because the whole purpose of such vessels is to remain covert. (Under international law, only overt actions can create new rights.) But today, with the sea ice melting and foreign shippers looking north, it is only a matter of time before other countries join the US in overtly opposing Canada’s and Russia’s claims. In the more than two decades since the Cold War ended, Russia has lost its superpower status, been integrated into the global economy, and become an active participant in Arctic cooperation. In these changed circumstances, Moscow and Ottawa should pursue the possibility of a joint Russian-Canadian position on the legal status of the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage. Such issue-specific diplomatic cooperation would strengthen the leverage of both countries as they seek – singly or jointly – to negotiate some kind of long-term compromise with the US. | GB

IN THE CABINET ROOM

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ILLUSTRATION: DUSAN PETRICIC

La crise européenne et le retour de la mafia

IN SITU

Le Vieux Continent est en feu, les mafiosi rebâtissent et s’enrichissent PAR PIERRE VERLUISE depuis Florence

B Pierre Verluise est directeur du site géopolitique diploweb.com, professeur à Grenoble École de Management, ainsi que directeur de recherche à l’Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques

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à Paris.

ienvenue à Florence, dans le Nord de l’Italie. Nous sommes dans un colloque organisé par la Fondation antimafia Antonino Caponnetto, du nom d’un magistrat qui s’est distingué dans la lutte contre la mafia. Plus d’une centaine de policiers sont sur les dents. La salle a été passée au peigne fin par le service de déminage et les chiens spécialisés dans la détection des explosifs restent à proximité, au cas où. Une douzaine de personnalités sont attendues pour répondre à la question: l’Europe colonisée par la mafia? Plusieurs des invités bénéficient en permanence d’une protection rapprochée, comme le procureur national antimafia Piero Grasso et l’eurodéputé italien Rosario Crocetta. Leurs gardes du corps passent leur temps à observer la salle – pleine de 450 personnes – et les alentours, en contact permanent via leur oreillette. Une mafia est une organisation criminelle qui repose sur un engagement réciproque de ses membres et sur des règles internes particulièrement strictes. La violence est un moyen utilisé aussi bien pour acquérir des richesses que pour protéger l’organisation par l’intimidation. La mafia profite de la faiblesse de l’État pour s’imposer en jouant un rôle social, politique et économique. Elle développe des liens avec la classe politique régionale et nationale, notamment pour obtenir un accès privilégié aux marchés publics, voire bénéficier de l’impunité judiciaire. En soutenant financièrement certains hommes politiques durant leur campagne électorale, la mafia se place dans l’ombre du pouvoir – au plus près de la prise de décision, mais derrière un rideau de fumée. Les ressources de l’organisation mélangent des activités illégales et légales afin de blanchir l’argent du crime. Le procureur antimafia Piero Grasso ouvre le colloque: «En fragilisant les entreprises et en multipliant les faillites, la crise économique qui frappe l’Europe depuis 2008 offre de multiples opportunités aux mafias. En effet, il leur devient plus facile que jamais d’acquérir à bas prix des entreprises pour blanchir l’argent du crime et s’insérer dans l’économie légale. Lorsque leur affaire bat de l’aile, les entrepreneurs sont tentés de ne pas se poser trop de questions sur l’origine de l’argent et les conditions induites par cet investissement tombé du ciel. D’autant que les moyens financiers de la mafia sont tellement importants qu’ils permettent à l’entreprise investie par la criminalité organisée

de procéder à d’importants investissements qui assèchent la concurrence. Les sociétés contrôlées par la mafia deviennent les plus compétitives pour remporter les appels d’offres. Résultat: l’entreprise dans laquelle la mafia a investi se retrouve rapidement en situation de quasi-monopole». Une mafia dispose toujours d’un ancrage territorial d’origine, mais cela ne l’empêche pas d’agir bien au-delà de son territoire. Par exemple, la France est depuis longtemps investie par des groupes mafieux étrangers, notamment italiens, russes, arméniens, géorgiens, roumains, bulgares… Les policiers ont récemment mis la main sur une équipe de trafiquants de cocaïne missionnée par la mafia calabraise pour faire passer le produit entre l’Espagne et l’Italie en passant par le sud de la France. La mafia russe s’installe depuis longtemps sur le littoral méditerranéen français et y achète de l’immobilier avec des valises de cash, sans que l’on sache d’où vient l’argent. La gendarmerie française a récemment démantelé un réseau roumain qui s’était donné une spécialité de voler le fret dans les camions de l’autoroute A1. L’Hexagone est aussi devenu une sorte de zone de stockage rapide et de transit pour la cocaïne et les drogues de synthèse venues de Pologne ou des Pays-Bas. La France se trouve également à la croisée des filières d’immigration clandestines tenues par les mafias. Les mafias chinoises et la mafia napolitaine collaborent pour fabriquer et écouler des produits de contrefaçon du luxe français. Les services de police italienne ne restent pas les bras croisés. Le 19 novembre dernier, 110 personnes ont été condamnées à des peines allant jusqu’à 16 ans de prison dans le cadre d’un maxi-procès antimafia à Milan. Elles appartenaient à la mafia calabraise, la ’Ndrangheta. Originaire des régions pauvres du sud de l’Italie, la ’Ndrangheta a fait des régions prospères du nord du pays «le poumon économique» de ses activités criminelles.

l faut sans doute aussi noter l’arrestation, le 7 décembre 2011, de Michele Zagaria, chef du clan Casalesi – le plus redouté de la Camorra napolitaine – recherché depuis plus de 15 ans. Le chiffre d’affaires de la Camorra napolitaine avoisinerait 30 milliards d’euros par an. Spécialisées dans le secteur du bâtiment et des travaux publics, ses entreprises obtenaient des marchés dans toute l’Italie. Et puis, une semaine plus tard, les carabiniers de Palerme ont arrêté 22 personnes

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AGF SRL / REX FEATURES

pays des Balkans comme le Monténégro, qui restent incapables de lutter contre leur crime organisé. Ils sont particulièrement actifs dans le trafic d’héroïne. La criminalité organisée nous oblige à réfléchir à une riposte globalisée. Il faut frapper les organisations criminelles au portefeuille, en confisquant leurs avoirs criminels. Soit nous pensons désormais en termes globaux et internationaux, soit nous laissons tomber, et basta»! Au nombre des progrès souhaitables, il est possible d’envisager que la loi italienne sur la séquestration des biens mafieux devienne une norme européenne. Cela permettrait d’attaquer la mafia au portefeuille et en conséquence de l’affaiblir considérablement. Il importe aussi de lutter plus fermement contre la corruption, une pratique qui fait le jeu de la mafia et nuit à la démocratie. Pays fondateur de l’UE, l’Italie reste un des plus corrompus. Et l’UE a été rejointe par des pays qui pour certains sont particulièrement inquiétants en la matière: la Grèce, la Roumanie, la Bulgarie… Ces deux derniers pays sont particulièrement actifs dans les activités criminelles des Balkans. Il manque encore à ce jour un projet européen pour lutter contre la criminalité organisée. Dans ce contexte de crise économique, lutter contre les mafias servira non seulement à ressouder le tissu social, mais aussi à réduire un des freins qui ralentissent la croissance. | GB

Recherché depuis presque 16 ans, le chef du principal clan de la Camorra, Michele Zagaria, est arrêté par la police le 7 décembre 2011 près de Caserte, dans la région de Naples.

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accusées d’association mafieuse, d’extorsion via l’impôt mafieux connu sous le nom de «pizzo», de trafic de drogue et de vol. Il reste cependant du chemin. Le procureur Grasso considère qu’il est possible de faire plus et mieux: «Nous avons une partie du diagnostic et quelques moyens, mais on ne s’en sert pas suffisamment parce que nombre d’accords importants pour mettre en œuvre une lutte contre la mafia à l’échelle européenne n’ont pas été ratifiés par tous les États membres. En Italie, l’auto-blanchiment n’est pas sanctionné par la loi. Face à une organisation criminelle très structurée, nous n’arrivons pas à mettre en place une organisation antimafia aussi structurée et cohérente. L’Italie ne fait toujours pas partie de l’Office européen de police (Europol), l’organisme chargé de la coopération en matière répressive entre les États membres de l’UE. Certes, le procureur antimafia italien obtient au cas par cas des arrestations de criminels par d’autres polices européennes, mais cela repose sur la bonne volonté. Nous avons une marge de progression». L’eurodéputé italien Rosario Crocetta prend la parole après Grasso: «Il faut désormais penser à la lutte contre les mafias en termes globaux. Par exemple, il importe de se pencher sur les liens entre les mafias européennes et chinoises. En outre, cessons d’envisager de faire rentrer dans l’UE des

New questions,

paradigms and worlds for an ancient craft BY JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

> John E. McLaughlin is Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He was Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Central Intelligence

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Agency from 2000 to 2004.

SPYING

2O AND ALL THAT

ntelligence in this century will continue to be a key feature of national security policies around the world. The basic contours of the intelligence game will remain familiar: there will always be human spies; intelligence analysts will continue striving to understand the world, predict events and avoid surprise; and the profession will continue to harness technology in aid of the purposes of spymasters. (See the classical article by Wesley Wark in GB’s inaugural issue in 2009 on the ranking of the world’s intelligence services.) But beyond these certainties loom many unknowns. At the end of the day, intelligence is about understanding the world, where events are heading, and anticipating potential sources of trouble. This was easier in the Cold War and in the 17-year period between its end – the Soviet collapse in 1991 – and the international financial crisis of 2008. During the Cold War, everything could be examined through the clarifying prism of US-Soviet conflict. Against that backdrop, most other concerns were secondary or derivative. And after the Soviet Union disappeared, the US had the luxury of being more or less unchallenged on the international stage until the 2008 financial crunch created huge resource strains, raised questions about the US economic model, and drew more attention to the emergence of China, India and other surging economies as potential challengers for primacy in the international arena. For US intelligence organizations, the world that they must understand has grown enormously more complex. Given that intelligence cannot cover everything with equal intensity and focus, it helps to have a widely understood organizing principle – sometimes captured in a phrase or two that all can grasp. However, in contrast to earlier eras of extreme challenge, no such concept exists to date – at least not one around which most observers could comfortably coalesce. During WW2, everyone could easily grasp ‘defeat the Nazis.’ And during the Cold War, Western intelligence services could easily rally to an anti-Soviet strategy captured

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ILLUSTRATION: RYAN SNOOK

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Some might presume to call the current era one of ‘integration,’ ‘asymmetry,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘connectivity,’ ‘precision,’ ‘globalization,’ or even ‘hard choices.’ Looking at various global trends, there is little likelihood that the picture will become clearer anytime soon.

by the idea of ‘containment’ – as put forth in George Kennan’s famous article in Foreign Affairs. Ideas like these provide the architecture for setting priorities when it is impossible to do everything. In describing American intelligence history, British scholar Christopher Andrew posited an “era of innocence” from the American Revolution to WW2 (when America was isolated or safe enough to feel no particular need for an intelligence establishment), an “era of transformation” from WW2 to the collapse of the Soviet Union (when American intelligence was organized at the national level, and took on a global mission), and an “era of uncertainty” from the collapse of the Soviet Union to, say, the attacks of 9/11 (when intelligence absorbed sizeable resource cuts, and had to recalibrate its mission). Some might presume to call the current era one of ‘integration,’ ‘asymmetry,’ ‘reformation,’ ‘fragmentation,’ ‘connectivity,’ ‘precision,’ ‘globalization,’ or even ‘hard choices.’ Looking at various global trends, there is little likelihood that the picture will become clearer anytime soon. At the most elementary level – that of population growth and the underlying demographics – the world is changing dramatically. World population not long ago passed the seven billion mark, and demographers suggest that, by 2050, it will exceed 10 billion. The recent spurt of growth occurred mostly in parts of the world least prepared to deal with the resulting pressures – Africa, the Middle East, parts of Southeast Asia – and projections are that the developed world will account for less than three percent of the growth over the next four decades. An important underlying trend has been a steady growth in urbanization (with more than 50 percent of the global population living in urban areas), with the trend once again dramatically more pronounced in the developing world than elsewhere. We are heading toward an era of developing-world mega-cities – from Lagos to Jakarta – of more than 20 million people. Intelligence officers watching all of this will have to be alive to the likelihood of increasing strains on governments that are unable to meet the concomitant demand for basic services and employment – and the possibilities of ethnic and tribal strife, societal instability, mass migrations, and the availability of large numbers of unemployed young men for recruitment by extremist movements. At the same time, resource pressures will be growing in the world. Despite repeated pledges by developed countries to lessen dependence on carbon fuels, nothing has yet occurred to make this a reality. Some projections therefore foresee global energy demand rising by at least 30 percent over

the next three decades. China’s demand alone over the last two decades grew by about 280 percent, and will likely continue to rise at a rapid rate. All of this, of course, could be driven up or down by growth prospects and other factors. But with 54 percent of proven oil reserves, and 40 percent of proven natural gas reserves, in the Middle East – still the largest deposits globally – intelligence officers will, for years to come, have to pay attention to great power competition and its consequences in that troubled region. Much has also been written recently about potential shortages in clean, safe water – especially in the developing world. Some projections say that, within a relatively short time, as many as three billion people could be affected. In developing economies, some 80 percent of water usage is still in agriculture, where it takes about a thousand tonnes of water to produce one tonne of grain. With more than one-third of the Earth’s surface consisting of river basins shared by more than one country, and with water tables falling in some of the world’s principal grain-growing regions, it is not hard to imagine circumstances in which water becomes a source of competition and conflict. Contrasting with such scarcity is the increasing availability of dangerous materials. Although US President Obama has embarked on policies intended to counter or reverse this trend, intelligence officers will, for the foreseeable future, have to worry about the security of these materials. With approximately 2,300 tonnes of highly-enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium stored in varying states of security around the world, intelligence officers will have to remain ever vigilant about the possibility of this material falling into the hands of people with ill intent. To be sure, we know that the material does leak: on at least two occasions – in 2003 and 2006 – significant amounts of near-weapons-grade uranium were intercepted at the Georgian border in the former Soviet Union. And these are, of course, only the cases that we happen to have detected.

n the background of such trends is another factor that is certain to strongly affect intelligence: the burgeoning revolution in technology that is altering all aspects of modern life. This is evident in nearly all fields, but especially in information technology (including social networking), biotechnology and nanotechnology. These developments will be of growing importance to intelligence for several reasons – chief among them being that intelligence must always do more than simply take advantage of existing technology. Intelligence must constantly be a step ahead of where everyone else is, as the adversaries that it must understand and detect have access to all that is commonly available. And, of course, this is a task that is complicated by the growing, unprecedented

history. The best minds in the intelligence profession need to work closely with technologists to brainstorm the future direction and scope of innovation, and what these might hold for both offensive and defensive strategies. One thing is certain: these kinds of revolutionary trends in technology – and indeed in the human condition – are likely to increase the number and broaden the scope of issues requiring intelligence attention. In the absence of a guiding strategic concept with the organizing power that ‘containment’ had in the Cold War, one of the principal problems for intelligence in the coming decades will be the struggle to prioritize. As mentioned, intelligence organizations, despite myths to the contrary, cannot be everywhere and cover everything. Add the fact that most nations are heading full-steam into a period of constrained resources in which intelligence leaders will increasingly have to ‘place their bets,’ as it were. This ‘bet-placing’ will extend to everything from technologies in which they invest to the types of individuals that they target for recruitment as spies. All of this is made doubly challenging by the fact that we are entering an era wherein the potential for surprise – since time immemorial the chief ‘enemy’ of intelligence – will be rising substantially due to shifting power relationships among nations and the speed of technological change. These circumstances will demand disciplined thinking about priorities. There are many ways to do this. Here is one way to think about it: why not arrange issues for coverage in five descending categories of effort – realizing that, with the fluid nature of geopolitics, these categories will be neither neat nor mutually exclusive. The categories could be as follows: Urgent – issues that unquestionably threaten the lives of citizens, the fortunes of armed forces, or the physical security of one’s country. For the US, at present, this would at minimum have to encompass issues such as terrorism, the development and proliferation of dangerous weapons (nuclear and conventional) and materials, and cyber-security. Important – issues that pose a clear threat to national interests and regional or global stability, along with specific countries that pose special dangers. Each country will have its own list, but for the US it might include regional tensions in places such as the Middle East and South Asia, and countries such as Iran and North Korea. Emerging – issues and countries in which neither the threat nor future evolution is clear, but for which the potential for miscalculation is great, and for which prudence demands an attentive posture. Each country will calculate differently on this score, but for the US, logical candidates might be countries like China and Russia (see the Feature article by Michael Byers on Russian and Canadian positioning, vis-àvis the US, in the Arctic at p. 18), as well as issues

New crises frequently spring from matters that are getting less attention and fewer resources, or for which no one has exclusive responsibility. The global financial crisis of 2008 is a good case in point.

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banality of very sophisticated technology-enabled or technology-based capabilities. This is probably the trend that is likely to have the greatest transformative effect on intelligence in the coming century, and it means that intelligence in the years ahead will have to be extraordinarily inventive. Challenging conventional wisdom about what is technologically feasible will become a requirement for success and, conceivably, for survival in certain circumstances. Increasingly, intelligence officers will have to ask themselves what has been called the ‘paradigm-shift question’: what is it that, if it could be done, would revolutionize what we do? The answer to that question often holds the secret to what intelligence has to tackle next – technologically or otherwise. Whether they knew it or not, American intelligence officers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were posing the paradigm-shift question when they asked: what if we could take photographs from space? Such imagery from space is now almost prosaic – especially for a generation that has grown up with Google Earth. Back then, however, it was a huge technological hurdle to reliably get a rocket into space with conventional photographic equipment, and then to return the film to Earth and interpret it. The initial efforts to realize this goal failed over a dozen times before success with what was known as the Corona satellite program (see the Feature by Nathaniel A. Raymond et al. on the future of crisis mapping at p. 12). This was a ‘game-changer’ to a degree that few appreciate today; after that success, the US was never again surprised by a major Soviet military programme (even though it was occasionally caught off guard by how the Soviets employed such programmes). How should intelligence answer the paradigmshift question today? What are the ‘game- changers’ of the future? Is it too much to ask: what if we could see through dirt? What if we could see through metal? What if we could detect the movement of very small amounts of radioactive substances from thousands of miles away? In essence, questions like these start to push intelligence beyond the suite of collection techniques into which intelligence agencies have settled a little too comfortably since the late 19th century, when classic human espionage – spying, as it were – began to be augmented by early industrial-age technologies, producing what we have come to call signals intelligence (SIGINT), photographic intelligence (IMINT) and various other technical measures and signals (MASINT). This long-standing intelligence framework, derived mainly from technologies that matured more than half way through the last century, will be dramatically destabilized in this new century – especially since, only one decade into it, we are zooming through what is arguably the most sweeping technological and scientific revolution in human

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A chainreaction of trouble could be triggered by a spread of nuclear weapons capabilities in the Middle East in the wake of an Iranian nuclear test, a renewed intifada in the PalestinianIsraeli setting or a major outbreak of cyber-war.

like climate change and the possibility of a global pandemic – both of which could have enormous national security implications. Maintenance – countries and issues in which the threat to interests and stability may be less obvious, but for which surprises can quickly elevate them into one of the top two categories. New crises frequently spring from matters that are getting less attention and fewer resources, or for which no one has exclusive responsibility. The global financial picture – the crisis of 2008 having caught nearly everyone off guard – is a good case in point; as is the crisis that unfolded more than a year ago in Tunisia (see the Feature article by Miloud Chennoufi on the Arab Spring and the Algerian paradox at p. 34). The challenge in this very broad category is to dedicate sufficient coverage to be able to detect trends heralding change, and to ramp up quickly should something occur that rapidly elevates the importance or threat potential of the issue. Investment – the proportion of effort that intelligence leaders are prepared to dedicate to developing new techniques and capability in recognition that the world is not static, and that the price of standing still – technologically or otherwise – is certain failure. Of course, no matter how disciplined one is, it is impossible to peer very deeply or confidently into the century now stretching before us. Any list of priorities will therefore be fluid, and intelligence officers will need unprecedented agility and high tolerance for ambiguity. Let us just imagine how successful futurists might have been at this point in the last century. Who could possibly have foreseen, in 1912, two world wars, the rise of history-changing figures like Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, the Cold War and nuclear power? Retrospective assessments of strategic futures are a recipe for deep humility (see the Tête à Tête interview with Michael Ignatieff at p. 52).

t is nonetheless possible – taking all of the foregoing into account – to imagine at least three different worlds that could evolve over the next decade or so, influencing the trajectory of events for years into the future, and fundamentally affecting the character and level of effort required of intelligence services. (Here we borrow generously from an informal talk in which former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, some 20 years ago, was commenting on very different circumstances for a group of national security specialists – including the author.) One – perhaps the least likely – we might call Stable World. This ‘world’ could come about through what might seem an unlikely concatenation of events. It could begin to emerge through some combination of outcomes, such as the strategic defeat of Al Qaeda (something already envisioned by some counter-terrorism experts), a settlement of the

long-standing disputes in the Middle East between Israelis and Arabs, agreements modernizing the international financial system, reversal of nuclear proliferation trends, and the continued evolution of Sino-US relations along lines of engagement, rather than confrontation. A second possible outcome we might call Messy World. This is arguably where we are today, and it is a state of affairs that could be prolonged by failure to make progress – or by continued drift – on many of the issues just mentioned. Tensions and uncertainties would abound in places such as the Middle East and the rest of Asia if Arab-Israeli negotiations remain stalled, and if the Arab Spring fails to yield the improved living standards and governance that populations desire. This would be a world in which nuclear aspirant countries like Iran progress enough to establish a ‘break-out’ potential – but stop just short of full capability – making it difficult to organize a consensual international response. This is a world in which great powers, such as China, the US, India and Russia, continue to vacillate between moments of suspicion and collaboration, with longer-term relationships remaining up for grabs. In short, this is a world in which many of the fundamentals affecting global stability remain unsettled. The third world we might call Nasty World. Given that we are at a moment in history when events in one part of the world affect events in other parts more certainly and rapidly than ever before, it would not take much to tip events in this direction. This is a world of rising tensions and little agreement among major nations about how to avoid or manage conflict. A chain-reaction of trouble could be triggered by things like a cascading spread of nuclear weapons capabilities in the Middle East in the wake of an Iranian nuclear test, a renewed intifada in the Palestinian-Israeli setting, state failure in an important country like Pakistan (see the Feature article by Ramesh Thakur on South Asia in the year 2047 at p. 42), another Taiwan crisis, or a major outbreak of cyberwar – or by some combination of events like these. These three ‘worlds’ are quite evidently neither precise nor mutually exclusive. The decades ahead might very well see elements of all three appearing simultaneously in some combination that would merit a different label – or a linear progression in one or another of these directions. In this tumultuous global environment, the only certainty for intelligence in this century is that the craft will be challenged more formidably than at any time other than during the global wars of the last century. With energy and innovation, this can, as was the case then, also be a time of transformation and renaissance for an ancient profession – a profession whose highest calling is to help nations see clearly enough to avoid the tragic or painful consequences of the worst of all worlds. | GB

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Miloud Chennoufi est professeur adjoint de relations internationales au Collège

G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

des Forces canadiennes à Toronto.

anvier 2011, à un moment où les événements en Tunisie étaient sur le point de provoquer l’inimaginable fuite du président Ben Ali, un pays limitrophe, l’Algérie, était traversé par une vague d’émeutes dévastatrices dans plusieurs villes. On a cru à l’époque qu’un phénomène du même ordre se produisait dans les deux pays. Très vite, il est apparu que les émeutes en Algérie ne comportaient pas de dimension ouvertement et proprement politique. Baptisées à juste titre «émeutes de l’huile et du sucre», elles exprimaient la réaction exaspérée d’une population financièrement exsangue face à la hausse soudaine des prix de ces deux denrées essentielles au régime alimentaire de base des Algériens.

La mémoire d’un printemps raté pèse sur l’esprit collectif des Algériens. À Alger, le calme règne.

À gauche, une bannière avec la photo du président Abdelaziz Bouteflika est brandie par des manifestants pro-gouvernementaux à Alger le 5 mars 2011. À droite, un rassemblement pour la démocratie avec des milliers de jeunes est

PAR MILOUD CHENNOUFI

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AP / SIDALI DJARBOUB

lamistes, entre autres, n’a attiré que 3 000 personnes, un chiffre dérisoire comparé aux marées humaines que drainaient les manifestations politiques dans ce pays 15 ou 20 ans auparavant. La répression policière y était pour quelque chose, mais en partie seulement. Des initiatives du même genre ont eu lieu pendant quelque temps sur une base hebdomadaire, attirant de moins en moins de monde. Le mouvement s’est

G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

Quelques semaines plus tard, cette fois-ci sous l’influence de la mobilisation égyptienne, un groupe formé pour la circonstance appelait à une journée d’action contre le régime algérien. Le 12 février, la manifestation de la Coordination nationale pour le changement et la démocratie (CNCD), un ensemble hétéroclite où se côtoient syndicats autonomes, opposants laïcs, anciens ministres du régime et is-

organisé à Alger le 19 février 2011.

essoufflé de lui-même, moqué avec beaucoup de cynisme par la population. Pourquoi en est-il ainsi? Pourquoi les émeutes contre le coût élevé de la vie en Algérie ne se sontelles pas transformées en contestation politique de grande ampleur? Pourquoi la CNCD n’a-t-il pas réussi à mobiliser au-delà d’un nombre insignifiant d’Algériens et pourquoi, surtout, a-t-il attiré sur lui la dérision, voire le mépris de la population?

n première approximation, la réponse à ces questions se trouve dans les propos récents de Rached Ghannouchi, leader du parti islamiste Ennahda («Renaissance»), qui vient de remporter les premières élections libres jamais organisées en Tunisie. Ghannouchi a fortement insisté sur la nécessité d’éviter de reproduire le scénario algérien dans les pays actuellement traversés par le Printemps arabe – allusion faite aux événements sanglants qui ont déchiré l’Algérie

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Le printemps algérien a commencé avec les émeutes d’octobre 1988, et il s’est poursuivi avec une ouverture démocratique de trois ans pour ensuite muer en affrontement sanglant sur une décennie.

pendant les années 1990. Effectuer un retour sur cet épisode traumatique de l’histoire récente de l’Algérie revient à saisir la clé de ce qu’on pourrait appeler le paradoxe algérien. Des événements similaires à ceux qui ont secoué la Tunisie et l’Égypte se sont déroulés en Algérie vers la fin des années 1980, forçant une ouverture démocratique – la première dans l’histoire des États arabes indépendants – qui s’est transformée en un bain de sang dont les cicatrices et les conséquences antidémocratiques expliquent le blocage actuel du pays. Le paradoxe algérien est digne d’intérêt non seulement d’un point de vue heuristique en ce qu’il permet de comprendre la dynamique politique propre à ce pays, mais aussi d’un point de vue normatif en ce qu’il indique les écueils d’un processus de démocratisation mené en absence d’une éthique de responsabilité dans le contexte particulier du monde arabe. Le printemps algérien a commencé avec les émeutes d’octobre 1988, et il s’est poursuivi avec une ouverture démocratique de trois ans pour ensuite muer en affrontement sanglant sur une décennie.

Les émeutes en question avaient duré plusieurs jours et ciblaient principalement les symboles du régime comme les locaux du Front de libération nationale (FLN), parti unique à l’époque, les commissariats de police et dans une certaine mesure les entreprises appartenant à l’État. Était ainsi remis en cause un système mis en place après l’indépendance acquise en 1962 et consolidé d’année en année. Jusqu’alors, il avait su se maintenir en place et contenir le mécontentement de la population dans des proportions gérables. Ce système, dont les principaux contours ont été élaborés sous la présidence de Houari Boumédiène (1965-1978), reposait sur trois piliers: les forces armées, le parti unique (FLN) et la bureaucratie. Dans l’agencement de ces trois composantes, la primauté a toujours été acquise aux forces armées, une relique de la guerre de libération menée contre l’occupation française de 1954 à 1962. Au sein de l’institution militaire, les services de renseignement occupent une place centrale qui leur permet d’exercer une influence qui excède leur mission: contrôler la population et les segments les plus lucratifs d’une économie étatique centralisée. Le FLN jouait un rôle de mobilisation, mais aussi de contrôle à travers des organisations de masse consacrées aux femmes, aux jeunes, aux paysans, aux travailleurs, etc. Quant à la bureaucratie, elle s’est construite sur le legs administratif du système colonial, mais s’est ensuite développée sur le modèle des bureaucraties socialistes de l’Europe de l’Est, acquérant une taille d’envergure. Le système reposait sur deux formes de légitimation: une légitimation révolutionnaire renvoyant systématiquement à la lutte pour l’indépendance du pays et une légitimation par la mission développementale et modernisatrice orientée sur les couches sociales les plus défavorisées, celles qui avaient le plus souffert sous le régime colonial français (1830-1962). La lutte pour l’indépendance est une composante identitaire fondamentale des Algériens d’aujourd’hui, y compris ceux qui n’ont connu ni les affres du colonialisme ni les douleurs de la guerre de libération. Mais la légitimation du régime par la référence révolutionnaire s’est effritée au fur et à mesure que les promesses de développement et de modernisation s’avéraient vaines. L’économie étatique était certes volontariste; elle a permis de construire tout un tissu industriel pendant les années 1970, réalisant des taux de croissance annuels importants et créant un marché du travail à haute intensité de main d’œuvre. Cependant, elle dépendait excessivement de deux sources de financement fragiles: la rente pétrolière et l’endettement extérieur. L’effondrement des prix du pétrole durant les années 1980 et, par conséquent, l’explosion des services de la dette ont exposé au grand jour l’inefficacité économique du système. Ainsi articulé, le système générait deux pratiques

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caractéristiques de la crise algérienne: l’exclusion et la corruption. C’est précisément ce que dénonçaient les émeutiers d’octobre 1988. La réponse du régime, alors dirigé par le président Chadli Bendjedid mais dominé en arrière-plan par les militaires, fut d’initier une ouverture politique à travers l’adoption d’une nouvelle constitution en 1989 consacrant le pluralisme politique, ainsi que l’ouverture de la voie permettant la promulgation d’une batterie de lois d’inspiration libérale. L’essentiel de ce que les Algériens appellent «les acquis démocratiques» remonte à cette période, notamment la presse indépendante, le mouvement associatif et le multipartisme. C’était une expérience unique dans le monde arabe. Jamais, depuis que les pays de cette région ont acquis leur indépendance, un pays n’avait connu autant de liberté d’expression ni autant d’effervescence politique. Des mouvements politiques qui étaient interdits et persécutés remontaient à la surface et s’activaient désormais ouvertement. D’anciens opposants exilés, notamment des figures de la lutte pour l’indépendance comme Hocine Aït Ahmed et Ahmed Ben Bella, rentraient au pays et avaient de surcroît accès aux médias étatiques, chose inconcevable quelque temps auparavant. En un sens, ces années-là représentent l’âge d’or de la transition démocratique en Algérie.

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G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

n aspect, cependant, allait pervertir le processus dans son ensemble: la forte polarisation idéologique. Car au-delà de la résistance au changement prévisible au sein des trois composantes du régime, l’opposition a choisi le débat (plus exactement, la polémique) idéologique et le populisme au détriment de la discussion des formes institutionnelles de la pratique politique pluraliste. La classe politique algérienne se structurait à l’époque autour de trois pôles: l’ancien régime qui cherchait à faire du FLN le parti porteur de sa nouvelle vision favorable aux réformes démocratiques, tout en cherchant à préserver les privilèges de la période antérieure; un mouvement islamiste dans lequel la faction extrémiste d’obédience salafiste et djihadiste incarnée par le Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) a surclassé la faction plus modérée des Frères musulmans; et un mouvement démocratique très fragmenté dans lequel les partisans d’une laïcité jacobine intransigeante étaient les plus en vue – par exemple au sein du Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Démocratie (RCD) ou du Parti de l’Avant-Garde Socialiste (PAGS). La forte polarisation qui en a découlé a produit un réflexe d’exclusion systématique qui caractérisait le discours de toutes les mouvances politiques. Chacune voulait exclure les autres et déclarait très ouvertement qu’une fois au pouvoir elle allait les interdire. Les voix sages et responsables existaient bien sûr. Elles étaient cependant inaudibles. L’absence d’une culture pluraliste à l’époque favorisait le populisme. Il faut pourtant préciser que si

la violence des laïcs intransigeants était strictement verbale, celle des islamistes radicaux étaient verbale et physique – même si ce n’était pas encore du terrorisme. Quant au régime, il pensait pouvoir profiter de cette polarisation en faisant apparaître le FLN comme alternative rassurante face à l’aventurisme des nouveaux partis. C’est dans un tel climat où se mêlaient les espoirs d’une Algérie démocratique aux craintes d’un extrémisme qui avançait triomphalement, que les premières élections législatives démocratiques étaient organisées. Dès le premier tour des élections, il était clair que le FIS allait obtenir une écrasante majorité. Contrairement aux islamistes modérés d’Ennahda et du Parti de la Liberté et de la Justice qui viennent de gagner les élections en Tunisie et en Égypte respectivement, mais à l’instar des islamistes extrémistes qui ont énergiquement participé à la rébellion armée en Libye, les extrémistes algériens annonçaient ouvertement qu’ils allaient établir un État théocratique rejetant la démocratie. Ce fut assez pour que

G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

Un aspect allait pervertir le processus dans son ensemble: la forte polarisation idéologique. L’opposition a choisi le débat idéologique et le populisme au détriment de la discussion des formes institutionnelles de la pratique politique pluraliste.

les factions du régime réfractaire au processus démocratique, principalement dans les forces armées, soutenues par les laïcs intransigeants, certains islamistes modérés et une partie de la société civile qui ne supportait pas l’idée de vivre sous un régime théocratique totalitaire, réagissent avec véhémence en suspendant les élections. En somme, la polarisation idéologique a fait en sorte que l’équation politique algérienne a été pervertie tôt dans le processus de changement. À l’origine, l’équation devait s’articuler autour du choix entre, d’une part, un système autoritaire de parti unique dominé par les forces armées et une bureaucratie gérant une économie étatique, et, d’autre part, un système pluraliste suffisamment inclusif pour faire place à tous les courants politiques prêts à faire preuve d’un sens de responsabilité. La nouvelle équation s’articulait désormais autour du choix entre une théocratie extrémiste et un État autoritaire sous influence militaire. C’est cette perversion qui représente le drame algérien et l’erreur que doivent éviter les classes politiques

dans les pays traversés par le Printemps arabe. Suite à la suspension des élections algériennes en janvier 1992, le pays est entré dans la tourmente d’une insurrection armée menée par des djihadistes déterminés à instaurer une théocratie, auxquels s’opposait un régime militaire tout aussi déterminé à leur faire barrage. Aux actes barbares commis par les uns répondaient des atteintes flagrantes aux droits humains commises par les autres. Les morts se comptaient par dizaines de milliers. Le pays étaient isolé à l’échelle internationale. L’Algérie devenait invivable. Et le souvenir de cette Algérie-là est encore vivace dans la mémoire des Algériens! Comme ils savent que l’ensemble de la classe politique ou presque s’est rangé soit du côté des militaires soit du côté des terroristes, et même s’ils honnissent le régime politique actuel, il faudrait nettement plus que l’appel d’un groupe comme la CNCD, citée plus haut, pour les lancer dans une aventure aux lendemains incertains. La polarisation idéologique qui s’est dégagée de l’ouverture démocratique et qui a provoqué l’affrontement sanglant des années 1990 a nourri un profond cynisme politique chez la majorité des Algériens. Un cynisme qui laisse croire que le pays demeurera à l’abri des changements qui frappent la région. Mais jusqu’à quand? L’expérience récente du monde arabe n’autorise pas de projeter la réalité ponctuelle du moment dans l’avenir en y voyant quelque destin inéluctable (voir l’entrevue Tête à Tête avec Michael Ignatieff à la page 52). Il est d’autant plus important d’être prudent en la matière que les facteurs qui ont conduit aux révoltes ailleurs sont loin d’être absents en Algérie. Certes, l’Algérie d’aujourd’hui ne souffre pas d’une tyrannie similaire à celle qui a sévi en Libye ou celle qui sévit encore en Syrie, pas plus qu’elle ne souffre du despotisme répandu dans les pays du Golfe. La presse est nettement plus libre que dans bien d’autres États. Il existe un pluralisme politique et l’économie est ouverte. Mais l’Algérie n’est pas une démocratie, loin s’en faut. La presse subit encore une forte pression de la part des services de renseignement. Le pluralisme politique demeure tout formel, car les élections sont systématiquement truquées, aggravant le cynisme politique des citoyens qui se déplacent en très petits nombre pour voter. Mais plus que tout, la corruption et l’exclusion qui avaient provoqué les émeutes de 1988 sont plus profondes qu’elles ne l’ont jamais été auparavant. Pour s’en tenir au seul aspect de la corruption, Transparency International classe l’Algérie au 112e rang sur 183 classés (le 183e pays étant le plus corrompu). Pendant la décennie écoulée, d’énormes scandales de corruption ont éclaté, entamant par-là même la crédibilité du régime car les plus retentissants ont touché les plus hautes sphères de l’État. Il en est ainsi du scandale qui a frappé la Sonatrach, la société pétrolière étatique dont

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l’ensemble du personnel dirigeant, à commencer par le président-directeur général, a été soit incarcéré soit accusé par la justice dans des affaires de corruption où les montants s’élèvent à des centaines de millions de dollars. Le drame est que la corruption en Algérie est nettement plus qu’un fléau; elle représente le mode de régulation du système issu de la décantation des années 1990. Il en est ainsi parce que la transition vers l’économie de marché pilotée par le FMI et la Banque Mondiale a eu lieu pendant les années d’affrontement armé. Cette transition a principalement consisté en une ouverture économique tous azimuts, sans jamais avoir été accompagnée de la réforme ou de la création des institutions absolument nécessaires à la régulation d’une économie de marché responsable et efficace. Résultat: un capitalisme de copinage s’est installé dans le pays où des fortunes gigantesques d’origine douteuse côtoient la misère et la pauvreté extrême. Pour que cette cohabitation de la richesse et de la misère soit fonctionnelle sous un régime sans légitimité démocratique, il est nécessaire que la haute corruption, celle qui touche la rente pétrolière notamment, s’appuie sur la moyenne et basse corruption, celle des fonctionnaires intermédiaires, des élus municipaux et des intervenants mineurs. Ce système connaît une limite; il ne peut bénéficier à tout le monde. C’est pourquoi l’exclusion sociale fait elle aussi partie du mode de régulation du système.

a situation paradoxale de l’Algérie ne garantit pas nécessairement la viabilité du statu quo. Les changements que des pays limitrophes (Tunisie, Maroc et Libye) ont connus sont trop importants pour être ignorés. D’où la récente promesse faite par le président Abdelaziz Bouteflika d’organiser des élections législatives honnêtes durant l’année en cours. L’Algérie semble vouloir suivre la voie marocaine qui consiste à absorber la colère populaire par un processus électoral introduisant pour la première fois dans l’histoire du pays une forme d’alternance au pouvoir; l’objectif étant d’éviter la voie révolutionnaire et l’ingérence étrangère. Est-ce à dire une reprise crédible de la transition démocratique? Cela dépendra principalement de l’évolution de la situation dans les autres pays. Si les nouveaux pouvoirs issus des révolutions, en Tunisie et en Égypte, connaissent un succès en termes d’inclusion, de stabilité des institutions et de développement économique, la pression sur l’Algérie sera telle que le pays s’engagera dans un processus sérieux de démocratisation. Inversement, si la tendance est dominée par des scénarios chaotiques à l’instar de ce qui s’est produit en Libye et dans une certaine mesure au Yémen et en Syrie, le paradoxe algérien militera en faveur du statu quo. Bref, l’Algérie fit figure de laboratoire pour le monde arabe il y a 20 ans. Aujourd’hui, c’est le monde arabe qui sert de laboratoire à l’Algérie. | GB

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Is the Arab Spring About ‘Western’ Human Rights?

QUERY

The future of rights in the Middle East, as in other theatres, will require an abiding rights ‘culture’ that is not so much ‘Western’ as it is the outgrowth of modernity BY LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN

Lawrence M. Friedman is the Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor at Stanford Law School. His most recent book is The Human Rights Culture: A Study in

G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

History and Context.

ince the end of WW2, a human rights culture has spread over much of the globe. The expression ‘human rights culture’ is used here very deliberately. Historians of human rights tend to focus on texts, theories and doctrines. They mention – as they must – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all of those noble documents, manifestos, treaties and charters to which so many countries have signed on. But, quite evidently, all of these amount to nothing – to scraps of paper, as it were – unless they have a strong institutional basis; and, even more importantly, a strong cultural basis. Indeed, there would be no human rights movement without the norms and attitudes that vast numbers of people – ordinary people, not philosophers or political theorists – hold today. What brought about this human rights culture? The growth of democracy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Parliaments, after all, can be bigoted, narrow-minded, intolerant, short-sighted and even oppressive. A human rights culture cannot depend on the people in power. On the contrary, it relies on ways of enforcing basic rights independently of governments. And, to be sure, in the last two generations, constitutions and bills of rights have sprung up like mushrooms after a rainstorm: in Spain, Poland, South Africa, Ecuador, Thailand and even Mongolia. Typically, these constitutions call for a court or courts with powers of judicial review. Canada has its constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights. The UK – once a stubborn hold-out – now has a kind of judicial review through the back door – as it were – in the form of its Human Rights Act. This law essentially commits the UK to the European Convention on Human Rights, and instructs British courts to comply, if at all possible, with decisions of the European Court of Human Rights – though some of these decisions have questioned the legality of laws and regulations of the UK. To succeed, the institutions – even more than the texts – have to rest on a strong culture of rights-consciousness. Naturally, this culture varies somewhat from society to society. Yet certain fundamental postulates are the same wherever this culture is strong. A certain menu of rights – freedom of speech, religion and mobility (or travel) – is com-

mon to all of these cultures. Also common to them is a postulate of equality; that is, that the menu of fundamental rights belongs to everybody – men and women alike, all religions, all races, all ethnic groups, all languages. No actual system lives up to what these postulates promise. But many societies do accept them as goals. And many make at least some progress toward these goals. Whence these goals, norms and postulates? Tracing them to Plato or Confucius or the Bible or Koran – or even to Kant or Locke – is ultimately futile. They are distinctly modern ideas. And they are not peculiarly ‘Western.’ Women did not vote in most Western countries – and certainly not elsewhere – until the 20th century. A number of countries that are both modern and democratic, like Italy, did not even grant women the right to vote until 1945. (Switzerland granted the right federally in 1971, and one canton dragged its feet until 1990.) Torture was freely used in European courts in the Middle Ages. Heretics were burned at the stake. Kings and nobles lorded over a mass of peasantry. Settler societies slaughtered native peoples, kidnapped their children, and suppressed their cultures. Slavery persisted in ILLUSTRATION: JANET ATKINSON

of human rights, globally? It is certainly possible. The human rights culture confronts at least three powerful and dangerous opponents. The first and most obvious one is the resistance of traditionalists, who find women’s or gay rights abhorrent, or who reject democracy on religious or traditional grounds. Iran had a revolution, in 1979, against an autocratic leader; but what resulted was not a liberal democracy. A stern theocracy replaced the Shah. Today, religious fundamentalism seems to be growing more powerful – and not only in Islam. Poverty and insecurity haunt the lives of millions of people. Markets and open societies seem to promise a good and prosperous life; but for these millions at the bottom of the heap, the promises seem hollow and empty. For these millions, fundamental religion is a haven – a safe harbour in a world of storms. It makes sense out of their lives, and it replaces allegiance to a social order that seems rootless, biased, and cruel; and which rejects their ideals and their values. Second, and linked to the first, is the danger from massive, global, systemic risks – dangers that are peculiarly modern. For example, for the first time in history, human beings have actual power to destroy our planet. An atomic war is well within the realm of the possible in the 21st century (see the Feature article by Ramesh Thakur on South Asia in the year 2047 at p. 42). Catastrophic climate change may be a real danger. We may ultimately lose the ‘arms race,’ too, between modern medicine and mutating bacteria, which can leap suddenly across borders – leading to titanic pandemics. The populations of poor, desperate countries are exploding; the populations of rich, developed countries are shrivelling. Dramatic demographic imbalances and overpopulation of the planet may eat into the quality of life of even the most advanced countries by century’s end. Third, technology, which has transformed the modern world, may be racing ahead with such rapidity that humankind may not be able to control or manage it (see the Feature article by John E. McLaughlin on the future of intelligence tradecraft at p. 28). The human rights culture depends on privacy, autonomy, human dignity and the right to decide things for ourselves. What happens, then, in an age that is capable of ‘lifelogging’; that is, in an age wherein everything about every one of us – from our first weak, babyish cry to our last death rattle – can be recorded, stored and instantly retrieved by powerful institutions and interests (both public and private)? Perhaps none of these three major opponents will prove irresistible to the expansion of rights this century. Thus far, the human rights culture has gone from strength to strength. It still, of course, has a very long way to go. The club of dictators is still large. Only time will tell whether the human rights culture grows or shrinks. And time is both silent and inscrutable. | GB

The roots of this rights culture lie in the structure of modern society – at least in the developed world. It is, most fundamentally, the product of what has been called expressive individualism.

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the US until the 1860s; even after it was formally abolished, the American South ran something close to an apartheid society. The human rights culture, therefore, is not old, time-honoured or traditional. It is no older than the industrial revolution, and in its modern and most radical form it is barely a couple of generations old. The roots of this rights culture lie in the structure of modern society – at least in the developed world. It is, most fundamentally, the product of what has been called expressive individualism. Expressive individuals are much more full-blooded and complex than ‘economic man.’ People today – expressive individuals – believe in themselves and in their own uniqueness. They believe in the right to choose their own pathways through life. They are conscious of rights, freedoms and opportunities. They want structures and rules that make their choices possible – that expand their freedom of choice. Economics does play a role here – for the soil in which this kind of individualism grows is a society of wealth, consumption and markets. In modern market economies, advertising is everywhere. Advertising is, in a way, the hallmark of rich, developed countries. And advertising – no matter what product is advertised – typically carries the message of modern individualism. It is addressed to ‘you’ the listener, the reader, the viewer. ‘You’ can be richer, better, sexier; you can have whiter teeth; you can have a happier life; you can buy more, enjoy more, live more; yes, you can even have a more spiritual life – especially when religious groups advertise. This same message of expressive individualism is omnipresent throughout a modern life lived. In kindergarten, we are encouraged to ‘show and tell’; at life’s end, we get to decide to whom we give our money, and, of course, how we should be buried. Cultures – including human rights cultures – are never accidents or mutations; they grow out of specific historical and social causes. And, very notably, they rise and fall. For about 50 years, on the strength of economic growth in developed countries, the human rights culture has been showing great strength. In living memory, Europe was the Europe of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin; today, it is the Europe of the EU, the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. The human rights culture has spread to parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America (see the In Situ article by Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo on Venezuela at p. 6). It seems to be conquering everything in its path. The future looks bright. Optimists would expect the laggards to fall in line over time: China, Vietnam, Middle Eastern countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco; perhaps even Saudi Arabia and Qatar – not to mention the many African countries that have one-party or one-man rule. But are we being overoptimistic about the future

One hundred years after Indian and Pakistani independence, a region-wide compact and community will have turned one of the world’s most explosive theatres into a peaceable, prosperous commonwealth BY RAMESH THAKUR Ramesh Thakur is Professor of International Relations in the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University, and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook

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of Modern Diplomacy.

ollowing a series of bilateral meetings between India’s and Pakistan’s prime ministers and foreign ministers during the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in the Maldives last fall, Indian leaders and journalists remarked on the shrinking trust deficit between the two nuclear-armed rivals. The era of decolonization began with the twinned independence of Pakistan and India in August 1947. Their sibling rivalry has sabotaged India’s tryst with its global destiny as a major power, and also Pakistan’s ambition to be the leading light of the Islamic world. Will 2047 mark 100 years of solitude and impasse in their bilateral relations – relations on which hinge the fates of all other countries and peoples in their neighbourhood? Or can they surprise the world by sublimating their conflict to the vision of a shared regional future of prosperity and stability? As a region, South Asia is defined by sharp natural borders and topography, as well as by shared histories and considerable economic and administrative coherence inherited from the British Raj. Yet regionalism was progressively weakened after the departure of the British, as the independent countries went their separate ways – politically, economically and in foreign policies. To date, inter-state tensions have inhibited the rise of region-wide South Asian identity, institutions and interactions. The South Asian region comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with at least Afghanistan and Myanmar as ringside observers. Its combined population represents one-fifth of the world’s people. It is also a population characterized by poverty, illiteracy and low life

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ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS BUZELLI

expectancy. South Asian countries do not fare well on these measures even by developing-country standards. Most are also wracked by problems of internal security and economic scarcity that threaten them with political destabilization and territorial disintegration. The region is home to one of the most concentrated groupings of fragile and failing states. Yet, on the positive side, South Asia too has been infected by the general worldwide movement toward greater democratization and market freedoms – even if the global financial crisis may well instill some hesitation on the latter front. India by itself accounts for some three-quarters of South Asia’s total population, land area and economic product. This has a triple consequence. First and most obviously, India is the natural hegemon of South Asia. Second, other countries find it difficult to imagine existential threats to India. Third, if India were ever to suffer from state failure and breakup, the impacts on all

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By size, location and power, India is and will always be the principal actor – indeed, the hub, with spokes running to all other states – in South Asian international relations.

other countries in the neighbourhood would be catastrophic as well. India’s position in the region is distinctive also for the fact that all other states – save the Maldives – share a land or maritime border with India and not with any other state. This too has three important consequences. First, all other states have every prospect of strained relations with India, but little chance to develop friction in their limited relations with each other. Second, having India as a common problem neighbour encourages the other states to team up against the regional giant. Third, India is open to major social and political forces that may at any point consume any one of its neighbours. Whether it be civil war in Afghanistan, Maoist insurgency in Nepal, Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka, the turmoil will spill over into India. By size, location and power, India is and will always be the principal actor – indeed, the hub, with spokes running to all other states – in South Asian international relations. To be sure, India has

not been free of difficulties in bilateral relations with any of its neighbours: demographic overspills from Bangladesh (the latter itself can be flooded by refugees from Myanmar); the flow of goods across India from landlocked Nepal; the use of water from shared river systems with Pakistan; the knock-on effects of ethnic warfare in Sri Lanka; maritime boundary disputes with Bangladesh and Pakistan; and the perennial problems in general relations with Pakistan in particular. India has considerable military capacity to influence the outcomes of varying levels of conflict in South Asia. But it lacks the economic underpinning and diplomatic finesse to bend regional affairs to its strategic will. Consequently, its self-appointed managerial role in the region remains flawed. Its aspirations to regional leadership are continually thwarted by the stubborn refusal of other South Asian countries to learn the art of followership. The smaller countries, for instance, were especially emboldened to challenge India’s preeminence by the humiliation inflicted on the country by China in 1962. The fact that India has sometimes had disputes with all of its neighbours simultaneously suggests that India itself might be the centre and cause of some regional disputes. Anxious to project itself on the world stage, the country has at times appeared irritated by regional obstacles in its path to acquiring the status of a world power. In a remarkable tribute to flawed foreign policy, the country finds itself without a network of useful friendships in its own region. Instead of realizing that its potential lies first and foremost in its neighbourhood, India has frightened all of its neighbours at one time or another. The search for a regional security structure remains elusive (see the classical article by Sam Sasan Shoamanesh and Hirad Abtahi arguing for a Western Asian union in the Winter 2010 issue of GB). Clearly, the pivot of South Asian regional geopolitics is the India-Pakistan rivalry. On the one hand, Pakistan is everyone’s favourite basketcase – constantly on the brink of state failure and collapse, and suspected of complicity in crossborder terrorism. Its bloody birth, the history of unremitting hostility with India, the bitter legacy of the loss of its eastern half to India-assisted secession in 1971, the decades of civil war with international entrapments in Afghanistan, the military capture of the commanding heights of national public policy – economic and securityrelated – and cultivation of Islamists as instruments of state-sponsored terrorism, the rise of Islamism as a global phenomenon, and the stranglehold of corruption on the country’s institutions, have

together yielded an extremely fractured society and polity. Having said all of this, Pakistan has a middle class that is as well-educated as India’s, a vigorous and inquisitive print and electronic media, an independent and assertive judiciary, and percapita income that is comparable to that of India.

In 2047, there will be a common regional currency, and a powerful and independent South Asian Central Bank will ensure that member countries’ monetary and fiscal policies do not stray outside of agreed bands. for contracts – except perhaps in such sensitive sectors as defence; comparable labour and industrial laws and policies among regional countries in order to facilitate entry and exit of workers and firms, with market forces determining business decisions; and so on. There will be a common regional currency – most likely called the rupee. A powerful and independent South Asian Central Bank will have the responsibility to ensure that member countries’ monetary and fiscal policies do not stray outside of agreed bands. There will also be tough enforcement of competition and anticorruption laws and norms, and indeed common prudential and surveillance instruments to stop the market from running amok, as it did in the US and Europe from 2008. Economic integration will spur market efficiencies, scale economies, specialization based on factor and other comparative advantages, and a shift to more productive, innovative and balanced national economies. By 2047, therefore, all South Asian countries will fare very well in the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business rankings. The size of the aggregate regional market will attract considerable investment capital; and the advanced infrastructure, good governance norms and insti-

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outh Asia’s diffidence in moving toward open economic regionalism stands in marked contrast to the trend toward free-trade agreements in several parts of the world. For all South Asian countries, prosperity will require the flattening of regional borders, free markets, property rights, the rule of law, the state limited to its elemental functions of underwriting the public goods of law and order, health, education, physical infrastructure, and defence and foreign affairs, as well as an abandonment of dirigisme (see the Tête à Tête interview with Michael Ignatieff at p. 52). Like the dramatic changes in Europe after 1945 that converted historical enemies Britain, France and Germany (see The Definition on the responsibility of Germany in Europe at p. 60) into firm allies within robust institutional structures, the turnaround in India-Pakistan relations will have to be based on a grim appreciation of the costs of continued enmity, as weighed against the gains from cooperative friendship. Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh both showed an almost religious belief in the need for peace with Pakistan. In this sense, they sometimes found themselves ahead of their officials and people in the risks that they were prepared to take in order to reassure Pakistan about India’s peaceful intentions. For positive trends to be initiated, accelerated and consolidated, the key Pakistani leaders will have to recognize that India’s gestures are based on self-confidence and goodwill – not weakness. The continued deterioration in, and economic cost of, Pakistan’s domestic security situation (the jihadists challenging the state, as well as worsening relations with the US and other Western powers over Pakistan’s unwillingness-cum-inability to end Pakistan-sourced attacks in Afghanistan) will sap the country’s resolve to keep alive the enmity with India. Put simply, both the military and the civilian leaders must conclude that the long-term gains – national, regional and international – from reciprocating India’s goodwill gestures will be higher than the losses suffered from taking on the jihadists and Islamists. Unable to fight its many enemies on all fronts at once, Pakistan will instead have chosen

to learn to live at peace and in friendship with India. But let us now imagine the year 2047 – 100 years after Indian and Pakistani independence. First and most obviously, there will be a complete, regionwide economic union: a single market with no tariff or non-tariff barriers to the movement of goods, services, capital and labour; a common external tariff; South Asia-wide regulatory norms, instruments and institutions to ensure a level playing field for producers, manufacturers and consumers; cross-recognition of qualifications, skills and certifications, with common professional governing bodies for tradesmen, engineers, doctors and lawyers; domestic supplier status for businesses in procurement tenders for all countries, regardless of the country of origin of the firms bidding

tutions, and highly-skilled, educated and mobile labour force will underpin rising productivity and prosperity. At the same time, government policies will have kept in check inequalities between individuals (bottom- and top-ten percentiles), groups (castes, religions, regions) and countries. In other words, South Asia will have a region-wide free market combined with a social welfare ethos that provides affordable social security safety nets for the poor and underprivileged. As a consequence, South Asia will have climbed dramatically up the human development ladder. The advances in human security will be matched by a highly progressive human rights machinery that seamlessly integrates national and regional norms and institutions – including a South Asian Human Rights Commission to advocate and defend human rights, and a South Asian Human Rights Court to enforce human rights laws and verify that national laws and practices comply with regional norms. (Few Asians are amused at being lectured on universal human values by those who failed to

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There will be a High Commissioner for National Minorities and Tribal Peoples, who will ensure that the rights and interests of Tamils in Sri Lanka, Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan, and tribal peoples across South Asia are protected.

practice the same during European colonialism, and who now urge them to cooperate in promoting ‘global’ human rights norms. The solution is to focus on human rights at the regional level.) In the South Asian context, economic, social and religious rights are as critical as civil and political rights to safeguard the rights of the poor, the marginalized, the tribals, the illiterate, the migrant and itinerant workers, the outcastes and women (see the Query article by Lawrence M. Friedman on the future of global human rights at p. 40). South Asian values and sensibilities are also highly attuned to the balancing between rights and responsibilities. There will be an appropriately mandated and adequately resourced High Commissioner for National Minorities and Tribal Peoples, who will ensure that the rights and interests of Tamils in Sri Lanka, Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan, Adivasis and tribal peoples across South Asia, among other minorities, are properly protected by laws that are enforced by the civil servants, the police and the judiciary. Other regional institutions will

include variations of a South Asian parliament, commission, president and foreign minister. The South Asian regional university will, by 2047, have been reinforced with a network of applied science, technology, social science, strategic studies and peace research institutes.

o be poor and female in South Asia is to be doubly cursed. Women can confront insecurity that is direct – for example, honour killing – or rooted in structural and cultural violence. While men suffer from the public violence of criminality and wars, the violence inflicted on women is mainly in the private realm of the household, and is mostly suffered in silence – from sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, to incest, acid attacks and dowry deaths. By 2047, policy measures in response to this state of affairs will include strengthened state capacity to monitor and enforce laws against women-specific violence, national implementation machinery for international commitments signed by states, and regional compacts to protect women and promote their welfare and empowerment. Like women, children are acutely vulnerable to abuse. They are forcibly recruited as child soldiers or sex slaves. They are vulnerable to death caused by disease and starvation. They have the right to be protected by their own government and, failing that, by regional and international actors. The national, regional and global machinery for enforcing laws and norms for protecting the rights of children will have been strengthened still further by 2047. Human trafficking – to service the sex trade, the adoption industry, the begging-for-alms industry – is a problem across South Asia, with children as its biggest victims. National performance lags behind international norms in combatting the problem. The dominant national security paradigm today treats human trafficking as a crime against the state. In 2047, however, this will be considered a crime against the individual person within the normative framework of human security. Trafficked persons will be treated by the police, immigration and criminal justice system as victims, and the focus of prosecution will have shifted to where it really belongs: the buyers and sellers, and the corrupt officials who collude with them. South Asia is also a major source of migrant workers to many Middle Eastern countries – for example, as maids, as well as casual labourers. These workers often lack legislative and police safeguards in countries of destination, and are very vulnerable to abuse. In 2047, South Asian countries should have common norms and investigative and advisory services to protect the

NATHANSON AD

Fresh thinking on an old question for a new century

À PARAÎTRE EN SEPTEMBRE CHAIRE RAOUL-DANDURAND L’Observatoire sur le Moyen-Orient et l’Afrique du Nord de la Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques présente :

G.I contre Jihad Le match nul

PIERRE-ALAIN CLÉMENT La confrontation entre George W. Bush et Oussama ben Laden s’est terminée sur un prévisible match nul. L’auteur expose les raisons de cet échec mutuel en démontrant que les stratégies des deux combattants ne pouvaient qu’exacerber les tensions.

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rights and ensure the welfare of each other’s citizens working and travelling abroad. They should also have common environmental norms, laws and institutions backed by a South Asian Environmental Protection Agency. Moreover, there will be South Asian regional bodies to regulate waterways, manage river systems, establish water usage and distribution norms, monitor water tables and pollution indices, control deforestation and oversee reforestation, encourage biodiversity and preserve ecosystems. Progress on South Asian regionalism was held hostage for over six decades by the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir. The ceasefire line (Line of Control) – that is, the de facto border between India and Pakistan running through the spine of Kashmir – had barely moved between 1948 and 2012. But the conflict had exacted huge costs from both countries, and even more from Kashmiris. Sensibly, all sides agreed that, in the modern age, what matters is not who formally controls a given territory, but how free all people are to move within, and in and out of, that territory. They worked hard and successfully to make the line separating Indian- from Pakistan-administered Kashmir irrelevant – for all practical purposes – as a daily reality. With the Kashmir logjam broken by 2047, both countries’ regional roles will have acquired enhanced credibility. Afghanistan – the site of decades of strife, volatility, international interventions, and murderous civil and regional wars – will be at peace, and will gradually be regaining political order and economic health. The key to its remarkable transformation will have been cooperation between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan will be able to engage in normal relations, as well as reduce defence expenditures substantially – without any security derogation. Their defence forces will be engaged primarily in the tertiary sector of national, regional and global constabulary, peacekeeping and disaster relief operations. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal having all been major contributors to UN peace operations, there will, in 2047, be thriving South Asian institutions for training and educating regional and international soldiers, police officers, civilian personnel and even NGOs in the skills, requirements and obligations of international peacekeeping. Indeed, South Asia will be a major node of peacekeeping best practices and lessons learned. A universal Nuclear Weapons Convention will have been signed and come into force. By 2047, the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles will have been verifiably destroyed, and the peaceful nuclear energy programmes will be overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency – itself in charge of an international nuclear fuel bank. A South Asian Atomic Energy Commission will work in close collaboration with the IAEA to ensure that the energy needs of South Asia are met in accordance with global safety, security and non-proliferation standards. South Asian countries will also have stopped being the haven for basing, financing or arming each other’s terrorists, and instead will have initiated measures of regional

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cooperation against terrorism and drug trafficking. They learned that it is better for them to cooperate against the common menace of cross-border terrorism than to use it as a weapon against each another. Their anti-terrorism collaboration will embrace the full range of responses – social, economic, political and security-based. And they will all be party to bilateral, regional and multilateral regimes for regulating and controlling the production, storage and cross-border transfer of terrorism-related materials, skills and technology. Furthermore, the region’s countries will collaborate in tackling the underlying or root causes of terrorism: lack of democratic institutions and practices, political freedoms and civil liberties; group grievances rooted in collective injustice; intractable conflicts; poverty; and religious suspicions. They will have learned from bitter experience that terrorism flourishes amid repressive, inept, unresponsive and dynastic regimes that spawn angry and twisted young men who take recourse to lethal violence. Consequently, their anti-terrorism campaign will be anchored in the norms of accountability, the rule of law and non-derogation from core human rights and civil liberties – including life, liberty and due process. The abatement of the risks of terrorism and IndiaPakistan warfare will have led to a boom in South Asian tourism. No other region in the world can compare or compete with South Asia – with its wealth of natural wonders and historical legacies, architectural monuments, and human diversity – for internal and international tourism. By 2047, there will be an active and highly visible South Asian Tourism Development and Marketing Board to promote joint tourism. Such tourism – and business more broadly – will have been greatly facilitated by the adoption by SAARC of a regional equivalent of the Schengen Agreement in Europe to usher in passport-free travel throughout South Asia. Tourists from within South Asia will also flock to the annual regional sporting competitions, where performance standards will have risen to world class by 2047.

Building linkages with Chinese academic institutions Conducting research on Canada-China relations, especially in the investment and energy sectors Fostering scholarship and joint research on China’s global role

www.china.ualberta.ca

china@ualberta.ca

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t may well be that South Asian regional institutions – and South Asian governance more broadly – will assimilate global norms. On the other hand, the region’s weight and gravity (and ‘soft power’) may be such that South Asian institutions could well shape global governance and international norms – at present, mainly of Western intellectual origin – through the export of South Asian values and worldviews. To be sure, if regionalism is elevated to the status of a major plank of the SAARC countries’ foreign policies, it would enhance the countries’ global influence and role, enable states to exercise a moderating influence on India as the regional hegemon, and also promote the economic development of all states in the region. For such an ambitious vision to be realized by 2047, South Asia will require a quality of national leadership that is still missing in 2012 – but that, it should be stressed, may well be around the corner. | GB

Une réunification des deux Corées d’ici 2047?

QUERY

À Pyongyang, on attend depuis longtemps une fin de régime brusque PAR BARTHÉLÉMY COURMONT

Barthélémy Courmont est professeur de science politique à l’Université Hallym (Chuncheon, Corée du Sud), chercheurassocié à l’Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques à Paris et rédacteur en chef de la revue Monde

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chinois, nouvelle Asie.

a question de la réunification des deux Corées est aussi ancienne que leur division, et remonte à la débâcle de l’empire colonial japonais. Dès 1945 et plus encore après la création officielle de deux pays distincts en 1948, les constitutions du Nord comme du Sud ont fait de la réunification la priorité, avec l’affirmation d’une autorité politique sur l’ensemble de la péninsule et une dénonciation des dirigeants de l’autre côté du 38e parallèle. Le premier président sud-coréen, Syngman Rhee, mentionnait ainsi le «régime de marionnettes de l’Union soviétique en Corée du Nord», ou encore des «marionnettes étrangères en Corée du Nord». Il accusait aussi les communistes de la Corée du Nord d’avoir «vendu la mère patrie aux Soviétiques». Côté nord-coréen, le Parti des travailleurs au pouvoir sous la direction de Kim Il-sung s’en prenait à la présence militaire américaine au sud du 38e parallèle, reprochant aux autorités de Séoul d’être dirigées par Washington. La guerre de Corée, de 1950 à 1953, fut elle aussi une tentative de réunification, par la force, mais qui se solda par un véritable statu quo et confirma le caractère hypothétique d’un rassemblement des Coréens du Nord et du Sud dans un contexte de guerre froide. Il fallut attendre le début des années 1990 pour voir à nouveau la question de la réunification être posée avec insistance. Mais en comparaison avec le rapport de forces 40 ans plus tôt, la situation avait considérablement évolué. D’un côté, le Nord se trouvait orphelin de son principal allié, l’Union soviétique, et de son aide économique, politique et stratégique. Le pays de Kim Il-sung, dictateur vieillissant, semblait même en bout de course, et l’isolement dont il fit l’objet attira l’attention des experts, qui prédirent sa chute prochaine, en particulier quand Kim Jong-il prit les commandes, en 1994. Pyongyang dut faire face à un contexte international hostile avec la multiplication des sanctions et l’absence de soutien, et à une situation intérieure catastrophique, avec une famine chronique et l’absence de ressources. De l’autre côté, la Corée du Sud récoltait les dividendes de son miracle économique, dont l’organisation des Jeux Olympiques à Séoul en 1988 en fut le symbole éclatant. En parallèle, ce «petit dragon d’Asie» amorça sa mutation politique pour

devenir une démocratie solide, après avoir pendant des décennies été dirigée de main de fer. La guerre froide a ainsi lentement créé deux entités totalement distinctes, tant politiquement qu’économiquement et socialement. Tandis que l’imaginaire des Sud-Coréens s’était nourri pendant des années de la tragédie vietnamienne pour repousser la tentation de la réunification, l’exemple de l’Allemagne raviva la possibilité de retrouvailles pacifiques. Mais les deux exemples sont bien différents. D’une part, les deux Allemagnes ne furent jamais en guerre pendant leurs 40 ans de séparation. De plus, si la République fédérale d’Allemagne (RFA) affichait une croissance économique exceptionnelle en rapport à la République démocratique allemande (RDA), la différence entre les deux économies ne fut jamais aussi abyssale que celle qui distingue désormais la Corée du Nord et la Corée du Sud. Enfin, on comptait presque quatre OuestAllemands pour chaque Est-Allemand, tandis qu’on compte deux Sud-Coréens pour chaque Nord-Coréen. Autrement dit, la facture de la réunification serait très élevée pour Séoul, et les jeunes générations se sont progressivement détachées d’un rêve devenu plus rhétorique que prophétique. Chez les jeunes, la réunification ne séduit pas autant que chez leurs aînés. Le rapprochement entre la Chine et Taïwan, les deux autres entités séparées de la région, intéresse davantage les Coréens aujourd’hui, qui estiment que la réconciliation en douceur est un scénario plus souhaitable. La possibilité d’une réunification provoquée par le Sud est donc aujourd’hui moins probable qu’elle ne l’était il y a quelques décennies, et cette probabilité se réduit de plus en plus, parallèlement à l’aggravation de l’inégalité économique entre les deux entités. Pour envisager un retour de la réunification comme objectif prioritaire à Séoul, il faudrait au préalable imaginer une augmentation du niveau de vie conséquente des Nord-Coréens afin de la rendre possible. La possibilité d’une nouvelle guerre, qui reste entière, serait également propice à une réunification. Mais elle n’est souhaitée par aucune des deux entités, ni même par les acteurs externes, que ce soit la Chine, le Japon, la Russie ou les États-Unis. Le déséquilibre militaire grandissant entre le Nord et le Sud, au bénéfice de ce dernier, a également

rendu l’hypothèse d’un conflit moins pertinente, et les provocations relèvent le plus souvent de la rhétorique, avec quelques rares agressions, comme ce fut le cas à deux reprises en 2010. Mais ni à Pyongyang, où une guerre serait une défaite assurée, ni à Séoul, où elle aurait des conséquences tragiques, on ne souhaite franchir le Rubicon. C’est alors du côté d’un effondrement du régime nord-coréen que les regards se tournent pour imaginer une réunification qui serait dans de telles conditions automatique, et portée par les représentants des deux entités. Cette question fut soulevée à plusieurs reprises depuis la fin de la guerre froide, et s’imposa même de façon insistante pendant toute la durée du «règne» de Kim Jong-il, en particulier après la mort de son père, quand son inexpérience était raillée dans le monde entier. On retrouve aujourd’hui des commentaires similaires pour annoncer les difficultés du jeune Kim Jong-un à imposer son style, mais il convient de les prendre avec toute la précaution qui s’impose. En d’autres termes, la succession en Corée du Nord suscite toutes les attentions et invite à la réflexion sur la chute du régime, mais elle ne fut pour l’heure qu’une perception extérieure contredite par la réalité de la politique nord-coréenne.

PHOTOGRAPHIE: KNS-PHOTO

Difficile pour l’heure de savoir quelle option pourrait précipiter la réunification, mais il est en revanche certain qu’en raison de la nature du régime nord-coréen et de la pauvreté du pays, l’effondrement de ce dernier sera, quand il se produira, extrêmement rapide. La réunification qui suivra nécessairement sera elle aussi extrêmement rapide. De même, le très opaque «royaume ermite» masque toutes les informations permettant d’indiquer des troubles annonçant un changement de régime imminent. Pour ces raisons, la chute du régime est aussi imprévisible qu’indécelable, et elle prendra par conséquent les dirigeants sud-coréens par surprise plus encore que la chute de la RDA a surpris les dirigeants de la RFA. La réunification coréenne semble un juste retour de l’histoire, mais sa date et les conditions de sa concrétisation restent hautement incertaines. Difficile d’envisager Kim Il-sung demeurer le «président pour l’éternité» encore de longues années, et de voir le pays le plus fermé du monde être entouré des économies les plus performantes. Mais six décennies d’histoire de la péninsule nous ont appris qu’avec Pyongyang, les événements ne se passent jamais comme prévu. | GB

Le dirigeant nord-coréen Kim Jong-un, qui est aussi commandant suprême des forces armées, entouré par ses soldats dans un endroit non divulgué en janvier 2012.

La possibilité d’une nouvelle guerre serait également propice à une réunification. Mais elle n’est souhaitée par aucune des deux entités, ni même par les acteurs externes. G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

our autant, il est impensable de ne pas imaginer que le pays le plus fermé au monde, entouré d’économies dynamiques et désormais avancées, et l’objet de toutes les attentions, soit un jour poussé à bout. La chute du régime nord-coréen, si elle reste pour l’heure totalement hypothétique, est d’ailleurs prise avec tant de sérieux en Corée du Sud que les études sur ses effets directs, à savoir la réunification, son coût et ses implications, se sont considérablement multipliées, en parallèle à la montée en puissance du «pays du matin calme». Deux écoles dans la jeune démocratie sudcoréenne s’opposent au sujet du turbulent voisin du nord et de la réunification. La première mise sur un isolement de plus en plus marqué du clan Kim, un appauvrissement du pays sous la coupe de sanctions de plus en plus fermes, et un effondrement du régime le jour où la population n’aura plus aucune confiance en ses dirigeants. Le président actuel, Lee Myung-bak, est le porte-flambeau de cette voie, qui pourrait faire des émules aux premiers signes de fléchissement

de Pyongyang. L’autre école estime à l’inverse que la réunification ne sera possible qu’au terme d’un dialogue apaisé, et d’une ouverture progressive de la Corée du Nord. Baptisée «sunshine policy» en 2000, la politique d’ouverture vers le nord pourrait, en étant réactivée, restaurer la confiance réciproque et crédibiliser la possibilité d’une réunification en douceur et étalée dans la durée. Pour les partisans de cette école, la réunification ne sera à terme possible qu’à ce prix, tandis que l’isolement de Pyongyang ne fait qu’alimenter la division.

TÊTE À TÊTE

On the State, Politics and Political Tradecraft GB goes fireside with the polymath professor and recent political battler to chat about the future look and content of government, governors and the governed Conversation with MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Michael Ignatieff

GB: What will politics be – as a vocation and as a concept – some 10 to 15 years from now?

is a Senior Resident at Massey College, University of Toronto, and a past leader of the Liberal Party

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of Canada.

MI: That is a challenging question. The only way to answer a question projecting into the future is to project back through the past in order to try and see how politics has changed in the last 40 years. Party loyalties are ebbing. The party used to be the form and focus of political mobilization. Party used to have an extremely important role in getting different races, religions, creeds and regions into the room. But parties, like all civil society actors, are showing signs of ageing and weakness. Party labels are less relevant to voters than what they call the air wars – battles of images and impressions. It may well be that political choice and political allegiance are becoming much more analogous to consumer choice and consumer allegiance. You choose a party the way that you choose a car. That did not used to be the case. You were a Liberal or a Conservative or a Progressive or whatever. Those were stable allegiances that were identity-related. Fifteen years down the road, it is hard to see that surviving. It is also hard to see very coherent political programmes surviving as such – programmes that are cued to identity and stable ethical allegiances. Politics, like everything else, is struggling to adapt to almost unceasing change. Who would have thought, in 2006, when I came into politics, that the most important event that would occur two years later would be a worldwide economic crisis from which, in 2012, we have still not exited. It is a little foolish to imagine a stable identity in the future when change is the reality to which we have to adapt. It does not mean that there are not principles that are stable and clear. In fact, I think that all politics has to be based on a sense of enduring and stable sovereign responsibilities that any government – whatever its label – has to discharge: control of territory; monopoly of the means of force; control of interest rates; control of currency; a capacity to stimulate demand when it proves short, because markets have an inherent tendency to overshoot and undershoot; a very important regulation function; and, among other things, a critical monopoly function. Indeed, the biggest emerging issue in

global politics today is actually an old one that was seen some 300 years ago in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: monopoly. Everybody thinks that the issue is inequality. Of course, inequality is a big issue (to which I shall return in a moment). But the real issue is monopoly. We have entities in the global economy that are ‘too big to fail’ – as it were – and can bring entire economies down with themselves. It seems to me that the role of government in a competitive market economy is to prevent entities from becoming too big to fail, and thereby from posing systemic risk. (See the Tête à Tête interview with Eliot Spitzer in GB’s Fall 2011 issue.) That is a very radical agenda. Our current agenda about ‘too big to fail’ is to identify who these entities are, and to subject them to particular stress tests. But it is not to break these entities up. I am not sure that we are not moving into a world where we may have to break up some of these outfits because they prove to constitute a systemic risk to the global economy. There is also, as mentioned, a crucial equality function in a modern system of government. This equality function is not about defining, ex ante, what the appropriate distribution of income for an economy ought to be, but rather about making sure that we take very seriously the importance of equality of opportunity as a condition of productivity and competitiveness and social cohesion. We are way off the mark in this respect. GB: Do you still see government as the key global actor 10 to 15 years from now? MI: I do not see how any other actor could be so important. When you look at what happened in 2008, we had endless cheap talk about global governance, transnational civil society, the passing of sovereignty, and about how globalization was pulling apart national frontiers and national authority. No sooner do you have a global economic shock than the first people to whom everybody turns are the US President and Secretary of the Treasury, the Prime Minister of Canada, the British Prime Minister, the President of France and the Chancellor of Germany. There are, of course, all kinds of facilitating and coordinating roles that transnational organizations have to play. But

to get people to do what they have to do. In short, sovereignty is not over. GB: Who will be number two if governments are still number one? MI: I would hope that transnational organizations that are responsible and accountable to sovereigns, and through sovereigns to the people, will be number two – in the sense that I would like to see a financial stability board, for example, having serious authority to prevent systemic economic risk. I would like to have a global climate change authority with the capacity to hold sovereigns to specific delivery targets on climate change. So, government first, and transnational coordination authority second. And then – needless to say – the transnational corporation will be third. As Ian Bremmer

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

and others have pointed out, the salient development in this area is the emergence of state transnationals: China National Petroleum Corporation, China Investment Funds Company Limited, and the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. They will all be enormous players precisely because they are state entities. Sovereigns at the national level will certainly have to develop national interest tests in relation to these companies. Finally, the fourth player out there will be transnational civil society. Look at Human Rights Watch. In 1976, it was a small office and secretariat, and today it has an operating budget of nearly US $50 million, and – to be sure – an organization with global reach.

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there is only one power that has coercive capacity. That is why the buck stops at political authority and sovereign authority: you have the capacity to coerce; you have the cops; and you have the regulators. Not so with international organizations. Fifteen years down the road, what I hope will happen is that we will have responsible sovereigns – sovereigns that do not transfer their liability to stronger ones: every tub on its own bottom. Fiscal discipline should be distributed among sovereigns. Of course, there must be increased coordination among sovereigns to restrain, control or manage systemic risk. But what strikes me as being true in this global crisis is that everybody is looking for confidence, certainty and closure – all of which depend on having sovereigns that can, if necessary, coerce on the one hand, and mobilize on the other, in order

When you look at what happened in 2008, we had endless cheap talk about global governance, transnational civil society, the passing of sovereignty, and about how globalization was pulling apart national frontiers and national authority.

So, to sum up, we will have sovereigns as number one, then much-improved and increased intersovereign cooperation mediated by multilateral organizations, and finally transnational civil society acting as a kind of control – almost as the parliament that holds the executive responsible. Transnational corporations are also held in check presumably by transnational civil society – and, to some extent, by sovereigns. If we get it right, this will be a world in which there is accountability within this network. But if we get it wrong, then we will just have more chaos, confusion and evasion of responsibility. GB: What will be the big issues or stakes in this world that you describe?

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We will have sovereigns as number one, then intersovereign cooperation mediated by multilateral organizations, and finally transnational civil society acting as a kind of control.

MI: I have always said that the nature of the chief problems of the 21st century is the same as that of problems in every century – and that is political. We know what our problems are: climate change, demographic transition, competitiveness, sustainability and governability. The key question is whether we have political systems in which political leaders are able to tell the people the truth, and get them to move toward where they have to go. There is no problem that we cannot solve if we have good politics. Good politics is not just leadership, but also about political systems that force accountability on leaders – force problems on leaders – and prevent leaders from avoiding the search for real solutions. What has scared everybody about the 2008 crisis – to this day – has been the political side. It is not as if people cannot find programmes to restart demand or to prevent systemic risks from wiping out people’s savings. I am talking about the political leadership required to get budgets back in balance; to impose austerity on unwilling public sectors; to drag down labour costs; and so on. The agenda of change against the crisis is relatively clear; the problem is the politics. And so the number one challenge facing us is the viability and health of democratic political systems. Is democracy up to the challenge? I feel very certain that it is. Actually, I think that Canada is a rather good example of a society that has ferocious political debate – I myself did not do so well in those debates – and has faced up to many key challenges. Canada has pretty good fiscal discipline, and pretty good banking regulations. Having said this, we are not dealing with the problem of inequality; we are not dealing with the Aboriginal problem; and we, of course, are not dealing with climate change. We know that we have to deal with demographic transition, and we know that we have to deal with health care. But the system is at least framing these issues properly.

GB: What is medium and what is message in this world? What are political tactics and strategy some 15 years from now? MI: The medium and the message often diverge. A political genius is someone who knows how to maintain differentiation with an opponent when there in fact is no differentiation at all – in other words, to send a message that says that we are offering you an alternative when in fact there is not one. This means, in the end, that the battle in democratic politics is always a battle in the centre. One of the paradoxes of the Canadian political system is that, in fact, there is a deep consensus about economic management – organized around fiscal responsibility – with some pretty sharp divergences at the ethical margin. This consensus at the core is a great strength of our system, as opposed to the American system – where at the moment there is a really radical disagreement about the fundamentals of fiscal responsibility. As I look forward 15 years, it becomes very important to our future that we have political systems in which we argue at the margins, but have some degree of agreement about the fundamentals at the centre. And these fundamentals at the centre are quite simple: first, do not spend more than you earn; second, maintain economic sovereignty over your national economy – do not trade economic sovereignty to other actors; third, prepare tomorrow – get your labour force ready by investing in equality of opportunity and training. Preparing for tomorrow means making sure that you can handle the coming demographic bulge. It means making sure that you are dealing with climate change. If you have political systems that agree that this is the broad agenda for tomorrow, and that this is how we have to manage the economy today, then you can fuss and fight about anything else that you wish. GB: There do not seem to be any political heroes – or major agents of change, or transformative figures – in this world. Is this correct? MI: On the contrary. We started the conversation by saying that there is going to be dramatic change. The issue is that we do not know whence it will come. If you and I had been sitting here some 10 years ago, who would have predicted that we would be talking about a world in which China is the number two economy, Brazil is number seven, and Canada is number 10 or so? The world has changed dramatically. It has a multiplicity of change agents. Radical change – in terms of technology, in war decorum, or in response to crisis and breakdown – will require political leadership. You get political leadership of a heroic kind when you have heroic challenges that require decisive leadership. We

may get there. But whatever happens, the thing that we most need to understand is what government must do – rain or shine, Conservative, Liberal, Green, Democrat, Republican or other. We need good managers, yes; and we need leaders who are good managers. But we also need good leaders who are deeply democratic. When I say that the problems that we face are political, I speak of problems of persuasion and argument – not problems of a managerial or technocratic character. I speak of persuading the people that we need to make some difficult choices together – that we need to put something aside for the rainy day that is coming. And here is the rationale for doing this. This may well require unheroic leadership, but it will require brave leadership, nonetheless. GB: Where – in which theatres – will the political contests of which you speak be most acute?

GB: How do we educate the future class of political leaders for the 21st century? What does the curriculum look like, what are the methods, and what is the mentality that we are preparing? MI: That is a wonderful question, and one that matters to me a lot, because I have been a teacher – on and off – for all of my life. Even in politics, I felt myself a teacher. Preparing students for relentless change and for the unpredictable means, paradoxically, that it is more important than ever to teach students – future leaders – history. And it is more important than ever to teach them basic moral philosophy – the old stuff, going right back to Aristotle. What you want to fight against is the tendency to believe that the only thing that matters is reading the latest blog post or watching the latest news headlines and the latest Twitter feed. You want to teach them to stand back, and to use the best traditions of the academy to understand what is new and unprecedented; to teach calm; to teach judgment; to teach reflection; and to teach suspicion of one’s own instincts. You cannot afford provincialism. The real enemy of serious engagement with the world is thinking that you know it. That certainty comes from being provincial. So what you really want to teach is unceasing curiosity, and indeed unceasing impatience with your own provincialism. We teachers will want to put some conceptual ground under the feet of people so that they are not frantically absorbing information – in an age of information glut – without turning that information into knowledge. We have to reapprehend the distinction – the sharp distinction – between information and knowledge. For it is knowledge that matters, and it is only knowledge that allows us to see any pattern to information. And what matters most of all – to be sure – is wisdom, which is the rarest quality of them all. | GB

The real enemy of serious engagement with the world is thinking that you know it. What you really want to teach is unceasing curiosity, and impatience with your own provincialism.

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MI: We did not predict anything. It is ever important to remember what blindsided us: 9/11, the 2008 crisis. We were not – to be fair – totally blindsided by the rise of China. But we were blindsided by the Arab Spring. I do not think that anybody predicted that a humiliated Tunisian fruit-seller would set himself on fire – only to unleash transformative change across a huge, strategically important region. So let us start with modesty. We are no better at predicting the future than we ever were. Evidently, good research is really important in trying to make any intelligent predictions. For me, the lead example of such great research is the Arab Human Development Reports. About a decade ago, these reports – based on terrific social science – told us that the Middle East is a tinderbox. They did not predict the Arab Spring, but anybody reading them saw some major potential triggers: educated young men under the age of 35 festering in societies that are burdened by heavy unemployment, underutilization of males (in particular), and systems that are not creating patents or translating books or investing in post-secondary education, science or technology. It is all in these reports. Consider what those reports were telling us would happen 10 years down the road. So yes, we were blindsided by the Arab Spring, but we should not have been. We need to invest in knowledge, and we need to be constantly battling against settled assumptions about how the world is. Even looking at myself, I am the creature of the Cold War. I grew up in a world the axis of which was the North Atlantic. That world is gone. And what makes the 21st century exciting is that I am in a totally new world. Is the place to watch the South China Sea? That is what many people think today: Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and so on. The whole region is combustible in myriad ways – a theatre

of battle for strategic influence. Obama’s deployment of troops to Australia is telling us that he sees that region as important for the future. Does that region end in conflict? There is no reason for which it necessarily should. But heaven knows that there are many examples in which conflict was perfectly irrational, but occurred nonetheless. Or is it actually the Arctic – because of great power competition in general, or an energy race in particular – on which we should be focussing? There is no way of knowing. There is also no way of knowing exactly how climate change is going to change global politics (see the Feature article by John E. McLaughlin on future intelligence paradigms at p. 28). We ought to have research into all of these areas. Forewarned is forearmed. But let us also be humble enough to know that, when it happens, we will be as surprised as we ever were.

NEZ À NEZ The Horn, Duty and Feeding the Hungry Advanced countries have a duty to help feed the Horn of Africa PROPOSITION:

JAMES RADNER vs JOHN W. McARTHUR

James Radner is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, where he also directs the Boreal Institute for Civil Society, an action research group in domestic and international human development.

John W. McArthur was, until recently, the CEO of Millennium Promise, and taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Previously, he was Deputy Director and Manager of the UN Millennium Project. He is currently a Senior G LO B A L B R I E F • W I N T E R 2 0 1 2

Fellow with the

UN Foundation.

James Radner (against): A terrible human catastrophe is unfolding day by day in the Horn of Africa. Innocent people are dying, or suffering permanent impairment, for want of food. Individually, as families, and collectively, as nations, we in the industrialized world have resources that could help, and I urge everyone to give generously to avert suffering and death. If there is one thing that people will take away from this debate, let it be a refreshed commitment to stretch ourselves to relieve the Horn. Why, then, beyond perversity and self-subversion, am I saying ‘No’ to the proposition before us? It is because I think that ‘duty’ is the wrong way to look at this, and the wrong basis upon which to decide what to do. Webster’s defines ‘duty’ as “a moral or legal obligation” – something binding. I do not see such an obligation here, and I would not want to try to convince a friend who prefers to spend the resources on, say, a humanitarian cause closer to home – or, more provocatively, for some other type of purpose altogether, like recreation – that she is guilty of shirking. What – if not a duty – do we have in the face of the famine in the Horn? We have, I think, a choice: we are not bound to offer any particular level of support, and we are entitled, as we choose whether and how to act, to take account of a full range of factors. When we choose as individuals, these factors will include our own life circumstances and the needs of our families. When we choose as nations, they will include considerations of national interest and Realpolitik. But if we cannot – as we make our individual and collective choices – find within ourselves an abiding and genuinely motivating compassion for the afflicted, then I think that we have lost a vital part of our own humanity. John W. McArthur (for): You and I agree that the hunger, suffering and starvation affecting more than 13 million people in the Horn of Africa merits urgent action and financing. Everything else is secondary to this first-order agreement. In that context, you make an interesting case

regarding why it is the right thing to do, rejecting notions of duty and obligation, and arguing instead for notions of choice – whether guided by household budget constraints or national interests. I have two main reactions to this argument. The first is entirely pragmatic. I am generally agnostic as to the variety of motivations that different people draw upon when deciding to help solve a problem. For example, many people are inspired by religious beliefs. Many follow secular theories of justice. Some people are driven by security concerns. Still others are motivated by economic interests – short- or long-term. One could easily and legitimately cite any of these schools of thought in order to motivate humanitarian action in the Horn. If one is focussed primarily on solving the problem on the ground, then, at a practical level, it matters little why one might, say, support the World Food Program to provide emergency food relief and, in turn, invest in local systems to support food security. What matters is that the relief is delivered, and that the local investments are made. The world’s most powerful coalitions for good have been formed when a variety of groups and interests have come together to solve a problem. The past decade’s campaigns to scale up AIDS treatment and malaria control, for example, drew upon leaders from academia, religion, industry, politics and non-profit organizations around the world – each of whom brought his or her distinct blend of motivations. But all of these leaders were united by an interest in solving the problem at hand. The second reaction is more philosophical, and focusses on the questions of duty and obligation. I probably take a harder line than you on this, since I believe that rich countries and their citizens do have an obligation to support humanitarian emergencies and development investments in low-income countries – primarily because it costs so little for us to do so. In December of last year, the World Food Program – which is financed entirely through voluntary contributions – declared the need for an extra US $92 million for the first four months of 2012. Spread across the one billion people living in the rich world, this works out to nine cents per person. If a country like Canada were to pick up the tab on its own, it would cost less than US $3 per Canadian. Indeed, the entire consolidated UN humanitarian appeal for 2012 is US $7.7 billion to support 51 million beneficiaries across 16 countries, at an average of US $151 worth of goods and services per beneficiary for the year. This works out to US $7.70 per person in the rich world, where average incomes now top US $40,000 per annum. To be sure, this is hardly the stuff of existential trade-offs. If we do not think that human lives are worth US $7.70 of our resources, then we would not

just be failing to meet our obligations to humanity; we would be failing to meet our obligations to promote a secure and stable world – and thereby to protect our own countries, our communities, our families and ourselves. Yes, we can always choose not to meet such obligations and reject any sense of duty. But to do so would be very unwise.

PHOTOGRAPH: OXFAM / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

of that overlapping consensus – from evangelical Christian conservatives to leftist activists, to people who would not place themselves on a leftright spectrum at all – could never have agreed on questions of ‘duty’ or reasons to act, but they could coalesce around a choice to act. What they

Women and children waiting to enter the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, July 2011.

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JR: I will approach your pragmatic point with a dose of philosophy, and then your philosophical point with a dose of pragmatism. First, philosophy. In the aftermath of WW2, the nascent UN decided to develop an international bill of rights. As part of that process, they appointed – believe it or not – an official commission of philosophers, drawn from diverse cultural and religious traditions worldwide, to work out a truly universal basis for human rights. They found that they could agree on the equal worth and dignity of human beings, but not on the reasons underpinning this equal worth and dignity. They could agree on a set of basic rights to guide how governments treat people, but they could not agree on what a ‘right’ actually is. As a result, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted unanimously by the General Assembly in 1948, included an enumeration of rights – but without a hopedfor preamble elaborating the source of these rights. This approach to rights brings to mind the Rawlsian concept of ‘overlapping consensus,’ in which people with divergent ethical and ideological commitments can nevertheless agree on social and political action. Your description of the remarkable recent achievement that saw a wide variety of international actors marshalling resources to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis fits the same pattern. The members

started needs more support still. In the meantime, however, I want to encourage just such a coalition – based on free, diversely grounded, but humane choice – to fight hunger in the Horn of Africa. Your second main point – that the cost to fight hunger is nine cents from each of us – is unanswerable; it is a philosophical slam dunk. To debate the underlying reasons for such an outlay would be to dance on the head of a pin. Instead, we need to shout your words from the rooftops, and come up with the money, pronto. Alas, as you know from deeper experience than my own, the pragmatics of humanitarian intervention can be complex indeed (see the Feature article by Michael Cotey Morgan on the three tragedies of humanitarian intervention in GB’s Fall 2011 issue). In 1992, the administration of President George H.W. Bush concluded that it needed to dispatch US forces to deliver food in the same territory that is again famished now. After 18 of those soldiers lost their lives in Mogadishu, the Clinton administration conducted a year-long ‘lessons learned’ review and produced the restrictive

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What – if not a duty – do we have in the face of the famine in the Horn? We have, I think, a choice: we are not bound to offer any particular level of support, and we are entitled to take account of a full range of factors.

Presidential Decision Directive 25. That, in turn, led to disastrous inaction in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Security and authorization issues present important challenges for the humanitarian mission in Somalia today. I can only admire the courage and sacrifice of the international aid workers there. I hope that they will be safe, and that the question of sending soldiers to protect them will not even arise this time. If it does, however, there will be no slam dunk arguments, and claims about our duties will not get us even to the mid-court line. Nor will Decision Directive 25. We need to bring to humanitarian crises a decision-making framework that enables complex, prudential choices – without ever forgetting that we belong to one human family. JM: You raise additional important points that help to advance the discussion – moving from questions of ‘whether’ to those of ‘how.’ As for the substance of how to proceed in the Horn, a first

step for any solution is to provide life-saving food and medical assistance to those affected by the crisis – including the more than 700,000 Somali refugees now living in Ethiopia and Kenya. A second key step is too often overlooked: emergency feed and veterinary support for the region’s pastoralist communities, whose livelihoods hinge on the fate of their livestock – including goats, camels and cattle. Protecting these critical assets will help those communities to maintain a buffer in order to escape the other side of the dry season with as much resilience as possible. A third step is to understand the deeper drought dynamics underpinning the crisis, and to initiate a strategy that will help the region to grow more food and livestock in order to prevent future crises. The region faces the same basic long-term decline in precipitation as the rest of the Sahel – a problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has highlighted as one of the world’s most significant changes in climate patterns since the 1970s. (For now, I leave aside the responsibilities of advanced economies to mitigate further climate changes – although we need to connect those dots at a policy level, too.) Livestock support is needed for the pastoralists, and a ‘green revolution’ strategy is needed to ensure that farmers in the food-growing regions use the basic inputs that are typically still out of reach: fertilizer, high-yield seed, and irrigation. A hundred dollars for two bags of fertilizer is still too expensive for most farmers in the region, so smart subsidies are needed (see how Malawi doubled its national food production from 2005). Irrigation expansion represents a deeper challenge, since it brings major economic returns, but requires capital outlays of perhaps US $3,000 or more per hectare. A real strategy requires large-scale private credit mechanisms matched with public finance guarantees in order to compensate for the most severe risks. A fourth step is to recognize and tackle the population pressures that are driving competition for scarce resources across the Horn. In 1950, the combined population of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia was 27 million people. By 2000, it was 105 million. By 2010, it had ballooned further to 134 million. In 20 years, it is projected to be 200 million people. In addition to food and nutritional security, we need to invest in child survival and girls’ secondary education across the region – both as ends in themselves and as key inputs to a rapid voluntary decline in fertility rates. Finally, there are legitimate debates about how best to address the security components of the crisis – particularly in Somalia. Here we need to avoid unduly militarizing the situation even further, and we need to recognize that political conflicts often have deep underlying roots in climate and food insecurity – as the Berkeley economist Edward

Miguel and colleagues have shown persuasively through their research. I am not a security expert and do not pretend to have a simple answer for tackling those dimensions of the crisis, but I do hope that the security-focussed minds are including agriculture, livestock, water and health as centrepieces of all of their strategies.

JM: You aptly underscore the need to be mindful of local institutional settings when intervening in any humanitarian emergency. Despite Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics is local,” there are countless situations in which local politics

I am generally agnostic as to the variety of motivations that different people draw upon when deciding to help solve a problem. For example, many people are inspired by religious beliefs. Many follow secular theories of justice.

million Kenyans and 180,000 Djiboutians. The map of crisis zones extends southward almost to Nairobi. A final point is that we need to be much more systematic in anticipating and preventing these food-based challenges, of which there will surely be many more in the years ahead. To their credit, Oxfam and Save the Children have just issued a tough assessment of the international response to the Horn in 2011 – including their own. They describe months of undue delay as warnings went unheeded. They stress the need to overcome a culture of risk aversion – the bane by which people are blamed for mistakes of action, but no one is responsible for the tragedies of inaction. They also wisely recommend a development-based approach to minimizing the risk of emergencies. The world has come a long way in building health systems that can track and mitigate emergent infectious diseases. We need to be similarly robust in tackling the risks and causes of famine. Tomorrow’s emergency can be prevented – at lower cost – with practical investments today. | GB

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JR: Pressures of population and drought are undoubtedly key causes of the famine in the Horn, but they are not the only ones. Neighbouring Kenya, for example, faces similar pressures, but has handled them far better (though no one should be complacent about Kenya). The main difference is that Somalia remains a failed polity. I would warn that we in the West have very little understanding about how to help to remedy such failures. A first step might be to consider our own past role. When the West found it expedient to pour Cold War aid into Siad Barre’s regime, the aid became an enabler for a rapacious state that worked to grab control of Somalia’s core resources – arable land in the river valleys, the trade-driven pastoralist economy of the north and, paradoxically, the flow of Western aid itself. The result was a combination of dispossession and winner-take-all incentives – oddly resembling dynamics in ‘resource curse’ polities elsewhere in Africa. Both of these baleful effects survived the post-Cold War collapse of Barre’s state; the 1992 intervention only reinforced the pernicious idea that centralized power could monopolize Somalia’s internal and external resources. My caution, as aid flows increase, is that we must avoid once again creating a central stream of resources over which factions will be inclined to fight. A more localized approach that nurtures existing social and economic bright spots might work better. The most obvious such bright spot (obvious because it is on such a large scale, and because it is not closed to the outside world) is Somaliland, where the animal husbandry and trade are again on the rise, and where, not coincidentally, the breakaway statelet has achieved a measure of democratic stability. Somalis are a remarkably entrepreneurial and mercantile people, who do have the capacity to govern themselves. They have a vibrant, economically successful diaspora. We should support and encourage these advantages in the very pragmatic spirit that you have articulated, but without imagining that we can somehow ‘solve’ Somalia – and without letting despair become a reason to turn our backs on starving children.

interplays with global actors toward painful ends. Poor countries are especially at risk of external meddling, and short-sighted strategic or ideological approaches commonly backfire. Somalia is undoubtedly one of the world’s thorniest theatres for crafting external support, given the suffering that has resulted from a complex mix of internal conflicts, international interventions and geostrategic interests – alongside deep ecological stresses. And – to be sure – the external actors are as regional in identity as they are global: both the Ethiopian and Kenyan governments have been overt in their military clashes with local leaders. Nonetheless, the challenges in Somalia should not distract from the fact that the majority of people affected by the crisis are in Ethiopia and Kenya. Of the estimated 13.3 million people needing humanitarian assistance, only about five million are Somali – including four million inside the country, and nearly one million refugees in neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, nearly 4.6 million Ethiopians have been affected – according to UN figures – along with 3.8

THE DEFINITION “Germany’s responsibility in Europe is... …to become the continent’s servant

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While timidity, pacifism and the avoidance of strategic discourse served the nation well after WW2, they keep today’s Germany from realizing how important and powerful it is.

leader. In 1970, Robert Greenleaf, an American business manager and scholar with a keen interest in the art of leadership, framed the famous principle of servant leadership. He claimed that “the first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is severely limited.” Germany now faces a similar choice. The decision that it will make will have grave consequences for the future of European integration, stability on the continent, and the transatlantic relationship. Two things stand in the way of Germany becoming the enlightened conductor of European affairs. First, the country operates in the 21st century with a 1950s strategic culture. While timidity, pacifism and the avoidance of strategic discourse served a morally and economically bankrupt nation well after WW2, they keep today’s Germany from realizing how important and powerful it is. They keep Germans from understanding that, in the words of Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, theirs is Europe’s indispensable nation. Second, during the nearly five decades of Allied custodianship, Germans were relieved of the need to fend for their own survival. This bred a culture of irresponsibility for themselves and for others. Today, the absence of felt responsibility for the world surrounding Germany is the most worrisome feature of the country’s foreign policy. Examples of this absence of felt responsibility can be found everywhere: abstaining on Libya; caveats in Afghanistan; sleepwalking through the euro crisis; putting the brakes on EU foreign policy; and refusing to contribute to the development of NATO. However, in marked contrast to earlier phases in its history, Germany harbours no desire to dominate its neighbours, or to rule the continent by some informal diktat from Berlin. Quite the contrary: there is nothing for which Germans have a greater preference than being left unbothered by the demanding political realities around them. Instead, they wish they could simply reimmerse themselves in the comfortable, apolitical world of Biedermeier – cushioned by ever-increasing demand for their high-quality industrial export products. But the demand for leadership in Europe is immense. Naturally, European leaders look to the largest, strongest and most centrally located country

for guidance. They desire an internationally minded Germany that is aware of its strength, solidaire, protective and engaged. They do not fear German tank divisions, but rather German self-centredness and endless soul-searching.” Jan Techau is the Director of Carnegie Europe in Brussels. Previously, he worked with the German Ministry of Defence and the German Council on Foreign Relations.

… to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with the multiple crises of the Eurozone. The prospects for 2012 are bleak: recession and snailpace economic growth in most Eurozone countries; a credit crunch; vast trade imbalances; high rates of unemployment; and a general loss of confidence in politicians – all signalling that the worst is likely yet to come. Alas, as more and more citizens experience its impact, it is no longer an exaggeration to say that the current economic crisis may quickly turn into a crisis of liberal democracy in Europe. Only Germany has the economic capacity and political clout to change Europe’s fortunes. Until now, the German government has been reluctant to accept its pivotal role. Incapacitated by regional elections and an unstable coalition government, the German government has reacted to the different facets of these crises only as they have surfaced. This kind of muddling-through may work in other contexts, but in the current one it is deadly. For ‘Eurocrisis’ is in fact a misnomer for a toxic mix of crises with multiple roots. A non-exhaustive list comprises the Economic and Monetary Union’s faulty institutional design (with an incredible nobailout clause), undercapitalized banks, lavish public institutions, and inflexible structures that choke off economic growth. The toxicity of this mix lies in the fact that a quick fix of one problem may suddenly exacerbate another. At a regional summit last year, all but one EU member state agreed to strict limits for structural deficits, automatic enforcement and penalties for violators. These measures were intended to reassure markets that consolidation is under way, and that excessive spending is a thing of the past. Yet these measures did little to calm markets. Why? Because they fan fears that spending cuts and tax hikes – which may yield short-run revenue – will cripple economic growth in the long-run. In short, only a comprehensive strategy that

offers a solution to all of the crises at once will restore the market’s (and public’s) confidence in the Eurozone. This strategy is only viable if the German government throws its full economic and political weight behind it. This is indeed a Herculean – but not impossible – task, and one that Germany is well suited to undertake.” Mareike Kleine is Lecturer and Assistant Professor in EU Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

…to better understand the role and

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Hans Kundnani is the editorial director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and author of Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.

For more answers, visit the GB website at:

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import of history in the current crisis, and in the consequences of failure or success. One of the most remarkable things concerning the debate over the euro crisis in Germany during the past two years has been the lack of a proper sense of history. The European single currency was created in the context of German reunification: although discussions about monetary union were already underway before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decisive agreement to create what became the euro was reached afterward – and in part as a response to the fall. In particular, France saw the single currency as a way of binding a unified Germany to and within the EU. Indeed, Chancellor Kohl presented the single currency as an essential complement to German reunification. And the creation of the euro allowed the Federal Republic to achieve what was perhaps its most important foreign policy goal. However, all of that now seems to be forgotten. Germany has also benefited from the creation of the euro in economic terms. During the last decade, it has gone from a trade deficit to

a trade surplus, as it has been able to dramatically increase exports both to other Eurozone countries and to the rest of the world. The introduction of the euro cut the cost of borrowing in peripheral countries like Greece, which enabled them to buy German products like cars. At the same time, the euro – a weak currency when compared to the old Deutschmark – has made German exports to the rest of the world much more competitive than they were before 1999. In short, the weakness of the currency has boosted German exports outside of the Eurozone, and low borrowing costs have boosted them within the Eurozone. All of this means that Germany has a responsibility to make the Eurozone work for all of its members. Since the beginning of the euro crisis, Germany has shown only limited and conditional solidarity with the rest of Europe. Although it clearly does not want the euro to collapse, it has opposed both the creation of a ‘transfer union’ and an increase in inflation – even as the crisis has spread from the periphery to the centre. Germany needs to come up with a credible plan for creating growth in the Eurozone – and in particular to help the debtor countries to grow their way out of the recession. Otherwise, the future of Europe will be one in which Germany simply imposes ever greater austerity on the rest of the Eurozone in order to prevent inflation and protect its own exports and savings.”

Only a comprehensive strategy that offers a solution to all of the crises at once will restore the market’s (and public’s) confidence in the Eurozone. This strategy is only viable if the German government throws its full economic and political weight behind it.

www.globalbrief.ca

STRATEGIC FUTURES What will have been the consequences of international human rights prosecutions by 2022? By 2022, international criminal

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Few political or military leaders will exercise their power without a fairly good understanding that they risk being held accountable someday, before a court of law, for violations of international human rights or atrocity law.

prosecutions of genocidaires and their henchmen will be a standard and uncontroversial function of the global system. International prosecutions of ‘big fish’ human rights violators will have triggered a cascade effect across national courts, regional and sub-regional human rights bodies, as well as hybrid institutions – all acting in concert to counteract the 21st century scourge of massively expanding international black markets in guns, drugs and trafficked people (see the In Situ article from Florence by Pierre Verluise at p. 26). The extradition of the final Serbian war crimes fugitives to The Hague, the trial of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, and Cambodia’s criminal convictions more than 30 years after the horrors of the killing fields, will isolate the chorus of trial skeptics and normalize criminal law as a tool in the kit of international human rights. The International Criminal Court (ICC) will have a firmly established record of indictment, trial and sentence from across Latin America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and other regions of the world in which perpetrators are caught by the Court’s jurisdiction – changing the perception that it is a Western institution that picks on Africa. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda will have completed their dockets – leaving in their place better-functioning national legal systems in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Strengthened regional and sub-regional human rights systems, aided by reliable evidence from willing and cooperative governments – and civil litigation to claw back the profits of corrupt government officials – will bootstrap up to international standards and resist retrenchment into ghettos of human rights abusers. Most significantly, international criminal prosecutions will embolden new actors on the international human rights scene. International politics will comprise national, regional and sub-regional networks of trade, technology and philanthropic not-for-profit organizations that increasingly work with national governments. Relationships

between governments, NGOs and capital will be symbiotic: nation-states need NGOs for their ideas and services; NGOs need nation-states to do the work of arresting war criminals; and corporations need governments to provide infrastructure. And all of these new actors need new technologies – cell phones, satellite positioning systems (see the Feature article by Nathaniel A. Raymond et al. on crisis mapping at p. 12), genetically modified food strains – that impact people’s capacity to acquire information, to politically organize and advocate, and to win and lose in international markets. The US will have joined the ICC – recognizing that even liberal democracies need supranational institutions. US foreign policy will no longer pressure foreign governments to improve personal freedom, while refusing to apply global or regional standards at home. As an international standard-setting nation, the US will increasingly turn to building relations with Asia-Pacific as a peaceable bulwark against a still-repressive China. Economic and human rights compacts with Libya and Tunisia will likewise isolate outliers in the Middle East. There will still be outliers, to be sure – countries where corrupt and autocratic leaders use violence against their own population. The risks of these isolated nations cannot be understated. But by 2022, repressive politicians will increasingly choose democracy – rather than risk being hauled into the criminal dock or have their bloated overseas bank accounts drained of funds. Merging governmental and private efforts – UN resolutions, national foreign policies, NGOs, corporations, investors and individuals – will pressure nations such as China and Iran to endorse (perhaps in initially vague ways) international human rights standards. By 2022, human rights will be the only legitimate game in town, and the litmus test for international and domestic credibility. Helen Stacy is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

The impact of international human rights prosecutions will have been tamed in accordance with the rising ‘price’ of removing autocrats from office. Indeed, more moderate regimes of prosecutions will prove more effective than monochromatically tough ones in the case of countries in which human rights are not deeply embedded in the domestic political culture. Autocrats at risk of inflexible international human rights prosecution are more prone to violate human rights – often brutally – in order to stay in power. For instance, Russia’s political elites – now unstable and confused after the mass demonstrations at the end of last year in Moscow – are developing two contrast-

ing responses to public protest: surrender, on the one hand, and tough reply, on the other. Surrender means gradual liberalization of economic and political affairs in order to create a more competitive total system. (This approach threatens the Putin clan.) The ‘tough reply’ approach involves violent repression of political opponents. In this sense, a straightforward or pedantic threat of international human rights prosecutions could well beget Tiananmen Squarelike clampdowns, and could push Russia toward the ‘Chinese path’ of hard political autocracy under a market economic system. Leonid Kosals is Professor of Sociology in the Moscow Higher School of Economics.

We can gauge what will be the

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David Scheffer is a law professor at Northwestern University and former US Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues. His new book is All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals. He was recently appointed

Three senior leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, from right, former Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, former head of state Khieu Samphan, and former Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea, stand trial before a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, for their roles in the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people.

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impact on world politics by 2022 of international human rights prosecutions by understanding what has happened over the last 30 years. The emerging reality is that such prosecutions do in fact have consequences, particularly in countries where severe human rights abuses and atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) have occurred – typically under authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Over time, there is a discernible diminution in such abuses and crimes in the wake of prosecutions of political and military leaders. Professor Kathryn Sikkink of the University of Minnesota documents this trend in her new book,

The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. She and her team of researchers examined human rights prosecutions both domestically and before international criminal tribunals, and found that nations subjected to such accountability – as well as neighbouring countries, in many instances – emerge as more respectful of human rights, and thus more law-abiding over the long-term. We need no longer to rely on anecdotal examples in order to prove the worth of human rights prosecutions. There is now empirical evidence to support the proposition that there are positive outcomes in such exercises – be they before national courts or before international criminal tribunals. By 2022, few political or military leaders will exercise their power without a fairly good understanding that they seriously risk being held accountable, someday, before a court of law, either domestic or international, for violations of international human rights law or atrocity law – namely, the specialized law being developed by the international criminal tribunals. The age of leadership impunity has been nearing its end for many years now, and by 2022 will be viewed largely as a historical relic.

Special Expert on the UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials.

EPIGRAM

The Future is Red in Tooth and Claw Parting volleys on humankind’s unmistakable arenas and theatres of contention BY DOUGLAS GLOVER

C Douglas Glover is a Governor-General’s Award-winning novelist and short story writer. His last book was The Enamoured Knight, a study of Cervantes and

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Don Quixote.

ooperation is local, competition is panthe world of struggle, work, error, guilt and knowldemic. It has always been this way. We live edge – all the sins of the Fall – either in this world in a churning cauldron of competitive vecor the next. But the yearning for non-competition tors, of drags and accelerants. We compete is paradoxical. As Schopenhauer so acutely noted, for money, jobs, love, space and power. We compete, life itself involves desire, struggle and competition: and we are competed for (for our votes, for our conto survive, we need something else to die. (Thus, it sumer dollars, for our admiration – desire desires is not necessarily a very nice paradox – life itself is desire). What goes for thinking these days is mostly “red in tooth and claw.”) Schopenhauer’s notional competition; what goes for information is mostly embrace of what he understood of Hinduism – the shill and exhortation. The media world is a vast quieting of desire through contemplation or infomercial – competing for the mind of the personal extinction – derived from this tragic reader, the e-reader or the (TV) e-watcher. apprehension. The dream of (or nostalgia for) Conversation is a competition to have non-competition is Death. one’s voice heard; to have one’s ideas prevail. The Nietzschean alternative is to renounce Languages compete and extend their reach or the fantasy of cessation and safety in order to disappear. The world is a chessboard of interembrace the seething flux of life – to do battle, Nietzsche national gamesmanship. In space, we are all to ride the whirlwind. Nietzsche invented the competing for the higher ground. And, willy-nilly, the infelicitous phrase Overman or Superman for this whirling, pulsing interactions of competition seem – which got him considerable bad press. Think of only to grow faster and denser as the world goes digital, him more as a romantic, Byronic hero with his nose and as connectivity multiplies arenas of contention. to the wind and a look of joy on his face as he joins The individual human being wins and loses a thouthe fray. Free-market economists are Nietzschean; sand times a day – mostly without even knowing it, the de rigueur buzz-phrase ‘creative destruction’ is as the virtual and invisible electronic tickers mark Nietzschean. What free competition destroys serves the rise and fall of prices, currency and interest rates. to create space and energy for renewal and rebirth. Being alive, we compete. We think of nature as “red What Schopenhauer marked as universal slaughter, in tooth and claw” (Tennyson’s phrase), in contrast to Nietzsche preferred to see as a dance (Nietzsche has human society, which is polite, restrained, cooperative that shady reputation – difficult sometimes to see and civilized. We take it for granted that civilization him as the naïve, Pollyanna optimist that he was; but has managed to evade the savage imperative. But there you are). Cooperation is the counterpoint to the truth is that much of what goes for civilization competition (indeed, competition is a nice dance unis competitive – albeit competition conventionalized til you or your people get caught in the meat-grinder and channelled; civilized at least in the sense that of creative destruction). It is fascinating to think war, rapine, pillage and slaughter are theoretically of society as formed in the tension (competition) diminished as options. between the two. Cooperation is local, but competiComplex animals developed cooperative behavtion is everywhere. Cooperation is conservative. It iours first as an aspect of reproduction, and then as a is about barriers and safety nets. This is a battle of social adaptation in larger groups (such as packs). In tempos. Competition accelerates, and cooperation humans, cooperation begins with mother, father and slows the rhythm. Borders, bureaucracies, treaties, child, and expands to hunting groups, tribes, villages, regulations, unions, political parties, service clubs, cities and states – forging larger and larger units for churches and even corporations create pockets of competitive advantage. Still, just as the local comrespite from competition, just as they also turn petitive interfaces expand and grow more complex, into competitive monads themselves. Yet nothing the internal structures of cooperative units seethe avails, for the scale of competition waxes, and the with competition for power, hierarchy, position, love trajectory of history is toward the unimaginable and wealth – units within units jockeying with each and the inhuman. It is exhilarating. It takes your other down to the individual human being (who is breath away. It drives invention and efficiency. And it probably torn by competing ideas and motives within exhausts the heart. Nietzsche or Schopenhauer – it his or her own heart). The great religious and utopian is difficult to decide. Sometimes you envy stones, ideas of the past were meant to redeem us from they are so calm. | GB

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