Global Brief #14

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

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5 YEAR

FALL 2013

GREAT POWERS SHALL GREAT POWERS NOT IN THE ARCTIC CLASH

SHALL NOT IN MICHAEL BYERS

THE ARCTIC CLASH WHEN CANADA BECOMES MICHAEL BYERS THE WEST'S 2ND STATE IRVIN STUDIN

THE END

WHEN CANADA OPENINGS IN

BECOMES THE

OF THE

THE IRAN-US DYAD

WEST'S 2ND STATE SAM S. SHOAMANESH

ARAB SPRING?

IRVIN STUDIN EMERGING MARKETS

PETER JONES

BACK IN THE BOX

OPENINGS BRETT HOUSEIN

THE IRAN-US DYAD THE ECONOMIC PRICE OF

SAM S. SHOAMANESH AFRICAN DEMOCRACY JORIM SCHRAVEN

EMERGING MARKETS AVENIR PRÉCAIRE

BACK IN THE BOX EN AFRIQUE DU SUD FRANÇOIS BRETT HOUSE BOUTIN-DUFRESNE

THE ECONOMIC CHINA’S MAIN

L’UNION

STRENGTHS PRICE OF AFRICAN

ÉCONOMIQUE

RICHARD ROSECRANCE,

DEMOCRACY

HSIAO-TING LIN ET AL

EURASIENNE:

JORIM SCHRAVEN

VÉRITÉS ET

AVENIR PRÉCAIRE

ILLUSIONS

EN AFRIQUE DU SUD FRANÇOIS

GEORGIY

BOUTIN-DUFRESNE

VO LO S H I N

CHINA’S MAIN STRENGTHS RICHARD NEZ À NEZ

ROSECRANCE, HSIAO-TING LIN

ET AL

TO DO GOOD, YOU MUST BE SHREWD CANADA & US $7.99 ISSN: 1920-6909

QUEBEC AND ITS QUESTION IN 2020 33

IRVIN STUDIN G OV E R N I N G T H E P O S T- S OV I E T S PAC E KEATS, MACHIAVELLI & TRUTH

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56698 93716

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JEAN CHAREST

GEORGE ELLIOT CLARKE

JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN EPOCH BETWEEN STRATEGIC EPOCHS

AFGHANISTAN AFTER 2014 JOHN DUNCAN VS DA N I E L P. FATA

Every Great Deed Requires a Strategy and a Strategist

EDITORS’ BRIEF

Machiavelli is misunderstood. All new-century princes – public and private alike – will have to be shrewd to achieve important goals in a precarious world.

GB

COVER ILLUSTRATION: SARA TYSON

other difficult theatres. Finally, Irvin Studin writes that Canada will be – indeed, may have no better choice but to become – the West’s second largest and most important state by century’s end. He suggests that the world will be better for this evolution of the Canadian project, much of which will have to be psychological and cultural.

In Tête à Tête, GB picks the brain of John E. McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA, to better understand and identify the sources of the micro- and macro-instability that even the world’s shrewdest governors will have to navigate in the coming two decades. GB tackles the ever-vexed Quebec question (what is it this century?) and its national and international implications with former Quebec premier Jean Charest.

In Query, former New York Times foreign correspondent James M. Dorsey distills the import of the Middle East’s soccer ultras for the future of the Arab Spring. Jorim Schraven of the Dutch development bank FMO calculates the (unusually low) economic price of Africa’s growing number of electoral democracies.

In Nez à Nez, John Duncan of Trinity College, University of Toronto, exchanges with the Cohen’s Group’s Daniel P. Fata over the fate of post-2014 Afghanistan.

In The Definition, we ask Harvard’s Richard Rosecrance, Stanford’s Hsiao-ting Lin and Barthélémy Courmont of South Korea’s Hallym University to speak to China’s chief strengths. And we anticipate Egypt in the year 2020 in Strategic Futures with American University in Cairo’s Laila El Baradei, Egyptian analyst Bassem Sabry and Lebanese blogger Wissam Syriany. In Situ reports come to us from GB’s managing editor Sam S. Shoamanesh in Tehran, where a historic opening may have presented itself in Iran-US relations, and from Johannesburg, where Washington DC-based economist François Boutin-Dufresne frets for the state of South Africa in the buildup to the 2014 presidential election and in the post-Mandela world. GB insinuates itself into Finland’s Cabinet Room to observe the Finns plotting to reclaim the Nobel Peace Prize. In Board Room (a new GB department), GB listens in on Gazprom’s elite praising Putin’s pugilistic prose. George Elliott Clarke, Toronto’s poet laureate, closes the book in Epigram.

Five more years! Enjoy your Brief. | GB

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

is five years old. Launched in 2009, the magazine is today sold in the leading stores in nearly a dozen countries around the world, on every continent. Demand continues to grow, with the magazine having held launch events in cities ranging from Toronto to Montreal, Winnipeg, The Hague, Palo Alto and Singapore – with Kiev, Austin, London and Paris upcoming. For all this we have to thank our many thousands of readers – in all our languages – around the world, in print and online, our terrific masthead team, and our wonderful partners at the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs in Toronto.

Our theme this issue speaks for itself – almost: there are, at the highest levels, no angels in international affairs and the broader rivalry and comedy of humanity. So much the better. For major projects (ends) require major strategy, creativity, shrewdness and, of course, luck. And still these may all end in tears. But tears are guaranteed if the right means – mental and material alike – are not in place. In this new century, this logic applies as much to the governance and survival of states as it does to the success of firms and even individuals fighting in support of great – though improbable – ideas.

Brett House owns the One Pager spot in this issue, lamenting the opportunity missed by emerging markets to fix their houses and, further still, to change the world. He warns of their growing vulnerability to coming economic storms. In the first Feature, GB Editor-in-Chief Irvin Studin examines the ideas and approaches behind the new-century governance of the complex states of the former Soviet space – from Russia to Ukraine, through to Kazakhstan and Armenia. The University of Ottawa’s Peter Jones assesses whether the Arab Spring has had its day, arguing that it has in fact only just begun, and is being driven by three transformative forces (and not in all cases toward democracy). French analyst Georgiy Voloshin looks at the nature and prospects of the Russia-led Eurasian Union, positing that it is a far cry from any reconstitution of the former USSR. The University of British Columbia’s Michael Byers returns to GB to make the case that the Arctic is a sui generis incubator for 21st century great-power cooperation and the formation of key norms of international behaviour that may be transferable to

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER Irvin Studin

|

FA L L 2 0 1 3 | Y E A R

D E PA R T M E N T S

MANAGING EDITOR Sam Sasan Shoamanesh ART DIRECTOR Louis Fishauf ASSOCIATE EDITOR Michael Barutciski ASSISTANT EDITOR Marie Lavoie SENIOR EDITOR & ASSISTANT PUBLISHER

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

Jaclyn Volkhammer SENIOR EDITOR Milos Jankovic

Brett House | Emerging markets back in the box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

JUNIOR EDITORS

IN SITU

Carly Barefoot, Becky Carpenter, Dylan Franks, Roxanne Hamel, Saad Khan, Jolie Lemmon, Misha Munim, Adina M. Unguras WEB MANAGER Aladin Alaily VIDEOGRAPHER Duncan Appleton WEB DESIGN Dolce Publishing PRINTING RJM Print Group

Sam Sasan Shoamanesh | Cracks in the Persian puzzle. . . . . . . . . . . 6 François Boutin-Dufresne | L’Afrique du Sud a du mal. . . . . . . . . . 32 TÊTE À TÊTE John E. McLaughlin | Navigating threats in the strategic dark. . . . . . 8 Jean Charest | Dancing between centre and periphery . . . . . . . . . . . 26

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Kenneth McRoberts (Chair), André Beaulieu, Tim Coates, David Dewitt, Paul Evans, Drew Fagan, Dan Fata, Margaret MacMillan, Maria Panezi, Tom Quiggin

IN THE BOARDROOM

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

James M. Dorsey | What role for the World Cup in the Arab Spring? . . . 24

General Enquiries, Feedback & Suggestions globalbrief@glendon.yorku.ca

NEZ À NEZ

Dusan Petricic | Gazprom ponders Putin’s prose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 QUERY Jorim Schraven | What economic price for democracy in Africa?. . . 34 IN THE CABINET ROOM Dusan Petricic | Finland seeks another Nobel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

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John Duncan vs. Daniel P. Fata Afghanistan will be a source of global instability after 2014 . . . . . . . 56

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STRATEGIC FUTURES “In 2020, Egypt will…. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 EPIGRAM

George Elliott Clarke | Keats, Machiavelli and truth . . . . . . . . . . . 64

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

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

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F E AT U RES

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GOVERNING IN THE EX-SOVIET SPACE Russians don’t eat their children. Nor do their former Soviet brethren. Now, how do they all govern this century? BY IRVIN STUDIN

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IS THE ARAB SPRING OVER? It’s a tale of three transitions – none obviously to democracy – and it’s hardly begun BY PETER JONES

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L’UNION ÉCONOMIQUE EURASIENNE Ladite union dirigée par la Russie devrait naître d’ici 2015. Certains prédisent le retour en force de Moscou. Mythe ou réalité? PAR GEORGIY VOLOSHIN

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GREAT POWERS SHALL NOT IN THE ARCTIC CLASH The contours of new-century international law are being shaped first and foremost in the Arctic BY MICHAEL BYERS

WHEN CANADA BECOMES THE WEST’S SECOND STATE Transformation of the national strategic psychology and culture can make a major power of the country BY IRVIN STUDIN

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

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Emerging Markets Back in the Box

ONE PAGER

They wasted time and opportunity during the boom. Now they must change the world even as their fortunes wane.

BY BRETT HOUSE

T

this happen. Instead, several emerging countries pressed the IMF to soften its longstanding opposition to capital controls. In 2011, they succeeded.

Most emerging-market governments should have used the last few years of easy money to address infrastructure bottlenecks, energy supply problems, financial sector weaknesses, regulatory inefficiencies, and narrowly concentrated industrial sectors. Of course, supply-side reforms are hard: they are complex, run against vested interests, and seldom produce quick returns. But in the absence of such reforms, most emerging markets remain difficult, bureaucratic and inflexible places in which to do business.

Emerging markets also missed a chance to change the world. They held enormous leverage during the crisis: Europe desperately needed fresh capital, and emerging markets held about two-thirds of global foreign-exchange reserves. These countries could have insisted on deep reform of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. They negotiated some increased voting power and more IMF Board chairs. But they did not seal US Congressional agreement on the deal – leaving it dead in practical terms.

If emerging economies falter now, no one can save them. Basic measures are needed to make the world economy more resilient. First, the IMF should be much bigger. Almost all of the IMF’s new loans to sovereigns since 2008 have been so large that the Fund has had to invoke exceptions to its lending guidelines. Thus, if industrialized countries stumble, the IMF will not have the resources to pick them up.

Second, there needs to be greater peer pressure exerted on countries to implement internationally agreed, time-bound reforms. The G20’s accountability processes need teeth. Otherwise, as St. Petersburg recently showed, when crises subside and a shared sense of purpose dissipates, nothing happens.

Third, the international toolkit for handling sovereign crises has to be improved. A neutral venue – a sovereign debt forum – is needed to bring creditors and debtors together systematically to address sovereign crises proactively. This forum should be complemented with measures to simplify debt rollovers, coordinate creditors, and write-down debt when countries are insolvent. These efforts can make future crises less costly and less destabilizing.

Emerging markets dropped the ball. That ball needs to be picked up and moved down the field. | GB

Brett House, formerly of the IMF, World Bank and UN, is a Senior Fellow at CIGI, a Senior Fellow at the Jeanne Sauvé Foundation at McGill University, and a Chazen Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

he financial press has sounded the death knell for emerging markets. Quite a turnabout: 2013 was to have been the first year in which emerging markets would account for more than half of global growth, and for more than half of worldwide production. What happened?

The destinies of emerging markets are only partially under their control. Both their rapid ascent and their recent wobble have been driven by external forces. First, China’s high savings rates, intensive investment and years of double-digit growth rates drove a commodity boom from the early 2000s onward. Chinese demand for raw materials was so strong that it sustained commodity prices even as industrialized countries slipped into crisis in 2008. Emerging commodity exporters benefited greatly.

Second, emerging markets profited from a longrunning credit boom in industrialized countries – one that made it historically inexpensive for emerging markets to finance themselves. After the dot-com crash in 2000-2001, the US Federal Reserve kept policy rates low until 2004. When the current crisis broke out, central banks pushed policy rates down to nearzero and used quantitative easing (QE) to further ease credit conditions. Investors pushed a ‘wall of money’ toward emerging markets in search of higher yields.

Both forces are now in retreat: Chinese growth has slipped below eight percent, and the Fed’s talk of tapering QE is pushing up market rates in the US. Emerging economies are getting broadsided by higher borrowing costs and weaker demand for their goods. The prospect of tapering QE is also driving the wall of money back to developed markets. Emerging countries with external account deficits – economies that rely on foreign credit to finance consumption – are seeing the biggest withdrawals by investors.

Alas, emerging markets wasted the benign conditions provided by Chinese demand and the wall of money. They failed to undertake difficult reforms.

Rather than welcoming cheap money as a godsend, many emerging-market leaders complained that their national currencies were appreciating, making their exports less competitive. Brazil, South Korea and Turkey, among others, enacted and intensified capital controls.

This was a mistake. Stronger currencies should have been seen as a means to import technology and improve competitiveness. Tariff barriers could have been dropped and tax incentives provided to make

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Cracks in the Persian Puzzle

IN SITU

There is nothing exceptional or sui generis about the Iran-US rivalry and current impasse. A window may have opened.

It should be seized. SAM SASAN SHOAMANESH reports from Tehran

I Sam Sasan Shoamanesh is the Managing Editor of Global Brief. The views expressed herein are those of the

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

author alone.

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ran and the US have not had diplomatic ties since the Iran Hostage Crisis and the 1979 Revolution. For over three decades, relations between Tehran and Washington have been defined by hostility and deep-seated distrust. And yet, as improbable as it may seem, closer relations between these two former strategic allies offer a long list of mutual advantages, with hugely positive implications for the security and stability of the entire Middle East.

Can this impasse be broken? Recent Iranian goodwill overtures toward the US, and public promises of “constructive engagement” by Hassan Rouhani, the newly elected President of Iran – topped off by a historic first phone call between Rouhani and President Obama – seem to suggest a rare window of opportunity to reassess and recast the relationship.

Still, the challenges standing in the way of Iran-US rapprochement are manifestly non-trivial. First and foremost, both sides suffer from powerful psychological biases and barriers, rooted in sour historical experiences and mutual grievances that cannot easily be cast aside. Over time, these barriers have become institutional in nature in the sense that the demonization of the other side has become part of the political DNA of both Tehran and Washington.

The psychological barriers mean that – reactive devaluation oblige – overtures by either side are, with the rarest of exceptions, dismissed out of hand as not being genuine. President George W. Bush rejected outright the 2003 ‘grand bargain’ offer made by former Iranian president Khatami, a reformer. And Obama’s initial engagement policy in 2009 was interpreted by certain factions in Tehran as not necessarily representing a sincere or authentic extension of an olive branch, but instead a tactical move to solicit Iranian cooperation on US projects in the region – notably Afghanistan (see the Nez à Nez debate between John Duncan and Daniel P. Fata at p. 56) and Iraq – at a time of diminishing American power and influence.

There are also, of course, important strategic considerations that clearly militate against rapprochement. To date, both Iran and the US have been competing for broader influence in the Middle East in a fierce, zero-sum contest. This contest is complicated by rivalry and intrigue among other regional players, with a number of states wary of closer Iran-US relations often fuelling the antipathy between Tehran and Washington.

Having said this, there is, in historical terms, nothing at all exceptional about the character and content of the Iran-US relationship that should render it impervious to change. Relations between the US and the former USSR, and also between the US and Mao’s China, were far more complex, involving polar-opposite ideologies. And yet the parties managed to establish dialogue, avoided full-scale confrontation and, if they did not establish comprehensively amicable relations, still arrived at a modus vivendi that opened up numerous important avenues for cooperation.

The current ruling elite in Tehran are, for the most part, pragmatic actors in their foreign policy calculus.

They can be engaged in serious negotiations. Seasoned American analysts and strategists recognize that war with Iran over the country’s nuclear programme is a costly and unpredictable option that would be best avoided. These same people would concede that an American posture of unrelenting confrontation has failed to bring about regime change in Tehran. This leaves diplomacy as the only viable path to pursue in order to advance US strategic interests vis-à-vis Iran and its immediate neighbourhood.

As for Iran, the country finds itself increasingly isolated – a situation that would be gravely aggravated were the Assad regime in Damascus to fall.

Sanctions have hurt the economy, placing growing domestic pressure on the national government in Tehran. While the Iranians know full well that the US’s military options are limited, and while they have doubtless taken copious notes about Obama’s indecision in respect of any Syrian intervention or strikes, they cannot discount the possibility of war coming to their shores given the pressure placed on Washington from the likes of Israel, which has long been pushing for a tougher stance on Iran. Tehran therefore still has reason for apprehension, and motivation to become serious about engagement.

The new Iranian President and his team appear to grasp the fact that pragmatic policy positions should not be hampered by ideological rigidities.

Resistance can pay dividends by causing the enemy to respect you (even if such respect is grudgingly acquired) and by forcing changes in the strategic calculus of these same enemies. But resistance for its own sake, sans end goal and at any cost, tends invariably to the realm of folly. Indeed, in the end, Iranian miscalculations about the capabilities and intentions of adversaries – caused by poor infor-

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / FRANK FRANKLIN II

US-Iran relations are now at a crossroads. The mutual strategic benefits to be derived from the normalization of these relations should focus and guide the parties’ actions. Both sides need to manage their internal political dynamics – keeping spoilers and hardliners at bay, at least temporarily in order to give real diplomacy an opportunity to succeed.

The code to the not-so-unique ‘Persian puzzle’ can be cracked. A new policy of sustained engagement – based on mutual respect and recognition of each other’s legitimate interests, rights and anxieties – can reignite relations. Should Iran’s recent offers of “constructive engagement” elicit a favourable response from Washington, then the path to détente will require a rapid series of concrete confidence-

building initiatives – expanding the discussions to include items other than only Iran’s nuclear programme. Areas of common interest and potential cooperation should be identified (there are many).

A statement of guidelines or principles should be crafted (consider the 1972 Shanghai communiqué), and a roadmap should be set for the normalization of relations (as was done for Vietnam-US relations in 1991). Iranian security anxieties can be assuaged through bolstered defence capabilities (and by a loosening of the noose or necklace of American assets around Iran’s perimeter). The signature of a formal non-aggression pact is not inconceivable – en attendant a more comprehensive regional security and cooperation architecture.

Countless mines pave the route toward this rapprochement. Yet never in the past three decades have the stars lined up so nicely – necessity and circumstances oblige – as to enable Tehran and Washington to break with the past and reverse their decades-long antagonism. After the recent Iranian charm offensive, the ball in many ways seems to be in the US court. | GB

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani addresses the 68th session of the UN General Assembly at UN headquarters, September 2013.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

mation, poor analytics, or simply surenchère, could result in catastrophe for the country.

The new leaders in Tehran – of course, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei remains extremely powerful – recognize that an Iran free from the pressures of international sanctions and scrutiny could focus on building the country, improving its economy, and achieving greater independence and prosperity. Seen in this light, a conciliatory posture toward a rival does not signify weakness, and does not mean that the country has to sacrifice its autonomy, standing or honour. Abandoning isolation in favour of rapprochement does not mean forgetting the past or denying a nation’s outrage (consider the 1953 Mossadegh coup, in respect of which Obama recently acknowledged American involvement), but rather the channelling of national energies into policies and postures that issue in greater real returns for the country and its citizenry.

The US, for its part, must begin to question the conventional wisdom in Washington policy circles that has undergirded a longstanding and ineffective containment policy toward Iran. Iran is today surrounded by US military bases, and yet these have proved futile in restraining Iran’s growing clout in the region. Having failed to topple the regime or otherwise coerce Tehran into capitulation on the nuclear dossier, US policy toward Iran has merely aggravated Tehran’s security perceptions and deep sense of isolation, provoking Iranian belligerence (see the Feature article by Peter Jones at p. 18). On the other hand, the unrelenting economic sanctions levelled against Iran over the last 30 years are probably pushing the country ever closer to economic collapse. To think that a weak and divided Iran – a coherent, historically important regional power occupying the landmass where Western Asia and Central Asia meet – is somehow advantageous to US interests in the region is terribly short-sighted. For a scenario of Iranian state collapse would squarely put US interests in the region in jeopardy. Without Iranian cooperation, the US will continue to face great challenges in advancing its objectives in the region, from securing the free flow of oil – key to the world’s economy – to resolving the region’s major conflicts, from Afghanistan to Syria and the Arab-Israeli impasse.

Bref, if the US wishes to remain relevant in the Middle East over the long-term – at a time of Chinese ascent and renewed Russian relevance (see Cabinet Room at p. 49, and Board Room at p. 30) – and also to ensure regional security, then Washington cannot indefinitely continue to ignore and attempt to contain Iran. Indeed, the reverse is true: brought in from the cold, Iran could become a strategic partner for the US in the region. In historical terms, this would not necessarily be an uncomfortable partnership for Tehran.

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GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

It may be that we are in an era of transition in the international system – a gap between strategic epochs.

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PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

Navigating Threats in the Strategic Dark

TÊTE À TÊTE

GB discusses the genesis, content and futures of the threats that all governments and governors must master with one of the world’s leading geokrats JOHN E. McLAUGHLIN

GB: What is the greatest threat to international global stability over the next 10 years?

JM: That is a tough question. You cannot point to

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 Agency from 2000 to 2004.

GB: Are you worried about any major inter-state conflicts over the next 10 years?

JM: Over the next 10 years, there are a number of flashpoints, in inter-state terms, that we ought to worry about. One, of course, is between China and Japan over disputed islands. Both sides are quite serious about these islands, and while this may seem a lesser issue to those of us who are remote from it, it taps into historical rivalries between those countries. Another would be the traditional rivalry between India and Pakistan, which currently is quiescent, in part because each side has, for the moment, shown a willingness to reach out to the other – most recently with the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reaching out to Indian Prime Minister Singh and seeking some basis for discussion and the easing of differences. Of course, this comes in the aftermath of recent turmoil in Kashmir.

Still, there are some things in the neighbourhood that may potentially disturb this equilibrium. For example, as the US withdraws from Afghanistan by 2014 (see the Nez à Nez debate between John Duncan and Daniel P. Fata at p. 56) – without clarity, at present, about how many US forces, if any, will remain, and with relevant bilateral security negotiations not yet complete – the diminished US presence will, in all likelihood, reignite Pakistani paranoia about Afghanistan and concern that India, which traditionally has maintained an influential presence in Afghanistan, will seek to do so again.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

a single greatest threat to global stability at this point. Perhaps the greatest threat comes from a condition, rather than a country or a problem. That condition may simply be that we are in an era of transition in the international system. Paul Kennedy of Yale University has called this era the gap between strategic epochs. What that means is that we are at a moment when the rules and structure of international relations are not crystal clear.

We do not have a name for the era in which we find ourselves. We came from the Cold War. It was all so clear in the Cold War period. It was also briefly clear after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and until 2008, when the international financial crisis hit (see the One Pager by Brett House at p. 5). That 17-year period was one in which the US was clearly the dominant power in the world.

We have passed through that period. The US is probably still first among equals, but other powers are rising. There are other significant actors who have important aspirations – actors who are not necessarily susceptible to US persuasion.

Americans have always had a guiding star for their international conduct. Our civil war was about preserving the union. WW1 was about making the world safe for democracy. WW2 was about defeating the Nazis. And the Cold War was about containing the Soviets. But we do not have a simple strategic concept or North Star at this point. So we are at a moment of strategic and systemic transition.

Another issue of great relevance to international stability is demographics. When you look at the parts of the world that are most troubled today – North Africa, for example – you see that about 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30. You have very high unemployment rates in societies that are not prepared to deal with the demands of that young cohort. Looking ahead, therefore, I suspect that most of the problems that we are going to see in the international system will be generated not between states, but rather within states. For us, then – say, for the US and the Commonwealth countries

– the problem is that traditional tools of statecraft do not work very effectively when we seek to address the internal problems of other countries. Our traditional tools of statecraft – things like economic sanctions and military power – work best in the context of relations between and among nations.

When it comes to all of these problems that are now appearing within states – in Syria, Egypt (see the Query article by James Dorsey at p. 24), Libya, many other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, other parts of the Middle East, and portions of Central Asia – our traditions, strategies and tools are weaker and less developed. As a result, there is great potential for instability in the international system.

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GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

We have to hedge such that we find a balance that disabuses Beijing of any impression or perception that we are somehow organizing Asia against it. This must be a key objective.

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(In my view, India will.) Removing the US from that trilateral equation has the potential over the longer-term to stimulate renewed rivalry between India and Pakistan – again, primarily because of the likelihood that India will seek influence in Afghanistan, and because Pakistan will react with concern, as it must always – as it sees it – protect its western flank when its eastern flank is exposed to Indian power.

Taiwan, to be sure, is always a potential flashpoint – although it is at the moment not a hot theatre. When you get past these first-order interstate issues, it is hard to see major ones that are on the horizon – although, frankly, these usually surprise us.

One could easily conjure up endless inter-state conflicts in the Middle East. We are at the point now where it is feasible to imagine a redrawing of the boundaries in the Middle East (see the Feature article by Peter Jones at p. 18). Of course, most people will draw back from that and say: how could that be? After all, these borders have been there since WW1 – except for the redrawing due to the Arab-Israeli wars. However, what we now see happening in Syria is, for all practical intents and purposes, an erasing of the border between Syria and western Iraq because the Sunnis in Iraq are identifying very clearly with their Sunni brethren in Syria, who are in revolt against an Alawite minority that has oppressed the majority Sunnis for decades. That border has become so porous that, in practical terms, it hardly exists.

Within Iraq, there are centrifugal forces that come and go, but I would again say that Syria has been the touchstone here. Iraqi Kurds identify with the Kurds in Syria. They also identify with Kurds in Iran. In essence, then, Syria is a proxy war between Shiites and Sunnis from across the Middle East. In a way, one could imagine Syria heralding a broader conflict in much the same way that the Spanish civil war in the 1930s heralded a broader conflict by becoming a proxy war between two competing ideologies – fascism and communism – with both the Germans and the Soviets playing heavily. Of course, I am not talking about WW3 here, but I do see an analogy insofar as we have competing ideologies offering physical support within a country – in a region that is highly volatile. Most of us who have followed the Middle East for years or decades will now say: “I cannot predict anything. I am just taking notes.”

I have left out obvious things: Iran and the US, or Iran and Western powers who oppose the Iranian nuclear effort. Yes, that could turn into an interstate conflict. But everything that can be said about that potential conflict has already been said. There are no good options (see the In Situ article by Sam Sasan Shoamanesh at p. 6).

GB: When do you begin to worry about intra-state conflict, and when do you let sleeping dogs lie?

JM: A great deal of work has been done on this.

A whole body of work exists to try to anticipate genocide – the ultimate expression of intra-state conflict. And the kinds of things that you look for are indicators of misery – as it were – in societies.

You look at things like the unemployment picture and the data underlying that picture.

When you look at unemployment data in many countries, it is often unreliable – particularly in third world countries, where it frequently does not include women. As such, if you are looking at an underdeveloped society, you can almost always add 10 to 15 percent to the official unemployment figures. When you see high unemployment and high population growth, as well as a society that is riven by ethnic or tribal differences, then that is the time to pay attention. You also look for what people are saying in those countries. Are there statements coming from groups that are essentially incitements to violence? That can be a precursor to genocide.

How do you determine that something like this is a threat? That is more difficult. It depends on where you stand. If your national policy is premised on the importance of human rights universally, then any one of these things is a threat to your interests.

If, on the other hand, human rights are not, in any practical sense, at the centre of your international strategic doctrine, then you are probably looking for concrete threats that you define in a hard-headed way as your interest. This, then, may cause you to distinguish between, say, Libya and Egypt, or Libya and Syria. Without minimizing at all the importance of what took place in Libya, it is now having secondary and tertiary consequences that were not apparent at the time. At that moment, one could not make the case that developments internally in Libya were central to US interests. They might have been central to European interests, given the degree to which many Europeans rely on Libyan energy. But when you look at a case like Egypt, which has upward of 85 million people, you have a highly populated country at the centre of the Arab world, where the Arab Spring effectively began in its most dramatic form (beyond the obviously important events that occurred in Tunisia prior to the Egyptian uprising). What you have at stake, then, is the survival of a values system that gained momentary expression in the Egyptian uprising.

That uprising was noteworthy for two reasons: first, it was internally driven; and second, it was about universal values that we all share, including freedom, the right to employment, freedom of the press, democracy, pluralism and equality among groups. That has not happened for a long time, if ever, in that part of the world.

The failure of this movement in Egypt is something that would clearly have the potential to impact all of our interests, because of the message that it would send across an entire region. Syria, similarly, is one of the keystones to establishing any kind of peaceful relationship between Israelis and Arabs. In its current state, it evidently cannot really contribute to a peaceful outcome.

The basic point is that determining what is strategically in your interests is very, very difficult. Take Rwanda in the mid-1990s. The US had not actively intervened in Rwanda prior to the genocide. Subsequently, President Clinton and all of his senior national security officials looked back and said with regret that we ought to have stepped in. Of course, it was understood in Washington that something horrible was happening in that country. One of the difficulties, as always, was to know where this was heading, and what the magnitude was going to be. At what point does something like that cross into the realm of strategic significance? It really does depend a lot on how your strategic doctrine conceptualizes human rights.

There are practical issues, too. In the West, we are all facing the practical issue of how to pay for interventions. You simply cannot pick up and deploy somewhere endlessly. That becomes too costly at some point. For the Middle East, another loose factor in all of our thinking about the region is the oil equation. This equation is changing rapidly and dramatically. The US is on its way toward virtual independence in natural gas within a foreseeable period of time. And when it comes to oil, the fracking process or drilling process changes that we are initiating are probably going to take us to the status of being a net exporter of oil in the not too distant future. We may not become totally independent, but our need for oil from foreign sources will decline.

GB: How is intelligence tradecraft changing in this early new century?

JM: There are two major, overarching changes at

For the rest of the Tête à Tête interview with

What is at stake is the survival of a values system that gained momentary expression in the Egyptian uprising. The failure of this movement in Egypt would have the potential to impact all of our interests, because of the message that it would send across the region.

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play, and then some minor ones. In terms of overarching considerations, the first one has to do with the absence of compelling organizing concepts – as I have mentioned. The Cold War concept of containment no longer applies. Without that sort of organizing concept today, you have to cover everything, in intelligence terms, because there is no obvious way of determining priorities. For example, during the Cold War, if the US was interested in Latin America or Africa, at a strategic level, then the dimension that overwhelmingly drew our attention was the nature and intensity of the relationship that those countries had with the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union was becoming interested in Nicaragua or Angola, then those countries suddenly became very

interesting to the US, and resources were mobilized in support of that interest and into those theatres.

Because that framework is gone, we now have to be interested in, and knowledgeable about, various societies for what they are in and of themselves. We have to take that knowledge down to the tribal level, the urban level and the cultural level. We therefore need intelligence specialists who have many more languages and far broader cultural acumen.

When the Soviet Union broke up, I was put in charge of the group that followed the former Soviet states. I had to move analysts who had spent their lives studying Russian into other realms. I had to get them to study Uzbek and Tajik and Arabic and other languages that they had not previously had to learn. We did that. In that sense, intelligence is actually doing rather well with languages these days. It has taken about 10 years – one might say even 20 years – to get to a generation of intelligence officers who are now coming in having figured out early in their lives that they need to learn a language other than the ones that we used in the Cold War. But again, there is no dominant organizing principle that allows us to say that we will cover country or region X and not country or region Y. However, if something happens in either of country X or Y – say, a terrorist attack that has ramifications beyond the locality, because of what it shows about the strength of the terrorist group and its relations cross-nationally and across networks with other terrorist groups – then we are going to have to pay attention. This happens periodically. It happened, for example, when East Timor gained its independence. This was an early harbinger of what was coming. All of a sudden, there was a major flare-up in East Timor that required the attention of our close Australian partners, and required Washington to be smart about what was going on there in order to offer assistance.

If the first point is that you have to cover everything, then the second point is that we are in the midst of the greatest technological revolution that any of us can remember. Perhaps if you were around in the Stone Age, technical change was equally remarkable then – that is, when someone figured out how to move to bronze, or how to move things with wheels. The current technological revolution spans every discipline. It is post-industrial, and the drivers are not heavy; they are light. The drivers are biology, information technology, nanotechnology – and also the combination of these three in different fields, and the synergy that develops among all of these new technologies. Technology, since the invention of the telegraph, has been the friend of intelligence. (continued )

John E. McLaughlin, visit: www.globalbrief.ca

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Russians don’t eat their children.

Nor do their former Soviet brethren.

Now, how do they govern this century?

Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher of Global Brief.

BY IRVIN STUDIN

GOVERNING

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IN THE EX-SOVIET SPACE

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ladimir Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He was perhaps exaggerating, on an analytical scale, but he hinted at one clear truth: Gorbachev did not intend or desire the disintegration of the USSR or the Soviet project. Far from it. After all, no competent head of state wills the failure of his or her state, whatever its pathologies – particularly the failure of a state of world-systemic consequence.

The hagiography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the West is a strange beast.

While Gorbachev’s instincts were manifestly progressive and reformist – seeking to blunt the extremes and idiosyncrasies of the Soviet system, and to make up a growing economic, strategic and legitimacy gap with the West – that he lost the Soviet state in toto speaks to gross incompetence, not heroism. At best, the heroism was accidental, and so the Russian people and Russian elites remain to this day properly bemused by the Western ascription of intense virtue to the last leader of the Soviet empire. And the Russians and their non-Russian post-Soviet brethren properly ask, some two decades after the fall of the USSR: what is good and competent governance in the post-USSR? Let us explore this question – first in strategic-geopolitical terms, and second in political terms.

All of the former Soviet space’s 15 states – from Russia in the east to the ‘stans’ in the middle, the Caucasian states in the south and the Baltic states in the west – live in the context of what Ukrainian strategist Grigoriy Sytnyk of Kiev’s Higher School of Public Administration has called the continuing disintegration of the USSR. This means that the structures, methods and, to be sure, psychology of Soviet governance and Soviet society are to this day still being unwound and disentangled. This is because the Soviet project not only created very peculiar (indeed, robust) algorithms of public administration, but also a very specific type of person – one who by the mid-1970s was being called ‘Soviet man’ – an ideal-type who had an identifiable mindset, values set, and risk-reward profile.

And because the Soviet Kremlin governed not only in the material frame, but so deeply and ruthlessly in the mental frame, it should come as little surprise that the construction of new national and state frameworks and ideologies in the post-Soviet space is still in a stage

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ILLUSTRATION: SARA TYSON

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of ‘quantum’ uncertainty – embryonic, stochastic, fragile. Post-Soviet man, in other words, is making up his future as he goes. And whether he succeeds or fails in fashioning for himself a post-Soviet telos is still an open and vexed question.

In seeding new institutions and engineering a new statecraft, the new generations of post-Soviets are living a strange paradox: in their struggle to invent the new, they often end up reinventing what once was – in the old USSR, of course – often in near-incomprehensible ignorance that such institutions, assets and capabilities ever existed (perverse ideology aside). Bref, not only are the populations of the post-Soviet states socially anomic (as Leonid Kosals of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics argued in GB’s Fall 2012 issue), but these same populations are also politically anomic in the most profound ways. The social anomie refers to the lack of credible moral authorities in most of the former Soviet states.

The political anomie means, not unrelatedly, that the post-Soviet generations have, in purging their systems of Soviet poison and rot, unconsciously discarded all that was successful in the Soviet system: the elite educational institutes, the institutions of high culture, the Nobel Prize-winning scientific projects, the sports machinery, and an advanced tradition of international strategy (again, Russian imperial brutality aside).

The challenge, therefore, for all of the post-Soviet states is to set legitimate and enduring psychological and institutional anchors for themselves – that is, to lay the constitutional and cultural groundwork for governance and for improving the welfare of the people over the course of the rest of the century. And yet only a handful of these postSoviet states will be successful in this pioneering task; that is, not all will survive over the long-term.

Geopolitically, nearly all of the former Soviet states continue to revolve, electron-like, around the Russian nucleus. (We leave aside, for the time being, the ‘strong force’ and ‘weak force’ dynamics within the Russian federation.) All of the current governing elites in these countries remain Russophilic and have deep networks of relationships – professional and personal – in Russia. If the three Baltic states are somewhat more Europe-leaning (indeed, full members of the EU and NATO), then the first imperative for all of the other states is to find the

right degree – the sweet spot, as it were – of distance versus proximity vis-à-vis Moscow. Total divorce is neither desirable nor, in truth, a serious option.

For Belarus and Kazakhstan, for example, a formal customs union with Russia has already been agreed (see the Feature article by Georgiy Voloshin at p. 38). Armenia, too, has just acceded to the customs union, not least because of Yerevan’s reliance on Moscow for military support in the matter of Nagorno-Karabakh (see Cabinet Room at p. 49). Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan may well also soon join the customs union. Ukraine, at nearly 46 million people the second largest of the post-Soviet states, has been invited and courted (carrots and sticks alike), as have other former Soviet states.

Even Georgia, in the post-Saakashvili era, has not closed the door on the union. In many cases, the grand strategy for many of these post-Soviet states is to dance promiscuously between the Russian and European poles, adding a third Chinese pole before long – if they can. If this dance is done well, it can give these smaller states critical marge de manœuvre; if not, these states will again before long become vassals to Moscow.

As for Russia itself, it quite obviously is the only country in the former Soviet system with significant strategic capacity (and a history of strategic extroversion), and indeed the tradition and will to use such capacity. There having miraculously been no great war at the collapse of the Soviet Union, there nevertheless ensued a large number of small inter-state and intra-state conflicts – some of which remain frozen or quasi-frozen today: NagornoKarabakh, as mentioned, but also, among others, Transnistria, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Only one real war has been launched by Russia since the collapse of the USSR – against Georgia for a few months in 2008.

This is a remarkable record of non-pugilism for a major power (Western powers have been far more aggressive in the post-Cold War era), but also unique for Russia over the course of its history. Whether it will endure remains to be seen.

Russian behaviour in the matter of Syria is instructive for understanding Moscow’s view of the world (see the Feature article by Peter Jones at p. 18).

Leaving aside Russian anti-Americanism and the numerous secondary motives for Russian resistance to Western pressure on Damascus (all countries naturally having many motives in international affairs), Russia is deeply concerned – more than Western countries – with systemic stability: that is, avoiding scenarios that, typically in contravention of international law, would put at strategic cross-purposes Russia and one or more other great powers (notably, the US, but also possibly China).

Russia in this sense puts a proper premium not only on internal stability (knowing that if Russia

collapses internally, the world changes), but also on an international order in which non-systemic wars – even if they shock the conscience – may be ignored or, in the alternative, treated as long as the treatment does not tend toward direct clash with the other major states. The reasoning behind this calculus is not uncompelling: as Russia knows all too well, great clashes between great powers lead to mass casualties, in many cases due to the systemic destabilization that comes from such military collision. And the casualties from such systemic clashes are very likely to be several orders of magnitude larger than the casualties that otherwise shock the conscience.

In the matter of Syria, then, for all of the caricatures of his position, and even if he has not altogether articulated the implied logic of this position, Putin has been essentially in the right. If President Obama argues for upholding the norm banning the use of chemical weapons in armed conflict, then Putin can be said to be upholding a perhaps even more important norm (that is, one that saves more lives, in the net) – to wit, the one that holds that great powers will not go to war against each other, and short thereof, will avoid crossing swords with one another, militarily.

O

All of the former Soviet space’s 15 states live in the context of what Ukrainian strategist Grigoriy Sytnyk of Kiev’s Higher School of Public Administration has called the continuing disintegration of the USSR.

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n Putin’s logic, the international system has, since the end of WW2, been premised on the idea that mutually contradicting vetoes in the UN Security Council among the great powers will help to prevent war between these same powers, and therefore avert catastrophic casualties (the legacy of the last century). It follows that if the US and Russia, or Russia and China, or China and the US, do not go to war, then we have success – on all hands, a rather de minimis standard of success. The world is, as a system, stable, and casualties (including civilian casualties) are minimized, although clearly not eliminated. If, on the other hand, lesser powers like, say, Canada and Demark (see Cabinet Room at p. 49), or Ecuador and Colombia, go to war, this may well be tragic, but there is no systemic or international-institutional imperative to stop such conflicts (possible breaches of international law notwithstanding). Similarly, if Syria implodes, resulting in mass civilian casualties, it may well be desirable to staunch these casualties (and morally distasteful to allow them to continue), but this is not systemically imperative, as long as the disintegration of Syria does not threaten to lead to war among great powers. And if any outside intervention in Syria threatens to issue in such war among great powers (as with, say, an American intervention that butts up against critical Russian or Chinese interests, perhaps resulting in

some clashes and cross-border spillovers that could escalate into full war), then such an intervention is systemically dangerous and is to be discouraged (on prudential grounds).

Politically, all of the former Soviet states have highly centralized, unitary structures inherited from the Soviet ‘power vertical’ system (imagine an ‘iron’ vector of constitutional power driven downward and outward, through the medium of presidential nominations, budgetary levers and administrative control, from the centre to the regions, oblasts and provinces of each state). This may suggest an inherent systemic democratic deficit of governance, but it also suggests that these states, from Uzbekistan to Turmenistan, may be easily ‘moved,’ as it were – to real democracy or, to be sure, its opposite. As such, an enlightened leader or leadership team may exploit the power-vertical system in order to quickly introduce new curricula and new laws, appoint new talent (provided it exists) and, with good geopolitical luck, apply sustained pressure to the national system in a way that is completely foreign to Western democracies. And, of course, it could also go the other way – a gifted, yet fundamentally devious leader could push the entire system to totalitarian ends with considerable rapidity.

In Russia, Putin has proved to be the most competent of all the post-Soviet leaders in using the power vertical to reconsolidate the centre (the Kremlin) and the prestige of Russia’s security class (the siloviki). Alas, having by his early second term achieved the goal of reconstituting the Russian state, he has now taken on a third mandate without any meaningful policy programme. And this, to be sure, is where he and Russia may be vulnerable over the medium-term: the absence of substantive reforms in the political-administrative, economic and social policy domains, having been masked for some time by high oil prices and a quite idiosyncratic brand of nationalism (most post-Soviet states having also developed idiosyncratic nationalist narratives for purposes of state-building), could well be exposed once the commodity markets turn. Indeed, this could make Russia ripe for catastrophic systemic collapse – a disaster for Russia, the former Soviet space, and likely the world.

Ukraine is another important case study. Contrary to appearances, it is, after the three Baltic states, the post-Soviet space’s most democratic country.

However, it also has among the least developed cultures of self-governance among these same states.

Having enjoyed little more than a single year of true self-government – in the event, between 1918 and 1919, under history professor-turned president Mikhail Grushevsky – before its independence at the fall of the USSR, it is by no means manifest that Ukraine will or should continue to exist as a self-governing state in the decades to come. Its survival dance is exceedingly delicate. The Ukrai-

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The relevant question or ‘frame’ for gauging the future of Ukraine is not democracy versus nondemocracy – but rather pioneering competence versus the absence thereof.

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nian state must still be stood up, and the country’s future must be secured. Whether this happens will depend to a great extent on the skill and luck of Kiev’s governing classes.

As such, the relevant question or ‘frame’ for gauging the future of Ukraine is not democracy versus non-democracy – but rather pioneering competence versus the absence thereof. The lack of a deep tradition of Ukrainian self-government means that, since the disintegration of the Soviet governing class (which once tended to poach the very best and brightest Ukrainians in the service of Moscow), Ukraine has had to spend the last 20 years creating (or finding) its own governing class virtually ex nihilo. Such manufacturing of ‘elites’ is happening, with varying degrees of success and seriousness, in many of the former Soviet republics, from Armenia to Kazakhstan, with former communist party schools and institutions being converted, with some connivance from the state and private capital (and foreign advice), into public service academies and universities intended to form the future governing elites of these countries.

Can Kiev project strategic-constitutional legitimacy across the entire territory of a state the coherence of which, in identity terms, is not yet affirmed, and the material well-being of which remains unimpressive and vulnerable? Or will the country – along with Belarus, the most ethnically, linguistically and psychologically close state to Russia – reduce to a strategic cripple, buffeted between larger powers and perhaps even seeking refuge with one of these (most likely Russia)?

So democracy is not the project in Ukraine. It is competence to govern. Viktor Yanukovytch, the current president, and Yulia Tymoshenko, the jailed former prime minister, are not respectively autocrat and democrat – far from it. The same can be said, grosso modo, for former president Viktor Yushchenko, of Orange Revolution fame. All are members of a transitional generation of rulers who still largely embody Soviet political values, Soviet administrative and patronage methods, and a still-Soviet mentality.

They face the same governing choices, and come with teams that are hardly differentiable in their world views – pragmatic, hard-nosed, nervous. They are all, however, nationalists (proud Ukrainians, that is): all, including Yanukovych, are EU-leaning, but perfectly cold-blooded about the significance of Russia – geopolitically, economically, culturally and psychically. Indeed, an apocryphal story has a high-ranking official in Yanukovych’s Presidential Administration (cabinet office) recounting a recent meeting between Yanukovych and Putin. Asked how it went, he explained: “They went their way, and we went ours.”

A clean break from Russia is not recommended.

It is not only strategic madness (even Russian

military action against Ukraine is not excluded in such a scenario), but strategically and psychically near-impossible: the imaginaries of the major cities, from Kiev to Odessa, and Dniepropetrovsk to Kharkov, remain largely Russian. But if a break from Russia is not wise, then a pivot toward Europe is commendable. The recently initialled EU-Ukraine Association Agreement suggests that Kiev is properly on its way in this regard. Moscow will apply a contrary pressure, as is its wont. Kiev will have to resist without losing the relationship – all the while inching toward Brussels and European respectability. In other words, it will have to dance for its life.

A

s I wrote in GB’s Winter 2 0 1 3 i s s u e, t h e p o s t Soviet space is, along with the Middle East (see the In Situ a r t i c l e by Sam Sasan Shoamanesh at p. 6), Africa (see the In Situ article by François Boutin-Dufresne at p. 32) and Latin America, in full voyeuristic mode as its capitals study the best practices from what may be termed Western ‘rule by argument’ and also the increasingly influential Sinophilic ‘rule by algorithm.’ If they are smart, the emerging class of post-Soviet leaders will be maximally promiscuous – adopting best practices with little regard to ideology and erstwhile notions of good versus evil. They will seek their legitimacy not in pure democracy as legitimated by Western observers (see the Orange Revolution debacle of a decade ago), but likely in some species of hybrid governance – the specifics of which are yet to be divined – that combines the outcomes-oriented, algorithmic technocracy of the East and the stabilizing decentralization (and federalism) and rights culture – that is, argument – of the West.

The algorithmic paradigm will give them their new-century expert and planning class, and they will need to slowly but surely delegate political and administrative power away from the ‘vertical’ in order to have enough information and ‘argument’ (from the people) to properly plan, and enough buy-in to execute plans on the ground.

In some sense, then, what happens in the former Soviet space and in these other voyeur theatres will tell us what state governance will look like in our time. And so the Soviet model, which continues its slow disentanglement, cannot be discarded outright: rather, the new post-Soviet leaders will, in order to be successful, have to be, Janus-like, at once quasi-Soviet and quasi-modern. They will have to reach backward in order to bring their countries forward, shrewdly assimilating the lessons of other transitional success stories in order to advance their purposes. | GB

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ILLUSTRATION: COLIN JOHNSON

It’s a tale of three transitions – none obviously to democracy – and it’s hardly begun

BY PETER JONES he ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected government by a military coup – for that is what it was, even if the US government hesitates to say so officially – and the subsequent crackdown on Islamist political movements raises the spectre that the so-called Arab Spring has ended. On this logic, we will look back on the last two years as having been a brief interlude during which the prospect of democratic governance made a tentative appearance before the region reverted decisively to its old ways of repression and cronyism.

This logic may well prove true. Still, in the long view of things, it is simply too soon to declare one trend or another as being the way forward. Certainly, for instance, events in Egypt make clear that the path to a transformation of the region will not be a steady or smooth one (see the Tête à Tête interview with Jean Charest at p. 26). Of course, no one who follows the region seriously ever really expected it to be so (see the Tête à Tête interview with John E. McLaughlin at p. 8). Indeed, no profound transformation of any region’s political order was ever accomplished clinically or cleanly, and there is no reason to have expected that the Arab Spring would be exceptional in this regard. For what is happening across the Arab world are three separate, but closely interrelated, transformations.

Each transformation would, taken on its own, be a significant challenge to the Arab world’s stability.

Taken together, these three transformations are shaking the Arab world to its core – with potential consequences for global stability.

Peter Jones is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is also Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

IS THE

ARAB SPRING OVER

For almost a full century, the nation-state system of the Middle East was primarily a creation of the European powers acting in the wake of WW1. These powers, particularly France and the UK, made many different promises to many different people during WW1. However, the only promises that they substantially kept were the ones that they made to themselves and each other in the form of the Sykes-Picot agreement. That agreement essentially divided up much of the Middle East into spheres of influence for Paris and London – an arrangement that was eventually formalized in the form of mandates under the League of Nations. When the dust had settled at Versailles, Britain held the mandate over what would become Israel, Jordan and Iraq, and France over today’s Lebanon and Syria.

Within their respective areas of the Middle East, France and the UK quickly established various nations-in-being in order to further their own interests. To run these nations, Paris and London rewarded local families and groups who had

?

TRANSFORMATION 1

The End of the PostWW1 Regional Order

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Some realized that any map of the region that made sense in terms of its ethnic and tribal realities would have to be quite different.

The famous T.E. Lawrence drew a map (above) that he believed would more accurately reflect reality on the ground.

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supported them during the war. These nations have largely endured to this day, though some of the families who ruled them initially have not.

Nevertheless, these nations were not founded on any deep understanding of the region’s tribal or ethnic realities. This was often the case in many other regions, where colonialism redrew maps in its own interests. Perhaps there was a degree of understanding of regional realities among certain experts of the Middle East, but no one in power in either London or Paris at the time really cared.

Certainly, it is clear that some realized that any map of the region that made sense in terms of its ethnic and tribal realities would have to be quite different. The famous T.E. Lawrence, for example, drew a map that he believed would more accurately reflect reality on the ground.

But it was not to be. Out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, nations like Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and others were eventually to be seeded according to European needs and preferences, as well as those of their local allies.

Many of these new nations came to be ruled by families or groups that saw repression of the others within their borders as the only way to keep their state together and, more importantly, to retain their own supremacy within it. Some made Faustian pacts with various religious groups in order to substantiate and justify their rule. All of this militated against the creation of any kind of comprehensive state nationalism beyond tribe, sect and family – even though many of the states sought to portray and legitimize themselves internationally as broadly representing a wider set of ‘peoples.’

The Arab Spring has unleashed forces that now threaten to tear many of these nations apart. Certainly, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon in the former mandate area are in this category; also Yemen and Libya (countries subject to similar historical pressures and processes); and possibly others besides. How could it be otherwise? If the various groups within these states that have been suppressed are to be given a free voice in determining their futures, it is reasonable to assume that many of them will use that voice to leave the states of which they never wanted to be a part – states that have repressed them for many years. And if these states try to stop them from doing so, there is a good chance that there will be bloodshed. That is what is happening in Syria now, and has been happening in Iraq (see

my Nez à Nez debate with Shuvaloy Majumdar in GB’s Spring/Summer 2011 issue on whether the USled war in Iraq helped to usher in the Arab Spring).

Of course, not all of the nations that are in danger of coming apart will ultimately do so. Central authority may prove far more resilient than expected; the so-called ‘deep state,’ comprised of interwoven security service and economic elites, may in the end prevail. But we are in for a bloody period as some nations are tested. Other ruling elites in the region, who fear the possibility that a contagion of disintegration may take hold and eventually threaten their own states, have joined the fight, trying to prop up states in danger of collapse. And forces that thrive in situations of chaos, such as radical Islam, will prosper in the unsettled conditions that will mark the era.

It is all a highly combustible mix. One thing is likely: the map of the Middle East that we have known for the past 80 years is going to change. Old nations will disintegrate, and new ones will be born.

None of it will be easy, or pretty.

Intimately tied to the chaos that will attend Transformation One, the Arab political order is also likely to undergo significant change. Based as it has been on strong families or groups ruling weak states through intimidation, corruption and fear, and demanding fealty from their populations rather than winning their loyalty, the Arab political order has been weak – in both structural and legitimacy terms – for many years. Demands from ‘the people’ for a greater say in political life cannot but challenge the very existence of this order.

If one had to try to sum up the aspirations that most Arabs have invested in the Arab Spring in a single word, it would be ‘dignity.’ For too long, ordinary Arabs have believed that they have been oppressed by corrupt autocrats propped up by outside powers – autocrats who have sought to so control their lives that they could not live in said dignity; could not provide properly for themselves or their families; and could not make the kinds of ordinary choices about their future that most adults in the developed world take for granted. Not for nothing was all of this begun by a Tunisian street vendor who set himself alight in protest after being humiliated once too often by a corrupt petty official.

If the Arab people are to achieve real dignity, then the governments that have stood in their way will have to change very substantially, or go.

But what is to replace them? That is not yet clear. The case of Egypt has shown that democracy requires democratic institutions – notably political parties that can channel large and somewhat diverse groups into organized constituencies that can TRANSFORMATION 2

The End of the Arab Political Order

compete for, and exercise, power. In the aftermath of the Mubarak government, the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organized group in the game.

If other forces in Egyptian society are to compete for power – assuming democracy is given another chance – they must similarly organize themselves into broad political movements that are capable of campaigning for, and holding, power on a national scale. There seems little evidence of this yet. Egypt, the bellwether of the region, is pockmarked by many small groups competing with each other for the same ideological-organizational space, rather than cooperating to form coalitions that can compete for power and hold it.

In most Arab countries, these same intellectual divisions also exist, but are exacerbated by deep religious, tribal and ethnic divides, which have in turn been manipulated and magnified for many years by ruling elites to justify their authoritarian grip on power. Divide and rule has been the norm of government in this part of the world for decades.

It is far more likely, at least in the near-term, that these religious and ethnic forces will pull countries apart than that credible national political movements – that is, movements capable of integrating different groups into a composite national political order – will emerge. Once again, then, forces are conspiring to challenge the stability of many of the existing states of the region.

The Transformation of the Outside Role in the Region

or may not be true in any objective sense; what matters is that it is increasingly widely perceived to be true. Europe is seen as a paper tiger in all but economic terms – and even then scarcely capable of unified action. Others, such as China, may be on the rise, but it will be a long time, if ever, before China can decisively intervene in the region. (As Beijing’s involvement in Africa has shown, China is as fundamentally self-interested in its interventions as any other power has been throughout history).

As a result, for the first time in over a century, the region may be in a position where it will have to look primarily to itself to shape its future. Coming at a time when the integrity of some countries is in doubt, this adds up to a disquieting period in store.

For many decades, the peoples of the region have avoided hard decisions and blamed outsiders for their lot, in a resigned way, as a means of avoiding responsibility for their futures. This may now be over.

Enemies of the current order are excited, though they do not appear to have anything with which to replace it in a way that will match the aspirations of the people: the Muslim Brothers, for example, are fundamentally about replacing one kind of autocracy with another. Those who have profited from the existing order are deeply worried that they are about to be abandoned. For example, the Saudi royal family interpreted the Obama administration’s decision to ‘abandon’ the Mubarak government in Egypt as a sign that America will no longer stand by its regional allies.

The Way Ahead

Of course, we must not succumb to a sense that the collapse of the entire region is inevitable or even likely. Even though it seems possible that some countries in the region (such as Syria, Iraq and Libya) will break apart – and that this will be messy and difficult – many other countries will muddle along. More democratic (or at least representative) systems may well emerge in some Arab countries (Tunisia, Jordan, and perhaps eventually Egypt), and could show the way to others. And there are some

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Finally, what seems to be underway as part of the package of changes that we call the Arab Spring concerns the role of outside powers in the area. This role is far less certain today than it has been at any time in the previous century. Beginning with the British, then the US and, to a lesser extent, the USSR during the Cold War (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin at p. 12), outside powers have played a key role in the Middle East. Though they have not been able to shape the region entirely to their liking, these powers have propped up certain regimes, and have been the lodestars around which others have organized their resistance to the prevailing order.

That may now be changing. Many in the region perceive the power of the US to affect the region’s future as being on the wane. The willingness and/or the ability of the US to intervene decisively in the Middle East on behalf of friends or against foes is seen as being on the decline across the region. This is because of a combination of military/ economic exhaustion, a growing interest in pivoting to the Asia-Pacific region and, increasingly, changing perspectives in the US itself brought about by new extraction technologies that promise to make the US self-sufficient in energy. The decline may TRANSFORMATION 3

For the first time in over a century, the region may be in a position where it will have to look primarily to itself to shape its future. Coming at a time when the integrity of some countries is in doubt, this adds up to a disquieting period in store.

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Building linkages with Chinese academic institutions Conducting research on Canada-China relations, especially in the investment and energy sectors

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Fostering scholarship and joint research on China’s global role

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www.china.ualberta.ca

china@ualberta.ca

powerful institutions that have been built up in at least some Arab countries – not least the military – which will try to keep things together and reasonably coherent.

But a prolonged and messy period awaits the entire region. In such situations, those who thrive on chaos have an opportunity, and they will try to seize it. Those in Iran, for instance, who seek to destabilize the region for their own purposes, will likely be unable to resist the temptation. But, even here, the picture is not a clear one. One trend that is likely is an intensification of the sectarian and ethnic splits that characterize the region.

While some Iranian leaders and factions have ambitions to influence and even dominate the region, and may have some allies throughout the region who share that goal, the events of the Arab Spring have tended to accentuate the divides that separate Shiites and Sunnis. This is resulting in further isolation for Tehran – something that may or may not be mitigated or reversed under new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (see the In Situ article by Sam Sasan Shoamanesh at p. 6). The fighting in Syria, which has seen Iran come to the aid of a non-Sunni regime that is slaughtering the majority Sunni population, has caused many throughout the Arab world to dismiss Iran’s propaganda to the effect that the events of the past few years are part of an ‘Islamic Awakening’ – led by Tehran.

W

hat we have learned from recent events in Egypt is that we should resist the impulse to imagine that an apparent transition to democracy has taken place in any country when one or two elections have been held. It will take much more than that. As has been the case in other regions of the world, certain fundamentals must exist for true democracy to flourish. These include such vital, but unsexy things as the rule of law, a relatively uncorrupt judiciary, property rights, minority rights, freedom of the press, and so on. Such things must exist on more than paper, and must begin to endure. This is the real challenge faced by the Arab world – a region in which these things have only a slight purchase, if any purchase at all.

Outside powers can help in these transitions. Indigenous groups seeking to make them can be gently helped (though not too overtly, lest they be imprisoned for being ‘agents’ of foreign powers). But let us not overplay the role of such outside assistance. The region is going to have to go through most of this by itself, and suffer the dislocations and hardships of any great period of historical transition. Gradually, those few countries that do get it right will prosper, and the many that do not will fall further and further behind (or collapse altogether).

That in itself may serve as the lesson that impels change more broadly.

The Arab Spring is hardly over. In fact, it has scarcely begun. | GB

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QUERY

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent

What Role for the World Cup in the Arab Spring?

Less than a year from Brazil 2014, in Egypt and Turkey alike, the stadiums give the pulse of the protests and the people

BY JAMES M. DORSEY

World of Middle

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East Soccer blog.

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A

soccer brawl last year in which more than 70 militant soccer fans died galvanized significant numbers of Egyptians against the military and security forces.

The brawl accelerated the military’s desire to turn power over to an elected government.

Eighteen months later, mass protests, involving Muslim Brothers, non-Brothers and street battle-hardened soccer fans took place to oppose the military ouster of elected president Mohamed Morsi and the subsequent brutal crackdown on the Brotherhood. Both the coup and the crackdown were backed by a significant segment of Egyptian society.

The resistance to military rule and the security

forces by many soccer fans and Egyptian soccer fans the youth groups that formed of the Al Ahly club the backbone of the popular demonstrate in front uprising that forced Hosni of the team in Cairo, Mubarak out of office in early March, 2013.

2011 is again visible. Today, this is a resistance that has been adopted by a far wider part of the Egyptian public, and indeed reinforced by what many Egyptians perceive to be a restoration of some of the repressive features of the Mubarak era. In other words, even if Morsi had succeeded in becoming widely reviled after only a year in office, the return of the capricious security force brutality that was one of the main drivers of Mubarak’s removal has the soccer ultras exercised.

This has been evident in various forms of violent pro-Morsi protests inside and outside of Egypt’s soccer stadiums.

The impact of soccer fans is, of course, not exclusive to Arab autocracies. It is also felt in the region’s illiberal democracies – the possible direction of Turkey, for instance. Egyptian strongman General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan see their critics in the same terms: as terrorists who need to be harshly subdued.

Soccer fans rank high on both their agendas.

Both Egypt and Turkey remain deeply polarized.

Public opinion is fluid. Backing in Egypt for the coup PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / AMR NABIL

against Morsi is fragile and conditional. Cracks in that support have manifested themselves despite a significant number of Egyptians egging on the military and the security forces to be even tougher in their crackdown on the Brotherhood.

By the same token, Egypt’s deep polarization has not left the militant soccer fans untouched. The crisis in Egyptian soccer was famously amplified by last year’s deadly brawl in Port Said. And while the ultras as organizations have refrained from joining the fray, many of their members and leaders have, reflecting the gamut of political views in their ranks.

For instance, in a twist of irony, many Ultras White Knights (UWK) joined the pro-Morsi protests. The UWK is a fan group of storied Cairo club Al Zamalek SC, which traces its roots to support of the monarchy that was toppled by the military coup in 1952 and replaced by Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser became the club’s president and brutally repressed the Brotherhood.

T

The crisis in Egyptian soccer was amplified by last year’s deadly brawl in Port Said.

While the ultras as organizations have refrained from joining the fray, many of their members have, reflecting the gamut of political views in their ranks.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

he arch rivals of the UWK, Ultras Ahlawy, the fan group of Al Ahly SC – historically the nationalist club – issued their first antiBrotherhood statement in more than a year, weeks into the current crackdown. The statement ended the group’s silence in respect of the government while Morsi was in office. By refraining from attacking the government, Ahlawy had hoped that harsh verdicts would be served in the trial of those responsible for the deaths in Port Said. Ahlawy got only partial satisfaction: while 21 supporters of Port Said’s Al Masry SC were sentenced to death, seven of the nine security officials were acquitted.

“The ultras have become fascists. Like Egypt, they have collapsed. They have no values and no real beliefs,” said one former ultras leader, who left his group in protest at the political turn that it had taken.

In a perverse way, the difficulty of Egyptian and Turkish ultras in defining themselves is not dissimilar to that of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has yet to make up its mind as to whether it is a social or a political movement. That decision may become easier if it survives the crackdown and emerges strong enough one day to negotiate the terms of a political solution to Egypt’s crisis – a prospect that, to be sure, appears increasingly unlikely.

The Egyptian and Turkish ultras, for their part, refuse to acknowledge that they are as much about politics as they are about soccer. Their battle in Egypt for freedom in the stadiums and their prominent role in the toppling of Mubarak, as well as their opposition to the military rulers that succeeded him and the Morsi government, made them political by definition. Those who populated their rank and file were united in their support for their club and their deep-seated animosity toward the security forces.

Alas, they were united on little else.

The ultras’ fate could change if Egypt continues down the road on which it has embarked – that of a restoration of Mubarak’s police state. Repression with little more than a democratic façade could again turn stadiums into political battlefields. The former ultra again: “I’m afraid of the return of the military state. That is not what I fought for in the stadiums and in Tahrir Square. I’m also afraid of the Brotherhood. It’s a choice between two evils. If you ask me now, I’d opt for the military, but that could well change once this is all over.”

The Turkish ultras have one leg up on their Egyptian counterparts. Carsi, the support group of Istanbul’s Besiktas JK, with a massive following across the country, traces its roots to the far left and positions itself as anarchist. Still, despite having wholeheartedly embraced massive anti-Erdogan protests last June in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, they, like the Egyptians, are responding to the backlash by insisting on their pro-forma apolitical nature – this after 20 of their numbers were charged with belonging to an illegal organization.

Neither the government nor the ultras have illusions. Both are preparing for confrontations this fall and into the new year – not in Taksim, but in the stadiums and the universities. The prospect of renewed protests has prompted the Erdogan government to announce measures that could have been taken from Al Sisi’s playbook. They include replacing private security forces in stadiums and on campuses with police forces; banning the chanting of political slogans during soccer matches; requiring clubs to force spectators to sign a pledge to abide by the ban before attending a game; and cancelling scholarships for students who participate in antigovernment protests.

To drive home the message that protest equals terrorism, a video issued by the Anti-Terrorism Office in Ankara warned that protests were the first step toward terrorism. The 55-second video featuring a young woman demonstrator-turned suicide bomber warned the public that “our youth, who are the guarantors of our future, can start with small demonstrations of resistance that appear to be innocent, and after a short period of time, can engage without a blink in actions that may take the lives of dozens of innocent people.”

As in Egypt, Erdogan’s efforts to squash further protests are failing. Fans have been reminding the government that the battle is not over – and indeed may only have just begun – when they chant during the matches, demanding political resignations: “Everywhere Is Taksim Square! Everywhere Is Resistance!” It is a slogan that the Brotherhood has adopted as it has launched regular, smaller-scale protests across Cairo and the rest of Egypt – a tactical evolution meant to avoid the massive demonstrations that risk ending in a bloodbath. | GB

25

TÊTE À TÊTE

Dancing Between Centre and Periphery GB talks politics, tactics and federalprovincial-international futures with the former Quebec Premier JEAN CHAREST

Jean Charest is the former premier of Quebec and partner at McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Montreal.

GB: Where do you see Quebec in the year 2020?

JC: I see Quebec as part of Canada. There is little doubt about that. I see Quebec as being the entry point for Europe into North America – in part because of the success of the Canada-EU economic partnership that, I hope, will be finalized in the coming weeks. And I see Quebec as a place that will be an example of the proper northern development of resources and protection of the North’s delicate environment more generally. Take my government’s Plan Nord. It involved the biggest conservation project in history, with the protection of some 600,000 square kilometres of land. This is where I see Quebec – as a real energy powerhouse beyond just the rhetoric of clean, renewable energy.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

GB: What about the internal composition of Quebec? How do you see that changing over the next couple of decades?

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JC: The identity issue will still be around in Quebec 20 years from now – even 40 and 60 years from now.

Its character and intensity will vary, of course. I hope that, through all of the trials and tribulations, we in Quebec will have been able to move toward a society that is more and more inclusive. Through trial and error, we more or less came to a consensus – including on language questions. Now that consensus is being questioned by this new provincial government.

I am very worried about the consequences of this government’s recent moves, including in respect of the Charter of Quebec Values – because this is being done not for high motives. It is being done for very partisan motives: to divide the population, rather than find some consensus and common ground.

But to return to your question: the national question will be with us for many years to come. I just hope that it will unite us more than it will divide us.

GB: What about Canada in the year 2020? Where do you see it in the global context?

JC: The demographics of Quebec will be interesting, because we will have demonstrated through policies that government can indeed affect demographic trends. Our government, for instance, did this through different policies aimed at helping women to enter the labour market – something that is critical given our ageing population. One of the outcomes of our policies was an increase in the provincial birth rate. The other piece of the demographic policy puzzle, for the times, is how we deal with people who are older and living longer (and in better health) in order to ensure that they are choosing to participate in the labour force. In the last few years, we introduced universal daycare, as well as a very progressive parental leave programme – as much for women as for men. We introduced family allowances. As a result, there was an increase in the number of women participating in the provincial labour market.

I should say that we also reduced poverty. The family allowance programme is weighted heavily in favour of low-income families. This has had a marked effect on the poverty levels in Quebec.

JC: This country has to get a lot more ambitious in respect of how it positions itself in the world (see the Feature article by Irvin Studin at p. 50). We need to realize that no one wakes up in the morning and thinks: “We should do a deal with Canada today.”

This is simply the reality of our world. We are small in relative population. We have extraordinary resources and attributes. But Canada has to carve out a place for itself. And that includes making major investments in infrastructure that will attract people and investments. We should have built a high-speed train between Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto a long time ago. We also need to build up our ports, airports, and indeed the North. The North is going to become a major issue for Canada, given climate change and the opening up of the new sea routes (see the Feature article by Michael Byers at p. 44).

These new maritime routes in the North and Arctic will be a major political and strategic issue for future generations. This will have a profound effect on us: we need to get our heads around it, understand what it means, and protect our interests.

GB: What about the identity or even national question in Quebec?

GB: Which countries impress you most in respect of how they manage federalism?

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / RYAN REMIORZ

One of basic tenets around which we all need to get our heads is that a country like Canada is, for all practical intents and purposes, run by the provinces. The day-to-day operations of Canada are driven not by the federal government, but rather by the provinces: daycare, education, roads, civil law – all of these are run by the provinces. This will not change. The federal government plays an important holding role – to be sure. But it makes great sense that we should have a Senate that is able to speak, in a balanced way, to the more regional forces in the country.

GB: What is the role of central authority, in the 21st century, in a territorially huge country?

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

JC: Germany is probably the country to which I look most in terms of how power is shared between the Länder and the federal government. I like the format by which the Länder have representation in the federal parliament. I believe in a bicameral system.

In that sense, I am quite distraught by the current debate in Ottawa on the Senate. Expense account abuses have now brought us to the point where we are willing to revisit the very basic foundations of federalism. I find it quite distressing to see the very low level of thought given to all of this by our political leaders. After all, the Senate was created for very specific reasons – and it serves its original purposes well. To think, also, that we are considering eliminating the Senate altogether when all serious people know that this cannot happen, constitutionally speaking, unless the provinces readily agree.

We in Quebec more or less came to a consensus – including on language questions. Now that is being questioned by this new provincial government.

This is being done for very partisan motives: to divide the population, rather than find some consensus and common ground.

27

JC: Its role is to coordinate a number of policies that should be universally available across the country, and to create the conditions that promote such coordination. Health care mobility is one such policy.

Internal trade is another one. Everything that needs a central vision and effort to allow a seamless framework of policies in the country to be implemented is where the federal government has a legitimate role. In the case of Canada, the federal government has a role in terms of allowing us as Canadians to have a sense of country – of who we are, and what are our shared values. Of course, there are a lot of shared values that unite us. (Unfortunately, the real sense of country that the federal government ought to be promoting is something of which I do not see much these days.) Finally, of course, the federal government has a very important role in projecting Canada to the outside world – through diplomacy, defence and other means.

Ottawa has tended to work from the assumption that the provinces are going to go out there and say something contrary to Canada’s interests or, in a worstcase scenario, that a péquiste government will get elected and say crazy things.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

GB: Is there a linguistic competence issue in Canada, compared with other leading countries?

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JC: We have some clear linguistic advantages. English has become the dominant language of business.

That is an advantage for us. Canada also has this extraordinary asset of a second language – French.

This gives us much broader reach in the world than many other countries. Canadians have very little understanding of how much this bilingual reality advantages us, and how much potential it gives us as a country. I have seen this both politically and in a personal way in business. In fact, I just finished negotiating an agreement in Senegal for a Canadian mining company. The fact that I speak French and know the Francophonie well was a major part of the reason for which I was retained to do this job.

As for a possible third language, I should say that Spanish has a not inconsiderable footprint in Quebec. My two daughters have learned Spanish.

And the policy sell within Quebec on language is quite interesting: the pitch must be that we as a society need to learn not just two languages, but also three languages. English is perfectly fine, then, because it is packaged in the context of trilingual-

ism, not bilingualism. The pitch would be: we should be learning Spanish. But to get to Spanish, we have to go through English. In that sequence, English becomes more acceptable to Quebeckers.

If we speak only about learning English, however, then we are apparently being assimilated.

GB: What is the appropriate role of the provinces in international affairs, if the federal government has the presumptive lead on foreign policy?

JC: We should start with the basics: in the Canadian constitutional framework, the federal government has the ability to negotiate international agreements and treaties, but cannot commit a province to implement aspects of such agreements and treaties in that province’s areas of jurisdiction. So it is in the interest of the federal government to organize itself in such a way that the provinces are at the table when international negotiations happen. In principle, the federal government is not doing this.

It has done this in the case of the current CanadaEU trade negotiations only because the Europeans forced Ottawa to bring the provinces to the table.

Brussels made this a deal-breaker, because it knew that it wanted a comprehensive partnership and trade agreement, and that on issues like government procurement and many others, if the provinces were not present, then the deal would not be comprehensive and credible. Of course, the federal government does not have the option of rewriting the Constitution when it negotiates. But let me be clear: the federal government has not to date been up to the task of getting the provinces actively and seriously involved in international negotiations.

I myself have done a lot with Quebec internationally. I have had no inhibitions about being present, and this posture has served the interests of both Quebec and Canada. I have not seen the problem of encroachment. Instead, what I have seen is insecurity in Ottawa. Frankly, I think that Ottawa does not understand. It does not practice the federalism that the country has adopted in a lot of policy areas – including in international relations. This is because Ottawa has tended to work from the assumption that the provinces are going to go out there and say something contrary to Canada’s interests or, in a worst-case scenario, that a péquiste government will get elected and will proceed to say crazy things.

GB: Is there a role for regional or provincial governments in questions of war and peace?

JC: Less, I think. There are provincial or regional views on these matters, but policy questions in relation to war and peace – on national defence, for instance – are clearly within federal jurisdiction.

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IN THE BOARDROOM

ILLUSTRATION: DUSAN PETRICIC

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

But let us expand the logic a little with an example.

If the federal government decides to get involved in, say, Haiti and to implement an aid programme, then we can rightly ask: where is Ottawa going to find the police officers who speak French and who will go to Haiti on a nine-month mission to train the Haitian police or security forces? Where is Ottawa going to find doctors and nurses to send? Answer: Ottawa clearly needs the cooperation of Quebec and the other provinces to accomplish many of its foreign policy goals. This applies to basic issues of national security as well, even if the constitutional lead in this domain is clearly federal.

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GB: What is political leadership over the next 10 to 15 years? What are its basic characteristics?

JC: It is to anticipate change, and to make that change work for you. It is the ability to really look ahead, and to bring people to a destination: to rally them to a plan – to a project that advances the interests of the whole society. In a more negative

way, political leadership is the ability to recognize that public opinion is not static. Leaders have the ability to influence and to actually persuade people of the value of their ideas, as opposed to simply trying to surf on the waves of public preferences.

(Of course, we see a lot of this surfing today in politics. This is very discouraging, as it does not advance things.) To be sure, some leaders have to have the ability to stand up to public opinion that is contrary to their beliefs. They have to be ready to fight for their convictions. Otherwise, what is the point of running for office? What is the point of running for office if the main objective is simply to get into office? I thought that the main point of running for office was to defend ideas, and to gain support for those ideas.

GB: What is the appropriate trade-off or tension between democracy and technical expertise in a 21st century state?

JC: That is a very interesting and complex question

GB: What is the best way to keep a complex country like Canada united – particularly in respect of the Quebec question – in this new century?

JC: There are two things for which all minorities strive: recognition and respect. Minorities want to live in a place that they recognize, and where they feel that they are respected. Consider Canada’s First Nations (see the Feature article

by Douglas Sanderson in GB’s Spring/Summer 2013 issue). What do the First Nations look for?

Answer: recognition and respect. It is not about money or more political or constitutional power.

In the end, it is about the sense that they are recognized and respected. This requires an effort by society to ensure that minorities are recognized not only in speech and words, but in deeds.

That is the thing that Quebec has sought most within Canada. And this has not always been understood. Indeed, there has been a failure on the part of a number of Canadians to understand this basic reality. | GB

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for those of us who believe in democracy. In looking at some of China’s successes and the Arab Spring’s disappointments (see the Feature article by Peter Jones at p. 18), we are learning about ourselves. We are learning that the belief that the democracy we experience and in which we so strongly believe is instantly exportable is naïve. In modern democracies, there is first and foremost a culture of democracy.

That culture of democracy is not something that you can just hand over to someone else. It needs to be nurtured and developed, and taught and adopted. If it is not, then other societies will not live by the same rules and norms that we enjoy. As such, there is now a sudden realization for many of us in the West to the effect that we were probably pretentious in our view that democracy is what is right for everyone else. We believe in democracy, yes. But that is not enough to make democracy automatically right and appropriate for other societies – again, in the absence of these enabling conditions. Democracy must be developed over time. It cannot simply be imposed or transferred.

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L’Afrique du Sud a mal

IN SITU

Économie devancée par le Nigeria, taux de criminalité extraordinaire, mise en branle du rêve de réconciliation – les mauvais signes s’accumulent pour les élections de 2014 FRANÇOIS BOUTIN-DUFRESNE depuis Johannesburg

François Boutin-Dufresne est économiste en finance et affaires internationales basé à

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Washington DC.

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’arrivée à Johannesburg est saisissante.

L’avion descend doucement au-dessus des terres fertiles du cône sud de l’Afrique pour ensuite survoler les gated communities qui ceinturent la métropole du pays. Signes d’inégalités économiques et sociales grandissantes, ces villeschampignons poussent autour des grandes villes pour assurer la sécurité des plus riches, qui composent un pour cent de la population – souvent blancs, mais de plus en plus noirs. Il est vrai que le taux de criminalité en Afrique du Sud demeure l’un des plus élevés au monde. Le centre-ville de Johannesburg, légèrement décrépit, rappelle fortement le Rust Belt des États-Unis: il est fortement déconseillé d’y marcher dans ses rues, et ce, même en plein jour.

L’Afrique du Sud a mal. La mise en branle du rêve de réconciliation nationale de Nelson Mandela tire de l’aile. Les promesses de la jeune démocratie née en 1994 ne se sont pas encore réalisées. Même la venue de la Coupe du Monde de 2010, qui pourtant annonçait un renouveau, n’a rien pu y faire (voir l’article Query de James M. Dorsey à la page 24).

Depuis lors, le pays accumule les problèmes politiques, économiques et sociaux. Jadis le fleuron de son continent, l’économie sud-africaine représente maintenant environ le quart du PIB africain et peine à suivre la croissance des pays avoisinants. Elle sera bientôt dépassée en taille économique par le Nigeria.

Les perspectives économiques et politiques récentes remettent même en question son sacro-saint statut de membre des BRICS. Alors que le reste de l’Afrique subsaharienne est devenu le second pôle de croissance économique mondial (voir l’article Query de Jorim Schraven à la page 34), suivant de près l’Asie, excluant la Chine, la croissance du pays de Nelson Mandela a stagné à près de trois pour cent en 2013. Près de 26 pour cent de la population est toujours au chômage – taux qui atteint environ 50 pour cent chez les moins de 24 ans – et le taux de participation au marché du travail demeure parmi les plus bas de tous les pays émergents. Les inégalités de revenus, mesurées selon le coefficient de Gini, étaient les plus larges au monde en 2009 – héritage des politiques raciales du dernier siècle. Le coût de la vie demeure élevé, néanmoins, dans un contexte où la monnaie nationale, le Rand, est demeurée forte malgré le ralentissement économique et une certaine stagnation

de la productivité au pays (voir l’article One Pager de Brett House à la page 5).

Le secteur minier aurifère sud-africain, représentant six pour cent de la production mondiale, a récemment été paralysé par plusieurs grèves, alors que les travailleurs demandaient des hausses salariales de l’ordre de 60 pour cent. Ceux-ci essuyaient le refus du patronat, qui citait la hausse des coûts de production en raison des nombreuses pannes de courant dans le pays. Les deux parties se sont finalement entendues pour une hausse salariale de six pour cent, soit près du taux d’inflation. D’autres grèves ont également paralysé les secteurs manufacturier et de la construction. Malgré l’abondance d’opportunités dans le pays, il est de plus en plus complexe de faire des affaires en Afrique du Sud dans un contexte où les élections de 2014 suscitent la méfiance des investisseurs locaux et internationaux.

L’Afrique du Sud a besoin d’électricité pour nourrir sa croissance. Pourtant, le pays est en proie à des blackouts fréquents, en raison de son incapacité de combler les besoins énergétiques de sa base industrielle. Les mines et autres industries lourdes tournent au ralenti et mettent régulièrement des travailleurs à pied pour cause de panne de courant, alimentant ainsi l’instabilité économique. Pour pallier à ce problème majeur, le pays, conjointement avec la République démocratique du Congo, développe présentement le complexe hydroélectrique Grand Inga, dont les 40 000 mégawatts de puissance estimée en font un projet plus ambitieux encore que le barrage des Trois Gorges en Chine. Au-delà des projets énergétiques, l’Afrique du Sud reste le premier investisseur étranger en sol africain.

Le multiculturalisme de la société arc-en-ciel demeure dysfonctionnel. Le pays a perdu près de 25 pour cent de sa population blanche depuis la fin de l’apartheid, celle-ci fuyant essentiellement la violence et les horizons économiques évanescents.

Même Winnie Mandela, la mère de la nation, avoue que le rêve de son ex-mari est encore à réaliser.

Pendant ce temps, une génération entière a quitté le pays, en attente de voir la situation sécuritaire et économique s’améliorer. Certains blogues recensent la mort de quelque 4 000 fermiers blancs à travers le pays depuis 1994, souvent victimes de crimes raciaux (crimes dont traite le grand romancier sud-africain J.M. Coetzee dans sa novella Disgrace). Des sondages

opportunistes ont réémergé, au cours des dernières années, avec un actionnariat «métissé», dont Gold Fields, la plus ancienne compagnie aurifère du pays, créée par nul autre que le diamantaire Cecil Rhodes.

Au - d e l à d e s ch a n g e m e n t s à ve n i r d a n s l’actionnariat des entreprises du pays, les politiques de rééquilibrage post-apartheid transformeront en profondeur la structure économique du pays.

Le gouvernement souhaite ainsi redistribuer 30 pour cent des terres agricoles du pays, la plupart

supplémentaire dans une économie déjà précaire.

Un objectif national de réduction de la criminalité, ainsi qu’une meilleure administration de la justice, devraient rester au centre de la prochaine campagne électorale. Ce faisant, le climat socio-économique deviendrait plus propice aux entrepreneurs qui souhaitent continuer à prospérer au pays de Madiba.

Reconnaissant que les tensions raciales soient aussi exacerbées par les inégalités économiques extrêmes entre noirs et blancs qui perdurent depuis la fin de l’apartheid, le gouvernement national a redoublé d’ardeur dans la mise en œuvre de sa politique du Black Economic Empowerment. Pretoria souhaite ainsi encourager l’entreprenariat des Sud-africains noirs, notamment par le transfert de propriété des entreprises souvent financées en tout ou en partie par des prêts de l’État en faveur d’un actionnariat noir. Plusieurs ont critiqué l’efficacité de ce programme qui, même s’il a eu pour effet de créer une élite économique noire – dont plusieurs figures sont proches de l’ANC – n’a toutefois pas eu d’impact notable ni sur le taux de chômage général, ni au sein de la population noire paupérisée. Cela dit, plusieurs consortiums d’affaires résolument

détenues par des blancs. Les inégalités économiques ne vont cependant pas disparaître bientôt. L’Afrique du Sud se situe toujours parmi les derniers rangs des classements de l’OCDE en matière d’éducation primaire (132e sur 144 pays) et en sciences et mathématiques (143e sur 155 pays). Les noirs sont toujours sous-représentés dans la plupart des corps d’emplois. Et étant donné la faiblesse du système éducatif, il faudra attendre au moins une génération avant de pouvoir observer les bienfaits des politiques de normalisation économique sur les inégalités raciales.

Les élections générales prévues pour la fin du printemps 2014 s’annoncent riches en débats. L’un des principaux enjeux sera la corruption, compte tenu des récentes révélations de fraude, corruption et autres méfaits – dont une accusation de viol remontant à 2006 – au sein de l’administration Zuma. De plus, les partis devront rassurer les différents acteurs économiques – notamment les investisseurs, que l’incertitude politique pousse à se montrer prudents – dans le cadre du présent ralentissement économique et la baisse anticipée des cours internationaux des métaux et minéraux. | GB

PHOTOGRAPHIE: LA PRESSE CANADIENNE / AP / DENIS FARRELL

Un service commémoratif à Marikana, en Afrique du Sud, marque le premier anniversaire de la mort des mineurs de platine grévistes, tués lorsque la police a ouvert le feu le 16 août 2012.

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récents suggèrent que près de 20 pour cent des gens d’affaires du pays souhaiteraient émigrer en raison du taux de criminalité exceptionnel.

Il est donc bien évident que le gouvernement a beaucoup à faire dans la lutte contre la criminalité et l’administration de la justice. Le crime est en hausse et 15 000 meurtres sont commis chaque année, et ce malgré les promesses du gouvernement Zuma d’améliorer le climat sécuritaire et social. En effet, la criminalité sud-africaine demeure une taxe

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What Economic Price for Democracy in Africa?

QUERY

It may not be high at all once a basic threshold of income is reached, and provided elections are properly conducted

BY JORIM SCHRAVEN

O Jorim Schraven is Manager, Credit Analysis, and past Manager of the Financial Institutions – Africa Department at FMO, the Dutch development bank, in

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

The Hague.

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n the face of it, democracy is on the rise in Africa. According to Freedom House, notwithstanding a not insignificant coterie of failed states, out of a total 53 African countries, there are now 19 full electoral democracies on the continent. (Of course, the question of democratic versus non-democratic values outside of elections is vexed.)

Since the democratic elections in Namibia in 1989, well over 30 ruling parties in Africa have changed on the strength of national elections. Contrast this with the lone peaceful transfer of power on the continent – in the event, in Mauritius – between 1960 and 1989, a period during which only five countries held regular elections.

In per-capita terms – with population growth still rising – and at purchasing power parity, gross national income has risen in Africa by over a third since 2000. Forecasts remain optimistic, with the IMF projecting that 11 of the world’s top 20 fastest growing economies through to 2017 will be African. It might be tempting, therefore, to conclude that there is a virtuous relationship between democracy and economic growth and development. Yet the interplay between the two is far from clear cut. During the past five years, while African growth has in many cases been impressive – even in the context of the global financial crisis – democratic progress has tapered off. Freedom House has reported a drop of five full electoral democracies (in the event, since 2005), and the Mo Ibrahim index has reported a drop of five percent in political participation since 2007.

Major challenges remain. Full electoral democracies are still in the minority in Africa. Robust economic growth is unevenly distributed, with some democracies like Mali facing both democratic and economic crises, while less democratic countries like Angola have experienced economic booms.

Moreover, where democracy and economic growth have interacted most directly – around election time – the impact of democracy on economic growth and development has not always been positive. For instance, Ghana’s growth dropped from 15 percent in 2011 to 7.9 percent in 2012, the election year. In Zimbabwe, the drop was 4.3 percent ahead of the 2013 presidential election.

The impact of electoral cycles can also extend to economic policy decisions. After the 2008 Ghana-

ian election, the new ruling party reassessed many existing contracts – especially in the construction sector – withholding payment for up to two years in some cases. Non-performing loans in Ghana’s banking sector soon more than doubled to 18 percent. In Zambia, the new government reversed the privatization of Zamtel, and made a surprise policy announcement to introduce additional capital requirements for the banking sector. This prompted Fitch to revise its rating outlook to negative, and raised the risk perceptions of foreign investors. Still, both countries later managed to place bonds in the international markets. In both instances, the bonds were several times oversubscribed.

So what is the economic price of democracy in Africa? The question demands careful treading.

For one, we might distinguish between the direct economic cost of democracy – such as election costs – and the economic price of democracy. The ‘price of something’ is commonly taken to be an unwelcome experience, event or action involved as a condition of achieving a desired end. That there is a direct economic cost of democracy is manifest.

In Africa, this cost can be substantial – at times higher than in the West. For example, the Australian election of 2010 is estimated to have cost about US $160 million, whereas the historic 2006 elections in the DRC are estimated to have cost well over US $400 million – over 50 percent more expensive per registered voter in absolute terms, and substantially more in purchasing power parity terms.

What about the economic price? Oxford’s Paul Collier has done extensive theoretical and empirical work that partially addresses this question. He paints a complex picture of the interaction between democracy, security and (economic) policy improvements that may ultimately foster growth. He and his colleagues studied data for over 786 elections in 155 countries. In one interesting conclusion, they estimate that elections make societies safer only when these societies exceed an income-per-capita threshold of US $2,700. Security and stability tend to be helpful to businesses, so this finding lends credence to the idea that democracy can help boost economic growth and development. However, the effect apparently only kicks in after economic growth and development have brought a country well above the middle-income country threshold. As such, the

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI

Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya. Of the top destinations mentioned, only South Africa qualifies as a country with a functioning democracy and per-capita income exceeding the said threshold (see the In Situ article by François Boutin-Dufresne at p. 32). Still, the majority of the remaining countries do hold regular elections. And with the exception of the December 2007 elections in Kenya, these elections have been quite peaceful.

Anecdotal evidence from my own experience in

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe received more than 60 percent of the vote in the 2013 election, beating his main rival Morgan Tsvangirai, who rejected the outcome.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

projected robust economic growth of many African countries could well help to reduce the security price of democracy in Africa.

At the same time, the research finds that democracy comes with certain economic benefits – in particular, that frequent elections produce structurally better economic policy. Net of electoral cycle effects, more elections are on average positive for policy – a relationship that Collier and his team attribute to better accountability.

(Surely, however, it cannot be that endless elections in short intervals conduce to better economy policy.) However, the research also finds that this effect is only robust for properly conducted, non-fraudulent elections. After all, fraudulent elections are less likely to lead to accountability visà-vis the populace. On this score, a number of African countries have less than fortunate starting positions, with income below the appropriate threshold and elections that are, for the time being, poorly conducted. The Collier theory predicts for these countries not only a monetary cost of elections, but also a non-negligible security cost to be paid for democracy – without the concomitant benefits from improved economic policy.

An on-the-ground perspective gained from investing in the continent paints a more positive picture. According to Ernst & Young’s 2013 Africa attractiveness survey, 86 percent of investors who already do business on the continent rank Africa as the second most attractive regional investment destination in the world – after Asia. Interestingly, the survey also suggests that African democracies with per-capita income levels well below the US $2,700 threshold are disproportionately favoured by international investors. These countries include Ghana, Nigeria,

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financing projects in Africa suggests that positive investment decisions do appear to benefit from the democratic credentials of African countries. Democratic accountability of governments to their people is perceived to be accompanied by better rule of law, more transparency, and less corruption – all of which aid foreign direct investment.

With the advent of the OECD guidelines for responsible business, increased pressure on investors from NGOs, as well as the tightening of regulatory standards in anti-money laundering and corruption, it seems likely that investor decisions will be increasingly influenced by the interplay between democracy and economic development. This tendency may well serve to reduce the price of democracy in those countries where it is potentially present.

From a policy perspective, the potential for a virtuous cycle of more democracy, investment and economic growth could be strengthened in several ways. International investment, which tends to be sensitive to violence and, increasingly, to political corruption, can help to raise the price of bad economic policy and stoking up electoral turbulence. Especially in higher-risk countries and nascent democracies, development banks, with their stable capital base and long-term planning perspectives, can, and already do, play a constructive role by investing throughout and across the electoral cycle. This effect can be strengthened by levering democratic institutions in the context of the investment process. In Ghana, for instance, development banks and commercial banks typically require parliamentary approval for large investment projects – as in, say, the power sector. To manage the electoral cycle of economic growth, increased central bank independence can help to address the monetary side of the problem. Addressing the fiscal and economic policy side of the cycle is more challenging. Capacity development programmes aimed at raising politicians’ awareness of the costs involved could be a start. According to an IMF study, another successful intervention could be to institute fiscal rules – conceptually similar to the Excess Crude Account in Nigeria – that can reduce the political flexibility required for opportunistic spending. The effectiveness of these rules could be strengthened by real-time feedback from external rating agencies: consider Fitch’s change in outlook for Zambia in response to its unpredictable economic policy.

Bref, there is clearly a cost to democracy: a direct cost, and also an indirect cost caused by periodic electoral instability – instability that can temporarily affect foreign investment decisions. Nevertheless, net of economic benefits, the case that there is an economic price of democracy across Africa appears weak. If there is a threshold of per-capita income below which this could be the case, anecdotal experience suggests that this threshold may be falling, as democratic countries exploit benefits in attracting international investors. Indeed, a new trend appears to be emerging in Africa – one where the combination of economic growth, responsible investors, and more experience in the conduct of democratic elections creates a virtuous interplay between democracy and economic development. | GB

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Ladite union dirigée par la Russie devrait naître d’ici 2015.

Certains prédisent le retour en force de Moscou.

Mythe ou réalité?

PAR GEORGIY VOLOSHIN

L’UNION ÉCONOMIQUE EURASIENNE VÉRITÉS ET ILLUSIONS

Georgiy Voloshin est analyste de la Russie et de la CEI. Il est l’auteur de l’ouvrage intitulé Le Nouveau Grand Jeu en Asie centrale: enjeux et stratégies

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

géopolitiques.

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a construction sous l’égide de la Russie d’une union eurasienne rassemblant en son sein plusieurs anciens membres de l’URSS s’agit-t-elle de la preuve de l’ambition néo-impérialiste de Moscou pour le 21e siècle? Peut-être. Mais malgré quelques avancées enregistrées par le Kremlin dans ses tractations avec les gouvernements concernés, la réintégration de l’espace post-soviétique placé sous la domination absolue et sans partage de la Russie reste une illusion optique dissimulant les véritables faiblesses de ce projet cher à Vladimir Poutine (voir Board Room à la page 30). Faible croissance économique, divisions politiques, incertitudes prégnantes liées à l’avenir des régimes autocrates – autant de défis à la réussite de ce vaste chantier dirigé depuis Moscou (voir l’article Feature d’Irvin Studin à la page 12).

Début octobre 2011, Poutine, alors premier ministre, a publié dans le quotidien Izvestia un article devenu rapidement célèbre, portant sur la création de l’Union économique eurasienne.

Cette publication est intervenue moins de deux semaines après le fameux congrès de la Russie unie lors duquel Poutine annonça sa décision de se présenter à la prochaine présidentielle de mars 2012, alors qu’une nouvelle candidature de Dmitri Medvedev était encore vivement discutée par la communauté d’experts tant en Russie qu’à l’étranger.

Dans le contexte du retour imminent au Kremlin de son précédent occupant, le projet d’union économique s’étendant à plusieurs pays membres de l’ancienne Union soviétique ne pouvait qu’attirer l’attention de tous ceux qui avaient compté encore récemment sur le maintien de

PHOTOGRAPHIE: AP / RIA-NOVOSTI, ALEXEI DRUZHININ

même signé un accord sur la création d’une zone de libre-échange qui devait être un pas supplémentaire dans le sens d’une politique économique et commerciale concertée. Dans le même temps, la coopération politique était assurée par des structures de haut niveau, telles que les conseils des chefs d’État et des chefs de gouvernement, certains conseils ministériels (affaires étrangères, défense, intérieur) ou encore l’Assemblée interparlementaire.

Cependant, l’existence de la CEI n’a été marquée d’aucun progrès majeur quant au rapprochement des politiques respectives de ses États membres, puisque son mode de fonctionnement ne prévoyait aucune harmonisation législative – favorisant plutôt et principalement le maintien d’un dialogue interétatique régulier sans engagements particuliers.

De plus, les relations entre Moscou et les capitales des pays concernés s’étant progressivement détériorées du fait de la montée des nationalismes, de nouveaux partenariats furent tissés par-ci par-là

Le président russe Vladimir Poutine, à droite, et le président arménien Serge Sargsian, discutent pendant leur rencontre à la résidence de Novo-Ogaryovo, près de Moscou, en septembre 2013.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Medvedev à la présidence russe. Pour eux, cette structure intégrationniste n’aurait pour but que d’assurer davantage la prééminence de la Russie sur l’échiquier eurasiatique, notamment vis-à-vis de ses anciens satellites. Aussi, Vladimir Poutine avait parlé dans son article d’«une puissante association supranationale capable de se muer en un des pôles du monde moderne et d’y jouer le rôle de connecteur efficace entre l’Europe et la région dynamique de l’Asie-Pacifique».

De fait, ce n’était pas la première tentative de Moscou de reconstituer ses liens politiques et économiques avec l’ex-URSS après l’écroulement de cette dernière en décembre 1991. La Communauté des États indépendants (CEI), héritière de l’Union soviétique, était alors conçue comme le cadre principal des interactions officielles parmi les républiques désormais souveraines, dans un climat de forte interdépendance favorable à la préservation de bonnes relations. En 1994, les pays de la CEI ont

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avec l’Occident, la Chine et d’autres acteurs, tels la Turquie, l’Iran (voir l’article In Situ de Sam Sasan Shoamanesh à la page 6), le Japon et la Corée du Sud. Alors que plusieurs chefs d’État ont commencé à pratiquer l’absentéisme, ne se rendant plus à des sommets, la guerre russo-géorgienne d’août 2008 a conduit à la sortie pure et simple de Tbilissi du dispositif. Cette décision n’a pas pour autant eu d’impact sur le fonctionnement de la CEI, à l’heure où son inefficacité était devenue flagrante.

Une autre tentative fut entreprise en 1995, peu après la signature de l’accord de libre-échange de la CEI, lorsque la Russie, le Kazakhstan et la Biélorussie décidèrent de créer une union douanière. Bien que cette initiative ait été soutenue par la suite par

L’ancien président russe Dmitri Medvedev (centre) pose avec les présidents de la Biélorussie, du Kazakhstan, du Kirghizistan, du Tadjikistan, de l’Ukraine, de l’Arménie et de la Moldavie dans le Grand Palais du Kremlin après le sommet de la Communauté économique eurasienne à Moscou en

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septembre 2012.

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d’autres pays comme le Kirghizistan, l’Ouzbékistan et le Tadjikistan, elle est restée lettre morte pendant les cinq années suivantes. Ce n’est qu’en mai 2000 que le nouveau président russe Vladimir Poutine, pour qui l’ex-URSS était devenue un vecteur stratégique de politique étrangère dès son élection, a proposé d’établir une organisation économique internationale sur la base de l’union douanière, toujours en état de sommeil. Avec le soutien du Kazakhstan, qui avait essayé de stimuler, sans beaucoup de succès, l’intégration régionale en Asie centrale tout au long des années 1990, la Communauté économique eurasienne (EurAsEc) est née en octobre 2000 au cours du Sommet d’Astana. Son accord de base, en force depuis le 30 mai 2001, prévoyait déjà le lancement de plusieurs chantiers, dont l’espace économique unique – idée phare des initiatives récentes soustendant le projet de Poutine.

Alors que plusieurs projets indépendants d’intégration économique dans l’espace postsoviétique étaient encore considérés comme viables, l’EurAsEc a réussi à détrôner ses concurrents vers juin 2006, lorsque le Sommet de Minsk reconnut son caractère transversal compatible tant avec l’Union douanière, jamais complètement réalisée, qu’avec l’espace économique unique, en discussion depuis 2004. Quelques mois plus tard, la Russie, le Kazakhstan et la Biélorussie rendirent publique

leur décision de composer le cœur d’une nouvelle stratégie, les autres participants devant adopter les réformes internes nécessaires pour graduellement se rapprocher de leurs partenaires plus avancés.

Cette stratégie consistait à accélérer le lancement de l’Union douanière, la première étape d’un vaste chantier intégrationniste qui déboucherait éventuellement sur une vraie union économique, voire politique, permettant de rassembler les fragments jusqu’ici dissociés du système post-soviétique.

En octobre 2007, le sommet de l’EurAsEc à Douchanbé fut l’occasion d’adopter un programme d’action de trois ans prévoyant à ce stade précoce la création d’un exécutif commun sous le nom de la Commission eurasienne. Malgré la décision de l’Ouzbékistan de suspendre sa participation à l’EurAsEc en octobre 2008, les trois pays ont redoublé d’efforts afin de mettre en œuvre leurs projets dans les délais prévus. Au cours de l’année 2009, près de 40 traités furent signés afin de doter l’Union douanière ainsi constituée d’une base juridique solide. Le 28 novembre 2009, Vladimir Poutine, Noursoultan Nazarbaev et Alexandre Loukachenko confirmèrent leur intention de lancer la nouvelle structure économique le 1er janvier 2010.

Même si certains malentendus entre Moscou et Minsk ont par la suite amené les trois présidents à repousser légèrement cette date, l’Union douanière est toutefois devenue opérationnelle le 6 juillet 2010, lorsque ses statuts entrèrent définitivement en vigueur. L’étape suivante a été franchie avec le lancement le 1er janvier 2012 de l’espace économique unique, et ce sur fond de mise en place progressive des organes de décision communs largement dominés par la Russie. Alors qu’aucun projet précédent n’avait abouti à des résultats pareils, l’initiative tripartite s’est ainsi avérée beaucoup plus efficace, car fondée sur une gamme pragmatiquement limitée de choix stratégiques et bénéficiant du soutien continu des élites politiques. À l’heure où la signature d’un nouvel accord instituant l’Union économique eurasienne est déjà prévue pour début mai 2014, cette structure serait en mesure de prendre ses premières décisions dès janvier 2015. Une telle perspective ne peut qu’inquiéter certains leaders politiques, notamment aux États-Unis et dans l’UE, où la stratégie de Moscou évoque infailliblement ses ambitions impérialistes – affaiblies par une série de défaites infligées à la puissance russe après la fin de l’URSS, mais retrouvées et renforcées sous Vladimir Poutine.

En décembre 2012, la secrétaire d’État américaine, Hillary Clinton, a exprimé publiquement ses craintes concernant le risque de «re-soviétisation» des pays d’Europe de l’Est et d’Asie centrale par la Russie, dans l’objectif de créer l’URSS du 21e siècle. Cette déclaration a été faite au cours d’un conseil des ministres des Affaires étrangères de

l’Organisation pour la sécurité et la coopération en Europe (OSCE), qui rassemble en son sein tous les pays post-soviétiques. Jugée par la plupart des analystes comme une remarque préméditée, la déclaration de Clinton aurait été destinée principalement à son homologue russe, Sergueï Lavrov, pour lui faire comprendre que la poursuite du «reset» avec Washington avait un prix – celui de l’abandon des ambitions «expansionnistes» de Moscou dans son ancien pré carré.

En dépit de ces inquiétudes, il n’en reste pas moins que le pari du Kremlin est loin d’être gagnant, et ce pour plusieurs raisons. Certes, l’Union économique eurasienne aurait pour conséquence d’accroître l’influence de la Russie aux dépens des autres acteurs, dont l’UE en ce qui concerne l’Ukraine, la Biélorussie et le Caucase du Sud, ou bien la Chine pour ce qui est de ses relations avec l’Asie centrale. Pourtant, le contexte historique et géopolitique actuel est tel que toute tentative d’éliminer la compétition équitable, non seulement parmi des pays souverains mais aussi et surtout parmi leurs modèles politiques, économiques et sociaux, serait ressentie comme une preuve forte et sans équivoque de la volonté de Moscou de priver ses partenaires de leur indépendance respective.

Le principal obstacle à la stratégie russe, laquelle consiste actuellement à assurer le retour des anciens alliés soviétiques dans le giron de la Russie, reste ainsi la politique multi-vectorielle pratiquée autant par Astana et Bichkek que par Kiev et Minsk, même si les options stratégiques dont disposent chacune des capitales varient des plus restreintes aux plus ouvertes.

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Alors que cette position de principe pourrait être liée à la volonté d’Erevan d’assurer le soutien de Moscou sur la question du Haut-Karabakh, il n’en reste pas moins que la posture du président Serge Sargsian fait partie d’un jeu géopolitique à plusieurs inconnues. d’un jeu géopolitique à plusieurs inconnues. Dans cette équation difficile, l’amélioration continue des relations entre Moscou et Bakou s’avère être un facteur crucial à ne pas sous-estimer.

Sur le flanc est, le Kazakhstan et le Kirghizistan, le premier étant déjà membre de l’Union douanière et le second un candidat confirmé, pratiquent tous les deux à leur manière une politique visant avant tout à assurer leur indépendance de tout partenaire extérieur. Bien que le Kirghizistan sous Almazbek Atambaiev se positionne comme un allié tant économique que militaire de la Russie en Asie centrale, son partenariat avec la Chine ne peut être négligé. De même pour le Kazakhstan, qui a vu son commerce avec Pékin exploser ces dernières années pour concurrencer celui avec la Russie, et ce malgré le fonctionnement de l’Union douanière fermée au voisin chinois. De ce fait, Moscou aurait du mal à convaincre ses deux partenaires centrasiatiques de sacrifier leurs politiques multi-vectorielles au nom d’une alliance dont les fruits sont encore à démontrer, au moment où les relations de plus en plus profondes avec la Chine auront déjà permis de mettre en œuvre plusieurs projets d’envergure – notamment dans le domaine énergétique, qui assure à la plupart des régimes locaux une stabilité interne.

Un autre facteur d’incertitude relativement à

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uoique la Biélorussie demeure très dépendante des subventions russes, son isolement actuel n’est dû qu’au fait que le régime d’Alexandre Loukachenko soit honni par l’UE pour ses dérives dictatoriales récurrentes et ses mesures répressives ciblant l’opposition. Dans le cas où Loukachenko serait contraint à la démission, sa relève n’aurait pas forcément la même réputation clairement négative en Occident et pourrait de ce fait jouir d’une meilleure sélection de voies diplomatiques afin d’étayer son ouverture après des années de boycott. Quant à l’Ukraine, son attitude vis-à-vis de la Russie a toujours été plus ambivalente. D’abord considéré comme candidat pro-russe, le vainqueur des dernières élections présidentielles, Viktor Ianoukovitch, a toutefois vite réaffirmé son souhait de voir l’Ukraine se rapprocher de l’Europe. Il faut d’ailleurs prendre en compte la question du prix du gaz naturel vendu à Kiev par Moscou, qui reste

une pierre d’achoppement importante dans leurs relations bilatérales. Même si la prochaine élection présidentielle ukrainienne n’aura lieu qu’en mars 2015, Kiev pourrait difficilement renoncer à sa stratégie de coopération renforcée avec Bruxelles.

Cela n’est cependant pas le cas de l’Arménie, qui a récemment indiqué son souhait de rejoindre la Russie, le Kazakhstan et la Biélorussie au sein de l’Union douanière et à terme dans l’Union eurasienne, aux dépens de son rapprochement stratégique avec l’UE. Alors que cette position de principe pourrait être liée à la volonté d’Erevan d’ainsi assurer le soutien de Moscou sur la question du Haut-Karabakh, il n’en reste pas moins que la posture du président Serge Sargsian fait partie

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l’Union économique eurasienne est lié à la continuité du pouvoir dans des pays comme la Biélorussie et le Kazakhstan, tous les deux dirigés depuis les années 1990 par les mêmes personnalités, ou encore le Kirghizistan, en proie à une instabilité politique devenue d’ores et déjà chronique. Dans ce contexte, le cas kazakh est révélateur de plusieurs tendances divergentes au sein de l’élite politique. Aux côtés de ceux qui militent pour la poursuite d’une coopération approfondie avec la Russie dans le cadre de l’Union douanière se trouvent des éléments pro-occidentaux et pro-chinois, pour lesquels la Russie ne représente pas le modèle politique le plus compétitif dans un monde globalisé et de plus en plus concurrentiel. Même s’il n’y a pas de lobby pro-chinois fort constitué au Kirghizistan voisin, les relations avec Pékin pèsent lourdement dans

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Washington et Bruxelles feraient mieux de poursuivre laborieusement la reconstruction de leurs économies respectives afin que celles-ci puissent servir, aujourd’hui et demain, de pôles d’attraction pour leurs interlocuteurs de l’ancienne URSS.

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la balance de certaines provinces du pays tirant le gros de leurs revenus du commerce transfrontalier avec l’empire du Milieu. En ce qui concerne la Biélorussie, l’opposition anti-Loukachenko – qui reste certes faible, mais qui pourrait un jour proposer un scénario différent de celui du régime actuel, si ce dernier s’écroulait – serait le plus probablement ralliée du côté de l’Europe, et donc en rupture avec la politique actuelle pro-russe de Minsk. Puisque l’Union économique eurasienne est un projet à long terme, de tels changements, même s’ils sont hypothétiques pour l’heure, ne peuvent pas être totalement ignorés.

Outre les risques associés avec les transitions politiques éventuelles, l’instabilité régionale en Asie centrale pose elle aussi des défis majeurs à la réussite du projet de Vladimir Poutine au sud de la frontière russe. La situation en Afghanistan est particulièrement inquiétante à cet égard, compte tenu du prochain retrait de la coalition internationale de ce pays et de la faiblesse du gouvernement afghan actuel (voir le débat Nez à Nez entre John Duncan et Daniel P. Fata à la page 56). Les services de sécurité du Kazakhstan et du Tadjikistan ont identifié récemment de nouvelles menaces extrémistes provenant des mouvements radicaux implantés historiquement

en Afghanistan et au Pakistan, mais se propageant rapidement à travers la région. Il s’agit, entre autres, du Tablighi Jamaat, du Joundallah et d’Ansarullah, ainsi que, en ce qui concerne le Kirghizistan, du Hizb ut-Tahrir, dont les positions se sont considérablement renforcées ces dernières années au sud de la république. La pénétration de ces organisations dans les pays centrasiatiques pourrait coûter cher à la Russie, qui risquerait ainsi non seulement de perdre des partenaires plus ou moins fidèles à ses initiatives intégrationnistes, mais aussi de se voir confrontée à l’instabilité et à l’insécurité tout court.

Enfin, l’Union douanière n’a pas pour l’heure réussi à répondre aux attentes initiales en termes d’efficacité. Selon les données de la Commission économique eurasienne, l’échange des marchandises entre la Russie, la Biélorussie et le Kazakhstan – premiers pays membres – a diminué de 10 pour cent de janvier à avril 2013 par rapport à la même période l’année précédente. Par ailleurs, la Russie se trouve au bord de la récession, sa croissance économique étant une fois de plus revue à la baisse, après la déclaration du ministère russe de l’Économie constatant l’incapacité du pays à atteindre les 2,4 pour cent initialement prévus pour 2013. Quant au Kazakhstan, son PIB n’a crû que de cinq pour cent en 2012 et devrait augmenter de six pour cent cette année, après une période d’expansion économique spectaculaire aidée par les exportations des matières premières. L’économie de la Biélorussie, dont l’inflation dépasse toujours les 15 pour cent, ne devrait croître de plus de deux pour cent d’ici 2014, d’après le FMI. Dans ce contexte, l’attractivité de l’Union économique eurasienne risque de souffrir aux yeux des candidats confirmés ou potentiels.

La «re-soviétisation» de l’espace post-soviétique reste ainsi à la fois un mythe alimenté par les tenants de la posture intransigeante envers la Russie de Vladimir Poutine et une erreur de calcul stratégique qui est celle des pays occidentaux. La Russie de 2013, affaiblie par la crise économique et financière, n’est plus la Russie des années 2000 où la popularité élevée de Poutine découlait de la conjoncture internationale favorable et de son ferme leadership face aux oligarques. De plus, le contexte actuel ne se prête plus au jeu des muscles de la part de la Russie, même si elle continue à exercer des pressions sur l’Ukraine pour que cette dernière renonce à ses visées européennes. Si l’Union eurasienne se veut une réussite, elle devrait inversement se construire sur un dialogue d’égal à égal, prenant en compte les intérêts de chacun des partenaires concernés. Washington et Bruxelles, de leur côté, feraient mieux de poursuivre laborieusement la reconstruction de leurs économies respectives afin que celles-ci puissent servir, aujourd’hui et demain, de pôles d’attraction et de points de référence pour leurs interlocuteurs de l’ancienne URSS. | GB

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Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia.

He is the author of International Law and the Arctic.

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GREAT POWERS SHALL NOT IN THE ARCTIC CLASH

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he recent showdown between Russia and the West over Syria sits in sharp contrast with the deep cooperative logic that governs great power behaviour in today’s Arctic. Let us recall that, in 2010, at a conference in Moscow, Vladimir Putin famously said: “It is well known that, if you stand alone, you cannot survive in the Arctic. It is very important to maintain the Arctic as a region of peace and cooperation.” (See the Feature article

by Irvin Studin at p. 12.)

Of course, everything in the High North today is changing with great rapidity – largely because the Arctic Ocean exists in a precarious balance between ice and water and is, as a consequence, acutely exposed to climate change. Indeed, at the current rate of melting, the entire ocean could be seasonally ice-free within five years. This rapid transformation has given rise to concerns about potential conflict over Arctic shipping routes and resources. And yet, apart from climate change, the most significant development in the Arctic today is the ever-increasing level of international cooperation – especially between Russia and the NATO countries (see the Feature articles by Michael Byers in GB’s Winter 2010 and Winter 2012 issues).

The charting efforts of the navy of the former USSR extended to the heart of the Canadian Arctic.

Indeed, in 2011, Soviet-era charts shown to the author on board the Russian research vessel Akademik Ioffe showed more depth soundings in the

Northwest Passage than do comparable Canadian charts. For decades, the Soviets dominated the Arctic in military terms – to the point where, by 1989, their Northern Fleet included more than 100 nuclear submarines. Although the fleet has since been scaled back, dozens of Russian submarines continue to operate under the Arctic ice, maintaining a second-strike capability that Moscow deems essential to great power status (see the Tête à Tête interview with John E. McLaughlin at p. 8).

Russian politicians have long used Arctic exploits to stoke nationalist pride. The first people to be designated “Heroes of the Soviet Union” were the pilots who rescued the crew of the SS Chelyuskin after it was crushed by ice in the Northern Sea Route in 1934. In 2007, Artur Chilingarov was designated a “Hero of the Russian Federation” after he descended approximately 4,000 metres in a submersible to plant a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. Chilingarov is a notable Arctic scientist, but he was also the deputy chairman of the Russian Duma during an election campaign. One of the other scientists involved in the flag plant later admitted that the event was nothing more than a publicity stunt.

In point of fact, the Russian government has explicitly acknowledged that the country’s future success will depend on international cooperation, including in respect of access to foreign capital and technology to develop vast offshore reserves of Arctic oil and gas. Oil and gas rescued Russia from economic collapse in the 1990s (see the One Pager

by Brett House at p. 5). Today, these account for roughly 30 percent of the country’s GDP. As more than two-thirds of that 30 percent comes from Russia’s Arctic, continued development of the region is an objective of central national importance.

Two Arctic natural gas deposits – the Bovanenkovo field on the Yamal Peninsula and the Shtokman field in the Barents Sea – hold more reserves than the total proven conventional reserves of the

The contours of new-century international law are being shaped first and foremost in the Arctic

BY MICHAEL BYERS

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ILLUSTRATION: MARK MATCHO

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Sea ofOkhotsk

Bering Sea

East Siberian Sea

Laptev Sea

Chukchi Sea Gulf of Alaska

USA

Arctic Ocean

US. France’s Total and Norway’s Statoil have been brought in to help develop the deposits through joint-venture agreements – although development of Shtokman is on hold for the moment because of the currently diminished global demand for gas.

Russia is the world’s largest producer of oil. However, falling production levels in Western Siberia have created an imperative to move northward – often in partnership with Western companies.

In April 2013, Russian state-owned Gazprom (see Board Room at p. 30) signed an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell to cooperatively explore and develop Russia’s Arctic offshore oil reserves. The importance of the agreement was underlined by the presence of both President Putin and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the signing ceremony. In June 2013, Russian state-owned Rosneft signed a similar agreement with ExxonMobil. The agreement foresees investments up to US $500 billion should reserves meet expectations.

RUSSIA Getting the oil and gas to markets will require improved transportation links.

Much of the gas from the new fields will be shipped west through the newly opened Nord Stream pipeline, which runs along the bottom of the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany. Much of the oil, for its part, will be shipped east to Asia via the Northern Sea Route.

Russia already uses icebreakers to escort commercial vessels along its 6,600-kilometre-long Arctic coastline, and charges fees for the service.

(In 2007, it launched the world’s largest nuclearpowered icebreaker, the Fifty Years of Victory, which is able to sail more or less at speed through 2.5 metres of ice.)

The Northern Sea has long been considered essential to Russia’s interests. During WW2, some 34 ‘lend-lease’ vessels owned by the US and crewed

by Soviets carried supplies from North America along the icy waterway in order to avoid German submarines. Today, the Russian government is intent on transforming the Northern Sea Route into a commercially viable alternative to the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca. Said Putin in September 2011: “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.”

Washington opposes Moscow’s claim that portions of the Northern Sea Route constitute Russian Karaskoye More

Pacific Ocean Beaufort Sea

Barents Sea

North Pole

Greenland Sea

Baffin Bay

CANADA

Norwegian Sea

Denmark Strait

Hudson Bay

North Sea

Davis Strait

Atlantic Ocean

Professor Bin Yang of Shanghai Maritime University has estimated that the Northern Sea Route could save China as much as US $60 to $120

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billion per annum.

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internal waters – a classification that requires foreign ships to seek permission to enter. However, the US has never physically challenged that position.

When the US Coastguard icebreaker Northwind approached the Vil’kitskii Strait north of Siberia in 1965, Moscow threatened to “go all the way” if the ship continued onward. Washington responded by ordering the Northwind to turn round, and has kept its ships away ever since.

In 2010, a ship owned by Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel was reported to have completed a round trip via the Northern Sea Route from Murmansk to Shanghai. The ship apparently needed only 41 days for the 18,000-kilometre trip, as compared to the 84 days that it would have taken it to complete the 38,000-kilometre journey by way of the Suez Canal. In 2011, the 280-metre Russian supertanker Vladimir Tikhonov carried natural gas condensate from Murmansk to Thailand. In so doing, it became the largest ever vessel to complete the route. It was able to do so because ice conditions now allow ships to sail north of the New Siberia Islands, thereby bypassing the shallow waters between those islands and the mainland.

In 2012, the Chinese research icebreaker Xuelong traversed the Northern Sea Route under the escort of the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker Vaygach. The presence of the Vaygach underlined an important point: despite the increase in shipping, Russia holds fast to its position that the Northern Sea Route passes through internal waters and is subject to its full control.

At the same time, Russia’s offshore oil and gas interests have strengthened Moscow’s commitment to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

This treaty grants each coastal state a 200-nautical mile (370-kilometre) exclusive economic zone (EEZ), where it has absolute rights over fish and seabed resources. Beyond 200 nautical miles, a coastal state may also have exclusive rights to adjacent seabed resources if it can scientifically establish that the seabed in any particular area is a natural prolongation of its landmass. An international body of scientific experts – the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf – exists to review and legitimate such claims.

These international rules accord Russia a massive area of seabed – thanks to its immensely long coastline and the general shallowness of the Arctic Ocean. Indeed, the combined jurisdictional zones of the five Arctic Ocean coastal states (Russia, Canada, the US, Denmark and Norway) likely cover all but two small areas of deep ocean floor near the centre.

Just as importantly, smaller overlaps in national claims are proving surprisingly easy to resolve. In 1990, Russia concluded a boundary treaty with the US in the Bering Sea. In 2010, it did likewise with Norway in the Barents Sea. Russia has also limited

its seabed claims in the Central Arctic Ocean, filing an initial submission, in 2001, with the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf that extended just halfway across the Arctic Ocean.

The US, for its part, has also embraced cooperation, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling a 2010 meeting of the Arctic Ocean states that “[w]e need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it.”

In the same year, the US withdrew its longstanding opposition to the creation of a permanent secretariat for the Arctic Council. It also led the negotiation of an Arctic search-and-rescue treaty – an important contribution given the amount of commercial air traffic traversing the region. Now the US is advocating for a regional fisheries organization to manage the biological resources of the Central Arctic Ocean in a science-based manner, consistent with the UN Agreement on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks.

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Beijing does not contest the rights of the Arctic Ocean coastal states to oil and gas resources on the continental shelves.

Indeed, it relies on the exact same rules to support its claims in the South and East China Seas.

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he US no longer opposes Russian – or potential Canadian and Danish – claims to portions of the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that runs across the centre of the Arctic Ocean. Nor does the US appear to show as much appetite today as in the past to challenge the Russian and Canadian claims that the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage constitute internal waters.

(To be sure, this US posture may well change with events and changes in administration.)

The embrace of Arctic cooperation may still credibly be seen, at least in part, in the context of US President Obama’s sporadic efforts to ‘reset’ the relationship with Russia – an effort that, again, notwithstanding recent Moscow-Washington tensions related to Syria, may be said to have resulted in the 2010 New START Treaty, whereby both countries committed to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Cooperating on the Arctic may well have facilitated progress on the nuclear issue, as a 2009 cable sent by the US ambassador in Moscow, and later released by Wikileaks, explained: “Our continued support of the Arctic Council and bilateral engagement on the Arctic [...] can help bolster the moderates [in the Kremlin] and give incentives to the GOR [Government of Russia] to continue cooperation.”

What of Canada in this emerging cooperative Arctic logic? In Moscow, a map produced by the Canadian Department of Natural Resources has pride of place in Arctic Ambassador Anton Vasiliev’s office in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The choice of wall decor reflects the fact that Canada is manifestly an important Arctic country. Still, that importance is

based almost entirely on geography: Canada cannot compete militarily with Russia or the US, and has done little to seriously develop its economic and diplomatic power in the Arctic. It lacks roads and pipelines connecting southern Canada to the Arctic coast, and has just one railway line to Churchill (Manitoba), on Hudson Bay. Its only other Arctic port is a neglected wharf located at an abandoned mine at Nanisivik, on northern Baffin Island. Canada also has a glaring shortage of adequate Arctic airports, search-and-rescue capabilities, and navigation charts – while poor social, health and education conditions have resulted in a largely unemployable local workforce.

Although Canada should be developing itself into an Arctic gateway, it has kept that door firmly shut.

To be sure, Canada was pivotal in the creation of the Arctic Council in 1996. And yet its diplomatic potential on northern matters has in recent years been hamstrung by inconsistent federal support for a sustained, credible northern push and strategy, as well as by the manipulation of Arctic projects for populist domestic ends at the expense of strategic consequence. Unlike Moscow, Ottawa has been slow to negotiate its Arctic boundary disputes.

Indeed, it was not until 2012 that Ottawa and Copenhagen announced an agreement in principle on the location of the boundary in the Lincoln Sea (see Cabinet Room at p. 49). Another relatively large boundary dispute remains in the Beaufort Sea between Canada and the US – a dispute that should, in principle, be easy to resolve, given that the two countries share a common energy market under NAFTA (which reduces the stakes). In short, the other Arctic countries have increasingly bypassed Canada in addressing northern issues. Even negotiations on sub-strategic matters like search and rescue, shipping safety, oil spill response, fisheries management, and short-lived climate forcers like black carbon have been led by the US – often in partnership with Russia.

What of China’s Arctic posture (see Definition at p. 60)? China has just received observer status in the Arctic Council, with the Chinese government publicly affirming its deference to “the Arctic States’ right to administer the Arctic Ocean under the Convention on the Law of the Sea.” The Middle Kingdom has a voracious appetite for oil, gas and minerals. It also has the world’s largest shipping fleet, and is well positioned to take advantage of shorter routes across an increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean. Beijing does not contest the rights of the Arctic Ocean coastal states to oil and gas resources on the continental shelves. Indeed, it relies on the exact same rules to support its claims in the South and East China Seas – even if its claims in the latter theatres have been held by many Southeast Asian states and Japan to be overinclusive and aggressive. Finally,

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Oil and gas rescued Russia from economic collapse in the 1990s. Today, these account for roughly 30 percent of the country’s GDP. As more than twothirds of that 30 percent comes from Russia’s Arctic, continued development of the region is an objective of central national importance.

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China also knows that offshore oil and gas are expensive to find, extract and transport – especially in remote and inhospitable regions – and that it is increasingly well positioned to provide the necessary capital and markets.

Already, Chinese state-owned companies have invested tens of billions of dollars in Western Canada’s oil sands, and are importing vast quantities of Russian raw materials via the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 2010, the Chinese government advanced US $25 billion to Russia’s Transneft and Rosneft, so that these companies could build an oil pipeline from Siberia to China. The pipeline is now complete and carries some 300,000 barrels per day. In 2013, China advanced another US $60 billion to Rosneft so that it could explore and develop the oil and gas potential of the Arctic offshore.

Beyond the Arctic Ocean coastal states’ possible continental shelf claims, near the centre of the Arctic Ocean are the two small areas of deep seabed that may constitute the ‘common heritage of mankind.’ In these areas, any nation can seek and receive a permit for deep seabed mining from the International Seabed Authority, the regulatory body established under UNCLOS. China might at some point wish to explore the deep Arctic Ocean for resources like magnesium nodules or frozen gas hydrates, and has every right to do so.

Most of China’s oil imports pass through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, creating a strategic weakness referred to as the ‘Malacca dilemma.’ Other ships loop around Africa to avoid the pirate-infested approaches to the Suez Canal, or around South America because they cannot fit through the Panama Canal. Either way, the extra distance adds costs in fuel, salaries and foregone business. The Northern Sea Route offers Chinese shipping companies a 10,000-kilometre shortcut to Europe, while the Northwest Passage offers a 7,000-kilometre shortcut to the eastern US. With time, a third route will become available – ‘over the top,’ as it were – across the Central Arctic Ocean.

These developments are anticipated and celebrated in China, where the media refer to the Northern Sea Route as the ‘Arctic Golden Waterway.’ Indeed, Professor Bin Yang of Shanghai Maritime University has estimated that the Northern Sea Route could save China as much as US $60 to $120 billion per annum.

In preparation, Chinese companies are already building ice-strengthened ships and tankers. Some of these ships and tankers have dual-directional technology that enables them to use a high-efficiency bow in the open seas, then turn round and use an icebreaking stern – and the increased water flow generated by the proximity of the propellers – to almost chew through sea-ice.

Of course, Chinese shippers using the Arctic routes will still need – and know full well that

they will need – assistance from Arctic countries.

Although the sea-ice is disappearing, the Arctic remains difficult to navigate. For instance, ‘icing’ – caused by sea spray freezing onto a ship’s frame or machinery – can result in ships becoming unstable and sinking. Inadequate maritime charts may lead to ships running aground. And great distances and extreme weather conditions can delay search-andrescue efforts for days.

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n the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage, geographic proximity makes Russia and Canada the countries most able to provide good charts, navigation aids, ports of refuge, weather and ice forecasting, search and rescue, and a police presence for the purposes of deterring and dealing with pirates, terrorists and smugglers. If they provide adequate infrastructure and services, China will almost certainly comply with reasonable laws concerning ship safety, navigation lanes, insurance coverage, and the provision of crew lists and cargo manifests to coastal authorities. As such, it is significant that the Chinese government has so far chosen not to take sides in the disputes between the US and Russia, and the US and Canada over the legal status of the Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage.

At the same time, the combination of economic opportunity and scarce infrastructure presents an enticing scenario for foreign investment in the Arctic. One can easily imagine Chinese shipping companies being willing to invest in improved charts, navigation aids, ports of refuge, search and rescue, and weather and ice forecasting along the Russian and Canadian coasts. One can also imagine Moscow and Ottawa embracing the opportunity to share costs – provided investors recognize, as they almost certainly would, the extensive rights of the coastal state.

The Arctic is the closest thing that there is in this early 21st century to a blank slate in international relations. Inclement conditions have to date deterred settlement, economic development and geopolitical intrigue. Climate change is changing this context dramatically. Nevertheless, the Arctic will invariably be a region where state and economic activity will, in the coming decades, carry unusually high risks and costs, providing a real incentive for state-to-state cooperation, commercial joint ventures, and other forms of burden-sharing.

Arctic states and even China are, for the time being, seeing these pro-cooperation incentives quite clearly. All of which begs the question: can this cooperation be scaled up to the global level – that is, to other theatres? Is the Arctic unique as a crucible for international cooperation, or does it hint at the possible in what promises to be an exceedingly complex new century? | GB

IN THE CABINET ROOM

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ILLUSTRATION: DUSAN PETRICIC

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Transformation of the national strategic psychology and culture – through events or, better still, heroic leadership – can make a major power of the country with the world’s second largest land mass. Canada may have no better option this century.

BY IRVIN STUDIN

WHEN CANADA BECOMES THE WEST’S SECOND STATE Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief & Publisher of Global Brief.

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y It

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y century’s end, if Canada still exists, it will be the West’s second state.

It will be less important than both China and the US, but larger than any country in Europe, with the likely exception of Russia. Whether a country like Brazil, India or even Indonesia is more important or not does not negate this basic supposition: by the year 2100, Canada will be among the top five or six states in the world. And in the West, it will certainly be the second most important state: no other Western country apart from the US is so obviously a ‘growing concern.’

Of course, it is not inevitable that Canada should exist in any recognizable form in the year 2100.

The Quebec question remains vexed, and will require careful stewardship in every single political generation (see the Tête à Tête interview with Jean Charest at p. 26). As I have written elsewhere, Canada would not survive the secession of Quebec: it would not have territorial continuity across its gigantic landmass and, more importantly, would suffer from a psychological incoherence that would make it nearly impossible for a 21st century political figure to ensure that the ties that bind St. John’s in the far east to Victoria in the far west and Whitehorse in the north are sufficiently strong and compelling as to allow all of these disparate and distant parts to agree to still be governed by and from Ottawa in a post-Quebec country called Canada.

This is to say nothing of the increasingly complicated Aboriginal question in Canada, which is generally viewed by Canada’s governing classes as an ‘internal’ matter, but will before long surely assume a highly strategic character as it begins to impact the practical efficacy of Canada’s federal framework and the capacity for purposive action by government (see the Feature article by Douglas Sanderson in GB’s Spring/Summer 2013 issue). I shall address the connection between Canada’s Aboriginal question and Canadian strategy writ large in a future GB piece.

For now, let us agree that the above logic speaks to one underlying verity: that Canada is and has always been, constitutionally and culturally speaking, a political project. Its strength and legitimacy depend on the quality and qualities of the political class, its policy agenda and the fruits of that agenda. There is no single

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ILLUSTRATION: TRACY WALKER

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‘deep state’ or ‘deep nation’ in Canada: there is only a deep and civilized tradition of complex political intercourse across the world’s second largest land mass, many diverse regions, and multiple nations (including the Québécois and scores of First Nations), local realities and mindsets – all conducing, thus far, to a very respectable general welfare.

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f Canada does stay united, then it most likely has no other good option but to become one of this century’s major countries – this in what promises to be a more difficult and demanding century, in strategic terms, than the country has known over the first century and a half of its modern existence. The other option – still in the Canada-is-united scenario – is far less auspicious: Canada exists, yes, but is otherwise a strategic cripple, operating on the terms and conditions of more serious, more energetic countries and peoples. Indeed, we may even choose to view the option of Canada becoming a major country as tantamount to the option of Canada avoiding becoming a strategic cripple.

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Power is capacity – nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing inherently ‘evil’ about being more powerful, just as there is nothing inherently virtuous or romantic about being not-powerful.

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There are, to be sure, positive reasons for which Canadians and their leaders may properly desire to become so powerful. First, however, a housekeeping point about ontology: power is capacity – nothing more, nothing less. There is nothing inherently ‘evil’ about being more powerful, just as there is nothing inherently virtuous or romantic about being not-powerful. For power in international affairs is a means – a means to achieve a variety of ends, some more virtuous or nefarious than others. But if power is a means to achieve ends (the content of which can be justly debated), then the absence of power is a certain route to the non-achievement of ends (good or bad).

There are at least three good arguments for Canadian power this century: the argument from national interest (which exercises us most of all in this piece); the argument from obligation; and finally, the argument from identity. We touch on the latter two arguments toward the end of this piece, and focus on the critical argument from national interest

immediately. The grammar of this argument from national interest is fairly straightforward: Canada will need to be far more powerful this century if it is to secure basic national interests in a strategically more intense Canadian century. These basic interests start with the capacity of Canada to govern in reasonable freedom from the strictures of other powerful states and people – a capacity that in turn informs such important interests as territorial integrity (particularly in the Arctic), national security, social peace and economic prosperity.

As I have written in GB in the past, at least three key forces will combine to exert far greater strategic and psychological pressure on Canada this century – pressure that will need to be parried and managed if Canada is to get satisfaction in respect of its basic interests. The first force is the opening up of the Arctic (see the Feature article by Michael Byers at p. 44) and the creation, for the first time since the 1871 Treaty of Washington, of a properly porous border for Canada: the ‘other’ will no longer be an abstraction, but will be promiscuously criss-crossing Canada’s northern flank (skinning Canadian shores) with growing regularity and in the name of myriad objectives (not all consistent with Canadian preferences).

The second force is the relative strategic decline of the US (see the Tête à Tête interview with John E. McLaughlin at p. 8). The US, as mentioned, will remain among the two most powerful states in the world, but will not be overwhelmingly dominant, will be more economical or fastidious in its strategic extroversion, and will not necessarily be able to, or even wish to, project strategic alignment with Canada on matters that Ottawa may well see as critical. Indeed, one can imagine scenarios in which core Canadian interests are challenged in, say, the Arctic, and in which the US is either a direct adversary, accords the issue less import than does Canada (Washington may view the issue as tactical in character, while Ottawa may see it as strategic and vital), or is otherwise indifferent on the matter (consider Washington’s clinically neutral stance in the 1995 Turbot war between Canada and Spain).

The third and final force is technology. Between drones and, more plainly, even conventional military capabilities – leaving aside cyber-warfare – it is hard to imagine that territorial North America – core North America being Canada and the US – will escape some description of warfare on its territory over the course of this century. Let us recall that core North America was the only continent not to have known any real warfare on its territory for all of the last century. This was exceptional on two scores: first, latitudinally, across all the continents of the world – each of which, from Africa to Europe and Asia, was scarred by terrible territorial wars; and second, longitudinally, across the sweep of North

American history since the landing of Champlain, with each century but the 20th seeing great military rivalry and bloodshed on the continent.

If there is any doubt about the idea of warfare returning to North America this century, then we might ask the following: is it conceivable that an entire century should go by without there being any military clash whatever between the world’s two major powers, China and the US? It is possible, but not likely. And as former Australian deputy defence secretary and current Australian National University professor Hugh White has written, if there is a serious military confrontation between Beijing and Washington, then within a decade there is every probability that China will be able to strike militarily at North American cities (see the Nez à Nez debate between Hugh White and David Skilling in GB’s Fall 2012 issue; see Definition at p. 60). Indeed, within two decades, even middle or secondary military powers will likely have the technological wherewithal to mount attacks of some intensity on territorial North America.

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o Canada enters this new, strategically more precarious century after one of the luckiest strategic centuries known to mankind. It is a state that enjoys high standards of governance, but one that has been built in exceptional strategic leisure – indeed, in the total absence of military enemies on Canadian soil or at the gates of Canada. And, to be sure, this strategic leisure has, over the course of nearly a century and a half of geopolitical good luck, formed and hardened a deep culture not just of political and constitutional civility – indeed, great constitutional sophistication – but also of strategic lassitude and naïveté. How could it be otherwise?

A Canadian prime minister there has almost never been who was not intimately – indeed, gutturally – familiar with the Quebec question and its existential import for the Canadian project. On Quebec and matters of Canadian national unity, the political classes in Ottawa must play for keeps – and they typically do. But nearly all Canadian prime ministers – with a small coterie of obvious exceptions – have been able to see war with another country or people as a total abstraction; that is, as a one-way action in which the enemy is seldom seen and never fires back (that is, to or in Canada), and in which failure by Canada to achieve victory or any number of objectives in war has no material impact on Canadian life whatever, and carries with it no felt responsibility for righting that failure.

This has made most Canadian prime ministers and most Canadian cabinets ‘serious people’ in respect of matters federal – and relatedly and belatedly, on

questions of majority-minority relations, and also individual rights – but patently ‘unserious people’ on matters strategic; that is, people who, with some heroic exceptions, do not have a felt appreciation of the stakes of high strategic questions because they have never had to live or die by decisions made in relation to such questions.

And so it should be. For this reality is a destiny foretold in Canada’s founding document, the Constitution Act, 1867, the little read second recital of the preamble of which reads as follows: the federation will “conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire[.]”

That Canada will “conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces” means that Canada was conceived to become excellent at federalism – that is, at managing federal-provincial questions (the essence of the negotiations at Confederation; again, see the Tête à Tête interview with Jean Charest at p. 26). That Canada will at once “promote the Interests of the British Empire” means that, in fact, Canada was designed to outsource strategy – the big questions – to Westminster. In other words, Britain was by vocation to have done strategy, while Canada was to become, at most, a tactical power.

Canada’s constitutional logic mirrored and prefigured a peculiarly tactical Canadian national culture and psychology that, without the conspicuous interruption of revolution (the American experience) or existential war (consider Israel, Singapore, Turkey, China, Russia and Iran), became the general context and gravity, as it were, within which questions of Canada and its performance in the world must be analyzed. This constitutional logic suggested that Canada was legally and politically emancipated from the imperial yoke, but that its strategic culture and psychology remained trapped in a colonial cage.

It follows, then, that, in many ways, the migration of Canada to a major power this century is very much a psychological and cultural proposition. For the Canadian in the Canada of the year 2100 – a Canada that, if united, can be a major power – will think, talk and act differently from the Canadian in the year 2013. This is only natural and proper. He or she will think differently about himself or herself as a Canadian, about his or her country, and about what is possible both for himself or herself in Canada, and for Canada in the larger human experience and in the sweep of human history.

Another way to understand or interpret this proposition is to say that the key moves for Canada this century turn not on the ‘ends’ of Canadian policy in the world, but rather on the ‘means.’ While it is common today in Canadian policy and strategic circles to debate about what Canada ought to do in international affairs in scenario X or scenario Y, and whether one federal government’s positions are more wise than those of alternative or past

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governments, this debate generally happens in the context of the aforementioned colonial cage – that is, in the absence of a deep national strategic psychology or culture. And because such strategic psychology or culture is the indispensable bulwark or foundation for Canada being able to act with great (and regular) consequentiality in world affairs, it follows that Canada as a major power is also a proposition about means, rather than ends.

In other words, before Canada determines what it may wish to accomplish in the world as one of its major countries, it must develop the requisite national psychology and culture to properly assess its options on such a plane of strategic potential.

Governing Canada in this more complex century will therefore require an approach that is not merely functional or, in the modern parlance, service-oriented, but one that will also have to be very deliberately effective in the psychological realm. The purpose of such government must be to emancipate the Canadian, psychologically, in order that Canada may begin to build and reappropriate its own strategic imagination – instead

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The metaphor of 100 million plays very clearly in the psychological space – reinforcing the conjecture that the mentality of the Canadian at 100 million will be markedly different from that of the Canadian at 35 million.

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of outsourcing it, consciously or unconsciously, to nations, countries and peoples that it has to date fancied more serious or authoritative.

Enter the argument that Canada should have a population of 100 million people by the year 2100 (see my Feature article “Canada – Population 100 Million” in GB’s Spring/Summer 2010 issue). This argument is both policy and metaphor. In policy terms, 100 million (or 70 million or even 120 million) people properly distributed across Canada’s land mass (including in the north, where the Arctic border will have become porous and contested), will give Canada both the internal energy and socioeconomic dynamism that it will need to support – nay, drive – a far higher standard of domestic achievement and, in the same breath, to undergird far greater Canadian influence (power) in international affairs.

As for the metaphor of the 100 million thoughtexperiment, it consists in the idea of Canadians and Canada thinking big and imagining the long-term.

In this sense, the metaphor of 100 million plays very

clearly in the psychological space – reinforcing the aforementioned conjecture that the mentality of the Canadian at 100 million will be markedly different from that of the Canadian at 35 million. (Note: the environmental or ‘carrying capacity’ critique of the 100 million conjecture is far less persuasive than the critique that sees such a larger population as greatly complicating the management of the Quebec question.)

To come full circle, then: if Canada does not rise to the status of major power this century, then it may well become a strategic cripple – outsourcing its strategic imagination to other players, and living in accordance with their interests and preferences (which are manifestly not necessarily consistent with, or supportive of, Canadian interests and preferences). If Canada does rise to the status of major power, then it will need to have changed its national psychology over the course of this evolution. That psychology will need to have become more strategic – or indeed more strategically serious.

Let me go even further: if Canada does not develop the appropriate psychology for playing at this more serious strategic level ex ante, then that psychology may well be foisted on it by events – that is, if Canada is to emerge without becoming a strategic cripple.

In other words, in asserting itself at this enhanced strategic level, Canada may quickly develop the psychology that comes with performance at this level. But then again, it may not – that is, Canada may not be successful in asserting itself at this level (the strategic cripple scenario revisited).

This suggests the following paradox: if history is any guide, then a national strategic psychology, as is absent in Canada for reasons of the country’s founding constitutional culture and the general penury of strategic stress over the course of the country’s history, can typically only be acquired through the presence of said strategic culture or geopolitical stress. We have already painted the scenario in which geopolitical stress finally causes Canada to become strategic (or not). The only other factor that may introduce such a strategic psychology is heroic leadership – the coming to power of a coterie of like-minded Canadians who are clear-headed about the good geopolitical fortunes of Canada’s past and present, the challenges and risks of the future, and indeed the transformative potential of the country on the global stage if it succeeds in developing a national psychology and culture and the associated material capabilities (means) necessary to be serious and to be taken seriously as a far larger and more important player.

Evidently, the scenario of a leadership class that builds such a strategic culture and psychology is far more efficient than the scenario of the country edging into a storm of strategically stressful contests – contests from which it may or may not emerge

successful (not successful because psychologically unprepared). For now, that leadership class does not appear to exist in Canada. And it is not visibly on the horizon. It may yet develop. If it does, it will hopefully see that a Canada that is firing on all cylinders, strategically speaking, will not only achieve its ends in national interest terms, but may well transform humanity in toto.

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GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

e return, in closing, to two other positive reasons for Canadian power and in support of the desirability of Canada becoming the West’s second state this century, and quite possibly a top-five or six state tout court. The argument from national interest suggests, as we know, that Canada may need to become more powerful whether it ‘wants’ to or not. But the argument from obligation suggests that Canada, levering its peculiarly good fortune, has a net responsibility to the over 99 percent of the rest of humanity – most of which lives worse than do Canadians – to help to improve their lot and raise their prospects in life. A not-powerful Canada with an astrategic national psychology is not an effective player in dispatching such an obligation. But a powerful Canada that enjoys the right psychology could lift many boats indeed. It could transform Haiti – nay, three or four Haitis – in a decade, on its own. It could regularly lead peace-brokering exercises and peace-negotiating tables for several conflicts at a time. It could stave off genocides through superior intelligence and unexampled diplomatic relationships. Und so weiter. Indeed, the specific end matters not (that is largely for the government of the day to decide) – for the means to achieve that end are undifferentiated; and Canada would have these means.

Finally, there is the (admittedly provocative) argument from identity: are Canadians a primary or secondary people? John A. Macdonald, the founding prime minister, was steadfast in his belief that Canadians were a secondary people; that is, that the ‘primary nation’ was the British one, and that Canadians were happy, albeit subordinate, parties to the larger imperial (and civilizing) enterprise anchored at Westminster.

Will the challenges of this century turn Canadians into a primary people? I suspect that they just might.

A signal question, as Canada moves to become a major power, is whether this migration to primary status will be conscious or unconscious. If the migration is conscious, then there may be much consternation and self-doubt along the way. If, however, the migration is unconscious, then Canadians will soon be doing world-historical things together, with fierce regularity, and will not make too much of a fuss in the process – for these things will have become organic to, and indissociable from, Canada and the Canadian. And the world will be better for it. | GB

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NEZ À NEZ Whither the Afghan project from next year?

Afghanistan will be a source of global instability after 2014.

PROPOSITION:

JOHN DUNCAN vs DANIEL P. FATA

John Duncan (in favour): History suggests that

John Duncan is Director of the Ethics, Society and Law programme at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Daniel P. Fata is the Vice-President of the Cohen Group in Washington, DC, and Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US. He is a former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Europe and NATO.

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Afghanistan will be an indubitable source of serious instability after 2014. During much of the 19th century, Afghanistan was the centre of struggle between the forces of imperial Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia. During most of the second half of the 20th century, the two superpowers – the USSR and the US – vied for the allegiance of Afghanistan, eventually resulting in the fateful Soviet invasion of 1979, which initiated the last major hot conflict of the Cold War. For nearly a decade, the USSR, on the one hand, and the US and regionally backed Mujahideen forces, on the other, fought a brutal war for Afghanistan.

After the USSR withdrew, Afghanistan proceeded to spiral into a bloody civil war led by its regionally backed former Mujahideen warlords, each competing for exclusive control of the country.

Partly in reaction to the ongoing lawlessness and internecine slaughter of the civil war, the Taliban rose out of the area straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan – an impossible border drawn by the imperial British through the middle of the traditional lands of the Pashtun nation, which itself, with the support of important Pakistani state forces, has continually supported the Taliban.

During the 1990s, the Taliban took over and ruled Afghanistan according to an ultra-conservative and ruthless Islamic ideology and Pashtun code.

Of course, Afghanistan under the Taliban became the crucible of the international emergence of Al Qaeda, which brought with it the massive terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001. Those attacks caused the single remaining superpower to enter a major international war that is now 12 years old.

The US is scheduled to hand off sole control of Afghanistan to the Afghans in 2014 (see the Tête à Tête interview with John E. McLaughlin at p. 8). The handoff will be largely nominal, because the Afghan forces that the West has been supporting would fall quickly without Western finances, training, logistics

and hardware – not to mention Western soldiers.

Thus, internationally backed national struggle in the sensitive region will continue.

Not only has Afghanistan been a site of major instability in the recent past, but that instability has itself co-generated other theatres of instability, such that the West now fights not only the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but also these same groups plus their proxies and imitators in Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa. The instability is spreading.

In response to the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded not only Afghanistan, but also Iraq, drawing the world into two inconclusive wars. The resulting dozen years have exacerbated tensions in the Middle East and Central Asia, generated shockwaves in Iran, the Arab Spring countries, Pakistan, India and beyond, and seriously diminished the credibility of the US and the West worldwide. NATO and even the UN took sides. Not only have both institutions dirtied their hands in Afghanistan, but both now find themselves at the centre of a maelstrom that continues to generate instability in the region and beyond. With the perspective of history in mind, as the 2014 nominal handoff approaches, it is clear that stability is not on the horizon.

Daniel P. Fata (against): I am becoming increasingly optimistic that Afghanistan, post-2014, will not return to the Afghanistan of the pre-2001 period.

While Syria, Iran (see the In Situ article by Sam Sasan Shoamanesh at p. 6), Russia (see the Feature article

by Irvin Studin at p. 12), the fate of Obamacare and the budget debates in the US Congress are dominating current news cycles, tens of thousands of US, European and other partner nations continue to serve on the ground in Afghanistan, helping to secure the country for the Afghan people, as well as ensure that the terrorist breeding ground and lawless state that existed before 2001 does not return.

The conditions that existed in 2001 when the US and allied forces liberated – not invaded – Afghanistan do not exist today. This is not to say that the conditions on the ground throughout the country or the governing structures in Kabul are ideal; they are not. I would argue, however, that today’s Afghanistan has been largely transformed from the Afghanistan of a decade or so ago.

I argue from the following four premises. First, the large international military, political, humanitarian and donor presence on the ground has brought many changes to ordinary life for people throughout the country. These are changes – in technological,

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / RAHMAT GUL

chiefs are able to reconcile their differences and differing visions for Afghanistan. In many ways, this is the most important reconciliation that there can be within Afghanistan – a reconciliation between the Pashtuns and the Northern Alliance (which is even more important than the reconciliation between the ruling government and the Taliban). How the different factions in Afghanistan come together to support a candidate or two for the 2014 election and, arguably more importantly, whether and how they accept the outcome of a presumably fair election, will be crucial in determining whether Afghanistan is on track toward a stable future.

Fourth, unlike the pre-2001 period, there is some degree of foreign investment into Afghanistan today.

To be sure, this investment is relatively small and largely focussed on the extractive sector. However, there have been infrastructure improvements in roads, rail, airstrips, cellular towers, irrigation systems, and power grids with distribution lines.

These have all been built with international as-

Afghan police officers attend their graduation ceremony at a national police training centre in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, September 2013.

More than one hundred national police officers graduated from a two-month training programme.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

medical, educational, agricultural and financial terms – that a significant proportion of the Afghan population will not wish to lose or do away with.

Second, the international community, via the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago and the follow-up donors’ conference in Tokyo, pledged military presence and financial assistance to varying degrees and for various purposes through to 2017. Afghanistan will clearly require some level and degree of international attention for some time following the end of ISAF combat operations on December 31st, 2014 because the overall project and mission are not yet complete.

Third, Afghanistan will have elections in the spring of 2014 to replace the current president, Hamid Karzai. There is already great effort and time being spent in the country to try to determine who will succeed Karzai, and what the vision of the future of Afghanistan needs to be. The post-2014 stability of Afghanistan will depend on how the country’s elected leaders, appointed governors and tribal

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sistance and cash since 2001. These developments have helped to leapfrog Afghanistan into at least the 19th century in terms of the infrastructure and ingredients necessary to create the essentials for a functioning economy. Of course, if it gets there at all, Afghanistan is decades away from being able to enjoy a robust, self-sustaining economy. The country will likely continue to remain a ward of the international community. That does not mean, however, that Afghanistan is ripe for return to the breeding ground that it was pre-2001. Those conditions no longer exist today.

JD: Has the Western donor presence in Afghanistan

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The Taliban rose out of the area straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, an impossible border drawn by the imperial British through the middle of the traditional lands of the Pashtun nation.

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significantly improved the lives of Afghans? Has it generated sufficient improvement for Afghans to seriously consider defending the Western legacy in their country, and to do so against the insurgency?

According to the UN Development Program’s Human Development Index (HDI), which measures development in relation to national health, education, and income levels, the answer is no. Data and analysis are provided from 1980 to the present, throughout which period Afghanistan has been both in the lowest country category of human development, and well below that category’s average. For 30 years, then, Afghanistan has been at the bottom of the bottom category of countries worldwide.

According to the 2012 numbers, Afghanistan’s HDI rank was 175th out of 187 countries, with a score of 0.374 – significantly below the average of 0.466 for the category of low-HDI countries, well below the average of 0.558 for the category of countries in Afghanistan’s region, and far below the world average of 0.694. Overall, although there has been improvement since 1980, the rate of improvement has not exceeded the rate of improvement worldwide, with the result that the country has not been raised from the bottom of the bottom category. Bref, the Western legacy has amounted to nothing worth defending in Afghanistan.

What can be said about the pledges arising out of the Chicago and Tokyo conferences? These and other ongoing pronouncements of support are simply too vague and fluid to allow useful analysis.

In a recent report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony H. Cordesman pulls no punches when he criticizes almost every major aspect of the current path forward, suggesting that “the US and its allies need to examine their reasons for staying in Afghanistan, and understand that they cannot succeed with half measures or on the cheap.”

Cordesman calls the funding numbers that have come out of official talks both “guesstimates,” and likely seriously inadequate. We have to say “likely” because, in point of fact, “official reporting on the war has been filled with too much spin and too many omissions to make it possible to predict the

course of the fighting.” The development situation is worse. Choruses of reports about cherry-picked transitional, tactical and training successes have not relieved the deep concerns of serious Afghanistan watchers. The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will not be ready for full transition before 2016-2017, and we are blindly underestimating what needs to be done in the country for the next decade.

If the US $7 billion that the US is spending each month in Afghanistan is reduced to something closer to $4 billion per year – the current guesstimate – after 2014, then it is anybody’s guess as to how the transition will work. Wagering that it will be a stable transition would be a long shot.

Sensing the real and formidable challenges ahead, some analysts have resorted to conditionality threats to the effect that, if Afghanistan does not fix itself – that is, if it does not field a national security force that can replace nearly 100,000 of the world’s most advanced and well-supported troops currently in the country, and if it does not clean up its notoriously corrupt government – it should be left to transition on its own. But such threats are idle. There is clearly no possibility that the ANSF will be ready to stand alone, or that corruption will be cleaned up by 2014.

What can we expect from the spring 2014 Afghan presidential elections? With the elections set in the context of the withdrawal of NATO forces, Afghanistan is said to be approaching a crucial crossroads. Although President Karzai recently ratified electoral reforms (after long delays), the major problems in past elections were not due to a lack of positive law. Already, as in the past, millions of illegitimate voter cards are in circulation. Only about one-sixth of the female election officers needed for the security of female voters is available. If left unremedied, this deficiency will exclude many women voters.

Insurgent groups, for their part, show no sign of setting up political wings to run in the elections. This all but dooms the elections in two ways. First, it is a sign that the insurgents will disrupt the elections with violence. Indeed, a senior election official in Kunduz was assassinated in September of this year, and the election commission has recently determined that half of the country’s polling stations face conspicuous security concerns. Second, although few in the West have been able to imagine that significant elements of the local population may have interests more similar to those of many insurgents than to those of Western soldiers, it is true that elections that do not include the chief rivals for power in the country are not likely to lead to stability. Although it is said over and over again that a political solution is necessary, and although elections are political, the Taliban is not fielding candidates. War will therefore continue after the spring of 2014.

However, when one visits Afghanistan, one sees a different story. I do not know when you last visited Afghanistan, but I have been there 10 times since 2006 (when I was in the Pentagon). During my 10 visits, I travelled to Kabul, Mazar, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand, Zabul, and parts of western and eastern Afghanistan. I saw roads being paved, grass being watered, buildings being erected, more and more cars on the streets, children wearing uniforms to school, cell phone towers becoming operational, irrigation systems being dug, and markets becoming increasingly full of economic activity. While the data that you present may not point to Afghanistan having moved far from the bottom of certain indicator lists, I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that the lives of many millions of Afghans have improved during the past decade. I honestly believe that, having had a taste of modernity, average Afghans will not want to go backward. They will therefore fight (possibly with arms) to ensure that at least the new status quo is maintained.

In respect of the issue of donor pledges being too small or too general, yes, you and Cordesman are probably correct. These are just guesstimates, and it may well be too little to bring about a 2.0 version of Afghanistan. Still, I am not sure that this is the responsibility of the international community.

Our collective goal should be to ensure there is no significant backsliding in Afghanistan’s evolution toward some limited degree of self-sustainability and self-governance. We know that transitions from non-democratic rule to democratic rule have road bumps. We know that creating a market economy from the ashes of a command economy is challenging. Trying to do both simultaneously in Afghanistan, where a government from Kabul has never been successful, and where no true cash crops (other than poppies) or resources exist for sale, makes this all the more difficult. However, the international community recognizes this and has made pledges to help the post-2014 transition.

Pledges can be increased if necessary. What is most important to the international community, however, in respect of these pledges is that Afghan government (at all levels) respect transparency, human rights and anti-corruption practices. Benchmarks, metrics and standards have been imposed by the international community on Afghanistan in order for the financial assistance to be disbursed.

As I noted in my first intervention, in many ways, the key to Afghanistan not returning to a pre-2001 lawless strip of geography is how and whether the Afghan people seize the opportunity shaped and presented to them by the blood, sweat, cash, and sacrifice of the international community. (continued)

DF: You have clearly done your research, and the data points, when presented as you have chosen to present them, certainly do paint a bleak picture.

For the rest of the Nez à Nez debate on post-

The post-2014 stability of Afghanistan will depend on how the country’s elected leaders, appointed governors and tribal chiefs are able to reconcile their differences and differing visions for Afghanistan.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Elections are one way in which we have told ourselves a story about the reform of Afghanistan –to wit, about its democratization. The truth is that, over the last few years, Afghanistan has became one of the most corrupt countries in the world, ranking first in a tie with North Korea and Somalia in 2012, according to Transparency International. The upcoming elections will therefore take place in the most corrupt country on Earth, and will be disrupted by an insurgency that the most powerful military alliance of all time has been unable to quell in 12 years. This is not a promising combination of facts.

President Karzai has stacked the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission with political appointees (including its head), presumably to investigate any allegations of electoral fraud – such as the ones that undermined the legitimacy of his last election. Karzai is barred from running again, but all eyes are on his brother and former chief of staff as possible successors to maintain his factional hold on power.

Finally, real economic growth in Afghanistan – that is, growth beyond the artificial stimulus given by the intervention – is seriously restrained by corruption, the drug trade and insecurity. Many hopes are pinned on the extractive sector – the leading example of which is the Chinese-owned Aynak copper deposit, one of the largest in the world.

However, Aynak has been targeted by insurgents, is likely subject to renegotiation and downsizing, and remains many years away from production.

Development of the huge Indian-owned Hajigak iron deposit – a few years behind Aynak – will most likely run into the same problems. Afghanistan’s major highway, between Kabul and Kandahar, is largely at the mercy of the Taliban, with several attacks on convoys every day. The country has been ranked 168th of 185 counties on the World Bank’s list of the easiest places to do business. More and more Afghans are turning to growing opium, and the UN expects Afghanistan to supply some 90 percent of the world’s opium again in the coming year.

Ultimately, more Western funds for, and investment in, Afghanistan amount to continuing fundamental dependence on the West which, although an existential necessity for any pro-Western government in Kabul, will do little to stabilize Afghanistan in the short- or medium-term. Longterm predictions that deviate from the country’s historical and recent record of serious instability are worthless. As such, an internationally backed belligerent regime in Afghanistan, with resulting ripple effects throughout a highly sensitive region, will continue.

2014 Afghanistan, visit: www.globalbrief.ca

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THE DEFINITION "China’s main strengths are… … first, an innate confidence that enables decision-makers and the industrial population to plan for the long-term – even 20 or more years ahead. Second, in economic terms, the Chinese possess the ‘flexibility’ to modify their existing strategies to keep up with those of the West and Japan. As Alexander Gerschenkron, the great economic historian, pointed out years ago, latecomers to industrialization may possess the “advantages of backwardness” in that they have ready-made models of success to emulate. Second and third industrial powers like Germany and Japan could imitate Britain and France, and they could buy new technology off the shelf in textiles, machinery and electric power stations. This advantage, of course, has a correlative disadvantage in that it does not provide for Chinese strength in new or developing technology. As we know from past economic history, some latecomers like Japan and Germany worked extremely hard to keep abreast of modern developments in technology. Others like Stalin’s Russia fell behind and relied almost entirely on their cornucopia of oil and natural gas, often neglecting technical developments in consumer industry.

In value-added terms, Beijing’s contribution to industrial production remains less than one half of the proceeds from sales in Western and Japanese markets. Until recently, Chinese state-owned enterprises tried either to buy or steal industrial secrets and technology from Western firms. They have not had uniform success. As such, one question for the future is whether China will be able to follow the German road to success, or whether it will be slotted into the Russian dead end. Evidence suggests that these Chinese firms will have to keep ties to Western markets and firms in order to remain abreast of the latest technologies.”

Richard Rosecrance is Adjunct Professor, Senior Fellow, GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

and Director of the US-China Relations Program at the

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Belfer Center of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He is the author of The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent War and Restore the United States and Europe.

…its rapid economic growth and its colossal market. Chinese leaders have transformed a poor society by economic miracle to become the

second largest economy in the world. China is the world’s fastest developing country today, growing at rates unimaginable half a century ago. This is a dramatic transformation that no one predicted. To ensure that its economic success is sustained, the Chinese government is focussed on educating its young people, selecting the brightest for the fields of science and technology, followed by economics, business management and the English language – all in order to retain the country’s global competitiveness.

Geopolitically, China’s economic prowess places it in a very strong position to suck its neighbours – most notably in Southeast Asia – into its economic orbit as a result of its vast market and growing purchasing power. Consider that China can impose powerful economic sanctions simply by denying access to its huge market of 1.3 billion people.”

Hsiao-ting Lin is a Research Fellow and Curator of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

…d’abord d’ordre comptable: une puissance économique en plein essor, dont la croissance demeure relativement forte, malgré une légère baisse récente; une capacité d’exportation incontournable et que l’implantation de liens commerciaux avec les pays du Sud ne fait que renforcer; une population importante, qui malgré son vieillissement fournit une main-d’œuvre à bon marché, en particulier en provenance des provinces les plus reculées; ou encore une puissance financière exceptionnelle, avec des réserves de devises permettant à Pékin d’investir massivement dans le reste du monde.

La force de la Chine se mesure aussi, au niveau économique, par les réseaux qu’elle est parvenue à mettre en place avec les pays en développement, instaurant de nouvelles règles d’échanges et d’investissements, que certains observateurs n’hésitent pas à qualifier de consensus de Pékin, en opposition au consensus de Washington. Le caractère incontournable de la puissance économique chinoise, qui s’étend également aux pays développés, crée un nouveau paradigme dans lequel il est de plus en plus difficile, voire impossible, de dire non à la Chine. Enfin, Pékin bénéficie d’une image globalement positive dans de nombreuses régions, où les pays occidentaux sont vus avec méfiance,

Barthélémy Courmont est professeur de science politique à l’Université Hallym (Chuncheon, Corée du Sud) et chercheurassocié à l’Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques, ainsi

Pékin bénéficie d’une image globalement positive dans de nombreuses régions, où les pays occidentaux sont vus avec méfiance. Puissance diplomatique de premier plan, membre permanent du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU et disposant de la principale force armée en Asie, la Chine reste en retrait des principaux défis stratégiques internationaux.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

en raison notamment de leurs lourds antécédents.

Puissance diplomatique de premier plan, membre permanent du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU et disposant de la principale force armée en Asie, la Chine reste en retrait des principaux défis stratégiques internationaux, s’implique assez peu et maintient ainsi une relation étroite avec des pays isolés, comme la Corée du Nord, l’Iran (voir l’article In Situ de Sam Sasan Shoamanesh à la page 6) ou la Syrie (voir l’article Feature de Peter Jones à la page 18).

Si on peut y voir une faiblesse de la diplomatie chinoise, cette situation lui permet de maintenir des relations économiques et commerciales là où les autres grandes puissances sont absentes».

que rédacteur en chef de la revue Monde chinois, nouvelle Asie.

ILLUSTRATION: DAVID PLUNKERT

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STRATEGIC FUTURES “In 2020, Egypt will… …have moved much closer toward

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

While the experiences of the past two and a half years might have strongly exhausted the Egyptian public, they have also given it knowledge, autonomy and selfempowerment.

Egyptians, more than ever, want accountable governments that can deliver.

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its target of establishing a truly democratic regime.

The military will have stepped down and passed on the governance of the country to a civilian government. A referendum will have been organized on a newly drafted constitution. Free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections will have been held.

There will have been no manipulation of religion to try to sway citizens’ votes one way or the other.

The Egyptian parliament will, by 2020, have fair representation of all groups in society. Women will represent at least 30 percent of its sitting members.

These sitting members will include members of the young generation that spearheaded the 2011 Revolution, as well as representatives of different minority groups.

In the Egypt of 2020, no Egyptian will ask another Egyptian about his or her religion, as Egyptians will increasingly recognize that one’s religion is a personal choice and private concern. A government of highly committed, qualified and public service-oriented technocrats who are well versed in the inevitable overlap between politics and administration will rule the country. Security will have been solidly established. People will feel safe once more on the streets.

Foreign direct investment will start flowing in, and the tourism sector will again flourish. Education will be at the top of the government’s agenda.

There will be true investments made in the cultural development of new generations, with maximum focus placed on access to knowledge through new information and communication technologies. Rote learning will be removed from the schools. Critical thinking and creativity will be the main outcomes of this new pedagogical process.

Public health services will be much improved.

Sustainable development – capitalizing on Egypt’s plentiful new and renewable energy resources, especially solar and wind energy – will be the norm.

And, to be sure, Egypt’s traditionally overstaffed bureaucracy will have been restructured and injected with fresh, highly qualified catalysts for change.

Citizens will be able to regularly hold their governments accountable. Laws will be respected.

Human rights will be violated neither in police stations nor in military courts. Quality of life for Egyptian citizens will have substantially improved.

Poverty will have been reduced, and Egyptians will

feel dignified and much happier. Egypt will be on the right path to development and prosperity. And I shall wake up from my dream.”

Laila El Baradei is Professor of Public Administration and Acting Dean, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, American University in Cairo.

…be something that is genuinely impossible to predict – that is, if we have learned anything from the past two and a half years. In fact, the country is becoming increasingly difficult to predict even a single week ahead in these particularly tumultuous and complex times.

Many now adopt the fully pessimistic expectation, following the ouster of President Morsi and the subsequent crackdown on the Brotherhood, that the Mubarak era is coming back in full force.

Alternatively, supporters of the current political state of affairs are promising the most democratic and progressive Egypt ever. Others are projecting that Egypt – at least in the next few years – will be a cross between the more open Egypt of 2011-2012 and the still strongly controlled Egypt of the last few years of Mubarak’s reign. The fact is that the sheer volume and volatility of the elements that currently comprise the ‘Egyptian equation’ make many competing futures possible.

In today’s Egypt, the revolutionary camp is divided. The embattled Brotherhood (and its allies) will likely prove impossible to fully isolate on a political level. And the country’s largest Salafi (and all-round second largest) party, Al Nour, is torn between the pragmatic line necessary for its survival in the current political atmosphere and the conservative base that is largely sympathetic to the plight of Morsi and the Islamists – a base that can only accept so much ideological and political pragmatism. There is a new administration that wishes to tighten its grip on the country and the Brotherhood, but also knows that the entire official premise of the Morsi ouster was the protection of democracy against the Brotherhood’s increasingly autocratic drive. That administration still recognizes and officially endorses the January 2011 revolution against Mubarak’s dictatorship.

Much of the country’s liberal, nationalist and leftist political forces have remained largely within the prevalent political line since June 30th (first day of the huge national protests that led to the ouster

of Morsi). However, a growing number of these forces are beginning to show discomfort with the excesses of the post-July 3rd phase (the phase following the July 3rd coup that removed Morsi from power), and are expressing fears concerning any return of Mubarak’s police state.

Egypt’s civil society, for its part, might still be facing uphill challenges. It has thus far proven to be quite resilient.

Indeed, while the experiences of the past two and a half years might have strongly exhausted the Egyptian public, they have also given it knowledge, autonomy and self-empowerment.

Egyptians, more than ever, want accountable governments that can deliver.

Nevertheless, there is clearly a great deal about which to worry right now in Egypt, and predicting the near future is becoming increasingly futile.”

Bassem Sabry is an Egyptian political commentator and consultant.

...witness ongoing reshuffling of political alliances. The emer-

PHOTOGRAPH: THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP / HASSAN AMMAR

other remote areas neighbouring the Sudanese and Libyan borders.

Relocating its drone fleet from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti will not force the US administration to curtail its strikes against alleged Al Qaeda senior members in northeast Egypt – tacitly motivated by the need to defend Israel’s strategic interests in the region. Egypt’s military, for its part, will not be exempted from the people’s rage. Nevertheless, the effective insulation of General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi from the public and the waiving of a few military, economic and political privileges will likely be enough to bridge the gap between the masses and Egypt’s most historically significant institution – the military.”

Wissam Syriany is a Lebanese blogger. The views expressed

General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, September 2013.

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

gence of new states and autonomous ruling districts will strip Egypt of its historical status as a pivotal player in the Arab world.

The coming years will demonstrate to the youth who invaded both Tahrir and Rabi’ah Al Adawiyah squares that democracy cannot be simply earned through the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, and cannot be restored or promised by coup. Such hard-earned lessons will turn Egyptians toward the seemingly inconceivable: an overture toward Mubarak’s family – mainly Gamal Mubarak – and some species of redemption and new role for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Like most predominantly Islamic countries, Egypt will witness a remarkable increase in its birth rate, which will insinuate additional burdens on an already dilapidated economy. The expanding insecurity and instability in North Africa and the sprouting new pattern of hostilities orchestrated by the Al Shabab movement in the Horn – especially Kenya – will pull the whole region into a fracas without end. This will hamper the recovery of the tourism sector in Egypt, cast shadows on the productivity of the oil sector, and hinder foreign investments from flowing into local markets. The high unemployment rate will create a favourable environment for the growth of radical Islamic insurgency movements in the Sinai Peninsula and

herein are the author’s alone.

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EPIGRAM

Keats, Machiavelli and Truth How our humanity (and our future) are distressingly contingent on context BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

“T George Elliott Clarke is the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies, Harvard University, and the Poet Laureate of Toronto.

His newest book of poetry is Illicit

GLOBAL BRIEF • FALL 2013

Sonnets.

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o betray philosophy is the gentle treason / of poets,” says Derek Walcott, the St. Lucianborn Nobel Laureate in Literature, in his poem, “XII.” His infinitive possesses a subtlety, for “betray” can mean to double-cross, yes, or it can mean to “inadvertently reveal.” So the actual “gentle treason” of poets is to pen a discreet philosophy.

Poets do suggest philosophical ideas. Thus, the English Romantic poet John Keats opines, famously, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” That line from his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is multifaceted enough to justify a thousand schools of aesthetics, from catwalk Gothicism to architectural minimalism, from Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe and White House to JFK’s promotion of the Green Berets and co-design of the livery of the jet-age Air Force One. For that matter, aesthetics can inform sadism as much as it informs bodybuilding.

Recall the photographs of Iraqis abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison a decade ago, and the ways in which their American captors posed them, like male Barbies, for ‘ironic,’ but gruesome effect.

‘Baconesque,’ one might say.

Then again, the staging of crime scenes has been a staple of modern crime since Jack the Ripper conducted his Whitechapel of London outrages. A grisly Cubism gets enacted.

In practice, then, “Beauty is truth, [and] truth beauty,” is an insight that can back almost any policy or programme, or call to action or call to arms (if a leader can argue that desecration or dishonour ‘threatens’ the nation).

Campaigns for national ‘redemption’ and/or ‘hygiene’ can rely on the same verse. Thus, Martin Luther King could make colour-blind civil rights a moral crusade and use ‘non-violence’ to bear witness to the virtue of his cause. But so could the government of Alberta, between 1928 and 1972, pursue compulsory sterilization of targeted citizens in the name of eugenics.

Still, we cannot hold Keats ‘accountable’ (a favourite word of today’s global political and economic classes) for the misapplication or misinterpretation of a brilliant aphorism that also combines two abstract nouns of inexhaustible meaning.

To say “Beauty is truth” is about as definable as to say “War on Terror.” And if one can be invoked to explicate the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the other descriptor is in fact employed to support wet-job assassinations and worldwide surveillance.

(Come to think of it, in our time, the pseudoRussian citizen Edward Snowden has demonstrated the force of Keats’ thought – “Beauty is truth” – by

alerting all that Uncle Sam had morphed into a digital Big Brother.)

As compelling as is Keats’ accidentally Machiavellian aesthetic, his English Romantic comrade Lord Byron provides a definition of history that is consummate: it is “the Devil’s scripture.”

Jotted down in his “Vision of Judgment,” an acidic, satirical rejoinder to the poet Robert Southey’s sycophantic paean to the dead George III, Byron’s phrase is less abstract than Keats’ line, for it does allow for the symbolic – “Devil’s scripture” – to tease our imaginations.

Indeed, given the several millennia of written records that we may research, Byron’s supposition is arguably more verifiable than is that of Keats.

No matter what our choice of clime or culture or chronicle, we are certain to find the Devil at work (or play); if not literally, then almost always ‘in the details’ of an event or in ‘the fine print’ and footnotes of historians themselves.

For tutoring in these truths, one can consult Oliver Thomson’s A History of Sin. Thomson seems to canvass every sort of human society – theocracy and republic, commune and kingdom – only to determine that ‘sin’ is very much in the eyes of its beholders, and that we tend to swing from repression to license and back again once we have had either too many orgies or too many executions.

Yet, even the most self-consciously sophisticated and civil polities can lapse into barbarism, which is the likely point of the popular zombie films and “Walking Dead” TV series: that our humanity is distressingly contingent on context.

In this sense, the oft-cited ‘lessons of history’ are not necessarily convincing, for they depend too much on too-fallible ‘teachers.’ Thus, when ‘we the people’ of the planet are lectured that one government is ‘evil’ and that another must be ‘punished,’ it is prudent to question the ‘teachers’ about their own ability to make moral judgments that are not hypocritical or cynical.

For instance, the historical ‘lesson’ of dealing with a dictator’s stockpiles of noxious weapons is not only that Chamberlain-style ‘appeasement’ fails, but also that governments sometimes seize on spurious casus belli that okay even worse bloodshed and greater grief.

The real lesson is not that ‘doing nothing’ is wrong, but that reckless decisions can misfire.

The American historian James Joll said it best: “The tragedy of all political action is that some problems have no solution; none of the alternatives are intellectually consistent or morally uncompromising; and whatever decision is taken will harm somebody.”

History is the Devil that we must know well. | GB