From what many politicians and some of the press are saying, the house of ethnic togetherness is about to fall apart and the Ossetian withdrawal from Georgia is going to destabilize whole continents. No wonder that Beijing is opposing Moscow in rushing to recognize the new order in South Ossetia.
Theoretically yes, historically no. A few years ago the political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin studied ethnic division in Africa, a continent notorious for its wars. They identified tens of thousands of pairs of ethnic groups that could have been in conflict. But they did not find thousands of actual conflicts or hundreds of new states. Indeed, for every one thousand such pairs of ethnic conflicts they found fewer than three incidents of violent conflict. With only a few exceptions, African state boundaries are the same as they were in 1960 at the time of the independence movement.
It is true that Africa over the last decade and a half has been through a period of great turmoil. But, according to the just published annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors world trends in violence, Africa along with Europe, is now the most peaceful continent in the world, with only one significant tribal or interstate conflict last year, and this. (That is with over 1000 battle-related deaths.)
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: after Georgia, get ethnic conflict in proportion’
Our cover story this month is an uncompromising attack on Russia’s intelligentsia, the liberals and intellectuals who after 1991, argues Arkady Ostrovsky, were presented with a one-off opportunity to drag their country into the modern world. Instead, they got mired in irony and bad art, and were all too easily seduced by Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist vision of Russia’s future and his exploitation of public nostalgia for Soviet greatness. Communism is dead, and will not return. But the absence of a liberal voice in Russia means that the most powerful force in that country, as the Georgians have just discovered to their cost, is likely to remain old-fashioned belligerent nationalism.
Let us know what you think in the comment boxes below.
Hamlet, the most famous Dane of them all, was both fictional and glum. Yet, Sally Laird argues in her Opinion piece for the latest issue of Prospect, real Danes in modern Denmark are the happiest people in the world (according to the best recent investigations into such matters).
They’re not the most economically successful, or the cleanest-living, or the most demanding. But a national emphasis on shared experiences and a “gift for being properly ceremonious without being solemn” have created a society happier simply to be itself than anywhere else on earth.
It’s also a place that might, just, remind the rest of us that man can hand on more than misery to man—given half a chance and a properly assembled plate of herring sandwiches.
If Richard Nixon, the erstwhile red baiter, wasn’t safely in his grave, most probably he would be writing op-eds in the New York Times saying that, “we are in danger of losing Russia.” For all the bodies of the liberal left in America dispatched by him on the way to the pinnacle of power, as president he became the originator of détente with the Soviet Union and at the same a respecter of its history and Russia’s massive contribution to arts, culture and religion. In his own words, Nixon was a Russophile. Once communism was defeated, he used to argue, Russia could assume its rightful place as a powerful European nation.
Today it seems that no one, either in the US or Europe, has the courage to stand up and say that we are in danger of falling back on our well-honed, oversimplistic cold war reflexes. The invasion of Georgia didn’t just happen because of some Kremlin malevolence. It happened because of the west’s ill thought-out position on the independence on Kosovo, the self-defeating military support President Bush provided for an unstable Georgian leader and, not least, because the west failed to bring Russia into the fold after the death of the Soviet Leninist system.
This is not to exonerate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for his macho posturing and his disregard of the importance of building a nation not of men but of laws. Neither is it to exonerate Boris Yeltsin for his erratic presidency, which allowed the deterioration of much of his country, not least the economy, and the rise of the robber barons.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: The long insult to Russia’
That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe is closed. So why is the Black Star on this side still open, and even extending its drinking hours?
Once the Warsaw pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping Nato going. The threat it was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Let the EU take the strain, by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, while America has led its quest for influence by application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war.”
As Mark Leonard wrote in Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, his clever little book of three years ago, “the contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush doctrine attempts to justify action to remove a ‘threat’ before it has a chance of being employed against the US. It is consequently focused very closely on physical assets and capabilities, necessarily swift in execution and therefore short term in conception, and unavoidably entirely military in kind. The European doctrine of pre-emption, in contrast, is predicated on long-term involvement, with the military just one strand of activity, along with pre-emptive economic and legal intervention, and is aimed at building the political and institutional basis of stability, rather than simply removing the immediate source of threat.” This is why Nato is no longer needed in Europe.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: How not to deal with Russia’
As the dust settles in South Ossetia, what has the Russo-Georgia conflict taught us about the complex politics of the Caucasian region? Russia had plenty of reasons for intervening so drastically in Georgia, of course, including the manoeuvring of traditional power politics and the urge to keep an uppity, restive neighbour in check.
But one aspect that many analysts have missed is the role played by Russia’s southern republics: North Ossetia, of course, but also Dagestan, Ingushetia and even Chechnya. Over the past few years the Kremlin has secured the loyalty of all the governments of these regions, but a continuing Islamic insurgency in the north Caucasus, which remains Russia’s top national security headache, means Moscow is unlikely to miss an opprtunity to keep the southern republics sweet—and found one in South Ossetia. North Ossetia obviously has an interest in defending its ethnic brethren over the Georgian border, but many of the other republics were also happy to see it stuck to the Georgians because of their closeness to the country’s other troublesome region, Abkhazia.
It’s a complex situation—Daniel J Gerstle, a writer and human rights consultant who has spent time in the Caucasus, tries to untangle it for us.
Also this week: as Labour’s fortunes under Gordon Brown continue to decline, Kieran Brett and Michael Macdonnell, former advisers inside No 10, urge the party to embrace pragmatism and to ignore those calling for it to return to its ideological roots. And Duncan O’Leary looks at how the Conservatives are responding to the increasing politicisation of public behaviour.
Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi peninsula. There are disputes over all of these territories but only one, the last—over a sizeable oil-rich wedge of land between Nigeria and Cameroon—has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason. In the latest situation, we see hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian.
Six years ago, Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsula, which had long been ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defence—who was pushing for a military solution—and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo and public opinion was nationalistic, but the president held his course even when, in 2006, the court ruled in Cameron’s favour. Bakassi is now being turned over to Cameroon.
Unlike South Ossetia, there was something important to fight over in Bakassi—large quantities of oil—but Nigeria nonetheless swallowed its pride. This does sometimes happen, though not as often as it should.
Continue reading ‘Power’s world: against self-determination’
In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.”
Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far from over, says Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. The old coercive system, which has led to modern Turkey’s history of parties being banned and military coups, may be over, but it is not at all clear what will replace it.
Also this week: Lesley Chamberlain marks the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. His accounts of life in the gulag killed off any lingering affection for the Soviet system among European leftists, says Chamberlain, but his own relationship with the motherland was complex and nuanced.
His identical twin brother may have been ousted as prime minister last year, but President Lech Kaczynski of Poland is doing a good job of maintaining the family tradition of intransigence in foreign policy. Just as the dust was beginning to settle following the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon treaty, the Polish president—never known for his Europhilia—has said that he will refuse to sign the treaty. Now other wavering countries, including the Czech Republic, may find it tempting to postpone ratification.
This all adds up to a big headache for France, which takes over the presidency of the European Union today. Before the Irish vote, Nicolas Sarkozy had looked forward to the opportunity of hosting a grand ceremony in Paris at which the Lisbon treaty would come into force and the EU would move on from its current tiresome phase of navel-gazing. Yet in an interview to mark the beginning of the French presidency, Sarkozy suggested that he understands that there is a difficulty with the EU’s attitude towards the democratic rights of its citizens, and that many people are beginning to wonder if the union is better equipped to “protect” them than member states. Sarkozy plans to travel to Dublin next week to meet Irish voters and listen to their concerns over Lisbon and the direction of the union.
Whether or not the Irish referendum was lost on grounds that had little to do with the Lisbon treaty, as many argue, the union cannot continue to reform and develop without the support of its citizens. Any ratification procedure that seems directly to go against the will of voters will lead to the continuing distancing of the European Union from ordinary people, and this is not sustainable in the long run, particularly if the union is going to expand to take in the Balkan countries and particularly Turkey. So while it is perhaps understandable that European politicians would express frustration that a few hundred thousand voters in Ireland can hold up what is seen as a necessary streamlining process, perhaps they should be looking a bit further ahead and thanking the Irish for drawing everyone’s attention to something that is long overdue. Sarkozy, to his credit, seems to have realised this—amd perhaps he has found a mission for the French presidency—making us fall in love with the EU again—that will turn out to be even more glorious than the one he had envisaged.
The surprise winner of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global intellectuals poll is Fethullah Gülen, a US-based Turkish Sufi cleric with an international network of 5m followers, many hundreds of thousands of whom propelled him to a landslide victory (see the full results here).
Those who had a pop at Prospect for pandering to the forces of pseudo-democratic populism by running such a poll will feel vindicated by the result. After all, the fact that the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s followers—successfully mounted an orchestrated campaign for their man does away with any claim of objectivity made for the poll (not a claim we ever made, of course).
Yet on the other hand, as I describe in my piece that accompanies the results, perhaps we can see in Gülen’s victory the emergence of a new kind of public intellectual: one whose influence is expressed through a personal network, with the help of the internet, rather than more traditional institutions like journals or universities.
And Gülen himself has strong links to Turkey’s ruling AK party, which finds itself on the receiving end of an attempt to ban it by the country’s secular establishment. As David Goodhart describes in his editorial, this is probably the biggest political battle in Europe—and anything that draws our attention to it must be a good thing. (Ehsan Masood explores Gülen’s life and work here.)
If you have any questions about the poll, or the various voting campaigns that it spawned, post them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them.
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