FEAR FACTOR - Sciences Po
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REVUE DES AFFAIRES INTERNATIONALES FOCUS IN Infocusrevue.com SCIENCES PO•PSIA•ISSUE 5•FEBRUARY 2012 the FEAR FACTOR [DOSSIER] The Doomsday Clock is at 5 to midnight... what fears are inching it closer to the end of the world?
Transcript of FEAR FACTOR - Sciences Po
ReVUe Des AFFAIResInteRnAtIonALes
FOCUSINInfocusrevue.com
sCIenCes Po•PsIA•IssUe 5•FeBRUARY 2012
the
FEAR
FACTOR
[DOSSIER]
The Doomsday Clock is at 5 to midnight... what fears are inching it closer to the end of the world?
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The Doomsday Clock, the concept created by the Bulletin of Atomic scientists, is currently set at 5 to midnight, i.e. the end of the world. It may have been constructed with nuclear war in mind, and may have recently included the threat of climate change, but international affairs today reek of a whole gamut of fears, threats, insecurities. The recent Toulouse killing spree in France is but one example of a situation that is already bringing a whole host of fears to the fore. And as nations recognize new areas in want of security - from energy to water, cyber to financial - fear, in all its myriad forms, seems to have permeated individual and national consciousness, in turn driving relationships with other individuals
and nations. Many have maintained that we are today living in a society of fear. Indeed, given the
various processes of securitization, Chris Bickerton, professor of World Politics at PSIA, states, “If security is an end in itself, then society would be founded on fear.” And since it is fear itself that generates the concept of security, are we not caught in a vicious cycle of fear?
The question, in the end: to what consequence this « surcroît » of fear? It was Coleridge who said, “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” Will fear lead to the minute hand inching closer to Armaggedon?
In this issue’s dosser, we offer a selection of some of the fears ‘doing the rounds’ today, and hope these ‘case studies’ allow you to decide for yorself in exactly what capacity fear is driving the world. We write of the inescapables: fear of China’s rise, the threat of Iran; we write of the anticipated: panic over an eventual global warming showdown, insecurity of burgeoning energy needs; we write of old ones and new: German’s distaste for inflation, the dangers overpopulation and urban health risks. Last but not the least, we talk of two socie-ties, each of whose existence seems perpetuated on the basis of fear.
We offer our usual wide-ranging variety of current affairs and comments, from Turk-menistan to Maldives, Falkland Islands to the corporate world of social responsibility. We also inaugurate our new “I-Witness” category: what better way to take advantage of our multicultural environment than to have a national present an issue particular to his coun-try?
With the second issue of the year out, we now start work on our Election special for our 6th InFocus issue. Till the next time...
Ritika Passi Editor-in-Chief
In line with our partnership strategy, the InFocus team con-tinued to look for social networks and other student magazines to partner up with. It is our aim to spread the word about InFocus “hors-murs” and to encourage exchange of articles with interna-tional affairs departments of other illustrious universities, so as to offer a platform for broader interaction.
We are happy that our first issue caught the eye of fellow student-run reviews such as Cambridge University’s “Art of the Possible”, a journal of politics, with which we have successfully established a partnership. We also invite you to have a look at ‘Duel Amical’, a student-run website on debates related to European politics.
As we continue our quest to broaden our horizons, do not forget to write to us if you come across similar student reviews or online platforms that we can contact!
Viktoriya KerelskaDirectrice de Rédaction
InFocus est une revue en constante évolution : vos questions, suggestions et commentaires sont donc les bienvenus ! Contactez-nous à [email protected]
InFocus is a constantly evolving publication and we welcome all questions, suggestions and comments! Please send any correspondance to [email protected]
A World of Fear?
INFO
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A publication of the Association Affaires Internationales deSciences Po, AAISP
rue Saint Guillaume 27 Paris Cedex 7 75337
Directrice de RédactionViktoriya Kerelska
Rédactrice en ChefRitika Passi
RédacteursMorgane EstivalHibba ItaniNithya KochuparampilAnjuli PanditAna Rovzar
InFocus would like to specially thank Peter Herrly for agreeing quotes. A thank you to Jamie .Stevenson for editing help
All photos are under the copyright of their
author unless stated otherwise
ED’s NOTE
4 InFocus
www.speaking-a-language.com est un nouveau réseau social spécialisé dans les langues et cultures étrangères dans les grandes villes du monde entier, à travers l’organisation de tandems, d’ échanges de conversation, de tables rondes où vous pra-tiquez votre langue étrangère préférée : apprendre l’anglais, apprendre une langue étrangère... Vous avez aussi l’occasion de participer (ou d’organiser) à diverses activi-tés qui vous permettront aussi de parler l’anglais ou une autre langue étrangère, ap-prendre le français, des cours d’anglais conviviaux entre amis... ! Des textes-supports mis en ligne dans le cadre de cet apprentissage convivial sont à votre disposition également.
http://www.accountingdegreeonline.net/rich-people-are-unethical/
Contents
InFocus 5
Current Affairs30 ans après la guerre: Les îles Malouines
Post Kim Jong-il: A Wind of Change?
Ici, C’est Pas le Cirque!
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8
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Media ReviewScrew Business As Usual
The Iron Lady Indeed
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I-WitnessNew Libya: New Fears, New Hopes
Mexico, Drugs and Fear
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48
CommentsElections: France
Turmoil in Maldives
Denmark: Green, Greener, Greenest?
Creating Shared Value
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42
44
DOSSIER: The Fear FactorFear: Constructs and Modern Realities
POLL: Road to Perdition
Rise of the Dragon = Fall of the Eagle?
«L’ Équilibre de la Terreur »
Climate Change: Don’t worry about the
End of the Planet?
Energy Security: The Reality
Too Many People: The Case for West
Africa
The City: A Threat to Human Health
Wheelbarrow of Worthless Bank Notes
Bahrain: Old Fears
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Using art to deconstruct fear: JR Face to Face ProjectLeft: Security Guards; Right: Sculptors
“ ...we're in Ramallah right
now. We're pasting portraits...
in the streets in a crowded
market. People come around
us and start asking, "What
are you doing here?" [We reply]
"Oh, we're actually doing an
art project here and we're past-
ing an Israeli and a Palestin-
ian doing the same job"...
And then there was always a
silence. "You mean you're past-
ing an Israeli face right here?"
"Yeah yeah yeah, that's part
of the project." And then...
we would ask them, "So, can
you tell me who is who?" And
most of them couldn't say!”
- Extract from JR's TED prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out
PHO
TOS:
JR/C
C
30 ans après la guerre: les Malouines au Conseil de Sécurité
J. Joaquin MAHDJOUBIAN DIAZ CANO
CURRENT AFFAIRS CURRENT AFFAIRS
6 InFocus
Les îles Malouines, ou Falkland Is-lands en anglais, sont l’objet d´une guerre de mots à l´échelle diploma-
tique entre les gouvernements argentin et britannique. À l´aube du 30ème anniver-saire de la guerre de 1982, l´Argentine a présenté le vendredi 10 février au Conseil de Sécurité des Nations Unies une plainte formelle contre la « militarisation de l´Atlantique Sud » par le Royaume-Uni.
La décision a été prise par la présidente argentine, Cristina Fernandez de Kirch-ner dans un acte public le 9 février. Pour montrer l´unité de l´Argentine face au sujet, elle a regroupé les membres du cabi-net, la coupole militaire et différents gou-verneurs, ainsi que des chefs d´opposition et des groupes sociaux et syndicaux. Elle a d’ailleurs insisté sur la démarche pacifique de son pays en expliquant sa volonté de passer par la voie diplomatique pour ré-soudre le conflit. Par ces mots: « aucune terre, aucun endroit peut être un trophée de guerre », elle faisait allusion à la guerre de 1982.
Dans le dossier présenté à l´ONU par le ministre des affaires étrangères argentin Hector Timerman, l´Argentine accuse la Grande Bretagne d’avoir quadruplé sa pu-issance militaire dans la région. La plainte mentionne : l´envoi aux îles du navire de guerre britannique HMS Dauntless, l´un
des plus modernes de la Royal Navy ; l´utilisation d´avions de haute technologie tel que le Typhoon 2 ; et la possession de missiles Taurus capables de cibler, comme le signalait Timerman, « une bonne partie du Chili, la totalité d´Uruguay et le sud du Brésil ». De plus, la rumeur de la présence d’un sous-marin nucléaire, a poussé le ministre argentin à parler d’une violation au Traité de Tlatelolco1. Il n’a pas hésité à affirmer avec ironie que « l´Atlantique sud reste le dernier refuge d´un Empire en décadence », et qu´actuellement le Royaume-Uni contrôle complètement le trafic maritime et aérien entre l’Amérique du Sud et l´Afrique.
Du côté britannique, l´UK Foreign Office est resté sur sa position en garan-tissant qu´il n´y aurait jamais des négo-ciations de souveraineté avec l´Argentine tant que les kelpers (britanniques habit-ant aux Malouines) voudront rester bri-tanniques. Sir Mark Lyann Grant, am-bassadeur britannique à l´ONU, est allé plus loin lorsqu’il a caractérisé la plainte argentine de « manifestement absurde », soulignant que le déploiement militaire en question est un déploiement de routine et purement dissuasif, et que l´Argentine devait arrêter avec sa politique d´hostilité envers les îles.
Mais la question de la militarisation
n’est pas la seule source de tension entre les deux pays. Elle s’inscrit dans un con-texte géopolitique plus global. La récente découverte de pétrole2 ajoute un élément de mésentente supplémentaire entre le Royaume-Uni et l’Argentine. Selon le cabinet de conseil Edison Investment, les gisements pétroliers pourraient en effet rapporter 176 milliards de dollars au gou-vernement britannique. Les deux pays, qui sont de plus en plus dépendants des importations énergétiques, ont eu, avec cette découverte, leur intérêt pour les îles Malouines renouvelé.
Prenant une longueur d’avance, le gouvernement argentin a récemment ob-tenu du Mercosur (marché Commun du Sud, conformé par l´Argentine, le Brésil, le Paraguay et l´Uruguay) le blocage de l´entrée des bateaux navigant avec le dra-peau des îles dans leurs ports. Il a même menacé de couper la communication aérienne entre les îles et le continent, en parlant de faire pression sur le Chili, pays par lequel transite le seul vol en direction des îles. Cristina Fernandez a annoncé sa volonté de remplacer les deux vols par se-maine qui arrivent au Chili par trois vols par semaine mais qui arriveraient à Bue-nos Aires et qui seraient assurés par la compagnie aérienne étatique Aerolíneas Argentinas. Nigel Haywood, le gou-verneur des îles, s’y est fortement opposé. De plus, une pression informelle avait été mise sur les entreprises en Argentine pour les obliger à réduire leurs importations provenant du Royaume-Uni, mais, après des critiques nationales et internationales, elle a été enlevée. Dernier évènement en date dans cette escalade des hostilités, le prince William se trouve actuellement aux Malouines en tant que pilote de la force aérienne britannique, présence comprise par l´Argentine comme une provocation directe. Dans ce contexte, le Royaume-Uni a annoncé le remplacement de son ambas-sadrice en Argentine, Shan Morgan, par John Freeman, un spécialiste dans la non-prolifération d´armements, terrorisme et la lutte contre le narcotrafic.PH
OTO
:HER
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Monument aux victimes de la guerre des Malouines à Ushuaia, Argentine
CURRENT AFFAIRS CURRENT AFFAIRS
J. Joaquin Mahdjoubian Diaz Cano is a first year Master student of
International Security at PSIA.
InFocus 7
Depuis 1833, l´Argentine dénonce « l ’occupation illégale britannique » des îles sur la scène internationale. Avant mais aussi après la guerre de 1982, l´Assemblée Générale de l´ONU n´a pas cessé d’inviter l´Argentine et la Grande Bretagne à pren-dre place à la table des négociations pour discuter de la souveraineté des îles3. Né-anmoins cela n’a jamais abouti se trouvant face au refus des britanniques qui clament le respect à l´auto-détermination des kelpers. La perspective d´une condam-nation internationale pénalisant l´envoi des troupes britanniques est faible, voire inexistante. Bien que l´Argentine réus-sisse à obtenir une résolution favorable de l´Assemblée Générale (de caractère non-contraignant), une résolution du Conseil de Sécurité (de caractère contraignant) reste impossible. En effet, l´Argentine sait bien que le Royaume- Uni, en tant que membre permanent du Conseil de Sécu-rité, peut utiliser son pouvoir de veto pour annuler la résolution. Il l´a d’ailleurs déjà utilisé par rapport aux îles Malouines dans le cas d’une proposition de cessez-le-feu pendant la guerre4. Même si la stratégie argentine auprès du Conseil de Sécurité est vouée à l’échec, ce pays y tient à la fois pour des raisons de géopolitiques interna-tionales et de politiques domestiques.
D´une part, l´Argentine souhaite tout faire pour « internationaliser » le conflit des Malouines. En effet, l´Organisation des États Américains et les pays de l’Amérique latine ont déjà exprimé leur soutien à la cause argentine. Selon les mots de Fer-nandez, « les Malouines ont [déjà] ar-rêté d´être une cause des Argentins pour se transformer en une cause globale ». Dans cette volonté d´internationalisation ciblant le long terme, la présidente refor-mulera sa plainte en avril prochain lors du Sommet des Amériques. Elle envis-age aussi l´option de se rendre en juin au Comité de Décolonisation de l´ONU pour défendre le sujet. De son côté, le minis-tre Timerman voyagerait dans certains pays membres temporaires du Conseil de Sécurité (notamment l´Azerbaïdjan). De possibles alliés parmi les membres permanents sont la Russie et la Chine, tandis que les États-Unis restent ambiva-lents et minimisent le déploiement mili-taire britannique. La France, quant à elle,
pencherait plutôt du côté britannique. Enfin, l´Argentine a accepté la médiation internationale proposée par le président de l´Assemblée Générale de l´ONU, le qa-tarien Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, mais le Royaume-Uni ne s’est pas encore mani-festé sur la question.
Au niveau de sa politique intérieure, le gouvernement argentin fait bloc et oblige les forces sociales et politiques (même celles de l´opposition) à se rallier autour de la présidente Fernandez. Le fait qu’elles aient été présentes lors de l´acte public constitue un premier signe de cette col-laboration souhaitée par le gouvernement. D´autres mesures sans poids réel mais ciblant l´opinion publique argentine ont été prises, telles que la désignation du tournoi annuel de football sous le nom de « Croiseur Général Belgrano5 », le choix d’établir la dernière réunion bicamérale des commissions d´Affaires Etrangères du Congrès le 27 février dans la ville d´Ushuaia (la capitale provinciale argen-tine la plus près des Malouines) au lieu de Buenos Aires, et la planification d´un Mu-sée sur les Malouines qui sera inauguré en août 2013 à côté du Musée de la Mémoire (dédié à dénoncer les crimes de la dic-tature argentine de 1976-1983), donnant ainsi un important caractère symbolique. De surcroît, un « grand acte national » est envisagé pour le 2 avril, anniversaire de la guerre. Cette « distraction » en direction de l´opinion publique, de l´opposition et des forces de pouvoir permettra de minimiser les contestations politiques et sociales face à l´insécurité, l’inflation hors contrôle, les tensions syndicales, l´austérité budgétaire et l´augmentation des prix des services publics que le gouvernement est en train de mettre en place. Ainsi ce dernier tente de prolonger « l´effet Malouines » jusqu’en 2013, quand auront lieu les élections lég-islatives.
Cette stratégie de caractère popu-liste n´est pas étrangère non plus au gouvernement britannique de David Cameron. En effet, les guerres de mots avec l´Union Européenne et par la suite avec l´Argentine montrent une volonté de détourner le public britannique des enjeux domestiques: une crise économ-ique qui persiste avec un ralentissement de la croissance et l´augmentation du
chômage6, tout en se conjuguant avec la crise politique du référendum écossais. Ceci explique les différents « provocations » militaires du Royaume-Uni, face à une Argentine très inférieure militairement et qui est loin de pouvoir (à la fois militaire-ment, politiquement, économiquement et au niveau de l´opinion publique) affront-er une nouvelle guerre contre les Britan-niques.
Actuellement, les îles demeurent une possession britannique. À long terme, cet état des choses sera néanmoins discuté par la communauté internationale, si la stratégie « d’internationalisation » de la cause des Malouines est un succès. En ef-fet, avec le nouvel ordre économique dont le Brésil, allié de l´Argentine, est l’un des premiers acteurs, ainsi que l’influence de la Chine, qui réclame toujours Taiwan, le statu quo pourrait changer en faveur de l’Argentine.
Toutefois, on peut trouver dommage que pour des raisons purement électo-rales, les deux pays mettent leurs chau-vinismes respectifs en avant au lieu de s’attaquer aux problèmes de fond auxquels ils doivent faire face, d´un côté ceux in-ternes à chacun et d´un autre, les négo-ciations réelles sur la souveraineté des îles Malouines. Espérons donc que les diffé-rents acteurs sociopolitiques et les élector-ats des deux pays ne tomberont pas dans le piège.
1 Signé en 1967, il établie une zone exempte d´armes nucléaires en Amérique latine et dans les Caraïbes.2 Pour plus d´informations sur la découverte de pétrole dans les îles Malouines : MAHDJOUBIAN DIAZ CANO, J. Joaquin; Las Islas Malvinas, ¿una guerra petrolera?; OPALC ; 22 février 2010.3 Assemblée Générale des Nations Unies, résolu-tions 2065 (1965), 37/9 (1982), 38/12 (1983), 39/6 (1984), 40/21 (1985), 41/40 (1986), 42/19 (1987), 43/25 (1988).4 Conseil de Sécurité, réunion n°2373, brouillon S/15156/Rev.2.5 Croiseur militaire argentin coulé par les britan-niques dans la guerre des Malouines en laissant 323 morts (la moitié des pertes argentines au long du conflit).6 Forecast of the UK Economy 2012 – HM Treasury.
“ L´Argentine souhaite tout faire pour « internationaliser » le conflit des Malouines”
CURRENT AFFAIRS CURRENT AFFAIRS
Post Kim Jong-il: A Wind of Change?
Vaagisha
8 InFocus
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) political leader-ship succession to Kim Jong-Un,
post the “dear leader” Kim Jong-Il’s de-mise, has transitioned relatively smoothly, as Republic of Korea (ROK) minister put it, and with it came the Chinese version of endorsement of supporting the smooth transition. Amidst rife speculation of a possible coup, the political establishment in DPRK is keen on consolidating power under its new supreme leader.
Kim Jong-Un has been consistently as-sociated with the nuclear tests undertaken during Kim Jong-Il’s era, thus indicating that the nation is already preparing to give Jong-Un a notoriously cult image that sees him carrying forward his father’s legacy of keeping juche central to the nation’s inter-nal and external policy.
The attempt to create an iconic aura around the young Kim also reveals some of the important key figures that wield power to influence and support the cur-rent leadership, such as his aunt, uncle and military chief. Despite the creation of an appeal similar to that of his father and grandfather nationally and internation-ally, the actual power is distributed among these select few, a departure from absolute dictatorship to collectivisation rule.
North Korea is at present maintaining a hard-line rule against its southern coun-terpart, is busy projecting a robust mili-taristic image, and is ridiculing the South Korean ministers as “confrontational fa-natics”. Expecting some military provoca-tion from DPRK in the near future is thus not a difficult diagnosis to make, despite the fact that ROK has offered an olive branch, and is willing to trade massive food aid as part of its goodwill gesture in lieu of North returning to the negotiating table for denuclearisation talks.
Kim Jong-Un’s focus on economic re-vival for its country in close association with ROK rather than People’s Republic of China is another important factor di-verging from previous leadership. Beijing, as it political and economic benefactor,
has been help sustain Pyongyang’s dismal economy; in recent years many scholars have argued that DPRK might take a leaf from Beijing’s way of market economy. However, North Korean economy re-quires substantial help and more than ex-pert advice: South Korea can thus step in, given its own past experience of rebuild-ing a devastated economy.
China and ROK also share strong eco-nomic ties with each since the past decade. Just this year, their respective presidents met in Beijing to negotiate the free trade agreement. The talks between Sino-South Korean leaders transpired at a strategic moment, when DPRK was still fresh in the mourning period of its “dear leader”.
The security dynamics working in the North-East Asian region are also largely influenced by the participating actors’ economic needs and policy. The young Kim’s policy will be, expectedly, dictated largely by the dynastic legacy and the ex-perienced influence of his well-wishers in the regime. Much will also depend on the new change in the South Korean leader-ship after its presidential election.
The change in political leadership in DPRK has seen China emerging as more than an economic partner for North and South Korea. The politico-economic clout that China holds in the two countries, along with its geo-strategic position, ena-bles it to dominate bilateral and trilateral relations. The cautious Chinese response and actions in maintaining stability in the region at this critical stage are due to its national policy of non-interference, though it is worth noting how it imple-ments it at its own convenience.
China – DPRK axis
China’s state-run media broke the news instantly about Kim Jong-Il’s de-mise. Beijing, however, took considerable time in presenting an official statement, and even then the condolences were of-fered in a routine press briefing. Chinese
scholars alluded this behaviour to the late intimation about Kim Jong-Il’s death by Pyongyang to the Chinese sources present in the Chinese embassy there.
Beijing and Pyongyang are undergo-ing seemingly amicable but strained dip-lomatic and economic relations. China is concerned about DPRK’s nuclear provo-cation, (which could heighten tensions in the peninsula to the brink of war), to which China has constantly sought the diplomatic route. Increasingly, however, many Chinese state officials and scholars see DPRK as a burden, given the pres-ervation of DPRK’s stability has been an important link between the two.
China shares a unique relation with DPRK more at the party and leadership level; consider the condolence message wherein China emphasised the unity of DPRK under Worker’s Party of Korea and the Kim Jong-Un’s leadership. China not only hopes for the preservation of the common ideology of communism flour-ishing in the North-East Asian region, but also wishes to keep DPRK under its con-stant vigilance at a time when the U.S. and ROK have escalated military exercises.
The biggest challenge China faces is maintaining stability in the Korean pen-insula. It was with this aim in mind that Beijing engaged in instant telephonic con-versations with its counterparts in Rus-sia, ROK, Japan and the U.S. soon after the official announcement of Kim Jong-Il’s demise. Moreover, Beijing’s objective in convening the Six Party Talks clashes with the hard-line rule endorsed by Kim Jong-Un’s leadership about inter-Korean relations and its nuclear policy. A stiffer policy of the new leadership in DPRK poses a problem for China; after the death of Kim Jong-Il, South Korean and Chinese representatives met and emphasized re-sumption of diplomatic dialogue via Six Party Talks.
China’s earlier policy of denuclearisa-tion was on the agenda prior to the Kim Jong-Il’s death; now, stability of the North Korean regime is of utmost importance.
CURRENT AFFAIRS CURRENT AFFAIRS
Vaagisha is a freelance writer on East Asia. She recently received a Masters
degree from LSE
InFocus 9
With the change in leadership and fear of regime collapse, issues such as control of nuclear weaponry, refugee flow and renewal of artillery attacks are common questions of interest for China and other regional actors.
Beijing has invested high stakes in maintaining Pyongyang’s image of bor-rowing patterns of Chinese-style market in the international political economy and has lessened any show of contempt against the latter’s nuclear provocations since 2009. China’s national interest clearly lies in an independent DPRK, since the Ko-rean reunification would imply U.S. troop deployment along the Chinese borders.
ROK-China axis
ROK became China’s third largest economic trading partner last year and third biggest source of FDI. China is already ROK’s biggest investment and trading partner. Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Seoul in October last year was a strategic meeting to upgrade their bilateral relations. During the high-profile visit, both parties expressed for more engaging inter-parliamentary, youth exchange programmes among other eco-nomic and social tie-ups to enhance the ROK-China relationship.
Yet, despite all the niceties, the real is-
sue is one of security and cooperation in the highly volatile region. Last December, the ‘accidental’ death of a South Korean by the Chinese navy on a disputed island bordering ROK and China resulted in agitations in Seoul by the public in front of the Chinese embassy. Such incidents invite further strain to the already scepti-cal perspectives held on each side about the other. What remains in focus between both sides is nuclear security and regional stability with respect to DPRK’s on and off provocative actions.
President Lee Myung-bak’s visit to Beijing earlier this year, and escalation in economic ties is an indication of the need felt for cooperation, due to the uncer-tainty over the North Korean leadership succession and stability. However, ROK’s need for strong ties with China is also a cause of concern as it also need to refrain from any activity that could jeopardise its relations with America, particularly in face of a potential U.S. troop increase on the ROK coast. Close relations with China could also imply being pulled into the Tai-wan issue between the other two.
Another aspect that has been adverse-ly influencing the development of inter-regional cooperation with greater mutual trust is the increasing demand for multi-lateralism from other East Asian nations. The East Asia Summit held in 2011 and ASEAN meet witnessed greater involve-ment of the United States as a third party, on a popular demand by ROK, Japan, Aus-tralia and to some extent India. The sum-mit saw a marked undertone of tension between China and the United States over power assertion in the region. Although the present uncertainty in DPRK could require engagement and cooperation with US-ROK, China predictably prefers to not engage itself in any such commitments. The new leadership change in both coun-tries will unfold further nuances in the relationship.
Predicting the unpredictable
Following Kim Jong-il’s death, China’s instant display of faith in the nation’s sta-bility of new leadership on a global stage as a responsible rising power was far clearer and firmer than the attempt of other regional nations or the U.S. and the UN. And in the current East Asian envi-ronment, opposing China’s attitude would be a wasted resistance.
China’s support for the ‘smooth’ North Korean leadership succession does not
mean that China would operate under an exclusive friendship with DPRK, raising its dependency. ‘Support’ indicates pro-tection of the national interest of DPRK, which implies internal political stability, which in turn means shaping of a favour-able geo-political environment for China.
The possibility of chaos cannot be ruled out within DPRK’s internal politics, since the decision-making power seems to have shifted from the top office chair to a distribution among the top ranks. Fur-ther, its chronic economic problems and social gap has been infinitely widened, and North Korean citizens, with all their political endurance, would certainly ex-pect relief from the new leadership. Also, Kim Jong-Un’s priority is to maintain political legitimacy, therefore domestic stability will follow at its own pace. One cannot expect great economic transition during this initial period.
The next year will be pivotal for DPRK if it fails to stabilise the internal situa-tion. The first to suffer the brunt would be ROK, and China would also eventu-ally have to bear the burden. At this point, China would prefer to maintain its na-tional policy of non-interference in North Korean affairs, but since the stability is necessarily a dear issue, perhaps China will not refrain from suggesting certain policies to DPRK to mitigate the current abysmal economic and social conditions.
The new leadership in DPRK’s foreign policy towards other regional parties and the United States has not been made clear, and thus an ambiguity surrounds DPRK vis-a-vis ROK and the United States. The magnitude of change in DPRK invites ROK to maintain alert toward new chal-lenges emanating from the former, and therefore ROK’s effort in offering cooper-ation to the new leadership is in sync with keeping itself abreast with uncontrollable factors like North Korea’s nuclear policy.
A change in DPRK’s brinkmanship and crisis diplomacy on the nuclear issue will depend a lot on the external environ-ment surrounding it: a greater mutual trust among the neighbouring countries has to be developed.
‘Tower of Juche Idea’ in central Pyongyang
Keeping the juche alive.
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Здесь не цирк ! (« ici, c’est pas le cirque »)
Natacha GORWITZ
CURRENT AFFAIRS CURRENT AFFAIRS
10 InFocus
Ici, c’est pas le cirque!
Un beau dimanche d’avril, nous partons avec d’autres expatriés, le guide et sa famille, marcher dans la montagne aux alentours d’Achgabat, la capitale du Turkménistan. La vue y est magnifique, les ombres projetées des nuages tapissent la vallée. Tous discutent, les langues se délient. Soudain, un grand éclat de rire : Здесь не цирк, c’est sûr, « ici c’est pas le cirque » s’exclame le guide. Elan de lucid-ité qui traduit avec humour les préceptes de vie à observer dans ce pays à la réputa-tion staliniste. Ici, mieux vaut se plier aux règles et se tenir tranquille.
Souvent ignoré, le Turkménistan, an-cienne République soviétique, est souvent associé aux records d’indice de corruption de Transparency International, aux larges réserves de gaz et de pétrole, ou encore, à Niazov, le président défunt surnommé le Turkmenbachy (« Chef des Turkmènes »), dont le culte de la personnalité n’avait d’égal que celui de Kim Jong-il en Corée du Nord. Depuis son indépendance, ce grand désert de cinq millions d’habitants est tenu d’une main de fer et dans l’isolement le plus total.
Berdymoukhamedov, président tout puissant
Depuis janvier 2007, Berdymouk-hamedov occupe la fonction présiden-tielle. A l’époque, malgré la légitimité con-testable de cet ancien proche de Niazov, certains avaient cru à un assouplissement du régime et à une plus grande ouverture.
Désormais bien installé dans ses pré-rogatives, le président se forge un culte de la personnalité plus assumé qu’au début de son mandat, à l’image de son attitude au cours des dernières cérémonies de la fête nationale où il confondait sa per-sonne avec l’idée même de la nation turk-mène. La statue dorée à l’effigie de Niazov qui siégeait au centre-ville et tournoyait au rythme du soleil a été détruite et le Rukhnama, écrit par Niazov et servant de
bible idéologique du régime, n’est plus le seul livre de référence. S’il tente de ban-nir les signes les plus distinctifs de son prédécesseur, il ne remet pas en cause les fondamentaux du régime autoritaire. Berdymoukhamedov, en leader paternal-iste, prône tout autant la modernisation de la société par le haut que le maintien des avantages en nature pour la population comme la quasi-gratuité de l’électricité et de l’essence et la fixation du prix du pain.
Le régime demeure très coercitif. Depuis 2010, les règles et les contrôles se sont plutôt durcis : les visas sont plus dif-ficiles à obtenir, les autorisations pour al-ler étudier à l’étranger se font plus rares. L’information demeure extrêmement contrôlée par le gouvernement : les media ne relatent que les nouvelles officielles et l’accès aux sites internet est censuré. Le film réalisé pour l’inauguration du nou-veau cinéma d’Achgabat et qui loue les vertus du régime et des traditions locales, y tourne en boucle depuis six mois.
Les élections présidentielles ont eu lieu dimanche 12 février dernier. Le succès de l’actuel président ne faisait aucun doute. Pour le scrutin, le régime du parti-unique a été supprimé. Toutefois, l’ouverture est ténue. Sept autres candidats dociles issus du régime, se prêtent à la farce électorale
après avoir reçu une autorisation préal-able de l’Etat.
Les résultats sont parus ce lundi 13 au matin. L’Etat enregistre un taux de par-ticipation record de 96%. Au Turkmé-nistan, les résultats officiels ne paraissent que trois jours plus tard. En revanche, en France, le scrutin est déjà connu : 97,14% des suffrages se sont exprimés en faveur de l’actuel Président. La commission élec-torale de l’OSCE (l’Office for Democratic Institutions and Human rights) a refusé de surveiller les élections : à l’évidence, les conditions requises pour un scrutin dé-mocratique n’étaient pas rassemblées.
Ashgabat, « ville blanche » ou « ville lumi-ère » : symbole de l’esprit modernisateur de Berdymoukhamedov?
Surnommée la « ville blanche » ou la « ville lumière », Achgabat est le reflet architectural des prétentions du régime : l’immensité des bâtiments tous de mar-bre vêtus et auréolés de coupoles dorées sont là pour rappeler la force du régime, la richesse du pays et son rattachement aux traditions nomades et musulmanes. Ses hautes tours, ses bâtiments disproportion-nés et son style futuriste sont les éléments qui ont donné à Achgabat la réputation
Chroniques turkmènes et dernières élections présidentielles
Le nouveau Ashgabat
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Natacha Gorwitz is a first year Master student of International Security at PSIA.
InFocus 11
d’être la « Dubaï d’Asie Centrale ». La modernisation du Turkménistan
est l’obsession du président. Elle est étroit-ement liée à la volonté de construire une nation turkmène puissante et unifiée. Berdymoukhamedov se situe dans la parfaite lignée de son prédécesseur qui voulait conduire la société turkmène vers le XXI° siècle, « siècle d’or du Turkmé-nistan ». Tous deux mettent l’accent sur l’identité nationale et la nationalisation de la société fondées sur la langue, sur le re-tour aux traditions et sur l’idée d’un destin manifeste des Turkmènes incarné par le « Chef ».
L’impressionnante cité est déserte. Ici, pas de boutiques, de kiosque à journaux ou de cafés, seuls les bazars traditionnels de la ville sont animés. La délinquance est inexistante. Petits à petits, les éléments du folklore local sont supprimés comme l’ancien bazar de Tochkulka. Il paraît que l’on peut tout y trouver ; et les Turk-mènes aimaient y déambuler en famille le dimanche. En avril 2010, le bazar a été remplacé par un immense complexe de marbre blanc, avec, pour entrée, l’image gigantesque à l’effigie du président. La plupart des commerçants a disparu, ceux-ci n’étant plus capables de payer les loyers exigés. Des quartiers populaires entiers
sont rasés au profit de la construction de grandes tours bien ordonnées. Ses anciens habitants sont relogés dans les pourtours de la ville dans d’autres immeubles nou-vellement construits.
Tout doit se conformer au nouveau visage marbré, impeccable, et moderne du pays naissant. Seulement, les habits traditionnels des femmes et les épiceries d’Etats, vestiges du régime soviétiques où les prix sont fixés, se marient mal avec ce-tte modernité et ce luxe affichés.
Le Turkménistan, nouvel acteur stratégique ?
Aujourd’hui, de plus en plus de multi-nationales tentent d’investir dans ce pays situé au carrefour de l’Eurasie, entre les géants russe et chinois et le Moyen-Ori-ent. Sous Niazov, Bouygues était la seule entreprise française à être parvenue à con-quérir le Turkménistan qui représentait son premier marché à l’export.
Le Turkménistan est le 10ème pro-ducteur mondial de gaz et produit égale-ment environ 10 millions de tonnes de pétrole annuellement. Entièrement cap-tée par l’Etat, l’exploitation des ressources naturelles fournit la manne financière du régime et attire aussi bien la Chine et
l’Inde que l’Europe. De nombreux projets voient le jour. En décembre 2009, le gazo-duc Turkménistan-China a été inauguré. Les discussions ont commencé sur la con-struction du gazoduc Nabucco qui reli-erait le Turkménistan au marché européen en passant par la mer Caspienne et l’Iran afin de diminuer la dépendance à l’égard de la Russie. De même, les négociations sont en cours pour la mise en place d’un pipeline qui relie le Turkménistan à l’Inde en passant par l’Afghanistan et le Pakistan (TAPI). En janvier, un gazoduc reliant le Turkménistan à l’Iran a été inauguré en présence du président Ahmadinejad.
Le régime de Berdymoukhamedov joue sur tous les tableaux : il s’appuie sur les rééquilibrages géopolitiques qui s’opèrent dans la région en développant de nouveaux marchés en Europe et en Asie et en tentant de s’émanciper de la Russie. Le Turkménistan, fort de sa neutralité, veut s’imposer dans le nouveau jeu ré-gional. A travers son rapprochement dès l’indépendance avec le Moyen-Orient, Turquie et Iran en tête, il prend ses dis-tances avec l’ancien monde soviétique. De même, compte tenu de la situation en Af-ghanistan et en Iran, le Turkménistan qui partage des frontières avec ces deux Etats, ne peut plus être ignoré des cartes.
Les intérêts stratégiques et économ-iques du Turkménistan tout comme la vo-lonté de modernisation de ses dirigeants forcent le régime à s’ouvrir. La question demeure de savoir quel impacts ces évo-lutions auront sur la société turkmène. Le maintien du régime autoritaire reposait essentiellement sur l’isolement du pays et l’absence totale de société civile, le prému-nissant contre toute forme de contestation et d’influence extérieure.
Voilà qui est certain : « ici c’est pas le cirque » ! Mais, comment le régime Turkmène parviendra-t-il à maintenir cet équilibre fragile à l’heure où celui-ci cherche à se moderniser et à s’affirmer dans le jeu régional tout en continuant d’imposer un régime de fer sur la popula-tion?
Car cet équilibre fragile d’une « mod-ernisation par le haut » combinée à une absence totale de libertés semble de plus en plus difficile à tenir, à l’image des con-tradictions de la nouvelle Achgabat, dev-enue véritable vitrine du régime.
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La nouvelle entrée du bazar de Tolkuchka à l’effigie de Berdymoukhamedov
FEAR: Constructs and Modern Realities
PSIA Poll
Rise of the Dragon = Fall of the Eagle?
Le Vrai-Faux « Equilibre de la Terreur »
Climate Change: 2 views
Energy Security
Too many people: The Case of West Africa
The City: A Threat for Human Health
A Wheelbarrow of Worthless Bank Notes
Bahrain: Old Fears
[DOSSIER]
DOSSIER DOSSIER
FEAR: Constructs and modern realities Ilina A N G E L O VA reveals how fear shape nation-building political incentives and strategies in Macedonia
“ Fear is the ontological fibre
intervowen in the concept,
embodiement and consequence
of hyperreality. ”
14 InFocus
What do Baudrillard, Th e Matrix or Lars von Trier’s Melancho-lia, contemporary nation-
building in Macedonia, and Critical Secu-rity Studies have in common?
Hyperreality would be a good an-swer. Th e idea, the examples (in art and politics), the implications of hyperreality– these fi t algorithmically with the sequence above and answer the question “Why is that the common thread of underlying af-fi nity?”
However, as any irremediable convert to critical theory would point out, “how” questions precede the “why” ones, just as understanding precedes, accompanies and envelops explanation.
In this vein, fear would be a better an-swer. Fear is the ontological fi ber interwo-ven in the concept, embodiment and con-sequences of hyperreality. It can import into the sovereign realm of explanation the understanding of the process whereby the multitude of collapsing realities, in-herent in hyperrealities inebriated with fear, can lead to the collapse of political systems and structures of security.
Deliberations on the multi-leveled na-ture of reality and its alter-egos have en-gaged generations of philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, but it is the work of the French social theorist Jean Baudril-lard (1929-2007) that cut the ribbon of a postmodern edifi ce of conceptual incar-nations of the real. His notion of hyperre-
ality refers to the "the simulation of some-thing which never really existed”, which leads to the hypothetical inability of con-sciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality – a phenomenon that is particularly acute in technologically ad-vanced post-modern societies1. Th e idea hinges on the concept of simulacrum – a copy without an original, a model “with-out origin or reality” that becomes a truth of its own right- a hyperreal entity2. Th e proliferation of media-generated simu-lacra has infected the existing collective consciousness, desirous of a continuous spectacle and state of simulated fascinat-ing sublimity. Th e inability of such trans-cendent social condition to be erected on the basis of conventional fi xed structures and demarcated boundaries - class, gen-der, identity - has caused the dissolving of meaning itself, rendering “impossible” the exchange between subject, object, concept and reality3. Th e possibility of the idea of opposition has thus been annihilated ; the cancerous propagation of simulations has colonized reality, replaced its genuine dif-ferentiations with a cavalcade of mirrors refl ecting projections that lead to concep-tual voids.
Fear is the fuel of the high-speed train of thought that crashes in the wall be-tween reality and simulation, driving out the collective social consciousness into a realm of mass-produced copies without originals. According to Baudrillard, con-temporary subjects are no longer struck
by ‘modern’ pathologies like hysteria or paranoia, but instead live in a constant “state of terror”4. It is sought by the com-mon psyche as a habit of social intoxica-tion aspiring to simulate the feeling of the sublime, which was famously defi ned by Edmund Burke as an aesthetic response to the nature’s capacity to strike us with terror, fear and awe: “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latent-ly, the ruling principle of the sublime”5.
Th e Matrix Trilogy is arguably one of the most prominent examples of hyperre-ality in cinema, with numerous direct and indirect references to Baudrillard, whose 1983 essay “Simulacra and Simulation” was in fact a compulsory reading for all members of the cast. Th e Matrix - the all-encompassing simulated, alternate reality in the movie - is a tool aiming at total con-trol, “a device seeking to reduce human existence to no purpose but the guarantee of the continued survival of the system”. Morpheus’ words to Neo “Welcome to the desert of the real” are a direct reference to Baudrillard’s idea of “desert of the real”, in which the imitation has “substituted the signs of the real for the real”6. Morpheus’ claim that “the Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth” also resonates with over-saturation of mass produced images and ‘simulated stimuli’ that ensure that “never again will the real have a chance to produce itself again”7 – the quintessence of the Wachowski Brothers’ commentary
Greek objections to the use of the Vergina Star, a symbol associated with the Ancient Kingdom of Macedon, led Macedonia to change its fl ag in 1995
DOSSIER DOSSIER
InFocus 15
on today’s society. The concrete relevance and social applicability of their observa-tions to real-life ‘systems’ make hyperreal-ity a valuable concept for the analysis of political dynamics of our own society and our fearful or daring engagement with the disclosure of its feigned facets.
Fear operates on a spectrum, ranging from unease to sheer terror, respective of the less or more radical nature of the binary oppositions on which this fear is constructed and which it itself constructs. Therefore, not all social antagonisms re-sulting in a restructuring of reality by means of novel discourses, structures or power relations can be characterized as instances of terror-fuelled hyperreality. That being said, it can be clarified that while the case in question – contempo-rary nation building in Macedonia - is certainly not an instance of hyperreal in-vention, it nevertheless has the potential to become one and eventually replace the stable boundaries and ideas preserv-ing the peace and stability in the country
and the Balkan region with unsustainable copies, detached from reality. The process which has the capability to transform the idea of Macedonian identity and nation-state from a secure entity embedded into common historical, cultural and political experiences to a “simulation of something which never really existed”8 is known as antiquization. Revived by the ruling party Internal Macedonian Revolution-ary Organisation – Democratic Party for Macedonian Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) after the country’s 1991 independence as a tool for political mobilization, it refers to the attempt to establish a new national identity on the basis of ancient Macedo-nian nationhood and, in particular, of the figure of Alexander the Great. Seen as a
solution to the “moral crisis of post-communism” and to the oppositional claims by all neighbors of Macedonia- Bul-garia, Serbia, Greece and Al-bania- antiquization measures have been used to “unify” the past of Macedonia by radi-calizing antagonisms within and outside the country and constructing the conceptual foundation of the nation-state on artificially engendered bi-nary oppositions with little or no connection to histori-cal realities. In short, Mac-edonia is being defined solely in opposition to “the other”, whereby the line demarcat-ing the boundary, dividing internal from external, real-ity from non-reality, has been drawn arbitrarily, with a po-litical aim, and without a seri-ous historical foundation, in mind. One of the stages in this process has been the invention and mass-production of tradi-
tion, defined by Hobsbawn as a “set of practices of symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition” to automatically imply “continuity with the present”9. Ex-amples of such sets of practices are the revival of the ancient Macedonian spring-welcoming holiday Xantica by the ruling party VMRP-DPMNE, the renaming of the airport and national highway “Alexan-der of Macedonia” and the Skopje stadium “National Arena Philip II”, and the con-troversial plan “Skopje 2014” envisioning the erection of tens of monuments, build-ings and foundations associated with the politically engineered idea of Macedonian ancient past. This phenomenon has been called “statuomania” by Hobsbawn, signi-fying the syndrome or act of “mass pro-duction of public monuments”- the last phase of the “mass production of tradi-tion”10.
These examples reveal one of the pre-dominant guiding principles of political action and discourse in contemporary Macedonia – autochthonism: the princi-ple that determines the historical right of a nation over a territory and symbols on the basis of the assumed or claimed lon-gevity of that national groups’ control or possession of the same. Unconventional and potentially destabilizing has been the application of this principle to layers of national identity where historically sedi-mented boundaries have been erased and new, radically unfounded, ‘realities’ with their concomitant delineating lines have been created. In the sphere of symbolic capital, for example, the incorporation in the national flag of the Star of Vergina – claimed as an ancient Macedonian sym-bol, but historically associated with the Greek control of common Macedonian and Greek territories – has exacerbated the already strenuous relations between the two countries. As a result, despite the radical unfeasibility and unsubstantiated nature of Macedonian claims over such symbolic capital, “among the population, symbols of antiquity, such as the Star of Vergina, started living up to the expecta-tions of a fully accepted national symbol only because of Greek contestation”11. The elevation of unfounded and distorted PH
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The erection of the 24m statue of Alexander the Great in the center of Skopje was seen by Greece as yet another proof of their history being usurped by the Macedonians.
“ Contemporary nation building in Macedonia has the potential
to become an instance of hyperreal intervention: a “simulation of
something which never really existed ”
1-4, 6-8 “Jean Baudrillard”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-losophy. 5 G. Ray, “History, The Sublime, Terror: “Notes on the Politics of Fear”, Radical Collective Culture. 9-10, 12 A, Vangeli, “Nation-building ancient Macedo-nian style: the origins and the effects of the so-called antiquization in Macedonia”, Nationalities Papers 39, 2011.11 J. Engstrom, “The Power of Perception: The Impact of the Macedonian Question on Inter-ethnic Rela-tions in the Republic of Macedonia”, The Global Re-view of Ethnopolitics 1, 2002. 13 T. Rizova, “A Case of Contested Sovereignty: Ex-plaining Ethnic Conflict in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 1991- 2002”, Review of Eu-ropean Studies 3, 2011. 14 E. Friedman, “The Ethnopolitics of Territorial Di-vision in the Republic of Macedonia”, Ethnopolitics 8, 2009.15 K., Fierke, Critical Approaches to National Security, 2007. 16-17 L. Lesnikovski, “Macedonia’s Ontological Inse-curity and the Challenges of Stabilizing Inter-ethnic Relations”, Eurasia Border Review. 18 P. H. Liottaa & Cindy R. Jebbb, “Cry, the imagined country: Legitimacy and the Fate of Macedonia”, Eu-ropean Security 11, 2002.
DOSSIER DOSSIER
16 InFocus
Ilina Angelova is a third year Bachelor Student at Cambridge University, studying
Social and Political Sciences.
copies of reality to the political sphere has made them a new ‘truth’ in their own right, a new ‘reality’ that has infected the region with artificially intensified enmity, clashing interests and fears, ‘hyperreal’ in their origin but genuine in their politically destabilizing implications. An illustration is the Greek opposition to Macedonia’s 2008 NATO bid and to its application for EU candidacy, both of which have failed and triggered new waves of insecurity and instability in the country12.
The fixation with the construction of a unified, homogeneous distinctive image of Macedonian identity out of and against a backdrop of ethnic and cultural het-erogeneity has mostly affected the social groups that least fit with the “hyperreal” nation, invented by VMRO-DPMNE: the ethnic Albanians in Macedonia. The au-tochthonistic claims used to substantiate the identitarian policies of the VMRO, as-serting the superiority of ethnic Macedo-nians over all other groups – Albanians (the most numerous minority), Romas, and others – have gained the loyalty of na-tionalists and resulted in even more hos-tile discourses and practices than those used against the Greek and Bulgarian “threat”13. While Albania has not explicitly articu-lated a specific territorial claim over Macedonia or taken political measures to en-force it, a largely unprovoked rhetoric of fear has resulted in documents, such as “the Document for the Salvation of Macedonia” produced by the Chairman of the Macedonian Acade-my of Sciences and Arts Gjeorgi Efremov. His idea, tacitly endorsed by the VMRO-DPMNE, to make Western Macedonia a “homogeneously ethnic Albanian enclave to be eventually ceded to Albania” in ex-change for a small area of land populated by ethnic Macedonians in Albania reveals the extent to which the pursuit of a sim-ulation of a projected reality can lead to genuinely threatening possibilities of eth-nic cleansing and social destabilisation14.
One approach which can not only identify and describe this colonization of reality by hyperreal constructs, but also conceptualize, explain the dynamics and predict the political implications of that phenomenon is the Critical Security Stud-ies (CSS) approach, and more specifically, the work of Copenhagen School. One of
the relevant contributions to this discus-sion of this academic tradition is the no-tion of “securitization”- the act of calling an issue a “security” one, which in itself constitutes it as a threat, where such might or might not exist originally15. Therefore, it is this “speech-act” which creates cate-gories that did not exist prior to the secu-ritization and which performatively con-stitutes them16. As per the Copenhagen School, by treating Macedonian identity as a referent object of security, political elite and society have jointly become the securitizing actor able to “decide on the limits of a given identity, to oppose it to what it is not, to cast this as a relation-ship of threat or even enmity, and to have this decision and declaration accepted by a relevant group”17. Transferring national identity from the realm of politics to the one of security allows for the bypassing of the realities of social and political life and the construction of their distorted cop-ies in a radically different domain, ruled more by fear and invention.
“The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to a state’s identity or existence; it is its condition of possibility” (Campbell). It
is possible that the securitization of Mac-edonian identity will define the situation in which the “construction of a commu-nity ultimately depends on the existence and suppression of that what is said to threaten it”. However, the illustrated prac-tical absence of explicit cultural, political, territorial or ethnic treats to the country’s identity on behalf of any external or inter-nal means that this constant invention of fear-related antagonisms will either im-plode under the weight of its own “hyper-reality” or will instead produce the truly dangerous oppositions it claims to be threatened by. An implosion will possibly be the result of the government’s fixation with these spheres of symbolic capital and its neglect of the practical, economic ones - the genuine threat to the Macedonian state at the moment. This detachment from reality is evident in the government’s decision to spend 50 million euros on the “Skopje 2014” project in times of se-
vere unemployment, financial crisis, and waning prospects of EU accession. This might potentially lead to the collapse of the Macedonian Matrix. With regards to the second scenario, “enemy stereotypes [often] have the terrible power of being self-fulfilling, because they set in motion a mechanism of resistance and response which, in its anticipation of anxiety, only provides new nourishment for all sorts of anxiety”. While recently there have been instances of inter-ethnic conflict in Alba-nian populated areas, leading to the death of three Albanians, the more prominent threat is again connected to the economic implications of the process of securitiza-tion of Macedonian identity. This has led to social discrimination in the form of bad healthcare, education and unemployment for ethnic minorities – stereotypically fertile political ground for conflict18. This collective participation in the spectacle of the simulation of national unity, perpetu-ated by fear of “the other”, has resulted in a hyperreal political system, in danger of imploding under the weight of the con-ceptual voids on which it has been con-structed.
“ The constant articulation of danger through for-
eign policy is thus not a threat to a state’s identity
or existence; it is its condition of possibility”
DOSSIER DOSSIER
ROAD TO PERDITION:What will bring global doom?
InFocus 17
Dec 23, 20121%
Rogue State - Iran3%
Rogue State - DPRK1%
The rise of China
4%
Nuclear terrorism / war13%
Weapons (NBCs) and Arms
7%
Technology1%
Climate Change
25%
Pandemic (actual or lab-created)
10%
Hunger/ poverty2%
Water Wars10%
Ethnic, religious clashes
7%
Running out of fossil fuels
9%
Economic recessions
2%
Control of the Masses4%
Cyber attacks
4%
PSIA voted: their biggest fear of what would result in world-wide devastation.
“We’ve known for some time that we have to worry about the impacts of climate change on our children’s and
grandchildren’s generations. But we now have to worry about ourselves as well.”
- Margaret Beckett, ex-British Secretary of State for Environment
“The world is thirsty because we are hungry”
- Theme of the 2012 World Water Day, focusing on the critical role of water in food security
“What keeps Pentagon planners today up at night, even more than the threat of a terrorist attack? It is the pros-
pect of an act of cyberwarfare... a ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’...”
- Christian Science Monitor on the need for cybersecurity legislation
“While the US would not use nuclear weapons against Iran, there are plenty of Iranians (and others in the
world) who aren’t so sure”
- Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute
18 InFocus
DOSSIER DOSSIER
Rise of the Dragon = Fall of the Eagle?According to Ritika PASSI, the Sino- U.S. relationship may not be a zero-sum game, but U.S. actions seem to indicate that it feels it’s dealing with a rising threat from the East
The great Chinese century has be-gun: An impressive growth rate – and that at a time when West-
ern economies are floundering; top spot as biggest world exporter with over $1.8 trillion worth of goods exported (from toys to cars); a growing clout as it builds its presence regionally and internationally (think WTO accession, ASEAN-RF, cli-mate change negotiations, Security Coun-cil veto, its ‘going out’ strategy...).
Fact and figures are abundant, laud-ing the rise of a ‘new’ power. As is the rife speculation that the American century of greatness is coming to an end. Pundits from all corners of the world are pen-ning discourses, citing historic, economic, military causes portending to the inevi-table and eventual drawdown of a nation that has been at the helm of world affairs for (what some consider) far too long as another nation rises up the ranks to “become the [world’s] helmsman”, in the words of a Chinese colonel in his book China Dreams.
And yet more than a niggling doubt remains. Will the United States of Amer-ica ‘go quietly into the night’? A choice epithet followed by a resounding no is still the answer in many quarters. It isn’t just patriotism or allied affinities either; let us not lose sight of those facts and figures that in no uncertain terms pit the U.S. as the bigger power: its defence budget is more than five and a half times higher than China’s; GDP per capita eight times higher, and though China may have over-taken Japan as the second largest world economy in 2010, its GDP is still lower than twice as half of United States’ (yes, take a moment to figure this telling sum out). China may have introduced its first aircraft carrier last August, but it pales in globla comparison – and indeed, its lone entry in the hub of exclusive nations that lay proud claim to one (or more) of these
babies – is rendered almost insignificant in comparison to the 11 that the US has in active service, with two in reserve. (Even Spain lays claim to two). And we need no figures to indicate the unmistakeably much larger American world presence than China’s, whether in terms of diplo-matic missions, foreign aid, companies, culture, media or military bases. Chi-nese ‘Confucius Institutes’, (non-profit program to teach the Chinese language and promote Chinese culture), may have spread to over 200 places in the world, but it’s no match for the Big Mac Mania – cur-rently at over 30,000 outlets worldwide. (And if you’re thinking ‘noodles’, consider ‘jeans’). Absolutes and relatives (at pre-sent, in any case) both unmistakeably pit American clout to be ‘more’.
Yet there seems to be an unmistakeable fear of getting left behind: the ‘Chinese threat’ isn’t mere fiction in many American minds. Case in point: club-bing it with Iran in the re-cent Joint Force Blueprint for 2020, which states that both nations “will continue to pursue asym-metric means to counter [USA’s] power projection capabilities.” Some in the top ranks of American politics have been recently declaring that “in a chang-ing world”, an era in which “US military dominance is waning at an increas-ing and alarming rate”, the US of A “cannot af-ford to sit on the sidelines and leave it to others to determine our future for us” . Perhaps it is this feel-ing of insecurity – amidst
a crumbling national economy, growing anti-Americanism around the world and a feeling of having bitten off more than it can chew with Iraq and Afghanistan – that has led the Obama administration to pro-claim a pivot to the Asia-Pacific to remain a global player with a changing strategy in changing times. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s budget briefing at the end of January stated that this rebal-ancing of “global posture and presence” is “to emphasize where [the US] think[s] the potential problems will be in the world”: a reaction to the fact that China may be “on the verge of significant power”?
In a recent interview on PBS, General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented, “China
« Le déclin de l’empire américain? » A diplay of books on this theme at the Bibliothèque Pompidou. Clearly a hot topic du jour.
InFocus 19
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appears to be this monolithic, homog-enous kind of world actor, and they’re anything but that”, citing “enormous” economic and domestic challenges. Yet there is clear acknowledgment of China’s potential as well: “we do need to think our way through how to ensure we find com-mon ground with China as it continues to grow, because it will.”
And this growth is worrisome. The Air-Sea Battle concept, a new joint mili-tary conceptual approach being explored by the United States Air Force and Navy, is meant to address the “military challenges posed by China and Iran” to American power projection and accessibility, given their thrust towards building up anti-ac-cess/area-denial capabilities. (Here again, the clubbing together of Iran, a ‘rogue’ state with China: even if only a simple as-sessment of reality, considering that both are building up area denial capabilities, the fact that it is included in the same sentence does give reason for pause). This need for power projection has been a re-sponse to America’s “growing dependence on overseas commodities, particularly oil, to sustain its economic growth”. Isn’t this exactly the same position in which the People’s Republic of China presently stands? Not so much a dependence on non-energy products as much as a vital stake in the global trade network, yet the end result is the same: a need to project power as well, to which the moderniza-tion of the PLA, trials of new weapon sys-tems, and Beijing’s recent advancements in Indian Ocean stand witness. This only provides further impetus for a clash be-tween the titans, one ‘historical’ and the other ‘emerging’. Another case in point:
“ China appears to be this
monolithic, homogenous kind of
world actor, and they’re anything
but that... we do need to think our
way through how to ensure we find
common ground with China as it
continues to grow, because it will.”- GEN. Dempsey
China’s energy policy of securing supply through diversification with bilateral co-operations is in contrast to Washington’s ‘keeping the global pool full’ strategy, one that considers energy to be a commodity and thus eligible for free market condi-tions.
And yet, this isn’t a zero-sum game – or at least, “you would hope not” is the re-ply Peter Herrly gives, a retired American army colonel, formerly Chief of Doctrine on the American Joint Staff from the end of Cold War to 1995 and the US Defense Attachée in France, currently teaching at PSIA. While American actions – par-ticularly military – may seem to some observers to be indicative of a strategy of containment (think of Obama’s recent statement on televisions that “budget con-straints will not come at the expense” of the envisioned “strengthening” in Asia-Pacific), Herrly feels that US interests “are not zero-sum oriented”.
Indeed, invoking the issue of energy, Herrly remarks that the dilemma of fossil fuels has to be solved internationally. And this goes to the heart of the issue of Chi-nese-American toss-up: whether some might say yes and some remain naysayers to China being a threat, “the important thing is to have a relationship.” This is why, when asked whether the U.S. is following a strategy of containment or engagement, Peter Herrly’s answer is, “if China’s ac-tions in areas like the South China Sea are perceived to be threatening by its neigh-bours, then some aspects of what might be termed “containment” could come into play – but from the US military point of view, the major challenge is to find a way to strengthen and deepen the US engage-
ment with their Chinese counterparts.” Nevertheless, recent tensions and sig-
nalling over sensitive areas like the South China Sea do serve to fuel imagination of a potential cold war-like situation, al-beit a globalized version – at least on the American side of things. But given China’s growing economic and political diplomat-ic presence in the world, it isn’t feasible to think that a solution to any of the world’s problems could be tackled without active participation from Beijing (and indeed, from the other emerging nations as well).
Engagement is necessary, since the ir-refutable fact remains that America needs China to give it money. Yet the U.S. hasn’t grabbed the begging bowl in its entirety just quite yet: the $1 trillion plus treas-ury holdings Beijing possesses may make Washington beholden, but it wouldn’t be in Chinese interests to start selling them for example. This would only depreciate the dollar and hurt American demand for Chinese exports (in what is called, in some circles, “Mutually Assured Depression”). There are some who go on to remark the disparity between the fact that China ex-ports its cheaper wares all around the world today while the U.S. is involved in
Finding common ground?: President Obama and President Hu
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“... in a changing world... US
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It is with respect to Taiwan that talk of long-range mis-siles and US ships parking in the nearby waters that furrows eyebrows. Indeed, it is the one issue (along with the South China Sea, as it increasingly appears) that no one doubts is a serious potential fl ashpoint between the two. The U.S. is ready to defend Taiwan’s sep-arate status from a Chinese threat and in this sense the military balance becomes im-portant. Thus arises the need, as U.S. senior offi cials have re-portedly pointed out, to estab-lish a comfortable and reliable means of communication in case of a potential fl ashpoint. This may, at fi rst glance, seem diffi cult, in face of Chinese ob-duracy on the Taiwanese issue. It has cut off military ties in the past over U.S. arms sales to the island-nation, and con-tinues claims of betrayal and infringement of sovereignty. China’s foreign minister was reported saying not earlier this month that the “onus” is on Washington to respect Chinese interests, i.e. Taiwan and Tibet. But many analysts feel this sort of statement is nothing but a “ritual”.
outsourcing much of its industry – oft en to workers in China. Clearly the relation-ship is one of give and take.
Th ere’s also a question of competi-tion when it comes to economic ideology, which pits the ‘Beijing Consensus’ against the Washington one. China is “Buying up the World”, as an Economist cover recently stated, in face of the “Coming wave of Chi-nese takeovers”, and in the process, propa-gating a state-based vision, given that it sees the state as an ally and not a strate-gic competitor as many others do (like the U.S). Any points Washington loses in motivating nations to adopt free mar-kets – which as many Americans strategic thinkers like to point out, are one of those American interests which benefi ts all – could be due to the growing attractiveness of China’s state-led economic growth, in
turn potentially aggravating any sense of insecurity on the part of Washington.
Furthermore, while the situation may have moved on from the Cold War days, when China was a perceived threat as part of the ‘spread of the red’, there is still ad-mitted unease about China strengthening anti-democratic and anti-US politicians in, for example, Latin America.
But what strikes a chord of terror the most in some American circles? Th e Chi-nese military build-up. “Political elites in the United States came away from the Cold War enamoured of military power”, claims Dr. Andrew Bacevich, given that the period ended with American victory (which only served to seemingly affi rm “God’s intention to extend the ‘American Century’ to the end of time”). Th is seri-ous “sustained fl irtation with militarism”, with a deep-rooted history, pits any po-tential opponent, particularly one that
seems bent on bridging the gap and has the political drive and economic prowess necessary to achieve the aim, as a serious threat. Th e threat only seems to grow big-ger, given China’s actions seem to be tak-ing on a decidedly aggressive undertone (at times, even an overtone), a seemingly sudden Chinese self-confi dence as it as-serts itself regionally through increased power projection.
Yet, Lawrence Korb, the former as-sistant secretary of defence in the Clin-ton administration, is wont to caution, “there’s no real danger” between the two: for one, “China is lending us money, we’re using [this] money to buy weapons, so they’re not worried”. And secondly, as Korb maintains, the pivot to Asia-Pacifi c is “not a new strategy”, it is only being “played up” as new – there have always
been 50,000 odd American military per-sonnel in Asia, all of whom are still there. Th e only marginal change has been an ex-tra deployment of 2,500 marines in Aus-tralia. General Dempsey would concur: it is neither a “re-emergence” nor “a new manifestation”, only a “rebalancing” that is “mindful of the shift s in demograph-ics, economics, and military power, which are all shift ing to the East.” Furthermore, many American analysts continue to con-clude that “China isn’t an expansionist power”, as Koben stated in a TV interview on RT earlier this year.
Korben further enlightens with re-gards to the already discounted aircraft carrier: it’s built on the Ukrainian carrier constructed in the 90s. Plus, “we’ve been building them every fi ve to six years”: the new-generation, 3-football fi elds long air-craft carrier currently being constructed isn’t in a response to any fear of a rising
20 InFocus
The ‘key’: TaiwanThe issue that brings rela-tive military power to the
fore
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1, 3 A. F. Krepinevich, Why AirSea Battle?, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010. 2 Hillary Clinton at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Summit in Hawaii past November.4, 5 A. Bacevich, Debellicised, London Review of Books, 27:5, 2005. 5 Interview, PBS, March 17th.6 Wired.com.7 J.D. Pollack, Chinese Military Power: What Vexes the United States and Why?, Orbis, 51:4, 2007. 8 Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, Jan 2012.
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InFocus 21
Ritika Passi is a first year graduate student of International Security at PSIA.
brethren, but only the next step in a pre-determined structure and plan. And the Chinese stealth, fifth generation aircraft? “But we’ve got thousands of stealth air-crafts!”
This may cause some to wonder, that if China doesn’t have any plans to take over the world à la Pinky and the Brain, (and neither the capacity to do it with), why then the very vocal and publicised Ameri-can pivot? Is the U.S. now looking to ex-tend the mandate of ‘pre-emptive strike’ to include future competitors on the in-ternational arena?
That would make sense, given that it may be the potential capacity that is wor-risome – the eventual capabilities that could, for example, engage in anti-access / access denial strategies. Take the case of missiles: some fear that the PLA may be inclined towards a missile-based strategy, possessing about 2,000 non-nuclear bal-listic and cruise missiles. The latest Dong-feng 21-D antiship ballistic missile, for example, has been said to be the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile. There is a definite potential, eventually, for these missiles to breach American carrier de-fences. The heavy investment in new cy-ber capabilities can’t be ignored either, nor can the “increasingly able to complicate, inhibit or directly challenge the employ-ment of American military power in areas contiguous to China” .
China may “never intend to challenge the US” and “will not match” US military power, as the General Chief of the PLA stated last year during his visit to the U.S.,
but what exacerbates fear and insecurity on the American side over the Chinese military build-up is the apparent non-transparency. For example, the PRC not long ago announced its military budget for the year at just over 11 percent, in line with a steadily increasing percentage which has quadrupled from the turn of the century till now. The undisclosed, real amount is widely considered to be higher by analysts all around the world, Chinese included, though just by how much is anybody’s guess (the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, posited the real amount to 70 percent higher that officially claimed).
U.S. military authorities, for example, have been asking the Chinese to “tell us what you’re thinking”, given that no clear information has been released or is availa-ble on what weapon systems, for example, Beijing is working on. Herrly takes it one step further: “One of the most concerning issues is a perceived occasional tendency for the Chinese military to act seemingly without the knowledge of the Chinese po-litical authorities... how much is the Chi-nese military really under Chinese politi-cal control?”
Whether or not it has any ‘interna-tional’ designs, Chinese regional aspira-tions are a given. Its aggressiveness in the South China Sea bears ample testimony, as does its expanding railroad network outside its borders. And then, of course, there is Taiwan [see box].
China’s own fears – and there are plen-ty – are another story, though it isn’t about to outright provoke Washington anytime
soon, even if it does consider itself being contained by it. World War III may not be in the offing, neither may be a clash of civ-ilization, but a clash of interest is harder to ignore; the option of ‘small wars’ isn’t go-ing anywhere. It is clear that the world is no longer any one country’s playground. So, for the moment it is an altercation over human rights here, a trade spat there; a state visit here and a defence pact with an Asia-Pacific ally there, as the US deliber-ates whether this ‘new’ centre of power is a threat to its “will...[to] remain the great-est force of freedom and security that the world has ever known” .
Duel Amical publishes two debate arti-
cles in each subject related to
European countries’ most interesting
political questions.
Who is right? It is up to you to decide!
http://www.duelamical.eu
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22 InFocus
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Le vrai-faux « équilibre de la terreur »Pourquoi l’Iran et les Etats-Unis craignent l’un l’autre et peut-on sortir de « la spirale de la peur » ? Pierre FALCONETTI explique
Les annonces du régime islamique iranien, ces dernières années, con-cernant le développement d’un pro-
gramme nucléaire, inquiète les puissances occidentales et certains pays de la région, notamment Israël. Selon Téhéran, ce pro-gramme viserait uniquement à acquérir des technologies atomiques pacifiques, à objectifs scientifiques et de production électrique notamment. Selon Washington et les Occidentaux, l’Iran chercherait à se doter de l’arsenal nucléaire, ce qui risquer-ait de déstabiliser fortement la région si ce doute venait à se confirmer.
En outre, les récentes manœuvres navales iraniennes (à l’occasion desquelles on a vu deux navires de guerre traverser le Canal de Suez et pénétrer en Méditer-ranée, avant de s’arrêter dans un port syrien) sont porteuses d’un signal fort. Téhéran ne compte pas faire profil bas et arriver à la table des négociations avec les « 5+1 » (Etats-Unis, Russie, Chine,
France, Royaume-Uni et Alle-magne), en position de faiblesse. Ces manœuvres, ainsi que la dé-cision de l’Iran de stopper ses ex-portations de pétrole en direction de la France et du Royaume-Uni, sont en réalité plus politiques que militaires ou économiques1. L’Iran n’a en effet pas les moyens de bloquer le Détroit d’Ormuz, et ses capacités militaires sont plus défensives qu’offensives. Le but principal de ces manœuvres étant de montrer les dents et, surtout, de signaler aux Occidentaux que Téhéran n’a pas l’intention de se laisser dicter sa conduite, rendent son comportement futur de plus en plus incertain.
La peur qu’auraient les Occidentaux de voir l’Iran désta-biliser la région est compensée par la frayeur qu’a l’Iran de se
voir mis au ban des nations. Certains ob-servateurs clament que le comportement iranien est dicté par des ambitions région-ales, voire globales, de se faire considérer comme un interlocuteur incontournable dans le nouveau grand Moyen-Orient. Or, l’Iran, au contraire de la Turquie par exemple (voir InFocus précédent), joue plus les gros bras que la conciliation afin de se faire entendre et respecter. En outre, le comportement de quasi Rogue State qu’adopte actuellement l’Iran serait plus dû à la peur de se voir exclu des march-andages visant à remodeler le Moyen-Orient (en quoi Téhéran perdrait toute crédibilité régionale) que par une volonté politique de puissance globale.
Les déclarations de l’Etat d’Israël concernant des éventuelles attaques « préventives » contre l’Iran afin de protéger sa propre sécurité soulignent cependant bien le caractère profondément anxiogène des relations Iran-Occident (vis-à-vis des
Etats-Unis et d’Israël notamment). Com-ment expliquer le sens de cette relation ? En d’autres termes, qui a peur de qui ? Les Etats-Unis craignent-ils réellement une offensive iranienne en dehors de leurs frontières ? L’Iran se préparerait-il effec-tivement à une agression extérieure ?
Une menace pour la paix globale ?
Comment appréhender le fait que l’Iran se dote de l’arsenal nucléaire ? Le discours qui prévaut serait celui d’une déstabilisation des équilibres régionaux en faveur de Téhéran. En effet, si la Ré-publique Islamique se dote prochaine-ment de la bombe A, elle serait alors la seule puissance atomique de la région avec, on le suppose, Israël. Or, Israël con-sidère son intégrité territoriale menacée depuis sa création en 1957. La dissua-sion que constitue son armée moderne et fortement équipée, en plus des très fortes suppositions sur l’existence d’un arsenal nucléaire, seraient les seules garanties de sa survie. C’est pour ces raisons que l’Etat hébreu fait pression sur les Etats-Unis et le groupe des 5+1 afin d’arriver à un arrêt du programme nucléaire iranien.
Les soupçons qui pèsent sur Téhéran concernant l’existence d’un pro-gramme nucléaire militaire font aussi craindre aux puissances occidentales l’émergence d’une puissance régionale qui pourrait s’appuyer sur les communautés chiites hors de ses frontières afin de ré-équilibrer le jeu régional à son avantage. La présence d’une forte communauté chiite en Irak n’est pas étrangère à cette crainte. En outre, les récentes révolutions arabes ont amené au pouvoir des forma-tions politiques comme les Frères Musul-mans, beaucoup plus tournées vers la reli-gion que le pouvoir précédent. Le fait que l’Iran soit une République Islamique lui donne donc une légitimité qu’il n’avait pas
Peinture murale antiaméricain dans la capitale iranniene
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InFocus 23
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1 Les importations de brut françaises et britanniques en provenance d’Iran ne représentent qu’environ 3 à 4% de leurs importations annuelles.
face aux dictateurs arabes, fortement laïci-sés. Un renouveau de la religiosité, et sur-tout, de l’extrémisme, soutenu par l’Iran, c’est cela qui effraie les Occidentaux.
Outre une déstabilisation de la région, la perspective de l’obtention par Téhéran de l’arsenal nucléaire pose la question de la prolifération. Un Etat de « moyenne » envergure comme l’Iran qui se doterait de la bombe en ce moment prou-verait que d’autres Etats de son envergure pourraient faire de même s’ils venaient à le souhaiter. Or, c’est cette perspective que les Occidentaux veulent éviter. En sus de la menace d’un « terrorisme nucléaire », une prolifération de la technologie atom-ique dans le Golfe Persique et au-delà dé-jouerait de manière durable et profonde les équilibres de puissance dans cette région sensible. D’où une volonté ferme d’empêcher l’Iran d’acquérir la bombe, afin de ne pas créer de précédent.
L’Iran se sent-il menacé ?
De son côté, si l’Iran cherche à se doter de la bombe (ce qui, rappelons-le, n’est qu’une spéculation), ce ne serait sûrement pas pour imposer sa volonté à d’autres Etats. En effet, la possession d’une arme nucléaire et son usage sont deux choses très différentes. La possession de la bombe permettrait une dissuasion efficace de l’Iran envers ses voisins, et n’implique pas la possibilité d’une attaque de grande envergure.
Pourquoi l’Iran aurait-il besoin de ce pouvoir de dissuasion ? Une des premi-
ères raisons tient au fait que le pays est entouré de bases américaines. Les Etats-Unis ont des facilités militaires en Iran et en Afghanistan, pays qui bordent tous deux l’Iran, le premier à l’Ouest, le second à l’Est. En outre, les bases de l’US Army en Arabie Saoudite et dans le Golfe Persique en général d’une part, et en Asie Centrale d’autre part, font que Téhéran se sent victime d’une politique d’encerclement de la part de Washington. Se doter de la bombe atomique réduirait les chances de voir sa souveraineté foulée par les forces américaines, et empêcherait une attaque à grande échelle, à brève ou longue éché-ance d’ailleurs.
Toutefois, les plus grandes menaces d’attaques par une puissance étrangère vi-ennent justement de la suspicion qui pèse sur Téhéran de produire de l’uranium en-richi afin de commencer la production de l’arme atomique. Dans ce cas, l’Iran aurait tout à gagner à stopper son programme d’enrichissement (s’il tant est qu’il aie un but militaire), et tout à perdre à persister dans sa ligne actuelle, même si la possibil-ité pour ce pays de produire son électricité grâce à des centrales nucléaires peut être considéré comme son droit le plus strict. L’Iran n’a cependant pas les capacités économiques pour résister à l’embargo dont il est victime, et ne possède pas non plus les capacités militaires pour résister à une attaque des Etats-Unis ou de ses alliés.
Ainsi, on peut voir que le double jeu de la peur de l’autre se fait sentir des deux
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Pierre Falconetti is a first year graduate student of International Security at PSIA.
côtés : du côté occidental tout d’abord, où le perspective d’un Iran nucléarisé terrifie les stratèges et analystes ; du côté iranien ensuite, où « l’encerclement » dont se-rait victime la République Islamique fait monter le ressentiment envers le camp oc-cidental.
Afin de sortir de cette « spirale de la peur », l’un ou l’autre camp devra faire des concessions, et pas des moindres : entre l’abandon du programme nucléaire sous menace d’une intervention militaire (pour les Iraniens) et laisser l’Iran avoir la pos-sibilité de fabriquer une bombe atomique (pour les Occidentaux), les négociations et les rencontres à « 5+1 » auront la part belle. Espérons que nous resterons au sta-de diplomatique sans passer par le stade de l’intervention militaire.
“S’il y a bien un enseigne-
ment à tirer des quelques
250 000 télégrammes
diplomatiques américains
du site Wikileaks, c’est que
la République islamique
d’Iran fait peur...”- Le Monde
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24 InFocus
Climate change was reintroduced to the agendas of many govern-ments and into the homes of peo-
ple around the world in the last decade partly as a result of Al Gore’s movie The Inconvenient Truth. I worked for Mr. Gore’s pet project, The Climate Project, helping to push his presentation and com-munication material to audiences around the world and especially in India. It was clear from our discussions with different sectors of society, and from the number of times in public media or diplomacy where Mr. Gore’s efforts were highlighted, that he had managed to bring a spotlight to this subject. It was no surprise that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 along with the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, from whom Mr. Gore collected much of his disturbing data.
NGOs and communication campaigns popped up with names like “2 Degrees” and “350,” representing maximum levels of temperature change and carbon diox-ide we should allow in the atmosphere. Governments set up Climate Change departments in their environment min-istries, and corporations added climate change to their social responsibility out-reach programs.
This climate craze that gripped the world was at its peak when the UNF-CCC COP 15 convened in Copenhagen in 2009 to discuss how to create binding
emissions reduction targets that would be more effective and stringent than the laps-ing Kyoto Protocol. A record high number of Heads of State attended the conference, and there were over 15,000 participants from NGOs and IGOs camped out at the event. Never had an international confer-ence on the environment seen such mo-mentum and support.
During the lead up to Copenhagen, a series of other publications and films that presented the data in a similar light be-came popular. Movies like The 11th Hour, Home, even Hollywood dramas like The Day After Tomorrow, were full of disas-trous images meant to induce panic that time was running out to save the planet. Books such as Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change, 6 degrees, and The Weathermakers, detailed the possible apocalyptic climate shifts to come. The international press, college graduation addresses, fifth grade school teachers, and Corporate general assemblies all sounded the doomsday cry, warning what would happen if we did not start lowering our thermostats, harnessing renewable energy sources, avoiding stand-by mode, and re-foresting.
In Al Gore and his contemporaries’ defense, in the mid-2000s –when econo-mies were booming, emerging economies were consuming at record levels , and oil exploration was rapidly expanding– the
scare tactic seemed to be the only way to get the Climate Change issue to the fore-front. There is plenty of validity to the horrifying facts that the public was being introduced to; climate change will pose a great threat to our existence. However, as the scare tactic became adopted by every sector of society, it also became trite. No one, corporations, governments, and in-dividuals alike, enjoys being scolded for their behavior, and change based on what will happen 20, 30, or 100 years in the fu-ture is very hard to sustain.
Beyond this, in their attempt to catch the public’s attention, it appears that some scientists and climate change activists had exaggerated and manipulated some of the statistics to make the consequences seem more immediate. The majority of the data is still undisputed, but these small contro-versies were quickly blown up by climate skeptics to question the veracity of the cli-mate change argument and dampen the legitimacy of its advocates. This is most evidenced by the incident where Dr. R K Pachauri–the chairman of the IPCC when it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007–was publicly shamed and reproached for a se-ries of incorrect assertions that the Gan-gotri glacier, which feeds the river Ganges, would dry up by 2035. Scientists had ap-parently miscalculated the numbers, and the possible date for this catastrophe is closer to 2350. Moreover, the controversy
All doom and gloom . . .How has instilling fear dropped out of the international climate change communication strategy? Anjuli PA N D I T explains
The big fear of climate change looms large. It is what a quarter of the respondents voted to be the biggest threat and the most likely to lead humankind to armaggedon. The following two pieces take different views on the media hype concern-ing global warming and climate change, whether positive or negative, whether leading to green jobs or drawing on fear and alluding to imminent threat. Whatever their take, the bottom line question - no more ‘end of the planet’?
Recognize the logos? Dire warnings indeed...
DOSSIER DOSSIER
InFocus 25
Anjuli Pandit is a first year graudate student in International Public Manage-
ment at PSIA.
. . . ou la peur comme conscience? Pour Morgane ESTIVAL l’écologie ne se résume pas à l’évocation de scénarios catastro-phistes pour promouvoir une prise de conscience
was fueled by the fact that the 1000 sci-entists who are attached to the IPCC all peer-reviewed this data, allowed it be published, and then continued to quote this inaccurate claim. This automatically lends to public distrust on the rest of the data the IPCC has published about the consequences of climate change.
It did not help either that Al Gore and his fellow messengers doom and gloom
were not so good at the second step in addressing climate change: solving it. Al-though plenty of papers and proposals have been printed by energy and environ-mental think tanks, there is still yet to be a proposal that provides a tangible, afford-able and achievable solution in the short term, especially considering the current economic climate. Efforts at cap and trade and carbon markets make sense economi-cally, but have encountered great political challenges, as nations withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol when they cannot achieve emissions reduction targets (as in the case of Canada this summer) or feel uncom-fortable transferring large sums of money across international borders (no one is keen to fund Ukraine or Russia’s emission deficit). Further, renewables are not see-ing the level of investments required to make them economically viable.
By 2010 climate change had fallen off the main agenda of most policy makers, the UNFCCC conference rooms were half
empty, the number of climate skeptics was on the rise, new oil pipelines were being proposed and Al Gore was only getting media attention for his divorce. In order to counter the trend of disinterest, envi-ronmentalists and social entrepreneurs have developed a new approach that tries to work with with large corporations and polluting countries, instead of alienat-ing them. Clearly, what we are seeing is a transition away from scare tactics towards making addressing climate change look trendy.
La nécessité d’agir pour l’environnement est rentrée peu à peu dans les pensées et s’est nor-
malisée grâce au développement de partis politiques, d’ONG, d’associations de con-sommateurs et d’entreprises misant sur le « vert » : les énergies renouvelables sont devenus aujourd’hui un véritable phé-nomène de mode. Le label anglo-saxon « nvironmentally friendly» est, par sa termi-nologie, représentatif du tournant qui s’est opéré dans la considération du change-ment climatique par l’opinion publique. La peur de la fin de la planète due à un désastre écologique semble avoir disparu pour devenir dans les esprits une prise de conscience de notre responsabilité collec-tive impliquant notamment une action citoyenne urgente et globale. Au lieu de se sentir coupable, nous nous sentons désor-mais responsables. Mieux encore, il est devenu opportun d’adhérer à l’idéologie
des « verts », car on est apparemment gag-nant sur tous les plans…
Pour s’adapter aux exigences de la société de consommation, le discours écologique semble en effet avoir aban-donné sa campagne axée sur la peur pour développer un discours plus modéré, mais engageant à agir. Nous avons évoqué pré-cédemment la responsabilité sociale de l’entreprise dans la contribution aux en-jeux de développement durable qu’elle in-duit: ce concept sera réellement popularisé pendant le sommet de la Terre de Johan-nesburg en 20021, auquel avaient participé de grandes entreprises, notamment fran-çaises, des secteurs de l’environnement et de l’énergie.
Dans le secteur du marketing économ-ique, l’apparition de slogans publicitaires basés sur l’engagement des entreprises à être écologiquement responsables et véhiculés par les médias et internet est ré-
La peur de la fin de la
planète due à un désastre
écologique semble avoir
disparu pour devenir dans
les esprits une prise de
conscience de notre respon-
sabilité collective...
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UNFCC COP 15: Global Action Day
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26 InFocus
vélatrice de cette tentation de séduire les consommateurs et de rassurer activistes et politiques convertis à la cause écologique. Certains slogans d’Areva témoignent par exemple de cette implication croissante: « L’énergie est une histoire qui n’a pas fini de s’écrire, continuons de l’écrire avec moins de CO2 », ou encore « Découvrez nos activités dans le nucléaire et les énergies renouvelables », suivi de « l’énergie est no-tre avenir, économisons-là ! »2. On passe définitivement d’un discours accusateur, improductif, voire sans fondements pour certains puisque les erreurs des scienti-fiques et les vigoureuses protestations des clima-to-sceptiques viennent alimenter les doutes, à un discours engageant.
Dans cette même veine, les enseignes de restauration se vantent d’utiliser des produits issus de l’agriculture biologique. Etre écologiquement re-sponsable est devenu plus qu’une norme ac-ceptée : c’est presque une obligation morale et citoyenne, comme le montrent certains slo-gans « verts » de Mc-Donald’s. Une grande affiche publicitaire verte nanti du fameux M jaune étale fièrement l’initiative écologique de la chaîne : « Parlons environnement, par-lons BIEN » ou encore « Croisons nos idées au service de l’environnement ». La volonté affichée de ces slogans d’associer tout le monde à la recherche de solutions envi-ronnementales montre bien qu’agir et mi-liter pour l’environnement est désormais à la mode. Loin d’être paralysés par la peur d’un désastre écologique dont nous sommes responsables, nous devons nous sentir moralement impliqués afin d’agir pour l’éviter.
En sus, les plus petites actions de notre vie sont concernées : utiliser du papier re-cyclable ou éviter le gâchis de papier, d’eau ou d’électricité sont des messages véhiculés tant par les services publics qu’au sein des entreprises et qui visent à cette prise de conscience de la responsabilité citoyenne en matière d’environnement. Yes, we can semble être devenu la posture générale et
consensuelle dans la lutte envisagée contre le changement climatique.
Cette croissance de l’économie verte, bien qu’encore cantonnée à une tranche de la population capable de se procurer ses produits encore onéreux, consacre l’émergence d’un nouveau offre et d’une nouvelle demande.
Le récent développement d’une fil-ière des énergies renouvelables consa-cre l’apparition d’un marché basé sur l’«environmentally friendly» en considé-rable expansion. Les énergies renouvela-bles ont été popularisées par l’apparition
d’une rhétorique attrac-tive et surtout incitative visant les consomma-teurs. Basant leur pub-licité sur la possibilité d’allier économies éner-gétiques et financières, les entreprises spéciali-sées en énergies renou-velables et la diversifica-tion des grandes firmes énergétiques dans ce domaine ont permis à de nombreux politiques de s’emparer de la per-spective de création de nouveaux emplois verts. Traditionnel-lement divisée en six secteurs (bioénergies, énergies marines, éo-lien, géothermie, hy-droélectricité, solaire), la filière des EnR a con-sidérablement accru son activité : si en 2005, elles représentaient moins de 12% de la
consommation totale d’énergie commer-cialisée dans le monde, elles représentent aujourd’hui 18% de la production mondi-ale d’électricité3.
Ce que l’on appelle désormais les EnR font de plus en plus consensus. Même la Chine s’est emparée de ce secteur en en-visageant de produire 40% d’énergies re-nouvelables sur le total de son mix éner-gétique d’ici 2040. Les USA restent les premiers investisseurs dans les EnR. Ce fait n’est pas sans révéler l’ambigüité de l’engagement écologique des Etats, pu-isque les EU n’ont par ailleurs toujours pas ratifié le protocole de Kyoto à ce jour.
En France, les EnR semblent bénéfi-cier d’une popularité croissante. En 2010, 97% des français se déclaraient favora-bles au développement des EnR avec une
Chaque siècle s’est
mobilisé autour de grandes
peurs...celle du 21e siècle
c’est la peur du changement
climatique. Celui si à son
tour laisse place à une prise
de conscience écologique
active.
Des innovations tech-
nologiques toutes aussi rocam-
bolesques les unes que les autres
voient le jour à travers le globe
suite à des initiatives géniales et
originales.
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préférence pour le solaire et l’éolien, bien que des critères esthétiques et de nuisanc-es sonores soient cités pour nuancer cet engouement populaire4. La mise en place de subventions par le gouvernement fran-çais pour inciter les ménages à installer des panneaux solaires sur leurs toits a été un élément important du développement de cette pratique. Créé en 2005, le système du crédit d’impôt développement dura-ble prévoit que l’Etat accorde une aide financière aux particuliers pour faciliter l’achat d’équipements utilisant les énergies renouvelables. Ce crédit d’impôt de 50% concerne l’achat d’équipement de produc-tion d’énergie photovoltaïque utilisant l’énergie solaire. En 2010, grâce aux aides publiques, le solaire a ainsi gagné 13% de consommateurs et les pompes à chaleur ont connu une hausse de 5%.
Nous l’avons dit, être “eco-friendly” est devenu un phénomène de mode: les pro-duits allient esthétisme, opportunité, utili-té, et surtout respect de l’environnement. Que demander de plus ? Le design des voitures hybrides telles que la nouvelle Toyota Yaris ou encore des modèles de véhicules électriques, ou véhicules du « futur » pour certains est recherché, mod-erne et attractif. Leur structure est un re-flet de leur rôle écologique.
Consommer bio, investir dans des infrastructures d’énergies renouvelables, inventer des projets novateurs en terme d’écologie est devenu un véritable courant. Dans le domaine de l’architecture, par ex-emple, le maître mot est aujourd’hui de construire des bâtiments qui consommer-aient le minimum d’énergie, tout en alliant pratique et esthétisme moderniste. C’est l’exemple de la gare de Bellegarde (Ain, France), dont la structure en bois et le dôme permettent une auto-alimentation en énergie solaire pour chauffer le grand hall. Des innovations technologiques toutes aussi rocambolesques les unes que les autres voient le jour à travers le globe suite à des initiatives géniales et origina-les. Cet inventeur californien, Joel Wolf, a mis au point un véhicule fonctionnant à l’aide d’huile végétale et lui permettant ainsi de rouler grâce aux déchets d’huile à frire récupérés des restaurants voisinant son domicile à Ojai…5
Enfin, l’idée que nous pouvons tous agir pour l’environnement est allée de pair avec le considérable gain de popularité des grandes ONG environnementales comme Greenpeace ou Friends of the Earth. En même temps que leur stratégie de lobby-ing auprès des gouvernements et des or-
Morgane Estival is a first year graudate student in International Security at PSIA.
ganisations internationales en charge de négocier les traités internationaux en mat-ière d’environnement s’améliore, ces ONG semblent être de plus en plus représenta-tives de l’état d’esprit de la société civile. Il ne s’agit plus de faire peur, car cette mé-thode est improductive, mais d’œuvrer ensemble.
Cependant, la crise économique ac-tuelle a-t-elle éclipsé l’urgence écologique de l’agenda politique ? Ou révèle-t-elle tout simplement que la société française conçoit la bataille pour l’environnement autrement ? Si le parti Europe Ecologie les Verts avait remporté 16,3% de sièges au Parlement Européen en 2009, il sus-cite beaucoup moins d’enthousiasme aujourd’hui dans la course pour la prési-dence française. Daniel Cohen Bendit, l’un de ses principaux leaders en est à se demander s’il ne votera pas François Hol-lande.6 Est-ce dû au manque de charisme et aux maladresses répétées de sa candi-date, Eva Joly, ou est-ce le fait que les fran-çais ne considèrent plus l’écologie comme une cause pour laquelle militer exclusive-ment dans le cadre d’un parti?
Finalement, cette changement de po-sition de l’opinion publique peut-être considéré comme révélateur d’un phé-nomène social : l’idée que chaque siècle s’est mobilisé autour de grandes peurs. La peur de la peste noire en Europe au 14e siècle, la peur de la surpopulation popu-larisée par les idées de Thomas Malthus, la peur du nucléaire militaire pendant la guerre froide… Si la peur du changement climatique est celle du 21e siècle, il n’est pas étonnant qu’elle tende à disparaître, et laisse place à une prise de conscience écologique active, au cœur d’une citoyen-neté responsable.
ITS DOING THE ROUNDS
Kony 2012
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, whose time is now.”
Acaye Jacob [former child soldier in LRA speaking with Jason Russell]: “So it is better when you kill us. And if possible you can kill us, you kill us. For us now, we don’t want to stay (on earth). We are only two, no one taking care of us; we are not going to school. How are we going to stay in our future?”
“...who are you to end a war? I’m here to tell you... who are you NOT to?”
If you would like to comment on the Kony Video,
get in touch with us at revue@affaires-internationales.
org.
1 sommetjohannesburg.org.2 http://www.jdp-pub.org/Areva-Euro-RSCG-C-O-France-Televisions-Publicite-et-Mediavision.html3 Key World Energy Statistics 2005 Edition, OECD/IEA.4 Baromètre annuel de l’Ademe, repris par Biactu (sondage effectué par BVA entre le 13 et le 25 septembre 2010).5 http://www.calgold.com/green/.6 Journal Le monde, 13 janvier 2012 : Daniel Cohn-Bendit se dit tenté par un vote « utile » pour François Hollande.
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T h e n u a n c e s o f e n e r g y s e c u r i t yTimon DUBBELING outlines how the notion of energy security means different things in different contexts
28 InFocus
Th e combination of the im-portance of energy on the one hand, and the concen-tration of most primary en-ergy sources – oil and gas in particular – on the other, have sown the seeds of the concept of ‘energy security’. Th e development of the term has followed an all too fa-miliar path: once it becomes a matter of increased atten-tion in media and politics, it becomes subject to a plethora of interpretations – and ex-aggerations. Th e threat posed by ‘energy security’ depends on its nature – whether it is an economic or a political issue – and the commodity market it refers to.
‘Energy security’ can mean diff erent things. On the one hand, it can indi-cate the sudden disruption of supplies,
as was the case during the 1973-1974 Oil Crisis or, more recently, during the 2006 and 2009 gas disputes between Russia and the Ukraine. However, energy secu-rity can also refer to the risk of sustained high energy prices. Although these two defi nitions share some aspects – rise of domestic prices, a potential slowdown of economic activity, and uncertainty among market stakeholders - they carry vastly diff erent implications. Th e risk of a sup-ply disruption requires political action, whereas high price levels are best solved within the framework of the market. An oil embargo cannot be resolved by mere economic tools, just as political involve-ment alone can do little to combat high oil prices.
Another crucial distinction for the dynamics and implications of energy se-curity is that between the oil and the gas market. Aft er the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, importing countries were quick to
reduce their dependence on imported oil. France, for instance, turned to nuclear power in 1974, whereas Japan switched from oil to liquefi ed natural gas in its power generation and enacted aggressive energy effi ciency measures. Such ‘demand destruction’ showed that high prices can make producers win the battle, but that it will not win them the war.
Especially since the OPEC pricing sys-tem was abandoned in 1985, the market for crude oil has become much more in-ternational – and its trade fl ows less po-litical. Although OPEC still covers 41.5 percent of global crude oil production1, importing countries are increasingly able to obtain oil from other suppliers. As non-OPEC supply increasingly came into the market, it became much more liquid and importing countries could increasingly diversify their import fl ows. As a conse-quence, the political leverage of individual producers and consumers decreased. At the same time, the international nature of the oil market provided tremendous fl ex-ibility to both producing and consuming countries. Th e current embargo on Ira-nian oil supplies by the EU and the US is only possible because importing countries are able to get their supplies elsewhere.
Th e price spike of July 2008, when
crude oil prices hit levels of nearly $150, revealed two important insights: fi rstly, that the challenges posed by the oil mar-ket are now of an economic, and not a po-litical order; and secondly, that when the boat of the oil market is rocked, everyone is aff ected. High oil prices are detrimental to oil producers as well. Global oil con-sumption slumped in response and again importing countries contributed large ef-forts to their oil use through alternative sources of energy. What followed were coordinated eff orts by producing and consuming countries through the Inter-national Energy Forum (IEF) to come to a controllable price band for oil prices.
Th e market for natural gas poses a whole new set of challenges in terms of en-ergy security. As transportation of natural gas historically required vast pipeline in-frastructures, countries either had access to gas supplies or they did not. Th is risk of exclusion made the issue of gas supplies a matter of political involvement. At the same time, producers such as the Soviet Union, which made enormous upfront in-vestments, sought certainty in the form of long-term contracts with their customers, so that their initial investments would be remunerated over time.
Nowadays the threat is defi ned in
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terms of Europe’s dependence on Russian supplies, which accounts for the majority of Europe’s total gas import needs. This topic became a matter of public debate as gas supplies through Ukraine to Europe were halted twice, in 2006 and 2009. This especially affected countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which were often fully dependent on Russian gas supplies and lacked alternative sources to rely on for falling supplies2.
The responses to issues of gas secu-rity fall into two broad categories: find-ing alternative supplies of gas, or finding alternatives for gas. Finding alternative supplies of gas can occur in multiple ways. Currently a lot of countries turn towards liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is nat-ural gas that is transported by large ves-sels. LNG, just like crude oil, is traded on an international market where buyers can choose between many suppliers to obtain their gas. LNG can therefore serve to al-leviate a country’s dependence of pipeline supplies. Another way to counter a halt in supplies is to store gas domestically. Such strategic reserves can then be used if nor-mal supplies are interrupted. If strong grid interconnection with neighboring coun-tries exists, a country can even make use
of gas reserves abroad.A second way to resolve the issue of
‘gas security’ is to ensure that alternative sources of energy exist within a country’s energy mix. Natural gas predominantly serves the power and heat markets. How-ever, within these markets there are mul-tiple alternatives to natural gas – nuclear and coal plants, renewable sources and bi-omass. By ensuring that these alternatives are sufficiently present within the power mix, a country can manage a sudden in-terruption of gas supplies by switching to other sources. This will also reduce the depletion of strategic gas supplies in case the country has access to those. The prob-lems suffered by countries in Central and Eastern Europe during the supply disrup-tions of 2006 and 2009 underline the im-portance of supply diversification and the availability of strategic gas stocks.
Although energy security is an issue that merits political attention, the threat of a supply disruption in the international oil and gas flows should not be exaggerat-ed. When transportation is fixed through pipelines, the producing country benefits as much from stable trade relations as its consumer counterpart. Recent experi-ences with gas supply disruptions show
that flexibility is the ultimate answer to energy security. Concerning the oil mar-ket, energy security is a matter of counter-ing high prices, not supply disruptions. As this is a challenge facing all stakeholders, it is likely to prompt a coordinated effort through institutions like the International Energy Agency or the International En-ergy Forum. The more energy security is a matter of concern among all players in the oil and gas markets, the more it will trigger international coordination. And if energy security is about the risk of being singled out, then such multilateral efforts will already make a difference.
1 BP (2011), Statistical Energy Review; data con-cerns 2010.2 Kovacevic, A. (2009), The Impact of the Russia-Ukraine Gas Crisis in South Eastern Europe, OIES NG 29.
Timon Dubbeling is a first year graduate student of International Energy at PSIA.
L’enthousiasme fait régner en Po-logne depuis avril 2011, date à laquelle l’Agence gouvernementale américaine d’information sur l’énergie (EIA) a an-noncé que le pays possédait 5300 mlrd de m3 de réserves de gaz non conventionnel (gaz de schiste), soit deux fois l’ensemble de la quantité du gaz conventionnel dont disposent la Norvège et les Pays-Bas. Alors que les compagnies d’énergie de premier rang (Chevron, ExxonMobile, Conoco-Phillips) se sont précipitées vers les lar-geurs de l’Est européen pour se concourir le droit d’exploration du gaz de schiste de ce nouvel El Dorado proclamé, la stra-tégie de l’élite polonaise revient à se con-centrer sur le gaz de shiste et à s’émanciper de la mainmise de Moscou.
L’exploitation du gaz non conven-tionnel en Pologne s’est vite trans-formée en mission nationale dont
La POLOGNE et le GAZ de SCHISTE Sécurité énergétique et au-delà
CAS D’ETUDE
La station d’extraction du gas de schiste dans le village en Krasnystaw Krynica dans la province de PH
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l’objectif est d’abord de réduire, voire d’éliminer, la dépendance du pays des importations de gaz en provenance de la Russie pour ensuite garantir la sécu-rité énergétique de la Pologne pour les décennies à venir. A l’heure actuelle la consommation domestique annuelle du gaz s’élève à 14 mlrd. de m3, dont deux tiers sont procurés par le géant gazier Gazprom. Ainsi, l’objectif premier de la production du gaz de schiste en Pologne est, d’après la formulation du Premier Ministre polonais Donald Tusk, d’assurer « sécurité gazière» de la Pologne d’ici 2035. En effet, si les réserves de gaz non conventionnel sont réellement exploita-bles, elles permettront à la Pologne de satisfaire sa consommation énergétique pendant les prochains 364 ans et la mettront en tête des réserves européens du gaz devant la Norvège et la France. Face à ces encourageants pronostiques, le Ministère de l’environnement polonais a accordé 100 concessions d’exploitation du gaz de schiste sur le territoire polo-nais qui n’ont pas tardé à donner des ré-sultats : la Pologne a extrait son premier gaz du schiste en septembre 2011.
Ces premiers succès ont affermi la position des élites politiques polonaises au sujet du gaz de schiste. Le fait qu’aucun des partis politiques n’ait entrepris un discours anti-schiste pendant les dern-ières élections législatives (octobre 2011) est révélateur du consensus qui s’est in-stallé à Varsovie : la Pologne doit pro-céder fermement à l’exploitation du gaz non conventionnel afin d’endosser son « miracle » énergétique et économique. A la différence d’autres pays de l’UE, tels que France ou la Bulgarie qui ont récem-ment interdit l’exploration des gisements du gaz de schiste sous la pression des ac-tivistes verts, l‘absence d’un mouvement environnemental fort et organisé en Po-logne a considérablement contribué à la montée en puissance de la rhétorique pro-schiste. En sus, si l’exploitation du gaz non-conventionnel en Europe centrale et orientale est soumise à la disponibilité des investissements privés, la Pologne est une exception dans la mesure où c’est le gouvernement qui a majoritairement as-suré le soutien financier nécessaire aux projets d’exploration et de production. Raisons pour lesquelles la position of-ficielle du gouvernement polonais ne manque de souligner, à maintes reprises, les bénéfices que l’exploration du gaz de schiste apportera au pays. D’une part, il
sera désormais possible pour la Pologne de convertir son secteur énergétique, traditionnellement basé sur le charbon, au gaz - une transformation d’autant plus importante vu le manque de programme nucléaire civil. D’autre part, le remplace-ment du charbon par le gaz contribuera à la diminution des gazes à effet de serre de 20% d’ici 2020, objectif fixé par l’UE, et permettra au pays de respecter ses en-gagements environnementaux.
Néanmoins, l’intérêt stratégique du gaz de schiste en Pologne va au-delà des frontières nationales et gagne d’importance à fur et à mesure que la conjoncture sur les marchés du gaz en Europe est susceptible de changer vite. Le désir de la Pologne de commencer la production du gaz de schiste pour des buts commerciaux en 2014 est un défi di-rect lancé à la Russie. Les réserves du gaz de schiste, si prouvées, excéderont les né-cessités domestiques du pays et le trans-formeront d’un importateur d’énergie à un exportateur. Les répercussions d’un tel scenario seront importantes : non seulement les Polonais briseraient leur lien de dépendance face à Gazprom, mais c’est toute l’UE qui se verra plus ou moins émancipée de la mainmise gazière russe. De plus, l’arrivée de la Pologne en tant que fournisseur d’énergie boulever-sera le status quo russe. La Russie risque-rait de perdre une grande partie de son marché européen traditionnel, tel que l’Ukraine ou les pays baltes, à un mo-ment où la demande de gaz à l’échelle européenne devrait doubler d’ici 2030. Par conséquent, les Russes feront face à une diminution de leurs revenus de gaz qui constituent 80% du budget de la Fé-dération . Toutefois, ils se montrent scep-tiques face à un tel scenario défavorable en évoquant le manque d’infrastructures en Pologne qui à leur avis empêchera celle-ci de poursuivre la production de gaz du schiste. En effet, le système de gazoducs se trouve dans la partie sud du pays alors que les réserves de gaz non conventionnel sont au nord et sud-est du pays, ce qui signifie que la connexion des réseaux exigera de larges investissements que le gouvernement polonais seul ne pourra pas financer sur le moyen terme.
En dépit du scepticisme démon-tré, l’alarme a été sonnée à Moscou. En janvier 2012, Gazprom a proposé une réduction de 7 à 10% sur les prix du gaz conventionnel pour certains de ses clients en Europe (GDF Suez, Wingas,
Viktoriya Kerelska is a first year graduate student of Inernational
Energy at PSIA.
Botas pour les entreprises ; la Lituanie et l’Estonie parmi les pays). La modération reflète l’importance du gage : le marché européen reste la principale destination des exportations du gaz russe ; celles-ci ont progressées de 138 à 150 mlrd. de m3 en 2011. Cependant, les Polonais ont été négligés par la vague de réduction des prix. En réponse, fin février 2012, le gazier polonais PGNiG a saisi le tribunal d’arbitrage de Stockholm dans un diffé-rent contre Gazprom et Gazprom Export sur les prix du gaz, ainsi laissant les deux acteurs dans des relations tendues.
Quelle que soit l’issue de cet arbitrage, l’actualité récente vient de témoigner de quels bouleversements connaît, et con-naîtra, le secteur du gaz en Europe suite à la stratégie polonaise d’exploitation du gaz de schiste. L’avenir est incertain, mais cette histoire vient de dévoiler que tous les acteurs majeurs impliqués ont de quoi avoir peur : les Polonais craignent de rester dépendents face aux Russes, les Russes craignent de perdre leurs mar-chés – marchés qu’ils défendront à tout prix.
1 Poland’s Flame of Hope, http://www.europeanen-ergyreview.eu/site/pagina.php?id=35142-3 Etat du gaz de schiste en Pologne, http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com/actualites/68031.htm4 Poland’s Shale Gas Dilemma, http://www.in-dependent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/polands-shale-gas-dilemma-for-eu-rope-2361570.html
A la différence d’autres pays
de l’UE, tels que France ou
la Bulgarie, l‘absence d’un
mouvement environne-
mental fort et organisé en
Pologne a considérablement
contribué à la montée en
puissance de la rhétorique
pro-schiste.
DOSSIER DOSSIER
Too many people: the case of West AfricaYumiko YA M A M O T O looks at the threat of population pressure in West Africa and the ensuing fearful consequences
InFocus 31
World population is increasing. The growth phenomenon has been particularly significant in
the past 50 years: a doubling of population from 1960 to 2010, and we crossed 7 bil-lion last year. According to the UN Popu-lation Division, such growth will continue till 2100, when the world population will reach 10.1 billion.1
The growth rhythm is particularly fast in areas like West Africa, where the aver-age annual growth rate is as high as 2.6%.2 This region of 16 countries4 possesses rich natural resources but is characterised by high poverty rate, weak debt repayment capacity, a high ratio of people suffering from tropical diseases and political insta-bility. In 2010, this region counted 304 million people.3
As the Table 1 shows, its annual growth rate for the last three decades ranges from 1.6 to 3.4%, which clearly differentiates from Europe (0.3%).4 The main reason for this growth is an increasing life ex-pectancy and decreasing infant mortality rate. But more importantly, it is the much higher fertility rate that contributes for the growth: on average, a woman gives birth of 4.8 children in her lifetime, while her European counterpart bears only 1.6.5
Consequences due to the population pres-sure
Numerous consequences are inevita-ble. Among them, most probably, an ag-gravated food crisis, deterioration of hu-man health, and thus stimulatinon of an internal and external migration.
The increasing population certainly requires more food in order to satisfy lo-cal needs. However, according the IFPRI’s Global Hunger Index, 15 of the 16 nations are already at serious level of hunger.6 If the agriculture productivity remains the same in these nations, further population
growth would inevitably cause famine.Furthermore, the population pres-
sure affects climate change. The important population growth would increase green-house gases in the atmosphere, which will heighten the temperature. This transfor-
Table 1: Population and its average annual growth rate in West Africa
mation will inevitably worsen water acces-sibility in the region. Already, due to the arid and semi-arid climate, water is a very rare resource. Drinking water accessibil-ity rate in the region is extremely low: for example, in a country like Senegal where the statistics are available, 76 % of total population does not have an access to safe water.7 Water accessibility deterioration would expand more widely infectious and tropical diseases like cholera and malaria. The population in the region is currently one of the most exposed to such diseases: one third of the reported malaria cases in the world are from this region.8
Finally, population pressure would reinforce urbanisation within the region and migration abroad. As can be seen in Table 2, there is a high percentage of a traditional rural popularion repre-senting a high proportion of civilians.
But, urbanisation has also progressed very rapidly in the last decades. It is es-timated that by 2020, more than half of the population in the region would live in urban areas (50.5% to total population).9 This would certainly heighten the energy and water accessibility needs, not to men-tion unemployment. If housing demands and job security is not satisfied in paral-lel to the urbanisation progress, it may provoke crime and violence. Population migration to Europe could also be further stimulated.
Furthermore, it is inevitable that the further population growth will even ag-gravate the balance between the food de-mand and need. As a result, the countries will face a more severe food crisis. Moreo-ver, the population pressure will deterio-rate people’s health condition which will then affect overall national economy due to the increased number of people unable to work. Accelerated urbanisation will bring different challenges to the towns including energy and water security and
Table 1: Proportion of rural population and farmers in West Africa
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32 InFocus
urban crime.In order to avoid such food crisis, de-
clined human capital, consequences of urbanisation, could their principal econo-mies (agriculture and natural resources) play an important role in the future?
Regional wealth : the answer?
In most of the West African countries, especially in Benin, Guinea Bissau, Niger and Togo, the majority of people live on their incomes from agriculture. Many of the countries also possess rich natural re-sources: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana extract diamante, while gold is obtained in Guinea. Senegal recently started to exploit phosphate in cooperation with Arcelor Mittal, an Indian-European merger. Ni-geria commercializes liquefied natural gas (LNG) - and Ghana produces bauxite and oil. Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania and Nigeria possess oil reserves. Nigeria, of course, has the biggest production capacity given its longer experience, with 2 356 million barrels per day which represents 86% of those in the Gulf of Guinea (Map 1).10
However, it is very unlikely that these domains - agriculture and natural re-sources- could play an important role for the transformation caused by population pressure. The former is relatively inconse-quential, as the productivity is relatively low.11
The current conditions explain why: firstly, mechanization in this sector lags far behind as compared to other parts of the world. To cultivate 100km² of arable land on average, only 18 tractors were available in 2005, whereas in Europe, 699 were deployed in the same year. A usual farm size in the region is also often small (run-by family size) with a land of 2 to 3 hectares, except Nigeria and Ghana (large agribusiness).
Secondly, very few lands are
equipped with irrigation system (only 2.4% in the region).12 Thus, in most cas-es, the land is used only when rainfall is sufficient for crop production. Thirdly, although the soil qualityis not always apt for crop production, fertilizer consump-tion level is pretty low, given high prices of these imported products. In 2005, on average, 83kgs of fertilizer were used to cultivate 100 hectare of arable land, while in Europe, 2,150kgs were used for the same land area. These factors limit their agricultural productivity. Due to this, the countries will have to depend more and more on imported agricultural products.13
Their natural resources cannot solve the problem either: only an elite group benefit from mining and exploitation of these resources and thus the wealth is not equally distributed. In fact, the population in severe poverty conditions represents on average 48.4% of total population in each country.
What solutions then?
National public policy, including edu-cation, is then the answer: it needs to be urgently strengthened in order to tackle possible consequences and to slow down population pressure. However, would simply implementing a public policy re-form such as family planning be a solu-tion? Would West African governments be financially able to provide contracep-tion to all women, ages 15 to 49? Could such policy reform really assuage popu-lation pressure in the region, when their reproduction culture is strongly bounded by tradition and value? It seems unlikely.
Support of such public policy reform through bilateral international aid could bring some hope, if there is reform at international level as the current system is not efficient long-term. This is due to the fact that ODA (Official Development
Aide) represents only around 10% of na-tional income – much less than their own indigenous income. Further, ODA is often used by donor countries as an instrument for their agendas.
In order to respond to specific needs like population pressure, it would be nec-essary to reorganise the bilateral interna-tional aid system. For example, making donor countries more responsible for pro-jects’ results in the country being aided, through assigning one donor country for one beneficiary nation’s economic and so-cial development. The Chinese aid system “one province-one country in Africa”, for example, makes each province respon-sible for one African country. However, this system does not prohibits provinces to provide aid to nations other than their designated one.
Although the Millennium Develop-ment Goals, signed by the 192 UN na-tions in 2000, aim to provide basic human needs for all by 2015, there is no specified objective addressing population pressure. It is now time for bilateral development aid to engage more deeply and more rap-idly to counter population pressure in a more efficient manner in order to avoid the impending fear of famine, national economic decline and other such threat-ening consequences caused by a too- quick urbanisation.
Source: Rekacewicz, P. « La cartographie des ressources naturelles en Afrique sub-saharienne », 2006, UNEP-GRID
1-2, 4-5, 9, 12 United Nations Population Division3 Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau6 IFPRI, « 2010 Global Hunger Index », October 20107 OCDE, Rapport pays « Sénégal », 2007 and PNUD, Rapport mondial sur le développement humain, 20068 Club du Sahel et de l’Afrique de l’Ouest de l’OCDE, « Atlas on regional integration in West Africa-Les maladies transmissibles », Paris : OECD, May 2008.10 BP Statistical review of World Energy, 200911 In 2005, farmers produced on average a profit of $ 527 per worker (WDR 2008)13 In fact, among 16 countries, Burkina Faso is the only one net exporter of agricultural prod-ucts in the region.
Yumiko Yamamoto is a lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po-CERI. She
holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po (2012).
DOSSIER DOSSIER
The City: a Threat to Human HealthAnna A B E N H A I M deals with the health challenges facing our increasingly urbanized societies
With more and more people living in ur-ban centers, increasingly significant health challenges are coming to the fore. Indeed, cities constitute a particular environment for human beings in many regards. Both by gathering people in a restricted geographi-cal area and by enhancing interactions, cities appear to provide not only a unique opportunity to thrive, but also a challeng-ing framework likely to put human health at risk. Furthermore, due to globalization, cities are increasingly becoming complex and facing new emerging threats. There are a number of health challenges being faced by our increasingly urbanized world, with increasing health inequalities and a dete-riorating situation for the urban poor.
“Urbanization will become one of the most critical development issues in the years ahead” (Harpham, 1995).
Almost two decades later, this statement
appears to be accurate. Indeed, today, both urbanization and its emerging chal-lenges are a clear focus for global atten-tion. In 2007 for the first time, more than half of the world population was living in urban areas and this trend is expected to increase in the future. By 2050, 70% of the global population will be living in urban centres. Thus, cities are becoming the new dominant setting of human life. However, if cities offer clear opportunities for people to prosper and optimize their quality of life, they also constitute a hos-tile environment for human health. Cit-ies also combine many different sectors, and urban governance cannot rely on one unique sphere. This multisectoral aspect of cities constitutes a major challenge in addressing urban health issues: overtaken by the speed of growth and its associated challenges, authorities at every level and health services in particular appear to be insufficiently equipped to manage both the current and emerging health threats faced by cities as well as the significant inequalities city dwellers face themselves. Indeed, the biggest urban growths are expected to take place in the developing world, and the largest health impact is ex-pected to reach the urban poor in the first place.
Historical Perspective
An expert committee of the World Health Organization (WHO) on urban health services addressed urban health hazards for the first time in 1963, stating that “the consequences of the explosive growth of cities threatens to become one of the major problems of our age”. In 1970, it held its first meeting on the health ef-fects of urbanization: awareness thus ex-isted from a very early stage. In 1972, the World Bank gave its financial support to a joint initiative of UN-Habitat and the
UN Program for Development (UNDP), the Urban Management Program, and became the largest contributor. In 1978, the Alma Ata Conference pointed out and drew attention to the vulnerability of deprived urban groups. The next impor-tant step was in 1984, with a joint confer-ence of the WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that raised awareness regarding the significance of urbanization and promoted the cause of the urban poor.
In 1991, the World Health Assembly on Urban Health marked the beginning of the global focus on urban health mat-ters. Indeed, in the 1990s, international organizations held many conferences and started to undertake specific urban health initiatives. Priority was given to research as the lack of data constituted a major obstacle for improving the situation. Co-ordination and collaborative activities as well as the creation of new partnerships were encouraged to deal with interdisci-plinary issues. One of the more innovative programs was the launch of the Healthy Cities Program (WHO/EURO) in 1999, which aimed at placing health on political and social agendas of local governments, fostering intersectoral collaboration and encouraging networking as well as shar-ing good practices between cities. The 2000s were also very productive years in terms of urban health initiatives: for ex-ample, the Zagreb Declaration on Healthy Cities (2009) that aimed at promoting equity, participation, collaboration, soli-darity and sustainability of urban health. Many reports have also been published by the WHO or UN-Habitat, to call attention to relevant issues and establish an agenda for action.
Yet, despite a clear international focus, urban health matters and risks remain in-sufficiently addressed, especially with re-spect to the urban poor.PH
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Today
The WHO recognizes urbanization as a determinant for health: either posi-tive, an impact through education, work, healthcare, or negative, as we see below.
For one, cities are gateways and pro-vide shelter for infectious diseases. With high population densities and growing human interactions, urban areas are likely to facilitate the spread of germs, and are sources of communicable diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis. These conditions enable disease outbreaks in cities, such as the H5N1 epidemic or the SARS epidem-ic. High population densities, increased interactions and unhealthy lifestyles (such as use of drugs) often imply risky behav-iors and are thus a major source for HIV/AIDS transmission.
The changes in lifestyles linked with urban life are also a major source for the emergence of non-communicable dis-eases. Indeed, unhealthy diets (the incli-nation towards street food for example, which is cheaper and richer in fats, sugar and salt) are a source of both malnutrition and of obesity, leading to high risks of car-diovascular diseases or diabetes. Abuse of tobacco and alcohol can lead to cancer. Changes in the environment, especially through air pollution, can lead to respira-tory diseases such as asthma.
Urban risks also lie in traffic injuries which currently represent three percent of total deaths. There is greater potential for mental disorders due to stress or anxiety. Urban violence is another risk.
The health of the urban poor is even more vulnerable in the city context, since their poor living conditions in effect dou-ble the risks they face. Currently, one bil-lion people are living in urban slums or informal settlements. By 2030, an addi-tional billion people are expected to live in such conditions.
These ‘conditions’ refer to the various aspects. For example, precarious hous-ing implies greater exposure to hazards such as flooding. Unsafe water access or inappropriate sanitation implies diseases such as diarrhea. The urban poor tend to eat cheaper food from street vendors or fast food and are thus more likely to de-velop type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Inadequate access to transports – an important inequity – is responsible for health issues such as stress and men-tal illness and traffic injuries, as the urban poor tend to own motorcycles rather than cars and thus constitute a more vulnerable
population on the road. Moreover, they often live in remote areas of the city, near industrial centers that are more polluted. They also tend to use solid fuels for heat-ing and cooking, which constitutes anoth-er source of air pollution from which they suffer directly. Poor living conditions also encourage health-damaging behaviors, such as the use of drugs or interpersonal violence. All this clearly indicates that the urban poor have unequal access to health-care from both a geographical and a fi-nancial point of view.
Addressing the issue of urban health “by ensuring that the growth in urban populations does not result in the growth of slums” (Millenium Development Goal No. 7) is thus necessary and urgent. Poli-cies at the global level have attempted to assess the urban context and identify the issues, to define the priorities and to set the goals, such as improving housing con-ditions, ensuring social cohesion, control-ling pollution, preventing violence and designing equitable and accessible health care. Yet solutions need to be local.
As already mentioned, urban health is a multisectoral field. It cannot be ad-dressed only by governments or only by the health sector. Furthermore, the situ-ation is too urgent to only be addressed with large-scale policies responding mostly to structural issues, which should only provide the background process for action. In order to implement the right measures, one should first assess the situ-ation with the right tools; however, there is a crucial lack of data within the field. Financing development projects through cities is another issue; smaller-scale in-novative financing could help address this matter. Establishing various innovative partnerships at the city and/or the district level, with the private sector, and under
Anna Abenhaim is a first year graduate student of International Public
Management at PSIA.
SOURCES- Our Cities, our Health, our Future, Report to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health from the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings, 2008.- The Zagreb Declaration on Healthy Cities, 2009.- Hidden Cities, WHO, UN-Habitat Report, 2010.- Why Urban Health Matters, WHO Report, 2010.
global monitoring, could constitute a way to respond to these challenges.
Some very interesting and pragmatic tools have been developed, which could enable implementation of more concrete measures at the local level.WHO’s Urban Heart (2008) and UN-Habitat’s UrbanInfo (2006) build an evidence base for actions and measure implementation, as they contain numerous indicators. Two Amer-ican companies, Model Epsim and Model TransSim, created software tools in 2000 and 2004 that provide mathematical and statistical models to enable simulation of a crisis and assessment of possible counter-measures. For example, the models could simulate people displacement through public transport utilities in a particular city, in order to assess the potential jour-ney of a virus.
Urbanization is necessarily and sys-tematically a negative determinant of health under poor standards of living, which explains why matters related to the urban poor should be prioritized.
Slums near a railway track in Delhi
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34 InFocus
The Wheelbarrow of Worthless Bank Notes
Markus K A U F F M A N revisits the German fear of inflation
InFocus 35
Rainer Brüderle is the current chair-man of the center-right Free Dem-ocrats (FDP) in the Bundestag, the
junior partner in Chancellor Merkel’s gov-erning coalition. Originally an economist, Rainer Brüderle is a fan of the Austrian school of economics. He promotes fiscal discipline and – above all – a tight mon-etary policy conducted by an independent central bank. Born just after the end of World War II, Mr. Brüderle is the prime example of German politicians to whom price stability is the Holy Grail.
In the wake of the European sovereign debt crisis, Mr. Brüderle recently appeared on national German television to give his opinion on the potential role of the Euro-pean Central Bank (ECB) as an unlimited source of funds to financially troubled south-European governments. In issuing a dramatic warning of increased inflation due to a more expansionary monetary policy, he said: “In the past 100 years, the Germans have lost their money twice. We’ll make sure this won’t happen again”. What was he talking about? Why do Ger-mans fear inflation like the devil himself?
In the current public debate on how to best solve the European sovereign debt crisis, one side of the argument holds that the ECB should assume a larger role as remedy to the crisis, first by direct fi-nancing of government debt and second through an expansionary monetary policy in the form of increased lending to finan-
cial institutions and open market operations to low-er the key interest rate in the money markets.
To many Ger-mans, such pro-posals are an af-front given that the mandate of the ECB explicitly prohibits the di-rect financing of European govern-ments. To many German central bankers, even the ECB’s ongoing purchase of gov-ernment debt in secondary markets is in a grey zone of the ECB’s constitution. But why so? The mandate of the ECB was modeled after the German Bundesbank – a fundamental German conditionality for giving up the beloved, stable Deutsche Mark to join the Euro. Hence, the ECB has been given one single objective only: price stability. All other objectives (e.g. stability of the finan-cial system, low unemployment) became inferior in the ECB mandate. Further, di-rect flows of money from the ECB to Euro governments were prohibited to ensure the ECB’s independence and in order to prevent political business cycles: the op-portunity for governments to use central bank money to buy votes. To the propo-nents of a larger ECB involvement in the current crisis management, the creation of the ECB single mandate reflects an al-leged German “fear” of inflation which re-mains the source of the persistent German opposition to a more expansionary mon-etary policy. But why? Why this German
“inflatiophobia”? Why this obsession with price stability?
A big part of it is collective memory, you might even say ‘collective trauma’– even though as time goes by, that memory is less and less ‘collective’. Mr. Brüderle has his historic facts correct; the Germans did lose their money twice over the course of the 20th century. First, the wheelbarrow with meter-high stacks of worthless bills of Reichsmark (RM) is the image of the Weimar republic’s hyperinflation of 1923 – and so is the bakery sign offering a loaf of bread for a couple billion RM, so are the kids in the garden building a pyramid out of worthless blocks of bank notes. No German student gets through high school without studying the hyperinflation of 1923, nor probably without talking to his grandparents about their families’ loss of all their wealth within a couple months. After all, an entire country’s savings and monetary assets virtually disappeared
From a 50,000 marks banknote on 19.11.1922, to 5,000,000,000 marks banknote the following year - and this wasn’t even the highest denomination.
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But why? Why this German
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36 InFocus
Markus Kauff man is a fi rst-year graduate student of International Public
Management at PSIA.
“On 1st Nov. 1923
cost of:
1 pound of bread
3 billion
1 pound of meat
36 billion
1 glass of beer
4 billion”1 glass of beer
”1 glass of beer
L’Antenne Jeunes Sciences-Po d’Amnesty International vous convie à un colloque sur
le droit d’asile: Y-a-t-il des « faux réfugiés » ?
La réalité de l’exil, la responsabilité des Etats.
Vendredi 6 avril, de 8h30 à 18h, amphithéâ-tre Claude Erignac, 13 Rue de l’université.
within less than a year. In no time, mid-dle class families whose savings had made them independent from government wel-fare lived in bitter poverty. Such memory stuck and was carried on from generation to generation.
Second, collective German memory of losing everything goes back to the end of World War II. Aft er the disastrous and to-tal defeat in a war that Hitler had fi nanced by printing money, the Reichsmark was worth nothing. In a nationalized econo-my build on the exploitation of conquered territory, the real value of the RM had hit rock bottom. In the years aft er the war, cigarettes became the currency of the mo-ment. Germany was a barter economy. Real assets meant real wealth. To protect the value of future savings from devalu-ation, the statute of the Bundesbank pre-scribed price stability as its one and only objective – guaranteed by the highest de-gree of institutional independence ever granted to any central bank. To many Ger-mans (and many German economists) the
strong Deutsche Mark and the Bundes-bank with its tight control of infl ation be-came key ingredients to the “miraculous” economic recovery aft er the war.
In Germany, collective memory is thus a powerful driver of current resistance against the expansion of the monetary base by the ECB – by whatever means. Yes, fear is a bad counselor and yes, invoking the images of 1923 and 1945 will not help to resolve the current debt crisis. But his-toric fear– which might sometimes seem a little irrational, paranoid even – is not the only reason to be careful about infl a-tion. Studies on its economic hazards fi ll books over books; the distortion of prices over time, increased price uncertainty, shoe-leather and menu costs are but a few. Th ere is little disagreement among econo-mists that price stability is crucial to long-term economic prosperity.
However, a conservative monetary policy controlling infl ation entails a par-ticularly interesting pitfall: the time-in-consistency problem. It deals with the hu-
man tendency to deviate from long-term, initially rational plans once preferences change. Anybody who has ever made a New-Year’s resolution to quit smoking or lose weight knows this. Hence – contrary to the idea that price stability is in the long run – policy makers encounter short-term incentives to conduct a time-con-sistent, expansionary monetary policy to stimulate economic growth and foster job creation. Suddenly, the policy of the mo-ment becomes what policy makers want it to be which likely leads to poor economic outcomes: Th e only thing that grows over time is infl ation, not real output.
As the time-consistency problem il-lustrates, there is more than historic fear and collective memory which should urge policy makers to consider the full range of consequences of expansionary monetary policies and infl ation. Yes, it is about time for Germans to get over it, to drive the ghosts of infl ation away. Yes, as time goes by generations of Germans who haven’t lost their money twice will become policy makers. And yes, infl ation is currently not a high-priority issue in solving the Euro-pean debt crisis. But there are reasons – both historic and non-historic – why the mandate of the ECB has been designed the way it is now. Its independence and its commitment to price stability will hopefully become pillars of a European recovery similar to that of Germany aft er WWII.
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InFocus 37
Bahrain: Old FearsNithya K O C H U PA R A M P I L asks whether old fears keep Bahrain a liberalized autoc-racy resistant to democracy?
Bahrain has been noted as a country that has taken significant steps to-wards political liberalization in the
past decade - and the suppression of its own version of the ‘Arab Spring’ is criti-cally linked to these political reforms. The particularity of Bahrain’s Arab Spring is revelatory of important defining factors in the ruling family’s relationship to its people: religion and demographics. These factors can shed light on the political lib-eralization reform measures undertaken in Bahrain over the years. Despite the advances in political reform, an earnest thrust toward democracy still seems to be, at best, a plan in the pipeline. Bahrain remains, as Daniel Brumberg puts it, a “liberal autocracy” – a country that allows a high degree of political activity, with focus on the provision of jobs and eco-nomic benefits running contemporane-ous with a security apparatus that seeks to maintain the controlling stake. There have been a litany of failures at the state level, right from the construction stage of the independent Bahraini state, that have im-peded the progress of any genuine power-sharing arrangement or the formation of a democracy in Bahrain. Whether deliber-ately engineered or not, there are very real fears that oppose any such power-sharing bargain and it appears that much of the answer can be found in examining these fears through the lens of religion and de-mographics in the Kingdom.
Bahrain has been ruled by the Al Khal-ifa clan from the 19th century. The native inhabitants of the land, the Shia Baharnas and their Sunni conquerors have had a contentious relationship that has been, according to Lawrence Louer, something more than just a religious divide: a divide “opposing the society of conquerors to the conquered, the aliens to the natives and in some respects also, the Bedouins to the peasants”1. This covert animos-ity has evolved into a larger Shia-Sunni
bloc-based differentiation and there exists even today veiled undercurrents of Shia-Sunni tension in the country. Despite these fractious undercurrents, Bahraini civil society, a fundamental pre-requisite for democracy, has for the most part been proactive and vibrant.
Bahrain’s history of labor unions be-gan with the first local industrial work-force at BAPCO (Bahrain Petroleum Company) in the early 1930s. The import of trained foreign labor (Iranian and In-dian) for the incipient oil industry was a cause of unrest for a majority of the locals who resented inflows of foreign labor at a time when the overall economic picture was bleak. This resentment eventually led to the Bahraini labor movement of the late 1930s, led by Sunni and Shia notables, “transcend(ing) sectarian cleavages on all rungs of the social scale”2 with their de-mands including further reforms of the judiciary and municipal administration, apart from protests over the recruitment of foreign workers. Besides the economic motivations for closing ranks, this united front began a precedent for a kind of of civil society unity within Bahraini society, an ‘us versus them’ mentality, the ‘insid-ers’ and those who would always remain ‘outsiders’. The huge numbers of expatri-ate labor to the country – today compris-ing almost half the total inhabitants on the island – facilitates such a construction. In early 2001, the current Crown Prince launched a ‘Bahrainization’ drive aimed at altering the make-up of the workforce in order to increase the employment of locals, reduce dependence on foreign la-bor, and also respond to persistent cries in Shia opposition circles critical of the Government’s pro-foreigner tilt. Several political commentators applauded this tactical move that fostered better relations between the Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society (main Shia opposition party) and the ruling family.
Development and inhabitation of the North of the island compared to the South
The Shia Baharnas and
the Sunni conquerors: a
divide “opposing the so-
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Such political mobilization is indica-tive of a power, although limited, behind civil society action to influence the status quo in Bahrain. However, the ‘dispos-sessed’ (as popular Baharna narratives would suggest) Shias of Bahrain, have of-ten been suspected of nurturing a much broader political agenda than their Sunni counterparts. This was particularly no-ticeable after the spillover of Shia radi-calization from the 1979 Iranian Revolu-tion. The long-term consequences of the Iranian Revolution have been disastrous for the politically conscious in Bahrain, as it introduced a sectarian dimension to lo-cal political issues, or at the very least, the possibility to use it as a plausible excuse to subvert reform. Nevertheless, differ-ent civil society mobilizations in Bahrain, especially through political associations and societies, have promoted the idea of
an arena of activity outside the state struc-ture that is motivated to advance common interests. It is therefore an over-simplifi-cation to attribute the lack of citizen mo-bilization as a cause for the slow pace of political liberalization.
Marina Ottaway has an interesting the-ory that can be aptly applied to Bahrain’s political predicament. In Uncharted Jour-ney: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, she argues that “the abstract rights and process-oriented character of democ-racy is in sharp contrast to the concrete promises made by some of the ideologies with which democracy has had to com-pete historically, particularly nationalism and socialism…furthermore, these ide-ologies tap into people’s emotions, includ-ing resentment, much more easily than democracy”3. In Bahrain, it would appear that democracy got mired in nationalistic terms, thereby undermining the legitima-cy of the democratic discourse itself. For example, resistance to the dismantling of the National Assembly in 1973 came from across the sectarian divide, along with calls for the reinstatement of the consti-tution. This call, however, has only been consistently vocalized over the years by Al Wefaq, the country’s largest Shia op-position bloc, widely acknowledged as a party that participates in negotiations with the government in seeking greater political liberalization. Al Wefaq has also asked for greater powers to devolve to the lower house of parliament, since the up-per house (the Shura Council, composed of the King’s appointees) can overrule the
lower house. Due to Al Wefaq’s consist-ent advocacy for these causes, the politi-cal scenario is often tinted to read as an exclusively Shia-related struggle which is not really the case. There are many politi-cally conscious citizens (as the early days of the protests of February 2011 revealed) who genuinely desire change and want to be engaged in a greater capacity in the political life of the country. However, the existence of factors like the underlying Sunni-Shia tensions, radicalization of one segment of Shia politics post-1979 and a deficient nationalism have often impeded democratic pursuits in this Arabian Gulf Kingdom.
This fear of native Shia ascendancy – real or imagined - is an old fear. It is a fear that was perhaps instrumental in the construction of the nation state in its pre-sent form. Noted scholar, Michael Barnett identified three activities that marked the process of Arab state formation: material incentives, the manipulation of symbols and external threats.4 In the Bahraini case, it would be more relevant to substitute patrimonialism in place of the manipu-lation of symbols. These activities have marked the nature of the state so deeply that one merely has to scratch the surface to notice them still at work. More interest-ingly, in Bahrain, each of these processes is heavily influenced by drivers of religion and demography politics.
The sustained ability of the state to act as the financial guardian of the populace has led citizens to link their material in-terests to the state.5 By framing economic development in these ‘statist’ terms, Gulf Arab states, Bahrain included, created a capitalist class that aligned itself very closely to the state – something that can be seen even today in the procurement of different contracts among business groups
Return of Bahrain Shi’ite opposition leader Hassan Mushaimaa on 26 February 2011: A protest hijacked?
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Demonstrations during the Bahrain spring: a lost cause?
The fear of native Shia
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state in its present form.
DOSSIER DOSSIER
Nithya Kochuparampil is a first year graduate student of International
Security at PSIA.
InFocus 39
closely allied to ruling family circles. The development of a welfare state model in these tax-free countries inhibits the devel-opment of democracy, as Daniel Brum-berg sees it, because the paternalistic stance of the state in ‘generously’ distrib-uting oil revenue to the public limits the demands citizens can make on the state lest they be accused of ingratitude.6 How-ever, wealth disparity is a glaring problem in many Gulf Arab states, Bahrain being one of them. This is a cause for major dis-content among the lower classes of Bah-raini society. Most of Bahrain’s population resides toward the north of the island, while large tracts of undeveloped land in the south are reported to be appropriated by members of the ruling family as private property. In fact, issues of state-held lands and unfair land distribution practices were among the rallying calls in the initial days of the protest in February 2011.
Bahrain seems to fit well with Brum-berg’s definition of ‘liberalized autocra-cies’, which like total autocracies leverage jobs and economic benefits for politi-cal support, but not for its significantly “higher threshold” of political tolerance. Brumberg argues that “state-controlled political change is necessary for survival”7 – and it is interesting to apply his argu-ment to the way Bahrain’s economy has developed over the past forty years. In the 1970s, acutely aware of its limited oil and gas resources, Bahrain promoted itself as the financial and services hub of the re-gion. This self-sponsored role demanded not only an open economy, but also rela-tively liberalized political and social spac-es. Without oil or other highly profitable resources on which Bahrain could lever-age power through monopoly control, the ruling elite could “loosen its grip without losing all the economic benefits that ac-crue from autocracy”8.
In Brumberg’s view, “The goal of state-managed liberalization is to give op-position groups a way to blow off steam. The steam valve must meet opponents’ minimal expectations for political open-ness and participation, but prevent them from undermining the regime’s ultimate control.”9 One way to do this would be through patrimonialism in the state con-trolled bureaucracy. The Shia majority in Bahrain, however, have cleverly domi-nated most government ministries except for the Ministry of Defense and the Min-istry of the Interior. These two ministries have a large Sunni-employee base, not just from Bahrain but from the greater Mid-
1 Louër, Lawrence, Transnational Shia Politics: Re-ligious and Political Networks in the Gulf, London, HURST Publishers Ltd., 2008, p. 242 Ibid, p. 373 Marina Ottaway, ‘The Missing Constituency for Democratic Reform’ in Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. by Thomas Carothers, Marina Ottaway, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005, pp. 157-1584 Micheal Barnett, ‘Sovereignty, nationalism and the regional order in the Arab states system’, Interna-tional Organization, 49, No. 3, Summer 1995.5 Ibid, p.497 6 Daniel Brumberg, ‘Liberalization versus Democra-cy’ in Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. by Thomas Carothers, Marina Ottaway, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005, p. 417 Ibid, p. 178 Ibid9 Daniel Brumberg, ‘Liberalization versus Democra-cy’ in Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. by Thomas Carothers, Marina Ottaway, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005, p. 2010 Eva Bellin, ‘The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective’ in Comparative Politics, Vol. 36, No. 2 Jan. 2004, p. 14511 Reuters, ‘Bahrain may need Saudi help to plug budget gap’, arabianbusinness.com, 12 October 2011
dle East region. It is amply clear that there is a patrimonial logic at play here, along the lines of religious affiliation. Eva Bellin argues that staffing decisions organized along patrimonial lines suggest rule by cronyism10, which could be relevant when looking at the allegiances of Sunni ‘natu-ralized citizens’ of Bahrain (originating from Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Pakistan) who are employed in key ‘Sunni’ govern-ment ministries. This policy of naturali-zation, apart from increasing the Sunni numbers on the ground in Bahrain to counter the mushrooming Shia popula-tion, also guarantees loyalty of these nat-uralized citizens, not only for reasons of religious identification, but also because of the benefactor relationship.
The nature of the Bahraini state has also been shaped to a great extent by ex-ternal support networks to guard against outside threats. Reuters recently report-ed that Saudi Arabian financial aid was helping plug Bahrain’s budget gap when its credit rating was downgraded by in-ternational rating agencies following the unrest of February 2011. Saudi Arabia is Bahrain’s closest regional ally and in many ways, acts as a pillar of support for the Al-Khalifa ruling family. In the opinion of a political analyst, “financial aid [is a] small price to pay for keeping a lid on politi-cal unrest”11. Furthermore, international support networks include the headquar-tering of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. It has boosted the image of the country as a close regional ally of the US whose pres-ence also guards against any schemes Iran may still harbor on Bahrain. This classic method of securing internal cohesion through promoting fear of an enemy out-side its borders is perhaps exemplified in the fact that the fear of Iranian interven-tion in Bahrain’s affairs is still very much a resonant frame of reference.
Several constructions of the present Bahraini state appear to relate directly or indirectly to the sectarian divide and de-mographic politics. Reluctance to yield real political freedoms stems, in part, from a deep-seated fear of losing power to a majority group that maintains the ille-gitimate status of the ruling family in their traditional narratives. Therefore, despite token gestures, there seems to be inad-equate momentum toward genuine politi-cal liberalization. It appears that moves to-ward political liberalization in Bahrain are less politically oriented than economically driven and socially motivated. Although some may argue that there are very good
reasons for maintaining this status quo in Bahrain, it would be prudent to note that such a world view seems to be fast ap-proaching its expiration date.
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COMMENT COMMENT
Quelle politique étrangère pour la France?: le débat manquant
40 InFocus
2012 est arrivée et avec la nouvelle an-née, une nouvelle élection présiden-tielle. Force est de constater qu’il y a
une grande absente dans les débats actuels opposant les traditionnels compétiteurs : la politique étrangère.
La crise financière puis économique, la dette qui s’alourdit de jour en jour, l’immigration légale et illégale, le nombre de mal logés, les promesses de hausses d’impôts pour les foyers les plus aisés, le retour à la compétitivité des entreprises françaises et le risque d’une implosion de la zone euro et/ou de l’Union Europée-nne sont les principaux sujets de discus-sion des femmes et hommes politiques en France à l’heure actuelle. Mais quasi-ment aucune réflexion n’est émise quant à la place de la France dans la politique mondiale. On pourrait rétorquer que les débats concernant l’UE et la zone euro n’ont jamais autant intéressés les Français. Mais la politique européenne ne fait plus partie, à proprement parler, de la politique étrangère, mais bien plus de la politique nationale. L’UE est devenue une telle ré-alité tangible dans la vie des Français que Bruxelles – que l’on soit pour ou contre son action et son influence sur les lois et les normes nationales – ressemble de plus en plus à la nouvelle capitale administra-tive de notre pays qu’une entité propre-ment extraterritoriale et totalement dé-connectée de la sphère nationale.
Ainsi, à l’heure des premiers débats politiques, la parole n’est que très peu don-née aux experts de la politique extérieure. Nous en sommes encore à parler de poli-tique comme nous le faisions après la Sec-onde Guerre Mondiale, dans une attitude stato-centrée et nationale – pour ne pas dire nationaliste – oubliant à quel point le monde d’aujourd’hui est devenu plat - pour reprendre l’idée maîtresse de la pensée de T. Friedman – et interconnecté. C’est oublier un peu trop vite à quel point un battement d’aile de papillon à Tokyo, ou un acte courageux et désespéré à Sidi Bouzid peuvent entrainer des conséquenc-es dramatiques pour le reste du monde, la
Boris METON
France y compris. Aucun homme poli-tique n’a encore abordé frontalement les problèmes internationaux importants de ce début du XXIe siècle : qu’allons nous faire pour sortir l’Afghanistan de l’ornière insurrectionnelle que l’Occident a lui-même contribué à creuser ; quelle attitude à adopter face à l’Iran ; que pouvons-nous faire en Syrie – et plus généralement dans les Etats qui laissent massacrer leurs pop-ulations – face au soutien indéfectible de la Russie et de la Chine ; comment doit-on aborder les mouvements et contre-mouvements actuels dans le monde arabe soudain libéré de décennies de dictature ; comment sortir de la crise économique mondiale actuelle.
Les tenants d’un fervent réalisme poli-tique et économique rétorqueront que toutes ces problématiques ne doivent pas interférer avec la politique nationale d’un pays non directement concerné. Mais c’est oublier un peu vite que ce qui se passe aujourd’hui en marge éloignée de nos frontières peut très vite faire tâche d’huile et nous concerner plus directement de-main. Derrière la stabilité démocratique
Boris Meton is a first year graduate student at PSIA in a double degree with
LSE.
d’une Egypte libérée d’Hosni Moubarak se cache en fait l’espoir d’un Moyen-Orient pacifié. Et est-il besoin de rappeler que la seule issue à la crise économique actuelle, la plus sévère depuis la crise de 1929, est une réponse concertée au niveau mondial, intégrant notamment les BRIC au pro-cessus de décision et de régulation ? Plus que jamais la politique étrangère est une donnée prépondérante qui doit être prise en compte dans les décisions de politique nationale. Malheureusement les hommes et femmes politiques d’aujourd’hui – les gaullistes de droite et les éléphants du PS – et de demain – les jeunes loups de l’UMP et les éléphanteaux de la gauche – semblent vouloir occulter l’importance de l’extérieur sur les choix de politique inté-rieure.
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Les enjeux européens occupent une place primordiale dans la politique extérieure de la France au détriment des grands problèmes internationaux - Iran, Syrie, Afghanistan
COMMENT COMMENT
InFocus 41
Turmoil in Maldives bears risks for wider region
Radu NIKOLAUS BOTEZ
In early February, Maldives entered a political crisis when the country’s first democratically elected president, Mo-
hamed Nasheed, stepped down in what appears to be a military coup backed by inimical political forces. Fearing the po-tential consequences of turmoil in a coun-try sitting astride some of world’s most important sea routes and seen by some analysts as being at the risk of becoming a new launch pad for Islamist terrorism in the region, outside actors, especially the United States and India, were quick to intervene. The deal brokered between Mr Nasheed and the government of Moham-ed Waheed, the former vice-president, calls for early elections. Ensuring that the Mr Waheed sticks to his promise is a pri-ority for those involved, as anything else would cause a set of new headaches.
Opposition to Mr Nasheed had been mounting over the past months. In De-cember last year, the government closed all hotel spas after claims by opposition parties that these were used for ‘anti-Islamic’ activities. Due to the country’s dependency on income from tourism, the government later reversed the decision. Mr Nasheed had also been repeatedly ac-cused of undermining Islam. Sunni Islam is the country’s only officially recognized religion, and religious freedom of Shia, Buddhist and Hindu minorities are cur-tailed. Practices, such as the public flog-ging of women having committed adul-tery, are permitted by law and have been criticized in the past by the UN High Commissioner for Human Right, Navi Pillay. Overall, observers say more ortho-dox forms of Islam are on the rise in the Maldives, to the detriment of the island-state’s moderate tradition that has been influenced by its Buddhist past.
Recently, concerns about a rise of Is-lamism in the Maldives, with potential consequences for the region, especially India, have grown stronger. Many Maldiv-ians attend, free of charge, Islamic educa-tional institutions in Pakistan and some of them have moved on to fight in Afghani-
stan, according to reports. Recruitment for both religious seminaries and terror-ist organizations picked up after the 2004 Tsunami, when Islamic charities provided assistance to those in need. Some of them, such as Idara Khidmat-Khalq (IKK), have been linked to terrorist groupings, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, among others.
Islamic hard-liners, however, are only a
the former regime and to start taxing the rich and powerful resort owners that en-tertained good relations with Mr Gayoom (the former dictator), led to his downfall. One way or another, Mr Nasheed, who was declared an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience in the early 1990s, acted heavy-handed and thereby offered his opponents an opportunity to bring him down. However, the day after quit-ting office and in a move which indicates that he is not willing to accept the situa-tion, Mr Nasheed and his supporters ral-lied the streets of Malé, the capital, leading to clashes with the police.
Political turmoil in the Maldives could provide space for religious hardliners and, potentially, Islamists that use it as a launch pad for operations in, for instance, India. Of similar concern, however, is the control of the sea routes astride of which the country sits. Specifically, the US and especially India, which tends to regard the Maldives as being part of its sphere of influence, are worried about China ex-tending its foothold in the Indian Ocean Region. Last year, China opened an em-bassy in Malé, while it is also providing assistance in infrastructure projects. The renewal of a defense agreement between the two is pending.
While the situation appears to be calm after the United States and India brokered a deal between Mr Nasheed and the new government which foresees early elec-tions, much will depend on whether the government will stick to its promises. Mr Nasheed, having fought for years against the former regime, is unlikely to abandon the field. Any doubt about the govern-ment’s commitment will bring him and his supporters back to the streets, with implications for the wider region.
Radu Nikolaus Botez is a second year graduate student at PSIA, studying
International Security.
PHOTO: MAT McDERMOT/FLICKR/CC
small constituent of the opposition, which includes more moderate parties such as the Maldivian People’s Party (MPP). Af-ter winning a majority in the 2009 parlia-mentary elections, the opposition made the government’s efforts increasingly dif-ficult. They also argued that president, a former human rights activist, resorted had similar means in dealing with dissent as his tough predecessor. Unsurprisingly, Mr Nasheed’s decision to arrest Abdulla Mohamed, the chief criminal judge who had ordered the release of an opposition leader accusing the government of work-ing against Islam, did not go down well with the opposition, leading them to take to the streets.
Many believe that Mr Nasheed’s deci-sions to jail a judge who had repeatedly refused to prosecute those with ties to
Mohamed Nasheed
COMMENT COMMENT
Ana ROVZAR
42 InFocus
Denmark, a leading country in green technology and policies, has set the ultimate goal for it-
self: by 2050, it wants to be completely independent from fossil fuels and nuclear energy for its energy production and use. The newly elected centre-left government and its energy minister, Martin Lidegaard, have designed an encompassing multi-step strategy in order to do so. The energy package focuses on increasing energy ef-ficiency as a way of lowering energy de-mand and puts forth electrifying the economy as a leeway to increase electric-ity generation through renewable energy resources.
Reaching this ambitious objective will require considerable efforts and will be anything but easy. In 2010 Denmark still depended on fossil fuels for 79% of its gross energy consumption (40% for oil, 21% for gas & 18% for coal). Transport and Households are the most energy-con-suming activities in Denmark and fossil fuels are used mostly for heat generation, electricity production and transport. Still, Denmark produces much of its own en-ergy. It is Europe’s 2nd largest oil exporter and exports significant amounts of gas, making it one of the few European net-exporter countries. Power generation is slightly different. Coal is imported as the most important fuel in electricity genera-tion. The production of nuclear energy is absent in Denmark due to a resolution
passed by the Danish Parliament in 1985 forbidding the installment of nuclear power plants. And in times of high peak demand for power, Denmark imports its electricity from its neighbor countries which are an important factor in its en-ergy provisions. The power provided by Sweden is half nuclear, half hydro generat-ed, the German imported power is mainly nuclear and coal produced, and Norway’s imports, the most important energy trad-ing partner, are almost completely hydro-produced.
Still, renewable energy has experi-enced important growth in Denmark, making the Danish energy and electric-ity mix for renewables above EU average. Denmark is very big on wind power and about 20% of Danish electricity is wind-produced. About half of this is consumed, and the other half is exported at spot prices. Another green success Denmark is famous for is its extended use of district heating systems to bring heat to its house-holds. Combined heat and power plants that produce electric output send the heated residual water from this process to heat households through the district distribution system instead of dumping it. In fact, 62% of Danish households are served heat through this mechanism. Un-fortunately, these policies come at a cost: high energy prices. In fact, Denmark has the highest energy prices in Europe for consumers as well as for industry. These
soaring prices have not held back govern-ments to further pursue grand ecological objectives. Energy policies emphasizing the promotion of wind power and CO² reductions are a shared objective for Dan-ish politics in general across all political parties. This proactive attitude of Danish politics towards global warming and eco-logical energy plans enjoys large public support by an equally energy- and climate conscient society and industry.
So how is Denmark planning to achieve the total decarbonization of its economy in four decades? The core strat-egy is two-fold: first, Denmark intends to stabilize and decrease its energy demand by increasing energy efficiency in energy production, in the industry and in house-holds. Simultaneously, the aim is to trans-form Denmark's current hydrocarbon-rich economy into an electrified economy which will trickle down into society. The power needed to allow for this electrifica-tion will be generated by renewable en-ergy resources, with wind power as the protagonist.
To allow for a gradual phase-out of fossil fuels for the economy, specific goals with different deadlines have been set. By 2020, the wind power’s share of electric-ity production will be pushed up from 20% to 52%, to be produced mostly in new offshore sites. The aim to reduce CO² emissions with 20 % by 2020 has now been doubled to 40%. By 2030, Denmark
Denmark: green, greener, greenest?
THE DANISH ROADMAP
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- Former Danish PM Rasmussen
COMMENT COMMENT
InFocus 43
plans to phase out oil burners and coal completely, without resorting to carbon-capture-and storage technology. And by 2035, heat & electricity will be covered by renewable energy, followed by a complete coverage of all energy supply – electricity, heat, industry & transport – by renewable energy in 2050. Electrifi cation is identi-fi ed as the most challenging aim since it requires a transformation of the electric-ity network. Since Denmark’s power pro-duction will increase greatly, there will be more surplus productions which it will then export, especially to neighboring countries. Th is requires a transformation and increase in capacity of the transmis-sion lines.
Additionally, this strategy is also aimed at boosting the economy. Th e pack-age stimulates investment in and develop-ment of green technologies (such as smart grids and electricity storage which are part of the energy effi ciency aim) as well as the generation of employment in this sector, which the government estimates at about 5,500 new jobs per year in the years ahead.
As ambitious as these goals do sound, Denmark’s start position is to its advan-tage. Th e Danes are already plugged in on renewable energy production, especially wind power production. Th ey possess the know-how in wind power technology and benefi t from good natural conditions. It has a motivated and energy conscious society and industry that are prepared to pay the price for the decarbonization of their economy. Even a particular diffi culty of wind power, which is its intermittency (the wind does not always blow), can be managed in Denmark’s case with help from its neighbors. Denmark can count especially on Norway’s large hydroelectric balancing capacity in case of a lack of sup-
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Towards a better future: Windmills at the shore of denmark at Bønnerup Strand, Denmark
ply. Th is mitigates for the risk of choosing substantial renewable energy power pro-duction.
With this comprehensive energy pack-age and its determination to become a de-carbonized economy by 2050, Denmark has set an exemplary role in the quest for rethinking energy needs and decarboni-zation strategies in accordance with eco-nomic necessities. But this is no easy quest. Th e chosen path is long and costly, the re-quired transformations in infrastructure and technology are substantial, and there are always unforeseen external events and risks that can complicate matters. Yet, as a small and industrialized EU-country, with optimal wind power conditions, energy and balancing rich surrounding countries and a motivated government and society, Denmark is off to a good start. Th e exam-ple set by Denmark will be hard to extrap-olate to other countries and the EU-level for precisely these reasons. Denmark’s case is therefore a unique case-study of a country that wants, and that can.
Sources- European Energy Review (www.europeanener-gyreview.eu)- World Nuclear Association (www.world-nuclear.org)- Denmark: Energy Mix Fact Sheet, Jan 2007, Euro-pean Commission, www.europa.eu- Danish government, Our Future Energy, Nov 2011.
Ana Rovzar is a fi rst year graduate student at PSIA, studying
International Energy.
“Quote.Unquote”
“Even though one year has passed, nothing has really changed.”
- Tatsuya Suzuki, survivor of the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami
“You can’t turn the wind, so turn the sail.”
- Kofi Annan, UN Special envoy, asking Bashar Assad to stop the
bloodshed in Syria
“He believes in apologizing to those who kill our young men and women. I will never apologize.”
- Newt Gingrich, Republican candidate, on Obama’s apology last month to Afghan president
over the burnings of Koran
“Notre système d’intégrati on foncti onne de plus en plus mal car nous avons trop d’étrangers sur notre terri-toire... il faut diviser par deux le nombre de gens que nous accueillons”
- Nicholas Sarkozy a déclaré récemment sur la chaîne de
télévision France 2
“...there is no supply shortage in the market. We are ready and willing to put more oil on the market, but you need a buyer.”
- Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister, Ali al-Naimi, on the soaring oil prices
COMMENT COMMENT
44 InFocus
Creating shared value Hibba ITANI
The United Nations’ Millennium Declaration affirms “the central challenge we face today is to en-
sure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people. For while globalization offers great opportunities, at present its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly dis-tributed.” In short, many corporations – especially multinationals – have been writing the rules of an unfair global econ-omy, prospering at the expense of pre-sent communities and foreclosing on the well being of future ones. Globalization has led to a decline in state power and a corresponding increase in the influence of corporations on people, communities, and the world as a whole. But this shift in the global power equation means that people now look increasingly to corpora-tions to contribute to society in more than just economic terms.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and global corporate citizenship by exten-sion offer the best means to re-legitimize business in the twenty-first century. De-fined as the accountability of business towards all of society – shareholders, em-ployees, suppliers, clients, consumers, and all other members of the public sphere – corporate social responsibility helps make the world a better place through innova-tive financial, social, and environmental policies and practices. More specifically, CSR emphasizes the creation of shared
value rather than profit per se. It reflects a marriage between the financial success of enterprises and the benefits accruing to local and global communities. Thus, CSR broadens the traditional conception of capitalism to allow for sustainable devel-opment alongside growth.
Corporate social responsibility has been a long time coming. In 1971, the World Economic Forum first formulated the “stakeholder concept” – the idea that businesses have a responsibility to the community at large rather than simply shareholders. Two years later, the Davos Declaration articulated the main princi-ples of corporate social and environmen-tal responsibility, and “doing well by do-ing good” became a fashionable corporate mantra. CSR was not so much adopted as publicized; many companies reaped large profits from projects that exacerbated social and environmental problems and reinvested a small fraction of proceeds in social causes or foundations sure to pro-mote their business interests, all the while publicizing their “generosity.” Some crit-ics subsequently dismissed CSR as spin, posturing, and opportunism at work – mere “window-dressing.” Others, such as Milton Friedman, went further and declared financial profit-maximization incompatible with the provision of public goods. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he famously declared, “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase profits.”
Not all profit is created equal, how-ever. Profits involving a social purpose represent a higher form of capitalism – one that allows society to advance more rapidly while enabling companies to grow even more. The result is a positive cycle of company and community prosperity, which begets profits that endure. In other words, creating shared value is a sustain-able business practice in which everyone wins. Because a successful enterprise re-quires a healthy society in which to oper-ate, enterprises can create economic value by creating societal value.
Despite a bumpy learning curve, re-cent decades witnessed a shift from cos-
Going above and beyond
This company’s value proposition is to sell organic, natural, and healthy food products to consumers who are passionate about nutrition and the environment. The company sources produce from local farmers for each of its stores, steers clear of products containing any of roughly 100 com-mon ingredients considered unhealthy or harmful to the environment, con-structs its stores using a minimum of virgin raw materials, transports spoiled produce and biodegradable waste from stores to compost centers, uses vehicles which run on biofuels, and is the only Fortune 500 company to offset its electricity consumption entirely by purchasing renewable wind energy credits. Almost every aspect of Whole Foods’ value chain reinforces the social and environmental dimen-sions of its unique value proposition, which distinguishes the company from its competitors and allows it to com-mand premium prices. Its corporate strategy is inseparable from its social impact, and the company and its com-munity enjoy a symbiotic relationship.
metic to operational CSR activities. The affirmation of shared value – companies that actively promote socially and envi-ronmentally friendly practices typically report higher financial profit – is one driver. Another is the rise of ethical con-sumerism: as consumers become more aware of the environmental and social implications of their day-to-day purchase decisions, they display a preference for socially responsible goods and services. This is where companies articulating a so-
“There is only one and only
one social responsibility of
business: to use its resources
and engage in activities de-
signed to increase profits.”- Milton Friedman
COMMENT COMMENT
Hibba Itani is a first year graduate student at PSIA, studying
International Development.
InFocus 45
cial dimension in their value proposition come out on top. Consider Whole Foods Market, for example.
A related reason for the socialization of markets is the increasing influence of activist organizations of all stripes, sizes, and persuasions. NGOs increasingly bring public pressure to bear on compa-nies and sectors engaged in irresponsible practices. For example, Shell Oil’s deci-sion to sink an obsolete oilrig in the North Sea in 1995 led to Greenpeace protests and international headlines. Shell sub-sequently redefined its value proposition to reflect a commitment to human rights and sustainable development through reduced carbon dioxide emissions in ex-cess of legal requirements, more efficient technologies, and a culture of engagement
requiring foreign factories to adopt basic environmental and health standards, Nike also founded and/or supports various or-ganizations focused on improving factory conditions in developing countries: the Global Alliance for Workers and Com-munities, the UN Global Compact, and the Fair Labor Association, among others.
Of course, globalization also results in new opportunities for shared value crea-tion. Nespresso, for instance, altered its procurement strategy in impoverished rural areas of Africa and South America in order to establish a steady supply of premium coffee. Recognizing that farm-ers’ limited production volume and low quality beans resulted from low produc-tivity and environmental degradation, Nespresso collaborated with its suppliers
historically marginalized communities, novel opportunities for economic devel-opment and social progress grow expo-nentially. In developed countries, too, businesses and the concentric circles of stakeholders around them stand to gain from creating shared value. Toyota en-joys a strong competitive advantage from the environmental benefits of its hybrid technology. Credit Agricole’s specialized financial products related to the environ-ment – such as financing packages for homes that conserve energy and for audits to certify farms as organic – attract a valu-able niche market. Marriott provides 180 hours of free classroom and on-the-job training to chronically unemployed job candidates, which also happens to reduce the company’s cost of recruiting entry-level employees. And so on.
Once upon a time, the term “sus-tainability” carried a lot of baggage. Cor-porate executives, in their narrow concep-tion of capitalism, thought “sustainability” smacked of ludicrous utopian idealism and that CSR meant sacrificing profits (and with them the economic contribu-tions of business to society – jobs, wages, investment opportunities, and the like). But as so many case studies clearly illus-trate, CSR is not philanthropy. It is self-interested behavior on the part of enter-prises to create economic value through the creation of societal value. Take the example of Unilever, which coordinates global CSR programs to combat poverty, water scarcity, and the effects of climate change, among others. About 40 percent of the company’s sales and the major-ity of its growth take place in developing nations. Its food products account for roughly 10 percent of the world’s tea crops and 30 percent of the world’s spinach crops. It is also one of the world’s lead-ing buyers of fish. Clearly, Unilever has a global stake in society and the environ-ment. And with tightening environmen-tal regulations, Unilever must innovate and invest in green technologies and the like in order to remain not just competi-tive but also financially viable. Compa-nies do not operate in a bubble; more and more, creating shared value is the only way to do business.
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with and reporting to stakeholders. The company is now regarded as an industry leader in sustainable development poli-cies.
As companies expand to new coun-tries and markets, they inevitably en-counter new challenges. Environmental restrictions and lack of consensus on what constitutes labor exploitation are prob-lems that can cost companies millions of dollars. Nike learned this lesson the hard way, when reports of abusive labor prac-tices at some of its Indonesian suppliers resulted in a massive consumer boycott in the early 1990s. Thus, globalization forces multinational corporations to examine not only their own labor practices, but also those of their entire supply chain. In addition to raising wages for its suppliers’ employees above the legal minimum and
by offering farming advice, guaranteeing bank loans, and helping to procure inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers. Moreo-ver, the company established local facili-ties to appraise the quality of coffee in or-der to pay the premium for better beans directly to farmers and thus improve their incentives. Farmers’ incomes increased with greater yields and higher quality cof-fee, and the environmental impact of their farms diminished. Meanwhile, Nespresso has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 30 percent since 2000.
From a CSR perspective, provid-ing appropriate products and services to underserved populations translates into economic, social, and environmentally sustainable business practices over the long haul. Thus, as companies introduce shared value capitalism to poor and/or
1995 Protest to prevent dumping at sea by Shell.
I-WITNESS I-WITNESS
46 InFocus
"War is hell”…that is how General Sher-man once described the war. In my opinion it becomes 'double hell' when
it occurs in your own country. I followed the news of the revolution in Libya min-ute by minute. The data, the numbers, the names, the images - everything was con-stantly in my mind…and in my heart.
However, I didn’t dare put my pen to paper, because I knew the victims and the slaughterers and they were both from my country: they were Libyans. I was afraid to judge or misjudge a person, his or her behavior, before I understood the big pic-ture. I was afraid to ignore some details or to focus too much on others. It is always painful to write about the war.
….But maybe it is the courage, not the knowledge, that I need to describe the situation in my home land.
The 17th of February 2012 marked the first anniversary of the Libyan uprising. However, it seems that toppling Gaddafi’s dictatorship was the easier part.
As a Libyan citizen, I admit that there is a long, bumpy road ahead of us toward democracy.
“The former regime may have been toppled, but the harsh reality is that the Libyan people continue to have to live with its deep-rooted legacy; weak, at times absent, state institutions, coupled with the
long absence of po-litical parties and civil society organizations, which render the coun-try’s transition more difficult”, asserted Ian Martin, the Secretary-General’s Special Rep-resentative and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UN-SMIL).
The present transi-tional council in Libya has less than seven months to prepare for the first democratic election since the 1950s. This long awaited election will be conducted in cooperation with the new transitional government which has only three months in office. The country has neither an electoral system nor a reliable constitution. The Libyan citizen has no experience with a demo-cratic culture or democracy as a concept the world knows it. Civil society, labor un-ions, and national state values have been left severely weakened after Gaddafi’s tyr-anny of four decades, which supported the patrimonial system and gave it the upper hand in the Libyan tribal-based society. The firearms trade and traffic is blooming
New Libya: new fears, new hopesAhmed TRAINA offers a personal perspective on the challenges his country faces one year down the line.
in the absence of law and enforcement. The transitional justice measures are not effective yet, and trust among members of Libyan society has been badly damaged by the brutality of Gaddafi’s war.
Therefore, the first and biggest diffi-culty facing the transitional government today is finding a peaceful mechanism to disarm our society. During the revolution, hundreds of thousands of civilians all over the country took up arms, joining the re-bels trying to defeat Gaddafi’s notorious forces. The ex-rebels (a.k.a. freedom fight-ers) are engaged in different regional mili-tias. The ministers of the interior and de-fense ministries both belong to the most powerful and largest militias of Misurata and Zintan. They announced a mutual plan to absorb 50,000 ex-freedom fighters in the national army and the police forces. Sadly, however, many other different mili-tants refuse to handover their armaments for fear of becoming incapable of defend-ing themselves if things take a turn for the worse in the future.
Many armed societies (like Lebanon), with wider ethnic and regional differences than those that exist in Libyan society, have nevertheless succeeded in normaliz-ing civil life. Here, we can see a potential role for the international community in building institutional and juridical capaci-ties in Libya.
Left: The different ammunitions and guns used by Gaddafi to invade Misurata. The damage can be seen in the burned building in the back-ground.
Top: Photos on the martyrs’ wall in Misurata city. The human cost here was the high-est in the country.
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Photos on the martyrs’ wall in Misurata, where the human cost was the highest.
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Ahmed Traina is an alumni of Sciences Po, Master of Public Affairs program
(class 2009-2011)
InFocus 47
The second biggest difficulty for the new Libya is to start the national recon-ciliation process even while lacking a clear transitional justice enforcement sys-tem. This delay in launching one makes no sense, because the head of the NTC (the National Transitional Council) was a judge and a minister of justice himself. I expect he should have realized early on the crucial role of law and justice in a post-conflict zone. Many of Gaddafi’s loy-alists committed war crimes during the revolution. Some have been captured and convicted by the rebels (who had no man-date yet to do so) but many criminals are still running free at large simply because our justice system has not been activated and certain laws that may regulate the transitional justice do not yet exist.
South Africa would give a good ex-ample for Libya. It set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, after the apartheid era. However, many Libyan victims prefer to rely on the source of the Islamic laws (Holy Quran) to structure the framework.
The problem of the reconciliation pro-cess in Libya is that Gaddafi encouraged some tribes allied to his own in Sirte to at-tack other tribes in Libya based on ethnic-ity. In some of his speeches for example, he ordered the tribe of Bin Walid to attack the people of the mountain areas because they mostly belong to the Amazigh (Ber-ber) minority. He also asked the major Sebha and Tarhuna tribes to attack the province of Misurata, alleging that they were originally Jews! And this makes the war we have seen in Libya look like a civil war.
Gaddafi knew what he was doing in instigating scuh violence: breaking up the solidity of our society forever. Further, when we take a closer look at the tribes involved in the Libyan war, we see that the same tribes who rose in the past to fight the Italian colonization (1911-1945) are the same ones who fought Gaddafi. And the tribes who helped the Italians invade the country… helped Gaddafi.
For this reason, when the young gen-erations of Libya start studying their con-temporary history, they will quickly con-clude that the betrayers of yesterday are the betrayers of today, and most probably they will be betrayers of tomorrow. This can push the goal of reconciliation further away and make it harder to achieve.
Historically speaking, the traditional tribal reconciliation process based on Is-lamic Sharia, led by the worship leaders
of Muslim communities, worked in the past probably because of the absence of documentation that could have been used as evidence of war crimes and massacres. This is not the case today: numerous re-ports and video footage show all the bru-tality we have seen within our small popu-lation. It makes me think that our wounds will always be ‘fresh’: re-seeing past events and thus re-experience the pain.
The third challenge is to honor the commitment they made in the early stages of the revolution to start the election by next June, despite all the difficulties men-tioned above. In case the NTC and our new government fail to achieve their goals in this short period of time, this will open the door for more organized and prob-ably religious groups to step in and fill the power vacuum.
The Arab spring gave a big boost to the moderate Muslim movements in Arabia, and this can be explained from a sociolog-ical point of view as a return (not retar-dation) to the most confirmed and widely agreed basics of religion and beliefs shared in Arab societies, with the aim of creating a new social contract to achieve the maxi-mum degree of order that would save the lives and the wealth of the country.
It is indeed a huge and serious respon-sibility awaiting new Libya. And fortu-nately, when we look back to what the Lib-yans have done in less than a year, there is definite optimism. I started writing this article in Tripoli, where I have heard no gun shots and seen no heavy artillery in the streets for weeks. The markets, the coffee shops, and the banks are all opened for long hours. Daily life in Tripoli has re-
turned to its normal pace very quickly. There are no doubt some fears during
this transition period; here, I attempt to interpret some through an anecdote I was told soon after liberation:
It was the first day in a Libyan primary school. The teachers came on time in high spirits, the students saluted our new flag, and everybody happily sang our new na-tional anthem. It was a fresh start in a new Libya. In class, the teacher started asking her students their names during attend-ance. It was going well until she arrived to a child in the rear. She asked him twice and he didn’t say a word. He looked irrita-ble and confused. She repeated her ques-tion, “Darling, please tell me your name!” He blushed and mumbled, “I don’t have a name, teacher”. The lady lost her tem-per, and shouted at him, “You little liar, of course you have one…WHAT IS YOUR NAME FOR GOD’S SAKE?” The child started crying. Then the boy next to him said, “Don’t push him, teacher; his father was a loyalist of Gaddafi and he gave his own kid ‘Gaddafi’ as a name…that’s why he won’t tell us…he is just ashamed of his stupid name!” For the next few moments the whole class fell into a dark silence. That day everybody went back home with something broken inside.
Muammar Gaddafi, now I hate you even more!
Tripoli’s walls are full of graffiti art these days. This one is mocking Gaddafi’s outrageous speeches. This would have meant a death penalty for the painter during Gaddafi’s era.
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Mexican society’s battle with fear: the drug war
48 InFocus
“... to survive in Mexico, you have to be bold, not naive...”
It is true. Living in Mexico can mean living in a violent and fearful environ-ment. The country is now in the spotlight for the war on drugs; murders are an eve-ryday frequency and everyone, to some extent, has to be careful. Violence and in-security are the major threats to Mexican society, enemies with no limits. And yet the Mexican society has internalized these fears and has learnt to live with them.
Let’s get this clear: everyone expects to experience fear at some point in their lives. As an integral part of human nature, fear has always been a vital response to any physical and/or emotional danger, borne out of protective instinct. Fear should not paralyze however; it should make people stand up for what is right. But in Mexico, only a few are standing up.
In my country, fear is a part of daily life. People are used to living with feelings of insecurity, as if it were normal to avoid walking on the streets at night, normal to gauge that no one is following, to see and/or hear the media discussing at least one or two murders each day. In Mexico, there has been an strange adjustment with regards to this fear from violence: a shift from powerlessness to anger, and from anger to complacence and indiffer-ence. This shift is subduing our natural response; make no mistake, deep wounds
will eventually resurface. Today, the drug war is sadly what
most people associate with Mexico. It is an internal armed conflict the Mexican government is waging against a series of drug cartels that control several illegal activities, besides drug trade. It all began when current president Felipe Calderón’s administration decided, in 2006, to begin fighting drug cartels that controlled cer-tain parts of the country. This war has be-come an everyday battle for the Mexican Armed Forces. Society’s peace has been robbed. The problem of drug dealing has been a permanent asphyxiation for Mexi-can society during the past decade.
In the last five years, the number of deaths has risen. According to the Secre-tariat of Public Security (Secretaría de Se-guridad Pública), 121,199 criminals from different criminal groups had been caught up to March 2010. There have also been casualties. According to the same source, between 2006 and 2012, around 50,000 people were killed. Some organizations es-timate the figure to be closer to 80,000. It is true several criminal groups have been weakened and most deaths have been of incriminated individuals, but around 10% were civilian victims, such as journalists or human rights activists. Furthermore, around 200,000 people have been dis-placed. These are not insignificant figures.
Despite these statistics, Mexico is not the most insecure country in the Latin
American region. That title goes to Ven-ezuela, with the highest rate of violent murders. El Salvador, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic also endure more violent crimes. What, however, draws greater attention to events in Mexico is that crimes are committed with unprec-edented viciousness between drug cartels. Thus, Ciudad Juárez, a northern border city in the country, has become the most insecure city in the world.
Take for example the teenagers caught by policemen, who have been paid by these cartels to torture and kill people. In late 2010, for example, the Mexican Police arrested a 14 year-year old US citizen, liv-ing in Mexico, for collaborating with the Cartel del Pacífico Sur, a drug-dealing organization that operates in the south of the country. According to the authori-ties, he was responsible for decapitating the enemies of this criminal group. These kinds of horrific stories are common me-dia fodder.
What exacerbates the situation is that although the economy is flourishing, in-equalities exist and in certain areas young people have little or no opportunity at all, such as access to quality education, em-ployment, and health services. Being part of a criminal gang gives these children not only a sense of identity, but also a way to earn money to support their families. When the battle is for one’s life, no won-der then the change in mentality of young
Natalia SANTOYO RIVERA shares what it means to be living among drugs and violence in her home country.
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The detention of a young girl in collaboration with a criminal gang
Public manifestation against the violence in Mexico organized by the Movement of Mexican Citizens in Barcelona (Movimiento de Ciudadanos Mexicanos en Barcelona). June 10, 2011.
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InFocus 49
people and the disappearance of tradi-tional morals and values. Youngsters be-longing to such groups appear immune to the pain of others, and live without regret of their actions. They even tend to believe it is better to risk death or prison, rather than spending their life on the fringes of society with no access to economic op-portunities and benefits. It is in response to this fear that danger and violence have become a part of their lives.
As for the political class, it has been unable to prevent the consequent cor-ruption and faces the problem in a more holistic manner, ignoring the factors that feed criminal bands such as poverty, social inequality, corruption and money laun-dering. Clearly, the government needs to step in, but it has proved ineffective so far.
Regular news coverage of this war seems to have become a function of daily life, desensitizing the society to the hor-rors. Last November, for example, there was a newspaper story of 26 bodies found inside a truck in the city of Guadalajara. Along with the bodies, the police found posters with messages from the Cartel del Milenio (criminal gang that operates in the central region of the country) to the governor of the State, Emilio González, and the President, Mr. Calderón. These messages basically ask them to stop the fight and let them work in order to con-trol the other violent gangs. One police-man interviewed stated, “Well, we are used to finding dead bodies. You know, two or even three bodies do not shock us. But more than 20, that is shocking!” That
it takes up to 20 deaths today to shock the police is in itself shocking.
The extent to which society has ‘re-adjusted’ itself, and realigned itself to ‘normalcy’ is absurd. People are used to hearing gunshots from time to time. Liv-ing that reality on a daily basis seems to have immunized the problem to some measure. Feeling unsafe seems a foregone conclusion.
The drug conflict hurts Mexicans deeply. True, it is not the only event hap-pening in the country, not all of the cit-ies are experiencing it, and the degree of exposure varies. That is why some peo-ple, including the president, have urged the media and citizens to speak well of Mexico. But it is a reality that cannot be pretend to not exist. It is not to undermine Mexico’s potential (natural resources, rich history, stable economy), or to discourage foreign visitors; but its citizens owe it to themselves to demand stronger and more powerful measures to tackle the problem. Mexico is a country of opportunities and resources that are not being maximized for its general population. We Mexicans need to cognitively realize the wrongness of the world we’ve constructed aorund us, and recognize the need for proactive re-dress.
There is no worse feeling than the fear of being unsafe. In my country it is nor-mal to feel fear. My country and society deserve much more. Being ignorant can no longer be bliss. Blind acceptation can-not be enough. It is not acceptable that a rogue minority has changed the rest of
society, blanketed cities with a perpetual worry of what could happen to them. This apparent normality and the willingness of Mexicans to conform within the con-straints of a drug war must change. Mexi-cans should revisit their traditional values of solidarity and compassion that now seem to be vanishing.
Luckily, not all those voices have van-ished. Some have not lost hope and de-mand others regroup. For instance, the “Walk for Peace” held in May 2011, led by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, after the tragic loss of his son by a criminal gang. This walk was replicated in 26 cities of the country to demand the Federal Govern-ment to stop the violence. But it is not enough: it is a duty that every Mexican has to face. As once said by a professor, “the best way to be generous with our coun-try is to think of it, think deeply about it and discuss it. Whoever does not do the exercise of thinking about the country is incapable of offering solutions.” In short, for every bullet fired in any corner of this country, there should be a voice that ech-oes: “Enough!”
Natalia Santoyo Rivera is a first year graduate student of International
Development at PSIA
The worst affected areas are those marked in red.
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‘I-WITNESS’
The newest addition to InFocus!
If you would like to share a personal experi-ence, a comment about a situation that you have been an active participant in, get in touch at [email protected] to get your say pub-lished in this new category of articles.
MEDIA REVIEW
What: Richard Branson’s Screw Business As UsualWhy: To learn more about the current trend moving into corporate mentality: social and environmental responsibility
How much: 12.93 eurosWhere: Amazon or any bookstore
It costs a lot of money to keep Rich-ard Branson entertained. Many of his past books and a glance at his twitter posts will tell you that he wakes up with the daily mission only a billionaire could have: to fi nd new and exciting ways to keep from being bored. Th e world in which Mr. Branson lives is paved in gold (or dia-monds or marshmallows, depending on what he fancies that day), populated with stars, and full of activities the rest of the world couldn’t even begin to imagine.
However, in his latest book Screw Business As Usual Mr. Branson tries to show a deeper side to his ambition and his company strategy that he says has been evolving over the last 7 years. He portrays himself as the Benevolent Billionaire. He believes that becoming a successful busi-nessman in today’s age is not based any longer on selfi shly pillaging the world for one’s own profi ts, but actually investing in the planet in order to secure prosperity tomorrow. He titles his concept Capital-ism 24902. No, it’s not an area code of his Necker Island home; it is the circumfer-ence of the earth. “Every single business person has the responsibility for taking care of the people and planet that make up our global village, all 24,902 circum-ferential miles of it,” he proclaims in the fi rst chapter of his book. Yes, it’s cheesy, but he’s got a point.
Although Mr. Branson does quite a bit of publicity for Virgin (reminding us they own a part of Pluto and that his team taught Archbishop Desmond Tutu how to swim), he also spends a good amount of time highlighting other corporate and business leaders who are taking the lead in Capitalism 24902. Not surprisingly he gives plenty of kudos to Wal-Mart, which has revolutionized the concept of sus-tainability in the supply chain. He points to GE’s ecomagination program which pushes clean technology innovation, and to the partnership between Danone and Muhammed Yunus to bring small-scale yoghurt factories to Bangladesh.
Branson has published a relatively in-
formative document about the who’s who and what is happening in the corporate social responsibility space. Th is is espe-cially useful to students who are looking out for work in development, which in-cludes a corporate salary. Branson pro-vides plenty of plugs as to why companies should expand their social responsibil-ity and philanthropic departments, stat-ing that it is not just better morally, but also economically, since more stable and healthy populations/environments will ensure prosperity for future markets.
Of course, in-between there are plenty of sparkling anecdotes and name-dropping to keep your interest. Th e book opens up with a naked Richard Branson watching Kate Winslet drag his mother out of their burning house at Necker Is-land. Actually, if you get a dollar for every time that Branson says Necker Island in the opening chapters you might be able to aff ord one year’s rent in St. Germaine de Près! Th e informal tone and Branson “humor” keep you amused and make this a pleasant read about how business should address development.
Contributed by Anjuli PANDIT
THE IRON LADY INDEED
Seeking to portray one of Britain’s most contro-versial Prime Ministers, director Phyllida Lloyd succeeds in bringing pow-
er, inspiration and pathos to the screen in an accurate and moving depiction of Mar-garet Th atcher.
Th e base point of the fi lm is of an old lady lost, disorientated and out of her depth in modern Britain. Suff ering from dementia, Margaret Th atcher has hal-lucinations of her late husband Denis throughout the fi lm, which bring about fl ashbacks of her past.
First we see a young Margaret, the daughter of a grocer, hiding beneath a ta-ble with her family in the midst of the Blitz as German bombers wreak havoc over-head. From here there are scenes of her move toward politics: from being inspired by the speeches of her father as town May-or, to suff ering defeat in the 1950 election at Dartford, to being elected to Parliament in 1959; and ultimately, reaching Down-ing Street as the fi rst female Prime Minis-ter of Great Britain in 1979.
Th e strengths of this biopic are in its detail and in its capture of the Iron Lady’s formidable character. From the very start as a young candidate we see her iron will, which is tested by the Conservative elite who sneer at her sex and modest family background. Th is iron will is never sub-dued: we see her as an old lady humor-ously refusing to be told what to do by her doctors.
Similarly her fearlessness and work ethic come across in scenes of Cabinet meetings and military planning for the Falklands War. Th is is intensifi ed by an excruciatingly brilliant performance by Meryl Streep. Th atcher’s famous hand-bags, pearls and outfi ts, and the symbol-ism behind them, are vividly portrayed, bringing another level to the fi lm. Atten-tion is paid to Th atcher’s religious back-ground by the prayer of Assisi she off ers before entering No.10 for the fi rst time. Furthermore, real footage of rioting and IRA bombings are eff ectively used to con-jure up the world of an unstable Britain in the 1980s.
Th ere are some glorious scenes of fe-male dominance in a hyper-masculine world: notably Th atcher speaking in the House of Commons, impressive camera angles from above a single woman in a sea of men, and some fantastic cutting dia-logue.
Th e fi lm does not hesitate to criticize Th atcher. She is portrayed as ruthless, curt and domineering in the scene that supposedly precipitates the mutiny of her Cabinet. Moreover, the struggle with home life is depicted as particularly pain-ful; an early scene in the fi lm shows her driving away from home to Westminster with her children running behind begging her to stay at home to play with them.
Th atcher’s single-mindedness and de-termination come across very strongly throughout the fi lm, emphasising her desire to “do something” rather than to “be someone”. It is inevitable that to some Margaret Th atcher will be remembered as an enemy of the working-class and war-monger, and to others as a patriot who triumphed against the odds. Th e beauty of this fi lm is that it sidesteps this debate. Here is an individual who loved her coun-try, was democratically elected to imple-ment her vision, and fought every step of the way in the face of fearful odds, stereo-types and opposition to do what she be-lieved was right.
Contributed by Louise Gammon
50 InFocus
An idea you’ve been thinking of developing? Work experience you would like to share? An opinion on a current or ongoing situation? A book you’ve read recently, or a must-watch documentary related to the world of international affairs?
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