London

A year ago this week, as he watched the great uprisings in Tunis and Cairo, the French scholar Olivier Roy declared that they marked the end of Islamist politics. “If you look at the people who launched these revolts,” he wrote, “it is clear that they represent a post-Islamist generation. … The new revolutionaries are perhaps practising or even devout Muslims, but they separate their religious faith from their political agenda. In that sense, it is a ‘secular’ movement that separates religion from politics.”

Well, you might say, how awkward. Those January protesters may have been secular and liberal, but, when I visited Tahrir Square six months later, it had become a rhetorical bearpit where Islamists commanded the most crowded stage. Over the past eight weeks we’ve watched Egypt’s first somewhat free elections give 48 per cent of the vote to a party controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, plus 20 per cent to 28 per cent to Salafists, who aren’t just Islamist but want an actual theocracy. Secular liberals were left with a rump of 15 per cent to 20 per cent. If this is “post-Islamist,” it sure has a lot of crescents and guys with beards.

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Mr. Roy’s words were not to be dismissed out of hand, because he is probably the world’s most respected scholar on Islamic societies and politics. And his argument was backed up by other scholars such as Asaf Bayat in the Netherlands, who wrote an important analysis of the Middle East’s “post-Islamist trajectory.”

This week, Dr. Roy was asked to explain himself on French radio. Did the Islamist electoral victories in Tunisia and Egypt pour cold water on his “post-Islamist” prognostication? Quite the contrary, he said. They proved it. The new individualism behind the Arab revolutions, he said, has led Arabs to vote for parties with an Islamic identity (in large part, because “secularism” was strongly associated with the dictatorships they overthrew) - but, in the process, it’s forced those parties to abandon the Islamist goal of a pure religious society governed only by the Koran.

“Islamist movements like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt can no longer even be called Islamist,” he said. “They are conservatives analogous to the religious right in the United States.” Much as socialist parties in the West had to abandon the revolutionary goals of Marxism to become electable, the new Islamist parties have had to give up actual Islamism: They can’t impose the Koran on people, but rather combine “a religious reference” with democratic bids to influence “family values.”

I don’t quite share Mr. Roy’s optimism. While an Iranian-style theocracy isn’t a possibility in Egypt, there are leaders in the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party whose views on women and Israel are alarming enough and whose ties to Egypt’s military overlords appear authoritarian enough that the result could look a lot like Islamism, even if it doesn’t quite work that way.

Where the “post-Islamism” scholars do have a point is in their reading of the trends that led people to vote for the Islamist parties. These, paradoxically enough, are driven by a shift to secularization of private life. Egypt and its neighbours are in the midst of the same demographic change that revolutionized the West two centuries ago: Fertility rates are falling to European levels, literacy is rising, and institutions such as first-cousin marriages are becoming increasingly rare. Religion has become a badge of identity, not a way of life.

This shift has made Islamists desperate to seize influence, because social influence can now only be won through politics. And it has put them in a unique position to gain it. Former Ottoman states such as Egypt never bothered to replace the religious obligation to give alms with a secular obligation to pay taxes. So the imams and mullahs became not only the leading voice of dissent but also the leading source of welfare. That, more than the Koran, wins them votes.

“The fundamental contradiction of Islamism is that its leaders think of themselves as guardians of a tradition, whereas the popular wave behind them is the result of a modernizing mental revolution,” demographers Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd write in their analysis of Muslim-country modernization, A Convergence of Civilizations. “Political victory is inevitably followed by cultural defeat.”

In between comes a tumultuous time. The Muslim world is becoming modern the same way France did, with wild swings of revolution and reaction. “Westerners would like to forget,” the two demographers conclude, “that their own demographic transitions were also strewn with many disturbances and a good deal of violence.” It’s not a safe and easy path, but it’s progress.

Photo via Nick Turse

Original Article

What on earth were we doing in Kandahar? Now that it’s all over, that question hangs in the air. Decades hence, students will be stumped by that question in much the same way I was when my high-school textbook opened to Canada’s place in the Boer War. It was full of sound and fury, but signifying exactly what? How did we pour five years, more than $18-billion and 158 lives into something so large and nebulous? How do we avoid repeating the mistake?

The process that led from Canada’s modest 2001 participation in the Kabul operation into the five-year semi-colonial Kandahar odyssey that began in 2006 remains something of a mystery. I’ve heard diplomatic and military officials of very high rank tell me they don’t really know how Canada became embroiled. Al-Qaeda had already been banished from Afghanistan by the time we entered the south. Our soldiers were professional, extremely courageous, calmly civilized and never quite sure what had caused them to be there.

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We now have some surprising answers. A team of analysts with London’s Royal United Services Institute, a security think tank, gained unprecedented access to the confidential documents and British official records of the decision by NATO members in 2003 and 2004 to expand the Afghan war for a special collection of papers. Matthew Willis analyzed the Canadian decision, which was deeply entwined with Britain’s. His paper, to be released this month, describes a decision made in secret by senior Armed Forces officials, without the knowledge of NATO or probably of Canada’s prime minister.

“The Canadians and the British,” a senior NATO official told Mr. Willis, “hammered out the whole thing without NATO’s assistance, behind closed doors. … We were not aware of the details.”

While Canada was ostensibly fighting as one member of the 42-nationNATO International Security Assistance Force, the decision to establish a base in Kandahar, the most dangerous province, was negotiated in Ottawa and London, without the knowledge – and against the advice – of the Brussels-based military alliance. NATO had been pressuring General Raymond Henault, then head of the Canadian Forces, to set up a mission in the provinces of Chaghcharan or Herat.

But Canada’s military officials had other ideas – and most were rooted in Canada’s experience, five years earlier, in Bosnia. They had come to dislike fighting with some other countries – Mr. Willis writes of “the Canadian leadership’s aversion to partnering with the Italians or certain other European nations.”

The generals also felt that the Bosnia and Kosovo missions hadn’t won Canada much international fame or recognition. Those had been real coalitions, and Canada had blended into the background.

“The reason went well beyond a Canadian desire to be patted on the back,” Mr. Willis writes, citing his interviews with Canada’s military leaders. “It was about being able to make one’s voice heard in the political and military fora where mission-defining decisions were being taken, including, not least, plans for the use of Canadian soldiers. It was thus also about improving Canada’s ability to exert its influence in accordance with its interests and values.”

Prime minister Paul Martin must have known that Canada’s troop commitment, just shy of 3,000 soldiers, was the most it could muster, and might not have been enough for a large and deadly province (it did prove to be inadequate). But the generals pressed ahead. Part of it, they told Mr. Willis, was a desire to please Washington.

He raises the “contentious question why the senior Canadian military leadership, and the defence and foreign affairs departments, persisted in pushing the mission forward. Ostensibly, the military was seeking redemption after a decade of unremarkable performances in unremarkable (read: peacekeeping) theatres; or perhaps it wanted to show the U.S., the Canadian public and other key allies that it really could do combat if called on.”

“Implicit and sometimes explicit in all of the above,” he concludes, “is the idea that Canadian planners were pursuing a principally national agenda divorced from the NATO plan and heavily conditioned by beliefs about what would go over well in Washington.”

It is discomforting to think that this dangerous war was prolonged beyond the ouster of al-Qaeda in order to further interests of organizational pride and stature. But this was a big part of the decision.

This may well be the reality of modern war, as we saw in Libya this year, where a handful of countries forged an ad hoc alliance in confidential meetings far outside of NATO’s vision and without all its members – a cafeteria NATO, if you will. It is a less formal process, but one whose miscalculations can cause years of damage.

Postscript

Responses to this column have come from a number people who were involved at the time. One of the top Canadians involved in the talks, a very senior official in the Ministry of National Defense at the time, wrote to say that the RUSI account is “largely correct,” and noted that this larger picture can be corroborated in the 2007 book Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. He added that the key talks took place not in London, as I had initially written, but “right in downtown Ottawa, at 101 Colonel By Drive, NDHQ.” He adds: “I was there, I was part of it. And I regret it.” He felt that Foreign Affairs had “never pushed Kandahar as an option - - they were at best agnostic and at worst removed and detached from this file, as unbelievable as that sounds.”

But guy who was in the high ranks of NATO at the time wrote, also confidentially, to disagree strongly with this account. He argued that NATO was much more involved than RUSI (and other sources) claim, that the key talks took place “at the yellow building which is ISAF HQ in Kabul on 24 or 26 Oct 2003.” He, on the other hand, claims that Foreign Affairs had a very active hand in pushing and promoting the Kandahar posting.

Jack Granatstein, the dean of Canadian military historians, pointed out that an analysis he coauthored in late 2011 with David Bercuson for the  Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. It largely follows the narrative described by the RUSI report, and comes to some similar conclusions, but with a lot more detail and some notable nuances. It makes fascinating reading, and should be on the desk of any politician contemplating participation in a military coalition. Here is its full text:

Lessons Learned: What Canada Should Learn from Afghanistan

Original Article

Antwerp

It is an early Saturday evening on Handelstraat, a busy and somewhat dishevelled boulevard in the north of this historic Belgian port city, its sidewalks lined with outdoor cafés and tea shops, fish restaurants, butchers and bakeries, all of them buzzing with customers. It’s a typical European street scene, except that most of the people have olive-coloured skin, many women sport head scarves and the throaty sounds of Arabic and Turkish mix with brusque Flemish.

Suddenly there is violence: Chairs are flying, punches are being thrown and people are surrounding a young man who is accused of selling hashish, pummelling him and pushing him away. Spilled tea pools on the sidewalk, and mothers drag their children away.

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As the street calms and the crowd dissolves, I approach the overturned tables and start asking questions. A teenager wearing a shalwar kameez approaches me. His name is Jamal, he says, and his family owns one of the cafés. “Look,” he says in good English, “I know this looks really bad to you. But trust me, this is good for us. It means we’re taking back our street.”

I have not come to this dense 19th-century neighbourhood at random. Few people do: While it is a five-minute walk north of Antwerp’s diamond district and central train station, and is quite a lively shopping destination for Muslims from neighbouring countries, this dense cluster of streets, known across Belgium by its postal code 2060, is rarely visited by middle-class, white Europeans. It is a Moroccan-dominated immigrant district, a place one leaves but rarely enters.

I have come in an effort to solve a European puzzle. Earlier this year, I met the mayor of Antwerp, a youthful and optimistic politician named Patrick Janssens, who was familiar with my writings on poor immigrant neighbourhoods in many countries. He wanted me to spend a few days inside the 2060, to watch it with a fresh set of eyes, see what makes it tick and try to find the roots of its malaise.

In exchange, he would give me access to the city’s information and employees, allowing me to speak to scores of families, including the deprived, who are usually inaccessible to outsiders.

It was a unique opportunity to peer deep inside a place that is at the explosive intersection of Europe’s simultaneous demographic and economic crises.

“We really don’t know how to talk about the 2060,” Mr. Janssens says. “We only know it as a set of problems, not as a place with a story.”

Europe’s new immigrant neighbourhoods – such as Tingbjerg in Copenhagen, Slotervaart in Amsterdam and Kreuzberg and Wedding in Berlin – have become flashpoints of conflict this year, as they face the dual challenge of devastating youth-unemployment rates and outside threats in the form of new far-right, anti-immigrant movements that have spread quickly, targeting these districts as hotbeds of alien religion and anti-European thought.

The economic crisis has left many of the newest Europeans trapped – in many cases, in neighbourhoods like the 2060. The severe labour shortages of the 20-year boom that began in the 1990s attracted millions of immigrants, many from poor places. But many European countries never bothered to give them full citizenship, and pretended they were “temporary” workers (an approach that never works) or simply ignored them. Now, at the worst possible moment, their children are in trouble.

Ghetto, Gateway, or parallel society?

This Antwerp neighbourhood is at the centre of the new tension. So far this year, there have been four riots or major street fights in the 2060 involving young men of Moroccan or Turkish ancestry, the most recent a knife-wielding clash between Kurdish and Anatolian Turks in early November. Reports of drug crime have also been on the rise.

The large and powerful far-right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party has targeted the troubles in the 2060 as evidence of their belief that Muslims can’t or won’t be assimilated into European society and are instead creating isolated “parallel societies.”

Conversely, some on the left claim that the racism of such parties is forcing migrants into ghettoes.

Neither theory, once you’re inside the neighbourhood, quite fits the reality.

A decade ago, many of the second-generation immigrants of the 2060 were becoming successful Europeans, a new immigrant-offspring middle class visible in business, politics and the media.

All evidence suggests that the current residents very much want to become full-fledged Belgians, albeit with different religions and sometimes skin colours: A survey this year by the Soros Foundation found that a strong majority of Muslim immigrants and their descendents in Antwerp – almost 70 per cent – said that they identified themselves as Belgian first, a better rate than among many other immigrant communities.

For politicians such as Mr. Janssens, the failures of places like the 2060 are a frustration and an embarrassment, as well as a policy challenge. If some migrant enclaves, like many in France or Germany, are ignored and neglected by their governments, the 2060 is doted upon.It is the subject of scores of important interventions and projects.

There are new parks, community centres and libraries; an impressive public-transit system; a robust adult-education program; and even a city-run temporary slaughterhouse to allow Muslims to sacrifice sheep on the first day of Eid in sanitary conditions. (This year, they offered a “humane” option, in which the sheep could be anesthetized first, for those devout Muslims who also happen to be animal-rights proponents.)

“We are really determined to make this a successful neighbourhood,” Mr. Janssens says. “But this is proving to be a challenge in these economic conditions.”

An escape from nowhere

As an outsider, my first response to the 2060 is to wonder what the big deal is. A few minutes’ walk north of the diamond district, the geometry of the streets becomes tighter, the scene a mix of thriving commerce and tight-packed houses, many of them tile-fronted 19th-century row houses not unlike those you would see around the canals of Amsterdam or the Hague.

Some streets are verdant and pleasant; others have uglier, public-housing apartments. But this is hardly the isolated, tower-block wasteland I have seen in Paris or Glasgow. Still, it is very much an immigrant landing pad – what I’ve elsewhere called an arrival city. Half the people living here were born in a foreign country outside the European Union, and in the densest blocks of the 2060, a third of the population is Turkish or Moroccan.

A majority of these people come from rural villages: The Moroccans are mainly from the Rif Mountains, the Turks from the villages of Anatolia and the southeast, and even the Poles (the largest current group of immigrants) are mainly from the rural villages of Silesia and the southwest.

This is a very typical European mix – indeed, it is similar to the rural-born mix that flooded Canada’s immigrant neighbourhoods after the Second World War, raising similar fears of giant immigrant families and alien beliefs swamping the population.

Jamal Elboujddaini came here as an infant in the 1970s. He was born in “the middle of nowhere,” a remote village in northern Morocco, where his family were subsistence farmers and life was often desperate. His father joined thousands of other Arab men in boarding ships to Western Europe to fill the labour shortages of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His father had expected to stay a couple of years, save some money and go home. But it rarely works out that way: His industrial employers, having invested in training, wanted to keep him on, and other migrant Arabs became his social network. In 1974, he brought his family over, including the newborn Jamal.

The 2060 was, in many respects, ideal. The houses may look small and tightly packed to middle-class Antwerp residents, but to a North African they are spacious and dignified, offer quick access to the street – and are cheap enough that a few years’ savings made it possible to buy one. With a little more money, often borrowed from fellow immigrants, you could start a small shop. Everyone sent money back to the villages and helped neighbours and relatives make the move.

Mr. Elboujddaini started school as one of a small cluster of Moroccans in a largely Belgian classroom. By the time he was in his final year of secondary school, he was the only Moroccan boy – the others had dropped out, with the school’s encouragement.

“Ninety per cent of these immigrants, they are not educated at all in their home country – not even in their own language,” Mr. Elboujddaini says. “My father never had any idea about my school, my friends – he had no way of knowing what I was doing outside the house. I was the one who translated the documents to buy the house. It was just luck and coincidence that I made it.”

Through cleverness and perseverance, he was able to join his Belgian-born classmates in university, and eventually wound up in education.

It’s not hard to find other second-generation Turks and Moroccans of his generation who became successful, but almost all have moved out of the 2060. Mr. Elboujddaini is a rare exception, but he still sends his children to a school in a more prosperous postal district.

This became the pattern: Europe’s immigrant neighbourhoods can provide an excellent bottom rung on the ladder, but the second and third rungs are broken or missing, so those who succeed go elsewhere, and those who fail stay behind.

I met a new wave of villagers from Turkey, Poland and Morocco, often renting the houses owned by people like Mr. Elboujddaini. They weren’t having an easy time.

Hasan Touzani, 36, came here eight years ago, worked at a series of odd jobs, mainly in shops selling knockoff brand-name clothing, and has five children, aged 8 to 18. Mr. Touzani very much wants them to become good Belgians, but has no idea how.

Like many Moroccan villagers, he speaks only a very rough Arabic – never mind French or Flemish. He fears that his kids don’t have any positive influences, and tries to keep them inside.

“We are very afraid of drugs and crime,” he says, “and we are constantly looking for activities to keep the children off the street. I am stuck in the 2060 because of my language – but if I had the choice, I’d live in a different neighbourhood to give my children a proper education.”

The toxic combination of the economy, hostile politics and abandonment by the more successful has turned this neighbourhood into something of a trap. It has created a lost generation of teens and young men who seem to have nothing to do but hang out on Handelstraat and get into trouble.

“I think the young people, when they make some money, they leave,” says Karim Barhdadi, another educated, successful Moroccan I met. “The older people, first generation, they will stay and improve their houses. But most of the people I knew when I was in secondary school, I don’t see them around any more. … If you want your children to progress, you have to get them out.”

More than the sum of its stats

A frequent error in looking at a neighbourhood like the 2060 is to treat it as a set of fixed statistics: Its population density is five times higher than the city average; its population is much younger; its poverty rate, 15 to 20 per cent, is 60 per cent higher; three times as many people, or 6 per cent of residents, are dependent on government benefits.

Chronic joblessness is very high: Among people 18 to 64, almost half are long-term unemployed, and there is fear that the economic crisis will return that rate to an alarming 61 per cent, where it stood a little less than a decade ago.

But that disguises what actually happens here: Past immigrants move out and new immigrants move in. In the core of the 2060, almost a quarter of the population leaves every year. Of the people who moved to this district in 2004 and didn’t return to their home countries, an extraordinary 63 per cent had moved to other postal zones by 2010.

The downside is that, for many poor villagers who have arrived in Europe in the past 10 years, their only encounters have been with other poor villagers. That wasn’t the pattern before.

Part of this is rooted in Europe’s web of immigration policies, which are both too open and too restrictive. There are a great many unaccompanied, single, immigrant men moving around the European Union, largely either economic migrants or refugee claimants whom the system will neither deport nor make citizens.

As well, most countries have tightened up their family-reunification policies, making it much harder for those single guys to become part of families (which, by every measure, are better for integration).

Some of the violence in the 2060, like the incident I witnessed, is simply established immigrant families fighting back against the criminal activities that sustain these young men, who are seen as alien outsiders.

But I also saw a lot of things that are blocking the path to integration. Most of the neighbourhood’s institutions are imported: Almost no teachers or police have made it up from the streets. Belgian police and other officials become frustrated with the workload and try to transfer out. Few are devoted to fixing the district.

“When you work with those few officers who do come from around here, they know everything,” says Jan Michiels, a senior police officer in the 2060. “They know who to follow. They know how to see things, and how to control the situation. We need more people like that. I believe that when they can give me 50 or 60 people from around this neighbourhood, we can clean up the neighbourhood.”

Moroccan and Turkish neighbourhoods in places like Amsterdam have had success with locally cultivated security forces.

Underlying it all is the central problem of education: Schools in immigrant neighbourhoods are often the worst, attracting the least ambitious teachers, in what becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of failure. School officials are inclined by reflex to place immigrant students, especially boys, in the lowest educational streams.

Only 8 per cent of Belgian Muslims are placed into the university-bound stream – and as many as 70 per cent of those are girls. As many as 85 per cent go into the technical steam. And 20 to 25 per cent of minority students are leaving school without a degree.

“My concern,” says Mariete Smeyers of School in Zicht (School in Sight), a group that tries to attract parents back to the schools of the 2060, “is that in these neighbourhoods are a lot of migrants who are coming here with high expectations – they want to give their children every opportunity possible. And then they are in this place where these poor Moroccan families are the example. And after five years, they lose a lot of ambition.”

Teachers leave because they have no idea how to work with unengaged parents, while engaged parents move away in search of higher standards. “It’s a pity we can’t keep these families in the neighbourhood, because they would serve as examples,” Ms. Smeyers says. “Instead, the one-income family dependent on welfare has become the norm.

“The ambition of this group is living on the edge of poverty. That’s enough for them.”

Black flight and white flight

The core problem is the social mix. The quiet secret of the 2060 is that it has historically served as a fairly successful machine for social and economic integration. But “black flight,” as Belgians call the departure of successful immigrants, combined with the “white flight” of ethnic Belgians, has hollowed out the lower middle class of the 2060.

There has been good reason to expect this to improve. The attractive 19th-century houses of the 2060, especially around the new parks, are becoming desirable properties for middle-class Belgian couples to renovate; those streets are becoming filled with coffee shops and boutiques, a nice mix of yuppies and lower-middle-class immigrant families. Of course, none of them send their kids to school here, but the rising property values help North African homeowners too.

“This is a good neighbourhood. The houses are nice, the customers are nearby, there are a lot of people here who want to be successful, who are starting small businesses,” says Husiyan Aslan, a businessman who came here from Turkey in the 1970s and whose industrial success has helped finance an unusually successful primary school here.

“But there are just too many things making people want to move out when they become successful, and those who are left behind need a lot of help. The image of the 2060 is preventing us from attracting customers, and it should be easy to change.”

After several days here, watching the mix of immigrant commerce and rough-and-tumble conflict, I was reminded of the East London districts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, when I first lived there in the 1980s.

Those 19th-century immigrant blocks were regarded as the country’s most dangerous places, with near-weekly street battles between skinheads and Muslim gangs, religious extremism among local Bangladeshis, and drugs and crime. They were places I avoided at night.

Today, that area of London remains an immigrant neighbourhood, but it’s the place to be for artists, restaurateurs, technology entrepreneurs and especially members of the new Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrant middle class. This transformation was the product of economic growth, but also of careful government programs.

I had a vision of the 2060, in two decades, turned into a Flemish Spitalfields: People would get off the train at Antwerp’s spectacular central station and head a few blocks north, into the labyrinthine streets of Handelstraat, to have a good time.

Prescription for transformation

That is almost certainly the 2060’s future. But meanwhile, what is standing in the way? I told the mayor that three things seem to be missing:

First, a way to turn its thousands of tiny immigrant-owned businesses into medium-sized businesses – by attracting consumers northward from the diamond district, by eliminating the typically strict Belgium business regulations, by creating symbolic landmarks to lure pedestrians and by making Handelstraat less like a planned shopping street and more like a Moroccan souk.

Second, a top-quality secondary school, one that is not just up to the standards of the city’s middle-class neighbourhoods (which is a distant enough ambition) but far better. It would be something like Britain’s “academy” schools, which are funded directly by the national government in order to turn around troubled neighbourhoods. In other words, the 2060 needs a model institution that will not just bring children back, but make middle-class families from outside compete to get in

And third, more yuppies: By demolishing the pockets of dismal high-rise public housing, Antwerp could create mixed-income developments that would include condominiums, loft apartments and artists’ spaces (sales would finance the redevelopments).

This diversity would recreate the social mix that has made North America’s immigrant neighbourhoods (New York’s Lower East Side, Toronto’s Spadina Ave.) so successful. This mix of incomes, occupations and educational aspirations tends to inspire people, and turn troubled places into upward-mobility success stories – as long as there’s economic growth.

There’s no growth at the moment – certainly not in Belgium, one of the harder-hit countries in the euro crisis. Once growth returns, if other immigrant-driven countries are any model, it will be these new Europeans who lead the way.

But in the meantime, there’s a simmering political force that sees them as nothing but a threat: A deeper economic crisis could turn the pressure on Handelstraat into something far darker. Here, at the bottom of the continent’s melting pot, it is going to be a difficult decade.

Photos: Jerry Lampen, Noortje Palmers and Doug Saunders

Original Article

Cairo on Friday was a tableau of bloodied faces, firebombs and rocks, club-swinging soldiers and turbulent street battles. If this year began with a simple arithmetic of immovable protesters facing down a dictatorship, it is ending with a more complicated geometry involving a power-wielding army, resurgent Islamists and humiliated protesters.

How do we understand the new politics of the Arab world? Here’s a suggestion: Don’t even try. You’ll learn far more if you make an effort to understand the economics. For what happened this year on the southern shore of the Mediterranean was far more an inevitable response to economic change than a spontaneous outburst of resistance. And to understand what happens next, you need to know what, economically, has come before.

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The most important voice this year is the Cairo economist Samer Soliman, whose book The Autumn of Dictatorship is not just crucial to explaining the Arab uprisings, but also offers the key to understanding almost all transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, and the troubles that occur along the way.

In his detailed analysis of 60 years of finances, it becomes evident that at the beginning of 2011, Egypt and Tunisia were at about the same place, economically, where you would have found Eastern Europe and Russia in 1988, or Brazil in the early 1980s, just as their authoritarian regimes were about to collapse.

All those regimes had spent years buying public support through the doling out of government jobs, food subsidies, housing benefits and positions at state-owned, protected corporations, with minimal taxes.

This was almost all “free” money. Arab states, like most authoritarian regimes, were generally known as rentier economies: They financed themselves not by creating internal economic growth and taxing it, but by attracting money outside: From Egypt’s modest petroleum industry and the Suez Canal rents, and most of all from Cold War foreign-aid payments from Moscow and then Washington, both of whom made Cairo, for a time, their largest aid recipient. This gave the Nasser and Sadat regimes the illusion of generosity – but their spending always exceeded their revenues.

Under Hosni Mubarak, that all faded. The oil and canal revenues were nowhere enough to support Egypt’s fast-growing population, and the aid money dwindled with the Cold War’s end. But by the end of 2010, the Egyptian state was getting by on only half the revenues that Mr. Mubarak was receiving when he came to power in 1981.

He bought time by creating what appeared to be an open market economy – but one that was essentially a state-protected oligopoly, companies owned by a circle of tycoons and the army, which became a big profit-seeker in exchange for keeping him in power. This narrow elite was suddenly the only beneficiary of the state – and it didn’t produce enough revenue to cover costs.

Mr. Soliman then asks the crucial question: “What happens when the rentier state grows poor and when its revenues dwindle and its deficit climbs?” This is also exactly what was happening in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.

There is only one possible answer: “Government will have little choice but to levy taxes, and at this point society can insist that government listen … and account for how it plans to spend the funds it has collected from the public. In other words, this is when the public can force government to become democratic.”

Indeed. Throughout history, democracy has generally been a product of taxation, and the concomitant demand for representation exists in all societies.

And as Tahrir Square exploded in January, Mr. Mubarak made the situation even worse, promising full-time government jobs and a 15-per-cent raise to half a million temporary contract workers, something Egypt could ill afford.

In the months since the regime fell, the showdown, as it always is in these cases, is between those who would hold their existing client privileges, those who would expand them to include their own group, and those who would try to create a real, non-corrupt, independent economy from the wreckage.

Egypt does not sit on a lake of petroleum like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Libya (or Russia) do, and therefore cannot exist as a rentier state. So its options, like its Warsaw Pact forebears, will likely be democratic and difficult – and Mr. Mubarak’s cloistered elite turned most Egyptians against the idea of a liberal economy.

So it’s not so much a question of whether Islamists or reformers win power, but whether the economically wise branches of both groups are able to join forces and win the day. Brazil, Turkey and Poland were all able to break free from the clientelist debt spiral and build real economies, but only after many difficult years. That, unfortunately, is the best hope for Egypt.

Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Reuters

Original Article

London

Forget economics. This was a political moment, and it will be remembered, possibly for a very long time, as the moment the politicians failed.

Angela Merkel failed: The German Chancellor could have used her country’s nearly unanimous clout to confront the root causes of the euro crisis, which lie in inequalities of trade and a collapse in consumption, but instead chose to pretend it was a matter of overspending by Mediterranean governments, to be solved with future rules. Mario Draghi failed: The European Central Bank chief could have launched a bond-buying, expansionist rescue – in short, acted as if this were the emergency it very much is. But instead he stuck to a suicidally narrow interpretation of his mandate, pretending that inflation, rather than its opposite, is the threat.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

But most of all, David Cameron failed. The British Prime Minister will be applauded by his more isolationist backbenchers for his decision to pull out of Friday’s euro-rescue treaty, making Britain probably alone among the 27 European Union countries in refusing to participate in the pooling of resources and common sacrifice necessary to put the continent’s finances back on track.

His withdrawal is a serious blow to Europe, the world’s largest single economy – making a collapse of investor confidence in the continent far more likely, and forcing the bloc into an imposed Franco-German solution rather than the sort of larger arrangement that Britain could have helped organize, if it had been constructive instead of destructive.

This is not a localized matter: All major economies, including Canada’s, are highly exposed to the euro; a fall could collapse banks in North America, too. This was the worst imaginable moment for nationalist isolation. Yet, that was what we got.

So it’s almost certainly a disaster for Britain. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where, in the wake of a 26-country agreement to create a fiscal and financial regulatory union with one dissenter, Britain doesn’t end up more isolated from Europe.

While Mr. Cameron’s Euro-skeptic MPs argue that Britain should withdraw into a trade-only relationship with Europe along the lines of Norway or Switzerland, they don’t understand: Britain’s trade ties with the continent are built on six decades of common laws, standards and regulations, all of which are now jeopardized. The British exemption could only result in less trade, not more.

The stakes are huge. This is a country, remember, whose annual trade with its 26 EU neighbours is between £140-billion and £185-billion, somewhere between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of all imports and exports. By comparison, it does £33.5-billion in business with the United States (15 per cent), £5.1-billion with China (2.3 per cent) and £3.6-billion with Canada (1.6 per cent).

The crippling of that relationship – the rejection of a country of 60 million by a continent of 500 million – would be a noticeable loss for Europe’s exporters, but a near total one for Britain’s. As every British prime minister learns within days of taking office, almost everything depends on good relations with the European neighbours.

Within Britain, Mr. Cameron will get a warm response: Europe is unpopular with voters, and there’s constant talk of Mr. Cameron’s facing a challenge from his party’s anti-Europe starboard flank. That’s pretty implausible. While many Tory MPs call themselves Euro-skeptics (and who, these days, isn’t somewhat skeptical about the euro?), the caucus of MPs that actually wants Britain to pull out of the EU, the “Better Off Out” group, has only 10 members. Let’s presume there’s a similar number hiding in the closet. In a party with 306 seats, that’s hardly a challenge.

The idea that this was necessary to protect the City of London from European regulations also holds no water. The threats will be worse with Britain outside, as it won’t be able to veto them (and they can still be imposed).

The threat of an emergency financial services tax imposed by the EU was also non-existent: Britain already has such a tax, the only one in Europe (its stamp duty), and it hasn’t prevented the Square Mile from becoming the world’s premier trading destination.

Reports suggest Mr. Cameron had genuinely wanted a 27-country pact but froze at the prospect of facing voters with an agreement that didn’t offer exemptions to Britain. His country has always been the European exception, ever since Margaret Thatcher negotiated lower EU membership fees in 1984. In this case, Mr. Cameron knew full well he was trading a momentary political gain for a long-term loss.

“I think I did the right thing for Britain,” Mr. Cameron told the BBC on Friday, claiming that Britain could take or leave pieces of the EU – a cafeteria common market. No serious observer believed him. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister, certainly didn’t: “Any Euro-skeptic who might be rubbing their hands in glee about the outcome of the summit should be careful for what they wish for.”

What’s saved the Western economies from total collapse in the past three years has been the heroic levels of international co-operation. There’s always been the threat of 1930s-style isolationism. We just never thought it would come from an intelligent free trader such as Mr. Cameron.

Original Article

This is a presentation about peacekeeping operations (PKO) and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) made by Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa during the 40th annual Canada-UK Colloquium at Wilton Park, England. It is referenced in my column on the challenges of humanitarian war.

Three Misconceptions About Peacekeeping and Intervention

Original Article

Wiston House, England

Ten years and seven weeks ago, this paper’s front-page headline read, in banner letters, “Canadians head off to war.” That would become the longest, and possibly the most controversial, military combat operation in Canadian history. On Thursday, with the lowering of the Maple Leaf flag at Kandahar Air Force base, it effectively came to an end: For the first time in more than a decade, Canada is not at war.

Enjoy it while it lasts. This may be peace, but it sure doesn’t feel like a period of lasting calm. It might be better to say that we’re between wars.

Read this column in The Globe and Mail

Also see this slideshow by Roland Paris, one of the Wilton Park presentations that informed this column

For, as we saw in Libya this year, we are sure to be asked again to send soldiers to put a stop to a mass atrocity somewhere, or (more likely) to prevent an atrocity that we believe will occur. This is a new, post-Cold War type of military operation, and we still don’t really know how to decide whether to use it or not, whether we’ll end up helping or causing further harm, how to gauge its success, even when to get out.

I spent Friday at a stately home in southern England with senior politicians, diplomats, scholars and military figures from Canada and Britain, in the fortieth installment of the Canada-UK Colloquium, as they tried to hash out a set of principles for future interventions in troubled countries. The long shadow of Afghanistan’s failure loomed over the day. But so did the comparative sanity, and inarguable brevity, of the NATO war in Libya.

In the 20 years that have passed since the Soviet Union dissolved in December, 1991, we’ve seen foreign militaries intervene in domestic conflicts – as peacekeepers, combat-oriented “peace support” soldiers or outright regime changers – in Namibia, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Liberia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Guatemala, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Liberia, Burundi, the Ivory Coast, and twice in Sudan.

Most of these countries are now better off, more stable and democratic, as a result of the foreign boots. Of course, some of the largest and most expensive examples, notably Iraq and Afghanistan, were failures that made things worse, in Iraq’s case disastrously so. Those are, not coincidentally, the places where outsiders haven’t just lent support to an existing liberation struggle but have started one themselves, and then tried to stick around and build a government and a society.

It’s popular nowadays to say, for understandable reasons, that we should get out of the military-intervention business forever, and stick to blue-helmet United Nations peacekeeping, like we did before 1991. (The Persian Gulf war that year was Canada’s first full-fledged military commitment since Korea in the 1950s.)

I can almost sympathize. But then I remember the horrible years of 1994 and 1995, when more than 500,000 Rwandans were hacked to death in a matter of weeks because peacekeepers weren’t allowed to stop them, and tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and thousands of Serbs and Croats were killed in terrible ways because the blue helmets were obligated to stand by and watch.

The NATO air operation in Bosnia that year marked a turning point, and brought an uneasy but genuine peace. And the one in Kosovo in 1999 marked something new: a NATO campaign to prevent a looming slaughter, and to provoke the ouster of a tyrant. It was too successful: In 2003, its logic would return as caricature in the form of the Iraq war.

The “humanitarian war” became the oxymoron of our age. Canada tried to codify it into international policy with the creation of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, an obligation to intervene to stop atrocities, which prime minister Jean Chrétien had the misfortune of attempting to sell to world leaders shortly after president George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech. Its principles sounded far too much like the Iraq war’s cobbled-together self-justifications.

The R2P doctrine sprung back to life this year, because it was used to make the legal case for the Libya operation. But I doubt it could ever become a universal code: We’ll never intervene in Zimbabwe or Tibet, because we’d have no support from the surrounding countries and zero chance of success. We decided against intervening in Sudan’s Darfur catastrophe, in part because there was a good chance it would make things worse.

I fear that Libya will be seen as a precedent, rather than an exception. Or that Bosnia will be forgotten, and a “humanitarian corridor” to Syria will become another peacekeeping quagmire. But I also fear that another genocidal massacre will be allowed to pass without comment. War is hell, but it’s not the only one.

Original Article

A member of Iran’s Basij plays the René Magritte card at the British embassy, Tehran, November 29, 2011.

Original Article

London

William Hague is a conservative foreign minister. He is an ardent supporter of Israel and a devoted promoter of Britain’s economic interests in the world, especially its petroleum industry.

How does he put those principles into practice? By taking an oblique approach. He has led the way in denouncing Israel for its expansion of illegal settlements beyond the country’s legal pre-1967 borders, describing them as “an obstacle to peace and a threat to a two-state solution.” He blasted Israel’s decision to cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority. He has, in short, tried to make sure that things are right for Israel, not that Israel is always right.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

He has pushed Britain’s economic interests in part by insisting that one of its key planks is cultural diplomacy: When the war in Libya ended, before BP had begun operating there again, he set up a Tripoli office of the British Council, which offers generous arts grants and English-language instruction. He has promoted Britain’s 27 foreign-language public radio and TV networks, including one that has become one of the most-listened-to voices within Iran. His signature act was ensuring that Britain’s foreign aid program, one of the most generous in the world, was spared completely from his government’s budget cuts, and that it continues to support the poorest countries, not those with the most economic ties with Britain. He has been a leader in pushing for a serious global climate-change agreement.

John Baird is a conservative foreign minister. He is an ardent supporter of Israel and a devoted promoter of Canada’s economic interests in the world, especially its petroleum industry.

How does he put those principles into practice? By taking a direct approach. In May, Canada was the only Group of Eight country to block attempts to make Israel stick to its legal pre-1967 borders. “Canada will not accept or stay silent while the Jewish state is attacked for defending its territory and its citizens,” Mr. Baird told the UN General Assembly in September. At October’s UN General Assembly session, he announced that Canada was voting against all motions, whatever their merit, that were critical of Israel. And rather than chiding Israel for cutting off aid to Palestinian entities, Canada cut off its own aid to them. In short, Mr. Baird is making Canada a champion rather than a broker, declaring that Israel is right, even if not all is right for Israel.

He has defended Canada’s business interests equally directly. When it became apparent that Europeans, who are crucial trade partners, see Canada mainly as a place that kills seals and produces a high-pollution form of oil, the response has been to shout back, through every channel, that the seal hunt is okay and that Canada’s oil is “ethical.” Canada has no budget at all for cultural diplomacy at most of its embassies, and no separate program for it; the government is cutting foreign aid by $1.8-billion a year by 2014 and aligned what’s left to Canadian economic interests. Mr. Baird’s only mentions of climate change this year were to pour cold water on the idea of carbon trading, distancing himself from participants like Australia and Britain, and ignoring the issue that caused the United States to postpone the Keystone XL pipeline.

Same principles, different approaches. Which are most likely to succeed?

Without getting directly to the point, let me say that one of the best books I’ve read this year is John Kay’s Obliquity. The veteran Oxford University economist (and Financial Times columnist) carefully examines the pathways that people and organizations follow to success, and finds, over and over, that those who succeed the most are those who take the oblique path. “If you want to go in one direction,” he writes, “the best route may involve going in another.”

The companies that make the largest profits are not the ones that have profit maximization as their main goal, but rather those that try to do something well. The people who have the most wealth are not those who set out to become wealthy, but often those who have avoided money-making opportunities. The people found to be most happy are not those who have pursued happiness, but those who have struggled against challenges.

He found that Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln had the best presidential track records of achieving “high-level objectives,” but not by applying principles directly. Rather, through “pragmatic improvisation in the face of circumstances,” both understood “that to approach their goals too directly would risk failure to achieve them.”

That last line made me think of Canada’s current way in the world. Why would any other country want to go along with Canada? Everyone knows where we’re going, but our direct path is probably not the best way to get there.

Original Article

On Sunday, Nov. 20, after Spain’s national-election votes were counted, the last major patch of red  disappeared from the European map. For the first time in modern history every major capital in the continent, from Lisbon to Helsinki, is now home to a conservative government.

Spain’s national election has been fought at the peak of a monetary crisis that has already tossed Greek prime minister George Papandreou, Portuguese leader Jose Socrates and Irish prime minister Brian Cowen, all of them broadly on the centre-left, out of office.

The crisis has provoked a real-estate crash and soaring unemployment in Spain, where 25 per cent of the population and half of all youth are jobless, and last month forced long-reigning Socialist Party prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to quit early after imposing deep and unpopular spending cuts with little success.

Voters replaced him with Mariano Rajoy, whose conservative Popular Party is promising far deeper cuts. Mr. Rajoy  joined a near-unanimous bloc of rightists across the continent.

The blue-tide reversal has been extraordinary. A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, Europe was a near-solid wall of social-democratic red, with only Ireland, Spain and a handful of Eastern European states held by conservatives. Now the 27-nation European Union has only four smaller members – Cyprus, Slovenia, Austria and Denmark – that are governed from the left.

Never has such political unanimity governed Europe – ironically enough, at a moment when the disappearance of monetary and political unity appears crippling.

Still, not since the early 1990s, when a wide bloc of centre-right parties helped create the euro, has conservatism been the dominant European idea.

Indeed, this time Europe’s conservatives seem to be divided by a common ideology: Frictions between Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron have all but paralyzed economic recovery. This has left some pining for the deep co-operation that existed a few years ago between leftists in Britain and Germany and conservatives in France and Spain.

More surprising, though, is that these disparate countries seem to change governing ideologies in tandem – after all, their elections are mostly fought on strictly national issues. In Spain’s vote, as with most European elections, continent-wide issues such as the euro-zone bailout do not figure at all.

“One of the surprising things that’s happened in the last 20 years or so is a Europe-wise synchronization of parties in power,” says Mark Franklin, a specialist on European elections and parties at the European University Institute in Florence. “It appears as if Europe is becoming a single polity, although we know voters don’t consciously think that way.”

When the European crisis began three years ago, there was an influential school of thought which held that it would produce a natural rush to the political left. After all, voters were furious at banks, finance capital and big corporations; not only that, but they were increasingly unemployed and dependent on government benefits. If the free-market economy had failed them, it seemed logical that they would turn to the parties of the big state.

And since it was mainly conservative parties that had created both the European Union and the euro currency, against the protest of many left-wing parties that still see European integration as a corporate profit-maximizing plot, you might have expected a backlash.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. While there have been huge protests against the centre-left governments of Greece and Spain from even further to the left, and successful “occupy” protests in several capitals, the voters have been overwhelmingly sending their protest votes rightward.

“If there is ever going to be a unified response to a unified situation, it would be the economic crisis … and you’d think that an economic crisis would be tailor-made for the left – but you’re not really seeing that, instead you’re seeing very different national responses,” says Paul Taggart, head of the politics and contemporary European studies department at the University of Sussex.

The blue tide is, in his analysis, more a simple matter of voters tossing out whoever happened to be in office when the crisis arrived – and in most cases, that was a centre-left party.

“The voter response that elects the British Conservatives is not the same as the voter response that elects the German Christian Democrats – the crisis plays out in different ways through different languages in different political systems,” he says.

But there does seem to be some connection between economy and ideology. An analysis this year by The Economist found that during the past two decades, periods of economic growth have tended to produce increases in the number of left-wing governments in power (with a two-year delay), and falling growth, as we’re seeing now, has raised the number of right-wing parties.

It isn’t quite a strong enough explanation to account for the entire continent’s politics. And, indeed, it may be possible that the left-wing parties drove themselves out of office by beating the right at its own game.

After all, these were not the tax-and-spend leftists of earlier decades. The big socialist and social-democratic governments of the 2000s were dominated by parties of fiscal restraint.

Mr. Zapatero is a perfect example: His Socialist government, elected by surprise in the wake of a 2004 Madrid terror attack that voters blamed on the conservatives, ran budget surpluses for most of his eight years in office, made important free-market reforms and oversaw large-scale growth of the private-sector export industry in Spain.

Likewise, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, whose Social Democrats provided the cornerstone of Europe’s red tide, was best known for slashing unemployment and welfare benefits and pensions that had become unaffordable under previous conservative governments. Britain’s Gordon Brown was famous for his fiscal restraint and low government debt.

In contrast, the new European conservatives have picked up a number of ideas from the left. At summits this month, Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel have been almost evangelical in their push for a Europe-wide micro-tax on financial transactions, sometimes known as a Tobin tax – a concept that a few years ago was supported only on the left.

(Mr. Cameron, who joins Canada’s Conservatives in opposing such a tax, attempted to strike a deal on Friday in which he would support a tighter economic and fiscal union among the 17 euro-zone countries in exchange for his continental colleagues dropping the transaction-tax idea).

And, in a final reversal of fate, it will likely be Europe’s true-blue conservative parties who, like it or not, will end up raising taxes, increasing government spending and building even bigger government – because they’ll have little choice if they want to resolve the crisis. In the process, they might reverse a decade of lower taxes and smaller government delivered by leftists.

By the end of next year, the blue wall will likely have some cracks. Mr. Berlusconi’s arch-conservative Italian coalition will likely (though not certainly) be replaced with a chaotic centre-left grouping. Mr. Sarkozy faces an election that may well see him ousted in favour of the Socialist Party, and Ms. Merkel’s German coalition is increasingly weak.

And, importantly, the conservative parties now in office will bear the brunt of the austerity and bailout programs, which will be unpopular with voters: Unless they can stay in office until the next wave of economic growth, they could be punished in the future for their currently popular policies. If the trends of the past 20 years are any guide, it could mark the beginning of a shift back to an all-red map.

Original Article