Doug Saunders

London

The giddy crowds in the streets, suddenly multiplying from hundreds into thousands, ignoring curfews. The sudden sense that the iron regime is tissue-thin. The tank-mounted soldiers wavering between support for the government and the protesters. It feels, in so many ways, like 1989.

But are the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa about to experience what Central and Eastern Europe did in those heated months of ’89 – a fast-escalating domino-fall cascade of regimes and leaders who found themselves stripped of all legitimacy in the face of crowds of indignant citizens?

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

Or could it, for most Arabs, end up like China’s experience of 1989, where a moment of rebellion was met with vicious and total repression? Or will it be one of those years, like 1848 or 1968 in Europe, where mass, region-wide uprisings spur social and political changes without toppling many governments?

Middle Easterners who experienced the democratic revolutions of 1989 say they’re finding the resemblance to this week’s events on the streets of Cairo uncanny. “I covered those [1989 protests] and see so many parallels,” Alma Kadragic, an Abu Dhabi-based journalist, said on Twitter, “except that it’s much faster now due to Twitter and Facebook.”

But history does not repeat itself, the Warsaw Pact states of the late Soviet era are not the same as the two dozen Arab states of 2011, and it is not at all clear that the Arab revolutions, even if successful, will have similar outcomes.

Those who have worked closely with the grassroots movements of the Arab world say that there are striking similarities to the democracy movements of 1989 in the views and organizations of the ordinary people in the street. The difference lies in the regimes, which are neither as homogeneous nor as universally weak as those twilight communist states.

Asef Bayat, a sociologist who documented the grassroots, street-level uprisings of Egypt and Syria in his book Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, said that the crowds forming in Arab capitals this month are strikingly similar to the tiny movements that suddenly snowballed into nationwide uprisings in 1989 – and are far more robust in the Arab world than is usually acknowledged.

“You have a very large group who I’d call the middle-class poor – they have Internet and Facebook and so on, but they don’t have any opportunities or any quality of life under these regimes and their economies, and aren’t getting any benefit. These people aren’t political, but a lot of them all at once thought, ‘If the Tunisians can get rid of their dictator so easily, why can’t I?’ ”

While Arabic citizens are often characterized in the Western media as submissive and placated, there has been a history of spontaneous grassroots movements in recent years. The most visible effects of these uprisings were the Palestinian Intifada of 1987-93 and the Lebanese “Cedar Revolution” that expelled Syrian puppet rulers in 2005, there have been dozens of less-documented uprisings that have indicated the volatility and irreverence of the Arab public.

But the difference, Dr. Bayat said, lies in the regimes: While the popular movements have similar causes and spontaneous tactics, they are facing a wildly different group of Arab leaders united only by their authoritarianism.

“Eastern Europe was a bloc that was very much dependent upon the Soviet Union, which suddenly became open.” Dr. Bayat said. “But this is not so much the case in the Middle East – you have states that are dependent upon the West, but not to the extent that the Eastern European countries depended upon the Soviet Union; and you have some countries that do not at all depend upon the West, like Syria and Libya.”

The two dozen Arab regimes range from pure monarchies with near-totalitarian controls such as Saudi Arabia, to self-described socialist states such as Libya and Syria to places such as Algeria and Lebanon, where more or less authoritarian regimes manipulate a nearly liberal state. Some, such as Tunisia and Libya, are largely secular, whereas the Persian Gulf states tend towards religious law.

So it is not always clear how strong a hold the regimes have on their power, or what sort of a replacement would be popular with the public, although a high degree of literacy and near-total use of cellphones and internet mean that Arab publics are becoming more similar in their aspirations.

The other key difference may lie with the militaries. Mass uprisings do not usually turn into full-scale revolutions until the soldiers begin supporting the protesters rather than fighting them. In Tunisia, this happened very quickly.

Egypt has the largest military in Africa, with more than 450,000 troops, but their pay is low and they have historically seen themselves as defenders of the people. In many Arab states, the soldiers are drawn from the same communities as the young citizens who are protesting – a solidarity that led to the collapse of Europe’s dictatorships in ’89, and this time could determine the difference between liberation and violent crushing.

Original Article

Ottawa

Inside a secure compound at Canadian Security Intelligence Service headquarters this week, I had the rather odd experience of talking to spies about farming.

The spooks at CSIS, like their counterparts in other countries, have recently become obsessed with such loamy topics as marginal crop yields, soil salinity, Indonesian rice futures and dairy-supply bottlenecks. This week, they played host to scores of agrarians, crop economists, agricultural-threat analysts and farm specialists from a dozen countries in an urgent summit on food security, a meeting in which crop-irrigation ratios were treated with the sort of gravity that, a few years ago, would have been reserved for jetliner flight-training facilities in Florida.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

And little wonder. As the intelligence officials listened to analyses of Indian irrigation policies and some rather silly talk about Islamist “agroterrorism threats,” the world outside was blowing up over food.

The uprising inflaming Egypt on Friday began, let us not forget, with crowds marching in Cairo on Tuesday to chants of “Bread and freedom!” The Tunisian revolution began in December as a bread-price protest. Neither event was ultimately about food, but its increasing share of the household budget became a catalyst for larger tensions.

Food prices have spiked this year, far less than they did in 2008, but ominously. This time, weather-driven crop failures caused by the Pacific La Nina current are playing a big part. But the underlying trend is one of insufficient supply: The world is now producing less than enough food when demand is rising.

Unfortunately, too many governments look at this situation of inadequate market supply and apply the label “food security.” This is dangerous: To treat food as a “strategic asset,” as something to be hoarded or kept from export, is to gravely misunderstand the nature of food. An increase in food production, anywhere in the world, increases the supply and lowers the prices everywhere. The challenge is not to provide your own country’s food needs from within; it’s to ensure that everyone in the world is growing plenty of food, so the question of domestic versus imported food is irrelevant.

When food consumers outnumber producers, high prices are dangerous. But a temporary spike in prices, as Nick Cullather suggested in The Globe this week, should have the considerable advantage of attracting large-scale investment in agriculture. And make no mistake: This food crisis is caused by underinvestment.

The world has a huge surplus of farmland that is either unused or underfarmed.

Consider sub-Saharan Africa, which, according to a new study by Harvard’s Calestous Juma and his team of researchers and colleagues, could easily be one of the world’s largest food exporters, producing more food than all Africans consume within a generation. The necessary investments are obvious: Only 4 per cent of African cropland is irrigated. Fertilizers, pesticides and high-quality seeds and machinery are unavailable. Bad roads make food spoil before it gets to market. Another new study, by the World Bank, finds that, in rice farming alone, Africa could outproduce Southeast Asia but for such impediments.

India, with the world’s second-largest supply of arable land, is capable of making up for all the world’s current food shortages. But it falls far short. Just to sustain the food needs of its own people, India’s food supply needs to grow by 4 per cent a year; it’s now growing little more than 1 per cent. There is huge potential: Indian wheat farms, for example, produce less than 3.5 tonnes of wheat a hectare in good years, whereas European and North American farms produce seven tonnes or more. India’s output could at least double with simple, cheap investments, but the barriers are all political.

The potential breadbaskets of Africa, India, South America and the former Soviet countries could bring the world back to a food-surplus position in a few years, with minimal investments. This is a strictly temporary and unnecessary crisis. Countries resist outside investments (or “land grabs,” as they’re falsely called), seeing them as security threats. They view “food self-sufficiency” as a noble goal, when, in fact, it’s destructive.

If you make a farm productive, it makes food cheaper and more plentiful. To make the world peaceful, we need to make bread more plentiful. It’s the stuff of life, not a strategic asset.

Original Article

Budapest

The first sign things had changed were the rectangular plaques that suddenly appeared on the walls of government offices, army barracks and theatres.

Headed “Statement of National Co-operation,” they informed anyone who cared to look that “a constitutional revolution in the voting booths” had occurred in Hungary, ushering in a “new social contract, that of national consolidation” bringing a new future based on “work, home, family, health, and order.”

Viktor Orban had arrived.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail
Read also: How Hungary’s Media Crackdown Turned Europe Against Itself
And: Spectre of intolerance reappears among Eastern Europe’s heroes of 1989 

In Hungary, it is impossible to avoid the forceful political footprint of the conservative Prime Minister. He assumed office last year, with one of the largest majorities in European electoral history going to his Fidesz party (a contraction of “Alliance of Young Democrats”) in what he calls the “two-thirds revolution.” Across Europe, leaders have been reacting with alarm to a man who has used this huge surge of popularity to impose an assertive, intensely nationalistic style of politics.

It marks the latest stage in his startling journey – long-haired, anti-communist libertine in the 1980s; democracy-movement hero in 1989; increasingly conservative leader in the 1990s; and today, a figure likened to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as the most authoritarian-styled elected leader in the 27-nation European Union.

The language on the plaques set the tone for what has unfolded in recent weeks, as Mr. Orban assumed the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union and shocked Europe with his outspoken defence of rigid policies.

Most visible was his media law, which places all Hungarian broadcasters and newspapers under the thumb of a watchdog panel of Fidesz supporters with the power to police newspapers’ pages for “balance” and fine them or withdraw licences. That law led to furious denunciations in the European Parliament last week, and worries that Hungary was leading a Central European turn to authoritarianism.

“The last time he was in power [1998 to 2002], there were things we strongly disagreed with, but it was all within the framework of democracy. Now, it is not,” said Kinga Goncz, a former Socialist cabinet minister and current member of European Parliament who is possibly Hungary’s highest-profile opposition figure.

“The goal this time, in all of this legislation, is stabilizing power – I think that’s the only goal he has. All the steps he’s taken are only useful in terms of extending his influence and power for years.”

Mr. Orban’s Communication Minister, Zoltan Kovacs, said in an interview at the Budapest Parliament that the media law was meant to be a technical matter and that all of its elements could be found in laws of other European nations, such as Germany, which outlaws anti-Semitic language in newspapers.

But when questioned on the motives for imposing the law at such a visible and risky moment, he noted that his party has been angered by the two newspapers loyal to the opposition Socialist Party. Mr. Orban blamed the biases of these papers for his earlier loss of the prime ministership in 2002, after four years in office.

New powers and old grudges

Aside from the media law, Mr. Orban has used his majority – which is large enough to amend the constitution with a single parliamentary vote – to stack even low-level public offices exclusively with Fidesz loyalists.

He also abolished the independent Fiscal Council, which is meant to scrutinize budgets; he confiscated the funds of a private-sector pension system for public employees in order to finance deficit cuts; and, when the Constitutional Court rejected a bill that would have retroactively applied a steep tax to severance pay, he summarily stripped the top court of its power to rule on budget-related legislation.

Most alarming to outsiders, though, has been Mr. Orban’s repeated moves to dredge up the darkest ghosts of Hungary’s past.

In July, days into office, he passed a law to establish an annual National Unity Day every June 4 to mourn the 1920 Treaty of Trianon – the war-reparations act that reduced the size of Hungary’s borders as punishment for the crimes committed by Austria-Hungary and their allies in the First World War.

The bill referred to a “united Hungarian nation” and was recently followed by another bill championed by Mr. Orban, who frequently mentions the “national tragedy” of Trianon, to grant citizenship to any ethnic Hungarians living within adjoining states. While Germany has similar passport laws for Germans in Poland, one would never hear Chancellor Angela Merkel criticizing the Yalta Conference, which similarly reduced Germany’s borders.

Viktor Orban is not a fascist, or an ultraright-wing racist. In fact, his defenders say his huge majority has had the beneficial effect of driving Hungary’s far-right racist Jobbik Party into political irrelevance. But his ham-fisted, nationalistic approach is a type of government that Hungarians say they haven’t witnessed since the post-1956 years of Soviet control. Many find it bending too close to authoritarianism.

“He’s not an extreme-right-wing guy,” says Istvan Hegedis, a Fidesz founder who is now a member of the opposition Socialists. “But, as a populist, he’s playing with views that are not so far from extremism.”

Mr. Hegedis is part of a group of Fidesz founders who preferred the years around 1989 when the party’s leaders all had long hair and tried to forbid anyone over 35 from joining – before Mr. Orban seized the party in 1994 and moved it rightward.

There is a keen debate among them as to whether Mr. Orban has shifted his views sharply over the years, or has simply given a new language and packaging to his beliefs. Certainly, many of his old associates say, Mr. Orban has always been an ardent nationalist, even when he used the liberal rhetoric of freedom from communism to express it.

“I’ve known him for a long time, since university years,” says Andras Racz, a former Fidesz official and unauthorized Orban biographer, “and I always think he’s had the message that it’s not acceptable that our country is just a collection of people – some coherence is needed to make it a people, a coherent nation.”

Rebels turned reactionaries

This type of transition is not unusual among former rebels in countries that escaped communism in 1989, such as Czech President Vaclav Klaus and the late Polish president Lech Kaczynski (along with his identical twin brother, Jaroslaw, Poland’s opposition leader).

Fidesz founders who remain close to Mr. Orban say his authoritarian leanings were always encoded in his street fighter’s instincts.

“He’s the only one who was in the middle of the changes in ‘89, and it’s given him a can-do attitude,” says Istvan Gyarmiti, who now runs the International Centre for Democratic Transition, a Central European think tank.

“He feels that if he could get us out of the Warsaw Pact and kick the Soviet troops out, then he can do absolutely anything. He really does feel that he can change the world – and to do that, he needs to have a stronger state.”

How worried, then, should Europeans be about Viktor Orban?

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Green Party, rose in European Parliament last week to denounce him as “on the path to becoming a European [Hugo] Chavez, a national populist.”

That was a telling jibe, for Mr. Chavez is an authoritarian-leaning elected leader on the extreme left, while Mr. Orban is ostensibly on the right.

But Fidesz has moved further left than his free-market Socialist Party predecessors on several fronts: He has renationalized (or deprivatized) several companies, imposed punitive corporate taxes on foreign multinationals and developed an unorthodox, high-risk fiscal-recovery strategy designed to force the International Monetary Fund out of Hungary’s business – all traditional left-wing planks.

Some American and European publications have gone further, describing Mr. Orban’s politics as a “Putinization of Europe” – a terrible insult to any leader of Hungary, a country that was colonized by Russia for almost half a century.

It is tempting to draw parallels to Vladimir Putin’s style, but not quite fair: The Fidesz media law has not yet been used to censor anyone, and there haven’t been violent threats to dissenters.

It may be better to liken him, as several of his friends do, to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has the same drive to control the media and the tools of re-election, and has manipulated high courts to achieve political goals (though Mr. Orban does not appear to share his Italian counterpart’s more private vices). The two leaders speak regularly, Mr. Orban’s friends say.

“I don’t think he’s economically prepared or explicitly political at all,” says Mr. Racz, his biographer. “He is a man driven by his values, and these include using a strong nation to maintain his hold on power. That’s really all there is to him.”

Original Article

London

Half a decade ago, his Sunday tabloid routinely printed front-page headlines that would deeply embarrass actors, musicians, politicians and members of the Royal Family by revealing the most intimate details of their private lives, obtained by having reporters break into the voicemail messages on the celebrities’ cellphones.

Now, in an apparent reversal of fortunes, that legacy has caught up with Andy Coulson, who announced his resignation Friday as chief media aide and right-hand man to British Prime Minister David Cameron after eight months on the job, acknowledging that investigations into the phone-tapping scandal had come too close to him.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail

The scandal, which dated back to his time as editor of the News of the World, a large-circulation tabloid owned by Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch, has cast a shadow over Mr. Cameron’s Liberal-Conservative coalition government from the beginning.

In 2007, it cost Mr. Coulson his job, when the scandal led to his resignation from the paper, but he continues to deny that he had any knowledge of the hundreds of incidents of cellphone hacking that took place under his watch and led to the paper’s most lurid and prominent scoops.

The big stories seemed, for a number of years, to have come straight from God’s mouth into the News of the World’s ear: A banner headline in 2006 reading “Chelsy Tears a Strip off Harry” revealed that Prince William had left a voicemail message on Prince Harry’s cellphone imitating his then-girlfriend Chelsy Davy berating him for having visited a lap-dancing club.

On Friday, as judicial inquiries into those headlines moved closer to his own former office, he abruptly resigned.

“Unfortunately, continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110 per cent needed in this role,” he said in a statement yesterday afternoon. “I stand by what I’ve said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it’s time to move on.”

A court hearing into the phone-hacking scandal has recently shattered Mr. Coulson’s claim that only a rogue Royal Family reporter and a private investigator used by the paper were aware of the password-bypassing technique widely used at the paper. While he has not been named in testimony, a number of reporters and editors, some of whom have told the press that Mr. Coulson directly ordered them to hack into cellphones, are due to take the stand in coming days.

But in a perfect illustration of the dark arts he had apparently mastered, Mr. Coulson waited to read the resignation statement, which friends said had been drafted two days earlier, until Friday afternoon when Britain’s 24-hour news channels were filled with live images of former prime minister Tony Blair giving testimony to the Chilcot inquiry into the decision to invade Iraq.

That tactic only partially worked, as most broadcasters interrupted their coverage of the Iraq inquiry to devote themselves to Mr. Coulson’s drama.

While Mr. Cameron was quick to issue a statement supporting Mr. Coulson Friday, arguing that his ex-aide “has been punished twice for the same offence,” the tabloid scandal has tainted his government with two less than desirable associations.

The first, evident in yesterday’s TV juxtapositions, is with Mr. Blair’s Labour government. While Mr. Cameron had campaigned to draw a line under the spin-oriented, media-driven approach to high office that exemplified Mr. Blair’s 10-year prime ministership – and has so far displayed a more mellow and disengaged approach to front-page headlines – the forceful tabloid presence of Mr. Coulson seemed a reminder of that era.

Indeed, Mr. Coulson had modelled his office after Alastair Campbell, the pugnacious press aide to Mr. Blair during the 1990s, who effectively circumvented the cabinet to run a “sofa government” from Mr. Blair’s office. That technique, while annoying to ministers, has proven popular with leaders from both parties, and has been key to Mr. Cameron’s strategy.

Friday night Mr. Campbell, writing on his blog, suggested that Mr. Coulson had overstepped the bounds of credibility.

“The News of the World story was just too toxic,” he wrote. “I have said before that one of the reasons it keeps rumbling along is that no journalist I know can understand how an editor wouldn’t know where big stories came from.”

The second dangerous association is with Rupert Murdoch, who is making a controversial bid to buy total control of the British Sky Broadcasting enterprise, which controls the country’s most-watched TV networks – a move that would give him a profound media oligarchy, as he already owns the Times and the Sun as well as the News of the World.

Mr. Cameron and his ministers will have to decide on the merits of that deal in weeks. Having a former high-profile Murdoch executive at the top of the Downing Street team does not help his image of impartiality; nor do reminders of the most sensational and ethnically questionable practices of Mr. Murdoch’s journalism.

There were few outside of 10 Downing St. who seemed to lament Mr. Coulson’s departure Friday night. Even loyal Conservatives and members of Mr. Cameron’s coalition cabinet had come to resent the press aide’s control over all messages coming from the government and his role in limiting access to Mr. Cameron to a small handful of core advisers.

“I think there was a real problem in the way in which Andy Coulson was controlling the Downing Street communications operation,” Tim Montgomerie, editor of the blog ConservativeHome, told the Financial Times. “He was talking to hardly anybody. Now Cameron has the chance to put in place people who will rebuild relations with the centre-right press, the grassroots of the party and his backbench.”

Original Article

London

It was hard to avoid the feeling, watching as Chinese President Hu Jintao stood beside his American counterpart at the White House on Wednesday and used the occasion to engage in the subtlest form of rhetorical sparring, that the leaders of the world’s two largest national economies are becoming equals.

Not only are the two countries becoming more similar in their international ambitions, it appears, but their citizens are drawing closer as Americans and many other Westerners watch their incomes stagnate while their Chinese neighbours burst forth into full-fledged consumerdom.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

A number of observers are beginning to call this a “great convergence,” a reversal of the “great divergence” that carried China and the West from positions of near-equal prosperity 250 years ago to extremes of wealth and poverty in the late 20th century.

Indeed, since 1950, the Chinese have seen their average incomes grow more than 10 times faster than those of U.S. citizens. In 1980, the purchasing power of the average Chinese citizen’s income was the equivalent of $525 per year; it now stands somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000. Over the same period, productivity per Chinese worker rose from 3 per cent of U.S. levels to 19 per cent. And the convergence seems to be speeding up: During the past five years, as the U.S. economy has grown only 5 per cent, China’s has grown by 70 per cent.

The consequences of such a shift to pan-Pacific equality would be vast. No longer would our economy be based on dirt-cheap goods from China, our debt provided by a huge Asian country struggling to dispose of enormous currency surpluses. Life would be more expensive, but also vastly better for the world’s majority. And conflicts between equals are less likely.

But before we get too excited by this looming prospect, let’s look hard at the realities behind this supposed convergence. Comparisons between countries are not as simple as we might think.

Luckily, we have a wonderful new book, The Haves and the Have-Nots, by economist Branko Milanovic, who has made international inequality his life’s work. He shows, with devastating logic, just how far we still have to go.

When the world returned to its normal state of globalization after the angry decades of the 20th century, the result was enormous growth almost everywhere. China, starting in the 1980s, made its people wealthy enough to render starvation-level poverty non-existent.

But surprising economic circumstances have caused wealthy countries to grow at an even greater rate, Mr. Milanovic notes. The advantage has stayed with the well-off.

“If the U.S. GDP per capita grows by 1 per cent, India’s will need to grow by 17 per cent, an almost impossible rate, and China’s by 8.6 per cent, just to keep absolute income differences from rising,” he observes. “As the saying goes, you have to run very, very fast just to stay in the same place. It is therefore not surprising that despite China’s (and India’s) remarkable success, the absolute income differences between the rich and poor countries have widened.”

And they have: Even as the Chinese worker has gone from $525 per year to $5,000 in two decades, the average American worker has gone from $25,000 to $43,200 – meaning that the income gap has widened from about $25,000 to $38,000, and, he notes, “of course so has the absolute gap in welfare between the average American and the average Chinese.”

The economic crisis, which continues in the United States but occupied only a few months of 2008 in China, might help, but it will still take a very long time before the most prosperous Chinese worker can touch the purchasing power of the worst-off American.

You may think of the United States as a place of extremes of wealth and poverty, and it is. Nevertheless, at the moment, the very poorest people in America, the 5 per cent with the lowest incomes, have better lives and more purchasing power than the top 5 per cent of income earners in India and the top 10 per cent in China.

The consequences are important: First, the forces of national inequality that drive large numbers of people to emigrate will certainly be with us for decades longer.

Second, the old theories of social class should be replaced: Today, 80 per cent of income difference is caused by geographical location, and only 20 per cent by income category; those geographic barriers may be harder to overcome than the old class barriers of the 19th century were. “We still have a long way to go,” Mr. Hu said on Thursday. It may be longer than he thinks.

Original Article

The violent events that reached a climax in Tunis on Friday aren’t just the first full-fledged popular revolution the world has seen in some time - they’re a sudden tear in the fabric of the Arab world, an irreparable rupture in the slick logic that has held two dozen countries in a retarded limbo of half-development for generations.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

To most outside observers, the Tunisian uprising seemed to appear from nowhere: Seemingly minor “food-price protests,” which began four weeks ago in the city of Sidi Bouzid with the self-immolation of a young man and spent December and early January in bottom-of-the-page news briefs, suddenly exploded into a mob takeover of the streets of the capital on Friday, leading long-time President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali - within a period of hours - to sack the government, call an election and then flee the country on his private jet, leaving the Prime Minister in control of a caretaker regime.

The people - clearly ordinary citizens, not bearded Islamists or foreign-funded elites - won the day, and their country. It’s fair to say the Arab world will never be quite the same.

Tunisia’s popular uprising is all the more surprising because it wasn’t part of a narrative that had been given a name and assigned a colour months in advance. To most people outside Tunisia, distracted by events in the United States and elsewhere, this came out of nowhere, in a country too often described as a “benign dictatorship,” one of those places we happily visit on package vacations because the torture chambers are kept well out of sight.

But not only Westerners were taken by surprise. Indeed, to most Arabs outside of Tunisia, it seemed the last likely place for an anti-authoritarian uprising.

Mr. Ben Ali, who has ruled the country since 1987, has been not so much a paternal figure as an avuncular one, showering gifts of economic modernization, foreign investment, education and technology, so the repression of politics, media and urban communities appeared to be secondary.

Indeed, few Arabs, who heard a lot about the protests in their news media, believed they had much to do with food-price inflation or joblessness. After all, Tunisia’s unemployment rate, at 13 per cent, is half that of some Arab countries to the east and south; its citizens have greater purchasing power than those of Bahrain or Libya; and they have the highest education rates in the Arab world, with more access to cellphones and the Internet than residents of Lebanon, Jordan or Syria.

“If the citizens of Tunis are dissatisfied,” the director of Dubai-based Al Arabiya television, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, marvelled in late December, “what can we say about the citizens of other Arab nations that are suffering from an even worse situation and reality?”

Indeed, what can we say? In the past, we’ve said one of two things: First, that this form of leadership is part of Arabic culture and tradition and is, therefore, broadly accepted by Arabs in ways it wouldn’t be by anyone else. Second, that the democratic option would inevitably lead to rule by radical Islamists, and that the besuited fellows whose pictures adorn the wall of every room are the alternative.

These two myths — neither of which holds up to close examination — have led the West to provide backing, legitimacy and investment to Arab dictators for decades, and to avoid supporting democratic opposition groups the way it did in places such as Eastern Europe. While U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an impressive speech in Doha on Thursday calling for region-wide reform, France, among other countries, continued to support the Ben Ali regime as late as Friday night.

What are the results of these twin myths? We have supported some of the worst regimes on Earth. The Arab states, despite a wealth of resources, have seen an economic growth rate of 0.5 per cent a year between 1980 and 2004 (and little better since then), according to the United Nations Development Program, placing them at the bottom of the world’s growth list; more than a fifth of their citizens live in extreme poverty, making less than $2 a day; and there are vast, intergenerational levels of unemployment.

Is it any wonder, then, that Arab citizens stopped believing the myths? Whatever the outcome, it will no longer be possible to say of those oppressed citizens, whether you’re an Arab ruler or a foreign observer, that “this is simply their nature.”

Original Article

For Europe’s last old-style dictator, this has become the week when the walls close in, as neighbouring democracies move to deprive his regime of travel, money, skilled citizens and – perhaps most galling – hockey.

Alexander Lukashenko, in his 17th year as President of Belarus, received sharp rebukes and outright threats on Thursday from the leaders of the European Union, the United States and a number of European democracies, all of them outraged by a December election in which at least seven opposition presidential candidates were severely beaten or imprisoned.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail

The European Parliament Thursday called for the near-complete isolation of Belarus through restrictions on travel of leaders, the freezing of government assets, bans on investment and cross-border trade, freezing of foreign aid and, perhaps most alarming for a hockey-loving nation, the stripping of Belarus’s right to host the 2014 world hockey championship, which the country has been planning for years.

“Alexander Lukashenko’s government lacks democratic legitimacy,” said Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament, as the European Union discussed a package of sanctions that could be imposed as early as next week.

Even more creative is Poland’s decision to punish its neighbour Belarus by removing all visa requirements for Belarussian citizens – but not leaders – and allowing free movement across the border, which had previously been heavily policed.

“This is a very clever way to bring about change, because it essentially means that the country will quickly lose its most skilled and talented citizens, but the only way to stop it will be for Lukashenko to close the border himself, from within, which would make him look even more authoritarian to citizens. It puts him in a position where he may have to back off,” Arkady Moshes, a Belarus specialist with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said in an interview yesterday.

While Belarus has long alarmed Europeans both for its largely unreformed Soviet-style government and for feuds with Russia that can cause much of the continent’s gas supply to be cut off, the latest escalation of political violence and repression had caused much deeper alarm.

The election and its aftermath were met with a campaign of arrests and harassment by the Belarus spy agency, still known as the KGB.

Europeans were horrified to read the story of three-year-old Danil Sannikov, who is set to be sent to an orphanage after both his parents, an opposition presidential candidate and a journalist, were jailed by the KGB after the election.

The EU and the United States Thursday pressed Mr. Lukashenko to release the approximately 700 political prisoners who were rounded up on election night.

While there was an unusually concerted effort to condemn Mr. Lukashenko and his regime in Europe and Washington this week, officials and activists are still divided on how to approach the problem of Belarus.

The financing and organization of opposition movements, known as democracy support, has ceased to be a popular strategy among many European governments, although the European Parliament Thursday vowed to increase funding to democracy think tanks and organizations in Minsk.

But there is a growing realization that punishment and isolation of the country could be both counterproductive and inhumane. Mr. Lukashenko has used Belarus’s isolated status as a point of national pride in the past, portraying his country as a garrison state facing a hostile Russia on one side and an uncaring EU on the other.

So there are efforts, including Poland’s visa-free travel regime, to help the Belarussian people (and to encourage their flight) in ways that do not support the regime.

Analysts say that Mr. Lukashenko, who in the past could turn to Russian oil and gas as his key source of financing and support, is increasingly dependent on Europe. He is in the midst of a bitter feud with Russia over Belarus’s right to take cut-price oil and gas for its own use in exchange for using its pipelines to ship much of Russia’s output into Poland and Germany.

The feud seemed to end in an agreement last week, but the oil is still not fully flowing. Russia is developing new pipeline routes to Europe that will bypass Belarus and Ukraine, and there is no sign of peaceful relations returning between the two Slavic countries.

“The economic situation of Belarus is bad – the regime is facing a very serious crisis so therefore it is interested in the sort of investments that can only come form the European Union and the West,” Mr. Moshes said. “I suspect that this is a serious enough threat to Lukashenko that he will have to find a way to back down and compromise.”

Original Article

London

You could tell as soon as the plane landed in Madrid last weekend that China has become the most important country in Europe. Very few foreign heads of state have attracted this kind of wall-to-wall attention and exercised such power over governments during their visits to Europe as Li Keqiang did during his three-country dealmaking sweep across the continent this week. Read full article, with interactive graphics, at The Globe and Mail

But Mr. Li, 55, is not a head of state: He is China’s vice-premier, or third-in-command, and this visit was one of half a dozen by senior Chinese leaders over the past year (he will be visiting the United States next week). That did not prevent him, in a few days, from transforming Europe’s economic picture to an extent that no other foreign figure has been able to do. China, in short, has become Europe’s rescuer. After international bond markets and Europe’s banks have priced the debt of Europe’s periphery countries out of reach, China is eager to park its money there with little concern for risk. With its vast currency reserves, which topped $2.85-trillion this week, and insatiable appetite for places to put that money, China is the one country that can pull the continent out of its economic crisis. That reserve is three times the size of Europe’s entire bailout fund for troubled economies and banks. By buying $7.5-billion in troubled Spanish bonds within hours after Mr. Li arrived there this weekend, China may have staved off a Spanish debt crisis (though several economies, including Spain’s, are still in deep trouble). A reported purchase of at least $5-billion in Portuguese debt may have bought Lisbon a few more days before it needs a bailout.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg: The Wall Street Journal estimated last week that China now holds almost 10 per cent of all national debt in the euro zone, or about $900-billion worth.] And, as premier Wen Jiabao pledged in Greece last year, China seems determined to buy enough European debt to return the continent to economic growth. But it is a reciporical relationship: Europe now matters to China more than any other place in the world. The European Union, with 400 million consumers and the largest economy in the world, is China’s largest trading partner, with close to $500-billion changing hands last year, most of it in Chinese exports to Europe. Because of this, China often appears even more interested in restoring economic growth to EU states than those states do themselves. In exchange for allowing the continent to postpone an economic collapse, though, China expects a price. The EU has built its success on a formula of open, unrestricted trade among its 27 member states, and steep tariff and legal walls preventing most outsiders from entering that market. China, in bailing out Europe, is asking for its goods to be allowed in without barriers — and for Europe to start selling technology, automobiles and most significantly military technology and weapons without restrictions to China. “We hope that the EU will relax restrictions on high-tech exports to China … and develop trade relations that are balanced and sustainable,” Mr. Li wrote in an Op-Ed titled “China will be more open to the world” that was published Wednesday in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. China is asking Europe to loosen or eliminate its embargo, dating back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, on providing China with arms or other military equipment. After investing heavily in Europe, the Chinese seem to have won a warm response to this overture. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign minister, released a policy paper calling the arms embargo “a major impediment for developing stronger EU-China cooperation on foreign policy and security measures.” This stance has angered the United States, whose diplomats worry that Europe will arm a fast-militarizing China, but the Europeans may have little choice but to accept a new relationship with the country that is keeping their banks from collapsing. Back in Beijing, the huge investment in Europe serves a triple purpose for China: It helps build political and economic influence in Europe; it provides leverage for China to open consumer markets in tariff-protected Europe, and it allows China to diversify its currency holdings, which are currently dollar-denominated but will become much more euro-heavy as a result of these deals. China’s financial rescue tour: BRITAIN

On Monday in Edinburgh, Chinese vice-Premier Keqiang Li announced that PetroChina, the country’s largest petroleum producer, would buy a 50 per cent share in Scotland’s largest refinery, a deal the Scottish government said would add 2,000 jobs — part of a larger move to expand China’s refining into Europe. That was part of $4-billion in business deals signed in Britain, involving green-energy exports, oil exploration in the South China Sea and alcoholic-beverage exports. At the centre was Prime Minister, David Cameron, who visited China in November and has pledged to open up economic relations. Mr. Li said in a speech there that London and Beijing should “deepen economic and trade co-operation” and Britain should lift its restrictions on high-tech (and military) exports to China. SPAIN After landing in Madrid last Wednesday, Mr. Li made his boldest gesture: Purchasing $7.9-billion in Spanish debt, a move that may have reassured markets amid a deep crisis, declaring that China “has confidence and great interest in the Spanish market.” China certainly spun it that way, with the People’s Daily boasting: “It is support that contrasts with the drastic demands for structural reform by the European Union in exchange for EU support. China has given Spain the support that it didn’t receive from the EU.” In exchange, Spain signed $7.1-billion in business deals with China, including one that paired China’s and Spain’s largest oil company in a project to explore for oil off Brazil’s coast. PORTUGAL Portugal, the most troubled European country at the moment, announced this week that it had made a “private placement” of debt, reported by the Portuguese press to be $5.16 billion in bonds purchased by China. If so, it was likely a far larger, and more unconditional, deal than markets were wiling to make on Portuguese debt. Portugal remains in trouble and most observers expect a bailout. GERMANY In a warmhearted visit to Germany in which he lobbied politicians aggressively, Mr. Li signed deals totalling $6.2-billion with carmakers Daimler and Volkswagen to import passenger cars to China, which has become the fastest-growing biggest market for German cars. Germany is experiencing the strongest economy it has experienced in 20 years, buoyed by large-scale exports to the Chinese market. Germany sold $140-billion in goods and services to China last year, a third of the EU total. Mr. Li held intensive meetings with chancellor Angela Merkel to expand trade between China and Germany, which makes up 30 per cent of all trade with the 27-nation EU. But there were strong suggestions that China is asking for more. Mr. Li told Germans that their country should make it easier for Chinese companies to set up branch plants in Germany. And German executives complained about what the Chinese expect in return for investment. Jürgen Hambrecht, CEO of giant manufacturer BASF, told the weekly Der Spiegel that there is a “forced disclosure of know-how in exchange for investment decisions” in these deals. GREECE During a visit to Greece in October, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to buy unlimited amounts of Greek bonds in order to rescue Europe’s hardest-hit country from a debt crisis that still is in risk of default. This week Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou told reporters that talks are “progressing” toward a massive Chinese bond purchase. China is reportedly asking for deeper access to the Greek shipping industry — in which it already has large investments — and consumer markets. FRANCE In the largest round of European dealmaking, Chinese president Hu Jingao signed $20bn-worth of contracts in November, including a deal to provide 102 Airbus jets to Chinese firms, $3.5-billion worth of uranium provided by the French nuclear firm Areva (who will also build a processing plant). BRUSSELS Mr. Li made no secret of China’s goals in investing scores of billions in bailing out Europe’s troubled counties: He wants Europe to end its barriers to Chinese imports, and even more importantly he wants Europe to end its embargo on exports of European military technology and weapons to China, a ban that dates to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Inside Brussels, some studies, and internal statements by EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton, have suggested that Europe’s bureaucracy wants to do away with the embargo. But it will take more than bond purchases and state visits to make that happen: Some countries, like Britain and Germany, are adamantly opposed to weakening the military embargo, and the United States is furious at the idea. But there was a sense, across Europe, that China has bought itself a set of favours that will, sooner or later, have to be repaid. “Portugal hasn’t gone bankrupt yet because China left five billion there last December,” the Spanish newspaper ABC editorialized this week. “One day they will call in all the favours - and more - at the same time, but right now it’s not a good time to be pedantic. They have a democracy deficit and we have our budget deficit. Let’s leave it at that.”

In this really good interview with Allan Gregg, we discuss the core ideas behind Arrival City and their implications in policy, politics and economics.

Original Article

The potential for a European monetary and political collapse is real, but it’s hard to imagine how it might unfold. In this panel discussion with three economists on Steve Paikin’s The Agenda, I discuss the realities and myths of the European crisis.

Original Article

A feature interview with Steve Paikin of The Agenda about Arrival City: The Final Migration And Our Next World.

Original Article

London

While the western and northern quarters of the world were enjoying their debt-fuelled winter holidays, a set of transactions took place to the east and south that simply could not have been imagined a few years ago.

Brazil saw the swearing-in of a new president, Dilma Rousseff, who is best known for being a former guerrilla rebel against Brazil’s military dictatorship. That was all in the past – a time when the politics and economics of Brazil, and most non-wealthy countries, were entirely defined by relations with the great former colonial powers to the north and west.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

In those days, countries like Brazil had a choice: They either sold raw materials and cheap goods at low cost to the Yankees and Europeans and played by their rules, or resisted them with closed borders, Kalashnikovs and command economies.

This was 2011, though, not 1981, so Ms. Rousseff had no need for such a choice. After her inauguration, she immediately set to work boosting export investments in value-added industries and cutting government spending to keep the Brazilian currency from inflating.

She also, tellingly, authorized a deal in which the huge Chinese company State Grid purchased seven of Brazil’s electrical-transmission utilities for $1-billion, essentially putting the country’s electrical-distribution grid under Chinese ownership, even though her government had weeks earlier placed import tariffs on Chinese toys during the Christmas season in order to avoid hurting her country’s trade surplus. In the poor half of the world, trade relations are not a matter of simple tit-for-tat retaliations.

While that was taking place, Chinese Vice-Premier Li Keqiang made a huge deal during one of his extremely frequent trips to Europe, in which China Petrochemical Corp. and Spanish oil giant Repsol spent $7.1-billion in Chinese trade-surplus funds launching an oil-exploration venture off the Brazilian coast. That worked so well that the Chinese-led group will spend tens of billions more exploring in Central Asia and Africa.

What these deals have in common is that they involve “developing” countries striking deals, and entering political arrangements, that have nothing to do with either supplying the Western world with cheap goods and raw materials, asking wealthy neighbours for investment and support, or resisting economic and political overtures from the West. Until very, very recently, those sorts of transactions dominated the world.

I believe we are witnessing the end of the post-colonial era in politics and economics. In China, Brazil and a dozen other countries, the type of thinking known as “post-colonial” – defined as a stark choice between angry resistance or humiliating subservience – has simply ceased to matter in political and business relations.

The post-colonial era began in earnest in the years after the Second World War, when Britain, France and the United States ceased to be formal colonizers, allowing southern and eastern countries to have their own governments (in places like Brazil, it had begun decades earlier). The end of the Cold War and the Soviet empire kicked it into high gear.

Post-colonial governments had responded to the external, commercial and globalized nature of their erstwhile colonial rulers very often by becoming nationalist, closed to trade and investment. Sometimes they were opposed to capitalism itself – witness the waves of Marxist and Maoist regimes that swept across Africa and South America, without Soviet prodding, during the postwar decades. Or they were dictatorial and violent and co-operative with the industries of their former empires.

While post-colonialism clings on in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe and a handful of other places, it has vanished from most of the world with amazing speed.

Consider two other developments in China these past couple of weeks.

First: On New Year’s Day, Beijing raised its minimum wage, to be followed by provinces across China, by a startling 20 per cent, to $173 per month, making it higher than Bulgaria’s. This move wasn’t aimed at the workers in the Pearl and Yangtze deltas, who make goods for export to the West – they already earn more than that – but to those in inland cities and villages, who make things for internal markets. In essence, it is the cornerstone of a move to turn Chinese workers into consumers and buyers of Chinese goods, ending the country’s yin-yang relationship with the West.

Second: Over Christmas, the United States was amazed to discover that China had fielded a fleet of short-range ballistic missiles that allow it to strike aircraft carriers throughout the region. This is not a Cold War development aimed at the U.S., but one designed to thwart any regional challengers.

Still, American generals reacted with alarm – not because they felt threatened with attack, but because they had suddenly discovered that they, like their country’s banks and corporations and consumers, have become irrelevant.

Original Article

For radio listeners in Hungary, this has been the week of the disappearing personalities. Over and over, well-known on-air figures have suddenly gone silent, usually followed by a few minutes of official music and then their complete disappearance from the airwaves.

“They just tell us to get out of the studio and not come back,” says journalist Sandor Jaszberenyi. On Tuesday, he went on the air for an interview, asked for a moment’s silence in protest against Hungary’s new censorship law, then was banished from the airwaves, never to be mentioned again.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail

Read also my report from Budapest on the turn to intolerance within the Hungarian right

He was appearing on a generally pro-government talk show whose long-serving host had suddenly disappeared over the weekend in a nearly identical incident. Two other radio personalities have also been banished – officially suspended from their on-air jobs and removed from broadcast – in similar circumstances, all without mention in any of the national media.

They are the latest victims of Hungary’s new media law, introduced this month by conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose right-wing Fidesz Party won an enormous two-thirds majority in last year’s elections, in an aggressive move to exert government control over the country’s newspapers, broadcast outlets and web sites with a law that places them all under government supervision and monitoring.

This return to the bad old days of state-regulated media gained attention across Europe Thursday when Mr. Orban took over the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union. French and German officials denounced the new censorship regime as contravening the spirit of Europe and a number of officials suggested in statements that Hungary ought to be denied the presidency because of its censorship.

“The question arises as to whether such a country deserves to lead the EU,” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said, arguing that Hungary be denied the presidency. “If we don’t do anything, it will be very difficult to talk to China or Iran about human rights.”

The Hungarian media law creates a five-person media council, comprised entirely of Fidesz supporters given nine-year appointments, who have the power to judge stations on the basis of “balanced coverage” and morality – neither of which are defined in the law – impose fines of up to $1-million and cancel the licences of newspapers and stations that are deemed unacceptable.

The media law and the angry reaction from Europe seemed to open up old schisms dividing the 27-nation bloc, reminding some members of the authoritarian regimes the EU had been set up to prevent, and others of the increasing polarization between wealthy states such as France and Germany and debt-addled economic victims such as Hungary.

Mr. Orban, in a furious statement to reporters on Thursday, denounced the Western European countries for hypocrisy, arguing that his law differs little from similar legislation in France, which has government-appointed editors of some outlets and Germany, which has laws prohibiting anti-Semitic journalism.

He angrily suggested that there was a Western campaign against former communist countries, which are having a high-profile year with Hungary holding the EU presidency until June and then Poland for the six months afterwards.

But journalists in Hungary say the new media law has coincided with a harsh treatment of the media: Outlets that are not owned or controlled by Fidesz have been denied any access to the government, and officials at public broadcasters have been replaced with Fidesz loyalists.

“This is complete nonsense, this law has nothing to do with racism or anti-Semitism or defending small children,” said Peter Nemeth, editor of the centre-left opposition newspaper Nepszava (“People’s Voice”), which published a communist-era symbol on its front page Monday to protest against the law. “Its only message is to threaten the actors in the Hungarian media who are not owned or controlled by Fidesz.”

Mr. Orban’s party and its senior members are the owners of two newspapers and a TV network, all of which have been supportive of the new legislation. His party has long held a grudge against the independent and public-broadcasting media of Hungary, which he blamed for his party’s narrow defeat in the 2002 elections, claiming they had a bias against right-wing parties.

While Mr. Orban insisted that the law would not be abused and would help protect minority groups from extremism, there were alarming signs this week that its goals were ideological. On Thursday the ultra-right-wing party Jobbik, whose members are closely associated with the fascist Hungarian Guard and given to anti-Semitic statements, held a protest outside the national broadcaster arguing that, as a minority group, it was underrepresented in the media.

European leaders have expressed alarm at the way Mr. Orban and his Fidesz party have used their huge majority not just to tame the media but to cement their hold on power. Late last year his government passed bills to redraw municipal boundaries to give Fidesz a 90 per cent election victory, to change the way judges are appointed, and to allow pension funds to be nationalized and seized by the government for debt reduction. Hungary’s constitution requires a three-quarters majority vote for such serious legislation, but its authors did not anticipate a party controlling such a large swathe of parliament.

“Legally, there’s nobody stopping him — the only limits are his imagination and some moral conviction that we’re simply not seeing these days,” said Gábor Horváth, editor of the independent daily Népszabadság (“People’s Freedom”). “It is a type of politics we have not seen in 20 years, not since communism ended.”

Original Article