Doug Saunders

London

Many of us awoke this morning to learn that the world’s seven billionth citizen had supposedly been born. Or, rather, three seven-billionth babies: Because of competition among UN agencies and charities to mark this world-population milestone, we wound up with a Baby Seven Billion in the Philippines, another in India and a third in Russia.

As if the world’s odometer had turned over and displayed a long row of zeroes, these births have elicited a storm of analysis, doomsaying, counter-doomsaying and debate over the magnitude of population growth. Such a noise has not been made since the birth of Baby Six Billion (Adnan Nevic of Bosnia, in 1999) or Baby Five Billion (Matej Gaspar of Croatia, in 1987).

Read post in The Globe and Mail

Read also: Why Population Growth Isn’t the Problem We Think it Is

But did the human race really fructify itself past the seven-billion mark on Halloween morning? Well, no. Or rather, maybe. Which is to say: We have no idea.

It could, in fact, have happened a year ago. Or it could happen in 2013. Or any time in between: We really have no idea how many people are born in any country, never mind the whole world, in any given year or day; we also have little idea how many people have died, which has as much effect on population.

The United Nations Population Division, the agency that keeps track of the number of humans, decided earlier this year to declare Oct. 31, 2011 Seven Billion Day, to draw attention to their latest World Population Prospects report, which estimates and predicts world population growth.

Its officials are happy to admit that the day was completely arbitrary: “The 31st October is a symbolic date, which is based on interpolated data from the original 5-year period estimates prepared by the Population Division,” they write.

The problem is that those estimates are mainly based on the national census data of 141 countries that produce them, and “official estimates” — that is, informed guesses — for another 89. And the countries with the fastest population growth and therefore the most profound effect on the pace of change are by definition very poor countries (Afghanistan and Somaliahave among the fastest-growing populations) and therefore have the worst statistics. Many of them have not conducted a census in 10, 15 or sometimes 20 years, and a few never really have at all.

So the UN officials say publicly that their figures could be off by a margin of six months in either direction if those statistics are assumed to have a margin of error of 1 per cent.

Which sounds fine, until you realize that they don’t even know what the margin of error is — and 1 per cent is probably way too low. Britain’s last census was adjusted by more than 1 per cent, and it’s famed for being one of the world’s most advanced. India’s has been adjusted by margins of several percentage points.

So many professional population-watchers assume that the margin of error is more like two years in either direction. Several institutions, including the US Census Bureau, believe that the seven billion mark will be crossed in 2012.

A group of scholars at the Vienna Institute of Demography published a research paper this year showing that the 7-billion mark is statistically more likely to be crossed late in 2012, though there is also a high likelihood that it could be crossed in 2013 or 2014.

Most informed observers feel that the proper date is probably later rather than earlier, because one thing we do know is that population growth rates are falling fast in almost every country.

In fact, it could well be that Baby Eight Billion, wherever he or she (or they) appear, will be the last such mini-celebrity.

The world’s population will likely level out and start dropping at some point this century – and depending on education, birth control knowledge and urbanization (the three biggest factors in growth rates), it could plateau at a low estimate of 8 billion in mid-century, or at an alarming high of 15 billion around 2100. Statisticians, such as the Vienna demographers, say the peak is more likely to fall somewhere on the middle-to-low end of that estimate.

It all goes to show that the arrival of billion-milestone babies, like so many other babies, is something that comes as a complete surprise.

Original Article

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Redrawing the map

If you had visited the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince a few years ago, you would have found the mountainside suburbs to its west, where the grand old homes are located, scattered with a few handsome compounds housing the great institutions that had dominated philanthropy since shortly after the Second World War.

At the hilltop was the enclosure of CARE International, down the street from the three houses occupied by Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and a few blocks from the whitewashed buildings of Oxfam. Down the hill were various branches of the Red Cross, and at the foot were Plan, World Hope, Save the Children and the sprawling blocks of United Nations agencies. These fortresses of altruism, humming with air-conditioned SUVs, were more permanent, changeless and bureaucratic than any branch of the impoverished nation’s government. And not just in Haiti. Around the world, these were the power centres of giving and helping.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

In Port-au-Prince today, you can watch the map of charity being remade. Amid the twisted wreckage of the 2010 earthquake and the tent cities that still fill every available space, the old charity village has turned into something of a metropolis. Those well-heeled old institutions have been joined by at least 2,000 new ones, some even larger and many much smaller, filling tracts of new prefab buildings and providing one of the island’s few sources of steady employment.

Hundreds of micro-charities have collected tens of millions through text messages, online donations and Twitter and Facebook campaigns, their offices jammed with new Apple computers, engaging in running behind-the-scenes battles and mutual jealousy with the old agencies.

Many are built on celebrity: Singer Wyclef Jean, who was raising a million dollars a day in mobile-phone donations after the quake, is no longer seen much at his charity’s lavish hilltop estate, ever since it was accused of squandering vast sums on video production, personal expenses and a $250,000 carnival float.

Actor Sean Penn’s operation, by the refugee camp that was once a golf course, is more securely in place, deploying squadrons of digging machines, though he rubs some of the charity elite the wrong way, as do the smaller charities of Patricia Arquette and Ben Stiller.

Officials from agencies such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Red Cross have complained the celebrity charities duplicate their work without the standards – for example, giving donated food to refugee camps, a practice established charities stopped years ago because it cuts into local farmers’ profits.

Many more of the new philanthropic powers in Haiti, and around the world, are not charities at all in the old sense, but corporations that mix profit-seeking with benevolent missions. Such “social enterprises” produce results that can be exceptionally efficient – and sometimes awkwardly self-interested.

Digicel, for example, is an Irish-owned company that dominates Haiti’s cellphone service. Its chief executive, Denis O’Brien, has spent hundreds of millions rebuilding large parts of downtown Port-au-Prince, providing shelters, sanitation and aid. It’s an act of generosity that also raises Digicel’s brand identity, making it a beloved household name among Haitians, which can only be good for its market share.

Mr. O’Brien plays another important role: He is a key figure in the huge network of corporations, governments and agencies organized by former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who has channelled hundreds of millions onto the island, persuading billionaires to give large amounts.

And that is the other factor looming over Haiti – the vast resources of the world’s wealthiest 1 per cent. With hundreds of their agents trooping around the traffic-clotted streets here, the vast funds of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and others are often among the most influential forces on the island.

What you see in Port-au-Prince, and what is taking over the world’s $2.2-trillion non-profit sector, is what some insiders call Philanthropy 3.0.

It marks a historic change. Philanthropy 1.0 was the handful of U.S. and British foundations, such as Rockefeller and Carnegie, that did “scientific” charity work in the prewar decades. Then came a revolution after the Second World War, with the births of both foreign aid and a galaxy of large non-governmental organizations and bureaucracies, including the United Nations and groups such as CARE. This edifice of Philanthropy 2.0 remained remarkably stable for six decades.

But over the past few years we have seen a third wave, born of globalization, crisis and technology, that is both more dynamic and less stable than the compounds of yesterday.

At the top of the pyramid are the new private foundations, dwarfing the largest of the old and playing a dramatic political role: They remake the executive structures of the old charities, forcing many of their activities to be organized in a much more businesslike way, or bypass established charities altogether to make direct links to the poor, diseased and disaster-ravaged.

At the opposite end of the scale are countless micro-initiatives and social networks, leveraging money and effort bit by byte, for causes great and small.

“You have the big givers, the Bill Gateses who’ve appeared all of a sudden, on the one hand, and then you’ve got the emergence of philanthropy in rapidly developing countries, and then the whole dimension of direct-giving philanthropy. It’s changing everything,” says J. Allister McGregor, head of the British-run Bellagio Initiative, created by the Rockefeller Foundation.

It is not hard to imagine a situation, when the dust clears after the global crisis, in which conventional charities are largely obsolete, squeezed out between the world-improving schemes of billionaires and the surging efforts of lesser people responding to calls for help on Twitter.

The economic crisis has put a dent in traditional giving. The U.S., which accounts for more than two-thirds of the world’s charitable giving, saw donations decline 13 per cent in the first two years of the crisis, bouncing back by a lacklustre 2.1 per cent last year. “At that rate, it will take five to six more years just to return to the level of giving we saw before the Great Recession,” says Patrick M. Rooney, executive director of the U.S.-based Center on Philanthropy.

Canada has seen a similar squeeze. According to an Imagine Canada report, a quarter of charities say they will have trouble covering expenses this year.

There is a sense that many of those contributions may be gone forever, because the high-tech ways of Philanthropy 3.0 allow people to connect almost directly to a recipient. That’s what younger people are doing (and giving less than their parents). Online micro-loan outfits such as Kiva, for example, put people in touch with, say, a street vendor in Rwanda looking for a $400 loan (at interest) to set up a store or buy a delivery motorcycle. Everyone is meant to profit: lender, Kiva and street vendor.

You might think that charities would find succour in the dramatic rise in giving from fast-growing China and India. In 2009, China’s 50 largest philanthropists gave a total of $1.2-billion, about a third of what their counterparts in the U.S. did.

But that money largely appears to be bypassing the 2.0-style institutions. Typical is actor Jet Li’s One Foundation, which collects millions of minuscule donations of only 1 yuan (16 cents), often through cellphones, and attracts huge sums for causes unlike the traditional ones in China, from adolescent depression to earthquake relief.

Much of the developing world’s giving doesn’t go to organizations at all. One study found that Pakistanis, for example, are perhaps the world’s most generous philanthropists – but they give almost exclusively to the needy in their own communities, often through mosque-based networks.

Yet as the economy sags, the established charities are being asked to take on monumental loads. On top of disasters, diseases, hospitals, universities and global poverty, the “third sector” is increasingly being expected to take the place of austerity-crippled government services.

Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain has made this official with his Big Society program. Its general failure so far hasn’t prevented the Canadian government from moving to copy it, as Ottawa revealed this week. And the U.S. Congress is currently debating a bill to slash funding to USAID, Washington’s foreign-aid and international development agency, by as much as a third ($1.4-billion), leaving charities to take up the slack.

The non-profit sector, meanwhile, is far from up to the challenge. Only 14 per cent of its funding worldwide actually comes from donations, according to the Bellagio Initiative – almost 40 per cent comes from governments. In truth, the vaunted “third sector” of charity and volunteerism can barely be called an independent sector, so tightly linked is it to government and big business.

As much as Philanthropy 2.0 is a victim of circumstance, though, there is also a sense that it has failed in its original mission to alleviate global poverty and disease.

There were some initial triumphs: UN agencies and major international charities began their efforts to eradicate smallpox worldwide in 1950 and succeeded by 1980; others spearheaded the Green Revolution, which ended large-scale famine in countries such as India in the 1970s. Today, many disasters and crises would be far more deadly if not for the highly evolved, fast-responding infrastructure of big agencies such as the Red Cross.

But in many areas, the world’s troubles have seemed immune to charity’s salve. A billion people still live on mud floors with no toilets and hardly enough food. Diseases such as typhus and cholera are not being eradicated as fast as they should. Over all, inequality and deprivation have yielded little to the trillions of charitable dollars thrown at them in the postwar decades.

And the main advances that have come cannot be credited to old-school charities. That includes the huge decrease in absolute poverty during the 1990s and 2000s (the rate worldwide plunged from 34 per cent to 25).

Researchers who polled thousands of individuals who managed to escape absolute poverty asked them what institutions and sources of income touched their lives. Not charities. Not Western foreign-aid programs. What brought people out of poverty was export-led economic growth and political stability.

The nagging question is whether Philanthropy 3.0 can do better. Its record, as we’ll see, includes historic gains against AIDS in Africa. But on the other side there is the tragic mess in Haiti. This country’s post-earthquake donation drive was the largest in history, with an astonishing $1.4-billion in private donations in four months. But despite the huge sums and the sprawling overgrowth of charities, there are few signs of improvement.

Some critics would even say that no matter what model they used, charities – by pouring free money into an economy that needed to start generating its own wealth – made things worse.

NEW YORK CITY: Rise of the philanthro-capitalists

In September, more than 50 prime ministers and presidents, dozens of billionaires, scores of Hollywood celebrities and scads of NGO heads and social entrepreneurs gathered in midtown Manhattan for the three-day annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Mr. Clinton strode the stage like a faith healer, extracting promises of aid from businessmen and philanthropists (close to $10-billion at this meeting, adding to the $69.2-billion pledged to date) and nudging those with money and those with causes into impromptu hallway meetings.

“We’ve learned that if you have government and the private sector and the NGOs working together, they can do things faster, cheaper and better, so that even if there’s less money, they can make the money they have go further,” Mr. Clinton said this week at his Manhattan office, where many of his group’s 1,400 employees work. “You want to get everyone pulling in the same direction.”

At any moment at the summit, he might have been huddling with billionaire Carlos Slim, the Foreign Minister of China and an NBC news anchor to talk urban reform, or hosting an informal discussion on climate change with the leaders of Bangladesh, Mexico, Mali, Norway, Grenada and South Africa, with Forest Whitaker and Geena Davis in the audience.

In the midst of it all were Ashok and Amrita Mahbubani, an elegant couple who became wealthy running an electronics company out of Toronto.

For many years, their main manufacturing plant was in Haiti, operated by Ms. Mahbubani’s Indian father, and his death in 2007 inspired them to start giving back. They set up their foundation, EKTA, with $1-million from his legacy. But instead of taking the traditional path – setting up an office and cutting cheques to the big charities and organizations – they decided to plunge into Philanthropy 3.0.

“We realized that we can multiply our impact if we use the network of people here,” Mr. Mahbubani says. “What took maybe six months to do here would have taken three years if we’d gone monkeying around by ourselves.”

The price of attendance is very steep, involving an obligatory pledge, but for smaller players such as the Mahbubanis, it is the ticket into a tight-knit network that combines world-transforming idealism with elite connections.

What is new in the Clinton approach, but now widely imitated, is that the ex-president’s group does almost nothing on the ground itself. Instead, it persuades others to join forces and take action, whether they’re private- or public-sector, religious or corporate or volunteer. The range of commitments is huge, from “rebuild Pakistan” to “empower girls and women,” as well as the famous Clinton commitments to fight AIDS and fix Haiti – or, rather, to get others to do so.

Unlike the older charities, they hope to create local economic conditions that make it unnecessary to have permanent agency headquarters in poor countries and regions. “You want to be in there so you’re working yourself out of a job,” Mr. Clinton says.

For their part, the Mahbubanis linked up with the Internet-driven charity Water.org, founded in part by actor Matt Damon, which seeks to provide clean water in poor countries. And they struck a deal with Invenio, a California-based social enterprise that uses an entrepreneurial model to provide solar-powered Internet access in dirt-poor rural areas (while technically a non-profit, it otherwise operates like a corporation).

The couple don’t just give money to these organizations. They actively take part in their projects and activities, linking their interests with the varied objectives of their partners. “We didn’t want to be a foundation that gives money to charity and never knows how it will be used,” Ms. Mahbubani says. “We wanted to do this in a businesslike way. I questioned that approach at first, because this is philanthropy – it’s different from the business world. But it has worked.”

That sense of unease about the private-sector-dominated philanthropy pioneered by Mr. Clinton is shared by a lot of people. In Haiti, for example, the initiative has been criticized for having brought in flawed shelters that happen to be manufactured by a company owned by one of the Clinton members.

In traditional philanthropy, there was a stark line between the capitalist activities of the benefactors and the altruistic activities of their chosen causes. The Clintonites have blurred the line, and perhaps erased it forever.

For a vivid example, consider Thomas Nagy, executive vice-president of the Danish-based multinational biotech company Novozymes. One of his tasks is to oversee its social enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa: In Mozambique, and soon in other countries, Novozymes has mounted a huge venture to end the reliance of poor villagers and slum-dwellers on indoor charcoal stoves – a practice that creates chronic health problems and ecological destruction, both from the stoves themselves and from the charcoal-making trade, which destroys forests and belches out tonnes of carbon.

Novozymes is replacing tens of thousands of family cookstoves with gas stoves. It is also paying the charcoal makers to become cash-crop farmers, while helping set up markets for their crops.

If it works, the project is unquestionably beneficial to huge numbers of people. But nobody is pretending it’s a purely altruistic venture. One of Novozymes’s businesses is converting farm crops into ethanol fuel. The charcoal makers will be taught to grow plants Novozymes can buy for that purpose, such as cassava. And the gas stoves in turn will create a large new untapped market in ethanol cylinders, assuring future markets for Novozymes.

“This is for profit. It is a social venture, designed to assemble an entire value chain,” Mr. Nagy says. “We are assembling a sustainable agricultural food and energy system with a supply chain that serves real needs, is more healthy and increases rural income and livelihood. It will have both a profit and a social and ecological benefit.”

Replacing the fuel economy of an entire nation is a kind of project that no charity or UN agency or foreign government would ever have attempted. The new profit-friendly philanthropy is built around such coincidences of interest – or conflicts, depending on your perspective.

Its great merit is that it is far more immediate, responsive and direct than the bureaucratic edifices of Philanthropy 2.0; the potential for profit prompts companies to mobilize far more people and resources far more quickly. But that is also its largest potential flaw – that self-interest could overshadow altruism, with no outside force overseeing it.

For established charities, there’s another worry: If people come to believe that the world’s problems can be fixed by acts of capitalism, will they be less inclined to make donations to charity?

It has come full cycle: Philanthropy 2.0, created to smooth out the flaws in the capitalist market economy, may end up being put out of business by it.

SEATTLE: The billionaires’ club

On a grubby stretch of Seattle’s industrial waterfront sits a drab, unmarked four-storey building that was once a cheque-processing centre. What takes place inside it is doing more to end the old order of philanthropy than anything else on Earth. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not just the largest philanthropic organization in the world. It is using its extraordinary wealth to remake the basic nature of charity, aid, development and, in some respects, government.

Founded by the software billionaire in the late 1990s, when he needed to compensate for his international reputation as a monopolist, the Gates Foundation is now to philanthropy what Microsoft is to personal-computer software.

With the $33.5-billion endowment it won in 2008 when investor Warren Buffett donated half his fortune and Bill Gates quit Microsoft to run the charity full-time, it is by far the largest charitable foundation in the world, three times the size of the next-largest (the Ford Foundation) and larger than the entire economies of many of the 100 countries in which it operates; it gives out a sum of money each year – more than $3-billion – larger than that disbursed by the other top 10 foundations combined.

If older foundations have viewed the world through the goggles of a missionary, a nurse, a social worker or a policeman, Bill Gates has approached it as an engineer. A great many of the 1,200 people working here devote themselves to metrics – painstaking measures of the precise impact of every dollar spent – for example, the precise amount it costs a particular program to extend life expectancy in a poor country by one year.

And where old-school charities would assess their projects on an annual or biennial basis, the Gates people prefer their data daily, live from the field, as it’s happening.

Mark Suzman, the head of the Gates Foundation’s international-development program, began his career in a UN development agency. “One of the things that was really surprising” about old-school philanthropy, he found there, “was the degree to which it was a field that had not focused on results. It was much more focused on outputs: Did you get your money out the door? … We spend a lot of time mapping out what we think the metrics of success will be, and how we will measure it, and the way it will be reported back.”

They also typically have longer time frames: Among the 20 core Gates projects, many, such as vaccination programs, are calibrated on five-, 10- or 20-year schedules. And the scope is beyond what even large governments would consider – system-wide re-engineering projects: changing the type of rice grown in Africa so it will be both flood- and drought-resistant, after climate change; changing the total secondary and post-secondary education system of the United States; ending AIDS and tuberculosis around the world, completely.

As with the Clinton Initiative, a lion’s share of the Gates money does not land directly on the ground, but is instead used as seed money to help other organizations raise and disburse further sums for their work. The Gates people call this “catalytic philanthropy” – not to do something themselves, but to cause someone else to do it.

Like the postwar charities, Bill Gates sees this as a mission to correct the imperfections of faltering governments and failing capitalist economies. “Where does the marketplace fall short and therefore a foundation can have a catalytic effect?” he asked in an interview last year.

As a result, though, the Seattle team is in the odd position of being not just rivals but often the main financiers of huge charities, UN divisions, other funds and government departments around the world.

To receive the funds, these bodies must apply the scientific standards, success-measuring techniques and organizing structures of the Gates Foundation. Since the amounts involved are so large, they often end up altering those institutions’ basic DNA.

An official with the British government’s Department for International Development tells of a foreign-aid program that was receiving hundreds of millions from both Whitehall and the Gates Foundation. The two clashed over how to measure the program’s results.

“The outcome was, as it always is in such cases, that the Gates people got to install one of their people as the director,” the official says.

Such effects can be witnessed around the world, as the Gates people struggle to spend a sum of money each year that some analysts consider too large to be absorbed.

“Gates is so big and so influential that if they decide they want to focus on, say, food security, then they have the weight to get other foundations and, indeed, government agencies to change the game,” Randall Kempner, whose Aspen Institute promotes for-profit philanthropy, told an interviewer last year.

“The profession of philanthropy has gotten much more sophisticated and rigorous,” says Kathy Calvin, chief executive of the United Nations Foundation, which was created in 1999 when media billionaire Ted Turner decided to devote a billion dollars to improving the UN’s image and activities; it has since become a key player in the network of Philanthropy 3.0. “Ten years ago, I think a lot of institutions all wanted to crate their own little project or program that had their name on it. But in the last ten years, a lot of foundations have said, I can get a lot more done if I work with others.”

Mr. Gates’s influence is even more powerful because it is amplified through the funds of other billionaires. The UN Foundation gets substantial funding from the Gates Foundation and, in turn, finances many of the old-school charities (and governments). Mr. Buffett took that meta-charity approach to a new level when he decided not to attach his name to a foundation but to leave his legacy to Mr. Gates.

And Mr. Turner, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett are all now campaigning to persuade other billionaires, such as Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to part with half their fortunes in the name of philanthropy.

Some may spot a piquant irony here: In an age of grotesque inequality, the interests of the world’s poor and diseased have become the concern of a small circle of billionaires, motivated – whether by guilt, concern for their reputations, vanity or pure altruism – to give a proportion of their wealth to do things that tax-deprived governments can’t manage.

And the effect of their huge injection of personal wealth is often to change the behaviour of governments and more middle-class postwar charities. It is, in short, a very top-down way to impose bottom-up solutions to the world’s problems.

Whatever the long-term effects, few will deny that the Gates effect has been broadly beneficial so far. “It puts human well-being back on the agenda,” the Bellagio Initiative’s Mr. McGregor says, “because people like Gates are keen to rethink it now.”

Although the old-school charities claim to be happily co-operating with the billionaires’ funds, in many important ways they are being left behind. That was most dramatically evident in what many consider the greatest accomplishment of the Gates and Clinton era: the taming of the AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2002, when Mr. Gates, Mr. Clinton and others decided to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, people assumed it would be operated by the World Health Organization, a branch of the UN. But Mr. Gates and Mr. Clinton were quietly adamant that the WHO be bypassed entirely.

“There’s a real sense,” says a WHO official who was involved in the dispute, “that if it had gone to the WHO, we’d still be at the planning stage today. We were seen as too slow-moving and bureaucratic – not entirely inaccurately.”

Since then, the Global Fund has spent $19-billion on programs of education, HIV drug treatment, adult circumcision and hands-on preventive health care of unprecedented scope and scale. And the campaign is a startling success: The AIDS crisis, which at the beginning of the decade had reduced average life expectancy in some countries to little more than 30 years, is coming under control in most countries, with deaths down by 20 per cent and new infections by more than 25 per cent in the past decade.

In a parallel effort, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has vaccinated more than 250 million children and prevented five million deaths. It created a successful meningitis vaccine last year and announced a malaria vaccine this month.

Reducing continent-ravaging plagues to expensive but manageable issues may be the most dramatic demonstration of the new philanthropy’s best potential.

GENEVA: The end of an empire

At the opposite extreme from the mud shacks, tent cities and crowded hospitals where aid is typically received is the calm, silent expanse of low, glass-walled buildings along the shore of Lake Geneva, the bureaucratic capital of the postwar philanthropic archipelago. Here are the well-paid elite of the Red Cross, many UN agencies and a number of the largest charities.

One of those glass buildings is home to CARE International, the quintessential 2.0 organization: Founded to deliver American food packages to the refugee camps that covered postwar Europe, it expanded and internationalized to become one of the world’s largest charities, with 12,000 employees across virtually every global trouble spot, backed by fundraising in a dozen countries, including Canada.

Robert Glasser, the seasoned field worker who is the chief of CARE’s worldwide operation in Geneva, remains one of the sector’s outspoken optimists, but he can’t help seeing the crises both within charity and outside it: “There are huge changes happening in philanthropy, and the scale of the problems is actually growing, and that is a real challenge to groups like ours.”

Donations to CARE from Canada, Britain and France actually have increased during the crisis. Yet in the U.S., which supplies 60 per cent of CARE’s donor base, donations are sharply down. Mr. Glasser is also beginning to see steep cuts in grants from deficit-stricken governments – the source of more than half of CARE’s funds, as is typical of the larger charities.

For the big institutions, the thousands of new organizations of Philanthropy 3.0. bring chaotic scenes of competition and crossed agendas, and not just in disaster zones such as post-tsunami Indonesia or Haiti. It’s also a problem in the capitals of a great many sub-Saharan African countries and in unstable countries such as Pakistan and Somalia, where the parade of pop stars, evangelists, single-issue obsessives, Chinese-government agents and U.S. billionaires can create unhelpful distractions.

“There’s good and bad with the crowded field,” Mr. Glasser says, diplomatically. “The good is that there’s new energy, innovation, new approaches, great ideas … The problem with that has been in situations like Indonesia and Haiti, where you have hundreds of NGOs descending and trying to be helpful … some of them are just chasing the money. The problem is it really clogs up the system, and actually decreases the efficiency of the response.”

He is one of many charity heads who would like to see a global registration system for philanthropy, to prevent incompetent, flaky or ultra-religious organizations from poisoning the well.

The way donations are going, the opposite is more likely to occur. A generation ago, charitable giving was almost entirely middle-aged, middle-class and Western (in fact, mostly American – of the $52-billion donated worldwide each year, all but $15-billion comes from the States).

But today, the old practice of tithing part of your paycheque or pension to charity, or getting a letter and writing a cheque, has not been passed down from the older generation.

A recent study found that Canadians born before 1945 give an average of $833 a year, and three-quarters of them donate regularly; among those born from 1965 to 1980, annual donations drop to $549 and only 60 per cent give. Among those born after 1981, only 55 per cent do, and the average falls to $325.

Clearly, the decline in giving is not merely an effect of the Great Recession. But the crisis does put charity in a new light: A system meant to alleviate the bumps and pitfalls of the global market economy is bound to seem less relevant and effective when that whole economy has become a charity case.

The effort to find solutions may have become more complex and sophisticated – but the problems have never been larger.

With a report from Timothy Schwartz in Port-au-Prince.

Sean Penn photo: Paolo Pellegrin / NYT

Original Article

The demise of Moammar Gadhafi is a great moment for Libyans, who are ending two generations of shame and degradation. And it’s a small milestone for the world, as it will reduce the number of non-democratic states from 55 to 54.

Beyond that, we shouldn’t pretend it has any larger world significance. Libya is unique. It’s a wealthy oil state with a tiny, ethnically homogeneous population; its eight-month war was not a clash of ideas or sects or clans, but a low-intensity, conventional army struggle pitting most of a population against one ruling family.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

As such, it offers few lessons for activists in other Arab states or autocracies. And the NATO air campaign, the first successful international military effort since Serbia in 1999, offers little by way of precedent: Libya’s struggle was self-contained, highly unlikely to inflame a wider regional conflict or divide the Arab world. It was an unambiguous moral cause.

And it was an obligation, because the West (including Canada) had such large financial investments in Colonel Gadhafi’s Libya. No, it was not a “war about oil,” since the petroleum relationships will remain largely unchanged – but if we’d have stayed out of Libya, Col. Gadhafi would have conducted a mass slaughter in the name of our oil, financed with our payments.

Libya’s uniqueness also makes it difficult to understand what might happen next. Many Libyans are insulted by the suggestion that they’re destined to collapse into chaos. “We are not going to become another Somalia,” rebel commander Ahmed Omar Bani told me. But they’re not going to turn into Switzerland, either.

To understand what might happen, and what the stakes are, we need to look at what makes Libya unique.

The favourable view: Libyans have a number of reasons to seek stability and non-extremism. For one thing, their country is perhaps the most urbanized country in Africa. The United Nations Population Divisionestimates that 86 per cent of its citizens live in cities, a proportion higher than Canada’s. From what I’ve seen, this urban life has done much to erase the old tribal and regional divides. People view each other by income and affiliation, while clan and village mean about as much as they do in, say, Ireland. And urbanization means that families are small, and women have rights.

More important, Libya has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world: 92 per cent of dwellings are privately owned. This means that Libyans have a direct, personal financial stake in the stability and progress of their communities. They have a sense of ownership. They have one of the ingredients of a middle-class life, and thus a desire for functioning markets and democracy.

This leads to the other ingredient of middle-class life: income. Libya, as writer Max Fisher points out in The Atlantic, produces 0.27 barrels of oil per citizen per day, almost as much as the United Arab Emirates. But people in Dubai are wealthier than Americans – and they make three times as much money as those in Tripoli, who are poorer than Mexicans.

This difference has everything to do with Col. Gadhafi’s closed, state-run economy (and something to do with his family’s massive theft, too). Libyans have every reason to believe their income could triple if they can keep things stable and well-run.

The darker view: If Libyans have property ownership and hope to have high incomes, they are utterly lacking the third key ingredient of middle-class life: functioning institutions of economy and state. And this is where Libya’s uniqueness is going to get them into trouble.

Col. Gadhafi destroyed everything that was professional and independent. He obliterated the army after several coup attempts, replacing it with cowboy militias. He sent education and medicine spiralling into the past by appointing incompetent cronies to run them. He erased any concept of a civil service, replacing it with a mafia-like web of kleptocracy and official paranoia.

One of the few things that remained stable and well-run was the mosque – and by associating the word “secular” with his rule, Col. Gadhafi enabled the Islamists to become a key political force.

And for the hundreds of thousands of Libyans who benefited from their small roles in his autocratic network – the 2000s were a prosperous time for Tripoli’s elite – the shift into a world dominated by imams and angry 17-year-olds with assault rifles could prove infuriating. In this tension, uniqueness could prove Libya’s undoing.

Original Article

Before he retreated to his home village, then to a compound and then into a drainage pipe with a golden pistol in hand for his final standoff, Moammar Gadhafi made it abundantly clear in one of his final marathon rants that he and his sons would not flee or surrender.

“We only have one choice. This is our country and we shall stay here till the end – dead, alive, victorious. It doesn’t matter,” he said in a scratchy audio address from an unknown location in June. “We shall not leave. We shall not surrender. We shall not sell it. We welcome death.”

Read article in The Globe and Mail

There were, it turned out, two truths in this. They tell us why the popular movement to unseat Col. Gadhafi proved so difficult, and why the next moment is an utter unknown.

First, Col. Gadhafi, the self-appointed ruler of Libya since 1969, did indeed fight to the very end, as he vowed when he began using heavy arms to beat back popular demonstrations in February. Rare among African dictators, he chose to declare total war, such as he was able, against the entire Libyan people, laying waste to his entire country in order to preserve his family’s rule and his own life.

He did this in the most determined way, by retreating to his tribal heartland of Sirte, with at least one of his sons and their militias, to lead rump forces in a final battle that lasted more than two months beyond the fall of Tripoli, the capital, to rebel forces.

Rather than giving up when his end was inevitable, as the dictators in his neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt did, sparing countless lives, Col. Gadhafi once again put himself first, shielding himself behind hundreds of disposable young soldiers as he retreated to the last possible redoubt: A loyal village, then a single compound and then a drainage pipe.

The fall of Sirte on Thursday marked, in every important way, the end of the eight-month battle by Libyan citizens to oust their dictator.

He was almost the last man standing. This showed, more than anything else in his life, that he truly believed his own mythology: He presented himself to the world as the embodiment of the Libyan state, and he was willing to defy every one of his subjects to prove this.

The second truth was contained in his claim to be the rightful owner of Libya: “This is our country… we shall not sell it.”

For this was the central problem of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, the crucial fiction behind the mythic “Socialist people’s Libyan Arab state.” It was his state. He was the sole proprietor. There was nothing beyond his ego – and without him, this slice of Sahara is a tabula rasa, an empty vessel.

When I was in Libya under Col. Gadhafi’s rule, I would be handed great swathes of Mr. Gadhafi’s personally penned manifestos: The Green Book, his desert-socialist manifesto of utopian pseudo-Maoist socialism; the Great Green Charter of Human Rights of the Libyan People’s Arab Jamahiriya (as he called his form of government), which outlined the complete equality that governed Libya, and the constitution titled “Authority of the People,” which outlined the awkward network of committees and annual meetings that served as a government in Libya, under the guise of “direct democracy.”

None of it bore any resemblance to Libya. Even the senior officials who gave me the official lectures on these books would acknowledge to me that it as a one-man state, governed by the will of the eccentric, possibly syphilitic military man who seized it in 1969.

He was able to buy off most of Libya’s tiny population by lavishing oil money on infrastructure and amenities that were considerably better than most African states (though he skimped on universities, which were mediocre, and hospitals, which were truly dire).

For the rest, there was terror. He was able to drive out the professional army, bullying it into collapse and replacing it with informal militias, and the Islamists – or anyone he considered an Islamist, which was thousands of people.

Institutions failed to develop. In the 1990s, he fully isolated Libya from the world, banning foreign-language education and forbidding most forms of travel, and left a generation physically isolated from the world, though connected by Internet.

He declared political parties and organizations of all sorts (except, bizarrely, the Boy Scouts) a fundamental sin, banishing them as a constitutional evil and against the basic values of Libyans. This made a political opposition impossible – and means that the people now trying to form a new government have no experience with its institutions.

But it also means that he was never able, and never tried, to form a Green Book party. Unlike the Baathists of Iraq or Syria, who remain loyal to the party’s ideas after the death of Saddam Hussein and (eventually) Bashar al-Assad, or the various Islamists and liberals of the region, there is no system of belief that survives Col. Gadhafi. He is the state, and with his death, so dies its animating idea.

We don’t know how many of Col. Gadhafi’s loyalists stayed at his side because they felt loyal to him, how many because they feared the revenge of the rebels, and how many because they knew Col. Gadhafi would kill their families if they defected. And we don’t know how long it will take to hunt down his sons, who have their own loyal militias.

But it is abundantly clear that his ideas will not outlive him. His was the first, and will be the last, Socialist People’s Arab Jamahiriya.

It is not so clear what ideas will take his place. He left six million people who, despite their characteristically Libyan pride and self-regard, have been humiliated before the world for two generations. As they cheer the richly deserved death of their abusive father, Libyans are slowly realizing just how little he left them.

Photo: Philippe Desmazes / Getty

Original Article

It was barely noticed on Monday morning as the world reeled from the violence in Egypt and Syria and the turn toward authoritarianism in Russia, but Poland’s national election showed how a formerly authoritarian country can defy the odds and step peacefully into democratic and economic stability.

It’s worth studying the Polish situation, as it raises some important questions about why some countries make the transition from dictatorship to democracy and economic openness much more easily than others. After all, little more than a day after the election, Poland’s next-door neighbour Ukraine descended further into darkness by sentencing its opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, to seven years in prison in a trial widely seen as unfair and political. How have these formerly authoritarian countries diverged so widely?

Read post in The Globe and Mail

The reelection of Prime Minister Donald Tusk in the Sunday vote, after his liberal Civic Platform party won a strong plurality of almost 40 per cent, not only marks the first time since the fall of communism that any Polish leader has been awarded a second term, but it an example of a professional and fairly fought election giving the victory to a competent and  intelligent leader without any appearance of corruption.

This was even more impressive because it was far from being a placid or insignificant contest. Poland’s election showdown could not have been more stark or ideological.

Facing Mr. Tusk’s European-minded liberalism from the right-wing nationalist corner was Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former Prime Minister and identical twin brother of the former president Lech Kaczynski, who was among many Polish leaders killed in a Russian plane crash last year.

Mr. Kaczynski’s angry brand of religious, anti-Europe, anti-Germany nationalism is the sort of thing that has proven popular in former communist countries recently — notably in Poland’s neighbours Ukraine and Russia. Yet, despite his near-heroic status in Poland, he has simply failed to catch on.

Mr. Tusk’s combination of an open economy, free trade and a fairly robust social safety net (by eastern Europe’s lower standards, at least) has proven more appealing: Poland has seen an economic boom that has made it the only European country to avoid recession throughout the global economic crisis, and it has seen robust inward investment from companies like Google and Samsung, turning its southwestern district of Silesia into a “Polish Silicon Valley.”

While Poland is far from a paradise today — it has a budget deficit approaching 6 per cent of its economy, and a system of subsidies that keeps a large part of the population tied to low-productivity peasant farming — it has surged ahead of its post-communist neighbours.

This leads to the central mystery: Why has Poland, which had a typically awful time during its years of privatization in the 1990s, as did Ukraine and Russia, surge so far ahead of its neighbours in both democracy and economy? They all started out at nearly the same point, with similar cultures and economies. Both Poland and Ukraine were economic and agricultural powerhouses at earlier periods in the twentieth century. They have similar languages.

But they have diverged wildly. Just look at the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index: Even though Poland and Ukraine both started at the same despearately poor economic level when communism ended in 1991, Poland has now become the 41st most prosperous of the world’s 172 countries — ranking it as a “developed country” by the UN’s ranking, while Ukraine sits at 71st, making it a developing country, poorer than Uruguay, Cuba, or Kazakhstan.

On democracy and freedom, Polandhas also surged ahead: Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index — a good measure of both democracy and commercial probity - - ranks Poland at 41^st place, and Ukraine far behind at 134^th, between Togo and Zimbabwe. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedoms places Poland at 68^th place, ahead of Portugal and just behind France (Canada is 6^th), while Ukraine is far behind at 164^th place, between Uzbekistan and Chad. The Economist’s Democracy Index places Ukraine far below Poland (and Russia even further below, as a quasi-democratic “hybrid regime.”)

Obviously it helps that Poland is in the 27-country European Union, which supposedly enforces democratic and fiscal standards (though this has not helped either Greece’s economy or the flawed democracies of places like Bulgaria). Poland also wisely decided to stay out of the euro — even though its economy would likely now qualify for membership in he 17-country monetary bloc — in order to use the lower value of the zloty to attract investment, and to avoid the crises and payments imbalances that have jeopardized other members.

Others suggest more exotic hypotheses: that Eastern Orthodox countries (Russia, Ukraine, Serbia) fare worse than their Catholic neighbours (Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic), or that Poland has benefited inordinately from its proximity to Germany.

But, more realistically, it is clear from any visit to Poland that well-established democratic institutions have more to do with it. Poland’s elections look like modern elections, of the sort most developed countries experience; its politicians and media function well. In Ukraine, even the most recent elections had the look and feel of the bad old days of the 1980s: Candidates (even the “reformist” opposition) appearing before uniformed ranks of state-company employees, reading lists of five-year plans.

Poland has done what its neighbours have yet to accomplish: It has held a boring election. The world had no reason to pay it heed, because it simply worked. For that reason, we ought to figure out what they’re doing right.

Original Article

As if to provide a useful metaphor for Russian politics, Vladimir Putin recently emerged from the Black Sea, in a scuba suit, carrying two ancient Greek vases. “The boys and I found them,” the vacationing Prime Minister, and former President, said of these treasures from the birthplace of democracy.

On Thursday, his spokesman admitted what everyone already knew: They were planted. “Look, Putin did not find an amphora that had been lying on the bottom for many thousands of years.. Of course, they were left there or placed there,” he said. “It’s completely normal.”

Read column in The Globe and Mail

Indeed, it is completely normal in Russia nowadays. A few days earlier, Mr. Putin made that abundantly clear with a much-heralded speech he delivered at Moscow’s Luzhniki Sports Palace.

You might have assumed, given the democratic revolutions across the Arab world, that Mr. Putin would use the occasion to exemplify Russia as a model of post-authoritarian democratic success. After all, the month of his speech marked the twentieth anniversary of the vote by the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies to disband the Soviet Union, a move that liberated 15 countries from seven decades of authoritarianism.

Instead, Mr. Putin decided to tell the world that Dimitri Medvedev, the Russian president since 2008, is a Greek vase.

Mr. Medvedev, who was elected to the Russian presidency after Mr. Putin finished his legal maximum of two consecutive terms, told the crowd that he would be stepping down as president next year so that Mr. Putin could run for the position - - and therefore win a third and probably a fourth term of office. Not only that, but it had all been part of a carefully calculated plot, a move to create the illusion of democratic competition in a country devoid of it. Mr. Medvedev had been planted at the bottom of the sea.

“I want to say directly: an agreement over what to do in the future was reached between us several years ago,” Mr Putin boasted to the crowd. Mr. Medvedev, who had spent much of his term appearing to distance himself from the former KGB chief and seemingly preparing himself to run against him as a more liberal alternative, admitted that he had been an eager participant: “We actually discussed this variant of events while we were first forming our comradely alliance.”

So Mr. Putin’s speech did end up providing an important lesson for the democratic revolutionaries of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. It showed what can happen when the former elites of a dictatorship become the self-appointed saviours of a country from the errors of its earlier democratic reformers.

Mr. Putin can get away with this presidential bait-and-switch - - he calls it “managed democracy” - - because he can claim that the alternative is the terrible chaos of the unregulated, laissez-faire 1990s, just as Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi were able to claim that the only alternative was Islamic extremism. And indeed, if their democratic successors aren’t careful to build strong institutions, a thriving market economy and a pathway into the middle class, they could find themselves in this position within the decade.

But this is far from an inevitable fate - - or an essential part of the Russian or Slavic character, as mythology holds. Democratic revolutionaries need only look next door to Estonia, which joined the euro this year and has led the efforts to support Greece’s recovery, or to fellow European Union member Poland, which is having a lively and wide-open parliamentary election this weekend and is the only European country to have dodged the financial crisis, or to the Czech Republic, Georgia or Slovenia, all of them stable democracies.

Mr. Putin, already speaking in presidential mode this week, has called for the creation of a “Eurasian Union,” joining Belarus, Kazakhstan and other neighbours in an autocratic bloc to rival to the democratic EU. It has led some to compare it, rather inaccurately, to the USSR (which Mr. Putin often lionizes these days).

But it means Mr. Putin is now actively courting Ukraine, whose president Viktor Yanukovych is teetering between west and east. He has made important moves toward joining the EU and putting aside old barriers, but he stands on the verge of imprisoning former president Yulia Tymoshenko in a transparently political trial. His decision in that trial could tip the balance of the entire region.

This is not a return to Soviet times. Mr. Putin’s Potemkin-village politics have infuriated several of his top ministers to flee his party to join a new democratic politics. There is a burgeoning new middle class, with no ties to the old elite, who have no interest in the easy security provided by Mr. Putin.

Democratic revolutions do indeed work. But Russia’s did not take place in 1991; it lies ahead.

Original Article

London

Margaret Thatcher was too frail to attend her Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester this week, which may be just as well, as the conference has turned into an angry attack on her beloved concept of individual rights. After all, she spent her Prime Ministership in the 1980s rebuilding her party — and Britain — around the rights of the individual, and famously declared that “there is no such thing as society.. there are individual men and women and there are families.”

Read post in The Globe and Mail.

So she would likely be horrified to watch Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives tearing themselves in two in public over a desire by much of the party to abolish the concept of individual rights, and specifically the right to a family — at least as they are encoded in law.

At the centre of the feud, which now threatens the very integrity of Mr. Cameron’s conservative-liberal coalition government, is a cat named Maya.

This was meant to be a conference that would show Britain that the Tories are a united and strong party with a clear vision of how to escape Britain’s economic mess. Then Theresa May, who as Home Secretary is responsible for policing, derailed the conference’s agenda by telling the Sunday Telegraph that “I’d personally like to see the Human Rights Act go.”

With that, Ms. May effectively dangled red meat before the Conservatives’ right-wing flank, who have largely been silenced under Mr. Cameron. While the right supported individual rights in the ‘80s, they have turned sharply against them now, because they are now associated with two things they dislike: The Labour Party (which, under Tony Blair, passed the act) and the European Union (the Act harmonizes British laws with European human rights legislation — although those laws actually originate in the Council of Europe, a wider and less formal body that is not related to the EU).

Mr. Cameron tried to brush away Ms. May’s provocations, telling papers that, while he had never really liked the Human Rights Act and would have preferred a home-grown, less generous bill of rights, he had no intention of changing it any time soon.

Then it all blew up in his face. Ms. May used her conference speech to tell the story of a failed refugee claimant who could not be deported because courts decided he had a constitutional “right to family” on the basis of his cat Maya.

That story was soon shown to be untrue (his cat was mentioned in passing in the decision, but it was not the reason for keeping him in Britain), but the “cat flap” had exploded into the tabloid press and all over the conference floor, where delegates were soon lining up to take sides.

The problem is that a good many Tories, and pretty much all of Mr. Cameron’s coalition partners the Liberal Democrats, happen to like human rights — and that Mr. Cameron has just spent much of the year promoting the concept in places like Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Leading the charge against Ms. May is Kenneth Clarke, Mr. Cameron’s justice minister and the only member of his government who served in Ms. Thatcher’s cabinet.

“I mean, the British are great believers in human rights,” he told the Times. “It isn’t just a subject that we go abroad and lecture foreign dictators about on the basis that it doesn’t apply to us. We actually invented the idea — you can go back to the Magna Carta.”

By Wednesday morning, it was all-out war between furious ministers in Manchester, Mr. Cameron was making statements to appease both sides, and much of the rest of the conference agenda was forgotten.

Whatever Mr. Cameron’s actual feelings are about human rights, he is not going to do anything during this government, for a very good reason: The Act is one of the key pledges that keeps his coalition government together.

Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and Liberal Democrat leader, made that point abundantly clear: “Let me say something really clear about the Human Rights Act. In fact, I will do it in words of one syllable: It Is Here To Stay.”

This put the Prime Minister in the awkward position of having to please both his party’s very anti-rights rank and file, and his extremely pro-rights coalition partners. That awkwardness all came out today when a Daily Mail reporter cornered him on a question he’d rather not have answered: Are you speaking for the benefit of Tories, or Lib Dems?

His stumbling answer — yes, he’d rather not have a Human Rights Act, but no, it can’t be done in a coalition — appeared this morning under the banner headline “I Want to Scrap the Human Rights Act But Clegg Won’t Let Me, Says PM.”

That was precisely opposite the message of unity and solidarity Mr. Cameron had wanted the conference to send. And it also was the worst possible answer for a man trying to keep control of a divided party and a fractious coalition, because it was an answer that pleased absolutely nobody.

Original Article

When Amanda Knox, appealing her conviction for the November 5, 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, stood up in a fourteenth-century courtroom on Monday morning to make a final, successful plea to have her conviction overturned, her sobbing entreaty was also a veiled attack on a system of justice:

“I trusted them completely,” she said of the Italian police and legal system. “I was betrayed on the night of November 5. I was manipulated. I am not who I say I am. I did not do the things attributed to me. I am not violent. I don’t have a lack of respect for life. And I did not kill. I did not rape. I did not steal. I wasn’t there at the crime scene at the time.”

Read this post in The Globe and Mail

Her frustration, echoed by many Americans and people from English-speaking countries, was directed squarely at a legal system that seems alien and menacing to outsiders.

Italy, like most European countries, has an inquisitorial judicial system. That is, the judge does not serve as a neutral arbiter between prosecution and defence, as in North America, but as the chief prosecutor and chairman of the jury, responsible for deciding whether charges should be brought and, ultimately, responsible for determining the absolute truth behind the charges. (After 1989, Italy added some non-inquisitorial elements to its system, such as the ability of defence lawyers to call their own witnesses, but it is mainly an inquisitorial system).

The most telling example of the difference is that European judges declare suspects “innocent,” whereas North Americans and Britons are only declared “not guilty.” It is the difference between an absolute determination and the settlement of an argument.

The initial guilty verdict against Ms. Knox caused a number of prominent Americans, including celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, to lash out at the European system.  It seemed that the case had been biased by circumstantial evidence, including Ms. Knox’s personality, reputation and psychology, that would have been disallowed or challenged by the defense in an American court.

Of course, the friends and defenders of Ms. Kercher’s family feel rather differently — they see her acquittal by an appeal jury that re-heard all the principal evidence, something that would not be permitted in Anglo-American courts, as a similar injustice. Still, those supporters have tended to speak favourably of the Italian system.

If the Anglo-American anger at the inquisitorial system sounds familiar, it could be because a very similar tone of vitriol was sounded over the summer as former Internaitonal Monetary Fund boss and French political grandee Dominique Strauss-Kahn faced charges of sexual assault against a New York hotel maid.

Europeans looked at the adversarial judicial system used in English-speaking countries with shock and dismay. In that system, the prosecution and defence are both allowed an equal say, and an equal chance to denounce or defend the accused, before a neutral judge and jury who are simply asked to weigh the strongest argument. There is no central effort to determine the absolute truth of the case; it is assumed that this truth will emerge from the process of deliberation and evidence presentation between the two sides.

To European ears — such as those of the celebrity philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, who spoke out against the case — this sounded grossly unfair to Mr. Strauss Kahn, who was paraded before cameras and subjected to lurid accusations from the prosecutor. In an inquisitive system, they argued, the judge would have dismissed the accusations before they had a chance to damage the reputation of Mr. Strauss-Kahn. In New York, the charges were only thrown out afterwards.

“I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed “adversary,” meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime—and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact,” Mr. Henri-Levy wrote.

For Europeans, the shock of the English-speaking system is that there is nobody responsible for declaring the absolute truth. OJ Simpson, to name one oft-cited example, walked free not because he was absolutely innocent, but because the prosecution failed to present a strong argument and showed themselves to have a racial bias.

Of course, Ms. Knox’s appeal proves that this can also happen in the European system. While the Italian courts unquestionably failed to prove her guilt, the fact that the prosecutor has launched a further appeal shows that the case remains ambiguous — something considered unacceptable in the European civil system.

For North Americans and Britons, the problem with the European system is that prosecutors and defendents are not equal: When highly questionable evidence about Ms. Knox was presented to the court, the judge did not challenge or dismiss it because the judge is also the prosecutor.

Monday’s appeal verdict has done little to narrow that divide.

Original Article

As the euro crisis approached a terminal point with the approaching default of Greece, the 17 countries that have the euro as their currency were forced to wrestle with something they should have considered months if not years before: A coordinated, central and lasting intervention into the continent’s financial systems. This turned the monetary crisis into a set of political crises. Here, I examine is dramatic effects on the continent’s leaders and their governments.

1. Angela Merkel

There were no burning cars, hurling barricades or raging rioters outside the Bundestag at midday on Thursday. Only a couple dozen very polite protesters, far outnumbered by idle sunbathers, requesting that the euro be replaced with the old deutschmark, gave any hint of what was taking place inside the glass-domed national legislature.

See a graphic version of this article in The Globe and Mail

Yet inside was the scene of an intense and viciously divisive battle that would determine the future of Europe’s monetary system, and of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s political fortunes. For she, like so many other European leaders this week, had hitched her own fate to that of the euro.

The euro crisis has exploded at a moment when almost none of Europe’s major countries has a strong and secure government. As a result, this became the week when the abstract monetary crises of the collapsing euro transformed themselves into very concrete and tangible political crises, threatening the futures of several leaders.

In a sequence of votes that swept across the continent, legislatures of the 17 countries with the euro as their currency voted this week on whether to pump 440 billion euros into an emergency fund known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), to prevent Greece from going bankrupt and bolster Italy, Spain and Ireland against a potential domino-collapse of defaulting economies.

The Berlin vote was crucial: If it failed to win a majority in Germany, the country with Europe’s only booming economy and with the greatest exposure to the continent’s bad debt, the euro would be in deep jeopardy — provoking bank collapses and debt defaults that could cost economies like Germany trillions — and Ms. Merkel’s career as chancellor would likely have come to an end.

But she faced both an electorate who are opposed to the idea of their tax money going to Greece, and a three-party conservative-liberal coalition government that is rife with dissention around the bailouts.

“It is almost like she is asking people to drink poison in order to survive,” said Artur Fischer, head of the Berlin Stock Exchange, as the vote proceeded. “That is what Mrs. Merkel has had to persuade the German people to do today. And I hope she succeeds.”

In the end, she got them to drink the poison. In an act that is being described in the German press as an ingenious and disciplined act of political martial arts, she persuaded her caucus, and those of the other two parties, to pass it by slim majority. The vote was a crisis for the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), who have been all but abandoned by voters as they wrestle with the euro crisis.

The expanded fund was, as many economists have pointed out, something that should have been passed at least a year ago. And it is only the beginning: To prevent the imbalances that created the debt crisis from spiralling out of control again, euro zone countries will need to agree on a system to unite their fiscal and bond-issuing systems – and they may need to pour more money, possibly trillions, into the EFSF.

Ms. Merkel just managed to keep her government together – but only by promising that there wouldn’t be future votes. “She did a very good job of passing this and holding her government together, so there won’t be an early election,” said Gerd Langguth, the University of Bonn professor who is her biographer. “The problem is that in order to do this, she has made it so the next crisis will be a bigger political disaster.”

2. George Papandreou

Two thousand kilometres south of Berlin, the scene was much less tranquil. Sporadic protests echoed across Syntagma Square, and threatened to erupt into more large-scale rioting, as the Greek legislature faced its own, hugely unpopular moment of truth. It wasn’t the bailout fund – which the Greeks easily passed – but the business end of the deal.

Prime Minster George Papandreou, in order to prevent complete insolvency and reassure European governments and investors that his economy isn’t simply a bottomless black hole, passed an emergency property tax, which would produce badly-needed revenues almost immediately (normally, the Greek government has troubles collecting taxes even three years after they’re due).

But on Tuesday, his own political fragility became all too apparent. His Socialist Party’s three-year-old majority has shrunk to four seats as MPs have defected in anger at the austerity measures - - and a dozen of them were denouncing the property tax and suggesting a caucus revolt.

If his government fell, it could doom Greece: while he would certainly lose an election, there is not party capable of winning a majority or even a large plurality. It could take months to form an awkward coalition, something almost unthinkable in the midst of an emergency rescue, an insolvency or worse. The bill passed, by a thin margin, but has left Mr. Papandreou clinging by his fingernails.

“It is increasingly apparent that this government is unstable and prone to dissent, and while it is not going to collapse right now, it could only be a matter of months before it loses a vote of confidence,” says George Kyrtsos, the editor of the Athens City Press. “Anything could cause it to collapse at this point, and the future is utterly uncertain.”

3. Silvio Berlusconi

In Rome, Italians were equally aghast at the sight of a government falling apart at exactly the wrong moment — buffeted not only by the pressures of the financial crisis, but by half a dozen criminal and sex-related legal investigations facing premier Silvio Berlusconi.

It became apparent this week that the scandals have prevented Mr. Berlusconi from doing the badly needed work of reforming Italy’s economy, which holds alarming levels of public debt.

On Thursday, Italian newspapers leaked a letter from the European Central Bank to Mr. Berlusconi, in which the bank broke sharply from its traditionally neutral role and all but begged the prime minister to “take all the appropriate actions.”

Mr. Berlusconi passed an austerity budget by a very slim margin last month — but not only did it not contain all the measures required, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that the pension changes and privatization measures simply aren’t happening.

And to add to the humiliation, on Friday Santo Versace, brother of the designer Donatella, quit his membership in Mr. Berlusconi’s caucus. “I like to work, and in [Berlusconi’s] Freedom Party there’s no need for people who work,” he told reporters. As Mr. Berlusconi marked his 75th birthday on Friday, it became increasingly apparent that his lack of leadership is pulling down both his government and the Italian economy.

4. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero

While many European governments are hanging on by a thread, he only one that actually did fall this week was Spain’s. And in some respects, that put Madrid in the best position of the lot.

By dissolving parliament and calling an early election (as planned) on Monday, prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero managed to fend off the sort of spiralling decay seen in his neighbouring countries – at least for now.

It will end his Socialist Party’s eight-year hold on power (he won’t run for election) and almost certainly give the right-wing Popular Party a majority. But the timing allowed Mr. Zapatero to push controversial reform legislation through parliament, including a balanced-budget amendment and, last week, a special tax on the country’s wealthiest citizens, that together leave the country in less dire shape than its neighbours. In one of this crisis’s great paradoxes, the most successful defence seems to be letting your government fall.

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Are we living through the least violent moment in human history? Has there ever been an age, during the past 10,000 years, with fewer wars or mass killings or chances of being murdered?

The answer seems, to me, almost self-evident. There are terrible wars today, but they are extremely scarce, not very intense and do not affect the lives of many people. If we assume that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Somalia are all “at war” today and all their people are affected, that means that just over 2 per cent of the world’s people know war. If you add simmering events like the Western Sahara conflict, the Middle East showdown and the Mexican drug wars, you might, at a stretch, get up to 4 per cent.

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Never before has this been the case. Forty years ago, at least a tenth of the world appeared to be in conflict; 70 years ago, more than half the world was. Earlier, it was no better: Pre-modern history (before 1500) was exceedingly murderous and violent, followed by half a millennium when near-total war was more norm than exception. Violent crime has become a rarity, rather than a part of daily life, almost everywhere. Not only violence, but the attitudes that glorify violence, are now rare exceptions rather than cultural norms.

I realize this. Yet I am also guilty of helping create the opposite perception. I have reported on dozens of murders, more than one mass slaying, and I have done much reporting from Afghanistan, Libya, Bosnia, Kosovo and other places stricken with violence. I offer no apology: We need to know about these things. But the totality of all these front pages does create a false perception of the state of the world.

To help me atone for this, the Canadian evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has done a great service by pulling together all the data on violence and war from the past 15,000 years.

“Violence,” he concluded in a lecture in Napa, Calif., in advance of a forthcoming book The Better Angels of Our Nature, “has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”

His evidence is overwhelming. If you look at the odds that a death will occur by violence, paleontological investigations show that in prehistoric and pre-modern times it ranged from 5 per cent to 60 per cent, but averaged around 15 per cent – that is, more than one in six deaths were violent. In modern times, this figure peaked at around 3 per cent worldwide in the 20th century (including all wars, genocides and famines); today it is about three one-hundredths of 1 per cent.

Homicide rates have seen a 50-fold decline from the Middle Ages to the present, with a slight uptick in the second half of the 20th century (which raised them back to early 20th-century levels) and then a further drop after 1990.

Dr. Pinker finds the same sharp, near-constant declines in every category he examines: Judicial torture, capital punishment, slavery, rape, lynching, hate crime, racial hostility, spouse-murder, domestic violence, child abuse – everything that can be measured has seen a marked and almost constant downward slant.

But the most important attention that Dr. Pinker devotes is to the past hundred years. For although wars became far less frequent in the 20th century, they obviously became more deadly. The Second World War, the Nazi and Soviet genocides and famines were the deadliest individual events in human history (even if the odds of dying by violence were still higher in earlier centuries).

In the six decades since the Second World War, though, wars have stopped being the major concerns of the world. Deaths from war peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s at about 300 deaths per 100,000 people. They then fell below five deaths per 100,000. Since about 1990 – even including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, which together killed more than 125,000 civilians – these decades have seen immeasurably little war death, far below one person per 100,000.

What has caused this dramatic shift away from war and violence? Steven Pinker argues that Thomas Hobbes was right: The creation of a “Leviathan” of governments and laws has reduced the incentives for violence; in short, it has civilized us. And the pacifying effects of global commerce have reduced the incentives for violence between states. To this, he adds the “expanding circle” of empathy caused by modern transportation and communications, and the “escalator of reason” caused by fast-expanding education and literacy. If you wanted to sum all these theories up, you could say that violence simply stopped making sense.

It is more than just popular misunderstanding and newspaper headlines that lead us to believe that the world has become more, not less, violent. This is built a long tradition of human thought, rooted in Christian notions of original sin. A great many Enlightenment thinkers, chief among them John Locke, believed that the Hobbesian “state of nature” was actually an idyll of natural law and cooperation, only to be soiled by the damaging effects of civilization. This idea was picked up by Karl Marx, who saw precapitalist society as inherently peaceful and cooperative, and amplified by some anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, who in his book Stone Age Economics argued that prehistoric humans were peaceful and cooperative. But a wider anthropological perspective shows that primitive humans are likely highly organized and cooperative, but are also highly reliant on violence as a means of survival.

But there is one thing that neither Dr. Pinker nor I can answer: Is this sharp twenty-first century decline in violence permanent? Or are we living in a trough between two terrible peaks, a calm before another global storm? On this, we can only hope.

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