Doug Saunders

We have now entered a very dangerous place, here in Europe, where the economic and monetary crisis is triggering a widespread crisis of politics and citizenship. Until this week, the debt emergency had brought everyone closer together. Now it will drive the continent apart.

It is easy to confuse the euro zone, the 17-country bloc that has shared the euro as its currency since 1999, with the European Union, the 27-country political, legal and trading confederation, created in the 1950s, that makes 500 million people more or less common citizens. The EU created the euro, in what we now all know was a flawed process, and selects the banking officials who oversee it.

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And it was the EU that held the euro zone together during the first three years of this crisis. With the European Central Bank paralyzed in an anomie of German self-interest, it was a series of EU summits in which the worst was prevented from occurring. And there came to be a widespread understanding that any lasting resolution will require much tighter fiscal and political integration – something the leaders of France and Germany acknowledged overtly this week.

But this is also where the old vision of a common European citizenship dies. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy and their officials this week called their new vision, variously, a “core Europe,” a “two-speed Europe,” a “variable-geometry Europe.” It is a way to keep the much poorer citizens of the failed Mediterranean states on board with their wealthier northern neighbours – even if some of them drop the euro. But it also ends democratic equality.

A hint of that was given when Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s surprise attempt to take the EU’s bailout package to his people with a referendum was quickly scuppered by EU pressure, at the cost of his job. It’s true that the vote would have caused a debt-market cataclysm far worse than the one the bailout was meant to prevent. But it was also a dangerous sign of the future.

For this happens to be the moment when voters in Southern Europe will have to be told that, if they want their countries and their livelihoods to survive, they must face a sharp and more or less permanent reduction in pay and standards of living.

To understand this, just look at a core issue behind the crisis: labour costs. In 1999, at the dawn of the euro, the cost of an hour’s labour in Spain, Italy or Greece was 15 to 20 per cent cheaper than it was in Germany. But then Berlin used the new currency to boost exports and cut its production costs dramatically, while the southern countries levelled their wages and standards up to continental averages. By 2010, an hour’s labour in the Mediterranean countries cost 10 to 15 per cent more than its German counterpart.

Because it costs them so much more to produce their own goods, this makes the southern nations permanently reliant on imports – and on loans, from exporting countries like Germany, that make those import purchases possible. That imbalance was what created the debt crisis, and it will happen again and again unless either Germany and France permanently subsidize the Southern European states (politically impossible) or they cut their labour costs and government expenses and get on the path to export competitiveness.

That is, a number of EU members will have to become developing countries again – after having lived as first-world countries for more than a decade. They’ll have no choice. This is true even if they quit the euro and readopt the drachma or the lira. In fact, possibly even more so: Most of their debts, including existing bonds, will remain euro-denominated, and will become grossly expensive if repaid with a hyper-deflated new currency, making their governments even meaner.

The problem is that nobody would vote for this. Would you? And what makes this even worse is that it’s being delivered not by elected leaders but by EU officials – and in an extremely unwise decision, the EU’s 2009 introduction of a president and a foreign minister made them appointed, not elected, officials.

As Greece, Italy and Spain are all changing governments this month under crisis circumstances, their people are being told, by appointed people from the EU and the ECB and the International Monetary Fund, that they won’t have the same democratic right to control their economic futures as their northern neighbours do. They may give this innocuous names like “two-speed,” but it is a recipe for division, anger and extremism – the very things the EU was created to prevent.

Graph: Financial Times

Original Article

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).

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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.

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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.

Original Article

London

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.

Read column in The Globe And Mail

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.

Original Article

It’s official: among the weapons Europe will try to deploy in its last-ditch effort to save its currency will be a “Robin Hood tax,” a miniscule fee on stock-market trades and other financial transactions.

That, at least, is was what José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, proposed in his “state of the union” speech to the European parliament on Wednesday morning. He was endorsing a draft directive issued by the Commission last week and strongly endorsed by the continent’s two largest economies, France and Germany.

Read post in The Globe and Mail

See also “A Tobin tax? The outré is back in”

It would, he claimed, raise 55-billion euros a year by skimming as little as 0.01 per cent from every financial transaction on European exchanges. This money would be used to finance the European Financial Stability Facility.

But the micro-tax, widely known as a Tobin Tax after its inventor, the economist James Tobin, is just as likely to divide Europe into deeper divisions and intractable feuds.

With the possibility of a Greek insolvency and a wider collapse of euro zone debt looming, Mr. Barroso and his colleagues are pulling out all the stops. He called for unity around a six-point plan, to be voted on by all the euro zone’s 17 parliaments this week, to boost the bailout fund to 440-billion euros in order to prevent the Greek collapse from causing a run on the debt of the far larger economies of Spain and Italy.

The European Tobin tax would be a small part of this. It has been endorsed strongly by the finance ministers of France and Germany, and the smaller economies on the continent are likely to back it. And Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister who now heads the International Monetary Fund, is an outspoken advocate of such a tax. And software billionaire Bill Gates gave the tax his endorsement on Friday with a report suggesting it could aid international development.

But the elephant in the room is Britain, home to the highest volume of euro-denominated trading, whose current Conservative-Liberal government is firmly opposed to a transaction tax – as are the United States and Canada. When it was proposed at the Toronto G20 summit last year, it quickly sank. Last week Britain’s finance minister George Osborne suggested that Britain would veto the tax unless it was allowed an opt-out.

Without Anglo-American banking, the thinking goes, a Tobin tax would be pointless, because banks and traders would simply move their transactions to the tax-free side of the Channel and the Atlantic.

To forestall such a possibility, the European Central Bank is attempting to pass a policy requiring financial clearing houses that handle more than five per cent of the market in euro-denominated products to do their trading inside the 17-member euro zone (a great many are located in London). But this is unlikely to fly.

Would entire industries move abroad to avoid such a small tax? Well, many institutions nowadays depend on high-frequency trading, in which transactions are conducted more than 10,000 times per second: The fees would add up. Given that a huge chunk of international trading moved from New York to London in the 2000s as a result of Washington’s arguably less burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, the risk of capital flight is real.

Or is it? As Financial Times columnist John Plender argues this morning, Britain already has a Tobin tax, the 1694 stamp duty, which has “signally failed to prevent London’s ascendancy in international finance.” And, he notes, it could cause banks to switch from speculative interbank high-speed transactions to more productive and useful longer-term investments in corporations and households.

Indeed, it is the British who have actually studied the workings of Tobin taxes the most. A major review of the implications released this year concluded that “a Tobin tax is feasible and, if appropriately designed, could make a significant contribution to revenue without causing major distortions. However,” the research report notes mordantly, “it would be unlikely to reduce market volatility and could even increase it.”

Original Article

When Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero went to bed on Sunday, he may well have picked up his Cervantes and turned to its climactic passage. It occurs when Don Quixote realizes that his bold efforts at heroism have not transformed Spain or caused anyone to love him, but have produced only heartbreak:

“The fact is,” he says to his squire Sancho, “that I was born to be an example of misfortune, and the target and mark at which the arrows of adversity are aimed and directed.”

Read post in The Globe and Mail

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Zapatero walked into the Madrid legislature and dissolved parliament. After eight dramatic years in office, he is triggering an election, set for November 20, that will end his political career (he will not be running for re-election) and almost certainly give the right-wing opposition Popular Party a majority.

If Greece is the financial black hole of Europe’s economic crisis, Spain has become its centre of political symbolism. It must have been with an allegorical eye that Barcelona decided to hold its last-ever bullfight on Sunday, for the next day would mark a stark transition from the bullish buoyancy of the Zapatero era to a more bearish, austere period of anxiety and panic.

Mr. Zapatero, who has transformed Spain like no other leader since Franco’s demise, became Europe’s ultimate unwitting victim, a Quixotic figure whose lance has proven useless.

Unlike Greece, Spain’s crisis is not one of government spending or debt: On the contrary, Mr. Zapatero was a master of the art of fiscal restraint. Until the very end of the 2000s, his governments ran budget surpluses and had one of Europe’s lowest levels of debt; he cut taxes, removed red tape from business and oversaw a long period of economic growth and full employment.

Like other members of Europe’s new free-market left (like Gordon Brown in Britain and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany), he used this fiscal and economic buoyancy to change his country dramatically. Gay marriage was legalized and women’s rights, including to abortion, were extended in this formerly Roman Catholic nation; millions of immigrants arrived; separatist-leaning Catalonia gained some autonomy; a radical peace was sought (and all but won) with the Basque rebels.

But throughout the decade, currency imbalances were piling up in Europe’s periphery. If Greeks experienced this imbalance in the form of spiralling government debt, the Spaniards (like the Irish) experienced it in the form of a massive, private-debt-fuelled real-estate bubble. When it popped at the end of 2008, it placed Spain’s famously robust banks in jeopardy, and Madrid was forced to intervene: First with a 50-billion euro rescue in October, 2008, and then, six days later, with a 100-billion euro fund.

The collapse was wreaking its toll: Unemployment quickly shot up from near-zero rates to more than 20 per cent, and this loss of tax revenue, combined with the huge cost of rescuing the banks, shifted Madrid into the red.

Within months, Mr. Zapatero was forced to reverse his tax cuts of 2006, 2007, and 2008. In 2010, there were large-scale privatizations and spending cuts, and this August Mr. Zapatero tried to reassure markets by passing — after only two days of debate — a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets.

On Thursday, in his final act, Mr. Zapatero pushed through the legislature a new law placing a special short-term tax on the very wealthiest citizens of Spain — exactly the sort of tax he had abolished a few years earlier.

By now, the Spanish newspaper El Pais was referring to his government as “The legislature of sudden shocks.” Mr. Zapatero’s golden years are forgotten, banished to a past that, to many Spaniards, seems like an odd dream. Opposition leader Mariano Rajoy, who will campaign on a platform of lower taxes, smaller government, even more austerity and a more socially conservative society, stands to win a long-sought victory.

His will be a more humble and quiet Spain, without as many acts of bold and unpredictable jousting. After eight years on the edge of their seats, Spaniards seem to be preparing for a less exciting era.

Original Article

New York

The Middle East crisis returned this week to its place of birth in New York City. The United Nations statehood resolution by the Palestinians is dangerous, impractical and possibly the only way to create a secure life for Israel and its neighbours.

Using a UN General Assembly resolution to make an end run around potential negotiations and create a Palestinian state is not a new idea, of course. It’s exactly what was done in 1947, under strikingly similar circumstances, and the resulting Palestinian state became known as Israel. That experience taught us a lot about the hazards of statehood by declaration from above – and about its occasional necessity.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

Read also “The Canadian who Created the Middle East Crisis”

The creation of a Jewish homeland was one of the first acts of a UN that had just been formed in the face of the unprecedented genocidal atrocity and refugee crisis that made Israel’s birth a tragic necessity. It was done at the General Assembly, without the approval of the Security Council, with a sense of urgency.

We should beware of precedent. Resolution 181 of 1947, let us not forget, seemed like a fairly simple matter but ended up producing more than 60 years of trouble. It was meant to create one multiethnic nation with two internal states, one Jewish majority and one Arab majority – a “partition with economic union,” to borrow its subtitle.

That plan was ruined within days, as Arab nationalists launched a war on the embryonic Israel, and radical Jewish nationalists pushed Arabs out of their homes and into the dwindling bits of Arab-designated territory.

And so it stood, a refugee crisis begat by a refugee crisis, for decades. From 1993 onward, when the Palestinians first recognized Israel, the path to resolution has been largely agreed on by all parties, defined by a 1967 UN resolution: Using the ceasefire borders of the Six-Day War as a starting point, Israel will cease settlements on the Palestinian side, the Palestinians will recognize Israel’s sovereignty and renounce violence, and a border will be worked out.

That plan has come tantalizingly close to fruition twice in the past 15 years, scuppered largely by Israeli domestic politics. So there are risks in the decision by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to sidestep that plan – or, more optimistically, to nudge it along – by asking the world’s leaders to recognize the Palestinian proto-state. His declaration could trigger a border war or attacks against the half a million Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands or the 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel.

But it may be the best way to a more secure and prosperous life for both Israel and its Arab neighbours. On the Palestinian side, it could have the considerable advantage of marginalizing and effectively ending the relevance of Hamas, the extremist party that has ruled the rump territory of Gaza since 2007. Hamas leaders, who are deeply opposed to a two-state solution, are sputtering with outrage at Mr. Abbas, whose humiliations at the negotiating table were the source of Hamas’s power. But this is the sort of symbolic victory on the world stage that Hamas could never deliver, and a statehood-bound Palestine vanquishes them to a dim past.

Israelis also recognize that a clearly defined Palestinian state is the only way they’ll be able to turn their country’s extraordinary economic, educational, technological and cultural resources into the basis for a secure life and a prosperous region. The Jerusalem Post found this week that 69 per cent of Israelis feel strongly that Israel should accept the statehood declaration if the UN passes it.

They understand something that their government apparently doesn’t. It’s something that was best expressed 21 years ago by the late Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, one of the sharpest scholars of Israeli-Palestinian politics. In an even darker moment, when all-out war in the region seemed likely, he suggested that perhaps a fully agreed-on peace settlement shouldn’t be the immediate goal, but rather just a tentative declaration of statehood.

“It would perhaps help if everybody would stop thinking about a definitive settlement,” he wrote, suggesting, instead, a provisional two-state beginning, “subject to periodic rethinking and negotiation.” It would be ugly, but it would achieve the most important thing for Israel.

“Israel’s very life depends on making peace with the Palestinians,” he said, “and thus opening the door to the Arab world as a whole. For its own sake, and for the sake of the world, Israel must soon join in helping the people in the entire region to achieve more decent lives.” That is even more true in today’s fast-changing Middle East.

Original Article

From the moment he stepped off his jet in Cairo Tuesday night to find thousands of Egyptian fans shouting “God is great,” this was far more than a routine visit by a foreign leader.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, toured the newly liberated capitals of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya this week with the sort of popularity usually reserved for pop stars. He is polling as the most popular politician, by far, in virtually every country of the Middle East, and for the revolutionary generation who turned to the Middle East’s only Muslim democracy for inspiration, he is a conquering hero.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

Not since the Kurdish sultan Saladin recaptured Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem from the Europeans in the 1100s, some commentators remarked as Mr. Erdogan filled TV screens across the region, has a non-Arab held such widespread popularity and uncontested influence in the Arab world.

But it is exactly those sort of imperial analogies that have Westerners worried about Turkey’s new assertiveness. It has become popular to call Mr. Erdogan’s tactics “neo-Ottoman,” after the Turk-led Muslim empire that conquered much of Europe, the Middle East and north Africa between the 14th and the 19th centuries. The worry is that Turkey is now turning away from its European roots – after being shunned by the European Union in its bid for membership – and using the power vacuums to its south to link up with the region’s Islamist parties and form a network of Islamic power to threaten the West.

It is a misleading analogy, mistaking Mr. Erdogan’s bold but self-interested mission for some sort of Islamic imperialism, but it is a popular and understandable one.

After all, Mr. Erdogan, a former Islamist and devout believer, launched this tour after turning a minor spat with Israel, Turkey’s traditional staunch ally, into an outright conflagration. After Israel refused to apologize earlier this month for its army’s killing of nine Turkish civilians aboard the controversial aid flotilla to Gaza in May of 2010, Mr. Erdogan responded furiously by withdrawing Turkey’s ambassador, suspending its military co-operation with Israel, and freezing all trade ties with the Jewish state.

His Arab tour has been laced with fiery criticisms of Israel, glowing support for the Palestinian cause, and macho statements suggesting a military showdown: “Israel will no longer be able to do what it wants in the Mediterranean,” he told an audience in Tunis on Thursday, “and you’ll be seeing Turkish warships in this sea.” That was only one of several such alarming sabre-rattling statements, suggesting that the spat with Israel is in large part intended to send a message of solidarity to his country’s Arab neighbours.

That, combined with the warm mutual embrace between Mr. Erdogan and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood (who tend to tell Western reporters that they see Turkey as their role model), has led some to fear that Europe’s largest Muslim state is turning to the dark side. It’s an alarming prospect, given that Turkey has Europe’s largest standing army and has become wealthy enough, from gas pipelines and industrial exports to Europe, to become a major power.

Yet most informed observers of Turkish diplomacy would say that’s a serious misreading.

“Yes, Turkey has been engaging its neighbourhood, and not just in the Middle East, and building its influence with Muslim states,” said Joshua W. Walker, a Turkey specialist who is a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “but it would be a mistake to think that this is a move away from the West or from democracy or secularism. They’re making a shift from a French style of secularism to an American one, where you’re allowed to be religious and still be in government, but there’s no sign that Turkey is moving away from the West.”

Indeed, many Western diplomats, including those from the United States, quietly say that Mr. Erdogan’s eastern turn is a welcome and beneficial development – in good part because it could herald the eclipse of Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s much more dangerous influence over the Arab states, but also because what Mr. Erdogan is doing is hardly imperial or Islamist.

His key message to Egyptians, delivered in a national TV interview, is that they should get rid of their old sharia-based constitution and become a secular state. “In Turkey, constitutional secularism is defined as the state remaining equidistant to all religions,” he said. “In a secular regime people are free to be religious or not.”

And if there was any ambiguity, he then told Egyptians that the most important thing Arabs should learn from Turkey is secularism – a word that is close to unmentionable in Egypt these days.

“I recommend a secular constitution for Egypt,” he said. “Do not fear secularism because it does not mean being an enemy of religion. I hope the new regime in Egypt will be secular. I hope that after these remarks of mine the way the Egyptian people look at secularism will change.”

That message was heard loudly across the Arab world, and provoked angry responses from the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups (who nevertheless still sought to associate themselves with the Turkish leader).

And it came alongside a number of other signs that Turkey is far from turning eastward. Just as he was falling into his feud with Israel, Mr. Erdogan struck a bold deal with the United States to use his country as the staging ground for a missile defence system that uses huge radar installations to protect against Iranian missile attacks. A senior U.S. official told the New York Times that it is “the most significant military co-operation between Washington and Ankara since 2003” and it was widely seen as part of a major boost in the country’s 59-year-old membership in NATO. At the same time, Turkey joined a major antiterrorism initiative with the United States. And its trade and political relations with European states have been growing strongly.

“If you actually examine what is happening,” says Fadi Hakura, head of the Turkey Project at London’s Chatham House, “you realize that this is the best possible situation for the United States and Europe – you have a strongly allied country that can exercise a tough position with Israel without promoting the kind of violence that other regional actors like Iran did.” In other words, Turkey may play the bad cop with Israel, but unlike Tehran, it won’t be interested in bankrolling terrorists groups like Hezbollah.

Mr. Ergdogan’s eastern thrust, accompanied by large aid expenditures across the Middle East, North Africa and Somalia, is part of a strategy engineered by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to build Turkey’s regional influence in order to avoid the multiple crises Turkey faced before 2000 when it was surrounded on all sides by menacing, unstable authoritarian states.

Mr. Davutoglu’s strategy is based on what he calls a “zero problems” relationship with Turkey’s neighbours, designed to minimize expensive confrontations. Given the bellicose standoff with Israel this week, and Mr. Erdogan’s own drift back into military conflict with his own Kurdish minority (whom he’d previously spent a decade granting impressive minority rights), it’s obvious that the problems with Turkey these days are far from zero. But they might be a lot fewer than you’d think.

Original Article

London

In the month since my city exploded in flames and mob violence, much has been swept clean. The burned-out blocks in Tottenham, Croydon and Clapham have been boarded up, the glaziers have repaired thousands of smashed shop windows and the courts have tried 1,715 looters, most of them young and male.

The violence is done, for now. But what’s opened up is a rupture in the ruling classes over how the riots should be understood and confronted. Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party has spoken in three distinct and disharmonious voices.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

See also my analysis during the riots: Not Race, Not Politics, but an Explosion of Futureless Youth

It’s worth listening to each of them, because they’re talking about something that extends far beyond the grey skies of London, confronting the major cities of most of the Western world’s economies.

The first response to the riots occurred while they were under way, when Mr. Cameron recalled the House of Commons for a rare August sitting and delivered a speech on the riots, denouncing them as the product of the “slow-motion moral collapse” of British society. “There is a major problem in our society,” he said in August, “with children growing up not knowing the difference between right and wrong.” This wasn’t about poverty or inequality, he said, but about sheer criminality. There’d need to be tough sentences, more discipline, fewer human rights, all in order to “restore a stronger sense of morality and responsibility.”

This, viewed cynically, was a summertime bid to win favour with two branches of Mr. Cameron’s party that have been alienated from the Tory mainstream since the Liberal-Conservative coalition formed in 2010: the social and moral conservatives of the backbench committee known as the Cornerstone Group; and the hard-core fans of Margaret Thatcher who insisted there was “no such thing as society” but only individuals making moral choices on their own.

But for many, this was somewhat unsatisfactory. While everyone agrees the rioters were the product of a morally challenged community prone to family breakdown, these things are a symptom, not a cause.

Something has caused thousands of Britons to enter a world where there’s nothing better to do than burn and loot, and where families don’t work. (And this was a riot of citizens, white and black, according to analyses of arrests: Almost no immigrants or their children were among those charged; in London, immigrants made up only 5 per cent of those arrested) Why do moral collapse and mass criminality seem to emerge, in strikingly similar ways, every time the economy takes a dive?

That led to the second major voice. Conservative Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, who referred to “the appalling social deficit that the riots have highlighted,” offered a larger explanation: the failure of institutions. He focused on prisons – which he said, are being used too much and are actually producing criminality, not reducing it.

Colleagues noted that an even larger problem lies in schools, which still allow – and often encourage – students to drop out at 16. As a result, a large cohort of young people – the children and grandchildren of the old English white-and black-skinned working class – have never found a place in the postindustrial economies of information and finance. And they have fallen into a set of institutions that seem almost engineered to prevent them from finding a place, tossing them into the “petty crime” grey economy, instead.

The third voice emerged this week from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, a Scotsman whose views straddle the line between the family-values Victorianism of the social conservatives and the more liberal conservatism of Mr. Clarke.

His focus was not on morality or the institutions, but on the home: Most of the rioters live in the districts that are peppered with Britain’s infamous expanses of grim postwar public-housing complexes (known as council estates). These places serve as traps: If you’re in them, you’re disconnected from the legitimate economy, without a path to a better life.

“For years now, too many people have remained unaware of the true nature of life on some of our estates,” Mr. Duncan Smith wrote. “This was because we had ghettoized many of these problems, keeping them out of sight of the middle-class majority. But last month the inner city finally came to call, and the country was shocked by what it saw.”

It sounds like three men looking, from different angles, at a large machine designed to turn once-hopeful families into marginal outcasts. While they argue over how to fix it, we ought to ask whether we have such machines in our own garden.

Original Article

Antwerp

To look around the elegant city of Antwerp, you wouldn’t know that Belgium has now gone longer without a government than any country in modern history.

The trains still run on time, the teachers show up in their classrooms, museums are packed, taxes are collected, welfare is paid, and the country’s F-16 fighter jets are dropping bombs in Libya - - even though Belgium has now gone a year and a quarter without a federal government, after the June 13, 2010 elections produced no majority and the feuding parties became locked in perpetual disagreement over coalition plans.

Read a shorter version of this article in The Globe and Mail

On Wednesday, the 454 th day without a government, Belgium’s King Albert II returned home early from his vacation in an ultimate attempt to negotiate a coalition government, after caretaker prime minister Yves Laterme quit to take a new job in Paris, and negotiator and potential prime minister Elio Di Rupo said talks were “seriously blocked” between the parties. The disagreements are rooted in a deep schism between the French-speaking province of Wallonia in the south and Dutch-speaking Flanders, whose parties have separatist ambitions.

If these latest talks fail - - and the odds are no better than even, observers say - - then Belgium will return to an awkward limbo in which legislation (such as participating in the NATO campaign in Libya) is only able to pass if MPs reach a majority vote among themselves, without a government to support them - - a rare occurrence.

For some, this might sound like a libertarian’s idea of utopia: A country with nobody to raise taxes, or to slash spending, or to introduce major new government programs.

And indeed, Belgium has just managed, despite having only a largely powerless caretaker government, to post second-quarter economic growth rates - - of 0.7 per cent - - that exceeded neighbouring Germany, France and Britain. The country’s world-leading beer industry, analysts say, has remained aloft as the world drinks away its financial sorrows. And the government deficit has even been cut somewhat.

But beneath the surface, the cracks are beginning to show. Without anyone at the rudder, tiny Belgium is in danger of colliding with some of the world’s more dangerous currents, and the next few weeks could be decisive.

That becomes apparent here in Antwerp, the second largest city and the economic hub of the Dutch-speaking province of Flanders. Recent weeks have seen violent clashes between drug dealers and mainly Moroccan shopkeepers seeking to clean up their streets in the city’s poor northern districts.

Police officials here say that the drug problem escalated when the neighbouring government of the Netherlands launched a huge campaign to drive the drug trade out of Rotterdam, which for years had been the “French connection” for heroin trafficking. The drug gangs, seeing an opportunity in a weakly governed state, moved their operations an hour south to Antwerp.

“Our crime problem now requires the kind of major solution that can only come from the federal government - - but it looks like we can’t do anything until we get one,” said a police official with the Antwerp force.

And even more serious problems - - ones that cannot be solved without a government — are looming just beneath the surface in Brussels, the capital.

“We have two big problems: One is reputation, as we are being ridiculed around the world, and reputation counts for a lot. We are losing investor confidence,” said Marc De Vos of the Itinera Institute, a Brussels political think tank. “And the other is the fact that, as a country, we are standing still. We are unable to make unable to make any structural reforms, so we are falling behind other countries.”

The caretaker government has been able to pass bills to make modest spending cuts, but the country’s larger problems, rooted in demography and the European crisis, would be challenging for any country with a majority administration, never mind one with no government at all.

“There are major decisions that have to be taken,” said Yves Desmet, political editor of the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. “We have a pension crisis that is threatening to overwhelm us, for which we don’t have the means, we haven’t put aside any money, and nobody has decided how to pay all those pensions. And you have a gigantic public debt of almost 100 per cent of GDP and growing. And those decisions can’t be taken without a government with full power.”

By the end of November, Belgium will need to pass a 2012 budget - - something that is almost impossible without a full government. A caretaker regime might be able to continue existing programs and services, but the difficult work of adjusting its economy to prevent a future crisis would require a governing coalition.

Belgium will almost certainly have to raise its retirement age from 65 to 67 in order to prevent a major crisis, but this can’t even be contemplated now. It will probably have to change its labour market - - 60 per cent of all job growth has been government-subsidized, which is unsustainable.

Yet it is not at all clear that these problems can be solved, even with a government. The Flemish parties would like to seize their province’s share of the tax revenue and use it to fund their own, separate programs. Most of the French speakers would prefer it stay national. And as the country has gone through 10 attempts to form a government without success, the parties have become even more entrenched in their positions and less compromise-oriented.

As a final insult, it seems that the fiscal problems will strike Belgium at precisely the moment when it forms a government - - assuming it is able to do so by 2012, which is not at all certain. In that case, the awkward years without a government may be remembered as an economic and political golden age.

“It’s not for nothing,” Mr. Desmet said, “that Belgium is the birthplace of surrealism.”

Original Article

London

As Greece teeters on the edge of insolvency this week, worries about Europe’s ability to hold its currency union together have shifted from a debt-crippled Greek economy to a German government that appears to be withdrawing from its economic responsibilities.

News on Monday that Greece is within weeks of running out of cash, and that Berlin is increasingly willing to allow Athens to fail, sent both the euro and European markets tumbling, with the German DAX down more than 2 per cent, France’s Cac falling 4 per cent and the euro falling to a 10-year low against the yen.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

Also read my detailed report from Düsseldorf on Germany’s inward turn

Greece is preparing last-ditch emergency measures this week, including a one-shot property tax, in a desperate bid to prevent an insolvency when the country runs out of cash in mid-October, and appears unlikely to meet the conditions for its next emergency loan.

Berlin has chosen this awkward moment to become embroiled in a highly charged political crisis over its response.

The shift was signalled on Friday, when Gunther Oettinger, the top German representative in the European Union, proposed that a bureaucratic invasion force be sent from Brussels to Greece to seize the struggling country’s assets “without regard to resistance.” (Mr. Oettinger also suggested that Greece and other debtors be forced to fly their flags at half-mast in Brussels.) Berlin papers characterized the proposal as a UN-style “blue helmet” operation; Greeks likened it to Germany’s Second World War invasion.

The same day, the German representative on the European Central Bank resigned, apparently in protest against emergency bailout purchases of troubled countries’ bonds. Most economists agree that far more such purchases are needed to stabilize the euro – along with a far looser interest-rate policy, something Germany has also resisted.

Then, on Sunday, officials close to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, suggested the forced “drachma-ization” of Greece – removing the country from the 17-nation euro bloc and reverting it to its former currency – was a plausible solution, even though such a move at this moment would devastate Greece and its neighbours and damage European banks.

On Monday, Ms. Merkel’s Economy Minister, Philipp Rosler, said “an orderly bankruptcy of Greece” should be considered – a day after Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou stood up to 20,000 protesters and vowed to do everything necessary to keep his country in the euro.

It is now apparent that many German leaders have given up on the project of keeping the euro together. This is deeply inconvenient timing, at a moment when most economists agree that any stable solution to the euro would require a far deeper engagement by Germany and other major economies, including big initiatives to share debt and fiscal instruments with their euro zone neighbours.

“It is not very helpful if German government members start talking out loud about a Greek insolvency,” the German edition of the Financial Times warned on Monday. “Even those members of the coalition who are skeptical … should have realized by now that such debates produce exactly the opposite of stability in the euro zone.”

While Ms. Merkel made efforts on Monday to tone down the increasingly hostile rhetoric of her colleagues, the core issue remains her government’s lack of political will. It is a problem that has persisted from the beginning, when Europe issued a €110-billion bailout to Greece early last year. Germans, and sometimes also French, insist on seeing the crisis as one of irresponsible southern countries imposing themselves on their wealthy neighbours.

By choosing to punish Greece rather than helping build a sustainable economy within the 17-nation currency union, Ms. Merkel’s colleagues would be denying their own deep responsibility in the crisis.

From the beginning, Germany used the initial strength of the deutschmark to position itself as the chief exporter and lender to its poorer neighbours, creating a situation where debt and obligations were piling up in the periphery.

Greece will never be able to escape the cycle of deepening debt and austerity measures until it is able to return to economic growth, or at least to stability. Instead, the opposite is happening: Rather than contracting by 3.8 per cent this year – the number upon which bailout plans were based – Greece’s economy is projected to plummet 5.3 per cent.

The large and patient investments required to turn Greece around would allow Mr. Papandreou to finish restructuring the economy without facing an immanent collapse. They would shore up the finances of neighbouring countries and reassure investors. And they would stabilize German banks and allow the euro’s members to find a path to stability and recovery some day.

“What was ignored for 10 years can’t be fixed overnight,” Ms. Merkel said Monday in a moment of considerable wisdom. “That means that we have to be patient.”

But, in general, large and patient investments are falling away from Berlin’s vision. The mood has turned to quick and decisive punishments, damn the consequences.

Original Article

Like most people, Mohammed Abdel Rahman remembers exactly where he was when the Twin Towers fell. He was in Afghanistan, holding a rifle, among the men who ordered and backed the Sept. 11 attacks. While he says he didn’t cheer that day, people around him were rejoicing.

The bearded Egyptian, who was later captured and tortured by U.S. forces, was a pioneering member of the al-Qaeda generation – the frustrated and pious men, mainly middle class and Middle Eastern, who took up arms, bombs and sometimes jetliners against Western governments starting in the 1990s.

Read column in The Globe and Mail

His father, Omar (known as the “blind sheik”), had organized the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and had been a founding leader of al-Qaeda. The younger Mr. Abdel Rahman was one of thousands of young Egyptians, Saudis and other Arabs whose preferred political outlet consisted of pursuing martyrdom in what they saw as a struggle against the West.

Yet, when he sat down to speak this week in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mr. Abdel Rahman had a different message. “My vision hasn’t changed, but the political agenda has,” he says. “Egypt now has become a free and democratic country, so I would advise young people to engage in political activities rather than taking up arms – everything has changed.”

While al-Qaeda remains an organized threat in Pakistan, Yemen and a few other corners, all indications are that the zealots who would have joined a decade ago are now turning in droves to the new democratic movements. They might want to impose a religious government on their country (an idea rejected by a majority in Egypt), but they want to do so by the ballot. A poll this year by the Pew Research Center showed that admiration for Osama bin Laden has plummeted across the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, dropping by 40 per cent in Jordan and the Palestinian territories and by 20 per cent in Egypt.

There’s good reason to believe that international Islamic terrorism is a generational phenomenon, just like the wave of left-wing terrorism that swept across North America and Western Europe in the 1970s. While jihadists (mainly Pakistani now) may still have some attacks left in them, I’d be surprised if their movement exists at the end of this decade.

Al-Qaeda and its cousins were not an inevitable development. They were born out of the struggle for control of the new countries created with the dissolution of the British and French empires after the Second World War. Strongman dictatorships and tribal oligarchies became the dominant force in the region, and their rival postcolonial opponents – at first both Marxist and Islamic – were violently crushed.

A great many of the Islamists, who might otherwise have become a conservative but essentially harmless part of the domestic political spectrum, were silenced, tortured and exiled into violent extremism – directed at first against the governments of their own countries (such as the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat), then against the Western nations that seemed to be keeping those governments in power.

“When you were blocked, as we were in Egypt, you develop an attitude – you feel that your only useful means are violence, and that your enemies are those who are supporting the regime that is killing you,” says Usama Rushdy, another Egyptian ex-jihadist (he was a founder of the group that killed Mr. Sadat) who has long since renounced violence and has now joined the democratic revolution – in his case, even more dramatically, by becoming a democratic pluralist and providing backing to non-religious candidates as well as moderate Islamists.

The postcolonial years destroyed the valour of specific identity. People no longer saw any pride in identifying themselves as “Egyptian,” and even “Arab” seemed a humiliation. After 9/11, the long-discredited medieval idea of a distinct and monolithic “Islam” and “West” took hold. North American leaders bought it, and so did thousands of men who had no other useful identity.

Now, suddenly, they’re seeing themselves as Egyptians again, and as Tunisians and Libyans and Syrians. Their ideas remain alarming. But, 10 years on, they’re fighting for them in the bear pit of national politics, not in the isolated netherworld of bullets and box cutters.

Original Article

Benghazi

For more than 20 years, he was Moammar Gadhafi’s most notorious political prisoner – the Islamist ringleader who escaped the 1996 one-day massacre of 1,200 of his fellow inmates and survived a decade in solitary confinement.

Today, as Col. Gadhafi’s rebel opponents falter in the rebel capital of Benghazi, Mohammed Busidra has quietly turned himself into the post-Gadhafi kingmaker.

Read article in The Globe and Mail

While secular and military figures have fallen into factional fighting, Mr. Busidra, 53, has brought together Libya’s disparate moderate Islamist leaders into the country’s only united political force. He has written a constitution that they have agreed upon, and is organizing Libya’s mosques into a political machine. This has made him, in the view of many people here, the figure who will wield the most political power, and likely control the country’s leadership, in the event of the dictator’s demise.

“We have to prepare our country politically now, to prevent any political vacuum from occurring when the criminal Gadhafi is gone,” Mr. Busidra said in the first interview he has given since early March. “And I can assure you, when we Islamists establish a party, which will be on a national basis, I think we will win comfortably.”

This assessment is shared, sometimes with alarm, by many of his opponents.

“The Islamist opposition are much better organized and financed than us because they are focused entirely on politics,” says Mohammed Bujamaya, founder of the Liberal Gathering, one of several secularist proto-parties struggling for recognition in Benghazi. “We are tied up with the crisis, while they have their figures outside of Benghazi and sometimes out of the country, scheming.”

The prospect of the multinational NATO air-warfare campaign, in which Canada is a participant, effectively helping usher in a democratic Islamist government is causing some unease among member nations. “It is not the best outcome we could hope for, but the Islamists will probably play a role,” says one European diplomat.

On the other hand, some Western figures say they prefer to keep Mr. Busidra empowered because he has worked to prevent Islamic extremists – such as al-Qaeda fighters and jihadist veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns – from becoming influential in post-Gadhafi politics.

“I make a point of meeting with these fighters,” Mr. Busidra says, “And what I say is: ‘Let us be clear from now on. If you are here to represent your ideologies, or to represent al-Qaeda, please leave our country.’ “ His group is presenting itself as a moderate Islamist option, opposed both to the sharia-law absolutism of the Salafists, al-Qaeda and other jihadi fighters, and to secularism.

“I can tell you one thing. I know the Libyan people, and they will not accept very strict Islam – that is definite,” he says. “Yet they will not accept a secular regime. Neither of them will be accepted by Libyans. Those who will win a general election are not secularists or Salafists, but are those who will respect Islam, and at the same time will be able to co-operate with modern life.”

But his moderation only goes so far. For those Libyans hoping that their country will become a liberal-minded holiday destination like neighbouring Tunisia, or a place with European-style equality of gender and sexuality, these Islamists will go only so far.

Mr. Busidra’s proposed Islamist constitution does not impose sharia law – which he says should not be part of the Libyan state – but rather insists that no law be passed which offends the principles of Islam. So, he says, it would remain acceptable for women to leave their heads unveiled (as is frequently done in Libya), as long as head scarves aren’t mentioned in law. But, he insists, both alcohol and homosexuality will have to remain strictly illegal, as will the praise of any religion other than Islam.

Mr. Busidra’s network is formidable: It includes the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood; the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, which is the largest fighting force among the rebel armies and is led by the influential cleric Ismail Al-Sallabi; the even more popular cleric, Mr. Sallabi’s Doha-based brother Sheikh Ali Sallabi; and a half-dozen other imams and leaders well known in Libya, including more moderate former members of the long-banned Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Mr. Busidra’s circle is opposed to the extreme Islam of al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

The Islamists have largely stayed outside of the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council, Libya’s internationally recognized interim rebel government, in large part because NTC executives must pledge not to enter politics after the revolution. But they appear to be dominating military matters and attempting to influence the highest ranks of the NTC.

This point was all rendered much more stark this week with the killing of General Abdel Fatah Younis, the rebels’ top military commander, apparently by members of one of the Islamist-led militias who are part of Mr. Busidra’s circle.

In a sign of this Islamist network’s increasing power, this week Col. Gadhafi’s leading son, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, gave an interview in which he claimed that he had struck a deal with Ali Sallabi to share power. Mr. Sallabi denied this, though he said he had met with Mr. Gadhafi to discuss a surrender. Whether Saif’s statement was a tactic to divide the opposition or to frighten the West with the spectre of an Islamist aftermath, it showed that Mr. Busidra’s network has become the leading post-revolutionary force.

Mr. Busidra says that he will not run for president, but that he is pushing for Sheikh Ali Sallabi to run: “We regard him as a very qualified leader. He’s very moderate, he’s also very nationalist, and I think most of the people like him.”

But there is something of the campaigning politician in Mr. Busidra himself. He speaks in clear English whose slight Welsh twinge betrays his background – it was while studying biochemistry at Cardiff University that he discovered political Islam – and acts like a diplomat: He opens the interview with lavish praise for Canada’s participation in the NATO campaign. “If Canada didn’t get involved, we could have all been killed by now … we are thankful to Canada and the rest of the alliance, and we hope you will put more effort into accelerating the disappearance of this criminal.”

Islamist politics are not an inevitable outcome in Libya, a country whose people often wear their religion lightly and abhor the strict asceticism of Saudi-style Islamic leadership.

But Mr. Busidra’s group has a number of advantages over any political competition. For one thing, their names – especially Mr. Busidra’s – are virtually synonymous with the February 17 protests whose brutal repression by Mr. Gadhafi’s forces marked the birth of the Libyan revolution. Mr. Busidra, already a well-known preacher, gained popularity in February when he issued a fatwa making it a sin not to join the protests.

Those protests began as mass rallies in support of the mothers of the 1,270 Islamists, mainly young men, who were machine-gunned to death at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison on one day in 1996. The civil-rights lawyer who represented the mothers, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, is a staunch secularist who is now the vice-chairman of the rebels’ NTC administration (and is also thought to have a future in politics).

Mr. Busidra had been the negotiator for the prisoners in 1996. Like most of them, he had been imprisoned in 1989 with no charge, after having joined the Pakistani-based Muslim proselytizing movement Tablighi Jamaat – usually considered very moderate and apolitical – while studying engineering in Wales. He would spend the next 20 years and six months in prison, many of them as an organizer of other Islamists.

The fact that he was spared indicates that he was considered powerful enough to be kept alive as a bargaining chip. And when he was released in 2009, as part of a rapproachement with the West organized by Saif Gadhafi, he was given the job of organizing Libya’s prison religious services by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, who was then Libya’s reformist justice minister and is now the head of the rebels’ NTC.

The prison experience, he says, turned him into more of a nationalist than a mere holy man. “I was 30 when I went into prison; when I came out, I was 51,” he says. “So it means I have grown up, and I have started to think, and see things from another point of view.”

And, he says, his group will remain favourable toward the West and its governments and oil corporations, and will not have any objection to sharing power with secular and liberal parties – so long as they don’t offend the Islamists’ core principles.

“The moment they respect our values – Islamic values – and the moment they won’t impose any law or any constitutional rule which is against Islam, we have no reason not to co-operate with liberals and secularists,” he says. “We have no objection to anybody ruling us, as long as there is justice, freedom and equality. During Gadhafi’s days, there was nothing like that.”

Photo by Doug Saunders

Original Article