London

On a patch of land scarred black by the industrial revolution, bombed flat by Hitler and denuded by decades of poverty and neglect, a country with little money and less self-confidence held the world’s most expensive and difficult sporting event.

And when it ended in a spectacle of pomp-free pop and quintessentially East London polyglot pageantry, there was a very surprising national sense of elation: Nobody had expected such a seamless 17 days of sport, such a mellow reception to 100,000 guests and such an extraordinary haul of medals for the hosts.

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Original Article

London

What happened Wednesday in Tripoli was almost unprecedented in the modern history of the Middle East. In a modest ceremony, the revolutionary council representing the rebel forces that overthrew Moammar Gadhafi willingly handed power over to a democratically elected, broadly liberal, non-Islamist government.

It was unprecedented in another way: This transition to democracy came about simply because the people of Libya chose it and fought for it. It was not part of any larger strategic or political scheme carried out by the United States, Europe, Israel or Russia.

Read full column in The Globe and Mail

Resources for this column:
David Crist’s new history The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran
Iran’s 2003 “grand bargain” opening to the United States: The original Washington Post article revealing the offer, some PBS interviews with the White House officials who ignored it, and Trita Parsi’s indispensable book on it.

Original Article

London

Looking for an out-of-the-way holiday destination this summer – some undiscovered place that’s off the tourist trail? Try London.

You might think the British capital would be jammed to the rafters with visitors flying in for the 2012 Olympics, which has attracted 100,000 spectators from other countries. But in an economic phenomenon that repeats itself every four years, the Olympics have driven away most of the 300,000 tourists who’d usually be in London over the summer – a loss that far outweighs any tourism benefits from the Games.

Read full article in The Globe and Mail

Also, this detail:

Economic forecasters have said that London should not expect to see economic gains flowing from hosting the Olympics, despite a $14.5 billion public investment.

“Overall, we think that the Olympics are unlikely to provide a substantial boost to the UK economy and believe that the impact of infrastructure developments on UK GDP has probably already been felt,” Moody’s Corporate Finance Group cautioned in a report issued in June.

Original Article

This is my guest post for Informed Comment. It is drawn from my forthcoming book The Myth of the Muslim Tide.

The attacks on two of the most prominent Muslims in American public life last week seemed to have come out of the blue. It appeared as if five Republican Representatives had arbitrarily chosen this moment to lash out at Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Representative Keith Ellison for no reason other than their religion, in a bid to discredit the entire concept of Muslims taking part in national politics and government.

A sequence of letters and public denunciations, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann and backed by four other Representatives, accused the two of being somehow indirectly affiliated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The charges were so devoid of substance that senior Republican leaders and many members of Congress were quick to condemn them as bizarre and inappropriate. Still, even though they came from a marginal corner of Congress (albeit one representing millions of Americans), the language of the attacks was drawn from an increasingly mainstream set of claims about Muslims in the West. The letters from the Representatives argued that Muslims in the U.S. government are part of a wide plot involving numerous ordinary Muslim-Americans to “impose shariah worldwide,” to “undermine the U.S. Constitution,” and to advocate “that Muslims not integrate into the cultures of non-Muslim countries.” For a surprising number of Americans, these phrases represent commonsense thought about the Muslims in their midst.

These myths are strikingly similar to the set of charges that were commonly directed toward Roman Catholic and East European Jewish immigrants between the 1890s and the 1960s – that these groups are disloyal, supportive of violence, unwilling to integrate into Western values, driven by a religion that is actually an ideology of conquest, and poised to swamp our society through high reproduction rates. The people who hold these ideas, then as now, are not simply racists or xenophobes but often liberals who have come to believe – - based on misleading or distorted information – - that religious-minority outsiders are a threat to their freedoms and liberties.

In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, these ideas came to be applied to Muslims in the West in a sequence of bestselling books, YouTube videos, websites, op-eds and activist campaigns organized by a small circle of anti-immigration authors and activists, increasingly often with funding from conservative foundations. The notion of a “Muslim tide” penetrated the American imagination. The millions of people who bought their books and watched their videos may not have subscribed to the movement’s full idea of an Islamic plot to take over Western civilization through immigration. In many cases they were simply trying to understand the different and sometimes strange-looking newcomers in their midst, and the simultaneous emergence of Islamic terrorism – - but the effect has been to popularize an interlocking set of myths about Muslim immigration.

In my book The Myth of the Muslim Tide, I explain the history of these ideas and trace their emergence in twenty-first century popular and political thought, and provide a detailed, research-based examination of the realities behind them. Luckily, the past five years have seen a number of very large-scale international studies and surveys that have revolutionized our understanding of the beliefs, views, behaviours and loyalties of Muslim immigrants and their offspring. What emerges is a picture of a set of communities undergoing the classic experience of immigration and integration – - with the same difficulties and challenges experienced by poor Catholics and Jews in their time –  but burdened with a set of popular myths that are leading them increasingly to be rejected and marginalized by the wider population.

I have identified three nested groups of myths that together have created a widespread misunderstanding of Muslims in the West and poisoned our political environment.

1 – The myth of extremism

Core to the “Muslim tide” ideology is the belief that the jihadist terror attacks of the past decade are the result of the immigration of Muslims to the countries of Europe and North America. It has become popular to believe that violent jihad is simply an extension – - or perhaps the essence – - of ordinary Islamic belief. “It’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion,” the popular “Muslim tide” author Mark Steyn wrote in a typical passage, “but that the religion itself is a political project – - and in fact an imperial project.”

Is Islamic extremism simply a more explicit extension of ordinary Islamic belief? Is it cheered, even if not actively supported, by Muslims throughout the West?

Our belief that Western Muslims are cheering terrorism is often based on a few misleading statistics. True, one survey showed that 7 per cent of U.S. Muslims feel that acts of violence against civilian targets are “sometimes justified” and an additional 1 per cent feel they are “often justified.” That’s a chilling figure, until you learn that, in the same survey, 24 per cent of non-Muslim Americans said that such attacks are “sometimes justified” and 6 per cent feel they are “always justified.”

In fact, numerous other studies show that support for violence, death penalties and “honour” killings among Western Muslims is usually similar to, and sometimes lower than, that of the general population. And support for figures such as Osama bin Laden has dwindled to the point of being barely above the levels in the general population.

It’s the same when it comes to support for sharia law (which is simply the Islamic name for religious law, as with the Ten Commandments received by Moses and also used in Jewish and Christian holy law). In the United States, Gallup found that 46 per cent of citizens say they believe scripture should be “a source” of laws, while another 9 per cent feel it should be “the only source” of law – - numbers that don’t differ much between Christians and Muslims – - and other studies show that Muslims in the United States and their community leaders have no measurable desire or ambition to make this reality. In France, where people are more secular, studies show that three-quarters of Muslims are actively opposed to sharia, almost half of them support the ban on headscarves in schools, and their rates of atheism and non-attendance of weekly prayers is about the same as that among Catholics. In other words, Muslims tend to adjust quickly to the level of religious observance around them.

But what about the terrorists themselves? There have been a number of major studies of their beliefs and motives in recent years, and what is clear is that almost none of them are motivated by religious faith or a desire to impose their beliefs on the world around them. Quite the contrary: it has repeatedly been shown that more religious Muslims are the least inclined to terrorism, and that those drawn to extremism are propelled by political, territorial and very often personal motives unrelated to faith. Not only that, but those Muslims who are living in tight-knit, religious-conservative communities and Islamic “ghettoes” are the least likely to go into political extremism or terrorism: Extremism tends be the preserve or fairly wealthy, educated Muslims who are isolated from other Muslims in relatively well-off neighborhoods. It’s not the “Muslim tide” that is creating extremism, but rather the political beliefs of a few middle-class loners.

Indeed, a large-scale new study conducted by a group of U.S. researchers who examined the Koran passages quoted by 2,000 Islamic terrorists and supporters found no suggestion that any of them want to convert the West to Islam – - rather, their messages are of a nationalistic nature, based on preserving the separation of Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. It’s no coincidence that “Muslim tide” figures such as Thilo Sarrazin in Germany and Christopher Caldwell in the United States express admiration for the “civilizational strength” of Muslim fundamentalist believers: They share the same core belief in independent and divergent civilizations.

2 – The myth of non-integration

Underlying the belief that every Western Muslim is a potential terrorist is the larger idea that Muslim immigrants and their offspring are opposed to Western values and lifestyles and are seeking non-integrated “parallel societies.”

In terms of loyalties, Muslim immigrants express levels of support for their new countries that are similar – - and often higher – - than those of the native-born population.  Yes, almost half of all American Muslims say they feel “Muslim first and American second” and 69% say religion is “very important in their lives.” But that’s almost exactly the same as with American Christians, 46% of whom see themselves as “Christian first and American second” and 70% say religion is very important in their lives.

All data point to Muslim immigrants and their children integrating into their surrounding societies as fast as, and sometimes faster than, the poor Catholics and Jews of the last century. In education, Muslims are leaders: 40% of American Muslims have earned a post-secondary degree, making them the second most educated religious group after Jews (61%) and far ahead of average Americans (29%).

In political beliefs, Muslims differ little: an impressive 62% of American Muslims say that Israel and Palestine can be reconciled, a rate nearly identical to the larger American population (67%). And even on heated issues of gender and sexuality, Muslims are becoming notably integrated: In the U.S., 90% of Muslims say women should be allowed to work outside the home, and 7 our of 10 say there is no difference between male and female politicians – - views little different from those of Americans in general. And 39% of U.S. Muslims (and 41% of those born in America) said in 2009 that homosexuality should be accepted – - lower than the 58% acceptance rate among Americans in general, but considerably higher than the 27% response given by U.S. Muslims four years earlier. In other words, they are falling into the patterns of mainstream American belief at an astonishingly rapid rate.  These are not the patterns of a self-isolating “parallel society,” but of people struggling to become as American as the people around them.

3.  – The myth of population

Wrapped around these images of violence and separatism is a gnawing sense that the Muslims are arriving in droves and will soon outnumber the rest of us. Even people who don’t subscribe to the notion of “stealth sharia” and theological conquest tend to believe that Muslims have inherently larger family sizes and therefore are poised – - perhaps deliberately – - to become majorities in European countries and American states, if not everywhere. Every author of “Muslim tide” literature expresses this idea in more or less dramatic form, and it is probably the reason why this movement has quickly become so popular.

Yet this is the most misleading myth of them all. Muslim family sizes and population growth rates are falling faster than among any other population in the world. Even in the most religious Islamic countries, family sizes are fast falling below the population-growth rate of 2.1 children per family. In Iran, where the average number had 7 children in the 1980s, it has fallen to 1.7 – - lower than in France. In Turkey, it is 2.1 children; in Lebanon, 1.9; in Tunisia, 2.0; in Indonesia, 2.19 and falling fast. Bosnian Muslims, at the heart of so many of the “Eurabia” theories of population takeover,  have 1.23 children per family – - the very lowest rate in Europe.

What happens when they emigrate? Some observers have noted that Muslims have larger families when they immigrate to the West than they did in their home countries, fuelling theories of conquest by reproduction. Yet these are misleading: Because immigrants have most of their children within a few years of arrival, their official fertility rates are skewed unnaturally high. And Muslim immigrants overwhelmingly tend to come from rural regions, leading to higher family sizes than their originating country’s general population.

There have been a number of very large-scale projections of Muslim populations conducted by respected organizations over the past few years. All of them show that the population-growth rate among Muslim immigrants and their offspring is falling extremely fast in every Western country, and is poised to converge with the native-born fertility rates by mid-century.

In the United States, Muslims tend to be very new immigrants – 63% of them were born in another country, and 71% of those immigrants arrived after 1990 – - so they have a comparatively high population-growth rate. In 20 years, there will be 6.3 million Muslims in the United States, making them, at 1.7% of the population, almost as numerous as Jews and Episcopalians. American Muslims currently have 2.5 children per family, higher than the U.S. average of 2.1. But that rate is falling, so that their population in 20 years is likely to be close to a peak: The children of these immigrants appear to be having about the same number of children that average Americans do.

Declining family sizes are a clear indicator of social, economic and educational integration: When people are adopting a host society’s values, their family sizes converge, and their use of birth control increases. This is demonstrably happening throughout the West.

Whatever problems are plaguing Muslim communities – - and they are numerous – - a secret desire to impose an alien religion upon an uncomprehending West is not one of them. The Muslims in our midst are following a path taken by millions of religious minorities who have arrived, adjusted, struggled against popular myths, and become integral parts of our societies. A simple examination of the facts shows this to be the case. We just have to take the time to look.

Doug Saunders’ book The Myth of the Muslim Tide will be published by Vintage in the United States and Knopf in Canada in August. A German edition will be published by Karl Blessing Verlag in October. 

Photo of Michele Bachmann: courier-journal.com

Original Article

London

We’re still calling it a “debt crisis.” And when we feel the jobs sweeping away and the cold hand of stagnation choking off the economy and threatening recession, we tend to search for an explanation by peering into the bottomless pit of debt.

But in most parts of the world, including Canada, debt is not the major problem. That was four years ago. Today, a far bigger threat is pouring down from atop the most prominent and least remarked-upon new addition to our financial landscape: all those teetering mountains of cash.

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Original Article

Munich

Until now, it seemed that the greatest threats to the future of the euro were the collapsing economies of Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland. But in recent days, a less likely threat has emerged: Bavaria.

This southern German state, known for its staunchly conservative politics, has launched a multi-pronged mutiny against German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her efforts to build a bailout plan for the euro economies, and the whole notion of European integration.

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Original Article

London

Every four years, at around this time, you start reading stories about the “Olympic ideal,” which is always described as having been betrayed. This is usually because something has been done to make the forthcoming Games seem closed, restricted, exclusive or elite.

[…]

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I examine the true ethos of the Olympic movement:

As it happens, this summer marks the 100th anniversary of the moment when the modern Olympic ideal made itself most abundantly clear. That occurred shortly after Jim Thorpe, the legendary native American athlete, bolted out of the starting blocks at the Stockholm Olympics and won twin gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon. “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world,” King Gustav of Sweden told him as he presented the medals, to which Thorpe famously answered, “Thanks, King.”

That warmth did not last long. A few months after the Games, the International Olympic Committee unceremoniously stripped Thorpe of both his medals and purged him from the record books. Their reason? They learned that two years earlier, stuck for income, he had played some minor-league baseball games. This, in the interpretation of the IOC, made him a “professional” athlete.

Original Article

Berlin

Berlin today does not look or feel like an imperial centre. In fact, it does everything it can to be the precise opposite, a living monument to the horrors and follies of attempting to rule the world, its well-maintained bombsites, bunkers and wall fragments a permanent reminder of history’s two bloodiest attempts, from the Reichstag and then the Kremlin, to expand control beyond one’s own borders.

So you might understand why Germans, and their leaders, have been slow and wary to accept that their fortunes are now intimately linked to a circle of countries that have become economic colonies, and that this responsibility carries very large-scale, and non-optional, costs and responsibilities for the German taxpayer.

They don’t like to think of it that way. When it became apparent this week that Berlin will have to contribute at least $32-billion toward a Greek rescue plan over the next three years, the front page of Bild, the flamboyant Berlin tabloid that represents a window into the country’s unguarded id, went apoplectic: “Billions for Greece: What’s In It For Us?” it asked in three-inch-high type.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had hoped that the big cash rescue could be put aside until after the May 9 regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, where news of a big foreign payout could hurt her party’s fortunes.

But the Greek crisis, and the mounting Portuguese and possibly Spanish and Italian crises, are, at their heart, and in their origin, German crises.

Ms. Merkel realized, almost too late, that letting the rescue wait will only cost Germany more money and possibly destroy its institutions, so on Thursday she took action and primed the pumps for a bailout. Greece and its neighbours, she acknowledged, are not just nearby countries; they are umbilically linked to Germany, and their fates had become inseparable.

To understand this, you need to visit the residential shopping streets of southern Europe. What you will see is German: The food in the supermarkets, the electronics shops, the clothing outlets and a great many of the cars on the road, to say nothing of the olive presses, sewage-treatment plants and fishing boats. The banks used by consumers are often branches of German chains, and their loans have financed huge building booms.

Germany is the world’s second-largest exporter, ahead of the United States and exceeded only by China, and its largest markets are its European neighbours. These countries are net importers: They meet most of their needs by buying things from other countries, especially Germany, which has used its size and wealth to build efficiencies, and economies of scale, that make its exports irresistibly cheap.

This leads to a balance-of-payments deficit: These importing countries have more money flowing out of their borders than they have coming in – for Greece, an amount equivalent to a tenth of the entire economy – and Germany has a surplus, with piles of it stacking up.

When other countries have balance-of-payments deficits, they can escape by devaluing their currencies and slashing the exchange rate. This, in essence, is what the United States is doing to ease its $2-trillion imbalance with China. But Greece and Germany share a currency, the euro, so that option isn’t possible. And in a common-currency system, a balance-of-payments deficit becomes a fiscal deficit: It turns into government debt.

Money cannot sit still, and nature abhors a vacuum, so German banks disposed of those heaps of surplus export-payment cash by lending it to companies, especially property developers, in those same countries at low interest rates. And they lent it to their governments, too, to fill their need for missing cash, which would in turn be spent on more German goods and services.

Through this constantly repeated cycle of exports, payments, surpluses and then loans to southern Europe, Berlin became an imperial centre, tying its southern neighbours to dependencies on debt and cheap exported goods. Switching sides was impossible: Unlike China, Greece didn’t have an undervalued currency in which to pay its workers and sell its goods, so it had no hope of developing a strong export sector. Germany had got the jump, by developing high-productivity big industries that its customer states could never match.

Ms. Merkel talked yesterday of using her country’s patronage to cure Greece of its miscreant ways. “We will not shirk our responsibility,” she said. “But the precondition is that Greece accepts an exacting program which will allow the restoration of market confidence in Greece.”

That’s a start. But as it stands, a complete rescue will only return Greece and its neighbours to the status quo ante: Dependency on German exports, German debt, German rescues. To end the cycle, Germany will need to dig in and help these countries develop real export economies. That’s a lot more expensive, and a lot more complicated – but that’s life in an empire.

Original Article

Stavanger

To stroll along the harbour of this pretty town on Norway’s North Sea Coast is to follow the history of an economic explosion. To the south, the old wooden canneries are still processing herring and cod, the commodities that until a few decades ago were the mainstays of Norway’s poor, austere economy.

Across the harbour, the constant movement of enormous cranes and construction ships is evidence of the great North Sea oil boom that has turned Stavanger into a high-rent boomtown and Norway into one of the world’s wealthiest nations. The streets of this fishing town are now lined with luxury-goods shops and packed with highly paid foreign workers.

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But further from shore, you will find a third economy, a more surprising one that has nothing to do with oil or fish. In one big building just outside of town, a local firm called HighComp is turning out 10-metre-wide housings for huge wind-turbine generators.

“We’re doing our best business in parts of the economy that have nothing to do with oil or fish being pulled from the sea,” said owner Helge Rasmussen, 34. His plastics firm’s wind-power division built $4-million worth of housings last year and has completed deals across Scandinavia and northern Europe.

Closer to the harbour is Laerdal Medical, which makes life-saving devices such as defibrillators and medical simulators for export to 22 countries. Its profits grew by 10 per cent last year, even though Norway’s currency has a high exchange rate. “We had our best year ever last year, and it was 97-per-cent exports, including difficult markets like China,” said Tor Morten Osmundsen, the company’s chief executive.

These companies are no exception. Across Norway, the oil boom is being paralleled by record growth in the non-petroleum, export-driven economy. In November, Norway’s non-oil private-sector economy reported quarterly growth of 1.9 per cent, the equivalent of a 7.6-per-cent annual growth - an astonishing economic performance, beating even the growth of oil and gas exports.

And that is the real surprise here. While it isn’t hard for nations and provinces to get rich from oil, it is exceptionally hard - almost impossible, by conventional economic reasoning - for them to make money off anything else while the oil boom is taking place.

Everywhere else in the world - including Canada - a boom in oil has led to a decline, if not a complete devastation, of conventional businesses. It’s a phenomenon known to economists as “Dutch disease,” after the tragic experience of the Netherlands, which discovered oil in the 1970s. As oil exports boomed, the flood of money into the domestic economy inflated the currency, provoked price increases and destroyed exports, leading to a decade of joblessness and rising inequality.

The same thing happened, on an even larger scale, in Britain in the 1980s. After North Sea oil was discovered, the British industrial economy was virtually obliterated, leaving four million people jobless. Poor countries, from Nigeria to Venezuela, have also discovered the economy-smothering nature of oil windfalls.

Among oil economies, Norway - the world’s third-largest exporter and 10th-largest producer in 2006 - is almost alone in having avoided this fate. As oil has boomed, so has everything else, and it has boomed in areas that will continue to generate economic growth when the oil revenues are gone. This is no accident: For Norwegians, this is a story of planning, self-discipline and a long learning process.

While other countries have become apathetic and uncompetitive during petroleum booms, Norway appears near the top of every international index of competitiveness and entrepreneurship.

The “Norwegian model” has become a topic widely studied, but rarely imitated, among other oil nations. The hotels of Oslo these days are populated with Kuwaitis, Saudis, Kazakhs and Brazilians who have come here to examine the Nordic way.

Their first port of call is an office deep inside the high-security headquarters of the national bank. There, a soft-spoken man with a bald pate and a neatly trimmed beard sits atop one of the world’s largest piles of money. Yngve Slyngstad, 47, is the newly appointed manager of the Government Pension Fund - Global, better known as “the oil fund.”

An adjoining room contains computer desks staffed by his 11 traders, who invest the $1-billion in oil money his office receives every week. Norway’s oil is drilled from beneath the North Sea by dozens of companies, including Norway’s state-owned Statoil and Canadian firms such as Talisman and Petro-Canada. In exchange for the right to drill, they must hand 78 per cent of their profit over to Mr. Slyngstad’s fund.

This is Norway’s long-term savings account, and in the 17 years since it was launched it has become one of the four largest investment funds in the world. It currently holds $368.2-billion, or $78,351 for each Norwegian citizen. By the end of next year, even with an oil-price decline, it is projected to hold almost $500-billion, or $117,000 for each citizen.

For one of the world’s most powerful investment bankers, Mr. Slyngstad is surprisingly humble. Aside from his Norwegian reserve, that’s because his job is strictly limited by a Norwegian law - which is regarded by most people here as something akin to the 10 Commandments - known as the Management Rule.

The Management Rule is the heart of Norway’s economic miracle. It is a profound act of self-discipline: All but 4 per cent of Norway’s oil earnings must be placed in the fund for savings; nothing can be withdrawn from the fund until the oil is gone, decades from now; and - most crucially - absolutely none of the money can be invested inside Norway. Mr. Slyngstad and his traders spend their days funnelling the oil wealth into foreign stocks and bonds, so none of it will touch the Norwegian economy.

Mr. Slyngstad explained that by investing all this money in non-Norwegian companies, the fund acts as a shock absorber for the entire Norwegian economy. Even as oil has soared, Norway has avoided high inflation and its non-oil companies have grown more competitive.

“Our politicians and voters have placed a bind on themselves, refusing to touch more than 4 per cent of the oil money, so what that means is their economy actually gets a stabilizing mechanism, which is built into the fact that the oil revenue doesn’t go into the economy, it flows out,” he explained. “So for the Norwegian people, the oil revenue is not revenue at all, it’s just wealth being moved into a more diversified portfolio for the future.

(By comparison, Alberta’s Heritage Fund currently receives about one-eighth of the province’s oil money; the rest goes into provincial coffers or is paid directly to Alberta citizens. In its 31-year history, it has accumulated $16.1-billion, or $4,588 per Albertan. Two-thirds of it is invested inside Canada.) On the face of it, Norwegians seem to be paying a price for their frugality: Only about 10 per cent of Norway’s $70-billion government budget comes from oil money. In order to finance their generous state services and social benefits, Norwegians’ income taxes are among the highest in the world, and their gas stations charge $2.30 for a litre of unleaded - the highest price in the world, in a country that is the world’s third-largest exporter of the stuff.

But it’s hard to find Norwegians who consider this a burden. They have among the highest disposable incomes in the world (and the fairest distribution of income: Even the poor are comparatively rich). In every quality-of-life index, Norway ranks at or near the very top, above Canada. Their unemployment rate is currently 2 per cent. And in the 2005 election, Norwegians re-elected the social democratic coalition government that has shunted their earnings overseas.

“Voters here know that there is no country in the world that has managed its oil resources and wealth so well as Norway,” says Auke Lont, an Oslo economist who specializes in oil economies. “So even if oil prices dropped and the economy started getting worse, Norwegians would not want to ruin that record and embark on something that is uncertain. It’s a system based on consensus, and it’s a pretty wide consensus.”

There are signs of potential weakness in Norway’s current economy. Mr. Rasmussen, the wind-turbine entrepreneur, points out that the extreme labour shortages caused by the low jobless rate have made it hard to find workers at any reasonable price. And there is a danger of inflation: Mr. Osmundsen, the medical-supplies executive, notes that his company’s 10-per-cent growth last year was just enough to keep up with the increasingly expensive currency.

Within the Norwegian government, there’s a realization that many more immigrants are needed to fill the work force and that much more needs to be done to make small, non-oil businesses prosper. Norway has one of the most flexible labour-law systems in the world, so it is extremely easy to hire and fire workers (making the creation of small businesses easier). And the government has a system of research grants that encourages people to move out of oil and into the future economy.

The attention Norway pays to planning its after-oil economy and promoting economic diversity must strike a chord with many Canadians. But the Canadian who has the most control over the use of the country’s oil money is not listening. Mel Knight, Alberta’s Energy Minister, said in an interview during a recent visit to London that he does not believe his province has any lessons to take from Norway.

“First of all, Norway is a country that is a federal jurisdiction. And if we were to turn over all of our resources in Canada back to the federal government, perhaps they would operate the thing differently.

“But our Constitution in Canada dictates that the province of Alberta has the mandate to deal with our own natural resources. We feel that wealth generation in the province of Alberta is worth something, and that to put that money back in the hands of Albertans, and let those people do what they do best with their money, is a better opportunity for us.”

Original Article

Nicosia

A cool blackness still envelops this rocky Mediterranean island at 6 in the morning, as the Canadian Contingent is rising and preparing itself for a day of soldiering. The sounds of waking, brushing, boot-polishing, bed-making and soldierly banter fill the air, as the Canadian branch of the United Nations Forces in Cyprus prepares to pull itself into an orderly rank and make its long daily journey into the buffer zone.

First, though, there are some distinctly non-combatant matters to be dealt with. There is the matter of the Canadian Contingent’s children, a nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl, who have to be ushered off to school. There is the Canadian Contingent’s wife, who might want to discuss matters involving swimming lessons, a long-postponed scuba-diving trip and the progress of homework. There is the Canadian Contingent’s white UN jeep, whose awkward right-hand drive the Canadian Contingent curses as he makes his winding way to the base in the warm light of dawn.

Inside the village of aging brick barracks that makes up the UN base in Nicosia, Captain Alain Chabot drives past the other national contingents. There’s a Hungarian Club, where 84 soldiers drink their brandy into the night; and an even larger shack, marked with a bright-coloured sign, where the 299 Venezuelan soldiers and military police hang out. But CANCON, as Alain Chabot’s contingent is known, does not have a Canadian Club. Not any more.

“The guys here joke about it a bit,” the 35-year-old Quebec City native laughs. “They call me the Contingent of One. But I think they’re envious because at least I don’t have a lot of bureaucracy to deal with here.”

More than 25,000 Canadian soldiers have travelled to Cyprus to wear the blue helmets and berets of the United Nations peacekeeper since the conflict there began in 1964 — the largest contribution Canada has made to any single military mission since the Second World War. Today, though, our official contribution has come down to one guy, Capt. Chabot.

A no-nonsense soldier who waves off the Ottawa-centred mysteries of his position, he finds nothing terribly odd about his solitary posting here. “I suppose it’s a political decision — I don’t know, I guess they decided that we should continue to have a Canadian presence here.”

Canada now claims to have peacekeeping missions in 10 countries. But of our 2,756 troops abroad, at least 2,300 are part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, which is not at all traditional peacekeeping — in which politically neutral soldiers keep combatants apart, monitor buffer zones, and mediate in disagreements — but rather an aggressive, “robust” mission of a new sort known as peace support or peace enforcement.

On these missions, the soldiers aren’t neutral, and they can keep the peace by shooting bad guys. Canadians are now well aware of this: In the past few months, 18 Canadians have returned home in body bags, most recently 26-year-old Capt. Nichola Goddard, who died on Wednesday.

But Canada is not quite ready to give up on old-style peacekeeping. Because of our promises to the UN and our desire to be seen as part of the solution in at least some of the world’s problems, we keep a foot in the door in many conflicts — though usually just a little toe.

Many of Canada’s obligations have been shaved to the bone: We now have exactly 21 peacekeepers in Bosnia, six soldiers keeping the peace in Haiti, 43 manning the binoculars in various parts of Israel and the Palestinian territories, nine in the Congo, 11 in Sierra Leone. For the honour of being the smallest Canadian contingent, Capt. Chabot is tied with Lieutenant-Colonel Shawn Tymchuk, who personally forms the little-known Canadian UN contingent in Iraq.

This week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a peacekeeping force in the bloody Darfur region of Sudan, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper alarmed some Canadians, including military leaders, by stating outright that Canada wouldn’t be able to contribute a significant force. But that conclusion isn’t new: From the time we pulled most of our soldiers out of the Balkans in late 1995, until Afghanistan, Canada hadn’t had a significant UN force anywhere.

The contrast could not be more dramatic between the deadly hell of Afghanistan and the stately time warp of the Cyprus Green Zone, where a bullet hasn’t been fired in 32 years and the safety warnings issued to soldiers tend to involve sunstroke, alcoholism and venereal disease.

Capt. Chabot understands the difference all too well: He came to Cyprus directly from serving in the dangerous North Atlantic Treaty Organization mission in Kabul. Before that, he did two terms in Bosnia with the UN. If peacekeeping is in crisis, its fractures are etched across his résumé. “I’ve done every kind of peacekeeping, peace support, combat, whatever they call it — the two kinds of missions are extremely different, and they both have real challenges,” he says.

Cyprus isn’t at peace. Turkey still refuses to pull its troops out of the north, and the Greeks in the south refuse to endorse a peace agreement that would unify the island. But the conflicts that keep the UN busy tend to involve chest-pounding squabbles over checkpoints and border crossings.

The peace seems to be pretty well kept here. When Capt. Chabot took over the Canadian Contingent last summer, the handover ceremony took place 30 metres beneath the Mediterranean. Both officers were avid scuba divers, and they snapped a picture of the handover of the Maple Leaf flag atop a coral reef. (Capt. Chabot learned diving in the icy waters of Quebec, and has done it on almost all his postings, except Afghanistan.) “It not a posting you complain about,” he says modestly. “It’s also the first time in 10 years I’ve been able to live in the same place as my wife and kids.”

Yet over his career, this solitary Canadian has found himself a central actor in the crises that defined the peacekeeping debate. If you want to understand the roots of this angry showdown between blue helmets and green berets, it might help to spend a day in the no man’s land of Cyprus with Capt. Chabot.

This morning, he is taking a stroll inside the Green Zone, the thick strip of land that cuts off the northern third of Cyprus. In downtown Nicosia, the zone looks like the Berlin Wall, with rifle-toting soldiers guarding barbed-wire emplacements on either side. Over here, near the UN base, are the surreal sights of abandoned jetliners, hangars and the once-sleek 1960s terminal of what had been Cyprus International Airport. Capt. Chabot points out the ghostly sights: “Everything here stopped on the 16th of August, 1974 — it’s just frozen in time.”

On that day, Canadian peacekeepers had already been here for more than 10 years, trying to keep the island’s Greek-speaking majority from driving the Turkish-speaking minority out of government and into subordinate status, and getting caught in the bloody fighting that ensued. At least 26 Canadians have given their lives to this conflict, most in those early years.

In 1974, Greece’s military dictatorship led a coup to take over the island. In response, Turkey seized the northern third of the island on Aug. 16, establishing borders that have barely moved since then. Suddenly, a classic UN peacekeeping mission was in place.

Peacekeeping, in its classic sense, was really born in 1948, when the UN made the infamous decision to allow the division of the world’s two most disputed areas, Palestine and the Indian subcontinent, largely along ethnic and religious lines. To keep the Israelis from the Palestinians and the Pakistanis from the Indians required a new kind of soldier. (Both of those UN missions are still under way.)

This type of activity became known as peacekeeping, and gained its blue-helmet uniform, after hundreds of UN troops were brought in to the Sinai after the 1956 Suez crisis. Peacekeeping was meant to be the opposite of war. It was based on what are often called the “holy trinity” of principles — impartiality, the consent of both parties and the minimum use of force.

These early missions defined the image of the peacekeeper: A couple of blue-helmeted soldiers, in an observation post atop a buffer zone, gazing through huge binoculars for any sign of conflict.

At least 36 such missions had been launched over 47 years, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, when a 23-year-old Quebec soldier was shipped out to Visoko, Bosnia, in early 1995. The UN peacekeeping operation in the former Yugoslavia, UNPROFOR, had a seemingly crystal-clear mission: “Monitor ceasefires, assist humanitarian agencies, deter attacks on safe areas.”

In fact, those words are considered by many to be the epitaph of modern peacekeeping. Shortly after Capt. Chabot arrived, the UN’s celebrated impartiality and avoidance of force led to some of the most dire incidents of the post-Cold War world.

In May, Serbian forces had detained UN peacekeepers and chained several of them, including Canadian soldier Patrick Rechner, to ammunition dumps to prevent NATO air strikes. In July of 1995, Dutch UNPROFOR peacekeepers in Srebrenica were forced to stand by as more than 7,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys were dragged out of one of those “safe areas” and summarily shot.

The Canadians, who were camped not far from Srebrenica, were equally unable to act. Many of them were held under siege by the Bosnian Muslim army, which questioned their neutrality and left them without food or water for days, some of them becoming ill.

For Capt. Chabot, who found himself in the centre of this impotent mission with rules of engagement that were often pointless, it was a frustrating lesson.

“It’s really difficult to be caught in the middle of a conflict like Bosnia, where you see one side committing atrocities against the other side and the rules of engagement prevent you from doing anything about it,” he said. “And nobody thought you were neutral. In Bosnia, there was always somebody saying, ‘You’re favouring the other guys.’ … It was a real nightmare.”

It was a nightmare shared by the UN and its member states, and for most of them it permanently changed the notion of peacekeeping. (The genocidal slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans under Canadian-led UN watch in 1994 already had created grave doubts.) “I think Bosnia was a hard learning experience for those of us with the UN,” Capt. Chabot said. “I think the UN had to learn the hard way to handle a major fighting experience like Bosnia.”

By the time he got to Afghanistan in 2004, the Canadian military’s attitude to peacekeeping, along with most of the world’s, had shifted 180 degrees. Impartiality was now seen as a dangerous hindrance, and so was the inability to fight. In the amorphous, stateless conflicts of the new century, the idea of winning the consent of two combatants seemed ridiculous.

When mass murder was at hand, many of the more humanitarian-minded nations now preferred to select the more pointed tool of NATO combat troops, who have no qualms about taking sides or shooting people. Sometimes this has occurred against the will of the UN (as with the NATO mission, including Canadian forces, that finally stopped the Balkan conflicts in 1999). And sometimes the UN has called for these NATO aggressors, as it did in 2001, when it authorized the Afghanistan mission.

This, of course, has created its own dangers. “When things go wrong here,” one NATO official said off the record, “it seems like we have half our troops rebuilding bombed-out bridges to help the civilians, and the other half of our troops blowing up those same bridges to stop the bad guys.”

In the Kandahar region, where the Canadians are posted, the ratio is more like one bridge-builder to five bridge-bombers.

“That’s the 64-million-dollar question,” says Paul Williams, a security analyst at Britain’s Birmingham University, who recently co-wrote a study of peacekeeping. “Can you do peace enforcement and still lead the country to a situation where real reconciliation between the belligerent forces is possible? That’s very hard to say.”

Many governments, not just Canada’s, have become increasingly unwilling to put their forces under UN control in the years since Srebrenica. But in fact the United Nations, too, wants its blue-helmets to become a lot more like NATO fighters. The UN’s 2000 Brahimi Report concluded that “when the United Nations does send its forces to uphold the peace, they must be prepared to confront the lingering forces of war and violence, with the ability and determination to defeat them.”

The UN still observes the “holy trinity,” but now it’s more often in the breach: Blue-helmet soldiers are allowed, and sometimes encouraged, to shoot people. “The traditional operation of a neutral monitor who doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t let civilians get involved is not something that really exists any more — after Srebrenica, those kind of troubles became impossible to ignore,” Mr. Williams says.

Actually, there still remain some places where it’s possible to ignore those problems. If Sri Lanka’s currently intensifying conflict is ever brought to an actual peace agreement, it’s the kind of place in which old-style blue helmets would work perfectly, to mediate a traditional territorial struggle with a fixed boundary line. And Canada, with its long history there, will be pressed to contribute.

And here in Cyprus, where Capt. Chabot has come full circle form the moral collapse of UN peacekeeping to the dramatic rise of NATO’s aggressive peace enforcement to the granddaddy of all peacekeeping missions, it’s hard to see anything wrong with the old concept.

The guys in blue spend their days patrolling the Green Zone in jeeps, chatting with the bored teenagers who make up the Turkish and Greek forces, and catching some sun. At 4, they drive home, where most of them live with their families — a luxury unavailable to most of the new-style peacekeepers.

The open Mediterranean sky gives them lots of room to reflect on the meaning of peacekeeping. Most of the 900 international soldiers here have served elsewhere, and they also have heated debates about their proper role.

The lone Canadian, like many of his colleagues, seems happy to wear any colour of beret.

“I had no problem being in Afghanistan with NATO, and I have no problem being here with the UN,” he says. “There are challenges involved in commanding NATO operations, and equally big challenges in commanding UN operations. Either way, you never run out of problems.

“What you hope is that if you do your job properly, maybe it will help — maybe it will make people’s lives a little bit better.”

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