Former US State Department official, Christopher Hill, has written an essay examining the causes of the refugee crisis. Most of the blame falls on Syrian President Assad and his extremist opponents, the Islamic State and al Qaeda. But Hill also points out the responsibility of the Western powers, specifically France and the US, for not having a viable response to the politics of the Arab Spring which led to the organized protests in 2011. Not only in Syria but also in Egypt, the protests were left with unpalatable choices and the Western powers did little to help support those who favored more democratic forces.
Voters in the Catalan region of Spain will vote on whether Catalonia should declare its independence from Spain. Secessionist movements are not allowed under the Spanish constitution, and the central Spanish government has vowed to suppress any move toward independence. The region accounts for almost 20% of the Spanish GDP and the Catalan grievances against the Spanish government include a sense of economic exploitation as well as the suppression of Catalan cultural identity. If the vote favors independence both Spain and the European Union will be in for a rough ride.
The European Union is struggling to develop a coherent policy for dealing with the influx of refugees into the 28-nation union. As is does so, it has to operate within the context of international laws and obligations that have grown up in the world system since te end of World War II. Refugees are accorded certain rights in international law, and The New York Times has an excellent article on some of those requirements. Nonetheless, the EU decision to force sovereign states to take actions of which they disapprove raises questions about the political autonomy of the members.
US President Obama and Russian President Putin will meet on Monday at the annual meeting of the United Nations in New York. The meeting is likely to be intense as both Ukraine and Syria are on the agenda, and both sides disagree quite strongly over the appropriate courses of action in both cases. There is an interesting debate over who asked for the meeting. The Russians insist that the meeting was mutually agreed upon; the White House insist that Putin asked for te meeting because of the effects of the sanctions on the Russian economy. It is unlikely that anything substantive will be decided upon at the meeting, but simply meeting is a good sign. There are, however, rumors that the Russians and the Americans have reached a “tacit” agreement on Syria, but the details are unknown.
US President Obama is meeting with Chinese President Xi and the Chinese are bringing to the table a new conception of “great power” politics. The idea is bold and directly questions US dominance in world affairs. The significance of the proposal is that it represents an exercise in imagination which seems to be quite lacking in American diplomacy right now. I doubt that the Chinese ideas will be greeted warmly by the US, but it is encouraging that such discussions are being held. The Americans seem either unwilling or unable to conceptualize a different world order even though the power configurations in world politics seem to be changing quite rapidly.
The European Union (EU) has voted to require its members to accept refugees in order to avoid crippling the countries that are willing to take in refugees. The EU very rarely “votes” on measures: it prefers to work by consensus whereby the votes are simple confirmations of prior agreement. But there were five countries that voted against the measure: Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia voted against the measure and Finland abstained. The vote, however, did not contain any enforcement measures and I suspect that the EU will not penalize those states that refuse additional refugees. The vote should be interpreted as a statement of intent and solidarity and not as a legal requirement.
The refugee crisis in Europe is also an index of a crisis for the Islamic State as the flood of refugees diminishes both the available manpower and financial resources available to the group. The Islamic State has said that those who leave for Western countries commit a “sin” and the number of young people leaving Syria far outstrips the number of young males and females entering Syria to join the caliphate. Ultimately, the Islamic State will have to address this drain on its resources, but the drain is perhaps also testimony to the loss of the attractiveness of the group.
The Pope’s visit to the US completely overshadowed the arrival of another guest to the US: Chinese President Xi Jinping who arrived in Seattle to dine with tech giants such as Bill Gates. President Xi will arrive in Washington soon (the Secret Service is certainly going to earn its keep this week) for meetings with US President Obama. The meetings between the two should be tense as they intend to discuss matters such as the South China Sea and charges that China commits cyber-espionage against US firms. Nonetheless, it is a good sign that the two sides are talking.
Brazil’s Guanabara Bay will be the site of many of the Olympic Games next year. Unfortunately, the Bay is an environmental disaster, and the Brazilian government does not seem to be taking effective steps to clean it up. If it isn’t cleaned up, then the image of Brazil will be sullied. Given the economic problems besetting the country and the political crisis that seems to have weakened the government, it seems unlikely that Brazil will be able to summon up the resources and the will to meet its responsibilities as host of the Olympic Games.
Guanabara Bay
China’s assertion of control over the South China Sea represents some major changes in policy from its earlier positions on maritime control. When China was a developing power, it shared many of the positions currently held by other developing powers such as Vietnam and the Philippines. But as a major power, its current policies conflict with those positions. The contrast is clear: China’s current stance on the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is quite similar to the US positions in the early negotiations on the treaty. The US is not yet a signatory to UNCLOS but has announced that it will follow the rules of UNCLOS.
The left-wing party, SYRIZA, has apparently come in first in the Greek election with about 35% of the vote. The conservative party, New Democracy, conceded defeat and came in second. It is not entirely clear what the outcome of the vote will mean for Greece. The elections were called because a more radical wing of SYRIZA wanted a stiffer response to the German demands in the debt negotiations. It seems likely that SYRIZA will forge a coalition with the right-wing Independent Greeks party which is adamantly anti-austerity. We should probably expect that the debt negotiations will become more difficult in the next few months.
The ethnic mix of Europe seems to be going through a massive change because of the emphasis placed on the refugee crisis. But the ethnic mix of Europe was pretty well established prior to the crisis and, in a continent of 490 million people, it is hard to change the mix all that much. The Pew Research Center did an analysis of the ethnic mix in Europe prior to the crisis and the information is a good base from which to think about the impact of the refugees. One cannot deny that the flood of refugees is incredibly difficult to manage and accommodate in the short term. But it is unlikely that Europe will be transformed by it.
Laszlo Toroczkai is the mayor of Asotthalom, a town on the Hungary-Serbia border and he has produced a video designed to discourage refugees from coming to his town. He is a member of the 64 Counties Youth Movement (if you cannot read Hungarian, Google can translate the page) which is an ultranationalist group closely aligned with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban. The video is quite remarkable.
The commander of US naval forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Harris, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee that the US should challenge Chinese activity in the South China Sea. According to Reuters:
“‘I believe that we should exercise – be allowed to exercise, freedom of navigation and flight – maritime and flight – in the South China Sea against those islands that are not islands.’
“Asked if this meant going within 12 miles, he answered, referring to the artificial islands: ‘Depending on the feature.” He added: “Conducting that kind of … freedom-of-navigation operation is one of the operations we’re considering.'”
Admiral Harris has international law on his side, but one should expect the Chinese to respond quite forcefully to such a move.
Yesterday the US Federal Reserve Bank announced that it would not raise interest rates in the US above its current level of 0.0-0.25%. The Fed cited “global concerns” for the decision, a basis for which unnerved many investors. The effective interest rate of zero has been maintained since 2009 and such a low level has never occurred for such a long time in financial history. There is little question that the global economy is in uncharted territory right now and it is difficult to figure out what the future holds.
Mesopotamia, c 3000 BC: 20%
Babylon, Code of Hammurabi, 1772 BC: codified earlier Sumerian custom of 20%.
Persian conquest (King Cyrus takes Babylon), 539 BC: rates of 40+%.
Greece, Temple at Delos, c. 500 BC: 10%
Rome, Twelve Tables, 443 BC: 8.33%
Athens/Rome: circa the first two Punic Wars, 300-200 BC: 8%
Rome: 1 AD: 4%
Rome, under Diocletian, 300 AD: 15% (estimated)
Byzantine Empire, under Constantine, 325 AD: limit 12.5%
Byzantine Empire, Code of Justinian, 528 AD: limit 8%
Italian cities, c. 1150: 20%
Venice, 1430s: 20%
Venice, (Leonardo da Vinci paints “The Last Supper in Milan), 1490s: 6.25%
Holland, beginning of the Eighty Years’ War, 1570s: 8.13%
England, 1700s: 9.92%
US, West Florida annexed by the US, 1810s: 7.64%
US, circa World War II, 1940s: 1.85%
US, Reagan administration, 1980s: 15.84%
US, Fed does not hike rates in September, 2015: 0-0.25%
Zero interest rates are a manifestation of the sluggish growth in wages in the US and around the world. There actually has been incredible growth in some sectors of the economy, but those gains are not spread evenly across the population. The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank provided statistics comparing corporate profits and wage growth in the US since 2009, the onset of the Great Recession. The chart is revealing:
It certainly does not appear as if wealth has “trickled-down.” But Jamie Dimon, CEO of one of the largest banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase, does not believe that the statistics reveal the truth. Bloomberg reports Dimon as saying:
“It’s not right to say we’re worse off,” Dimon said Thursday at an event in Detroit in response to a question about declining median income. “If you go back 20 years ago, cars were worse, health was worse, you didn’t live as long, the air was worse. People didn’t have iPhones.”
For the record, I do not have a smartphone (nor do I want one). And I suspect that most people would enjoy at least some share of the corporate profits since their labor produces those profits. But the corporations do not even need to be profitable for income inequality to get worse. Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, was forced to step down because of corruption charges. Even though United’s stock is down 15% this year, Smisek received the following severance package:
“United will hand Smisek nearly $5 million in cash plus other financial compensation that could top $20 million.
“In case he’s ever in the mood to travel, no problem. Smisek gets free first-class tickets on the airline for the rest of his life.
“He also gets free airport parking for life, health insurance until he’s eligible for Medicare in about four years and, oh yes, the keys to his company car.
Nice work if you can get it.
For those who have followed this blog for some time, it is no secret that I believe that climate change is occurring and have little patience for so-called “deniers“. One of the more persistent themes in the denial meme is that there has been a “pause” in the rise in global temperatures, presumably indicating that human activity cannot explain the variations in temperature since the warming process has not been “linear.” There are four new studies, one which tested the data with economists who were asked to review the data labelled as “agricultural” production (in other words, a test which presumably screened out bias on the issue of climate change), which emphatically refute the idea that there has been a “pause” in the rate of global warming.
Last October protesters forced the President of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, from extending his 27-year rule over the country. An interim government has ruled in his place until a military coup d’etat ended that promising beginning of democracy. The coup will likely prevent the elections that had been promised for this coming 11 October. Burkina Faso had emerged as a hopeful sign to other countries in Africa that citizens could overcome the tyranny of a long-standing dictator. Those hopes were dashed by the coup.
Bills to change Japan’s military posture in world affairs appear ready to pass the Japanese Parliament despite large protests on the streets and within Parliament itself. The change proposed by Prime Minister Abe is not a fullscale repudiation of Japan’s disavowal of projective military power. The main bill gives Japan the right to come to the aid of Japan’s allies (presumably the US) if those allies are acting in defense of Japan’s interests. Nonetheless, many, both inside and outside of Japan, interpret the move as a slippery slope in a return to Japan’s militarist past.
The Syrian government has begun to use new weapons supplied to its army by Russia. Very little is publicly known about the weapons but they are an index of Russia’s renewed commitment to supporting President Assad. Using the new weapons, the Syrian has begun to attack the city of Raqqa which has been held by the Islamic State for some time. Not coincidentally, Raqqa is a frequent target of the US-led coalition against the Islamic State. So the US and Russia are de facto allies in the civil war, even though the US continues to insist that Assad must go. At some point, actions speak louder than words.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has indicated that his government is negotiating with the extremist group, Boko Haram. The group has been terrorizing many parts of Nigeria in its pursuit of an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, and has kidnapped over 200 Nigerian girls. The group, whose name means “Western education is a sin”, has been difficult to control and has destabilized the economy of Nigeria to a considerable extent. Buhari has made bringing the group under control one of his top priorities. Nigeria’s progress on this matter has been difficult to assess.
Sri Lanka endured a 26-year civil war between the dominant Sinhalese and the minority Tamil on the island which finally ended in 2009. The end of the civil war was bloody and raised all sorts of questions about the conduct of the war. The UN has finished an investigation into the conduct of the war and has issued a report which asserts that many war crimes and crimes against humanity occurred. The report does not name any particular individuals involved in the crimes but the implications of the report suggest that the former President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was involved in the commission of the atrocities. Sri Lanka now will wrestle with whether a domestic court of inquiry is an acceptable alternative to the suggested international court.
11 September marked the end of the ice melting season in the Arctic, and the amount of ice recorded was the fourth lowest since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s. The lowest level ever recorded was in 2011, followed by 2007 and 2011. The trend seems unmistakable: Arctic sea ice is diminishing and the likely cause if global warming. The prospect of an ice-free Arctic in the summer months could potentially be destabilizing in world politics and states compete for what are believed to be significant oil and gas resources in the region.
Hungary has mobilized its army to control its border with Serbia. The leader of Hungary, Viktor Orban, believes that it is Hungary’s task to defend what he calls “Christian” Europe against the “invasion” of Muslims. Orban is distinctive, but not unique, among new leaders and movements in Europe. The National Front in France, the Golden Dawn in Greece, the True Finns in Finland, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have all adopted similar rhetoric. There are terrifying parallels to what happened in Europe in the 1930s and what is happening today. We can only hope that the European Union is strong enough to defuse this trend toward fascism.
Four weeks ago China claimed that it had stopped dredging in the South China Sea in its efforts to claim soveriegnty over certain reefs. However, on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, DC, evidence has surfaced that the build-up of the reefs has continued. The news will no doubt strain the meeting between Obama and Xi which was already suffering from accusations about cyber spying and the continued hacking of US government sites by what Washington believes to be Chinese military units. We will see how the parties navigate these tensions during their negotiations.
Tensions have been rising for several weeks over the status of what Jews call the Temple Mount and what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary in the city of Jerusalem. The site exists in Old Jerusalem which was controlled by Jordan until the 1967 war after which has been controlled by the Israelis. Since 1967, Israel has prevented Jews from praying on the site in deference to the tradition giving access to Muslims to the al Aqsa mosque. Recently, however, some Jews have insisted on praying on the site and violence has broken out between those Jews and the Muslims defending the mosque. Rumors are swirling that the Israeli government of Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to change the rules to allow Jewish prayers as a matter of course. Such a change would likely precipitate a harsh reaction from Muslims all over the world.
There seems to be a consensus emerging among many of the outside powers involved in the Syrian civil war that the only solution to the slaughter is to line up behind President Assad. With Iranian support consistent and likely to increase once Iran is able to sell its oil again and the Russians building a military base to support Assad, it seems as if Assad’s position is assured. The Europeans are more or less deciding that ending the civil war as quickly as possible is the only way to staunch the flow of refugees. And the Americans, although rhetorically opposed to the Assad regime, is in fact supporting Assad by attacking the Islamic State. In the end, it seems as if the cruel logic of realism will prevail: better to deal with the butcher who appears most likely to win.
The Brazilian economy recently fell into a recession (two quarters of negative economic growth), its bond rating was lowered to junk status, and the popularity of its President, Dilma Rousseff, is in single digits. Now the country has to go through painful fiscal austerity. It has increased taxes and reduced subsidies to infrastructure and poor families in an effort to balance its budget. No one knows if the austerity will ultimately prove to be successful, but the initial shock of austerity will be very difficult for most Brazilians. The global economy continues to weaken.
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