World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

As the Italian constitutional referendum looms large, the fate of Italian banks may hang in the balance.  Many Italian banks are undercapitalized:  the lack the money to cover all the claims that depositors and bondholders currently have on their assets.  The fear is that if voters reject Prime Minister Renzi’s proposed reforms, then Renzi will resign (as he has promised to do).  The lack of a stable government may then trigger Italian deposit and bond holders to withdraw their money from the banks which, in turn, will force many of these banks to shut their doors.  Since many other European banks are bondholders to Italian banks (Deutsche Bank, for example, holds many bonds from Italian banks), then the fear may spread to other European banks.  It is a very delicate moment.

India has the largest percentage of poor people of all the countries in the world.  25.4% of all the poor people in the world live in India.  The data from Credit Suisse which analyzes the richest people in the world also contain information about poverty.  The growing income inequality in the world continues to worsen as the data from 2010 to 2016 clearly indicate:

There is little reason to believe that the market will, on its own, correct this trend.  Indeed, inequality is becoming more deeply entrenched.

There is little question that many outside of Cuba considered Fidel Castro to be a ruthless dictator.  But the news reports from Cuba suggest that people in Cuba have been genuinely moved by his death.  The media is reporting very long lines of people wishing to pay their respects and the interviews (never a reliable index of true feelings os large populations since one never knows who was not asked, refused to answer, or who were simply ignored by the reporter) all suggest resigned sorrow.

Next Sunday, Italians will vote on a proposed constitutional refirm that would take some powers away from both the Upper House of the legislature and from local governments.  The reform, pushed hard by Prime Minister Renzi, are designed to make the Italian more efficient and less prone to gridlock.  Today, tens of thousands of Italians protested the reform.  Prime Minister Renzi will likely step down if the reform is defeated in the national referendum, and there is no obvious coalition government to take Renzi’s place.

The recent decision of the Indian government to retire large bank notes from circulation has led to a great deal of controversy and there are many in the Indian Parliament that are scheduled to protest the decision tomorrow.  But the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has shown no sign of backing down and has indicated that his ultimate goal is to create a cashless society.  Moodi argues that the move is designed to limit the possibilities for corruption which he believes disproportionately affects the poor.  But the move to an all electronic system of exchange gives the state incredible access to information about all citizens.

The Foreign Ministry of North Korea has sent a memorandum to the newly elected Trump Administration concerning North Korea’s relationship with the US.  The memorandum is a brief of all the hostile actions North Korea believe that the US has committed against North Korea during the Obama Administration. The assessment of the memo is that

“The ongoing economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. are indeed the toughest of all times and they are vicious hostile acts seeking to suffocate the DPRK’s overall economy, undermine the people’s livelihood and ultimately isolate and stifle the DPRK.

“As shown by the facts above, during the last five years the U.S. has designated the DPRK as the primary target for attack and regime change in the implementation of their aggressive Asia-Pacific domination strategy and steadily and systematically intensified political, military and economic pressure on it.”

The memo then describes the nuclear weapons program of North Korea as an act of legitimate self-defense:

“All the facts above clearly substantiate the truth that the root cause of escalated tension on the Korean peninsula lies with the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threats against the DPRK, not the latter’s nuclear and missile tests.

“The DPRK has chosen the road of possessing nuclear weapons as a self-defensive measure to safeguard its state and system from the constant nuclear threat of the U.S. We are strengthening our nuclear forces both in quality and quantity, holding fast to the line of simultaneously developing the national economy and nuclear forces as our strategic line.”

It seems unlikely that President-Elect Trump will agree with this assessment.

Fidel Castro has died at age 90.  He led a revolution that overthrew the dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959 and ruled Cuba until his retirement in 2008.  Although he was initially greeted as a potential ally by the US, the circumstances changed quite quickly and Castro ultimately embraced the Soviet Union as his primary ally.  Throughout the Cold War, Cuba was a flashpoint and the US invaded the country in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Hostilities reached a dangerous point in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In recent years, US-Cuban relations have slowly thawed and it remains to be seen how the new American Administration will react to the changes in Cuba today.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

It is often difficult to rank foreign policy priorities.  The mere act of trying to rank such priorities overestimates the degree of choice policy makers actually have–the world constantly intrudes upon the chain of events.  But some issues are more immutable.  Paul Pillar makes the argument that the irreversible nature of climate change gives it the top ranking.  The argument is persuasive, but it is also remarkable how easy it is to ignore.  The short term almost always trumps the long term.

Charts from the Economist

The Economist has a very nice essay on the distinction between what it calls “universal, civic nationalism” and “blood-and-soil, ethnic” nationalism.  The former is represented best by the aspirations of the French Revolution and the latter by the nationalism ushered in by German unification under Bismarck in 1871.  The essay develops the current growth of ethnic nationalism as a response to the process of globalization in the late 20th century.  The essay covers much of the world and is definitely worth c very close read.

For a British view of the recent American election. one could hardly ask for a better analyst than David Runciman.  In an essay for the London Review of Books, Runciman gives a completely different interpretation of Mr. Trump’s election.  The anger that propelled many voters to vote for Mr. Trump is not the type of anger that will lead to protests in the street.  The real violence of that anger is manifested in the high rates of incarceration and the high rates of suicide and drug abuse–an anger bred of hopelessness and not rage.  Runciman then takes a breathtaking step:  that hopelessness cannot be addressed if the political system tries to protect itself and

“Under these conditions, the likeliest response is for the grown-ups in the room to hunker down, waiting for the storm to pass. While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.”

While he does not make the point explicitly, Runciman suggests that the correct course of action would be to let the system collapse to force citizen action.  Undoubtedly, a risky option.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the group administering Berlin’s state museums, holds more than 1,000 human skulls from the German East African colonies–now Rwanda and Tanzania–controlled by Germany from 1885-1918.  The macabre collection is just one measure of the horrific legacy of imperialism and reflects the contemptible attitude of the Europeans toward non-European peoples during the period of European expansion.  There are many such collections throughout the developed world, but there finally is an intense campaign to have such remains returned to the homelands of the dead.

Map from 1909

Yesterday the European Parliament voted to temporarily freeze negotiations on Turkey’s accession to the European Union.  These negotiations have been going on for years, but the increasingly authoritarian policies of President Erdogan have raised questions in many European minds about Turkey’s commitment to human rights.  Additionally, President Erdogan has grown impatient with what he regards as the unfriendly policies of the EU toward Turkey.  Today, Erdogan threatened to “open the border gates” to about 3.5 million refugees who wish to emigrate to European states.  The threat must be taken seriously, but it is unlikely that the EU would change its decision.

What happens if nationalism defeats globalization?

From the Washington Post

In my career as a teacher, I have welcomed the internet as a way to expand my access to diverse news sources.  The dark side of this innovation, however, is that the internet is also a place where there are many misleading or false stories planted by organizations and people who have a vested interest in manipulating public opinion.  Researchers at Stanford University have tested the ability of students–at all levels of education–to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of information.   Their findings are deeply distressing:  most students accept information on the web as reliable without assessing the integrity of the source.  There is no way for democracy to survive without a well-informed citizenry.

We are all bewildered by the process of globalization, largely because the pace and intensity of cross-border exchanges have increased exponentially in the last thirty years.  But one can study globalization in slow motion by studying how the potato moved from what we now call Peru to Europe.  The new food genuinely transformed the ability of European farmers to feed a growing population.  Prior to its introduction, agriculture was an extremely dicey business:

“The effects of this transformation were so striking that any general history of Europe without an entry in its index for S. tuberosum [the potato] should be ignored. Hunger was a familiar presence in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Cities were provisioned reasonably well in most years, their granaries carefully monitored, but country people teetered on a precipice. France, the historian Fernand Braudel once calculated, had 40 nationwide famines between 1500 and 1800, more than one per decade. This appalling figure is an underestimate, he wrote, “because it omits the hundreds and hundreds of local famines.” France was not exceptional; England had 17 national and big regional famines between 1523 and 1623. The continent simply could not reliably feed itself.”

I hope everyone had their potatoes for Thanksgiving!

Potato Famine Memorial in Dublin

The revised peace accord was signed by both the Colombian government and FARC rebels and it will be sent to the Colombian legislature for its approval.  The accord will not be subject to a popular referendum as was the case with the first agreement.  The agreement was greeted more with resignation than with celebration by the Colombian people and one hopes that this accord will prove to be lasting.  There are still other rebel groups that need to be brought into the agreement, but the hope is that slowly all parties will accept the terms.  The guerrilla war has been going on for 50 years and its end will mark a new page for the Colombian people.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech in which he indicated that Turkey does not need to join the European Union “at all costs” and is contemplating joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security/economic group created in 2001 and comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.  India and Pakistan will join the SCO in 2017. Mongolia, India, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are currently SCO observers.  If Turkey does join the SCO it will signal its turning away from the liberal system and will be a sign that the liberal system continues to weaken.

Leila Nasr has written a provocative essay on the liberal conception of human rights, posing the central question of whether these rights are “universal, inalienable, and indivisible”.  Western states have asserted these characteristics to human rights in such documents as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948.  Nasr raises insightful questions about these assumptions and in so doing enriches the discussion concerning the centrality of human rights.

John Schindler is a former National Security Agency analyst who has written an essay on Russian foreign policy objectives.  It is a hawkish, but incredibly well-sourced point of view.  I hasten to point out that the media outlet that published the essay, The Observer, is published by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.   But the essay is definitely worth a close read.

A billboard shows U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the town of Danilovgrad on November 16, 2016.

From the Economist:  A Depressing Graphic

More Depressing News from The Economist:

“IF YOU had only $2,220 to your name (adding together your bank deposits, financial investments and property holdings, and subtracting your debts) you might not think yourself terribly fortunate. But you would be wealthier than half the world’s population, according to this year’s Global Wealth Report by the Crédit Suisse Research Institute. If you had $71,560 or more, you would be in the top tenth. If you were lucky enough to own over $744,400 you could count yourself a member of the global 1% that voters everywhere are rebelling against.”

Fortunately, the earthquake near Fukushima, Japan did not cause major damage.  There was a fear that a tsunami of up to nine feet might be associated with the earthquake, but the surge was much smaller.  There was slight damage to the nuclear facilities that were heavily damaged in the 2011 tsunami, but the quake was a deadly reminder of the earlier devastation.

The Credit Suisse Research Institute has released its Global Wealth Report for 2016.  Since 2010 Credit Suisse has published information about the distribution of wealth in the world, concentrating on what are known as as the ultra-wealthy.  Its findings are stunning:  0.7% Of Adults Control $116.6 Trillion In Wealth and the bottom 73% (3.5 billion people) control $6.1 trillion in wealth.  The world is an extraordinarily unequal place.

Russia announced on Monday that it would deploy Iskander ballistic missiles and S-400 missile-defense systems in Kaliningrad, its enclave on the Baltic.  NATO regards the deployment of the missiles, which are top-of-the-line in the Russian arsenal, as highly provocative.  Russia claims the deployment is in response to NATO’s deployment of missile defense systems.  The war of words continues, even as most NATO countries wonder about the strength of President-Elect Trump’s commitment to the alliance.  Kaliningrad was formerly known as the German city of Koenigsberg but the city was transferred to Soviet control after World War II.

You know the world is getting very weird when the planet’s largest communist country is the leader in the movement to promote free trade.  We do not really know whether President-Elect Trump will follow through on his campaign promises to raise tariffs on a variety of countries, but China has already assumed that he will and has taken up the mantle of the state leading the charge towards greater globalization.

We are getting news just now about a strong earthquake in Japan.  The quake, estimated at 6.9 on the Richter scale, occurred off the coast near Fukushima, the site of the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in 2011.  I will follow up on this story later on this evening as more information becomes available.

Joel Mokyr has written an essay on the idea of progress.  Progress is a central tenet of Liberalism and we often take it for granted that the future will be better than the present.  The idea of progress, however, is a recent notion which had to fight a difficult battle against the assumption that the ideas of ancestors should be venerated. Mokyr does an excellent job of referring to different Enlightenment thinkers and tracing the evolution of their ideas.

Max Fisher has written a very good article on the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for dominance in the Middle East.  It traces the hostility only from 1979, the year the Islamic State of Iran was created so it does not address the deeper historical tensions between the two, but it lays out the various stages of the rivalry in geopolitical terms.   The article does a very good job of laying out the reasons why Saudi Arabia is so apprehensive about the rise of Iranian power and why that tension could come to a head in the Trump Administration.

An earlier post noted how warm it has been in the Arctic.  More recent news indicates that the warmth is contributing to the lowest area of sea ice recorded for this time of year.  Indeed, satellite readings of global sea ice area (including Antarctica) leads to w rather remarkable chart (below).  The red line primarily reflects the loss of Arctic sea ice (as the article points out, it makes little sense to combine both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice) and the deviation from average is stunning.

An editorial in the Chinese news service, Xinhua, has blasted reports that US President-Elect Trump wishes to impose tariffs on Chinese products.  Such editorials reflect the official view of the Chinese government and it does not mince any words:

“Trump’s campaign rhetoric has suggested that the future leader in Washington would be no friend to free trade, while his lashing-out at the TPP bodes ill for the trade pact.

“What is more alarming is that the incoming U.S. president may backtrack from other free trade deals in the area and beyond.

“In exactly two months’ time, Trump will be at the helm of the world’s largest economy. Turning his trade-bashing campaign talks into actual policies could bash any hope that the Asia-Pacific will finally have its much-wanted free trade deal. Worse, it could drag his country and the wider world into deeper economic distress.

“The billionaire-turned-politician needs to prove that derailing the global economy has not been one of the reasons why he ran for U.S. president.”

Mr. Trump does have the unilateral authority to impose punitive tariffs on China.  Doing so, however, would unquestionably bring about a trade war with China.

The meeting between Mr. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Abe was notable since it was Mr. Trump’s first formal meeting with a head of state and because it was conducted without any coordination or consultation with the US State Department.  The meeting also reflects Japan’s concern that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on American alliances during the campaign suggests that he is willing to see formally strong ties loosen considerably.  Japan has already begun to diversity its connections with other countries, notably Russia.  But the more urgent question is the extent to which Japan might compensate for a reduction of an American commitment with a build-up of its own military capabilities.  Such a move would trigger off the Security Dilemma for other countries in the region.

The Pew Research Center has conducted an interesting study in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.   The questions asked to respondents were about economic problems, economic aspirations, and societal cleavages.   One of the more interesting questions concerned the role of internal divisions (race, ethnicity, or religion) and government bias.  The responses revealed that many in these countries believe that economic benefits are unfairly allocated on the basis of these societal differences,