MULTILATERALISM
AND THE MANAGEMENT OF GLOBALIZATION AFTER IRAQ:
Investing Petrodollars in Entrepreneurs and Building Social
Capital in Fragile Democracies
Jim de Wilde www.jimdewilde.net November 21, 2006
Elsewhere on the website, www.jimdewilde.net , there
are three pieces which provide the foundation for the
following essay: (1) From
Durand to Ahtisaari, the New Political Cartography, which
explores the challenge for international law in dealing with
the post-colonial residue for border disputes and states which
cannot create the domestic social capital required for
building sustainable prosperity; (2) Human Rights Jurisprudence After
Darfur, which looks at the role for international politics
to pursue rule-of-law based liberal interventionism by means
other than those which were used in Iraq; (3) Creating Value Through Entrepreneurship
in Angola and Kazakhstan, which seeks to link
international business thinking with the kind of capital
market reform required to produce the politically-accelerated
end of poverty.
This piece is intended as a broad policy statement based on
the three other essays/speeches and is an ongoing part of the
discussion among Canadian and American foreign policy makers
who are trying to work through the routes to the new
multilateralism. There is much more
work required on the new capital markets, the role of
remittances and economic savings, much being done in
international institutions. All requires we focus on
capital markets that allocated resources to talented
entrepreneurs within an economy protected by the rule of
law. I believe that demonstration effects
work, and that the international community has to focus on Sri
Lanka and Somali with the same energy devoted to Iraq and
Afghanistan in order to create positive
precedents. I also believe that academic
institutions have to bring together case studies of proponents
of human rights and the rule of law in a framework which
emphasizes their interconnectedness. Reason is the
universal language which trumps the cacophony of Babel.
The resurgent Taliban is financed by money obtained from
the mature opium crops, now five years after the overthrow of
the poppy-destroying Taliban.
The 1909 treaty between the British Empire and the
Kingdom of Siam is now the cause of a crisis in the rise of
Muslim fundamentalism in the southern Thai provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. The
treaty did not involve the participation of the ethnic Malays
who were “ceded” by the colonial power to Thailand.
These problems were anticipated. There
was simply no mechanism to deal with
them. The framework of international
politics lacked mechanisms for acting. Ad hoc coalitions
either failed or succeeded in situations like Kosovo, Sierra
Leone, Rwanda and now Darfur, Somalia, southern
Thailand. Like the great Gonalez Inarritu
film, Babel, we are now living in an interconnected world and
sometimes are only vaguely aware of the
interconnectedness. A century-old treaty
between the Siamese and the British can have ripples through
the global community. The reality of opium markets
in Central Asia can affect the security system on which North
Americans depend and put our Canadian soldiers at greater risk
in Afghanistan. This is the beginning of our new
multilateralism, in an interconnected world with many players,
not a superpower-organized chess game structured for strategic
negotiations.
The convergence of international crises in 2006 has
underlined the need for this new multilateralism in the
world. The next generation of U.S. political
decision-makers seems to understand that the era of unilateral
action is now over. One hopes that the lessons learned
include that there is no U.S. monopoly on expanding the global
rule of law and that in many instances, U.S. involvement can
be counterproductive. One of the great strengths of the
U.S. is reflected in its economy. There is
restless energy, constant innovation and capacity for
self-renewal, an engineering-driven approach to
problem-solving and technological solutions. These
qualities do not always work in international
politics. As a result, the rest of the world tends
to look at a different track record, a failure to read
historical patterns and a frequent confusion of nationalism
with a threat to global order. The challenge for
the world is how to prepare for 2008 while managing the
international system until then with the lame duck Bush
Presidency. Canadian foreign policy has to focus
on this challenge. The discussion of what is
required for a new practical and democratic multilateralism to
take place needs to begin now.
There are at least four great opportunities for innovation in
the international arena that can be begun while we are
experiencing a long overdue renewal of ideas in London, Paris
and Washington as well as in Ottawa:
(i) The new multilateralism can
create global capital markets that ensure energy revenues are
used to create the conditions for entrepreneurial growth in
emerging markets: To ensure that oil revenues
are reinvested in sustainable development and rule-of-law
based entrepreneurial growth in the regions from where the oil
came. It is a truism that oil has been a curse in
most of the world outside of Norway and Alberta. Now is
the opportunity to design a political economy of oil which
transforms oil revenues in the Gulf of Guinea and Central Asia
into entrepreneurial capital. If oil
revenues were converted into productive capital and pensions,
it would transform the African and central Asian economies. It
has to be done by an innovative rule of law to create
efficient long term capital market activities.
(ii) The new multilateralism
can create a framework for a global rule of law which manages
many of the latent disputes that impede the development of
successful institutions around the world: As an
outgrowth of the work being done on human rights commissions
and the debate about who is a terrorist and who is a freedom
fighter, we need to approach the issues which have been swept
under many rugs for two generations – the issues of
post-colonial boundaries which were implemented without the
consent of the governed. A new multilateralism has to
deal not only with questions of morality and international law
towards Kurds and Burmese, Tamils and Afro-Sudanese but
with all the unresolved disputes of colonialism which make
coherent politics and dynamic growth impossible and now
threaten the international system. The trials
in Sierra Leone will take a significant step towards
documenting this, but the future of Baluchistan, Kurdistan,
Somaliland and a hundred other “border disputes” or
post-colonial failed or weak states will test the
international system for the next few decades. An
attempt to establish a rule of law framework to correct
colonial arbitrariness (the Durand line between Pakistan and
Afghanistan) would go a long way towards reducing the number
of future Iraqs. For those of us who would like to increase
the rule-of-law based international system, there are some
possible first steps. How is
Somaliland different from Slovenia? Or Northern Cyprus.
To make the rule of law the guiding principle for
dispute resolution, we need some clarity (and debate) on these
“theoretical” issues. If the answer is an
invocation of realpolitik, then at least we would know where
we stand.
(iii) The new multilateralism
can start the redesign of the institutions of international
harmonization and economic management replacing the post-1945
frameworks with management cultures and mandates appropriate
to the digital age: The institutions of
international governance have been in need of an overhaul for
a long time. A Security Council permanent membership and
a G-8 which is more reflective of the global realities of 2006
would go a long way toward creating a new dynamic in the
international system. One is repeatedly struck by
the quality of officials working in international
agencies. The problem is threat they have few buttons to
push. The more China, India, Brazil and Russia are
engaged in international problem-solving, the more likely we
are to have effective international
institutions. In the new era, it is
essential that Brazil (or Indonesia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan for
that matter) be challenged to play a role in places like
Darfur. It is also essential that the redesigned
international institutions represent those countries with a
demonstrated commitment to the rule of law.
The image of human rights abusers on the UN Human Rights
Commission did almost as much damage to the credibility of the
UN as its demonstrated weakness in ending the
killing fields of Rwanda or Darfur.
(iv) The new
multilateralism can understand the “wisdom of crowds” approach
to data collection and commentary on the internet is already
creating new networks for political action. This is case law
for the 21st Century. From the Finnish role
in the resolution of the Aceh-Indonesia disputes to continuing
attempts to resolve through UN mediators Cameroon-Nigerian
border disputes, the Sri Lanka civil war, the Ethiopia-Eritrea
border disputes, we are creating a set of precedents and
prototypes. In themselves, this case law will be a
building block for the next generation of political activists,
increasingly conscious of the global precedents and
inspirations. This gives us the chance to help the
next generation explore ways to design interconnectedness and
navigate interdependencies. As in so many other
areas of public policy, the simple existence of the internet
creates the possibility of designing new approaches to the way
we view international law. Law students can
collect data about individuals in Darfur and document land
use, migration patterns and economic geography in the
Eritrea-Ethiopia border area. Knowledge does not
in itself set us free, but it does create options and
amplifies the demonstration effect of shared comparative
experiences. The era of web-organized information
provides opportunities to pool strategies, to build
collaborative networks and promote prototypes of political
innovation.
For Americans, many believed in the recent past that
unilateral response was required because there was no credible
multilateral option. A renewed multilateralism opens the
possibility that American security can be more effectively
pursued by other means. By pushing the
issues of global capital market reform, fixing the negative
residues of colonialism and acknowledging we need serious
institutional redesign in the machinery of international law,
international decision-makers can set the stage for the
construction of this more effective multilateralism.
For U.S. political leaders, the challenge is to create the
credibility for this new multilateralism. The challenge for
the next generation of U.S. Democrats, in particular, is to
show that their ability to build a new multilateralism
increases the real security of Americans living in Sante Fe,
Denver and Cincinnati. It could allow the
U.S. to step back from the need to be a global police actor, a
role it has played unwillingly and poorly, simply because
there was no multilateral alternative.
For Canadians, the effort to fix multilateralism has
collateral . Too often, our position
on international affairs involves an abstract invocation of
“multilateralism” without acknowledging that there is no
multilateral capacity to do anything. Our foreign policy too
often looks as though we are enamored with process-oriented
multilateral frameworks and have lost focus on the things they
were intended to accomplish. By setting our foreign
policy priority on fixing the multilateral process, we
actually do something useful within our
capacities. This will enhance our credibility and
provide some concrete steps to “punching above our
weight”.
In Canada, our multicultural framework provides us with
a potential, as yet unrealized, to link with hubs in Dubai,
Singapore, Taipei, Shenzhen, Bangalore and Kuala Lumpur to
build a very different model of a 21st Century
knowledge-intensive competitive economy. To
do this, we need to become a global leader in issues like the
empowerment of women, the key to economic development,
astutely recognized in many of the recent Nobel Peace Prize
awards. We need to earn credibility by playing a strategic and
focused role in places like Somalia and Sri Lanka, the way the
Finns have done in Kosovo and Aceh. This requires
that we consciously tap the creative energies of those new
Canadians who have adopted Canada’s democratic framework to
advance global agendas. We see this next generation of
multilingual, globally-oriented talent in all political
parties in Canada. This strengthens our hand
in building a new multilateralism. Our foreign
policy agenda needs to link this talent to the practical
issues of building a new multilateralism.
By refocusing Canadian foreign policy around the
building of an effective multilateralism, Canadians can make a
significant contribution to global security.
Canadian foreign policy can play a role with
other non-colonial western nations (e.g. Finland, Norway)
whose perspective is different from the Americans and European
powers. We are at an early stage in this new
process. History will
organize the calendar as: 1945-1989, the
Cold War, 1989-2006, managing a globalization led
by technology, the internet and satellite
communication. Then the period from 2006-20xx,
which will be defined by how successful we are in building a
rule-of-law based multilateralism from here onwards.
Back to
Top
FROM DURAND TO
AHTISAARI - THE NEW POLITICAL
CARTOGRAPHY: When the Durand Line meets
Globalization – Creating Successful States and Building Social
Capital in the 21st Century
www.jimdewilde.net
November 21, 2006
Ethnic conflict within artificially constructed
geographical boundaries is now one of the most important
topics of international politics. We cannot and should
not redraw every boundary, but we had better start thinking
about these issues. They already impede economic
development and block strategies for eliminating
poverty.
We need the case law to show that law can
compensate for the political cartography of colonialism and
that legitimate grievances will be addressed because we want
to create a framework of global rule of law. We want to
create viable states and avoid the 21st Century specter of
Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, the collision of globalization
and post-colonial political cartography.
In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand arbitrarily decided the
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There
was of course no referendum on its political acceptability to
anyone who lived there. The borders that were decided in
European capitals define the globalizing post-colonial world
of today.
In the 21st Century, former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari
successfully negotiated between the Aceh Independence movement
and the Indonesian government a workable arrangement.
This achievement which many thought would win the participants
the Nobel Peace Prize was the beginning of a new process of
political cartography and dealing with the residue of
colonialism. From Durand to Ahtisaari, the
international community is moving in the right
direction.
But when the Durand Lines of the post-colonial world meet the
contemporary realities of globalization, so-called
“failed states” erupt into global security issues.
Many of the present
crises in the world are in significant part problems of
political cartography. This is even more the case
of some of the crises we can anticipate which are often
labeled the crisis of “failed states”. In the next
decade, the global community will have to address (among other
zones) the questions of Baluchistan, the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, and the
northeast African borders. When the Durand Line
meets globalization, brushfires can become
volcanoes. Instead of
marginalizing the areas trouble spots, globalization has
brought all our histories home to us. One of the
challenges of the 21st Century is to deal with the residue of
colonialism which limits the development of effective states
and capital markets.
The significance of
failed states goes beyond the issues of terrorism, although
that will drive the international security discussion.
The epidemiology of disease from viruses in Africa to avian
flu emphasizes the importance of functioning institutions on a
global basis. In Angola, the need to curtail the spread of
viruses has made the poor institution-building and
dysfunctional cartography of Portuguese colonialism intensely
relevant. The global community has a stake in a
well-functioning Angolan state and health bureaucracy.
The global community needs an effective Angolan state
with the capacity to monitor virus transmission, deliver
health care infrastructure and record the traditional
medicines which ameliorated these problems in the past.
In the post-9/11 world we live in, there is an appropriate
world-wide condemnation and enforcement of all activities that
are rebellions against recognized authority. The
behaviour of Chechens, Tamil Tigers, and private militias in
Congo or Somalia is correctly labeled as unacceptable by the
community of international law. However, for this stated rule
of law to be credible internationally, the next generation of
foreign policy makers must attempt to provide a framework for
resolution and or management of all the Durand lines which
clutter the world map. These residues of colonialism
frequently stop the development of “social capital” or
effective government required to generate the preconditions
for sustainable prosperity in emerging economies. Realpolitik
ensures that the global community will focus on “crises”, but
international law can attempt to have an early detection
system for emerging zones of conflict.
We can only acknowledge that and
push for a political cartography that, in the best traditions
of utilitarianism creates the greatest good for the greatest
number and removes as many failed states from the global map
as is possible. This required diplomatic
negotiation like Aceh and also political imagination in the
construction of new state structures, like Catalonia or,
increasingly, Kurdistan.
We are now in an era where the value system of what Tony
Appiah calls “liberal cosmopolitanism” is in clash
with simplifiers or fundamentalists, from Beirut to Kansas.
All places are afflicted by fundamentalisms that are
deliberately simplistic responses to the complexity of our
time. The consequences of this response to globalization
in a world where there are hundreds of Durand lines and
political institutions that fail to create social capital are
increasingly serious.
“Liberal cosmopolitans” have to accept the reality that
in failed states and communities, it is extremely difficult to
build “social capital” when politics is about the full-time
mediation of geographical disputes between communities.
The great successes of liberal cosmopolitan building of social
capital, e.g. the Indian Congress Party, are not easily
exportable models. In the
post-Cold War era, the examples of Slovenian or Estonian
democracy-building are more typical. These regimes, both
successful, were significantly propelled by a liberated
nationalism that was channeled towards democracy.
The South Korean model of economic growth
and social liberalism is a similarly fusion of a traditional
nationalism required for survival channeled into a growth
oriented and socially liberal agenda. These have
proven to be the more frequent models for creating new areas
in the global economy defined by their acceptance of the rule
of law and their capacity to channel social capital into the
preconditions for sustainable prosperity.
The global community knows several things that it didn’t know
a decade ago about nation-building, peace-making and the role
of social capital in creating the conditions for sustainable
prosperity. The political agenda for the next few
years is going to require sorting them out and developing a
global politics based on that solution. The
development of a Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Brazilian, Kazakh
worldview on managing globalization is a component of this and
will influence whether it is to be done
successfully. The world of
globalization must no longer be confused with the image of
spreading American cultural values. Two decades
ago, Gorbachev understandably valued McDonald’s for the way it
educated young workers about work ethics and
productivity. Similarly, other proponents of a
“flat earth” valued Wal-Mart for the way it creates an
efficient distribution chain. That era of globalization
is past. The next issues on the agenda are what we do
with the need to create social capital and political
accountability. It is important to demand of BRIC
countries (and Kazakhs, South Africans and Persians) that they
assume proportionate responsibility for these issues as part
of the new multilateral legal system.
Let’s start with some counterfactual questions which by
definition no one can answer: If the
arbitrary Durand line were crossed off the map and an
independent Baluchistan existed, how would the politics of
south central Asia change? Would there be more
security in the “northwest frontiers”? Would it be
possible to create more social capital building an economy in
Baluchistan instead of spending political energies on
resisting influences from Lahore or Tehran?
Obviously, no one knows the answer to these questions with
certainty, but we had better start thinking about
them. Durandism, the making of maps which
have no sense to the people living in the region has collided
with globalization making the world a much less safe place and
distracting us from even more important issues, e.g.
eliminating global poverty. Creating
viable states with successful economies and the social capital
required for sustained democracy is a challenge from Slovakia
to Georgia and East Timor. It is not just an issue of
economic development, but of global security.
One size does not fit all, and the solutions for
Malaysia are not the solutions for Pakistan, the solutions for
Catalonia are not the solutions for former Biafra.
Nevertheless, much of the turmoil in the world today stems
from not addressing these issues. This requires
imagination and flexibility. It requires creating
multiple state structures that can manage the oil revenues of
regions like the Gulf of Guinea. It is about redesign
and innovation within our international political system.
The question is how we are to manage these
new realities.
First, we need to start to ask how we develop
functioning institutions in countries held back by 19th and
early 20th century amateur cartographers. The bias
against microstates is refuted by relatively peaceful
countries with internal coherence like Bahrain and
Slovenia. The rule of law must work to resolve these
issues. What is the rule of law on Northern Cyprus and
East Timor and how does the international legal community
differentiate the two cases? A little clarity here
would go a long way in figuring out how to mitigate the effect
of Durandism on the world of the 21st Century by creating a
confidence in the coherence and potential of international
law.
Second, multinational states can be made to work if they are
not built on exploitative models. It is a constant
balancing act in the architectural design of Canadian
federalism to ensure that wealth-production is not constrained
by regional politics. For multilingual
and multicultural states to work effectively there must be
other instruments of what Peter Katzenstein called social coherence
in his analysis of Switzerland. In
Switzerland, national financial institutions provide the
framework in with social capital and common purpose can be
shaped.
Practical problem-solving starts with finding a few success
stories. Peter Galbraith and Shlomo Avineri’s belief in “three
Iraqs” and building a progressive, democratic Islamic
state in Kurdistan are good starting points for practical
analysis. In the long term, we
have to look at the legacy of the Durand line, the
illegitimacy or telling people to live within borders they had
no role in setting, the importance of social capital as a
prerequisite for sustainable prosperity, and the insistence
that whatever formula is decided from Congress Party to
Slovenia, that decision is made
democratically. The first step to doing this
is to ensure that the rule of international law has a clarity
and logic to it as we try to compensate for the effects of the
Durand negative legacy without unleashing new tyrannies of
parochial chauvinism and fundamentalism.
Political realism requires that every case study be understood
distinctly. There are attempts
to look at situations where minority rights are threatened
systematically as in the MAR project, which is a good
start. We need comparative politics
and case law to be able to talk about this phenomenon.
We need creative political theory to define new institutional
structures, post-federal and networked to international
partners. Catalonia, Kosovo and Kurdistan are
differentiated legal and political entities. We need
different categories to deal with the aspirations and
challenges of Baluchistan, Kashmir, and Northern Cyprus for
example. International law and the
mobilization of social capital to eliminate poverty are not
the only agenda in an era of multiple threats to our
security. The role of international law is
to ensure that choices are as free as is possible in a world
of competing new states and absent a compelling international
legal authority. A world in which
young Turkish Cypriots, Shan, and Kosovars compare their role
in the international economy is something offered by our
networked age. When the next generation of foreign
policy makers confront security issues, it would be helpful if
they are not blindsided by other “Durand lines”.
The next generation requires that the skills of Ahtisaari be
applied where there are many other Durand
lines. We will never eliminate ethnic
conflicts, but we can start to try to minimize them.
Back to Top
Human Rights
Jurisprudence after Darfur: ICANN, Open-Source
Transparency and the Role of China in
a Global Rule of Law
April 2006
This
essay is written primarily for teaching purposes. The
issues of developing human rights jurisprudence post-Sierra
Leone and aligning it with post-rise of China realpolitik is
the challenge for the next generation of international
development students. I hope to look at specific
case studies to work out a legal theory for international
relations after Darfur
working at the intersection of international realism, new
approaches to “failed” states (i.e. states with no protection
of rule of law) and human rights agendas in states with
artificial multiculturalism resulting from post-colonial
boundaries. Case studies include:
(i) the successful Finnish mediation between Aceh and
Indonesia,
(ii) current Papua-Indonesia relations, (iii), the sale of the
Canadian oil company Arakis and the impact of
China on
strategies for advancing human rights in
Sudan and
(iv) post-Andijan Uzbekistan. From the empirical
discussion of these concrete situations, students will
hopefully build on the issues raised
in this essay.
The most important and exciting work on international
economics is being done at the vector of entrepreneurial
business, web-enabled commerce and development economics.
It is done intuitively by people under the age of
thirty who do not operate within the intellectual silos of the
last generation. The next vector
taking shape is the one between human rights jurisprudence,
international politics and web-enabled pro-democracy activism.
In April 2006, the Sierra Leone tribunal led by Desmond di Silva’s prosecutorial
work and the Arusha trials on Rwanda
war crimes has created the framework of a rigours
jurisprudence which will be refined and developed in the
21st Century.
It will provide a framework for discerning when war
crimes trials are the appropriate response to human rights
disputes and when truth and reconciliation commissions on the
model pioneered by Bishop Tutu in South
Africa are the appropriate
responses in democratic and moral theory. As the global
community deals with Darfur, Burma
and Uzbekistan
in the post-Sierra Leone global
community, this will have significant political
implications.
In April 2006, a pro-democracy network links the
responses to globalization of urban Iraqi youth, post-Charles
Taylor Liberians, Rwandans and those who have come to
celebrate liberty through the Rose, Tulip, and Orange revolutions of
Georgia,
Ukraine
and Kyrghizstan. The
practicalities of an open-source world, where files are
shared, experiences learned and refined as web-enabled case
studies is already with us, but it requires rigorous analysis
to ensure that this does not become a moment of political
atonality with no practical implications.
In April 2006, the future of the internet is being
called into some question by the potential development of a
coalition of closed societies, seeking to regulate the
anarchic mix of voices on the global web and produce controls,
or even a rival internet regulatory capacity,
challenging and possibly competing with
ICANN.
Open-source accountability – the next
generation of pro-democracy
activism:
In the next decade,
there will be opportunities for a form of open-source
accountability to become a defining part of the global human
rights regime. It will be
possible for a framework of rule of law be available to rule
of law activists in Belarus
and Burma. It will also be
possible for a community of pro-democracy activists to be
empowered through the organized social networks of the modern
internet society. It is also possible
that in this open-source age we will end up with a fragmented
internet, with closed societies opting out of the global
society and/or an anarchic framework of unregulated gossip, a
global tabloid of unverified charges and amateur journalism
creating a Babel of
incoherence in the way we look at global human rights
activities. To make sure that we
have the opportunity to build a global internet community that
is about real human rights, we need to start having a debate
about the next generation of political activism, web-enabled
human rights strategies, right now.
The role of ICANN and the potential for a
rise of a coalition of closed societies:
In the past few months, the future of the internet has
been brought into question by the proposal to create a
competitive structure to ICANN, the overall regulatory authority over
domain names. A coalition of
anti-openness, including possibly the Chinese, the Iranians
and the Venezuelans have started to recognize the power of the
internet and a concern that universal openness may be equated
with U.S. dominance. The
architecture of the new international rule of law and a
practical framework for the enforcement and advancement of
global human rights requires that the open-source web society
that has developed in
the last decade not be equated with Americanization.
For this reason, one of the most important debates
going on right now, with implications for the advancement of a
global human rights agenda is the future of Icann. In a world where
state power is only one area of influence and government aid
an increasingly less significant avenue for facilitating
economic growth, the impact of the internet economy going
global cannot be exaggerated. Its impact on
economic activity is well understood and articulated in the
increasingly focused debate about the “digital divide”. However, it
will also frame the debate about human rights, about scrutiny
and oversight of human rights abuse.
It also has the potential to develop mechanisms of
transparency and accountability which were not possible before the
internet.
The Burmese junta,
the Iranian mullahs, reactionary sections of the Chinese
Communist Party and the equally reactionary caudillo populists
of Latin America
understand the power of the internet. The chaotic
nature of an open source world and wiki-dominated knowledge
system often remains in the peripheral vision of conventional political
decision-makers. But the
technology-literate social entrepreneurs who are defining
21st Century social and
economic policy are starting to develop new strategies,
sometimes bypassing public policies.
Google maps and monitoring
water treatment and environmental developments anywhere in the
world: It is now
possible to map and the water treatment engineering capacities
in every village of Somalia with
Google maps. It is now possible to
network entrepreneurs with microcredit-based business
plans. The theory of
economic development is transformed daily by these
market-facilitating activities. The
transformative potential of the web also applies to the area
of pro-democracy advocacy and human rights jurisprudence.
The wiki and open source
world can also be chaotic, unnavigably anarchic and not
sufficiently subject to validation of claims.
Conventional bureaucrats who want regularized channels
will point to web-charlatans, using blogs to advance
particular causes, not following conventional journalistic
standards of verification and simply being unrepresentative in
their views. Conversely, new economy
“Wired” magazine readers will point to the rigidity of old
economy bureaucracies whether the Encyclopedia Britannica or
university research administrators. Both will be right. Both will be
wrong. We are in the
process of creating a new framework for the global
organization of knowledge and information. In that
process, we will expand the possibilities of the way we
advance human rights law and enforcement of basic democratic
values.
The
lessons of Wikipedia – how to create credibility in
open-source systems of knowledge and reliability in
open-source systems of information:
The development of Wikipedia provides
a case study of the strengths and
weaknesses of these new strategies. Wikipedia has
developed with many minuses, and more pluses.
Open-source knowledge may not appeal to people, who
want peer-reviewed articles, but collaborative networks of
patients are revolutionizing health-care and the wikipedia
model has proven a way of demonstrating a wisdom of
crowds. The skepticism about
expertise is one of the great debates of our time and has to
be managed with great care to steer between the rigidities of
academic orthodoxies and pesudo-sciences and the anarchy of
unverified opinions. The
opens-source/wiki model requires constant validation.
One of those checks is simply the openness of the
open-source system. We want to
create a system which combines the rigour of conventional
disciplines with the flexibility of open-source.
It
is also it now possible to pool knowledge and to collaborate
on human rights investigation. For this to work, it must
avoid becoming a form of global vigilantism
or a form of superficial tabloid analysis. If this were to
happen, it would produce a negative effect on the governance
of societies. The ideal version
would be one where the open source communities complemented
the existing legal
infrastructure and accelerated the changes in the development
of the rule of law. The new
organization of information means that it is possible to
collect data about the atrocities in
Sierra
Leone and in
Rwanda.
We are already capable
of organizing and collecting stories of atrocities in a manner
which was impossible a decade ago.
From Mladic to the janjaweed in Darfur, there has been a
significant change in a decade. Elizabeth Rubin’s article in the April
2, 2006 New York Times shows the extent that this can be done
when combined with the legal rigour and personal courage of
investigators like Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court.
What is required, now as in the period before the
open-source revolution is the kind of analytical rigour
associated with great education.
Without this, and a clear debate about what this looks
like, open-source runs the risk of being a mix of vigilantism,
“Crossfire” soundbites and relativistic analysis.
THE OPEN-SOURCE WORLD AND THE HUMAN
RIGHTS AGENDA
It
is possible and it may be desirable to have a global human
rights project with a wiki-style discussion of
Burma
and Uzbekistan
about the common issues of building a civil society and an
infrastructure for democracy. The legal enforcement of
Sierra
Leone and Bosnia
won't be there but we create an historical record a community
of accountability between young Uzbeks and young Burmese and
an impediment to the posturing of 21st Century tyrants,
exposed by a global openness and a debate. To do
that we need a perspective on human rights, a debate about
when war crimes trials should take place and when we hand the
instruments of justice to the future bishop Tutus and begin
peace and reconciliation processes.
We know the capacity
for new media led change that can come from the activities of
a credible and visionary journalist like Pulitzer Prize winner
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. The atrocities of a single
village and the outrages of human rights violations against a
young Pakistani woman are now the subject of a global
conversation. A large
dimension of the new discussion of global rule of law begins
online.
The debate about human rights, legitimate use of
military force and the development of an international
security capability have moved dramatically since the British
intervention in Sierra Leone in 1997 The
debate on the Iraq war has sharpened the focus between those
who speak in a language of global security, those who speak in
a language of economic realism and those who speak in a
language of human rights and the right of every citizen on the
planet to live under a rule of law.
For law schools and political science departments, this
future human rights jurisprudence requires the rigorous
focusing of a number of questions.
Otherwise, the wiki-dominated documentation of abuses
in Darfur and the
Google satellite-mapped trail of atrocities will fall in a
legal quicksand.
Some of the most important questions confronting the
next generation of pro-democracy activists require being
focused in classrooms today:
(1) How
universal is democracy and how much an imposition of modern
western cultural values?
The clash of various realisms and various idealisms on
these issues has posed a new dimension to the political
philosophy of the early 21st
Century. How universal
are democratic values is an issue which has been addressed
with characteristic uniqueness and astuteness of perspective
by Amartya Sen. Can the rule of law
be “imposed” by force if a local clan values clan loyalty
against outsiders as a trump value? How do we
choose when to enforce an international rule of law?
Who is “we”?
(2) Why was the
experience of the Shia in Iraq absent from the moral radar screens of
the west in the 1990s?
Is it no more complicated than the fact that there was
no video as contrasted with Darfur today? The
Marsh Arabs were persecuted by someone who had
access to oil and have after much tragedy and moral failure
been liberated by military action.
(3). What is the
common law principle emerging from Sierra Leone and Rwanda on
the line between a war crime and a civil war situation which
requires truth and reconciliation?
The superb work done by
architects of a new global rule of common law in Sierra Leone,
Rwanda is just starting to attract attention in legal theory
and political philosophy circles. The
Hague trials on former
Yugoslavia
have started to develop a body of evidence about atrocities
and crimes which constitute “war crimes”.
But what is the border-line between state-sanctioned
ethnic conflict and war crimes? When is the
appropriate remedy “Truth and Reconciliation” Commissions and
when is the appropriate remedy
the application of an emerging standard of rule of law
appropriate for an international tribunal such as the one in
Sierra Leone? In terms of the
borderline between politics and law, when is the judgment that
an amnesty or “Truth and Reconciliation” process is
politically preferable to a trial the correct decision?
The judgments of Chileans regarding the Pinochet regime
have haunted international human rights law for twenty
years. How
does one judge the generals in Rangoon or
terrorists in Sri
Lanka who have the option of
advancing their interests through an
internationally-sanctioned mediation process?
If the Burmese generals were to leave office tomorrow
with their narco-currency generated wealth in exchange for a
peaceful transition to a rule of law backed regime, is this a
deal which should be sanctioned by global democrats?
If an amnesty accelerated the peace process in
Sri
Lanka, would we still argue
that war crimes trials are required because of the abuses
committed by suicide bombers? Once again, who are the
global democrats who should be making this decision:
UN bureaucrats, the government of Finland or India, the
State Department in Washington, a committee consisting of
Nobel Peace Prize winners, an international court of
Justice a committee of international law schools, the
editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the Financial
Times, or Rupert Murdoch or some combination of the
above.
4. What are the
legitimate means for multicultural states to handle conflict?
What is the role of international rule of law in these
situations? The issues of
Biafra and
Sri
Lanka pose this question
concretely and are case studies which should be analyzed
intently. The development of a
rule of law framework is painstaking and incremental. It
contains within it the potential for errors, the potential for
trivializing great evil and overpunishing people who
reasonably could not be expected to resist social pressures
and the intimidation and fear of reprisal which is the real
world in periods of civil war and conflict. There are
some standards which the trial of Charles Taylor may
establish. The person who plays
the role of Hannah Arendt as Taylor in
Freetown (or
The Hague) instead
of Eichmann in Jerusalem will
probably not see the banality of evil.
Instead, he or she will see a network of
rationalizations about the nature of civil threats and
stereotype of the behavior of people different.
Mladic and Taylor’s first clear evil is that they used
state power to effect great suffering. The
Andijan citizens confronting Uzbek soldiers, the Kurds at
Halabja similarly confronted a state power which saw no checks
on its activity. The international
rule of law and human rights jurisprudence requires that we
aim for a consistency of standards about these issues.
These last four questions are the framework if a
curriculum for a new jurisprudence of human rights. If there
is a vector about political activity involving political
science, legal theory and social networking, similarly there
is an intellection conjunction between political science and
jurisprudence. International law has
had a blood transfusion of fresh ideas.
The development of a common law of international human
rights will come about through case law, through the
activities of people like Ocampo in his pursuit of the
architects of the Darfur massacre, in the work of the lawyers
at the Arusha trials on Rwanda and in the work of Desmond
Silva on the Sierra Leone war crimes trial, whose work in the
trial of Charles Taylor may be one of the most significant
events in political and legal philosophy of the 21st
Century.
Undoubtedly the internet will transform the way we look
at human rights issues even more than it is already.
Now, as in so
many other areas, we need to develop the tools which turn the
internet from a global knowledge-dredging activity and add
value through a process of validation and debate. In all
information innovations, sooner or later economic power goes
to those whose capacity to validate and organize knowledge is
established in the marketplace. All those of us who
are engaged in knowledge creation (media, new media networks,
wikis, voluntary associations, NGOs, government agencies,
universities) have to have answers to these issues.
This applies to the standard-setting blue-chip media,
who are even more important in the cluttered of an open-source
world where brand is the only shortcut.
For the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall
Street Journal, McGill Law School,
Harvard, and MIT, these questions have to be addressed and
worked through. As the
line between university, blue-chip media and wiki starts to
converge, this will have real ramifications for the way we
discuss and teach democratic values and the rule of law.
Already an inventory exists, documenting activities in
Darfur, Sierra
Leone, Rwanda.
We can construct a map of Darfur villages and janjaweed
militia movements on a laptop with Google Maps. What we cannot
do is ensure that our knowledge management capacities enable
us to ensure that the human rights questions which rightly
preoccupy the next generation of political idealists can
receive an effective organization of data which sets
priorities. Perhaps it is a brand like
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the New York Times and
the living Nobel Peace Prize recipients backed by a
secretariat that provides resources and infrastructure.
It starts, however, with
universities and law schools asking the right questions about
international politics and human rights jurisprudence.
It continues with the use of the new social networking
software and skills of the internet to organize data of human
rights abuses and to share it in a way which empowers often
isolated human rights advocates. The power
of Transparency International to shed sunlight on previously
obscure corruption in various parts of the world augurs well
for a web-enabled human rights agenda. The power of web-enabled
human rights jurisprudence to provide a similar standard and
record also exists. Ensuring that the
internet has universal acceptance has become a top priority
for advocates of a global rule of law.
Human Rights Watch has already started this process and the
development of organized data on unacceptable activities
around the world has increased exponentially since the
international anti-landmines movement demonstrated the power
of information technology to affect public policy. The next
stage of international human rights jurisprudence is to
organize the open source accumulation of case studies and
stories and to create a rule of law backed set of criteria for
future enforcement. Politics
remains an indispensable component of effective enforcement
mechanisms. Kristof’s political
strategy for an international force of Bangladeshi, Moroccans
and other Muslim troops in Darfur is recognition of the
political context of human an example of the recognition of
the political context of human rights jurisprudence.
With no enforcement mechanism, there is no meaningful
rule of law. Without political
consensus, there is no enforcement mechanism. The borderline
between law and politics is one of the templates of democratic
theory. Contemporary human
rights activists are the map makers for this
borderline.
Back to
Top
Iranian
blogs and backing Iranian democracy:
January 26,
2006
“Since the major student riots of 1999,
disturbances have frequently spilled out of the campuses and
on to the streets. Especially in June 2003,
which saw ten days of nightly violent clashes between those
seeking greater freedoms and the Basij
(mullah-backed militia). American officials,
including President George W. Bush , voiced their support for
the protesters, but this only allowed the regime’s hardliners
to dismiss the demonstrators and hooligans and the affluent
remnants of the monarchy, dancing to the tune of their masters
in Washington…It remains to be seen how long a small group of
ageing clerics can impose their desire fir an Islamic state on
a society in which the majority of people are under 30 and
have no memory of the Revolution of
any appetite for its ideals.” Nasrin
Alavi We
Are Iran: The Persian Blogs p. 139
The emerging global debate over the Iranian
nuclear programme has revealed the vacuum of western policy
towards Iran.
Fareed Zakaria’s highly useful piece in Newsweek
(January 30th)
argues persuasively that many boats have been missed
and that the tactics required for minimizing the threats of a
nuclear Iran require different approaches than the approaches
rehashed from the current foreign policy menu. David Brooks’
piece in the New York Times of January 22nd 2006 argues perceptively that
there are four current positions on Iran, none of them
satisfactory: pre-emptionists
(who would use military force to preempt an Iranian
nuclear capacity) , sanctionists (who would attempt to deter
Iranian militarism through sanctions) , reformists (who will
wait for a better regime in Iran)
and silent fatalists (who acknowledge the limited
options of an overextended “west” in dealing with the new
situation in Iran.
There is a possible fifth position, radical
pro-democrats, attempting to assist the development of a
next-generation cyber-democracy, concerned with the type of regime that
exists in Iran and
adjusting short term tactics to achieving these objectives.
The fifth option obviously
requires a careful calibration of designing incentives and
deterrents and then constructing international coalitions, but
we are on an accelerated learning curve in this global
cosmopolitan world. Iran
will be a critical test of the global rule of law coalition.
The role of Canadian foreign policy in promoting
democracy in a new Persia
is complex. It is obviously caught in
the same labyrinth of competing stratagems and philosophies
that underlie the approach of other western democracies.
As Canadians, we can overstate our potential influence,
the role of soft power, the promotion of Farsi-language film
makers at the Montreal Film Festivals, the ties between
Canadian and Iranian technologists at Canadian universities,
the Canadian track record of supporting dissidents and
democrats from Mandela to Havel when that wasn’t the
orthodoxy of “realpolitik” foreign policy.
But we can also underestimate the role and impact of
global cosmopolitanism in backing sustainable democracies in
key parts of the world.
The politics of
contemporary Iran is
particularly complicated because Persia
has played such a unique role in the last half century of
world history. It is a great power
that has been locked in an ideological backwater since
1979. The poisoning ideology of
that revolution has contaminated the Iranian political
culture. The harassment by
Iraq
since 1980 has further contaminated the culture and this
created a new reality with which we must now deal. The global pro-democracy
community is now dealing in Iran
with the result of these many political wounds that have
become infected. The global
pro-democracy movement cannot succeed without leveraging the
current multilateral international efforts on
Iran’s
compliance with nuclear controls.
Conversely, the agenda of ensuring a peaceful role for
Iran in
the global community cannot succeed without sensitivity to the
impact these negotiations are having on Iranian
democracy. In the short term,
inclusion of Iran into a multi-power structure to manage the
nuclear issue is one way to help empower globally-oriented
members of the Iranian political community. But in the long
term, the only way to allay the understandable global
concerns about the Iranian nuclear
programme is to nurture the development of a stable democratic
Iran. The tactics are
as we all know, tricky. We are forever unraveling
the tangled cord of 19th
Century imperial histories and 20th Century Cold War “realpolitik”
foreign policies.
Let us start by trying to untangle these cords. The
western democracies missed opportunities to back Iranian
dissidents in the 1970s and 1990s.
Any future Canadian role has to deal with the
challenges of creating and earning
credibility for western democracies in the Farsi-speaking
world. As in
other parts of the world, our own expectations have to be
calibrated to be bold but to stay within the parameters of the
possible. Canadians and pro-democracy
movement are all too aware of how difficult it has been to
back democratic movements even in Burma, a
country where the geostrategic complexities do not include the
specter of nuclear proliferation or in apartheid
South
Africa where it took a long
time to come around despite the current global celebration of
the triumph of democracy there. So even with
realistically calibrated expectations,
what can Canada
do about the pursuit of Persian democracy and the development
of a role for a new Iran on
the world stage? The answer is that we
can start to lay foundations, learning from the successes of
the African National Congress and the Polish Solidarity
movement.
Iran
could be a success story like post-Ataturk Turkey,
Korea,
and Japan
after 1945, or it could turn out to be like
Germany
after 1918.
Iran is
one of the countries where there is a great debt owed by the
west, where we have failed in the past to promote the cause of
Iranian democracy. Western democrats
failed to advocate the cause of democracy effectively under Mossadegh, even as we
helped Persians resist Stalin. More recently,
western democracies failed to understand the
implausibility of the Shah’s regime, failed to find a point of
leverage to back the democratic elements in 1979 and allowed
the secular Bani-Sadr and Bazarghan coalitions to dissolve
into exile and political weakness.
Above all, we failed to
recognize the huge impact and trauma of the Iran-Iraq war and
the, at minimum, negligence of the global community in that
period. This in no way
exonerates the extremism of the current regime. Nor does it in any way
understate the dangers represented by such an extremist rogue
regime. However, it does speak to
the tactics required to empower courageous and
visionary Iranian democrats and lead to the successful
democratization of Iran.
The political challenge
for proponents of rule of
law in the global community is one which requires an effort to
find an Archimedean point to back democratic forces in
Iran.
In Somalia,
an
enforced rule-of-law could contribute to a progressive outcome
and dictates the pro-democratic strategy.
In Sri
Lanka, an
enforced peace and a negotiation between groups who are
disarmed may produce a Northern
Ireland type of best possible
outcome and this dictates the pro-democratic strategy.
Iran
presents a different challenge.
So, how does
Canadian foreign policy play a role in influencing the
direction of a democratic Iran? Our role is to
back the progressive social
forces in Iran,
the globally-oriented
progressive democrats without discrediting them by having our
backing. Our hope is to help them
invent a vibrantly democratic Iran,
governed by rule-of-law, becoming at minimum a
Malaysia
or South
Korea in the global economy
as it organizes its intellectual capital and takes a
constructive role in the new global geopolitics.
Here are seven potential contributions that Canadian
foreign policy could make:
(a)
The
role of moral referee in international frameworks is
significant: Because
Canadian foreign
policy can be based on a unique
post-multicultural liberal cosmopolitanism,
we can provide a role in the educating the
international process about the emergence of the new
international framework. We can be a moral referee
in international frameworks. If once again the
differences in the region are not understood as well as
differences in Europe are understood, there is little chance
of a democracy (America, Canada, Britain) calibrating its
foreign policy correctly. On a recent major
U.S.
news show, the journalist hosting the show talked (not as a
slip of the tongue, but repeatedly) about President
Ahmedinajad appealing to the “Arab street”. Arab-Persian
relations have a history and few Farsi-speakers appeal to the
Arab street. It is difficult to create
sound public policy in a democracy when there is such
widespread misinformation. At
minimum, Canada’s multicultural cosmopolitanism provides a
grammar for discussing the complex historical relations of the
region and promoting democratic values with that grammar.
(b)
To strengthen the hand of
Persian reformers, western democracies have to admit they were
wrong in failing to back previous democratic
movements: Apologies are an
invitation to an endless and
counterproductive reopening of history.
(“We ask the French to apologize for the Norman
invasion” is the ultimate in the inappropriate use of
history). Apologies must not be
allowed to become a blank cheque for
political extortionists or apologists for neofascism. Nevertheless, the treatment of
Iran in
the global community between 1953 and 1979 and, in different
ways, between 1979 and 2005 reveals a failure western
democrats should acknowledge. We
collectively acknowledged
how Cold War geopolitical strategies contributed to
the toleration of the
apartheid regime in South
Africa in the process of
rehabilitating the “communist” and “terrorist” Mandela. How else do we
communicate to the 25-year olds in the Persian street that we
“get it”?
(c)
The Canadian role in creating a
global petro-economy which emphasizes productive reinvestment
strengthens the hands of democratic reforms in
Iran:
We have to use our potential global role in
petro-diplomacy and energy diplomacy to include
Iran in
a collaborative discussion of post-OPEC oil diplomacy.
This might be an informal exercise involving Iranian
academics and bureaucrats along with Chinese and Indian
investors and investor analysts and led by Canadians suddenly
self-conscious of the fact that we are the world’s leading
energy superpower. As Canada
assumes its role as one of the world’s leading energy
superpowers, we can develop more strategies to include Iranian
democrats in the management of a new global economy programmed
to facilitate the development of an entrepreneur-led
sustainable prosperity. The more we create
multilateral frameworks for deciding issues about global
energy consumption and production, the more we encourage and
support Iranians with the skills and ambitions to participate
in such frameworks. This is
reminiscent of the discussion about supporting young South
Africans in the 1980s.
(d)
Canadians can facilitate
investment in new public capital markets, like the Tehran
stock exchange, which leads to increased pressure for
transparency and increased involvement of new capital markets
in Canadian projects:
Canada’s foreign economic policy can be more involved
in creating a multilateral framework for South-South economic
transactions that create growth and operate within the rules
of a transparent and rule-of-law inspired economic
framework. The negotiations that are
part of the WTO process and in which Canada has long enjoyed
its avenues of multilateralism become suddenly relevant in a
world where Chinese investment in Syria, Malaysian investment
in South Africa, Korean investment in Uzbekistan and Indian
investment in southeast Asia becomes one of the drivers of the
new pattern of economic growth. German
involvement in the Tehran stock
exchange has been a significant new phenomenon in the
construction of a globalized and globalizing Iranian
economy. The more accountable and
well-regulated cross-investment takes place, the easier it
will be to create a constituency of support for
democratization. As more Iranians
participate in this process, the
consensus for integration in the global economy will
grow deeper.
(e) The Canadian support for human rights
means that while we are backing the democrats in the new
Persia, we have to create an equivalent of the Helsinki protocol to monitor
repressive activities in the realities of the present
tense: We could create the
equivalent of the Helsinki protocol for Iran, working with
Amnesty International, Transparency International and over
like-minded governments without an imperial history
to create a data base of political prisoners and violations in
the standards of rule of law in Iran.
Sunlight is a disinfectant and simply making the world
more aware of events in Iran
creates one of the preconditions of a successful
democratization process, while western support is at
best a double-edged sword, it can be used to empower
individuals as the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the human
rights activist, Shirin Ebadi
demonstrates. We do not have the
equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize in terms of publicity but
in the age of the internet, this kind of focused activity has
enormous potential to illuminate and disinfect.
(f)
Even though we have had trouble figuring out how a G-8
becomes a G-12 or how an L-20 becomes relevant, there is a
role for an international grouping to manage nuclear
proliferation, the nuclear powers plus Iran.
How do we maintain the principle of nuclear
non-proliferation now that the global community has accepted
the Pakistani and Indian nuclear programmes?
How does the New Delhi-Beijing-Moscow role in shaping
global policy affect pro-democracy agendas in
Iran?
The advantage of pursuing such a strategy, similar to
the six-power negotiations in the Koreas
is that it provides an incentive for responsible Iranian
participation and it recognizes the need of having
China,
India,
Pakistan
and Russia
in a new collaborative framework. It
gives Iran a chance to participate, without necessarily having
to acquire nuclear capabilities.
It also gives internationally-oriented Iranians a
podium from which to participate in the international
management of nuclear proliferation. Canada’s
role in the G-8 provides a standing to help facilitate
this.
(g)
The Iranian world of today is filled with a dynamic
emerging cyberdemocracy, well documented in the western
press. Like the
samizdat of Soviet Russia, it creates a framework for a new
regime philosophy. In the
short term, the Persian diaspora has to be assisted in backing
these positive forces. The role of a
democratic foreign policy is to ensure that these forces are
known, celebrated and backed.
Contributing to the growth of a Farsi-language new
media network is an exciting potential role for Canadian
foreign policy. As we know from
the experience of Ukraine
and Lebanon,
the role of new media in facilitating the emergence of
democratic thought is something which government bureaucracies
continue to underestimate. (Some
Iran-oriented web-sites are listed below).
These are obviously small steps. But they do point in
the right directions and they do leverage our advantages.
They are the first steps in
using Canadian foreign policy to empower Iranian democrats and
in starting to play a role in the Dubai to
Singapore
world where the tides of global economic history are
shifting. Our moral principles and
our economic self-interest point in the same direction.
It is imperative that we do not miss this opportunity
as we have missed so many others in the past fifteen years.
Useful web-links
on Iran
include:
http://hoder.com/weblog/
http://www.webneveshteha.com/en/weblog/
Also, it is strongly
recommended to read the work of Ray Takeyh at the Council of
Foreign Relations, accessible on-line at http://www.cfr.org/bios/bio.html?id=9599
Zakaria on
Iran (January 23rd Newsweek)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10966808/site/newsweek/
David Brooks (January
22nd,
2006) www.nytimes.com (by subscription)
Back to
Top
December 10,
2005 Interconnectedness and the Future of Democratic
Tamil Politics or Federalism and Tamil-speaking Canadians
Canadian Foreign Policy and the Creation
of Multicultural Democracies
Canada
can articulate a foreign policy based on the principles of
expanding human rights, overcoming all forms of racism and
sectarianism in an increasingly interconnected and
multicultural world and establishing the infrastructure
required for democratic choices wherever there is
intercultural conflict. We can,
at least start.
There are a number
of initiatives going on in the world, born of European social
democratic principles, South Asian non-sectarian democrats,
and proponents of a rule-of-law based social prosperity
everywhere in the global economy. There is a
unique Canadian perspective on these issues.
These remarks are
addressed to Tamil-speaking Canadians about the future of
Sri
Lanka and the Tamil-speaking
world. When speaking with
Tamil-Canadians and people interested in Tamil politics, I
often suggest that they look at events in Tamil-speaking
Sri
Lanka in a global context and
understand the unique importance of their activities. By repudiating
the violence that has damaged the reputation of Tamil culture,
they make a point of global significance in and of
itself.
Tamil politics will also be influenced by the
interconnectedness of the modern world.
Events in Kurdistan and Burma will have the
kind of ripple effect on Sri Lanka which
events in Poland
and Eastern Europe had on South Africa
two decades ago. Events
in Sri Lanka and the Tamil-speaking world will also have
ripple effects that will be felt around the world as struggles
for the achievement of multicultural democracy seek their
inspirational templates.
It is important
for a democratic movement in Tamil-speaking Asia to put the issues which
interest and motivate their political activities in a language
of global justice and the global politics of the pursuit of
the rule of law and sustainable prosperity. No nationalist
politics can exist in 2005 without a global context
. It is
important to show the connections between
seemingly obscure and distant events.
Who in 1982 saw the links
between events in the shipyards in Gdansk and the changes that
would come by the end of the decade in South
Africa?
The end of the Cold War ended the realpolitik-based
defense of the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
Now today, democratic nation-builders like the Kurdish
regime and Iraqi President Talibani will make decisions about
how the institutions of a liberated Kurdistan integrate into a
pan-Iraqi regime and that will have implications for the
Tamils of Sri Lanka. They will set a framework
for the management of multicultural states pursuing the rule
of law. In global geopolitics,
a Buddhist democracy in Burma will have
implications for the greater south Asian community from
Lahore to Java.
A democratic
Burma
would open up the possibilities for more cross-border
investment and for different strategies of south
Asian economic growth. That too will have
implications for the way in which Sri Lankan politics will
evolve.
South Africans in
1982-89 could only monitor the events in Gdansk and Warsaw that would
within a decade ripple through the interconnected world of
global politics. But they could
be ready and could understand how global
democratization might create opportunities for them.
Today Tamil-speakers who want to reconstitute a
democratic Tamil politics have to understand how events in
Kurdistan and
Burma
may create opportunities for them.
Success will require an understanding of how
domestic politics intersect with the global environment in
this interconnected world.
History teaches us
not just of “butterfly effects” and undisclosed connections.
It also shows us how events inspire, how liberalism in
Napoleonic Spain had an impact on Spanish-speaking California or the Colombian
and Venezuelan settlements on the Caribbean coast. Every society in the
world is grappling with the complex politics of
multiculturalism. And there are lessons to be
learned from how good politics and great political leadership
can accelerate the end of isolationism and sectarianism in
this modern age.
A
football game in Barcelona
reveals some important new networks in a world of celebrating
post-nationalism
In
Barcelona last
month, the football player of the year Ronaldinho
invited Catalan fans to a friendly match between Barcelona and the
Israel-Palestinian Peace team. The hosts of the
event (www.peres-center.org) included Shimon Peres, the Nobel
Peace Prize winner for his attempts to manage the complex
politics of multiculturalism; Sean Connery, the world’s
most famous Scottish nationalist;
and Pasqual Maragall,
the President of Catalonia, a “non-state nation” in the
new jargon of international diplomacy, and certainly a 21st Century metaphor for the
management of complex identities and for peaceful
cross-cultural nation-building. (“I am a Catalan, I
am a European, I am a Spaniard” is a phrase echoed and turned
into spoken poetry in European popular culture.)
We are in 2005
enjoying the possibility of entering a new global political
era of democratic non-sectarianism. This is not the time for
advocates of human rights and rule of law to take a victory
lap, but there are powerful metaphors there for those who
choose to see them. Democracy is not something
one imposes, but if we look at the activities in
Zimbabwe,
Burma and Kashmir as of 2006, we know
that in Bernard Kouchner’s phrase, “humanitarian intervention”
sometimes makes possible the removal of the artificial
obstacles to democracy.
The Zimbabwean,
Burmese and Kashmiri people have all demonstrated a will to a
democracy that has been suppressed. Kouchner
remains an important political figure, outside of the current
power situations www.echofoundation.org , an advocate of liberation of Kurdish
democrats among others whose vantage point and philosophical
framework is European democratic socialism.
Similarly,
the speech Harn Yawnghwe delivered on behalf of Aung
San Sui Kye to the conference at the University of Virginia is
of eloquence and importance to democratic advocates because of
its
belief in the universality of democratic aspirations
and its evidence that there is nothing “western” or “imposed”
about democracy.
http://www.researchchannel.org/inside/news/events/nobel.asp.
Another Nobel
Peace laureate, Jose Ramos-Horta wrote in an article in
the Wall Street Journal http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005071 challenging the assumptions
frequently made about the role of international institutions
and what Kouchner would call “humanitarian intervention” in
creating the conditions for democracy.
The vigour of democracy in these contexts like
Bosnia,
Burma, and
East Timor is
remarkable and inspirational. These butterfly effects, or
global ripples have implications for the future recasting of
constitutional options in Sri Lanka
and for Tamil-speaking
Canadians and their advocates who want a democratic formula
for sustainable prosperity in Sri Lanka
and the Tamil-speaking global
community.
Complex identities
and Canada’s Significance for a New Democratic Order in Sri
Lanka
For Canadians, this is an
historic opportunity to redefine our foreign policy around
things that matter and things we understand, we have long lived
with the complexities of identity (“I am a Canadian, I am a
Quebecois and I am a North American”).
The reconciliation of different cultures in a
functioning democratic system is something that Canadians deal
with daily (and we take too lightly our success at doing
this). It is one of our
contributions to the models of global decision-making that
make us unique. We are the only member of
the G8 with no imperial history. We are also the only member
of the G8 that is explicitly about the creation of a
multicultural politics in our constitutional design.
We are a democratic society which has chosen to spell
out the terms of our disengagement in a Clarity Act; we are
the anti-Lincolns of the 21st
Century. As Bob Rae (*)
has pointed out, we have something to offer
young Tamils and Sinhalese speaking Sri Lankans by way
of our learned and digested experiences with federalism and
other complex models for multicultural nation-building.
We can at least define the options.
(*) See in particular Bob Rae’s
comments regarding the applicability of discussions about
Canadian federalism to the current political negotiations on
Sri Lanka
http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=9514
It is for Sri
Lankans to determine the form of their new political
order. The
democratic world can only speak declaratively on the
rules of the game. We can only assist in
framing the options.
Federalism can work. The Czech and
Slovak partition within a unified Europe provides another
option which has proven viable. As Canadians, we know
the value of complex multiple identities; we also know the
stresses and potential for an economic lack of focus in a
federal state without strong national institutions.
Cross-border investment and the future of
Sustainable Democracy in Tamil-speaking Asia
The Tamil business
agenda is as significant as the Tamil political agenda.
The need for Canadians with business backgrounds to
create the economic instruments which are the prerequisite of
longterm sustainable development is more apparent than
ever. Just as there is a
need to create instruments to provide entrepreneurial finance
to innovative Palestinians, there is a need to create these
kinds of financial instruments for the development of a new
economic structure in South
Asia.
Cross-border
investment reinforces democratic political tendencies.
While the realities of capital markets are such that
there will and should always be obstacles to complete ease of
access, the next stage of economic
integration provides for the kind of investment in new growth
activities which wealthy counties have been doing for
decades. In the previous
section the Palestinian Peace fund was citied as an
example. The proposal for a
northeast African instrument of economic integration, backing
business management teams from Somalia, Ethiopia,
Eritrea and Djibouti has been discussed previously
(see www.jimdewilde.net ) , Such attempts
to provide innovative structure for entrepreneurial finance in
south Asia are equally important to the sustainable prosperity
of the region and the capacity of nation-states to evolve a
predictable rule of law.
The future
prosperity of any multicultural unit and especially one which
involves a federal arrangement depends on its capacity to
create win-win investment deals between regions. The politics of
south Asia depend
on the capacity of the capital markets to create export-led
competitive strategies of the types which have made successes
in Thailand,
Korea
and Malaysia. Economic
integration and the development of well-capitalized
export-oriented companies make nation-building easier in
multicultural societies. Federalism without a
formula for win-win economic decision-making and the
development of globally competitive economic strategies is a
formula for economic inefficiency, and obviously a
corresponding political instability.
In South Asia, the already
existing Tamil role in e-commerce provides an
important component of sustainable prosperity in a
knowledge-based south Asian economy http://www.tamilnation.org/digital/singtisc.htm . The Colombo exchange
www.cse.lk , existing as it does
halfway been Dubai and Singapore, is an incentive to
create of win-win economic
deal-making, regardless of the constitutional forms that are
democratically selected for Sri Lanka and the models of
economic integration that are democratically selected for
South Asia. The challenge is to develop
economic and political strategies for making diversity in
Sri
Lanka and South Asia a source of
competitive advantage.
The
importance of Sri
Lanka and
Democratic Tamil Politics to the New Global Communities
We know that
tolerance of the use of political violence disqualifies people
from serious participation in the management of complex
intercultural politics. We also know that
successful management of multicultural societies requires both
legal frameworks than facilitate negotiations and economic
activities which create the win-win bargains between regional
economies. The development of
cross-regional commitments to sustainable prosperity remains
one of the great political philosophical breakthroughs of the
early 21st Century.
Even while the European initiative falters in the
Netherlands and
France, it gains
ground in globally-oriented communities in Bratislava and Lvov, Tallinn and Bucharest.
For the south Asian region, an ASEAN initiative on
creating cross-regional commitments to sustainable prosperity
starts with Burma.
In the Middle East,
economic integration creates
the potential for win-win activities between Israeli and
Palestinian entrepreneurs and financiers.
This process has been one step forward and two steps
sideways for over a decade, since the Oslo accords
started an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Cross-border investment creates economic habits that
offset parochial sectarianism. The Turkish
initiative in creating instruments or regional investments for
three-way deals between Turkey, Israel and
Palestine and
Shimon Peres’ Peace
Technology Fund for channeling Israeli investment into
Palestine, http://www.peres-center.org/ are case studies that
suggest strategic options of economic network-building and the
political complexities of doing it in areas of historical
sectarianism. http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=41319
What could be more relevant
to the development of a democratic 21st Century politics than a
Tamil-led commitment to the liberation of primarily Buddhist
Burma, showing that a commitment to sustainable prosperity,
the politics of economic growth and the universality of
commitment to the rule of law underlies expressions of Tamil
political culture? Tamil politics is
either about the attempt to express democratic sentiments
through new political forms or the attempt to introduce a
narrow sectarianism with a violent trajectory into 21st Century politics.
As in northeast Africa, the test is in how the
inevitability of regional politics is reflected in the
political agenda of aspiring political leaders in
Tamil-speaking south Asia. One
valid test is how they view the democratization of Burma
and the ASEAN agenda for the region.
It is not
for me to suggest whether a unitary Tamil state is
preferable to a federal state, or whether the Scottish, Slovak
or Catalonian “models” make the most sense for Sri Lankan
constitutional engineering. It is for
people like me to say that they want Tami politics to be
identified with the best form of 21st Century democratic statecraft
and not the worst form of 20th
Century political violence. It is also for people
sitting learning from the Canadian experience to show that the
project of regional integration can be liberating for smaller
communities. Catalans and
northern Italians with their own regional frustrations
embraced the united Europe.
The building of economic habits of integration and
cross-border investments is not just good for investment
bankers. It also develops the
economic habits which make possible the management of complex
identities in the modern world. How Tamils approach the
issues of democracy-building in Sri Lanka and the
creation of the conditions for sustainable prosperity in an
economically interconnected south Asia can set standards for global politics in
the 21st Century.
Canadians know about the complexities of multicultural
nation-building and can offer some significant political
insights into the tradeoffs of different models of
constitutional design.
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“Nation-building” or The Expansion of the
Rule of Law and the Somali Economic Prosperity Initiative
August 22, 2005 :
“Nation-building” was impossible, it was
believed, when the failed state of Somalia
was in the global headlines in 1992-3. A decade later,
we
know much more about “nation-building” and it is the epicentre
of the global political debate. Among other trends,
the debate is informed by the extraordinarily valuable work of
Transparency International (www.transparency.org). There is an increasing
consensus about the relationship between rule of law and
sustainable prosperity. TI created a benchmark
against which performance can be measured and, indirectly, an
incentive system for political regimes. In
the last decade, abstract political debates about economic
development have been increasingly replaced
by practical discussions
about water purification projects, disarmament of militias,
and establishment of entrepreneurship zones. This is an encouraging set
of trends.
Political scientists understandably tend to look at
institutions and constitutions. Investors tend
to look at the efficiency of capital markets in directing
capital to growth opportunities as well as the resources that
are there to be developed (geological, agricultural,
intellectual capital). Practitioners of
development assistance tend to look at building the
infrastructure capacities (roads, mobile telephony,
distribution-networks for vaccines and health-care
products). In approaching the
challenge of accelerated economic development,
leadership is required to use all these pieces of
software.
Proponents of democratic activism try to find
courageous advocates who can lead a transformation to
democracy. On a planet with the
potential for intimate and instant media communications, these
democratic leaders can be backed in the manner which most of
the international community has rallied behind Aung San Suu
Kyi in Burma,
and more effectively, Nelson Mandela.
After the qualifiedly
successful experiences of Liberia,
Rwanda,
Bosnia
and the ongoing experiences of Kosovo, Iraq and
Haiti,
it is possible to talk in concrete terms about
“nation-building” or the expansion of the rule of law.
Debates about globalization and development have tended
to take place in echo chambers with institution-building and
economic strategies being discussed as if one could happen
without the other.
It is against
this backdrop that a spotlight can be put on the
current complex realities of present day Somalia.
The mix of issues
confronting Somali democrats and modernizers creates a perfect
challenge for a global community committed to creating the
preconditions for sustainable prosperity through advancing the
rule of law. Somalia
is, at one level, a society which has already had a profound
effect on international politics as a result of the period in
the early 1990s. In that period,
Somalia
became the political metaphor for a “failed state. It was used
by
those who thought
nation-building was an
impossible objective as an excuse for non-intervention in
Rwanda
and Bosnia.
But Somalia
is also in 2005 an historical opportunity, a vibrant society
with a tremendously well-educated diaspora.
It has an economic network sustained by international
cooperation within a complex system of cooperative finance.
It has a rich history
and a dynamic Islam culture rooted in centuries of distinctive
national practices. Because of this, it is an
opportunity for proponents of a rule of law based
international system to champion Somali nation-building as an
historic opportunity.
No country should be considered a laboratory for social
theories. Each country is a
unique history and culture. Somalia,
however, is timed to be an opportunity for a major moving
forward in the self-confidence of the global community that
the rule of law can take root in previously “failed”
states. What is required to do
this?
First, there is one obvious but too-often
underemphasized precondition for sustainable prosperity and
that is the disarmament of private armies.
Whether in Kosovo, Liberia,
Sierra
Leone, Afghanistan
or Iraq,
the existence of private militias impedes and eventually
denies the development of the political culture required to
create sustainable prosperity.
Independent militias
create a world in which, by definition, capital cannot be
channeled to growth opportunities and people live with the
fear for arbitrary, unaccountable action that affects their
basic security. So,
without the disarmament of private armies or their integration
into a rule of law based police function, experience teaches us that there is
sadly no point in discussing economic growth.
Second, the discussion of how social capital is created
is an important part of the new democratic theory of economic
prosperity. Networks of
independently minded people create a communications system
which makes possible economic decisions that accelerate growth
and sustain prosperity. This is why there can
be a competitive advantage for smaller societies, with habits
of working together and social market signals about decisions
and performance. This is obviously true in
smaller countries like Slovenia
or Estonia,
Finland
or Norway,
where compatibilities create a natural efficiency. The political systems of
smaller democracies can focus on mobilizing for economic
growth rather than spending scare resources on mediating
between groups and negotiating an acceptable framework for
operation. Social capital,
described this way can seem to be a synonym for
nationalism. But
single-language activities do not necessarily make pan-Italian
institutions more efficient. Nor do multi-language
activities necessarily make Swiss
institutions less so. Social capital or the
elusive community value called trust is a prerequisite to
democratic stability and needs to be nurtured and developed
through shared activities. It
is difficult to create social capital by design, but one
thinks of the Nigerian football team or the Slovakian hockey
team as examples of shared experiences which can be leveraged
– up to a point. A celebration of
Somali national heritage, cultural and philosophical is a form
of social capital not always easily replicated.
Third, a well-connected international diaspora can be
assistance in developing sustainable prosperity in a global
economy. The economic development
successes of countries like Poland
and Ukraine
have been accelerated by access to a Ukrainian or Polish
speaking community who can invest and provide strategic advice
in their economic development. But having a
well-connected diaspora is obviously not a sufficient
condition for economic development.
If there are no domestic
institutions which can create a
disciplined capital market, the alchemy of turning
investment into sustainable growth will not occur.
What can be developed from this is the beginning of a
state-building exercise, applicable perhaps elsewhere, but a
starting point in Somalia:
First, disarm the forces of violence and
coercion. Without protection and the
enforcement of the rule of law, there can be no framework for
the development of sustainable prosperity.
While obvious, this point is frequently missing from
discussions of nation-building. The trajectories of
Haiti
and Liberia
point to the indispensability of international action in
providing security infrastructure.
Second, develop social capital.
In Somalia,
the network of sophisticated financial lending through hawala
is significant. Because this is a
system of collaborative finance, social capital literally
comes about as a result of a culturally specific and
potentially socially unifying financial activity.
The strength of the
Somali tradition and its sustaining power as a strongly
defined cultural heritage is an important source of social
capital. Celebration of
Somali artists and the promotion of Somali culture
internationally are not frivolous because appropriately done,
it contributes to the growth of social capital.
Third, develop a market allocation to permit entrepreneurially-led
commercialization of the resources in Somalia.
The idea of a web-connected pool of capital to back
entrepreneurs in emerging markets has been germinating for a
while. Such a web-syndicated
investment vehicle could provide small amounts of capital for
the management of investments in Somali entrepreneurs. The framework is a
somaliventures.com approach, which would enable a Somali
entrepreneur access to capital and management expertise.
The corporate
governance of somaliventures.com will need to ensure that
capital is invested in entrepreneurial projects, that
strategic advice and management assistance to new ventures
will be available through the web and that these activities
will be provided with their own web-sites for both monitoring
and strategic assistance. The efficient allocation of
relatively small amounts of capital to entrepreneurs is a
cornerstone of development and can be done on a much larger
scale given the capacity of the global internet to link
investment opportunity with source of finance.
Fourth, develop the kinds of capital markets
necessary to manage globalization from a position of
strength. This means mobilizing all
the networks of which Somalia
is a nucleus: the diaspora, the relationships with Gulf
States and other sources of
institutional capital. A Somali Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (SBRD) could be created on an investment
banking model similar to that of the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development which channeled international
capital into market-sensitive investments.
An SBRD-style
institution could facilitate the creation of a dynamic,
internationally-networked capital market which enabled Somalis
to invest in their future and to translate the returns that
come from resources (tourist, natural resources) in a manner
which ensures long-term growth. The capital would come from
debt-conversion, international sources and would lead to
dividends or pensions being paid to Somali citizens. It
speaks to the challenge of making Somalia
the fastest-rising country in the Transparency International
rankings and to make Somalia
analogous to Malaysia,
South
Korea or Turkey
as a society with the capacity to translate its present tense
resources into future-oriented investment strategies. Without this
kind of growth-oriented capital market structure, sustainable
prosperity is a mirage.
Fifth, determine through a democratic framework
what form of relationship is desirable in creating regional
partnerships. When democratic
processes and issues of political integration create
cross-border challenges (see The
Organizational DNA of Democracy below), the prime
directive is to ensure the democratic integrity of the
process. All states need a
larger economic market and the Northeast Africa zone
provides Somalia
with a geographical opportunity to create a cross-border
investment and trading with Ethiopia,
Kenya,
Eritrea,
and Djibouti.
Nation-building cannot take place in a vacuum.
.
The
Somali Economic Prosperity Initiative will involve a group of
political activists and policy analysts operating out of
Toronto who will try to assist in advising the new Somali
government on these and other related steps of
nation-building. A conference to discuss
rule of law in Somalia and
the role of hawala in creating efficient capital markets for
longterm growth will be held in late October and will be
synopsized on this web-site. For those interested in
Somali politics, the following websites are
cited:
A useful map to
facilitate understanding Somalia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Somalia
Some websites with
an interest in Somalia
or hawala
http://www.somalivoices.com/press.htm#Mach
http://www.allgedo.com/news/04apr804.htm
http://www.cbuae.gov.ae/Hawala/presentationsList.htm
http://www.somalifamily.org/news_hawala.htm
http://www.somalia-rebirth.org/frame-team.htm
http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=55102
http://www.dahabshiil.com/article.jsp?id=1
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1128/p6s1-woaf.html
www.hamarey.com
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Nation-Building and the Complexities of
Creating the Organizational DNA of Democracy – When
Should Boundaries be Redrawn if Ever?
August 18,
2005
The rule of law starts when there is no fear of a guy
with a gun. How do we get to a
situation where legal force is stronger than arbitrary
force? Throughout the world,
the DNA of democracy is created a step at a time:
creating a market for protecting endangered species
that finances an anti-poaching police force and thereby
complies with participation in the Endangered Species
Act. These are
admittedly small steps, but taken together, they
create a tapestry of civil
society and a set of incentives for non-corrupt individual
behavior. This
rule of law is a
prerequisite for the kind of economic activity which creates
sustainable prosperity.
How does the rule of law become established?
There is obviously a cultural phenomenon, the habits of
consensus-building which are part of many traditional
societies, the unscripted natural order of a chaotic highway
or an English bus-queue, enforced by learned habits and an
incentive to create efficient markets. The process is
hard, practical work: developing management
capacities for the delivery of essential services, organizing
compliance with international trading systems and providing a
framework for the peaceful resolution of disputes.
It is the result of
millions of decisions on the ground which translates into a
social network of collective decision-making. But it also requires
the political will of the international community to ensure
that there is no “guy with a gun” who can misappropriate
wealth.
Transparency International, an increasingly valuable
organization demonstrates (www.transparency.org) a sophisticated approach to assessing
levels of corruption and the impact of corrupt governance on
economic performance. By simply
measuring corruption, it sets a standard for improving
behaviour and creates benchmarks and targets for all community
to strive for. There are
informal tests that we can all use:
(a) Are compliance laws, like the endangered species
act, enforced? (b) Are serious laws about
human rights and due process enforced?
(c) Is there widespread petty
corruption at the level of bureaucratic transactions?
For political scientists, the issues of creating viable
democracies have long been central to the development of a
meaningful approach to political theory.
The debate over democratic state formation is a
constant. The question of homogeneity
of culture is one raised frequently in debates about the
prerequisites for democracy. As
Canadians, we have long a familiarity with managing
cross-cultural institutions. As Canadians, we have also
developed a predilection for economic integration between
culturally distinct regions and an aspiration that we can
create the circumstance for win-win deals between these
regions. This habit is not, however,
one which can be applied to all contexts and situations.
Few thoughtful Canadians advocated that
Slovenia
stay in Yugoslavia
or Ukraine
in the Soviet
Union (although that was the orthodox view of the
U.S. State department in both cases). The
issues of when restructuring post-colonial boundaries requires
the design of new states is one which can only be decided by
those involved, but proponents of
international rule of law have a stake in HOW it is
decided.
Three political analysts have written in the last
decade with special insight into this issue. The first,
Jeffrey Herbst of Princeton writes about
Somaliland and
Somalia.
The second, the great Nobel laureate in literature,
Wole Soyinka, writes about Nigeria.
The third, the Israeli political philosopher Shlomo
Avineri, writes about Iraq and
the possible desirability of “Three Iraqs”.
Each is countries is dealing with the remnants of
colonialism and the impact of arbitrarily drawn
border-lines. These have
resulted in extraordinarily
complex issues for government. The issue of
the remnants of arbitrary colonial decision needs to be explicitly
addressed. Whatever decisions are made,
it is unrealistic and inappropriate for the Banquo’s ghost of
arbitrary colonial decisions made a century ago to linger and
simply be ignored. At
a minimum, in designing democratic institutions, proponents of
the rule of law and sustainable prosperity need to create
mechanisms for regional economic integration that compensate
for these past colonial decisions.
Avineri is right that there is no magic formula for
culturally diverse societies. Each case is separate.
The importance
is that the debate is conducted democratically and the issues
are recognized and addressed.
Iraq,
Iraqi Kurdistan, Somaliland,
Somalia,
Nigeria
are all complex cases which require different and nuanced
discussion. The issues involved here go
to the heart of issues of modern security, the creation of
“social capital” and economic development. There has
been a pattern in U.S.
thinking that no matter what the historical circumstances,
states should not break up. In this view,
partition is
always bad in this view and the geographical implications of
decolonization are a bit of a lottery. The view
was dogmatically enforced until the ending of states called
Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia
and the Soviet
Union. There has to be renewed
interest in designing mechanisms of economic and political
integration which allow modern citizens to have multiple
loyalties: Quebecois AND Canadian,
Catalan, Spaniard AND European, hypothetically
Somali-speaking, Ethiopian AND a member of Northeast African
Shared Prosperity Zone.
The challenges here are enough to keep political
science students busy for a generation.
Why should Somali-speaking Djibouti
be a separate country because of its colonial heritage and
Somaliland
not? How does one
democratically resolve whether Nigeria
should remain a single country, whether Turkish Cyprus had a
right to resist a military junta in Athens, whether
Kurds and Shia Iraqis should share a state with Sunni Arabs,
whether Aceh should remain party of Indonesia? These
questions will not disappear conveniently for democratic
state-builders and would-be architects of global sustainable
prosperity. All we can do to answer it
is to suggest that as Canadians, we know something about
establishing the rules of democratic disentanglement and the
challenges of building win-win economic bargains between
culturally diverse regions.
But the issue cannot
go away. Understanding the
historical context can alleviate much political tension and
create first step to forcing the next generation of
decision-makers to acknowledge the past and move on, the past
having been acknowledged and not ignored.
Geoffrey Herbst on
Somaliland and
Somalia
http://www.somaliland.org/arcns.asp?ID=04010201
Shlomo Avineri on
Three Iraqs, not one
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1007912/posts
Wole Soyinka on
the future of Nigeria
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Articles_Gen/colon_bound.html
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19961101fareviewessay4242/crawford-young/the-impossible-necessity-of-nigeria-a-struggle-for-nationhood.html
The work of the Japanese activist and
economic writer, Kenichi Ohmae is of continuing relevance in
discussing the increasing importance of regions and the
development of many layers of economic alliances.
For a discussion of Ohmae’s
recent thinking, there is a review by John Heilemann in the
July 2005 Business 2.0
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1083383-2,00.html
For a summary of Francis Fukuyama’s views
on social capital, see his speech to the 1999 IMF Conference
on Second Generation Reforms http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/seminar/1999/reforms/fukuyama.htm#I
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Debt-relief
and International Capital Markets July 4, 2005
:
The heightening of consciousness about
Africa produced by the
Live8 Concerts is a good thing. In a world of
constant social networking, millions of young people who
wouldn’t have done so otherwise will think about African
poverty, do research projects in high school class rooms about
African development. There is a worry though
that this kind of global digital age populism distracts from
tough decisions and critical agendas.
John Kay’s column in the Financial Times.
(www.ft.com) on debt
relief is a good antidote to this tendency.
Debt-relief is the kind of public policy which is
probably harmless except for the reality that it makes people
think more is being accomplished than actually is and this
sends incorrect market signals about what forms of economic
activity should be encouraged. It is much more
important to reward fiscally-sound and economically innovative
governments like Mozambique and
Senegal , than
to use a global Chapter 11 to eradicate the bad economic
behaviour of lenders and consuming regimes.
Easterly’s very useful strategic focus on the doable
and the practical matches the kind of strategic social
entrepreneurship exemplified by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, focusing as it does on fixable areas of public
health which are not covered in the footprint of traditional
aid strategies (www.nytimes.com) . As
millions of young people focus on Africa as a result of the
accomplishment of celebrities leveraging celebrity status to
put items higher on a global agenda, it is important to focus
on the need for (a) innovative capital markets backing African
management talent through an African infrastructure bank; (b)
the empowering of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship
at a local level which provides concrete
examples of success and ;
(c) the celebration of African
cultures through great artists like Achebe, Soyinka, Sembene,
Yameogo, Sissako who show that the African voice is not a
voice of tragedy alone, nor one that is derivative from
colonial experiences alone. It is instead part of the
celebration of global achievements and, as such, a motivating
force to ensure that the first two goals are met
realistically. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/3a791c3c-e736-11d9-a721-00000e2511c8.html (John Kay)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/opinion/03easterly.html (William
Easterly)
www.johnkay.com and http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/Media.html
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June 30,
2005: Africa after the G8 /
Gleneagles:
The G8 initiatives and the many complex
and well-intentioned proposals for debt-relief on Africa are
the number one issue for a refreshed global liberalism. We
need attention to the quality of government of the type
focused on by Transparency International (www.transparency.org). We also
need economic assistance that is targeted and accountable to
agreed success criteria as the private social entrepreneurship
funds are doing. . But we also need something else: an
African-run capital market that creates both a longterm stake
for Africans in the commercialization of their resources (a
pension fund) and a capacity to use the revenues from the
commercialization of their resources for the creation of new
enterprises.The challenge of creating efficient capital
markets was a constant problem in the management of
privatization in the EBRD-zone in Eastern Europe and the
former USSR. The European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (www.ebrd.org) was, I
would argue, another highly successful investment banking
innovation.
A few years ago, I was looking at
Canadian-based companies investing in African resources there
were no African institutional investors, i.e. pension funds,
investment banks to facilitate deal-making with global mining
companies. A relatively small amount of capital could have
purchased significant equity in these companies, enhancing
African economic prospects and creating better deal-structures
for the foreign investors. However, there was no African
institutional investor with the financial resources, skills
and mandate to accomplish this. There still isn’t.
Those of us who grew up in Quebec know
the singular significance of the CDP (formerly Caisse de
Depot) in ensuring that Quebec’s capital base (the
pension-system) was used to facilitate economic growth and, as
importantly, concentrating Quebec’s young MBA talent on an
exercise which facilitated their developing world-class
investment skills. Despite the acknowledged issues of the
Caisse model in today’s economy, few would argue that Quebec’s
economic growth from 1970-1990 would have been as successful
without it. In Africa, the creation of a
professionally-managed fund which took equity in mining
companies and resource projects and converted that equity into
dividend-granting financial instruments and new sources of
investment is essential for the positioning of the African
economy to benefit from globalization.
The challenge for Africa is to fuse the
CDP and EBRD models into an appropriate institutional investor
to participate in the creation of efficient African capital
markets. Such an institution would be able to galvanize
financial skills in the African communities, ensure an income
for all African citizens from their share of the resource
rents that are coming about as a result of the
commercialization of Africa’s geological resources. It could
provide Africans with a stake in globalization and the balance
and traction necessary for the successful alchemy of
transforming participation in the global economy into
sustained economic prosperity.
As international investment bankers try
to come to grips with energy financing in the current
environment and development bankers look at the lessons
learned from Arabian oil financing for the Chad-Cameroon
pipeline and the Gulf of Guinea initiative, this is the next
step. An African version of the EBRD, www.ebrd.org , formed
with a capital base derived from converting some debt to
equity and a portion of the African ownership of resources is
a proposal needed to create sustainable growth.
In the next decade, the Gulf of Guinea
will become one of the major sources of petrodollars in the
global economy. The next stage of attention to Africa requires
the development of an investment capability to ensure that the
management of the sale of these resources into the global
economy produces longterm benefits to the countries involved
and the African development project as a whole. An African
Bank for Reconstruction and Development, ABRD, which managed a
portion of this capital and converted it into dynamic
investment, is essential if we are to move the debate about
Africa forward. Africa is a rich continent; it simply lacks
the capacity to turn bonanzas into longterm structural
growth .
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