Charles Grant
In the multipolar world that is emerging, which powers will matter? The US and China, certainly. India, perhaps. Japan, Brazil and South Africa? Not yet. And what about the EU? Ten or even five years ago, the EU was a power on the rise. It was integrating economically, launching its own currency, expanding geographically and passing new treaties that would create stronger institutions. But now, although the EU is respected for its prosperity and political stability, it no longer looks like a power in the making. If anything it is slipping backwards.
On many of the world’s big security problems, the EU is close to irrelevant. Talk to Russian, Chinese or Indian policy-makers about the EU, and they are often withering. They view it as a trade bloc that had pretensions to power but has failed to realise them because it is divided and badly organised. Barack Obama began his presidency with great hopes of the EU but is learning fast about the limitations of its foreign and defence policy: few of its governments will send soldiers to the dangerous parts of Afghanistan, and some senior figures in Washington now worry about the EU’s ability to ensure stability in the Balkans or its eastern neighbourhood.
But does the EU’s unimpressive performance on hard security matter? Should not the 27 governments just focus on deepening the single market, while they pursue their own national foreign policies and count on Nato to keep the peace? The EU does need to improve its act because the world is changing in ways that may not suit it. It is not clear whether the new multipolar world will be multilateral—with everyone accepting international rules and institutions—or an arena in which the strong pursue their objectives through the assertion of military and economic might. The EU is instinctively multilateral, but the other big actors—the US, Russia, China, India and so on—can be unilateral or multilateral, depending on their perception of their interests. So the EU must try to persuade these powers that they can best achieve their national objectives through multilateral institutions. A weak EU will make that task harder.
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Archie Brown
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Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
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Thomas de Waal
Standing in the muddy farmyard, I couldn’t see the flag at first. Then the farmer pointed out a beige canvas tent perched on the bare hillside opposite and above it the white-blue-and-red tricolour. It was a new Russian military post.
Meghvriskhevi, a village in Georgia, has the misfortune to be on a somewhat surreal would-be international border. A mile away an Ossetian village named Grom now lies within the new, supposedly independent state of South Ossetia, recognised only by Russia and Nicaragua. The camp is a sign of Russian intent to score a black line across the map.
No one wants it that way. The villages have always been intertwined and they used to share a Sunday market. My host, a farmer called Zakharia with a permanent smile and thick charcoal eyebrows, was the vet for both villages. “A year ago, I bought two cows from some Ossetians in Grom,” he said. “They kept wandering home to their former owners and I kept picking them up. No problem at all.”
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Jonathan Ford
City gent caught out (again)
It has been another bad bubble for Chris Gent, the well-known businessman who used to run the world’s biggest mobile phone company, Vodafone. In 1999, at the height of the last investment mania—the so-called telecom, media and technology boom—Gent did what was in corporate terms the equivalent of buying a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in the late autumn of 1636. Under his direction, Vodafone paid £112bn for a German mobile phone company, Mannesmann. Despite doubling in size and becoming—in the modern parlance—too big to fail, Vodafone’s share price has never recovered from this act of largesse. Even now the whole company is worth only £57bn: roughly half what it offered for Mannesmann.
One might have thought that after this, Gent would have steered clear of any business with a bubbly feel the next time there was a screaming investment boom. But in 2003, just as the housing mania was getting underway, he joined the board of Lehman Brothers, one of the prime movers in the business of peddling mortgage-backed securities. Unfortunately, Lehman was—as was discovered in September—not too big to fail, although its collapse did result in one of the biggest and messiest bankruptcies ever, one which almost brought down whole the global financial system.
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Rodric Braithwaite
The discussion between David Miliband and a number of experts in last month’s Prospect centred on concepts that have formed the core of the British and western view of international affairs for the last two decades: liberal interventionism, universal values, multilateralism, globalisation, and ethical foreign policy. But these ideas have lost plausibility as “the west,” their main champion, continues to suffer a loss of authority, not least as a result of the financial crisis.
The end of the cold war was followed by a brief decade of euphoria. Our politicians talked of our moral duty to intervene in other people’s affairs to force them to behave properly. Foreign office officials were discouraged from using words like “hegemony” and “multipolar,” because they had a whiff of anti-Americanism about them: the clarity of their thinking suffered accordingly. British foreign policy became out of touch with reality, and largely irrelevant in world affairs.
We and our closest allies are now reaping the reward of hubris. Today, history is back with a vengeance, and the instruments of US military and economic power which were at the centre of our worldview have proved unequal to the task. Take as only one example the recent Georgian conflict, which showed that the US could not make good on an implied guarantee to defend a small, far away and badly-led country whose politics they barely understood. We may see a clear distinction between our bombarding Serbia and recognition of Kosovo, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and its recognition of Abkhazia and South Georgia. The distinction is not apparent to others. We are amazed when foreigners accuse us of double standards. But the foreigners are not wrong.
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Thomas de Waal
If all politics is local, then we need to know what happened in the Georgian villages of Avnevi, Tamarasheni and Kurta on the evening of 7th August, just before Georgia and Russia plunged the world into crisis.
Georgian officials say that these three villages of ethnic Georgians around the South Ossetian city of Tskhinvali came under sustained attack just after President Mikheil Saakashvili had announced a unilateral ceasefire in the local skirmishes between the two sides in South Ossetia. The Ossetian side says that the evening of 7th August was relatively quiet before Saakashvili launched a major assault, which then triggered the brutal Russian response.
In the Caucasus, local politics matter, but few outsiders understand it. Instead, the region is seen through the wrong end of a geopolitical telescope, written into large-scale strategic scenarios which overlook the inhabitants of places like Avnevi or Tskhinvali.
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Marko Attila Hoare
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“Georgia has lost South Ossetia and Abkhazia for good”—one can almost taste the relish in the Guardian’s editorial of 15th August, as it argued against even peaceful, diplomatic measures to punish Russia for attacking Georgia. For a significant strand of left-liberal opinion in the UK, the default position on the Russia-Georgia conflict is that it is payback for earlier western sins in Iraq and Kosovo; that US, not Russian, warmongering is the problem. Yet none of this is true. Russia’s intervention in Georgia and recognition of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s “independence” are not equivalent to western action over Kosovo or Iraq, and we allow them to go unpunished at our peril.
Moscow’s apologists frequently refer to the alleged “Kosovo precedent.” They argue that if Nato can carry out military intervention without UN authorisation against a sovereign state (Serbia), to protect a persecuted ethnic minority (the Kosovar Albanians), then unilaterally recognise the independence of an autonomous entity (Kosovo) which had until then been internationally recognised as belonging to Serbia, then Moscow is justified in acting likewise vis-a-vis Georgia and South Ossetia.
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Manneken Pis
The other presidential race
Tony Blair’s campaign to become the first president of the European council has been dealt a lethal blow before it ever really got going. The post, created by the new EU reform treaty, will not be filled before December 2008 at the earliest, but Blair had received a surprising semi-endorsement from Nicolas Sarkozy in the autumn. But now two other leaders have all but declared Blair unacceptable. Angela Merkel and Romano Prodi are seasoned politicians who do not couch things in direct and personal terms. Nevertheless, at a recent summit, the German chancellor and Italian prime minister agreed that they expect the first EU president to come from a country that takes part in the EU’s core policies. With its legion of opt-outs, Britain hardly satisfies that criterion. The second, unspoken argument against Blair is the divisive role he played in the Iraq war. One senior MEP harks back to the famous council of war in the Azores when Blair met George Bush, José María Aznar, then Spanish prime minister, and José Manuel Barroso, the former Portuguese premier who is now president of the European commission. “Aznar’s gone and Bush is going,” said the MEP, “and we can’t have the other two running Europe.”
Other candidates for the post include the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who coincidentally has just announced plans to hold referendums to end Denmark’s EU opt-outs, including its self-exclusion from the euro. Then there’s Polish ex-president Aleksander Kwasniewski. As a socialist he would provide balance to the likely reappointment of the centre-right Barroso as commission president—a particular advantage if the other post being created by the treaty, foreign representative, goes to a right-winger.
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Hilary Davies
Before Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin brother Jaroslaw became, respectively, president and prime minister of Poland in 2005, a mocked-up group photo of the future president standing in a row with the rest of Europe’s leaders did the email rounds among Poland’s intelligentsia. “Think before you vote!” read the caption. The head of the diminutive Lech reached, on average, elbow level of the other leaders.
Poland’s twin leadership have indeed stuck out like two sore thumbs in Europe from the moment they entered office. They squat like garden gnomes on Europe’s political landscape, a grumpy Tweedledum and Tweedledee whose high self-esteem and low physical stature makes them irresistible to tabloids throughout Europe.
The brothers’ credentials as pre-1989 anti-communist activists and their hard talk on corruption have earned them the benefit of the doubt among most western observers. But what may seem at worst a distant comedy from Britain feels like a living tragedy in Poland. The Kaczynskis, once freedom fighters, are bringing the habits of authoritarianism back to Poland.
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Manneken Pis
East European discontents
Eighteen months after eight ex-communist countries joined the EU, eastern Europe’s march towards stable liberal democracy is slower than even Eurosceptics expected. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets of Hungary, nationalists are in power in Poland and Slovakia, and the Czech Republic has got used to having no government at all. What’s more, though billions of euros in subsidies are destined for the former Soviet satellites, the EU is getting a lot of flak. The Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, is a noted Eurosceptic, as is Poland’s far-right populist deputy prime minister, Andrzej Lepper. Even in Hungary, where approval of the EU remains high, there are growing signs of scepticism. Its prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, was famously caught admitting lying “morning, noon and night,” about the country’s dire economic predicament. But EU rules for curbing its spiralling budget deficit have now come under fire in Hungary. When the EU monetary affairs commissioner Joaquín Almunia commented on the Hungarian deficit reduction plan, the opposition leader and ex-premier, Viktor Orbán, challenged him pointedly to come and live on Hungarian wages.
With the exception of Britain, Ireland and Sweden, EU countries are also blamed for failing to open their labour markets. Many Poles see this as particularly unfair, given that their post-communist governments opened up to allow EU companies to buy huge chunks of the Polish economy.
Structural funds and farm subsidies are beginning to make their presence felt, particularly in Poland, but public support for the EU is brittle. In the meantime, Brussels may have to get used to dealing with mavericks and populists who know little about the inner workings of the EU and care less. Budapest’s European policy is paralysed by a feud between officials working for the prime minister and those working for the foreign minister; meanwhile the Czechs have spent weeks in a governmental no man’s land. One diplomat bemoans the insularity of the twin brothers who occupy the posts of prime minister and president of Poland. As if to highlight the point, the prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczy´nski, recently suggested the creation of an EU army tied to Nato. Anything called an “EU army” is a non-starter for London and any European force subordinated to Nato is anathema to Paris. The Polish plan therefore achieved the rare feat of riling the EU’s two biggest military powers in one go.
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