Category: Development

The Chomsky/Vltchek worldview

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By Richard Falk

Recently I read On Western Terrorism: from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, published in 2013 by Pluto Press here in London, and consisting of a series of conversations between Chomsky and the Czech filmmaker, journalist, and author, Andre Vltchek, who is now a naturalized American citizen.

Vltchek in an illuminating Preface describes his long and close friendship with Chomsky, and explains that these fascinating conversations took place over the course of two days, and was filmed with the intention of producing a documentary. The book is engaging throughout, with my only big complaint being about the misdirection of the title—there is virtually nothing said about either Hiroshima or drone warfare, but almost everything else politically imaginable!

Vltchek, previously unknown to me, consistently and calmly held his own during the conversations, speaking with comparable authority and knowledge about an extraordinary assortment of topics that embraced the entire global scene, something few of us would have the nerve to attempt, much less manage with such verve, insight, and empathy. After finishing the book my immediate reaction was that ‘Chomsky knows everything’ and ‘Vltchek has been everywhere and done everything.’

Omniscience and omnipresence are not often encountered, being primary attributes commonly attributed by theologians to a monotheistic god! Leaving aside this hyperbole, one is stunned throughout by the quality of the deep knowledge and compassion exhibited by these two public intellectuals, and even more by their deeply felt sympathy for all those being victimized as a result of the way in which the world is organized and Western hard power has been and is being deployed.

The book left me with a sense of how much that even those of us who try to be progressive and informed leave untouched, huge happenings taking place in domains beyond the borders of our consciousness. It suggests that almost all of us are ignoring massive injustices because they receive such scant attention from mainstream media and our access to alternative sources is too restricted. And, maybe also, the capacity for the intake of severe injustice is limited for most of us.

The book is well worth reading just to grasp this gap between what we care about and what is actually worth caring about. Read More »

BRICS: The real “Global South” today

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By Johan Galtung

Keynote European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd, 12 Oct 2013

Two basic facts stand out in the world economic development, leaving aside military, political, cultural and social development:

* The BRICS – an acronym becoming a social fact–are emerging;

* The USA-EU are declining; not only as markets, also as producers.

Another way of saying this is that the West has been outcompeted, not by the Rest but by – so far – a select part. The world market is not constant but increasing sum, but much demand may be met by domestic production, not by import-export. As part of the story.

The West got the definition of development wrong, still clinging to economic development = economic growth (measured by annual GNP/capita increase). The BRICS understood development differently, adding economic distribution (measured by the ratio in acquisitive power between the top and bottom 20%, and between the CEO and average worker salary; at the macro and micro levels). No growth spells recession-depression, no distribution spells worse: death. For economic, like for geographic, positioning, at least two dimensions are needed. A professor in latitudes, or growth, only, is simply not good enough.

Development becomes increasing growth and increasing equality. Growth alone may lead to flagrant inequality at the expense of those at the bottom and nature–a system we know only too well–distribution alone may lead to the shared misery of some human past. We need both.

The map of the world was also wrong. Read More »

The EU foreign policy: Ten wishes

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By Johan Galtung

Speech given in Brussels to the European External Action Service, Free University, October 8, 2013

The EU is in a crisis mainly of its own making. Some of it is economic and can be solved by strict control on speculation, separating savings and investment banks, by gradual debt forgiveness, by lifting the bottom up, the most miserable communities, by the GIPSI (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland) countries cooperating, by stimulating agricultural cooperatives with direct sales points, etc. But much of it is political; the EU has become invisible on the world scene, incapable of a foreign policy building peace and security, also much too tied to US and Israeli fundamentalisms and too anti-Islamic.

The following are some ideas about steps that can be taken.

The EU glittering success as a peace zone is much needed in zones of war and where war threatens: the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia. A Middle East Community, of Israel with five Arab neighbors (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt); a Central Asian Community of Afghanistan with eight neighbors (Iran, Pakistan, five former Soviet republics, Ashad Kashmir) with open borders (crucial for the Pashtuns and others); and a North East Asia Community (with two Chinas, the two Koreas, Japan, Mongolia and the Russian Far East (now with Khabarovsk as capital) could all benefit from EU opening its archives, telling how it all happened, sharing a major learning experience for humanity.

A United Regions added to the UN but with no veto powers, of the EU, AU, SAARC, ASEAN and the coming Latin America and the Caribbean, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Middle East, Central Asia, North East Asia could take shape and become a key tool of global governance.

EU and Crisis Management. There are many of them, and there will be more crises given the legacy of colonialism constructing countries, putting together what did not belong together, dividing what did. An example are the four Sykes-Picot colonies: Iraq and Palestine for England, Lebanon and Syria for France, built-in catastrophes, now exploding. The EU will have to recognize the responsibility of some members, and then listen to what all the parties want, trying to arrive at a bridging perspective. Generally speaking, two approaches:

* federation within, with high autonomy for the nations and democracy within each part – but not an all over “one person one vote” which would result in the majority dictatorship of the most numerous nation;

* confederation, community, between, with open borders for nations that belong together to travel freely.

For Syria this would mean both respecting the Sunni majority and the minorities protected by Shia rule, with a two-chamber parliament, territorial for the provinces and non-territorial for the nations, with veto rights in matters concerning their identity. EU should send well trained mediators to the crisis area to understand the parties, and facilitate dialogue between them at the local level, many places.

EU and the use of military force. Should be Chapter 6 peace-keeping, not Chapter 7 “peace enforcement” (a contradiction in terms). Given the strong attachment to their goals of autonomy, a ceasefire with no image of a solution will be used for rest, smuggling of arms and redeployment; the road to ceasefire passes through a vision of a solution, not vice versa. The role of peace-keeping is to prevent violence, not to use it, and with that in mind peace-keepers should have military expertise and weapons for self-defense; some police training for crowd control; nonviolence training; some mediation training to know how to understand and facilitate dialogues; be 50% women more focused on human relations, less on control; and be so numerous that we can talk about a blue carpet, not only blue helmets.

EU-Third World, mostly former colonies: time is overdue for some reconciliation. Just compensation for the genocide and sociocide–killing social structures and cultures–is out of question, but joint understanding is not. Mutually acceptable textbooks about that period would be very useful, building on the German experience rewriting text books for reconciliation.

West-Islam. At the political level Turkey should become member, making Istanbul a hub for positive West-Islam relations. North Cyprus should be recognized; all of Cyprus – unitary state, federation or confederation – should be an EU member. A dialogue of civilizations could aim at combining Western pluralism with Muslim closeness and sharing for mutual benefit. The Western approach to the Catholic-Protestant divide might be useful for Shia-Sunni understanding.

Russia. Historically the many invasions were from West to East with two exceptions: Russia hitting back after Napoleon and Hitler. There is room for reconciliation based on such facts rather than the paranoid use of the image of Russia, like of China, as peril.

China. The main Silk Road was not a track in the desert and the mountains but a major Buddhist-Muslim East Asia-East Africa sea lane for 1000 years, 500-1500; destroyed by the Portuguese and the English in the name of their Kings. Time for reconciliation – including gunboat “diplomacy”, opium export, and colonization of Macao-Hong Kong is overdue. And an EU recognizing Israel partly because of two thousand years old history might also recognize some Chinese ocean rights with a much more recent history–in no way leaving out joint Chinese-ASEAN ownership of some of the islands, and joint Northeast Asian Community in due time of Senkaku-Diaoyu islands, and others, with their EEZs.

Eurasian Partnership. The EU is a peninsula on the Eurasian continent; increasingly connected by excellent railroad links mainly built by the Chinese, coming ever closer together. This is the time to add an Eurasian orientation to a Trans-Atlantic one, today in abeyance, waiting for he USA to recover and stop spying on the world.

All this is feasible: with realism in the brain and idealism in the heart.

Originally published at Trancend Media Service here.

Is Egypt going to have another Tiananmen Square?

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By Jonathan Power
Written August 12, 2013

Is it going to be the massacre of China’s Tiananmen Square all over again? The new civilian/military regime has promised to break up the large Muslim Brotherhood-led demonstrations now being held in favour of the deposed, democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

The demonstrators look immoveable unless massive amounts of force are used. The television pictures show us that there are significant numbers of families among the demonstrators with their (often small) children. If the police and perhaps the army are unleashed on them and there is massive bloodshed of innocent people Tiananmen Square will look like a tea party in comparison. The whole country will be aflame, with a raging civil war a likely outcome.Read More »

America over the top on threats

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By Jonathan Power

Even taking into account the terrorist bomb attack on the Boston marathon an American has had less chance this year of being killed by a terrorist than killed falling off a ladder. Is it really necessary to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of half the world in order to combat such a small threat (including countries such as Brazil which have never had a terrorist incident)?

Why not monitor the use of ladders? Or find a way of reducing car crashes in the US which claim 33,000 deaths a year to the Swedish level? Or spend the vast budget of the spy program on education and give up hunting down Edward Snowden who has performed the brave task of opening up this debate to media and congressional scrutiny? And just keep a very modest intelligence spying operation for the handful of countries that could produce a terrorist that might do some real damage- Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea……….Can you think of any more?Read More »

Competition and cooperation: Finland’s school system

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By Johan Galtung

“The Secrets to Finland’s Success with School—and Everything”, The Atlantic (11-Jul-2013), has many messages to a US readership from that particular welfare state. One of them is a school system which ranks as one of the world’s best with no standard testing or South-/and East!/Asian “cramming”; limiting student testing to a necessary minimum; there is less emphasis on competition. And another, closely related, Finns have an incredible equality and very little poverty; an extremely low child-poverty rate. The two points are related.

The article, written by Olga Khazan, wisely points to smallness and high homogeneity as two factors underlying the “success”, also known to the other Nordic countries. However, as pointed out, there are “sizeable Swedish and Russian-speaking communities – the former ruling the country till 1809, the latter on till the Russian 1917 revolution–took time to even it out. What the article has not picked up is the closeness to that revolution, and its impact on the labor movements: lifting the bottom up for more equality is possible; education and health are basic tools; it is the task of the government; it requires planning; and, what USSR failed to pick up: it works better with democracy.Read More »

Whither Turkey: First thoughts after Gezi Park

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By Richard Falk

Written in Turkey, June 30, 2013

Preliminary Disclaimers

As the dramatic Turkish protests subside, or declare an intermission, this is a time to take stock, but cautiously.

Precisely when political reality explodes in unexpected ways, pundits come along suggesting comparisons, offering hastily constructed explanations, and cite influences and antecedents. Surprise is suppressed by most ‘experts’ who do all that they can to hide these awkward exposures of how little they knew about the explosive forces in society, which erupted without any advance notice. After the explosion these wannabe gurus step forth with undiminished confidence to tell us with learned demeanor why and how it happened, why it was almost inevitable to turn out as it did, and the most arrogant and often most influential even dare tell us what to expect next, and why it is good or bad.

While appreciating this fact of public life, let us take note that even the most wily intelligence agencies, with billions at their disposal, total command over mountains of secret data, running roughshod over the privacy and legal rights of even their own citizens and others to get it right on behalf of their government employers, still invariably miss ‘the jumps’ of change that are the real stuff of history.

Why are the historians of change so bad at anticipating these jumps of history? Partly, for the same reasons that even the most sophisticated vulcanists cannot predict with any accuracy an earthquake or volcano – as in politics, the tipping points in nature and society are rarely anticipated by interpreting scientific trends or through the analysis of incremental changes, but generally disclose themselves with an unforeseeable abruptness.

In reaction, an appropriate level of humility and tentativeness goes a long way, acknowledging these limits of understanding, suggesting hesitantly and explaining as best we can such charismatic events when they occur, taking due account of their distinctiveness and admitting our inability to access deeper meaning that lie beneath the surface of cascades of events.

Another type of difficulty associated with these interpretative ventures is the bias associated with the observer’s gaze. We are habitually trained and experienced to look at politics from above, whether our perspective is that of elites or counter-elites, but revolutionary impulses come, if and when they come, almost invariably from pressures generated from below, that is, from the ‘multitude,’ pressures that materialize by suddenly bursting forth as happenings that startle and reverberate (e.g. Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the velvet revolution, the Jasmine Revolution, Tahrir Square, Occupy Wall Street).

The Gezi Park Protests

Was Gezi Park in Istanbul such a happening, as many here in Turkey hope? Read More »

Political infernos: United States, Turkey and Egypt

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By Richard Falk

Written June 28, 2013

Prelude

To begin with, I know of no truly mature political democracy on this, although to be sure some rest on a more stable political base than others. Most importantly, some forces of opposition despair of ever succeeding by democratic procedures, while others pin their hopes on the next election, or the one after that. Some democracies have greater economic stability or can boast of high growth rates, possess a larger private sector and bigger middle class with more to lose, than others. Some states are more vulnerable to foreign interference than others, and some have formidable foreign enemies that seek regime change or something worse.

Perhaps, more victimized than any most modern societies, Germany devastated after World War I was caught in the midst of recovering from a humiliating military defeat accentuated by vindictive victors, a resulting economic depression featuring high unemployment and runaway inflation. Its pathetic enactment of liberal democracy could neither find credible solutions nor adopt principled positions. It should not be surprising that an extreme form of political polarization emerged in response, producing disastrous results not only for Germany but for Europe and the world: Communism versus Fascism. Battles raged between these antagonists in the streets of German cities, and the Nazis emerged triumphant even at the ballot box, helped by the complicity of cartelized big business and the ethos of the Bavarian elites hostile to any hint of democratic politics. The rest is history.

Today, there exist an assortment of deeply worrisome encounters between political extremes brought on by a range of conditioning circumstances. As a first approximation I would mention three disturbing instances, each distinctive, yet each afflicted by destructive polarized politics: Egypt, Turkey, and the United States.Read More »

Why Arabs need Iran

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By Sharmine Narwani

In 2011, when Arab revolts began to sweep the Middle East and North Africa, the view from Washington and its closest allies was one of concern. How would the removal of mostly pro-Western dictatorships affect the balance of power in the region? More importantly – how to prevent these events from boosting Iran’s influence?

Two years on, the regional competition for influence is in full throttle. In its sights – among many other developments – are recent efforts by Iran and Egypt to upgrade their relationship.

The spoilers will have none of it. Said Steven A. Cook last week on the website of that most prestigious of US institutions, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): “Other than some quick cash and subsidized energy, there is nothing that Tehran can offer Cairo that will, in the long run, be to Egypt’s benefit.”

He has it entirely wrong. “Quick cash and subsidized energy” can only be used to describe the superficial offerings of countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both vying for influence in this new Egypt.

There is no contest whatsoever between that kind of assistance and what Iran can bring to the table. Iran has achieved its economic independence the hardest way imaginable…

Continue

Up and up in the developing world

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By Jonathan Power

Never in the history of mankind have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast.

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain, took 150 years to double its output. The US which industrialised later took 50 years. Both countries had a population of less than 10 million when they industrialised. Today China and India with populations over a billion each have doubled their output in less than 20 years – and many other developing countries have done as well.

According to the UN’s recent Human Development Report– which everyone should read on line – it is more exciting than most novels – reports that by 2050 Brazil, China and India will account for 40% of the world’s output. The combined incomes of eight developing countries – Brazil, Argentina, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey – already equals that of the USA.

Their success is boosting the fortunes of many of the poorer countries, not least in Africa, because of higher levels of trade, investment and capital inflows and, perhaps most critically, India’s sale of affordable medicines and medical equipment.

The most important engine of growth of the developing South is their own domestic markets.Read More »