Peter Hall on the Eurozone's woes

A quite good analysis.

Regional integration and the state, Mideast version

An interesting statement by Harriet Feinberg reproduced in this post suggests that "new governance structures" may be the eventual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Israel, she writes, will need to become part of two "regional consortia," one consisting of Mideast countries, the other of those that border the Mediterranean. She cites the EU as a work-in-progress and also (implicitly) a model, as well as regional integration efforts in Africa and South America.

One of the notable features of existing regional arrangements, however, is that they have not replaced nation-states but rather built on top of them. Nor is there any strong evidence that the EU, for instance, is going to replace states in the foreseeable future. Thus while Feinberg's thoughts are to be welcomed, her vision of separate nation-states in the Mideast becoming as obsolete as Royal typewriters in 50 or 100 years is one that I would hesitate to place bets on as a prediction. Which is not to say that regional consortia are not a good idea; they almost certainly are. Whether they can solve the underlying problems in that region, however, is less clear.

Heady days for the Front de Gauche

Here and here.

And (via A. Goldhammer) a video of Mélenchon speaking in Toulouse. Crikey, my French aural comprehension is not what it should be. I got some of it, understood he was attacking the EU, but if anyone would like to provide a proper translation in the comments that would be nice. Actually the Reuters piece linked above gives one line: "When there's no more liberty, civil insurrection becomes a sacred duty of the Republic." Ok, that's clear enough on the video; but then the last bit... ?

Then the young man being interviewed: "C'est le cri de guerre du peuple." Yup, got that. This is the level of my French these days: pathetic.

Airline carbon emissions tax: latest EU-U.S. dispute

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently upheld the EU's levying of a carbon emissions tax on non-EU planes flying to EU destinations. The U.S., Canada, and China strongly object, with the U.S. arguing that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is the proper body to deal with this.

A couple of thoughts. First, when it comes to concerns over climate change versus concerns over the balance sheets of U.S. airlines, the latter wins out in the Obama admin, it seems. Second, whatever objections are being advanced to the ECJ's ruling, it is probably hard to fault the court's reasoning that sovereignty is not in question here: the planes are flying into EU airspace, after all. But large amounts of money are apparently involved, so this dispute will no doubt continue.

The new European treaty vs. social democracy

C. Bertram:

The Euro treaty..., assuming it goes ahead as planned and is enforced, mandates balanced budgets and empowers the Eurocrats to vet national budgets and punish offenders. Social democracy is thereby effectively rendered illegal in the Eurozone in both its “social” and “democracy” aspects.

Whole post here.

DSK in another context

Looking through Harold James's 2006 book The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (having taken it out of the library, I was trying to decide whether to actually read it), I ran across a reference to Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a discussion of European identity (pp.132-34):

...Europe can probably most easily be defined by what its makers think it is not. It is not empire and it is not America....

A need to compensate for American mistakes or to resist American policies has in practice often been behind the momentum to create new European institutions. The European Monetary System in 1979 was in large part a response to the mismanagement and weakness of the U.S. dollar in the late 1970s. These were initiatives of policy-making elites frustrated by American high-handedness or incompetence; but the European response ran largely along technocratic lines.

It is only relatively recently that commentators have thought that they observed a more deeply embedded transcontinental assertion of a new identity. European civil society was mobilized by resistance to the 2003 Iraq war. One analysis, initially set out by a former French finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, spoke of the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war across Europe on Saturday, February 15, 2003, as the sign of the new civic consciousness. "A new nation was born in the street. And that new nation was the European nation."

James's cite is: D. Strauss-Kahn, "Une nation est née," Le Monde, Feb. 26, 2004 [I assume that should be 2003]

James goes on to observe that "[b]y 2005, President Chirac was appealing for a 'yes' vote in the French referendum on the European constitution on the grounds that it offered a defense against America, and that the 'Anglo-Saxons' were trying to frustrate a new Europe." (p.134) But the French and the Dutch defeated the constitution in the 2005 referendums.

The EU then went back to the drawing board and came up with something called the Treaty of Lisbon. Among other things it created a post called High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, popularly if not accurately referred to as the EU Foreign Minister. I'll end this little potted excursion into contemporary history with a question that Herman Cain might ask (assuming that he's heard of the EU Foreign Minister): How's that working out?

Scotland forever

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has scored gains in local elections and looks set to win a majority in the Scottish parliament. According to the linked article: "The SNP's leader, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, promised to push for a referendum on Scottish independence during the next four years."

With the caveat that I know nothing about this (it's becoming a mantra here), I suspect that Scottish independence looked more plausible when the EU was in better shape than it is right now. Who needed Britain when an independent Scotland could get the benefits of economic integration and a common currency as an EU member? But the EU at the moment may not appear to be as strong a reed to lean on as it once did. Plus, seceding from the UK would mean no more good seats at royal weddings. Though I guess an independent Scotland could join the Commonwealth? Somehow I don't think that's in the SNP platform.

One-year retrospective on the EU's Eastern Partnership

In May '09 the EU launched its Eastern Partnership Initiative. The idea was to offer Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia closer political and economic links to the EU in exchange for domestic reforms. How has it worked? Judging from a paper (actually I only read the summary) done a few months ago by the Madrid-based think tank FRIDE, the answer would seem to be: Not very well. The link is here.

Fisk on Israel, the EU, and NATO

With a sarcasm that may not be entirely unjustified, Robert Fisk blasts Israel's close political-military ties to NATO and the EU. It's no doubt the case, as Fisk writes, that Britain spends millions of pounds annually on weapons licenses for Israel and that NATO conducts military exercises with Israeli soldiers (as indicated by the recent helicopter crash in Romania in which several IDF members were killed).

Let's suppose, however, that NATO and the EU were to hold Israel more at arm's length. Would that affect its military capabilities? Almost certainly not, not as long as the U.S. is committed to $3-billion-plus in annual military aid to Israel aimed at ensuring that Israel maintains what is called in Washington policy circles its "qualitative military edge," or QME. The U.S.-Israel military relationship, and its untouchability in U.S. politics, makes the EU and NATO angles a sideshow. The problem is not so much that the U.S. gives Israel a huge amount of military hardware as that this connection is treated as effectively separate from U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In attempts to put pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction, for instance, the U.S. begins with one hand tied behind its back, since Israel knows that the U.S. would never threaten to cut down assistance or do anything else that would jeopardize Israel's QME. (Occasionally in the past the U.S. has withheld loan guarantees, but this sort of action has been very rare.) If you deprive yourself ab initio of your main source of leverage, you aren't going to be able to exercise much leverage: that's pretty obvious.

Robert Lawrence on why the U.S. auto companies have loved to build trucks

A very interesting story, which I did not know and which goes back to the U.S.-E.C. trade quarrels of the '60s.

Congo update

France has failed to persuade the EU to send 1500 soldiers to eastern DR Congo to augment the UN peacekeeping force (MONUC), according to a radio report I heard earlier today. The 17,000 UN peacekeepers must deal with a region with roughly 1.7 million people, as Edmond Mulet, UN Asst. Sec. Gen. for Peacekeeping, pointed out in a letter published in yesterday's Wash. Post. Meanwhile, Gen. Nkunda, whose forces have been fighting Congolese government forces as well as, apparently, some soldiers from the government's ally Angola, threatened in an interview with the BBC to overthrow the government of Joseph Kabila unless it agreed to talks. Congo's ambassador to the UN dismissed the remarks. The UN has accused both sides in the recent fighting of war crimes against civilians.

On the Great Powers

Nick at Worlds Apart has two thoughtful posts on great powers in the early 21st century. Reading these posts reminded me that there is no consensus among scholars about exactly how to define 'great power' or exactly which states count as great powers. To a large extent, however, the disagreements are probably more terminological than real.

Nick argues for three categories: 'global great power' (a category currently occupied only by the U.S.), 'regional great powers,' and 'global middle powers'. To be a 'global great power', he says, a state must meet five criteria: 1) dominate its region; 2) have a first-class military, including secure nuclear second strike capability, and an economy to support the military establishment; 3) wield 'soft power'; 4) have a political system that major domestic actors see as legitimate; and 5) be recognized as a great power by other states, as reflected in holding key positions in international institutions. Of these criteria, the only one I might quarrel with is number 4, though I would not want to press the point too hard. Two of these criteria, numbers 3 and 5, suggest that being a 'global great power' requires a certain amount of prestige. Prestige is itself a contested concept and there is disagreement about whether and how states compete for it (whatever 'it' is, exactly).

So, who counts as a regional great power, to use Nick's phrase? I would say China, India, the EU, Japan, and Russia. These five plus the U.S. account for a bit more than half the world's population, three-quarters of global GDP, and 80 percent of defense spending (R. Haass, "The Age of Nonpolarity," For. Aff., May/June '08, p.45). Of these five, China and India are 'rising powers,' while the positions/trajectories of the EU, Japan, and Russia are more uncertain.

There is one other aspect of the great power role that deserves mention: great powers have, or traditionally have been thought to have, special rights and responsibilities with respect to the maintenance of international peace and security (H. Bull, The Anarchical Society, p.202). Several of the great powers arguably have not been discharging these responsibilities as they should in recent years. The U.S. invasion of Iraq; China's actions in Sudan/Darfur and Tibet and Xinjiang; Russia's war with Georgia -- while these are not 'equivalent,' and while the rights and wrongs of each particular case can be argued, it does seem to be time for the great powers to reacquaint themselves with what one writer (R. Jackson, The Global Covenant, p.173) calls "the moral significance of what is involved in being a great power."

Rome, Babylon, Scarsdale: Does U.S. decline (or the debate about it) matter?

"...Niall Ferguson has observed that American IR scholars and analysts tend to choose alternative words for what is arguably the same imperial behavior, words such as 'unipolarity,' 'great power,' 'superpower,' or 'hegemon.' In contrast to the American empire debate, there has been little political and scholarly debate over whether it is appropriate to characterize the United States as a 'power' both during and after the Cold War. Instead much of the debate about the 'power' label has revolved around its qualifiers. Is the United States a 'great' or 'super' or the 'only' power relative to others? Could it be...a 'hyper' power? Or is it a (gasp!) 'declining' power?"

-- Jennifer Sterling-Folker, in International Studies Perspectives 9:3 (August 2008), p.321



"The great wars of history...are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations," declared the British geographer Halford Mackinder in 1919. The principle of uneven development, as Lenin called it, means that one should expect the material power of nation-states to ebb and flow as they seize upon (or, as the case may be, fail to exploit) economic, technological, and military innovations. Leading or hegemonic states that have benefited from such innovations must expend large resources to maintain their position, producing economic strains that over time undercut them. As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in a 1994 essay ("Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy, 1990-2025/2050"): "The rise and decline of great powers has been more or less the same kind of process as the rise and decline of enterprises: The monopolies hold for a long while, but they are ultimately undermined by the very measures taken to sustain them. The subsequent 'bankruptcies' have been cleansing mechanisms, ridding the system of those powers whose dynamism is spent and replacing them with fresher blood."

In the United States, however, a significant current of opinion has never accepted that this principle applies to the U.S. On this view, the U.S. is not a "normal" country and is therefore not subject to the historical forces that govern the fates of other societies and nations. The strength of this "exceptionalist" belief accounts for much of the intensity that has accompanied the long-running debate about U.S. "decline".

Roughly two decades ago, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers helped bring concerns about the erosion of U.S. power into public consciousness. Kennedy asserted that:

[I]t has been a common dilemma facing previous "number-one" countries that even as their relative economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes out productive investment and leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense. If this, indeed, is the pattern of history, one is tempted to paraphrase Shaw's deadly serious quip [in Misalliance] and say: "Rome fell; Babylon fell; Scarsdale's turn will come." (p.533)

Kennedy emphasized that U.S. decline would be relative and that the changing power balances probably would affect the USSR, as it then was, more than the U.S. He called for American policy makers to "recognize that broad trends are under way and that there is a need to 'manage' affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage."

Not terribly long after Kennedy wrote these words, the USSR dissolved, the Cold War ended, and the first Gulf War took place, all of which appeared to many (though not all) analysts to signal a period of unipolar U.S. dominance, if not the "end of history." Decline was out; triumphalism was in.

But since 9/11, decline has been "in" again. Observers have discerned an "end of the American era" (Charles Kupchan) or what Fareed Zakaria more recently called a "post-American world." Parag Khanna sees the emergence of a tripolar world (China, EU, U.S.). Whether U.S. relative decline is thought to have begun around 1970, as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, or more recently, the prescriptions tend to be similar, and very close to Kennedy's two-decades-old prescription: in a nutshell, graceful management of an inevitable reduction in power and influence.

This does not go down well in certain quarters: witness, for example, this article by Robert Lieber in the current issue of the journal World Affairs. Rooted as it is in an exceptionalist worldview, Lieber's article not surprisingly dismisses those he calls the 'new declinists'. He argues that China is "America's most serious, and in many respects only true, competitor," but says its emergence as a genuine great power rival "seems very, very unlikely in the near or medium term." This is a questionable judgment, as is Lieber's view that the EU will not be able to arrive at a cohesive foreign and security policy.

Let's step back a bit, however, from the volley of charge and counter-charge. In a review of Parag Khanna's book The Second World ("Guess Who's Coming to Power," New York Times Book Review, 3/30/08), Raymond Bonner writes that "the notion that the United States will not be the world's only superpower, that it will have to share power with Europe and China, will horrify many Americans." It shouldn't. As Paul Kennedy pointed out 20 years ago, the size, population, and resources of the U.S. suggest that its "natural" share of global wealth and power (however "power" is defined -- an issue I defer here), is somewhere around 16 or 18 percent (a figure that might be lower today). A reversion to this "natural" share, Kennedy observed, will still leave the U.S. as a major actor. Moreover, as Wallerstein notes (here), "erstwhile hegemonic powers have not suffered that much in their declining years. They have lived off their accumulated fat, provided they have adjusted to new realities."

Seen in this light, "decline" is perhaps an unnecessarily emotive word for what has been occurring. In a world where the leading powers compete in ways that do not involve war, Mackinder's "unequal growth of nations" is not cause for undue alarm. The notion of "the rise and fall of great powers," suggesting as it does a quasi-apocalyptic fate to be avoided or a titanic struggle to be engaged, is somewhat misleading. This imagery obscures the messy, prosaic daily bargaining that occupies those who run the machinery of the current world order. The needed reforms of this machinery (expansion of the UN Security Council, to take one of many possible examples) will not be advanced by worrying about or debating U.S. "decline." If "hegemonic decline" is part of a cyclical rhythm driven at bottom by economic forces, then it will occur regardless of who says what about it; if it is not, then perhaps it does not merit the ink being spilled over it.

The weight of the evidence suggests that, contra Lieber, a slow erosion of the U.S. position is occurring, but whether this represents a pressing problem is doubtful. If a new administration reorients U.S. foreign policy in a way that now seems likely, many of the issues surrounding the decline debate may begin to appear somewhat less urgent.

p.s. added Aug. 15: For somewhat different perspectives on U.S. decline (though not ones I especially endorse), see Gary Becker and Richard Posner at their blog. Becker posted on the topic Aug.3, Posner then added his own post. (N.B. Chicago School economics rules there.)

Miliband on EU security policy

The Guardian is reporting that in a speech scheduled for delivery July 2, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband will indicate support for French president Sarkozy's proposals for stronger European military, "conflict prevention," and "crisis management" capabilities.

Pertinent brief excerpts from the article:

[Miliband] will...praise the French for saying they are willing to reintegrate into Nato's command structure, and will insist that a stronger European defence policy does not mean Nato stops being the cornerstone of European defence.

But he will add: "As the Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated, unless Europe can develop its own capabilities, it will be consigned always to wait impotently until the US and Nato are ready and able to intervene." ...

He will highlight the role of EU troops in training Palestinian police in the West Bank, adding "the countries of Europe need to be better at using their hard power."

Miliband will point out that Victoria Nuland, the US ambassador to Nato, welcomed a stronger European defence policy in a speech in February, reversing a decade of American fears that strong European defence would undermine Nato. The US position has been changed by Sarkozy's election because he has agreed to reintegrate France into Nato's command structure as well as send more French troops to Nato's operation in Afghanistan.

Perhaps those analysts who have been predicting for some time a more assertive European geopolitical and military policy are finally going to see their predictions start to be vindicated. The full text of the Guardian article is here.