Rising anthropogenic, or human-caused, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have up to twice the impact on coastal estuaries as it does in the oceans because the human-caused CO2 lowers the ecosystem’s ability to absorb natural fluctuations of the greenhouse gas, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Oregon State University found that there was significant daily variability when it comes to harmful indices of CO2 for many marine organisms in estuaries. At night, for example, water in the estuary had higher carbon dioxide, lower pH levels, and a lower saturation state from the collective “exhale” of the ecosystem.

These night-time harmful conditions are changing about twice as fast as the daily average, the researchers say, meaning the negative impacts on shell-building animals, including oysters, clams and mussels, may manifest more quickly than expected from simply observing the daily average.

Results of the study are being published April 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was funded and led by the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and Region 10, through a Regional Applied Research Effort grant. The project was coordinated by Stephen Pacella, an EPA scientist who also is a doctoral student in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

“In these environments that are dominated by marine plants, photosynthesis and respiration cause large differences in CO2 concentrations and the addition of anthropogenic carbon make these day-to-night differences even larger than they would be without that extra carbon,” said George Waldbusser, an Oregon State marine ecologist and co-author on the study, who serves as Pacella’s Ph.D. adviser.

“The continued addition of CO2 to these waters results in the worst conditions changing twice as fast due to the loss of the system’s ability to buffer itself,” Waldbusser said.

This is one of the first studies to analyze the dynamics of an estuarine carbonate system on such a fine time scale. Pacella’s research focused on an underwater seagrass habitat in Washington state’s Puget Sound, which varied between one and four meters in depth. He spent two-and-a-half months monitoring the native eelgrass habitat, which is common to Puget Sound.

The researchers say that although the study focused on a habitat in Puget Sound, the results provide an important framework to evaluate other seagrass and estuarine habitats that tend to have lower inherent buffering capacity and large natural variations in chemistry.

Pacella, who was lead author on the study, used the detailed data he collected to create a model to estimate the daily carbonate chemistry weather during the summer dry season back to the year 1765, and also projected conditions ahead to 2100 altering the amount of anthropogenic carbon in the system.

His measurements and model demonstrates that seagrasses make CO2 lower during the day, and higher at night, compared to a system without seagrass. The model however predicts that by 2060 atmospheric CO2 levels will be high enough that harmful nighttime high CO2 levels would actually be more frequent if the seagrass weren’t there. So, presently there are relatively more frequent high CO2 times because of the seagrass, but after 2060 there are relatively fewer high CO2 times with seagrass than there would be with no seagrass.

“There is tremendous interest in using marine plants to locally mitigate excess CO2 in coastal waters to the benefit of other sensitive marine species, such as oysters,” Waldbusser said. “Steve’s very nice work on this topic is among the first in temperate estuaries to demonstrate the potential for this mitigation, while noting that the real benefits may still be a few decades away.”

However, the researchers point out that seagrass should be looked at holistically, not just through a carbon budget lens, because it also offers ecological benefits including habitat to marine organisms.

Waldbusser has called these changing daily CO2 conditions “carbonate weather” because changes in the chemistry are so dramatic depending on the time of the day – much like the difference and interaction between weather and climate.

“Organisms, including us, experience the weather – and climate is what causes changes to the weather,” Waldbusser said. “However, we can’t really ‘feel’ the gradual change in global temperature. We do, though, experience the extreme weather events or flooding, which are predicted to get worse due to gradual increases in sea level.

“In this case, the carbonate chemistry history is changing more rapidly than we anticipated. As with sea level rise, the graduate increase becomes more important during events that amplify those otherwise naturally occurring cycles.”

The researchers say they are still working to better understand how these events – versus changes in average conditions – affect the long-term health of species that are sensitive to ocean acidification. There also are implications for how water quality criteria are set.

“If, as we tend to believe, extreme events matter to marine organisms, the research suggests that more work is needed to define water quality criteria that incorporate daily changes in the highs and lows of CO2 rather than just utilizing average daily or annual conditions,” Waldbusser said.

A range of less than one degree Fahrenheit (or half a degree Celsius) of climate warming over the next century could make all the difference when it comes to the probability of future ice-free summers in the Arctic, new University of Colorado Boulder research shows.

The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Climate Change, show that limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) would reduce the likelihood of an ice-free Arctic summer to 30 percent by the year 2100, whereas warming by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) would make at least one ice-free summer certain.

“I didn’t expect to find that half a degree Celsius would make a big difference, but it really does,” said Alexandra Jahn, author of the study and an assistant professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a fellow in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). “At 1.5 degrees Celsius, half of the time we stay within our current summer sea ice regime whereas if we reach 2 degrees of warming, the summer sea ice area will always be below what we have experienced in recent decades.”

The study used simulations from the Community Earth System Model (CESM) run at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and examined warming scenarios ranging from 1.5 degrees Celsius all the way to 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. The lower bound of the study is an important benchmark worldwide; in 2015, the international Paris Climate Agreement set a global target of constraining warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Arctic sea ice extent has declined overall in recent years with increasing global temperatures, but the effects of future warming remain uncertain. The new findings illustrate that different scenarios of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission levels lead to drastically different results for Arctic summer sea ice.

“This dataset allows us to predict how soon we’re likely to see ice free conditions as well as how often,” said Jahn. “Under the 4-degree Celsius scenario, we would have a high probability of a three-month ice free period in the summer months by 2050. By the end of century, that could jump to five months a year without ice. And even for half that warming, ice-free conditions of up to 2 month a year are possible by the late 21st century.”

But, Jahn continued, if warming stays at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the probability of ice-free summers would drop by 70 percent, delaying or potentially even avoiding such occurrence altogether.

The significant difference in the results, Jahn said, might provide added incentive for countries to attempt to hit the 1.5-degree Celsius warming target in order to preserve current ecological conditions.

“The good news is that sea ice has quick response times and could theoretically recover if we brought down global temperatures at any point in the future,” said Jahn. “In the meantime, though, other ecosystems could see permanent negative impacts from the ice loss, and those can’t necessarily bounce back.”

By Mohammed Nosseir*

Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s re-election for a second and final term as president of Egypt should prompt him either to do more of what he has been doing during his first term, or to consider a complete shift of economic and political policies aimed at realizing achievements of a different kind. El-Sisi, who has so far been completely focused on physical expansion, may in his second term consider concentrating on mental development, which has a long-lasting and effective impact on society.

El-Sisi spent his first term focusing on three major missions: Stabilizing the Egyptian state, fighting terrorism, and developing mega-projects. There is minimal room for any expansion in these areas during his second term. Over the last four years, substantial efforts and financial resources have been allocated to these fields; any further achievements would be hardly noticeable and the magnitude of the projects realized cannot be repeated.

El-Sisi needs to work on creating some sort of balance between stabilizing the state and empowering its citizens to develop and strengthen their sense of belonging to their country. The president needs to consider shifting his government’s focus from mega-projects to genuinely incentivizing SME expansion, from over-empowering the state’s entities to inspiring Egyptian citizens to engage in, and contribute to, the resolution of our challenges. The ongoing “Sinai 2018” military operation will substantially reduce terrorism, and the government should therefore be able to focus on better applying the rule of law to combat commercial and civil crime.

Egyptian leaders often want to be remembered for their mega-projects: Gamal Abdel Nasser built the Aswan High Dam and Hosni Mubarak developed the New Valley Project (Toshka), which was named “Mubarak Toshka” for years until it was revealed to be a failing project. El-Sisi has developed the Suez Canal extension and is currently focusing on building the new administrative capital city. The merits of these kinds of projects tend to be debatable among experts — their outcomes often last for years before they eventually fade away.

The late President Anwar Sadat developed a few mega-projects, but his peace accord with Israel has been a remarkable achievement that the entire world continues to value highly almost four decades later. Because of the peace accord, Egypt’s mental energy and budget expenditure priorities shifted dramatically, from war to peace and prosperity. El-Sisi has a clear opportunity to embark on a similar reallocation by tapping into Egyptian citizens’ potential and engaging them constructively in their country’s development.

The Egyptian state has been doing its utmost to shape “follower citizens.” However, such hypocritical flatterers will never help a nation with a population of 100 million inhabitants move forward. Additionally, the state engine is embedded in our deep government bureaucracy that needs to be completely reformed: An obsolete engine cannot tow a huge, overloaded cart.

Egypt’s young people continue to be the nation’s main challenge that could be turned into assets. This won’t happen by enabling them to demonstrate and protest again, but engaging them in national political and economic developments will certainly improve our nation’s productivity. We have been dealing with our youth by applying a top-down approach, imposing the older generation’s ideas and attempting to control our young people. While this policy might succeed with a very tiny segment, it keeps the majority at high risk.

Shifting gears mentally is not an easy task, but the decision to do so depends totally on the legacy the president wants to leave behind and the state in which he would like to hand Egypt over to his successor. El-Sisi could consider positioning our youth as the locomotive that pulls the nation forward and have the government play the role of facilitator. Breaking out of our current economic and political deadlock requires us to seriously consider adopting new patterns of thought that differ entirely from those that we have been using for decades.

• Mohammed Nosseir, a liberal politician from Egypt, is a strong advocate of political participation and economic freedom. Twitter: @MohammedNosseir

The Federal Reserve recently increased interest rates to 1.75 percent. This is the highest interest rates have been since 2008, but it still leaves rates at historic lows. While the Fed says economic growth justifies future rate increases, an honest examination of the economy suggests that future rate increases are unlikely.

The Fed’s claim that the economy is strong is based on misleading government statistics. For example, the official unemployment rate understates true unemployment by not counting those who have given up looking for work. According to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, the real unemployment rate is above 20 percent. Government figures also understate the rate of inflation by pretending that you are not negatively impacted by inflation if you can still buy hamburger when you cannot afford steak. Shadow Stats estimates that the real rate of inflation is as much as four times higher than the official rate.

President Trump’s tariffs will further weaken the economy. While export-driven industries, including manufacturers that rely on imported materials, will be particularly hard-hit, the tariffs combined with the inevitable retaliation from other counties will impact all sectors of the economy. A global trade war could also lead other countries to stop buying US debt instruments, increasing pressure on the Fed to keep rates low.

Since Republicans have held control of the White House and Congress over the last year, federal spending has increased 12.9 percent. Clearly those in Congress serious about reducing government spending are few and far between. The sad fact is that both major parties are happy to increase welfare and warfare spending, although many Republicans pretend to oppose deficits when a Democrat sits in the White House. This puts tremendous pressure on the Fed to keep rates low so as not to increase the federal government’s already high interest payments.

This cannot last forever. Eventually the combination of a spendthrift Congress and a print-happy central bank will cause a major economic crisis. This crisis will herald the end of the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that sustains it. The only question is whether the existing system will be replaced by a free market and limited constitutional government or we will complete our descent into totalitarianism.

Fortunately, more Americans are becoming aware of the freedom philosophy and demanding that government roll back the welfare-warfare state and rein in the Fed. Many are also demanding protection of their right to opt out — not just from government programs like Obamacare but also from the Federal Reserve System. For example, Wyoming recently joined Arizona in passing a law recognizing gold and silver as legal tender. Citizens of these states are now able to protect themselves from the coming dollar crisis by using what has historically been considered real money.

At the federal level, the movement to audit the Fed remains strong. As the failures of Keynesianism become more apparent, the movement to audit and end the Fed will grow in size and strength. Hopefully this movement will ensure the end of the welfare-warfare state and the fiat currency system as well as lead to a new era of liberty.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

The challenge the United Nations faces today is that the vast majority of people have forgotten what the UN is supposed to be doing, and why. We have forgotten why the world set it up. Notwithstanding the periodically hortatory nature of its founding documents, the United Nations was not a purely idealistic construct doomed to crash with the passage of time upon the cruel rocks of political realism.

By Matthew Parish*

For anyone who has read Michael Soussan’s notorious memoir Backstabbing for Beginners, about his career as an intern in the United Nations during the “Oil for Food” programme in which the United Nations administered a corrupt regime of providing humanitarian relief to sanctioned Iraq in the 1990’s, one might imagine the United Nations to be nothing more than a multi-course meal of flick-knives for breakfast. There is a lot of talking, a lot of time-wasting, a lot of money spent on things it should not be, and an unprecedented level of political intrigue at every level that discredits the institution as a whole.

Unfortunately much of this image is accurate. But not all is. There is some logic to the United Nations, or it would never have been founded from the ashes of World War II. The challenge the United Nations faces today is that the vast majority of people have forgotten what the UN is supposed to be doing, and why. We have forgotten why the world set it up. Notwithstanding the periodically hortatory nature of its founding documents, the United Nations was not a purely idealistic construct doomed to crash with the passage of time upon the cruel rocks of political realism. This was an institutional structure approved and joined by Joseph Stalin, who most people may be able to agree was not one of life’s great idealists. Mao Zedong spent colossal efforts lobbying to ensure that the People’s Republic of China could join. There must have been a reason for it all.

The central problem of international relations is one of credible commitment. This is a term from law and economics. It deserves a level of explanation. In order to thrive, people have to cooperate, and so do companies. The way they cooperate is by one party promising another that they will do things, each in exchange for the other: I will do this, if you will do that. These mutual promises are called contracts, and they are the basis not only of commerce, but family relations (e.g. marriage) and even the operation of government (statutes and laws, that set out rights and responsibilities of the governed and the governing).

To be effective, contracts generally require someone other than the parties to enforce them. If someone breaks the contract then a third party will intervene. Some contracts do not typically require a third party to play this enforcement role. They are sometimes known as “point-to-point contracts”. They are contracts created in a market or souq. I buy some vegetables from you. I pay in cash. You hand over the vegetables. I walk away. The contractual terms involve very little more than an immediate exchange of goods for money, and hence an enforcement mechanism is rarely necessary.

Nevertheless the economy of the market can only get us so far. Sophisticated commerce – and sophisticated government – requires contracts whose rights and obligations are extended in time and space. I buy something on eBay or Amazon when I live in New York. The vendor lives in San Francisco. There is no instantaneous exchange either of money or of the goods. There has to be some trust, and trust is created by an enforcement mechanism. If you breach your side of the bargain, then I will be able to force you to comply with it or, at the very least, to punish you. There will be a price to pay.

There are, very roughly, three methods of enforcement although they overlap. The best one is called courts – if they are fair. You pay money to lawyers and (indirectly – through taxation) – to judges, and they decide who is right and who is wrong if a dispute arises. If the party who is wrong does not wish to do what the judge has decided they must do to remedy their wrong, then the force of the state will be used to compel them to do that. This can be a very effective way of procuring trust – in other words, of ensuring that when people sign contracts they create credible commitments. That is because the costs of litigating a dispute are so high that most times you are better off just doing what you agreed to do. Ultimately you will be forced to do that anyway, in most cases, if your opponent cannot afford a much better lawyer, and if the judge is approximately fair.

The second-best method of creating credible commitments is reputational risk. In some societies, the way contracts are enforced is because people know one-another, whether through families or otherwise, and a person who does not stick by the rules will be talked about. One might ask “who cares if other people talk about me”. The answer is that other people may not enter into contracts with such a person in the future. This is what it means for one’s reputation to be damaged. This system is imperfect, because the mechanisms for managing one’s reputation (or managing the reputation of another) may have very little to do with the rights and wrongs of the matter at hand. People’s reputations may be trashed justifiably or unjustifiably. For this system to work, it requires something of a concentrated monopoly in the capacity to trash reputations to be held by wise people. This may be rare.

The third-best method of creating credible commitments might be called “arming yourself to the teeth”, or the “Wild West” method of justice. You and I agree something. If I decide you did not comply with your side of the bargain, we meet in a square at dawn and I shoot you. The main problem with this method of enforcement is that you might shoot me instead. Moreover my assessment of whether I want to escalate the matter to the square at dawn might turn out to have very little to do with my assessment of the merits of the matter. I might just make up an excuse, because I want to shoot you and I think I can do so before you shoot me. Perhaps I was just able to buy a bigger gun since we signed the contract. One soon starts to wonder what the point of signing the contract was In the first place.

These three narratives more or less amount to the history of civilisation. Nations tend to develop from the third to the second to the first, and perhaps this is what Stanley Kubrick was trying to tell is in her superlative motion picture ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. As an aside, the reason I believe societies develop in this direction is because for intelligent people, the first method is better than the second which in turn is better than the third. Intelligent people tend to get their way: this might even be regarded as the definition of what it is to be intelligent. Hence societies develop from brutalism to civilisation.

Now we come to states.

States need to cooperate in the same way as do people. The problem is that states are not very good at cooperating. States are very good at signing contracts. We call them treaties. States have always been good at this. Yet they are not very good at sticking to them. While states may agree all sorts of things between one-another, they may later just decide that they no longer want to do the things they promised they would. Or, they may decide that they want to accuse other states of not doing that which they agreed that they would, for whatever purpose. That is because states have an unfortunate habit of seeking benefit in what economists call “comparative advantage”. It is better for one state if it is stronger than its adversary state, even if the consequence of this is that both states are worse off than in a situation in which the states are of equal power.

The reason states seek comparative advantage, rather than cooperation for absolute advantage, is because as a general matter states operate in the third scenario above of credible commitments. They are always concerned that their adversary state might insist that they meet in the square at dawn. The best way of foreclosing that risk is to have comparative advantage. It is much better for one state that it is stronger than its adversary. If every state thinks like this, we have a race to the bottom. States go around trying to belittle each other in order to obtain maximum comparative advantage. On important lesson history may teach us from the first half of the twentieth century is that if states become too powerful (superpowers) and relentlessly pursue their comparative advantage, then there are periodic world wars and everything is totally destroyed.

One solution to the fact that states appear to be in stage three of the development from barbarism to civilisation might be to give everyone nuclear weapons, and this was the stage three solution the superpowers devised early in the second half of the twentieth century. It was rather dangerous, as the Cuban Missile Crisis showed. Soon the nuclear powers realised that, to paraphrase the fictional Peter Sellers character Dr Strangelove, there is no point having the ability to destroy the entire world unless you tell everyone else about it and then you talk to everyone else to resolve your problems. Hence hotlines and the like were set up. So there was peace between nuclear powers. But there was no world peace in general. Indeed history since the end of World War II has been particularly bloody, as nuclear powers have decided to fight proxy wars in the territory of non-nuclear powers rather than fighting one-another directly.

Moreover nuclear powers have a most understandable inclination not to let any other nuclear powers emerge. That is because in a scenario three model of credible commitments, the overwhelming comparative advantage of unilaterally having nuclear weapons (i.e. one’s opponent does not) is something that a rational state must do everything possible to maintain. Moreover nuclear states are in a strong position to prevent non-nuclear states from becoming nuclear. They can use their nuclear status as a lobbying tool to impose economic and political sanctions upon aspirant nuclear powers. And, in the final analysis, they can blow them to pieces. The foregoing must explain some of the logic to the current crisis in North Korea.

Every rational state actor surely understands that the foregoing state of affairs is not a good way in which the world is run. The world, armed to the teeth, needs its diplomacy to progress from stage three to stages two and one. Otherwise we are all going to die after the next Wall Street Crash. That is why Stalin and Mao approved the founding documents of the United Nations. They did so not because they had faith in the professed liberal ideals of a multilateral system – at least, not intrinsically so. They did not believe that states automatically reciprocally comply with treaties and all one needs to do is to create an international secretariat imbued with aspirations of good faith, whereupon the world’s problems all evaporate. Rather the progenitors of the United Nations were trying to civilise inter-state dialogue: gradually, but inexorably.

The problem with method one for creating credible commitments between states is that there is no global government, no global court system and no global judicial enforcement mechanism. Where the United Nations uses force, it has to borrow troops from its member states. This is very different from having its own army whose genuine fealty lies towards the United Nations. That is because the United Nations has no effective method of compulsory tax-raising. It is reliant upon its member states for donations which, although expressed as mandatory, are essentially voluntary as we are now seeing. Traditional substantial donors to the United Nations, including the United States and my country the United Kingdom, are threatening to de-fund the United Nations if it does not improve what it is doing. The United Nations has no tax-collectors and bailiffs to enforce its funding demands. From this it follows that the United Nations cannot have its own independent police, armed forces, courts or judges. Those authorities cannot be independent if they are at the mercy for their funding upon the parties against whom they might be expected to serve as adjudicators and enforcers.

Nevertheless the United Nations has tried to emulate method one institutions. It has established a number of international courts, but none of them work very well for precisely reasons set out above. It has created peacekeeping forces, and endowed them with distinctive uniforms (“blue helmets”) and legal mandates established in international instruments. The United Nations has tried to create things that look like laws: General Assembly resolutions, for example. But these have all, more or less, been elaborate constructs. Talk of giving the United Nations an independent army has never come to fruition. UN Security Council Resolutions seeking to enforce or implement international court decisions are often blocked.

That is because, some very rare historical examples aside, states virtually never genuinely agree genuinely to pool power into new institutions with authority over more than one state. In the very rare historical circumstances in which this has happened, it has taken place extremely gradually and more by stealth than by design. States are much better at splitting up (two new Presidents to be happy with their titles, rather than just one) than they are at joining together.

One course the United Nations has been trying to pursue may have been to move too quickly from stage three to stage one in the quest to create credible commitments between states and thereby avoid a new series of international security catastrophes. I am not saying that there should be no international courts. I am saying that we have to think much more carefully about what those courts are realistically capable of doing, and to plan the development of the United Nations accordingly. One of the problems with the United Nations at the current juncture is that nobody much cares about what it is doing, because it has become discredited. The United Nations aspired to do things in category one that it could not do because it was moving too quickly. Nobody was thinking about this problem, and therefore the system created more bureaucracy, confusion, waste and chaos in lieu of more perfectly effective institutions. In other words, the United Nations tried to cover up its own failures, although those failures were not really the fault of the United Nations. Its member states had imposed upon the UN system a series of aspirations that it could not hope to achieve – at least, not so quickly. As any peacekeeper will tell you, institution-building takes far longer than the usual temporal perspective of any democratically-elected politician (i.e. the next election).

So what do we do now? We do not need to demolish all of these institutions. Instead we need to realise their limitations and work with them to improve them in the right direction. We may need to slow them down a bit. The UN’s member states are becoming frustrated with the amount of money the UN is spending – it is their money. Their tolerance for spending more money may be limited. So we need to pause and regroup. We need to assess the effectiveness of different parts of the United Nations, sweeping away some cobwebs of inefficient bureaucracy and better applying the resources we have to those functions in the United Nations that more clearly operate effectively.

It is no good replying with the commonly-heard refrain that efficiency does not matter because UN member states’ contributions to the organisation’s budget are so fractional as regards national budgetary expenditures that member states’ actions towards the United Nations are not motivated by money. That assertion has been proven false. UN member states are now threatening to, and are, withholding UN funds. Whether because they think those funds could be better spent elsewhere, or because they think that doing this may give the UN an incentive to act more usefully, funding of the United Nations is now an issue. If the UN does not show a willingness to reform, it will go bust. If nothing is done then I believe it will go bust very soon: within the lifetime of the current Secretary-General. This would be a catastrophe.

What does the United Nations do well? Its critics do not often give the United Nations enough credit for what it does do properly. Those things lie in the spheres of methods two and three in the creation and sustenance of credible commitments. As to method three, the officers of the United Nations serve as diplomats of last resort. When nobody is talking anymore – and that seems to be a major problem now, as we apparently slide into a new Cold War – we need a group of diplomats who can still negotiate and speak behind the scenes, often behind pretexts that they are doing other things. One is reminded of the line of Jim Hacker in “Yes Minister”, in which he observes that the best place to discuss foreign policy is at a funeral. That is because nobody is asking you to hold a press conference; there are no expectations; nobody can criticise you if the talks went wrong. When pistols are about to be drawn at dawn, the United Nations can remind everybody that this is not a particularly good idea. Generally the United Nations does this very well.

The other thing the United Nations can do well – but it can also do it badly – is in the sphere of method two. The United Nations can serve as an arbiter of states’ reputations in upholding bargains. One must recall that all rational states – and I think we must assume states in general to be rational or there is no point thinking of international relations as a branch of political science at all – want the United Nations to do this. That is because all rational people want contracts to be enforceable in some way. If they did not, then they would not sign them. The current state of affairs, in which treaties are sometimes respected by nations and sometimes not – does not benefit anybody. It just creates paper that people may or may not later find it convenient to comply with. If the United Nations could serve as an ever greater impartial arbiter of reputational standards amongst treaty-makers, it might become more mature.

As things stand, it is far too clear that many states do not trust the judgments the United Nations makes about them or about other friendly or adverse states. The reason for that may be because the United Nations is not holding itself to the highest standards in the judgments it makes. The problem has become so acute that now there is a funding crisis.

How might the United Nations hold itself to higher standards? Offices such as the High Commissioner for Human Rights might bring increased scrutiny and due process to their roles. The High Commissioner is surely a legal officer, forming judgments and taking actions about whether human rights standards – essentially legal standards – are complied with. This might mean exercising ever greater care and discretion in the decisions the High Commissioner makes. This might entail ever more substantial inter-state consensus around the veracity and reliability of the decisions of the High Commissioner. Although it is impracticable within the confines of this article to enumerate all UN agencies that play a reputation-supporting role, this model of scrutiny and due process might lend confidence in the judgments of the United Nations. If the UN wants to serve as a standard-bearer in a quasi-judicial capacity, it must bring judicial standards to bear in what it does.

In short, the United Nations is good at method three enforcement of credible commitments, but it under-sings its praises in this regard. It should do more quiet diplomacy, and it should publicise better what it does. Diplomacy is something that to a great extent must be done in private, because the criticisms one makes in private are often not usefully repeated in public. As Bismarck said, making laws is like making sausages: better that it not be seen. Much the same might be said about diplomacy. Nevertheless the United Nations does achieve a great deal in this field, even though it may consist of things so anodyne as maintaining the peace or preserving the status quo and preventing conflict. Newspapers much prefer bad news to good news, but a great deal of what the United Nations does is quiet, good news. The United Nations is not very good at developing a positive media message for what it does. Most of its media message is incoherent platitudes that fool nobody except those who have already drunk the hemlock. The United Nations should become better at this.

The United Nations should likewise improve its method two projects. The UN serves its member states. It can only incur derision if it fails to do this. It therefore needs to consider more carefully how it may act as an impartial signaller of the proclivities of states to comply with their treaty commitments. It should not act as a moral foghorn, taking sides in contentious and difficult disputes without regard for reason or deliberation. The United Nations must observe due process, undertaking careful and deliberate enquiry, working on a bipartisan basis to ensure that its conclusions are impartial, exercised with caution yet confidence, and ultimately respected. In this regard the United Nations has a lot of work to do.

As to method one, I believe that only once the United Nations has made substantial improvements in method two may method one follow more naturally. Nobody is going to invest  further in international judicial institutions with credible adjudicatory capacity unless they have broader confidence, in a softer setting, that the United Nations is capable of careful and impartial deliberation in a method two context. Then we can move on.

Finally, I think it is appropriate to make a comment about funding. I believe that the United Nations has become so discredited that some dramatic cuts to its funding are now inevitable. Its traditional funders have proceeded beyond irritated, to infuriated and determined. Whether or not they are justified in this is not to the point. It is the reality. Therefore there are going to be cuts. We need to make sure that these failures in confidence in the United Nations are never repeated. But in the interim, we need to find other ways of funding the United Nations. My own tentative view is that we should explore private means of funding the UN. We should never permit massive donors to occupy the ideology of the United Nations, and therefore funding caps from any individual or entity should be avoided, while so-called tied funding (i.e. the provision of funding conditional upon certain projects or goals being achieved) should be entertained only with great caution lest the aspiration of multilateral neutrality be structurally undermined. These comments are only fleeting; the funding of the United Nations could and should be the subject of another, much longer, essay than this.

Nevertheless the world needs the United Nations. The people of the world need it. They might be willing to donate to it. UNHCHR underwent that revolution in the last decade. The UN as whole might consider the same. In undergoing this transformation, it might find an incentive to self-reform, because if it does not improve its reputation in doing things the peoples of the world want it to do then it will lose its financing. Those who are concerned about UN accountability and reform might find an outlet to create institutional incentives for improvement.

We live a new world. In many ways it is very dangerous. In other ways it is replete with hope. In this essay I tried to capture both, and to set out my vision for a new and rejuvenated United Nations Organisation.

*Matthew Parish is an international lawyer based in Geneva, Switzerland and a former UN peacekeeper. He is a scholar of ethnic conflict and civil war, and he has published two books and over two hundred articles. He is an Honorary Professor of Civil Law and Litigation at the University of Leicester and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Bilan magazine named him as one of the three hundred most influential people in Switzerland. www.matthewparish.com

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of TransConflict.

The United States on Monday named seven Pakistani nationals as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, saying they were acting on behalf of the militant Islamist group that carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks and have been blamed for instigating ongoing violence in Indian Kashmir.

The U.S. government also identified Milli Muslim League (MML) and Tehreek-e-Azadi-e-Kashmir as aliases for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which it listed as a foreign terrorist organization in 2001.

All seven “global terrorists” are officials of the Milli Muslim League, which introduced itself as a political party at a press conference in Islamabad in August 2017, according to statements issued by the U.S. Department of State and Department of the Treasury.

The LeT has been using aliases and front groups to circumvent sanctions and deceive the public about “its true character,” U.S. officials said.

“Make no mistake: whatever LeT chooses to call itself, it remains a violent terrorist group,” Nathan Sales, a top counterterrorism official, said in a statement released by the U.S. State Department.

“The United States supports all efforts to ensure that LeT does not have a political voice until it gives up violence as a tool of influence.”

LeT is best known for carrying out the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Indian authorities also say LeT is one of several Pakistan-based groups operating in insurgency-torn Indian Kashmir, where weekend violence left at least 20 dead and 200 injured.

The seven Muslim Milli League officials accused of acting on behalf of LeT were Saifullah Khalid, Muzammil Iqbal Hashimi, Muhammad Harris Dar, Tabish Qayyum, Fayyaz Ahmad, Faisal Nadeem and Muhammad Ehsan.

“Terrorism designations expose and isolate organizations and individuals, and deny them access to the U.S. financial system. Moreover, designations can assist the law enforcement activities of U.S. agencies and other governments,” the U.S. government statement said.

In August 2016, the United States added Hizbul Mujahideen, the oldest and largest rebel outfit fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, to its list of global terror organizations – a move slammed by separatists in the region who termed the group a “decades-old indigenous freedom movement.”

By Saurabh Malkar*

I came across an article shared on a Facebook group, describing Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak’s, take on Indians’ lack of creativity and the resultant dearth of innovative enterprise. The article was met with a lot of pushback and hate-posting, mostly arising out of national and cultural chauvinism.

But Woz’s words were like music to my ears. He is certainly not the first person to have lambasted Indians for their lack of creativity and innovation, but he is one of the few ones who touched on points that subtly implicated the culture, straying away from the oft-cited bogey man – the Indian educational system.

I will try to swing further Woz’s wrecking ball and try to break down (pun intended) the shortcomings of Indian culture that stymie creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and individual progress.

For this rant, I shall use everyday examples and observations, while eschewing citing scientific literature. This is, thus, an opinion grounded in empiricism.

Low Expectations

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of a lofty goal, often, with scant resources. The challenges are not merely of an infrastructural or a monetary nature, they are first and foremost of a psychological kind. The individual has to place his personal life and tertiary goals on the proverbial altar that will serve as the foundation of his venture.

Unfortunately, such goals and aspirations have no place in a culture of low expectations. Indian culture encourages playing safe just so one gets to check off a centuries old check list of ‘success.’ The check list comprises of education (in select disciplines), employment (in select industries), matrimony, a mortgage, and a car loan.

With the bar set to keeping up with the Joneses, setting off on an almost monkish, backbreaking entrepreneurial journey is off limits.

Group Think

Starting a business or being innovative requires a person to make critical decisions that can either make it or break it. Such critical decision-making needs one to be self-aware and accustomed to make independent decisions from a young age.

A culture that puts a premium on defining one’s identity in the ethnolinguistic group in which one was born is not at all geared for the rigors of independent decision-making.

To add to the burden, individuals are perceived as part of a group and are expected to be in lockstep with group conventions, practices, and thought. For a maverick, this can be stifling and self-isolation is the only counter-measure.

A sub-malady of group think is that individuals get painted with a rather broad brush. Group outliers, viz. future mavericks, tend to be ridiculed, jeered, and in some cases, ostracized due to the misalignment of their compass with the group north star.

A combination of group think and steep penalties on renegade behavior means that the raw creative energy, the fuel of entrepreneurship, is lost or discharged in hackneyed pursuits.

Identity Politics

Group think and ethnolinguistic segmentation segues into identity politics. People tend to judge individuals by their default identities, issued at time of birth, by no virtue or fault of their own.

While this pathology seems to be at its peak in the US, fortunately, there are counter voices that rail against it.

In India, it’s part and parcel of the routine life. Preferential policies and biases towards hiring folks of similar ethno-linguistic groups as that of the employer is rampant in most parts of the country.

Identity politics can creep into fraternizing, segmenting the populace along ethnolinguistic fault lines. This can be extremely counterproductive to the process of information exchange and making beneficial acquaintances – essential pre-requisites to entrepreneurial beginnings.

Lack of Grassroots Innovation

Entrepreneurship has become such a money-minting buzzword that universities now run courses that teach folks how to bootstrap their ideas into successful businesses. Big to medium sized cities see at least one event dedicated to discussing and fostering entrepreneurs. Magazines beat the entrepreneurial drum at least once in their publication cycle and Youtube is chalk full of videos on entrepreneurial hacks.

But really, entrepreneurship and innovation is not a gala affair and certainly doesn’t result from a structured top-down plan. It’s more akin to the randomness and meandering trajectories of Brownian motion. Over time, a few of these random trajectories lead to success.

Rockefeller’s success with oil, Henry Ford’s successful application of the assembly line, modern day advances in fracking, the smartphone, and all the petty things that make our domestic life convenient have one thing in common. They are the cumulative result of the effort of average individuals, with great minds and even greater dreams, who wanted to innovate contemporary processes and systems to bring about a greater good.

Indians, for a variety of reasons, lack the innovative mindset. Outliers apart, most Indians don’t think of upgrading existing ways of doing things to make their own lives better. To demonstrate this, I will use two extremely routine, but telling, elements of our lives – house cleaning and food packaging.

House cleaning involves sweeping, mopping, and wiping down surfaces.

The Indian broom hasn’t undergone any significant upgrade since its inception. It’s still made of long fibers of processed grass, held together by a plastic casing which doubles up as the handle. From head to tail, the broom measures around 3.5 feet. The result: poor cleaning and significant strain on the back from bending over. No thought has ever been put into upgrading this tool. It’s only through the entry of products from the West that urban Indians are being introduced to the ‘real’ broom – one with greater work efficiency and optimized for use in upright posture.

Mopping in the average Indian household is performed with a rag and a bucket of water. One has to squat and use their bare hands to mop the floor with the wet rag. Only recently has a mop and a purpose-built bucket been introduced into Indian homes. But to much dismay, this convenience is the result of globalization and trade, not local innovation.

It’s routine to wipe down surfaces with a damp rag. The process requires frequent rinsing and wringing of the rag. Not only is it time consuming, it also produces poorer results. To date, there is no alternative to this, as there is nothing like Clorox wipes on the market.

Food packaging is my pet peeve. I was particularly wowed by food packaging in North America. There is a great emphasis on three criteria – ease of opening, resealability, and ease of dispensing. Cue food packaging in India, and except a few multinational brands, most food packaging is dismal. None of it meets the above three criteria and situation hasn’t changed much over the past few decades.

It seems, at least empirically, that the driver of innovation and entrepreneurship – the individual – is missing in action. This very much explains, partly, the state of shambles India has found itself in.

Lack of Infrastructure

I won’t detail on infrastructural quagmires affecting at a macro level like GDP and public transportation. This is an individual-centric harangue, so I will touch on the micro effects.

Innovation or entrepreneurial pursuit needs contemplation, solitude, and some spare time to etch out the road map. The above elements become unattainable due to the way infrastructure is (mis -)set up in India, at least in urban India. (These problems don’t occur in rural India because there is no infrastructure to begin with.)

The Indian infrastructural setup is for the most part pre-industrial. This accompanied by a pre-industrial culture and way of life throttles any serious contemplation and self-reflection.

Following has been my observation.

Poor roads and dismal traffic management often result in urban Indians spending over 3 hours commuting one-way. While one could theoretically brainstorm and introspect while stuck in traffic, the co-existent cacophony from honking and outdated car motors makes this theoretical prospect unfeasible.

But what about using ear plugs and reading up on relevant issues on the Internet while stuck in traffic? This unfortunately is made impossible due to poor Internet speeds/bandwidth – a characteristic flourish of digital India.

The same lack of quiet is continues on into the urban residential setup, thanks to poor city planning, resulting in noisy vehicular traffic streaming right down the middle of the township. The problems get compounded, every now and then, by cultural and social events, where making the most noise and being inconsiderate to others seems to be the end goal.

With a lack of privacy, quiet, and uninterrupted me-time, it’s hard to think about anything, except the most trivial matters.

Inverse Logic

Part of the goods and services tax in India is also the culprit for not affording the average Indian sufficient downtime. Elements that free up time and make daily routine convenient – frozen and canned foods, processed foods, packaged foods, and household appliances like dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and ovens – incur a steep tax.

The rationale: the above goods and products are luxury items, hence, should be steeply taxed.

The counter-rationale: how can these conveniences become mainstream if they cost a lot?

The result: most Indians continue to live pre-industrial lives, with household chores occupying a significant chunk of their daily schedule.

Introspection, contemplation, and brainstorming, then, are prerogatives of post-industrial cultures of the West, which is where most innovation and developments occur. This is not serendipity, it is cause-and-effect.

Parental Baggage

This might become a contentious issue.

Exceptions aside, adults in the West are expected to bear fewer parental responsibilities than adults in India. While helping parents out occasionally and tending to their health in times of need can certainly be accommodated in the life of a young adult, there is a threshold to such accommodation, beyond which it adversely affects the adult’s life.

Indian children are not only expected to take care (read middle age to grave) of their parents, they are also expected to fulfill some of the latter’s dreams and expectations. In some unfortunate cases, adults are expected to live with their parents, in line with long-standing cultural norms, despite having the means to move out.

The externalities of such a setup: young adults live a sheltered life and become encumbered with expectations and demands that can put their personal pursuits in a chokehold.

Such young adults can hardly be expected to become trailblazers and mavericks.

Indians are Philistines

Granted India has its own philharmonic orchestra and hosts art exhibitions and cultural festivals. Upon analyzing closely, one finds that such events draw out only the uber-elites of Indian metros – the real bourgeoisie with Ivy-league education and refined tastes. Unfortunately, they are a niche minority.

Most of the the Indian population, including inhabitants of metros, despite their university degrees and corporate careers, couldn’t care less about the arts. Patronage to the arts is considered so superfluous that it doesn’t even brush past the mental orbit of an average Indian.

The arts play a vital role in that they encourage creativity, out-of-box thinking, and open intellectual dimensions that cannot be opened by rote lessons that are the forte of the Indian K-12 system.

Case in point: the user experience on Apple products wouldn’t have been so definitively distinct had Steve Jobs not dropped in on a calligraphy course at Reed College.

It would be almost blasphemous and heretical for an Indian to wish to study the arts or want to build a career in humanities. Not only will he/she incur the wrath of their parents and the ridicule of a vacant society, they will remain cash strapped for the rest of their lives. The culture and the resultant economic system isn’t built to nurture artistic pursuits.

Notable Takeaway

The common thread running through all the above listed reasons is culture. It’s not the lack of money, or the burgeoning population, or poor governance – oft-cited culprits – that result in a dearth of entrepreneurship, lack of innovation, and a miserable existence.

In closing, while I would like to end on a sanguine note, I prefer realism to optimism. Cultures are difficult to change. Cultural upheaval results from the efforts of individuals who have seen the light and hazard walking towards something better.

There is a genuine dearth of rugged individualism in the Indian culture. With the engine for change, innovation, and entrepreneurship non-existent, there cannot be a cultural shift or individual progress or creative enterprise in India.

About the author:
*Saurabh Malkar, an ex-dentist and a business graduate who is greatly influenced by American conservatism and western values. Having born and brought up in a non-western, third world country, he provides an ‘outside-in’ view on western values.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy.

By Sam Morgan

(EurActiv) — The European Parliament’s UK office made light of Britain’s decision to ditch burgundy passports after Brexit in a tweet posted on April Fool’s day (1 April), joking that the EU would also switch to blue next March.

In a tweet posted early on Sunday morning, the Parliament’s UK office announced the “breaking” news that all EU passports would switch in colour to dark blue, mirroring the UK’s insistence that its documents will change colour after Brexit.

But clicking on the link included in the tweet takes users to the original 1981 rules on passport design, not fresh legislation, confirming that it is the Parliament’s contribution to the annual increase in misleading information otherwise known as April Fool’s day.

Despite EU rules only advising member states to adopt a uniform burgundy colour in order to make border checks easier and quicker, the UK’s Leave camp has made reverting to blue passports a main pillar of its post-Brexit roadmap.

Changing from the colour shared by 26 other member states (Croatia retains a dark blue passport as burgundy was thought to be too reminiscent of the red-coloured documents issued before the collapse of Yugoslavia) is supposed to be a way of reclaiming sovereignty, according to Leave politicians.

Unfortunately for the British company that currently prints British passports, the contract for the Brexit document seems to have been awarded to Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto, a decision that has prompted outrage and amusement from Leave and Remain voters, respectively.

On 22 March, incumbent maker De La Rue said it would appeal the result, warning that it could not guarantee that jobs would be a lost as a result of losing out on the €490 million contract.

Numerous petitions have been lodged that call on the government not to give final approval to the decision, although EU rules on procurement make it unlikely that post-Brexit passports will not be produced overseas.

Britain’s new passport will be issued from October 2019 and will reportedly feature “a raft of new and updated security features”.

The Sunday Telegraph also got in on the April Fool’s action by trying to dupe its readers into believing the EU will soon launch its own version of the UK’s Royal Yacht Britannia to increase its own trading prowess.

Apparently dubbed “le trade yacht”, the fictional ship would transport EU trade officials around the world to boost chances of brokering commercial deals with non-EU countries, particularly in the Commonwealth.

Most social media users seemed to have been wise to this year’s attempts to provoke outrage, which led Wales’ own version of Berlaymonster to quip that people should use that same scepticism on the other 364 days in order to combat against fake news.

By Nurjamal Djanibekova

It was like he had never left.

Kyrgyzstan’s former president, Almazbek Atambayev, has made a characteristically pugnacious return to the political bull-ring following his unchallenged coronation this weekend as head of the party he helped create in the 1990s.

With Atambayev back in charge of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, or SDPK, a fresh dose of intrigue has been injected into a scene rendered largely sterile by escalating repression.

Journalists were kept well clear of the closed doors jaw-jawing at the SDPK congress at Bishkek’s Orion Hotel on March 31, but Atambayev made up for the wait with a Q&A heaving with indignation. The assembled press were eager to learn of any signs of disaccord between Atambayev and his successor and would-be ally, President Sooronbai Jeenbekov.

The 61-year old didn’t disappoint and cast himself as the sage elder to an inept acolyte.

“I am two years older than him. Like an older brother, I have to tell him things — often unpleasant things — that few people can say to the president of Kyrgyzstan,” Atambayev said.

Atambayev said that he and Jeenbekov spoke recently for four-and-a-half hours, but insisted that salacious rumors the pair had come to blows during one of their encounters were quite untrue.

This is an unusual moment for Kyrgyz politics. There can be little doubt that Jeenbekov owes his presidency to Atambayev, who only left his throne because he was required to do so after having served one six-year term. Atambayev first implicitly anointed Jeenbekov as his successor and then participated actively in smearing the only other viable candidate, wealthy business Omurbek Babanov.

Since his swearing-in in November, however, Jeenbekov has begun assembling his own power base, igniting talk of schisms.

Not that any of this should have been on the cards. In the twilight of his presidency, Atambayev would speak dreamily of riding off into the sunset and taking up playing the piano again. He then changed his mind, surprising almost nobody, and announced he would return to the SDPK and lead it into battle at the next parliamentary elections, currently slated for 2020.

There are some mercantile motivations at play here. Control over the SDPK will give Atambayev effective control over the party lists ahead of national and provincial elections. In Kyrgyzstan’s business-driven politics, the formation of party lists is said to be a lucrative affair.

And this may all set up a parliament-versus-president’s office dynamic that the country has not seen for a while. Atambayev is already making it clear he wants a say in running the show.

At the post-congress press conference, the pudding bowl-coiffured party leader reserved considerable animus for Jeenbekov’s handling of the Security Council, a largely consultative body.

“I’m telling him: ‘Look at who you have got working at the Security Council.” I got Temir Jumakadyrov [to head the council] and he brought in serious people. Now they have all left, and [their replacements] just check whether or not security officials are wearing uniforms,” he seethed.

This is obviously sublimated rage at something altogether different.

Jeenbekov spoke at a February 8 meeting of the Security Council on the need to pick up the battle against corruption and grumbled that judicial reforms had fallen flat. He was particularly critical of the General Prosecutor’s Office and the anti-corruption department of the State Committee for National Security, or GKNB, the successor agency of the KGB. Both those bodies were, as it happens, regularly deployed to take down Atambayev’s political antagonists. The Security Council meeting prompted one commentator to suggest Jeenbekov had declared “war on the Atambayev clan.”

In an apparent response, Atambayev offered dark talk of people in Jeenbekov’s office trying to plot a return to a strongman presidential system.

“We’ve been through too much as a country to return to authoritarianism,” he opined, more than a little disingenuously.

In the event of any clash, Atambayev still has strong cards to play. Both the GKNB and the Interior Ministry are led by cronies.

To add to suspicions of mounting intra-party breaches, one of the multiple absences at the SDPK congress included Jeenbekov’s brother, Asylbek Jeenbekov, a bigwig in parliament. Atambayev pooh-poohed talk of differences with this junior Jeenbekov, but nonetheless suggested it might be better if he relinquished his seat in parliament. Retaining the seat would be improper, argued Atambayev, an unfortunate throwback to the family clan-style rule that predominated before the 2010 revolution.

Several delegates did storm out of the congress in strong disgust at Atambayev’s comments on Jeenbekov, the MP, but anybody hoping for outright fighting within the ranks should probably temper expectations.

The new president, unlike Atambayev, is a taciturn type ill-disposed to public confrontations. As gossip swirled ahead of the serially postponed party congress, Jeenbekov said little, but made a point of reassuring the public that there would be no clan rule in Kyrgyzstan. He also said that neither he nor his brother have any plans to form a new political party. On April 2, a spokesman for Jeenbekov brushed off Atambayev’s remarks as “emotional.”

But could an increasingly obstreperous Atambayev prompt a change of heart?

By Stephan Uttomand Rock Ronald Rozario,

Luckless Rohingya refugees in southern Bangladesh look to the skies for portents of calamity.

Makeshift shelters, mostly made from bamboo and tarpaulins, now overwhelm the once-forested landscape of Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, some 35 kilometers from coastal Cox’s Bazar town.

This and other camps are sanctuaries for hundreds of thousands of people who fled extreme violence in Rakhine State, just across the Naf River in largely Buddhist Myanmar.

However, members of the Muslim minority huddling in unsanitary conditions remain in great peril.

The monsoon season is approaching and humanitarian workers fear things will get worse — much worse.

Many of the refugee shanties are built on hillsides of dry crumbling earth, posing a threat of catastrophic landslides in a nation long-blighted by natural disasters.

Cox’s Bazar shelters about 867,000 refugees who have been crossing from Myanmar since 1991, according to humanitarian aid workers.

About 770,000 arrived following persecution and military crackdowns in October 2016 and August 2017. There are more than 400,000 refugees in the Kutupalong camp.

Including the host community, the United Nations’ World Food Program (WFP) feeds about 880,000 people and has appealed to donors for an additional US$230 million in humanitarian funds.

All the camps are located in what was previously a verdant strip along the Bay of Bengal.

Only patches of green remain and they are not expected to survive the human avalanche as refugees cut down trees to build dwellings and obtain firewood.

Standing in the middle of Kutupalong camp, Shelley Thakral, communications officer in Cox’s Bazar for the WFP, cautions that conditions are ripe for disasters to unfold.

Thakral describes Kutupalong as a “mega-camp” in which the cheek-by-jowl existence of inhabitants exacerbates risks.

There is much to do if lives are to be saved, Thakral said.

Some 150,000 people are most vulnerable to flooding and landslides. Strong winds pose a further threat.

The WFP collaborates with U.N. refugee and other officials to implement drainage and land stabilization measures, but few believe the mitigation will be adequate.

There is also a disaster preparedness program to provide for emergency responses.

“We need to make sure we reach all — including young children, pregnant women, new mothers and elderly people — so that they get food, medicines and supplies in advance,” Thakral said.

Uzzal Kanti Pal, assistant meteorologist at Cox’s Bazar, told ucanews.com that April-May and October-November are potentially dangerous months.

There will be several depressions on the Bay of Bengal from April and at least one strong cyclone, he predicted.

“The temperature in Cox’s Bazar has been increasing day by day over the past few weeks and once it crosses 27 degrees Celsius, it could form depressions and consequent cyclonic storms,” Pal said.

Located on the floodplains of the world’s largest river delta system, Bangladesh is naturally prone to cyclones, floods and landslides.

Clearing of forests for firewood

In a report published in December last year, the U.N. stated that refugee settlements in Cox’s Bazar posed multiple environmental and public health risks.

Rare animals could become extinct and humans face the specter of a rapid spread of communicable diseases.

On the environmental front, consideration is being given to use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as an alternative to firewood, but this would require additional funding, not least for training and safety precautions.

Health experts are bracing for potential monsoon outbreaks of water-borne diseases as well as those carried by mosquitoes and other insects.

Mir Abbul Karim, assistant health director at the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, is alarmed over a lack of capacity to deal with any serious outbreaks of, for example, diarrhea and cholera.

“Many people, especially children and the elderly, are highly vulnerable,” Karim told ucanews.com.

Unburdening the host community

For a long time, Cox’s Bazar was largely a no-go zone for humanitarian groups due to government restrictions. But things have changed markedly since August.

More than 150 international and local humanitarian organizations are based in the Cox’s Bazar district and most focus on refugees.

The WFP, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Catholic agency Caritas are partnering with the Bangladesh government to provide food as well as medical, education and other services.

The WFP has involved locals in providing school meals for refugees as well as livelihood projects such as cattle rearing and the setting up of small shops.

Rights advocates build awareness on the needs of refugees, particularly the aged, women and children.

The ICRC says it is vital that food, medical and other needs of the host population are catered for. This was necessary to maintain harmonious relations between locals and refugees.

Graziella Piccoli, an ICRC public relations officer, told ucanews.com that the agency interacts with both groups.

“The social infrastructure in Cox’s Bazar is unable to absorb the quick and massive rise in population and it has become difficult for everybody,” Piccoli said.

Ashraf Al Saadoni, ICRC economic security delegate, cited plans for some 1,600 micro-economic initiatives within the Bangladeshi community.

Meanwhile, all those living in the Cox’s Bazar area are awaiting with trepidation for the arrival of the monsoon, hoping they will be spared the worst that nature can unleash.

Several military and police generals have announced their candidacies for the 2018 simultaneous regional elections before they retire from active service. What induced these generals to enter politics and what does it portend for Indonesian democracy?

By Keoni Indrabayu Marzuki and Dedi Dinarto*

Five active military and police generals have announced their early retirement to contest in Indonesia’s highly anticipated regional elections currently underway for governor or vice-governor. Their participation in the elections, taking place all at the same time known as pilkada serentak, is a significant development. Generals who enter politics usually do so after they fully retire.

The generals have aligned themselves to different political parties in these gubernatorial elections. These parties belong to either the ruling coalition of President Joko Widodo, such as PDI-P, Golkar, NasDem and PAN, or the opposition led by Prabowo Subianto, such as Gerindra and PKS. For the regional elections, however, the political alignments are more fluid as candidates may end up being backed by parties that do not support them at the national level.

Who Are The Generals?

The senior officers who retired prematurely include Lieutenant General Edy Rahmayadi (formerly Chief of Army Strategic Reserve Command/KOSTRAD); Brigadier General Edy Nasution (formerly Commander of Riau Military Resort Command); Inspector General Murad Ismail (formerly Chief of the Police’s Paramilitary Unit, the Mobile Brigade Corps/BRIMOB); Inspector General Safaruddin (formerly East Kalimantan Regional Police Chief); and Inspector General Anton Charliyan (formerly Deputy Head of the Police Education and Training Institute) who previously served as the West Java Regional Police Chief.

Gen Edy Rahmayadi, who currently serves as the Chairman of Indonesian Football Association (PSSI), is running as a candidate in North Sumatra province with endorsement from Gerindra, Golkar, PAN, PKS, and NasDem. Gen Edy Nasution runs as a vice-governor candidate for the Riau province with endorsement from Nasdem, PAN, and PKS. Gen Murad runs as a candidate in Maluku province with endorsement from eight political parties, including PDI-P and Gerindra.

Insp-Gen Safaruddin, on the other hand, runs as a vice-governor candidate in East Kalimantan province, whereas Gen Anton runs as vice-governor candidate in West Java. Both Safaruddin and Anton run on the PDIP ticket.

The Indonesian Constitution and election rules guarantee every citizen the ability to exercise their political rights, including running in an election, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, and profession. To maintain impartiality and professionalism of state institutions, police officers and military personnel are required to resign or retire from their institutions should they wish to enter politics.

Slippery Slope?

How these regulations operate was demonstrated recently by Agus Yudhoyono, a former major in the Indonesian Army, who retired early from the military to run in the Jakarta gubernatorial election in 2017. Another case was Yoyok Riyo Sudibyo, formerly a major in the Indonesian Army, who retired early from the military to enter business, before running and getting elected as the Regent of Batang in 2012.

Retired military and police officers, on the other hand, are free to exercise their political rights given their having transitioned to civilian life. It is a contentious issue when military and police officers express, even if tacitly, their interest to exercise their political rights before they resign from their posts. This is because it could affect the professionalism of the respective institutions.

Given their extensive influence over the rank-and- file of the respective institutions they lead and the strategic offices they hold, it is feared their plan may lead to the abuse of authority, resulting in the politicising of both institutions, directly or indirectly.

Indeed, the abovementioned legislations restrict both military and police personnel from voting. Family members or close acquaintances, however, could be enticed, as the legislations do not bind them. Additionally, military personnel and police officers with patronage links to the candidates could be mobilised to influence the outcome of the election in various subtle ways.

On top of institutional influence, relations with societal groups and communities in a given region could be leveraged by the prospective candidates from the military to gain an edge over their competitors.

Push and Pull Factors

Push and pull factors play a key role in the generals’ early transition to politics. Personal aspirations seem to be a common driver. Generals Edy Rahmayadi and Murad, for instance, had indicated their willingness to serve and to help develop their respective home provinces. Another critical push factor is the mandatory retirement age and the subsequent uncertainties that come with it.

By transitioning early to politics using the momentum of the regional elections, the generals could avoid the uncertainties of their own future. Finally, the backlog in career pathways due to the shortage of posts in the military is another compelling driver for military officers, not only generals but also mid-ranking officers, pushing them to find alternative career paths.

The inability of political parties to groom party figures with extensive political capital – i.e. financial resources, political networks and popularity, among others – is a critical pull factor. The simultaneity of regional elections means that parties would have to compete in numerous regions and at different levels of the elections, in turn increasing the demand for capable, tested and popular party cadres.

‘Ready-made’ Leaders?

Producing electable party-groomed cadres in numbers, however, is a time consuming and costly undertaking. Moreover, as party identification in Indonesia is low and individual figures feature more prominently in regional elections, there is little guarantee the investment parties make in grooming their cadres would yield pay off.

Military and police generals, therefore, are a logical group of potential leaders to be tapped considering that they possess ready-to-use political capital that could plug the chronic lack of leadership grooming among Indonesian political parties. These generals are also relatively well-known thanks to their military or police backgrounds, their capacity to bankroll their own campaigns, and the substantial personal networks forged during their time of service.

Even though their popularity and influence will slowly decline over time, retired senior military and police officers remain suitable candidates. More importantly, they can be recruited almost instantaneously without having to exhaust precious resources or time to groom and train them.

Implications for Indonesia’s Democracy

What does this trend mean for Indonesia’s democracy? First, it shows that political parties struggle to nurture electable party cadres, In the long run, such deficiency may result in dependency on stop-gap solutions, which reliance on military officers can lead to. The trend also shows that political parties are highly short term-oriented, prioritising practical gains over long term benefits.

Secondly, the trend may compromise both military and police professionalism, particularly the need for both institutions to remain politically neutral during election campaigns.

Although the political participation of active military and police generals in elections may not directly contravene the existing laws and regulations, it may compromise their commitment to professional ethics and duties to safeguard the country and to uphold and enforce laws.

*Keoni Marzuki is a Senior Analyst with the Indonesia Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Dedi Dinarto is a Research Associate with the Indonesia Programme. This is the first in a series on Indonesia’s simultaneous regional elections.

welve months since Theresa May started the clock on the UK’s two-year journey towards exiting the EU, the transition arrangements and guidelines have been agreed. With a year to go, what are the potential stumbling blocks and how important will the Irish border be?

By Aédán Mordecai*

Twelve months ago Prime Minister Theresa May invoked Article 50, officially signalling the UK’s intention leave the European Union and beginning a period of prolonged negotiations. However it was quickly realised by all parties that the stipulated two-year timeframe would not be sufficient to complete any comprehensive withdrawal deal. Instead they recently settled on a broad agreement to allow a transition period, which would last until the end of 2020, a 2l-month extension in total.

Both sides have lauded the agreement as a sign of progress and indicative of a greater willingness to expedite the negotiations, hopeful that this will lead to added momentum heading into the remaining talks. The UK, however, has certainly made most of the compromises.

UK Compromises

London will point to the ability to sign new trade deals with non-EU countries during the transition period as a victory, but in many areas the UK had to concede to EU demands. This includes continuing to follow the Common Fisheries Policy quotas until 2020, promising to pay a ‘divorce’ fee of £35 billion-£39 billion.

Another concession is granting all EU citizens moving to the UK during the transition period the same rights and guarantees as those moving before the Brexit date. A significant caveat is that the transition period will only be realised if there is an agreement on the Irish border.

Overall it’s fair to say that May has not had the leverage she had hoped for in negotiations. Not only has Europe been relatively united in its stance and demands, May’s hand has been weakened domestically by a series of events. In particular, her decision to hold an early general election backfired tremendously.

A major sticking point, and ironically, an afterthought to many during the build-up to the referendum is the Irish border issue. The border that separates Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, a separate state and EU member in its own right, is not a typical border.

Ireland the Key?

Currently it is an almost invisible border thanks to both the UK and Ireland being members of the EU. A border however cannot simply be enforced post-Brexit due to the political history of the region. Northern Ireland remains a disputed area, despite its recent relative peace.

Decades of political violence, often referred to as ‘The Troubles’, came largely to an end thanks to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The agreement was a landmark moment in the Northern Ireland peace process; setting up power-sharing arrangements as well as committing to continued North-South cooperation in the process.

The promise of allowing free unrestricted movement of people and goods between the North and South of Ireland was also included.

When the UK proposed to leave the EU, they faced the prospect of having an outward border with the EU, the Irish border. This prospect has raised many questions. The entire peace process is at risk if the situation is not handled correctly. How does the UK leave the EU but simultaneously maintain a seamless border with the EU?

Both sides agree that a ‘backstop’ option must be agreed to guarantee that no ‘hard’ border with physical infrastructure and checks will be created. However disagreements exist regarding what this will entail.

UK’s Options Limited

The UK finds itself in a tough spot as a result. It can remain in the customs union and most parts of the Single Market to be in sync with Ireland, changing little from the current status quo but losing the ability to contribute to the creation of the rules it must then follow. A ‘soft Brexit’ such as this would disappoint many Eurosceptics.

Or it can essentially move the de facto border to the Irish Sea partly splitting Northern Ireland from Great Britain. This move would greatly upset the Unionists in Northern Ireland who do not wish to be separated from the rest of the UK, and who are represented by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Theresa May is now reliant on the DUP’s handful of seats to push through legislation, including the final Brexit bill. Both these options have so far been deemed unacceptable by the government.

Instead the government’s ambitious, almost fanciful, plan to please all is to agree a comprehensive free trade and customs deal with the EU and monitor the border ‘invisibly’ with technology that is yet to exist, creating an unprecedented border that is maintained entirely without physical infrastructure.

Prospects Gloomy for Theresa May

Despite the relief at the recent progress, much still needs to be negotiated. Further compromises to the EU will not please those who supported Brexit, while those wishing to remain seem destined to remain disappointed.

Even as some of the more ambitious promises made by the initial Brexit campaign fall by the wayside, it is unlikely that a situation will arise where a reversal in the exiting process will be possible, as both the ruling Conservative Party and the opposing Labour Party are committed to the Brexit process.

With a no-deal so economically disastrous for the UK, expect the EU to get their way in most cases. When also considering how any deal hinges on satisfying Ireland in regards to the border, Theresa May’s hands are firmly tied. Overall she will do well to survive as PM until a deal is fully agreed with the amount of pressure on her, as the situation increasingly resembles an exercise in damage limitation.

*Aédán Mordecai is a Senior Analyst with the Centre for Multilateralism Studies (CMS) at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.

It’s become a deadly autumn tradition in northern India: after the rains of the late summer monsoon subside, farmers set fires to their fields to clear stubble after the harvest and send choking smoke rolling across the countryside. New Delhi, already thick with pollution, can grind to a halt for days. Last year, the chief minister of the Delhi state likened the city to “a gas chamber.”

While crop burning has been illegal for years, there hasn’t been a large enough deterrent to effectively crack down on the practice, in part because it’s been difficult to measure exactly how much smoke from the fires is making it downwind to the city.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated that in October and November, a peak burning season in nearby Punjab, about half of all pollution in Delhi can be attributed to agricultural fires on some days.

The research is published in Environmental Research Letters.

“On certain days during peak fire season, air pollution in Delhi is about 20 times higher than the threshold for safe air as defined by the World Health Organization,” said Daniel H. Cusworth, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper.

To model how much of that pollution is coming from the fires, the researchers used satellite data from NASA to identify hotspots corresponding to active fires. The team gathered available data for October and November, 2012 to 2016 and plugged it into a particle dispersion model — an algorithm that accounts for geography, wind patterns, and physics to predict how far and in what direction smoke particles travel.

During the post-monsoon season, the air in northern India is particularly stagnant, meaning smoke particles don’t vent into the atmosphere as they would during other times of the year. Instead, the black carbon and organic particulate matter slowly permeates throughout the entire region, which is home to 46 million people. In urban areas, that smoke mixes with existing pollution from cars and factories creating a thick, deadly haze.

On average, without fires, urban Delhi experiences about 150 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate air pollution.

To put that into perspective, the World Health Organization (WHO) puts the threshold for safe air at 25 micrograms per cubic meter, and India’s Central Pollution Control Board limits exposure to 60 micrograms per cubic meter, said Cusworth, a member of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group led by Daniel J. Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering, and Loretta J. Mickley, Senior Research Fellow at SEAS.

Extreme fires during the post-monsoon season can pump on average about 150 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter into the city, doubling the amount of pollution and increasing total levels 12 times higher than WHO recommendations, and even 20 times higher on some days.

“A relationship between pollution and mortality is well known,” said Mickley, who co-authored of the paper. “We hope this research can help provide policymakers with a quantitative sense of the consequences of agricultural burning in order to inform decision-making.”

On your next stroll through the woods, take a look at the dew droplets hanging from the leaves. If you see moisture on a cypress or juniper tree with their distinct bifurcated leaves, you’ll likely see those water droplets defying the rules of physics.

Inspired by the large droplets that form on a leaf tip or other thin filament, a team of researchers from Utah State University, University of Liège, Belgium, and Brigham Young University have found the exact angle at which a bent fiber holds the most fluid. Their findings were published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Soft Matter, a top journal covering physics, chemistry and biology.

Lead researcher Dr. Tadd Truscott, creator of the world-renowned Splash Lab at USU, says the study offers important insight into the field of fluid dynamics.

“For the first time, we can identify the exact angle of a bent fiber that will hold the most fluid,” he said. “This research has many industrial applications including drug manufacturing or in developing technologies that use microfluidics. This could also be useful in developing more efficient fog-collection nets which are becoming more popular in arid regions. Or on the other hand, this research could inspire a more efficient dehumidifier design.”

Truscott uses the analogy of a spider web to illustrate the bent fiber concept. Water droplets attach to the web fibers at various locations, but the largest drops accumulate at the intersections of fibers that form acute angles. The best angle for a large droplet: 36 degrees.

“After experimental testing, we determined that a bent fiber forming a 36-degree angle traps the most water,” Truscott added. “That amount is three times more than can be suspended on a horizontal fiber.”

The researchers, including USU’s Dr. Zhao Pan, Dr. Floriane Weyer and Dr. Nicolas Vandewalle of the University of Liège and Dr. William Pitt of BYU, tested their bent-fiber theory using a specially-constructed apparatus. Drs. Weyer and Pan built a rigid circular frame and strung nylon fibers from one side of the frame to the other. Next they attached a narrower fiber at the center and pulled the original horizontal fiber upward, forming an upside-down v. By varying the fiber attachment locations, they could change the angle formed between the two halves of the bent fiber.

Liquids were applied to the fiber corner using a micro-pipette. The volume of the droplet increased incrementally until the droplet detached from the fiber.

Truscott and his colleagues at the Splash Lab used high-speed photography to capture the entire process. The footage and other details were then analyzed and mathematically modeled by USU’s Zhao Pan with the help of William Pitt at BYU.

The researchers, of course, are not the first to be inspired by droplets in nature. The ancient poet Tu Fu (AD 712 – 770) recorded his observation of “heavy dew beads and trickles.” Jules Renard penned a similar observation about 125 years ago: “A few dew drops on a spider web and here is a diamond river.” Truscott says the droplet study offers a connection between science and art.

“That’s the best part of our lab,” he said. “We are science nerds from different cultures, but we are all passionate about literature and art.”

Rising sea levels have worsened the destruction that routine tidal flooding causes in the nation’s coastal communities. On the U.S. mainland, communities in Louisiana, Florida and Maryland are most at risk.

Stemming the loss of life and property is a complex problem. Elected officials can enact policies to try to lessen the damage of future flooding. Engineers can retrofit vulnerable buildings. But, in the face of a rising tide, changing hearts and minds might be the most formidable obstacle to decreasing the damage done by flooding.

David Casagrande, associate professor of anthropology, is exploring attitudes and perception around flood risk.

“When people’s homes are damaged by flooding year after year and they are offered a buyout, why don’t they leave?” asked Casagrande.

Casagrande is part of a National Science Foundation-funded, cross-disciplinary team of researchers in anthropology, hydrogeology, and planning from Lehigh, Western Illinois University and the University of California, Davis who are studying impediments to flood mitigation in the Midwest. They are identifying flood-prone locations, key individuals, and intervention strategies that lead to community-based mitigation. Their work indicates that mitigation is most likely to occur soon after a flood, and is most successful when decisions are community-based.

He is also part of a team of researchers from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland and the State of Maryland who are looking at similar issues in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region, an area that is highly vulnerable to current and future coastal hazards. According to the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the sea level is expected to rise by at least 1.4 feet by 2050 and possibly over 5 feet by 2100.

Casagrande and his colleagues have surveyed residents, as well as conducted in-person interviews and focus groups. He will be presenting some of his findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SFAA). This year’s meeting, Philadelphia Sustainable Futures SFAA 2018, will take place in Philadelphia, April 3-7, 2018. Casagrande will present in a session called “Sustainable Futures of Chesapeake Communities Facing Relative Sea-level Rise” on Wednesday, April 4.

From the SFAA program: “In this session, we apply ethnographic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives on how local residents and policy-makers are communicating and making decisions (or not) about adaptation to increased flooding. Culturally informed dialogue could promote decisions that support more sustainable futures for Chesapeake communities.”

“In some cases, houses on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay have been in families for thirteen generations,” said Casagrande. “They’re not going anywhere.”

Casagrande employs cognitive dissonance theory to identify the rationales that residents employ to “avoid having to make really difficult decisions”–such as leaving.

Cognitive dissonance theory says that individuals have a tendency to seek consistency in their beliefs. When encountering information that does not fit in with their beliefs, individuals seek to eradicate the discomfort caused by the inconsistency–or dissonance–by changing their beliefs, changing their behavior, or rationalizing to explain the inconsistency.

One common way that residents of flood-prone communities rationalize their choice to stay is by scapegoating–or placing blame elsewhere.

“On Smith Island, for example, many people blame the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for not doing a better job of preventing erosion,” said Casagrande. “There is an erosion problem, but that is not the only challenge.”

Another tactic to resolve inconsistencies is social comparison, which states that individuals tend to evaluate their own situation by comparing it to others.

In other words, according to Casagrande, residents justify their decision to stay by believing that other places are so much worse.

When Casagrande, working on a separate project, interviewed a resident of an area along the Mississippi River that had recently experienced severe flooding and a simultaneous tornado–he asked: Do you think is a dangerous place to live?

Paraphrasing the resident’s response, Casagrande said: “‘No! Look at California – the earthquakes, the forest fires, mud slides…’ It’s always worse somewhere else.”

“Research participants use strategies to downplay risk and favor large-scale technological options over difficult household decisions,” said Casagrande. “Many prefer to accept known risk to avoid options like relocation that engender uncertainty.”

There is a positive side to engaging in this work, said Casagrande:

“We are actively helping communities mitigate as we learn how social relationships affect attitudes and actions.”

Only if individuals believe they are truly at risk will they begin to take steps to prevent disaster. Individual beliefs are often formed at the community-level, and, according to this research, that is where interventions are most effective.

“It would seem there is a whole dimension of the question ‘what is a ‘great’ butler? I have hitherto not properly considered. It is, I must say, a rather unsettling experience to realize this about a matter so close to my heart, particularly one I have given much thought over the years.” (pg. 113) – Stevens in The Remains of the Day.

On New Year’s Eve, I completed my week-long first reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The night before I made, perhaps the unregrettable mistake of watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Jumanji. This is to say that, I had polluted my consciousness with magical and intergalactic-swashbuckling-light saber-fighting story of Good v. Evil in the former, and overdone-overtold-over-hyped story of a Star Wars and next in the latter a story of yet another realism low-tech in nature, of a bunch of American high school-kids on detention but plunged into this role-playing game called Jumanji (a story read when the book came out in the early 80s).This is to say that my polluted mind was not yet ready to be immersed again into the second half-ending of my reading of The Remains of the Day. From hyper-realism to Victorian narratives I had to suddenly vacillate by way of a viewer/reader response to literature.

That sort of confession to a reader’s idea of pollution aside, I will share my thoughts on this elegant novel, written by a recent Nobel Laureate, the Nagasaki-born British author of Japanese descent. I was not ready to read a Victorian novel, after immersing myself for the last six months of 2017 with a set of seven novels – of two major work of the Japanese Haruki Murakami, three of the British-Indian Salman Rushdie, and two of the Indonesian Eka Kurniawan. I analyzed each in depth, by way of closely reading them as a writer, drawing out the author’s craft and style and each story’s subtext.

Reading The Remains of the Day

Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s, The Remains of the Day brought me the sense of immersion of my undergraduate readings of Chaucer, Jane Austen, Johnathan Swift and the like, and of late Virginia Woolf, especially her rendering of elegance of sub-textuality in her classic essay “The Death of the Moth.” I am also reminded of Anton Chekov’s presentation of the themes of linguistic-structural violence, guided by a style of crisp absurdism, in his classic short stories such as “The Death of the Clerk,” and “The Huntsmen.”

Ishiguro’s work, beginning from the opening chapter, like the feel of literary-exploratory magic itself brought me into this world of Victorian elegance and the highly-stylized form of English spoken as elegance as the Queen’s — because precisely that was what the author had intended to convey: the power of discourse and the inherent complexity of class-semantics and semiotics that the reader, beyond the sensitivity of the novice, needs to read into.

I shall discuss one aspect of this excellent novel: of the elegance and violence, of the meaning of existence when the question of self-dignity is put forward, of the author’s weaving of the contradictions inherent in language itself, in its rustle and carnivalesque of its function as a shaper of reality.

But what is the novel, at least through my own understanding, about? Why did I feel both angry and calming at the end of my reading? What was it in the craft and form of The Remains of the Day that has left me savoring the elegance of the literary presentation of a Master-Slave narrative, or of oppression?

Voice of hidden slavery?

The most poignant moment that signified the author’s deployment of language of narratology and the sense of elegant despair and irony of human dignity is half-way through the story when the butler of Darlington Hall, the protagonist Stevens reacted to news of his father’s death of a heart attack. Here the scene is so elegantly crafted both in dialogue and dramatic expose’ that represented the height of human absurdity when we speak of the one’s aspiration to reach the greatest height of professional and ultimately be crowned with the much-coveted sense of existence: dignity. The most poignant moment was as such when Stevens’s father (himself a butler at Darlington Hall) was pronounced dead of exhaustion just when the most important dinner was happening. Stevens’s response when told by Miss Kenton, the housemaid, of the death was emblematic of the ethics of butlership he was passionately proud of:

“Dr. Meredith has not yet arrived.” Then for a moment she bowed her head and a sob escaped her. But almost immediately she resumed her composure and asked in a steady voice: “Will you come up and see him?”

“I’m very busy just now, Miss Kenton. In a little while perhaps.”

“In that case, Mr. Stevens, will you permit me to close his eyes?”

“I would be most grateful if you would, Miss Kenton.”

She began to climb the staircase, but I stopped her saying: “Miss Kenton, please don’t think me unduly improper in not ascending to see my father in his deceased condition just at this moment. You see, I know my father would have wished me to carry on just now.”

“Of course, Mr. Stevens.”

“To do otherwise, I feel, would be to let him down”

“Of course, Mr. Stevens. (pg. 106)

Poignant is the underlying tone of the conversation, at the finest moment of Stevens’s encounter with a dilemma of choice of action. However, it is being interpreted and played out by the butler, the central dilemma is the maintenance of dignity as the language of properness demanded. In fact, this is what I feel, the only theme of the story– a deep-play, anthropological and philosophical explorations of the idea of “dignity”, elegantly presented in the tradition of a Socratic dialogue (such as in Plato’s “Meno“, “Crito” or even “Symposium“) framed, as I felt as well, in the tradition of (Clifford) Geertzian and (Bronislaw) Malinowskian or even (Franz) Boas-ian way of presenting an anthropological study.

The way the character Stevens presented in a narrator’s voice that utilized the not-often-used “You” (besides the First Person unreliable/always conditional voice of narration) made me smile: it reminds me of the classic piece of Anthropology “The Naciremas.” Ishiguro executed the narration brilliantly, I supposed, in making the reader feel the importance, and exclusiveness of the world of high-brow culture, Queen’s English, linguistic social markers, and the high-aristocratic-untouchable feel of the Victorian-remnants-of-it-albeit, that was currently dealing with a period of decision-making as grave and world-shattering as one involving the intricacies of power relation in and of World War I: of the defeat of the Germans and what Britain is to do about it in face of an American intervention.

Behind the authoritative voice of “you” lies the story of hegemony and class and personal-structural violence of the human condition narrated as “I” in which the “colonized has become the colonizer of his own colonialized condition” as the Algerian thinker, author and psychiatrist spoke Albert Memmi wrote about in his seminal work on mental oppression, The Colonizer and the Colonized, an existentialist-theoretical-narrativistic text in the tradition of Franz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks and later in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and in the work of other writers writing about the colonized mind that has turned many a human being into “little brown brothers” as Mohandas K. Gandhi once called slaves wishing to think like their masters.

I am reminded as well of Malcolm X’s notion of “house slaves” and how the indentured serfs would appropriate the language of their masters and defend the narrative of their existence, because the language of colonizer has tamed the raging fire of freedom in the colonized. Such are the instances of the power of the language of social control as presented by Ishiguro in the most elegant way in The Remains of the Day. What else of not “suicidal and pathological” could one not describe the butler Stevens in the scene of the discovery of his father’s death”, described earlier, a total detachment of the feelings of grief or a most intelligent hiding of such feeling, because he had a more important matter to attend to: serving the masters of imperialism, rather than grief of a loved one. For Stevens, one can be a slave in the home of the rich yet be a master of one’s enslaved condition where dignity and professional pride is concerned. He summarized the ethos governing his profession:

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity.'” (pg. 42)

Stevens the butler is not only the story-teller but a mirror and embodiment of the absurdity of language and social reality and the structural violence inherent in the narratology of social and cognitive class. It is a Gramscian story of hegemony at its literary best. I shall explain below with reference to an example in the traditional Malay culture I grew up in.

The Queen’s English and the decomposing empire

About a quarter way through the novel, having been sucked into the author’s narration par elegantly-excellence, and being reminded by the butler of highest distinction of the importance of correct usage of the English Language, and to be proud of the greatness of England, and especially of such exquisite landscape such as Oxfordshire (indeed beautiful from my own visits,) I asked:

Is this a BREXIT novel?

It has come to win the Booker Prize in 1989 (and for Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in 2017) at a time when Britain needed its early cry of ethnocentrism and nationalism, a decade or so before Brexit? is that what the sub-sub-sub-text of The Remains of the Day about? I suspect so but will propose this idea through a few selected passages by way of a close reading of the tone as well as the semantics of narrative style.

Of course this is just a side note of the larger topic of analysis: of uncovering of the elegant violence of the story.

Class and Violence in the Malay court language

A few years ago, sitting under a tree in my garden, on a pleasantly breezy early Autumn, I thought of the language I grew up in and that evening composed these verses. They have a bearing on the sense of hegemony I feel engulfing the tone of the novel:

“Pronouns, pathetically yours …”

Sitting in my garden under a flame of the forest today
I closed my eyes
Autumn breeze so refreshing
I am at the mercy of the beauteous rays of sunlight
so warm as if love is in every speck of light
bathing me with my eyes closed, my soul scattered in the universe
Three wind chimes surrounded me
One made of steel
One made of wood
One made of bamboo
together — music so magnificent they made
Three winds of culture blew into my slumber
as i think of pronouns in a land I once knew

why did god in scriptures speak in shifting pronouns?
ahh … i thought … not an important thought at this moment
i was as if like a dry autumn leave blown to a land yonder
as i asked with eyes still closed

if i meet an ancient Malay king
will i use to pronoun “patik”
when i feel it sounds like “pathetically yours”
or will addressing them and their monopolized status divinely-sanctioned with a “you and I’ will suffice?
i suppose i have the answer: “patik” or “pathetically yours” will not go
as i think the word “beta” as the pronoun of the monarchy conjures in my mind “of an experimental “beta-testing” version of a government … if it works it works ..
no — i then say, neither “patik” nor “beta” will go well with me
yes – “pathetically yours” and “beta-testing” will they sound to me
I shall settle with “you and i” as i address these human concepts of ascribed power i shall not agree ..

if there is “your high-ness” there must be “your lowliness” i must say. in the mind of both they must agree to play this game of pronouns i should say
no– i thought: i shall not play this game

the autumn wind blows
my eyes still close
such a beauteous day
i though the wind in its glory has brought me
like that single red leaf drying
to that land i once knew
has brought this “pathetically yours”
to where i ought to belong, the old folks would say

with a deep deep breath i took, like a buddha under a flame of a forest
i opened my eyes
i am still here … i am … that red leaf .. saved from being crushed perhaps
by pronouns …

Those were my words on the remains of the hegemony still permeating the mind of the Malays. Neo-feudalistic construction of reality that produced prison-houses of language.

The Malay form of court address, upon critical analysis, is both elegant and pathetic, useful in structuring a system of violence in the mind: of blind obedience, fear of the unknown, and the slaves being made to feel good being controlled and commended well by the master. because, borrowing Mr. Stevens the Butler’s logic, the latter is to be pledged unconditional loyalty to because he or she has to deal with matters of higher and more complex significance: matters of the “fate of humanity”. Or, in the case of Malay feudalism, the Master to rule as ordained by a good and just God – the god of humanity.

Authorial “You” and sinisterism

Back to Ishiguro’s literary thesis on language of the master-slave construction.

There is, I feel, sinisterism in the way at times the narrator Mr. Stevens uses the pronoun “YOU” in talking about the prestigious household and the master he worked in and for respectively.

The “you” is a not-often used voice in fiction unless the impact intended for a complex ideological sophistication wherein the interlocutor is speaking with exclusivity and authority guarding his/her well-preserved and conserved terrain.

In The Remains of the Day, I paid attention to how the authorial voice of the Second Person is used and situate it within the larger goal of the narrator: to preserve exclusivity of his dungeon of oppression, as I see it. But how is this both a Pathos and an Eros of the sociolinguistic, idiolectic, and narrativistic proportions? What is Kazuo Ishiguro trying to tell the reader of the human condition as narrated by a highly-regarded butler of the highest gentlemanly standard?

Why is the Second Person “you” used, and how is this effective in narrating the “remains of the day” of the feudal mind? This is element of craft is worthy of further study

Conclusion

The novel is a subtle critique of the hidden curriculum of mental colonization of the British colonial empire, as it waned down during the time of Winston Churchill. In its naturalness and exquisiteness of depicting the finesses-ness of the language of high-culture of “exemplary butlerism,” it presented the readers with a way of looking at irony of social class, framed intellectually. Ishiguro presented the classic example of how language defines, deconstructs, and destroys reality by having the butler speak about the elements of power and knowledge or as Michel Foucault puts it “power/knowledge” (the hybrid-matrix of the cultural control of the mind, body, and meaning of life as homo economicus of the modern human being, and how the Marxist notion of whoever controls knowledge controls, and how the culture of control is also evident in the world of linguistic reality as well, as radical sociologist such as Pierre Bourdieu wrote about in his explanation of “habitus”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ishiguro, Kazuo (1993). The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage International.

The leaders of the EU countries approved the guidelines on the framework for a future relationship with the UK after Brexit at the EU summit, which ended in Brussels on March 23.

“Decision: EU27 has adopted guidelines for the future EU–UK relations after Brexit,” European Council President Donald Tusk announced on Twitter.

Earlier London and Brussels have agreed large part of the agreement that will lead to the UK withdrawal from the EU.

“We confirmed the agreement on future citizens’ rights. We agreed that British citizens and European citizens of the 27 who arrive during that transition period will receive the same rights and guarantees […], although it remains to agree on pension provision issues. We confirmed the agreement on the financial problem [reached in December 2017, according to which the UK will continue to pay contributions to the EU budget until the end of 2020]. We agreed on the terms of the transit period. […] We have made a big step forward, but we need to understand that we are talking about the preparation of an international agreement in which the full legal accuracy of the wording should be achieved,” the Commission’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier said during a joint press conference with British representative David Davis in Brussels on the results of the next round of talks on March 19.

In addition, the parties determined that the transition period after Brexit will end in December 2020.

“We agreed that the transit period will be limited in time and will take 21 months from 30 March 2019 when Great Britain leaves the EU. During this period, Britain will be able to enjoy all the rights of the EU member, remaining a member of the single market, but will not be able to participate in the decision-making process in the European Union,” Michel Barnier explained.

Business representatives positively assessed these agreements, getting the opportunity to build development strategies for almost two years ahead. Nevertheless, a number of unresolved issues between the European Union and Britain, including the Irish border problem, can significantly complicate further discussions.

Commenting on the negotiation process between the UK and the EU, Craig Erlam, Senior Market Analyst, OANDA, called the draft agreement on the transition a very important and decisive step, stressing however that most of the work is yet to come.

“Both sides have had to concede on certain issues but ultimately, the most important aspect of this two year negotiation will take place over the next six to nine months. This will determine how successful Brexit will be,” he said.

“Whether the negotiators will or not will reach an agreement depend on how much appetite there is for one from both sides, which includes the willingness to concede on certain issues, likely including previously stated red lines. The risk of a ‘no deal’ outcome is real but benefits no one and I therefore believe it will be avoided,” Craig Erlam said.

In his opinion, a solution to the border problem is likely to be extremely complex.

“It will depend on the final relationship and how tightly aligned the UK and EU is from a regulatory standpoint. There will need to be concessions though as the absence of a hard border will require a border of some kind between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK,” the expert explained.

According to him, Belfast will remain more aligned to the EU than the rest of the UK.

“However I believe agreements will be made to ensure it is not cut off from the rest of the UK,” Craig Erlam stressed.

Meanwhile, European politics expert Simon Usherwood, University of Surrey, shared the opinion that Ireland remains the biggest concern for the process.

“There has been no real movement from the Joint Report of December last year, and while the UK says it doesn’t like the backstop arrangements in the draft agreement, it has also not been able to produce viable alternative models,” the analyst said.

However, according to him, reached agreements became an important step in getting to a final agreement in time for the UK’s departure.

“It demonstrates the extent of agreement between the two sides and confirms the goodwill to resolve the remaining points. While largely on the EU’s terms, the draft does acknowledge various priorities for the UK, as well as providing a basis for getting to a new relationship in the longer term,” Simon Usherwood said.

At the same time, he believes that the “period to December 2020 looks still to be very tight to negotiate and ratify a comprehensive trading relationship.”

“The chances of a deal being in place in time for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in March 2019 are now higher than they have been at any point in the Article 50 process. If the UK continues to make concessions in the way it has, then a final text should be agreed in October,” the expert suggested.

In turn, Georgina Wright, Researcher on the Europe Program at Chatham House, drew attention to the fact that the parties discussed an agreement about the UK’s withdrawal from the EU on 29 March 2019 and the terms of the transition period until December 2020, which does not cover the future trade agreement between the UK and the EU.

“It is currently unclear whether the transition period will be long enough to negotiate the future [trade] deal; let alone get it signed and ratified by member states and their parliaments. But at least it has reduced the risk of a no deal outcome, as the transition will grant the EU and the UK more time for negotiations,” the analyst said.

However, according to her, there are still some outstanding issues, such as the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, which could delay talks about the future.

“Some suggestions [concerning the Irish border issue] have included setting up cameras at the border and investing in new technology – but this would still need to be developed, and it’s unclear whether this can be done in time, before the end of the transition in December 2020,” Georgina Wright explained.

Nevertheless, the European Council’s negotiating guidelines on the future relationship are encouraging, she said.

“They show that EU countries want an ambitious trade agreement, as well as strong partnerships in security, defence and law enforcement. Now, the UK must present its proposals for a future deal as well as resolve outstanding issues around the withdrawal. […] The Prime Minister is under pressure. The UK is currently split — the Cabinet, the Parliament and the country — so Prime Minister May will not only need to convince the EU, but also people at home that this is the best deal for the UK and the EU. That will be a challenge,” Chatham House expert said.

Meanwhile, Peter Taylor-Gooby, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Kent stressed that he does not consider the draft agreement as a breakthrough, because “the UK has given in on all counts.”

According to him, the prospect of a trade deal between the United Kingdom and the EU depends entirely on London’s willingness to give in yet again.

Analyzing the further development of events in the country, Peter Taylor-Gooby paid particular attention to the lack of consensus on Brexit and the conditions for its implementation within the UK.

“Big struggle over access of UK finance to EU exacerbates splits in Conservative party between pro- and anti-Brexit factions, as people realise that the Brexit they want will be damaging to UK ruling class. Labour has to jump one way or another, I think it will become anti-Brexit and win a snap election on the Brexit issue round about early 2020, but will have bitter internal struggles,” the expert said.

John Fender, Department of Economics, University of Birmingham, also noted that as far as Brexit goes, he’s not optimistic.

“Suppose that the final outcome is that the UK negotiates a free trade deal with the EU, does not participate in the EU’s preferential trade deals with other countries, but is free to negotiate its own trade deals with other countries. In this case there will need to be customs checks on goods being transported between the UK and the EU and firms will need to produce certificate of origin documentation. The reason is that if the UK has a preferential trade deal with a country which does not have a preferential trade deal with the EU, exporters from that country may try to send goods to the EU via the UK. In the absence of customs checks, they will be able to do this without paying the tariffs they should pay to the EU,” the analyst explained.

“In fact, in any plausible scenario, there would need to be customs checks on goods being transported between the UK and the EU. This would not be the case if the UK stayed within the Customs Union and participates in the EU’s preferential trade deals with other countries, but this is almost certainly not going to happen,” John Fender added.

In his opinion, it seems inevitable that there will need to be a ‘hard border’ between the UK and the EU after Brexit takes place.

“However, a commitment has been made to avoiding a hard border between Northern and southern Ireland. I see no way of solving this Northern Ireland border issue,” he said.

In turn, Neil MacKinnon, Global Macro Strategist at VTB Capital, stressed that he would not say that the transitional deal is “decisive” though it is a step forward to Brexit.

“My concerns are that a proper exit is delivered. In other words, the UK regains primacy of its law and regulation, control of its borders and has the ability unilaterally to negotiate its own trade deals. The problem with the transition period is that during the transition period we are subject to EU laws and regulations but without any say in the decision-making process. The good thing is that there is a definite end-date [of the transit period] otherwise the allegation that the UK had become a ‘vassal state’ which is clearly totally unsatisfactory,” the expert said.

He also reminded that the parties have to find solution to a number of complex issues.

“There are still outstanding issues over UK fishing rights. The Northern Irish border issue is also unresolved but the wish of the majority of the Northern Irish people is to remain within the UK and not part of the EU. There is no reason why the current state of affairs cannot be retained,” Neil MacKinnon said.

At the same time, he believes that a “no deal” outcome will not cause much damage to the UK.

“In fact, I support a ‘Clean Brexit’ as I am in favour of the UK taking back control. The UK is the 5th biggest economy in the world and it is already the world’s largest financial centre. Not one bank or financial institution will move “lock, stock and barrel” to Frankfurt and Paris. The fact is that EM economies account for half of the global economy and are the main source of growth and trade. The Eurozone economy by contrast is characterised by low growth and high unemployment and accounts for a declining percentage of world output and world trade,” the analyst explained.

“Brexit allows the UK to escape the protectionist EU which is designed to support EU farmers and big business, allows the UK to promote free trade and for the UK to reduce import tariffs to the benefit of UK consumers, as well as pursuing trading and investment opportunities elsewhere. Beijing, not Brussels, is where it’s at,” Neil MacKinnon concluded.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/65234-2018

By K. V. Kesavan*

The Korean peninsula is at a crucial turning point now.  For the first time in many years, there is an opportunity for both North and South Korea to come together to reduce tensions and build a new path for peace and cooperation. The inter-Korean summit which is  scheduled to take place  in the last week of April and the first  Trump- Kim  summit which is to  follow  in the month  of May have aroused some  optimism for a significant  breakthrough in their  relations. Many important changes in the equations among Pyongyang, Seoul, Washington and Beijing have occurred in quick succession proving that diplomacy could still be a useful instrument for paving the way for reconciliation among rival countries.

The starting point to the whole unfolding  drama in  the Korean situation should be seen in  the invitation of South Korean President Moon Jae-in  for the participation of North Korea in the Winter Olympics  and North’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un’s  response to send a high level North Korean delegation that included his own influential sister. The joint participation of North and South Korean athletes created a great deal of excitement among the Koreans. This was followed by the extension of an invitation from Kim Jong-un to Moon for a formal visit to North Korea. Things started moving rapidly culminating in the visit of an official South Korean delegation to meet Kim Jong-un. During the discussions, the South Korean delegation surprisingly found Kim in a very conciliatory mood, offering to meet President Donald Trump and agreeing to halt his nuclear weapon and missile programme in return for an assurance that the US would not threaten his regime. In addition, Kim also agreed not to insist on the halting of the US-South Korean military drills.

The South Korean delegation then visited the US and informed President Trump about the unexpected outcome of their meeting with Kim. Pleased with this major change in Pyongyang’s position, Trump expressed his readiness to meet the North Korean leader at a palace and date most convenient to both countries.

Analysts, long associated with studying the US-North Korean relations, have been completely puzzled by the sudden shift in Pyongyang’s attitude, because until last December, both Trump and Kim were locked in mutual abuses and recriminations.  Some analysts entertain serious skepticism about the trustworthiness of Pyongyang’s gesture. They suspect that the real objective of Kim  could be  to gain time for further developing his country’s nuclear and missile capabilities. They recall how North Korea used the long-drawn-out six-party talks in the past as a ploy to develop its nuclear technology. Similarly, many believe that Kim, while ostensibly professing to promote peace and reconciliation, might have the true intention to loosen the tough economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations.  As against this, there are others, including Trump himself, who believe that the current peace overture has been caused by the “strong pressure” enforced by the US and other countries.

One country which seems to have been somewhat overtaken by the rapid diplomatic developments is Japan, a strong ally of the US. When its Prime Minister Abe received the news about the planned summit meeting between Trump and Kim, he was quite dismayed.

To be sure, Abe and his colleagues knew that a dialogue between Trump and Kim was expected to happen eventually, but they wanted certain pre-conditions like the inspections by the IAEA to happen prior to that. Further, since his return to power in 2012, Abe has considered North Korea as posing one of the biggest threats to Japan’s security.  Japan’s first National Security Strategy (NSS ) published in 2013 talks about the serious threats emanating from North Korea. In October 2017, when Abe opted for a snap national election, he considered North Korea’s threat as one of the reasons for his political decision.

Further, Abe also has some concerns on the outcome of the Trump-Kim summit. Japan has always demanded Pyongyang’s commitment to final, comprehensive, and irreversible denuclearisation. Abe is, therefore, worried that any agreement that Trump signs with Kim should address not only the concerns of the US but also those of Japan. Japan is wary that both Trump and Kim may reach an accord on intercontinental ballistic missiles but not include North Korea’s medium and short-range missiles which are more relevant to Japan’s security. Second, Japan also wants Trump to address Tokyo’s interests on the long-pending abduction issue by making it a part of his summit agenda with Kim. Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono made a visit to Washington to lobby for his country and met important US leaders, including the Secretary Of State and the National Security Adviser.

But what has increased Japan’s feeling of wariness was the sudden and unexpected visit made by Kim Jong-un recently to Beijing – from 22 to 25 March.  During this visit, Kim reaffirmed his commitment to the denuclearisation of the peninsula and his upcoming meetings with Moon and Trump. Chinese President Xi on his part assured that his country would uphold its friendship with North Korea.  There is no doubt that Kim’s meeting with Xi has considerably bolstered Pyongyang’s bargaining strength before negotiating with Trump in May.

Finally, since Trump announced his readiness to meet Kim, there has been a major change in his team of negotiators. Both John Bolton, the new  National Security Advisor, and Mike Pompou, the new  Secretary of State,  are known for their “hawkish views” on North Korea and  given the unpredictable temperament of  Trump and Kim  in addition,  one can expect the talks to be marked by hard-bargaining from both sides.

By Bernard Wasserstein*

(FPRI) — In 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II rode into Jerusalem on a white horse, flamboyantly manifesting his resolve to transform Germany into a world power. In 1977, Anwar Sadat, the first Egyptian president to visit Israel, flew to Jerusalem as an earnest of his desire for peace. The huge symbolic significance of Jerusalem has attracted grand theatrical gestures throughout history.

So it is with President Donald Trump’s declaration in December 2017 that he would transfer the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The announcement enthused many fervent supporters of Israel while infuriating Palestinian Arabs and their patrons in the Arab states. But on the ground, little has changed. The episode is unlikely to have long-term diplomatic or political consequences. How has such a seemingly minor technical matter as the location of an embassy nevertheless produced such a rumpus?

Its origins go back to the establishment of Israel. Between 1920 and 1948 Jerusalem had been the capital of the British mandated territory of Palestine. A “mandate,” akin to a colony, was under the control of the governing state and therefore no embassies were based there, only consulates. In November 1947, when the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, it made an exception for Jerusalem and its environs, including the town of Bethlehem. That area was to be a “corpus separatum,” part of neither state. Instead, it would be under direct UN administration. After ten years, a plebiscite was to be held to determine whether a majority of the inhabitants wished to join either the Jewish or the Arab state.

United Nations members could not, however, agree to back up the organization’s decision with armed force. As a result, the UN was never able to implement its resolutions on Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Arabs and Israel decided the issue in battle. When the fighting died down, culminating in armistice agreements in 1949, the city found itself divided. The western, mainly Jewish-inhabited districts were held by Israel; the eastern, mainly Arab ones, including the Old City, fell under the control of King Abdullah of Jordan. He had come to the “rescue” of the Palestinian Arabs, and succeeded in annexing to his kingdom what came to be called the West Bank (of the Jordan river).

The international community never recognized the partition of Jerusalem. In fact, as the Israeli historian Motti Golani has pointed out, after 1949 the only two countries that favored it were Israel and Jordan.

In December of that year, Israel’s prime minister, David Ben Gurion, went further. In an impulsive declaration, worthy of President Trump, he proclaimed Jerusalem “an integral part of the State of Israel and its historic capital.” “No United Nations vote,” he insisted, “will change this historic fact.” Several cabinet members, including the foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, doubted the wisdom of this pronouncement, but with characteristic pugnacity Ben Gurion pushed it through regardless. “I knew we had an ally – Transjordan,” he later said. “If they were permitted to hold on to Jerusalem, why weren’t we? Transjordan would permit no-one to get them out of Jerusalem; consequently no one would dare to remove us.” Most Israeli government offices were eventually transferred to Jerusalem, save the Defense Ministry, which remains in Tel Aviv to this day.

As for Abdullah, he paid the supreme price for what some saw as his betrayal of the Arab cause in treating with Israel: in July 1951, he was assassinated by a Palestinian as he left Friday prayers in al-Aqsa Mosque on al-Haram al-Sharif (what Jews call the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. His successors on the Jordanian throne, while often friendly to Israel, have generally behaved with circumspection on matters relating to Jerusalem.

The Israeli declaration of Jerusalem as its capital did not yield rapid dividends. The U.S. State Department informed the Israeli Foreign Ministry that the United States did “not recognize the sovereignty of Israel in Jerusalem.” All the great powers concurred. With few exceptions, foreign diplomats remained stationed in Tel Aviv.

There were several reasons, among them a desire not to provoke the hostility of Arab and Muslim states and a wish to keep the prospect of recognition of Israeli Jerusalem up the diplomatic sleeve as a potential bargaining card. But the main reason was that the powers could not agree on any alternative policy on Jerusalem. So non-recognition of the city as Israel’s capital froze into permanence. Like non-recognition of Communist China, it became for long an unquestioned axiom of U.S. foreign policy.

For eighteen years after 1949, a fence divided the Jordanian and Israeli sectors of Jerusalem. Intercourse between the two sides was almost completely severed. Only diplomats, some Christian pilgrims, and a few other privileged persons were able to pass through the single crossing point at the “Mandelbaum gate” (so called because it was near the house of a Jewish merchant of that name). Occasionally, Jordanians and Israelis exchanged potshots across the line.

In June 1967, Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein, imprudently joined Egypt and Syria in war against Israel. Israeli forces immediately occupied east Jerusalem, together with the whole of the West Bank. The epic victory in the “Six-Day War” restored Israel’s hitherto drooping self-confidence and gave rise to a far-reaching movement of nationalist assertiveness. Israel celebrated the “reunification” of Jerusalem and effectively annexed the eastern portion of the city. The municipal boundary was expanded to incorporate adjacent areas. A cult of the Western Wall, the Jewish holy place just below the Temple Mount, captured the imagination of Jews, even many non-religious ones, the world over.

In the course of the past half-century, large housing estates for Jews have been built in Jerusalem as well as in a broader area ringing the city. Its Jewish population has consequently grown by leaps and bounds. Yet, Arab natural increase has more than kept pace, with the result that the Arab proportion of the population has risen from 26 percent in 1967 to 40 percent today.

Arab Jerusalemites, unlike the population of the West Bank, are routinely granted Israeli residence permits, giving them access to Israeli national insurance and the right to vote in municipal, but not parliamentary, elections. Theoretically, they can apply for Israeli citizenship, but, in practice, bureaucratic obstacles make that difficult and only a few thousand have done so. Most, therefore, remain in a legal-political limbo, with limited rights in the city of their birth.

The Israeli conquest of east Jerusalem did not change the international consensus opposing recognition of Israeli sovereignty anywhere in the city. Only a few countries, mainly in Africa or Latin America, established embassies there: by 1973, just 16 had done so. But after the 1973 war, when many African states withdrew recognition from Israel altogether, that number dwindled.

The visit of President Sadat in 1977 paved the way for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, but there was no agreement on Jerusalem. In 1980, the Israeli Knesset (parliament), prodded by the extreme right, enacted a “Basic Law” declaring that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.” The mayor of the city, Teddy Kollek, was among the many skeptics: “All in all,” he said, “Jerusalem will benefit nothing from the law.” He was soon proved right. The United Nations Security Council censured Israel by fourteen votes to zero (the United States abstaining). All remaining countries with embassies in Jerusalem withdrew them to Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem question was drawn into American politics, largely as a result of the growing influence of the pro-Israel lobby, supported by both Jews and evangelical Christians. Every major-party presidential candidate from 1972 onwards, even George McGovern, regarded as unfriendly towards Israel, issued a campaign pledge to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. With equal regularity, every incoming president, on the stern advice of the State Department, found some way of avoiding fulfillment of the promise.

In the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s, the combustible Jerusalem issue was repeatedly set aside for fear of derailing the whole process. At the last-gasp meeting of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000, President Clinton offered a compromise: “The general principle,” he proposed, “is that Arab areas [of the city] are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Israeli.” Palestine would be sovereign over the Muslim holy places and Israel over the Western Wall. It was understood that each state would have its capital in Jerusalem.

Shortly afterwards, an incident on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem kindled a new conflagration known as the “second intifada.” The return to violence precluded any progress towards a settlement, whether on Jerusalem or anything else. Yet, the “Clinton parameters” gradually gained the tacit approval of influential circles among both Israelis and Palestinians. In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a former mayor of the city, in negotiations with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, offered to withdraw from Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem and place the Old City under international supervision. But those talks too led nowhere as Olmert’s government collapsed in a corruption scandal.

Over the past decade, under the hardline leadership of Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel has tightened its hold on east Jerusalem. Checkpoints at all access points from the West Bank have blocked off Arab Jerusalem from its natural hinterland in the West Bank. Israeli housing developments in and around the city have mushroomed, while Arab applications for building permits are routinely rejected.

Today, “reunified” Jerusalem is, in reality, an unhappily disunited place. The “security barrier” constructed by Israel in recent years, slices through the city no less brutally than the pre-1967 partition fence. Constructed mainly of concrete blocks, like the former Berlin wall, it twists and turns for 125 miles through (not just around) the city. At least 90,000 Jerusalem Arabs as a result find themselves cut off from the rest of Jerusalem.

In the northeast of the municipal area, the walled-in Shuafat refugee camp, a festering slum, home to tens of thousands of people, receives virtually no municipal services. Utilities and sewage are in a state of near-collapse. Garbage remains uncollected. Rats proliferate. Periodic raids by Israeli security personnel are all that remains of public security. Emergency vehicles dare not enter. On account of its pervasive violence, local residents call the area “Chicago.”

President Trump has seen a different kind of American parallel. In November 2016, he advanced the Israeli barrier as a model for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexican border: “If you think walls don’t work, all you have to do is ask Israel,” he said.

But the wall has not stopped terrorism in the city. Sporadic attacks by Palestinian “lone wolves” have continued to kill and injure Israeli Jews as well as foreign workers and tourists. Fear of violence is a prevalent reality of daily life in the city.

The attacks derive from a suppurating sense of collective grievance among Palestinians that is socio-economic as well as political. The Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz reported recently that Arab Jerusalem “is still plagued by poverty, neglect, illegal construction and a shortage of school classrooms, while anarchy reigns in areas beyond the separation barrier.” Half a century after Jerusalem’s supposed unification, its two halves receive grossly disproportionate shares of municipal resources—this in spite of promises by successive mayors to rectify such allocations.

Even as Arab Jerusalem is sunk in arrested economic development and political despair, Jewish Jerusalem is deeply divided within itself. Ultra-orthodox and secular Jews live apart, send their children to different schools, and engage in perennial rows over such issues as Sabbath observance, women’s rights, and the refusal of ultra-orthodox Jews to serve in the army.

Residents of Jerusalem thus live in distinct topographic, linguistic, religious, social, and psychological cocoons. This is, without question, the most divided capital city in the world.

In accordance with time-honored ritual, Mr. Trump declared in the course of his presidential campaign that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem “fairly quickly” upon taking office. After his inauguration, it appeared at first that, like his predecessors, he would find some pretext for reneging on the commitment. But last December, with characteristic spontaneity, he “tweeted” that he was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and would move the U.S. embassy there.

In a more formal announcement a little later, he claimed that his decision was “nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality.” He did not spell out which realities he had in mind. If he consulted the State Department, he ignored its advice. He did not consult or even inform his allies. Nor did he reckon that diplomacy has to do not only with facts (real or “alternative”) but also with legitimacy, the formation of coalitions of like-minded nations, and the prudent exercise of national self-interest.

Seemingly oblivious to the self-contradiction involved, the president stated: “We are not taking a position o[n] any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders.” That passage had evidently been inserted in his statement at the urging of the State Department. Yet, a few weeks later, he further muddied the waters by boasting, “We took Jerusalem off the table. So we don’t have to talk about it any more.”

Following President Trump’s announcement, 128 countries backed a UN General Assembly resolution calling on the U.S. to change course. Only seven countries, apart from the United States and Israel, voted against. These were all U.S. client-states such as the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau. Most of these had no diplomatic representation in Israel. The only UN member so far to announce that it will follow the American lead and move its embassy to Jerusalem is Guatemala. The Czech Republic toyed with the idea, but now seems to have backed off. On this, as on so much else these days, the United States thus finds itself bereft of support even from most of its allies.

The new U.S. embassy will formally open in Jerusalem in a few weeks’ time. The site chosen is a U.S. consular building bizarrely located in “no-man’s land” on the former dividing line between the Jordanian and Israeli sectors of the city. The move will be more demonstrative than substantial: large numbers of embassy employees will continue to work in Tel Aviv while new facilities and protective security are constructed in Jerusalem. That may take years.

In defense of Mr. Trump’s action, it might be argued that much of the original rationale for the traditional U.S. position on Jerusalem has eroded over time. Contrary to many expectations, initial reactions from Muslim and Arab states were somewhat muted. More pressing problems such as the civil wars in Syria and Yemen command their attention. Tensions in the West Bank and Gaza have admittedly risen in recent weeks and have once again exploded into violence. But that has more to do with deteriorating social and economic conditions, especially in Gaza, than with diplomatic arcana that seem remote from the everyday lives of most Palestinians. Proponents of Mr. Trump’s action have argued persuasively that the Palestinians may, in due course, decide that they have more urgent things to worry about that the address of the U.S. embassy.

The president may nevertheless find that, like David Ben Gurion in 1949, what seems like a straightforward affirmation of reality turns out to be an ill-timed and foolhardy venture. It exhibits to the world American friction with its allies at a time when, both in Europe and in East Asia, they are under renewed threat from nuclear-armed antagonists. The move has been strongly criticized by professional American diplomats, including nine out of eleven former ambassadors to Israel. It pulls the rug out from under the administration’s reported intention to unveil yet another peace plan for the Middle East.

Disheartened advocates of the “two-state solution” lament that Mr. Trump’s demonstration of partiality will prevent the United States from acting as an honest broker in negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the episode retards rather than advances prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, already dimmer than at any point since 2000.

The embassy move is, in reality, little more than a hollow public-relations gesture, designed primarily for internal U.S. consumption. Perhaps Mr. Trump will crown it with a triumphant visit to Jerusalem, like the Kaiser. In spite of the president’s fondness for parades, he will probably not enter the Jaffa Gate on horseback. But he could inaugurate the embassy and admire the wall. He might, however, bear in mind what the Kaiser’s empty braggadocio led to.

President Trump may be a self-proclaimed master of the art of the deal, but his decision on Jerusalem is no big deal. Actually, it is no deal at all, since this was a unilateral concession, in return for which the United States gained no quid pro quo. The “card up the sleeve,” as dealt by Mr. Trump, turns out to have been a busted flush.

About the author:
*Bernard Wasserstein, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago, is the author of Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (Yale University Press)

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

By Trey Goff*

Ever since the release of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, people have been searching for a real-life Galt’s Gulch—a place with little to no taxation, little regulation, and a blossoming entrepreneurial spirit. Galt’s Gulch exists, but it’s not located in the mountains as Rand’s was. No, it’s in the Caribbean and it goes by the name Cayman Enterprise City.

Cayman Islands Governance

Before discussing exactly what makes the Cayman Islands Galt’s Gulch, it’s important to understand how it is governed and what incentives drove it to become so free. Although the Cayman Islands are considered a British Overseas Territory, they still retain a high degree of political autonomy. They’re simply too distant from the UK for the British crown to rule it effectively. However, the British Crown still holds significant sway over the Cayman Islands government. The Governor of the Islands is appointed directly by the British Crown and serves as long or short a term as the Crown desires. The Governor must approve all legislation passed by the Cayman Parliament as well as appoint the Premier, who is the leader of Parliament. The Parliament is directly elected, and the Parliament in turn appoints the Governor’s Cabinet which is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of governance.

However, it is not this governance structure alone which has created the Cayman’s liberty and success. No, the incentives created by competitive governance have done that.

There are roughly 32 countries in the Caribbean (give or take a few, depending on what counts as a country). Most of these countries are in close geographic proximity to one another and have little land mass. These facts combine to mean two important things: these jurisdictions are heavily reliant upon trade and imports for economic well-being, and it is relatively easy for citizens of any given country to change jurisdictions to any nearby jurisdiction with a short boat ride. These two facts create pressure on Caribbean governments to create governance institutions amenable to trade along with governance institutions which will attract, rather than drive away, residents. After all, with no natural resources and little land, the only axis upon which these Caribbean jurisdictions can compete is governance. These competitive pressures should drive these Caribbean jurisdictions toward liberty and away from tyranny as they compete to attract new residents.

At least, it would if the governments of these jurisdictions operated like a for-profit corporation rather than a public government. The final and most important incentive which, combined with the previous two, creates competitive governance is the profit motive: so long as governance providers profits are directly derived from the well-being and prosperity of the people and businesses in its jurisdiction, then the market forces of competitive governance will drive governance toward liberty, protection of property rights, and rule of law and away from the corruption and tyranny seen elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Although this third and final incentive is not directly fulfilled, it is still indirectly present among many of the territories in the Caribbean. This is a result of the fact that many of the territories (and notably the most economically free ones) are British Overseas Territories governed by the British Crown. This gives the governor of the territories a far lower time preference than a democratically elected representative with a short term of rule would have. This low time preference combined with the reliance on trade is enough to create competitive governance incentives in the Caribbean even without the important direct profit motive.

These incentives explain why a vast majority of the world’s “tax havens” are in the Caribbean, and that the best tax havens (or worst from the state’s point of view) are all Overseas British Territories within the Caribbean.

These competitive governance incentives reach their apogee in the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands have no direct taxation, period. That means no:

• Corporate income tax
• Capital gains tax
• Individual income tax
• Sales tax
• Property tax
• Payroll tax

This may leave one wondering, “How in the world does the Cayman Islands government operate with no taxes for revenue?” There are, unfortunately, still some coercive revenue generation streams in the Cayman Islands. The largest is the 22% import duty, as well as annual work permit fees, company registration fees, stamp duty on land transfers, trade certificates, vehicle licensing fees, and passport fees. Although they are still coercive, a number of these fees such as the registration fees could be seen as simply fee-for-service, with the “service” being provided in this case being rule of law and provision of public goods while operating inside the Cayman Islands. This argument could be strengthened if individuals moving into the Caymans explicitly consented via signing a residency contract. In lieu of such explicit consent, though, fee-for-service is still marginally better than outright theft via direct taxation.

As if this wonderful tax environment weren’t already enough, in 2011 the Cayman Islands enacted a Special Economic Zone law which facilitated the creation of the Cayman Enterprise City. This is the true Galt’s Gulch. Not only does it have none of the taxes listed above, but firms which incorporate there are also exempted from the few fees the Cayman government does charge. Thus, firms in the CEC are also exempted from:

• Import and export duties
• Some licensing and incorporation fees

This means firms in the zone have literally zero tax liability, period. This comes hand-in-hand with a streamlined, transparent, and light regulatory framework in the zone. This aggressively competitive governance structure has borne fruit, too: the Cayman Islands have the highest GDP per capita of any Caribbean nation and the 21^st highest GDP per capita in the world-barely behind the United States.

The incentives created by decentralized, small, and competitive governance jurisdictions have already resulted in the creation of a modern-day Galt’s Gulch. It just happens to be a tropical paradise rather than a mountaintop hideaway.

About the author:
*Trey Goff is a recent graduate of Mississippi State University, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science. He is an Alumni of the Charles Koch Institute’s Summer Fellows program, and has been published at the Foundation for Economic Education. Trey was heavily involved in the student liberty movement throughout college, and is now a leading voice in the free societies movement. Trey is currently actively involved in a variety of ongoing free society projects.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute