Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 604

Beijing Winning in S. China Sea, Aussies Say

The tanking Chinese stock market may have strengthened the opposition to President Xi Jinping, but Beijing is still pursuing its regional ambitions. Australian analysts say that Beijing is fast solidifying its hold on territory in the South China Sea, the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

China has won the first round of its contest for control in the South China Sea by completing construction of an archipelago of artificial islands, say senior Australian sources.

And there is little that will stop China from winning the next round, too, as an indecisive US Administration and allies including Australia struggle to follow through on earlier promises to challenge unlawful Chinese claims with “freedom of navigation” exercises, the sources say.By 2017, military analysts expect China will have equipped its new sand islands with ports, barracks, battlements, artillery, air strips and long-range radar systems that will enable it to project military and paramilitary power into the furthest and most hotly-contested reaches of the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported yesterday that the Japanese defense ministry has requested the largest military budget in the country’s history, as the country grows increasingly worried about Chinese encroachment:

Japan had been making annual cuts to its defence budget for a decade up to 2013. The increases since then reflect its growing anxiety about China’s expanding naval reach. The rise is also in line with Japan’s more assertive defence policy under the conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, as he seeks to check Chinese influence and expand the scope of his country’s military.

As we’ve said before, U.S. allies in Asia, chief among them Japan—though none of them are strong enough to take on Beijing alone—together can form a net around an ever more assertive China. But if America’s strength isn’t there to reinforce the net, the strategy doesn’t work. For the moment, few seem to believe it is.

US Wind Energy Stuck in the Doldrums

The U.S. installed nearly 10 percent more wind production capacity over the last year, so why is output down 6 percent so far this year? As the FT reports, the answer may be as simple as, “it hasn’t been as windy.” 2015 has been one of the least windy years in around 40 years, according to the paper.

“We never anticipated a drop-off in the wind resource as we have witnessed over the past six months,” David Crane, chief executive of power producer NRG Energy, told analysts…

And El Niño is expected to keep wind speeds slow in the opening months of 2016, which means that this trend will persist into next year. Slightly slower wind speeds are no small problem, either. The Energy Information Administration explains that “[b]ecause the output from a turbine varies nonlinearly with wind speed, small decreases in wind speeds can result in much larger changes in output.” In other words, even a small dip in velocity can have outsized consequences for the renewable source.

This exemplifies one of the biggest challenges renewables face: intermittency. Solar panels will obviously struggle to produce electricity on cloudier days, and wind turbines require a minimum air speed before it even makes sense to turn them on. But consumers aren’t going to stop relying on electricity when the wind dies down or the day becomes cloudy, and, lacking any cost-effective storage options for renewables, we’re once again left with the undeniable fact that fossil fuels are a necessary cornerstone of modern society. Greens will be loathe to admit it, but solar and wind energy require a more consistent baseload partner.

Nationalist Violence Erupts in Kiev

Violent nationalist protests broke out in Kiev yesterday after Ukraine’s Parliament gave initial support to a bill that would devolve power to the breakaway eastern regions of the country—one of the conditions imposed on Kiev by the Minsk agreement. At least two policemen were killed by a hand grenade thrown by what government forces said was a nationalist protester, and around 130 were reportedly injured in the demonstrations. The New York Times explains the background on the measure:

Monday’s vote in Parliament was just a first step. Changing the status of the rebel eastern regions, as demanded by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in peace talks in Minsk, Belarus, last winter, involves both an amendment to the Constitution, which must receive final approval from a supermajority of 300 of Parliament’s 450 members, and a separate law passed by that chamber.

The measure is fiercely opposed by Ukrainian nationalists and many others, who loathe any concession to Mr. Putin and see him as the driving force behind a civil war that has claimed more than 6,500 lives […]

Mr. Avakov [The interior minister, Arsen Avakov] said the police had detained a member of a right-wing paramilitary group, Sych, that is the militant arm of the Svoboda political party, one of the three parties that backed the Maidan street uprising against Mr. Yanukovych last year.

It’s important to remember that these autonomy measures are strongly backed by the EU and the United States. The State Department made the special effort of sending Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland to Kiev in July to help convince wavering lawmakers to support a similar autonomy bill.

President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, already beset by low approval ratings, are facing what might be the biggest challenge to their political fortunes with these bills. 265 members of parliament voted for the measure yesterday, but it faced stiff opposition by three major parties in parliament. Former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko (one of the heroes of the Orange Revolution who was subsequently laid low by allegations of corruption in the energy sector) appears to be trying to leverage the crisis in a bid to regain power. “This is not the road to peace but to decentralisation. This is a diametrically opposed process which forces us to lose territory”, she said after Monday’s vote.The constitutional amendment itself should be up before Ukraine’s Parliament in December when it comes back from the courts, and it will require 3o0 votes for passage. That vote could easily end up being a pivotal moment in the country’s politics, and the future of the Maidan revolution.

Obama Preparing China Sanctions over Cyber Theft

The Obama Administration reportedly has readied an unprecedentedly broad raft of sanctions against Chinese companies and individuals determined to have benefited from the theft of intellectual property belonging to U.S. companies. Officials say that the secrets stolen include everything from nuclear power plant designs to source code for search engines to the confidential negotiating positions of various energy companies. According to the Washington Post, the final decision on unleashing the sanctions hasn’t yet been made, but could come within the next two weeks—ahead of President Xi Jinping’s official visit to Washington.

The case for rolling out the sanctions could get an assist from the intel world, where evidence is growing that both China and Russia are aggressively cross-referencing the data from the massive OPM hack that compromised the identities of millions who have U.S. government clearances with the hacks of private companies like the health insurer Anthem, United Airlines, and the e-adultery website Ashley Madison. At least one U.S. clandestine network of support engineers has been rolled up due to these initiatives, according to two Obama Administration officials.After the OPM hack, reports were swirling that the Obama Administration was looking for a way to retaliate. Given that both Chinese and Russian spy services often partner with criminal hackers to get access to information, the ability to clearly pin down responsibility is limited. A hefty set of sanctions for intellectual property theft may therefore have to do double duty.Earlier today, we wrote that, “every time you venture onto the internet, you are entering a wilderness as full of predators and dangers and powerful actors as any Enchanted Forest in any fairy tale ever told.” Here are two of the malefactors. Those who focus only on the domestic side of digital privacy discussions often have predicted a libertarian backlash, but the efforts of foreign bad actors online is one of the things that likely will militate against this. In the 21st century, adventurism does not just mean that Chinese agents will be subsidizing Sub-Saharan African countries, but that state-sponsored hackers will be looking into your health insurance, your travel arrangements, your extra-marital affairs. And Americans will likely demand to be protected—even from that last one.

Are We Ready for a Less Icy Arctic?

President Obama is in Alaska today to speak at a conference called Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience. If that name sounds like a mouthful, consider that it was likely chosen for its much pithier acronym, GLACIER. Obama is the first sitting president to make a trip to the Arctic, a fact that points to the growing importance of the region as at least some polar ice begins to break up and melt. But as the New York Times reports, a simple visit doesn’t mean Washington is well-prepared for the strategic and commercial concerns that a less icy Arctic is poised to bring:

Some lawmakers in Congress, analysts, and even some government officials say the United States is lagging behind other nations, chief among them Russia, in preparing for the new environmental, economic and geopolitical realities facing the region…“We have been for some time clamoring about our nation’s lack of capacity to sustain any meaningful presence in the Arctic,” said Adm. Paul F. Zukunft, the Coast Guard’s commandant. […]

Russia, by contrast, is building 10 new search-and-rescue stations, strung like a necklace of pearls at ports along half of the Arctic shoreline. More provocatively, it has also significantly increased its military presence, reopening bases abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Predictions about an entirely ice-free Arctic may run ahead of the evidence, but the Arctic won’t have to be ice-free to become economically and geopolitically interesting. It appears that some ice, at least, is melting—and that we aren’t ready for what will happen as it does. Last summer the National Research Council released a report that found America was woefully unprepared for a potential Arctic oil and gas rush. The USGS estimates that the Arctic contains 15 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, and nearly a third of its undiscovered gas. Shell recently got the green light from the Obama administration to begin drilling an exploratory well, and you can be sure more majors will be looking to get in on the act in the coming years.

But it’s not just oil and gas that makes the Arctic important. New shipping lanes could open up, creating new strategic interests for America’s navy. As Admiral Jonathan Greenert put it, “[t]he inevitable opening of the Arctic will essentially create a new coast on America’s north.” But the Navy has just two icebreakers, one of which is nearing the end of its lifecycle, while Russia has more than 40. Nor is Russia the only competitor here: the NYT also states that China, South Korea, and Singapore are looking at shipping through waters that could open in coming years.Star Trek told us that space was the final frontier. Maybe one day we’ll find that true, but it’s not true today, because the Arctic looks poised to see terrestrial land grabs. And while countries like Canada and Russia jockey over boundary-setting, America may be falling behind in preparations for at least a somewhat more navigable Arctic Ocean.

Facts Rain on Xi’s Parade

As China is buffeted by economic crisis, President Xi Jinping is facing growing opposition. Take, for example, his upcoming World War II Victory Day parade. The celebration was supposed to be a confident display of Xi’s successful consolidation and expansion of Chinese power, but it is quickly becoming a national joke. From the Wall Street Journal:

The damage to Mr. Xi’s image is evident in social media comments mocking the parade. A cartoon, widely circulated online, showed haggard-looking stock market investors marching in the procession.

“The bears are roaring! The bulls are fleeing!” begins a satirical version of a famous anti-Japanese war song. “This summer’s only memories will be violent rain, violent losses and violent explosions.”The parade will also show how Mr. Xi’s assertive approach to territorial disputes in Asia has antagonized the U.S. and many of its allies. No major Western nations are sending leaders or troops to the event.

Xi and China face some real issues. The country’s shift away from the old economic system of easy credit and export-fueled growth means lots of pain for many powerful interest groups — and, inevitably, an overall slowing of the blistering rates of growth in China’s recent past. But it is a shift that must be made, and a ship the size of China doesn’t change course without a strong hand at the wheel, especially when the new course will mean economic pain in the short term. Xi, therefore, has been working systematically to gather enough power into his own hands to ram through the necessary changes to reshape China’s economy.

To get that power he has resorted to the classic methods of Communist leaders from the time of Lenin and Stalin: “anti-corruption” purges that spread terror through the bureaucrats and factions who might oppose the Leader, combined with heavy crackdowns on the intellectuals, scholars, and journalists who might otherwise be tempted to make snarky remarks about the emperor’s wardrobe. The latest of these measures is a crack down on stock analysts. According to the BBC, Chinese officials have punished 197 individuals for spreading rumors about the stock market crash and the recent massive chemical explosions in an industrial area of Tianjin. Xinhua, China’s state news agency, announced that one analyst admitted he “wrote fake report on Chinese stock market based on hearsay and his own subjective guesses without conducting due verifications.” (Imagine! Sharing your opinions! One eagerly awaits news that China will now prosecute all the rumormongers whose unfounded opinions and shoddy analysis helped drive the markets up.)Humor aside, this overall strategy has worked, up to a point. Xi is unquestionably the strongest leader in China since the days of Deng Xiaoping and maybe even since Mao. But the power comes with a price tag attached—two price tags, actually.First, power comes at the expense of responsibility. Now that Xi is as close to all-powerful as human beings get outside the city limits of Pyongyang, anything that goes wrong looks to hundreds of millions of Chinese like it’s his fault. The stock market goes down: blame Xi. The government’s measures to stop the decline fail: blame Xi. A warehouse blows up near residential neighborhoods in a major city: blame Xi, again.Second, his growing power comes at the price of more opposition. Xi’s centralization of power scares a lot of party officials into compliance, but not everybody is ready to jump on the bandwagon. And with the purge creeping closer to powerful former leaders every day, the very success of Xi’s strategy is creating a determined opposition who are beginning to think that either Xi goes down or they go to jail—or worse. (China still executes criminals.)What Xi may not have counted on is that the two problems can interact: The opposition can use the failures and shocks that the public already blames on Xi against him. That seems to be happening now. Xi’s many enemies are looking for ways to use China’s economic and political problems to mobilize opposition to his power grab.Meanwhile, there are all the people who hate and fear even the good reforms Xi wants to make—and that for China’s sake need to be made. They are a significant crowd: the heads and managers of the giant, no-good State-Owned Enterprises that are dependent on cheap credit and bailouts; the millions of Chinese who like the “iron rice bowls” those enterprises still provide; local party officials who love the old system of bribery and collusion that has enriched millions of crooked Commies from one end of China to the other; all the owners and managers of the companies, state-owned or not, who benefitted hugely from, and are still tightly tied to, the old “invest for export” growth model; the bankers and private lenders who loaned heavily to companies and local governments in the belief that the good times would roll on forever and who face ruin if the economic shift destroys (as it must in most cases) the business model of their indebted clients.None of this is a recipe for political serenity or economic success, but this is what China now faces and what Xi must overcome.

Egypt Finds an Offshore “Supergiant”

“It’s an exciting moment for us and also for Egypt. This historic discovery will be able to transform the energy scenario of Egypt.” Those were the words of Claudio Descalzi, the CEO of the Italian energy major ENI, as he tried to put in context ENI’s discovery of a so-called “supergiant” gas field some 120 miles off of Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The offshore Zohr field could contain as much as 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, making it the largest find of its kind in the Mediterranean and one of the biggest in the world. The Guardian reports:

Eni said in a statement that the Zohr field, which covers an area of about 60 square miles (100sq km), could hold as much as 30tn cubic feet of gas.

“Zohr is the largest gas discovery ever made in Egypt and in the Mediterranean Sea and could become one of the world’s largest natural-gas finds,” it said, adding that it had full concession rights to the area.

The gas won’t start to flow at once, but this will come as welcome news for Egypt, which according to Descalzi, will be able to use the field as an energy source for a decade. ENI says it plans to use existing offshore infrastructure to help “fast-track” the development of the new find, an approach Cairo will welcome as it continues to struggle with blackouts caused by energy supply shortages amid the aftershocks of the Arab Spring.

But this is also a boon for the rest of the world. A stable and prosperous Egypt is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for stability and peace in the region. The discovery that the Arab world’s most populous state has natural gas will help stabilize Egypt’s economy and promote the foreign investment without which it cannot prosper. Saudi and the UAE may be especially pleased, because they can now begin to think that over time they can reduce their expensive aid to Egypt.Israeli gas companies have seen share prices drop sharply on the news, ostensibly because Egypt was expected to be a large consumer of the gas from new offshore gas fields like the Leviathan (a hostile political climate is also playing a part in the poor market performance). But while the Egyptian find may be roiling Israel’s offshore waters, it’s really Moscow that stands to be the biggest loser if any of this gas finds its way across the Mediterranean and into Europe. Policymakers there have already been clamoring for diversification away from Russian supplies in the wake of the Ukraine crisis; the Zohr field could help them cut reliance on Gazprom and weaken one of Russia’s most effective levers on the Continent.

On the Backroads of Morocco

Morocco’s troubled socio-economic profile is well known. It is ranked 129th on the latest UN Human Development Index, lower than all other North African states except for Mauritania. Fellow petroleum-poor monarchy Jordan ranks 77th. Among the especially problematic indicators that shape Morocco’s ranking are adult illiteracy—25 percent for males and about 40 percent for females, with the rate among rural adult women close to 90 percent; maternal mortality (70th in world rankings) and infant mortality (74th); and GDP per capita (156th). In the category of health expenditures as a percentage of GDP, as calculated in 2009, Morocco ranks 109th. One-fifth of Morocco’s population (6.3 million) live either in poverty or just above the poverty line. The differences between Morocco’s urban and peripheral rural regions are especially stark.

To be sure, the Moroccan state’s penetration into the country’s rural regions is considerably greater than it was in the past. This penetration includes expanded electrification of villages (96.5 percent in 2009 compared to just 18 percent in 1996), the building of schools and roads, and increased access to potable water (from 20 percent in 1990 to 87 percent in 2009, and presumably well over 90 percent today). In addition, migrant workers from rural areas, who spend part of the year in big cities or live for extended periods in Europe, provide crucial injections of cash into village economies.Nonetheless, the deprivation in remote Atlas Mountain villages and valleys, which are populated primarily by Amazigh communities, remains high. The conditions there were highlighted anew in late November 2014 by devastating floods, which overwhelmed the poor infrastructure that is still the rule in much of the country’s interior. However, notwithstanding the periphery’s dire straits, it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of a Moroccan version of Tunisia’s Muhammad Bouazizi. No despairing young vendor’s self-immolation in protest against the heavy-handedness of local authorities, staged in some dusty provincial town far from the center of the country’s political and economic life, could ignite a nationwide movement, let alone result in the toppling of Morocco’s entrenched regime. Indeed, there hasn’t even been a significant rural rebellion since 1958–59, when northern Amazigh Riffian tribes rose up against the newly independent government dominated by Morocco’s urban Arab elites.Of course at that time there was no Amazigh movement per se, nor was there any official reference to the Amazigh component of Moroccan national identity. This was despite the fact that Tamazight, in its three main Moroccan forms, was the native language of a majority of the country’s 12 million people, most of whom lived in the rural periphery. Some 55 years later, the percentage is considerably lower: Tamazight is now a minority language in Morocco, although the exact percentage of native speakers of its three main Moroccan dialects is hard to determine and understandably controversial. On the other hand, the Moroccan state has taken a number of significant symbolic steps in recent years to recognize Amazigh language and culture as a core component of Moroccan national identity, enshrining it in the new constitution drawn up and ratified in July 2011, as part of the king’s response to the protests of the grassroots February 20th movement earlier in the year.Amazigh youth participated in these protests, articulating both particular ethno-cultural demands and broader Moroccan national ones. The new constitution’s recognition of Tamazight as an official language, along with Arabic, was an historic achievement by any measure for the Amazigh identity movement. And it points to a paradox: The movement, and its agenda of re-centering North African and Moroccan history and identity, is very much a part of the increasingly contested fabric of public life, in which the traditional khuf min al-makhzen (“fear of the authorities”) has weakened. Yet it is extremely difficult to speak of the Amazigh movement in Morocco as a mass movement, at least if one measures the number of persons who can be mobilized for public demonstrations, let alone sustained ones. By way of comparison, the Moroccan Amazigh current has never generated anything approaching the two now-iconic episodes of sustained mass protest and large-scale organizational capacity displayed by the Kabylian Amazigh in Algeria—the 1980 “Berber Spring”, and the 2001 “Black Spring.”Given the neglected state of the largely Amazigh peripheral regions in Morocco, one would expect them to be a natural and fertile base for political recruitment and mobilization. However, the Moroccan makhzen has pursued a sophisticated and generally successful strategy combining co-option and repression that makes it difficult for would-be challengers to build a sustained base of support. Indeed, one of the country’s oldest and most durable political parties has been the staunchly pro-monarchy Mouvement Populaire, whose ties to the Palace enable it to dispense patronage services among its Amazigh electoral base, primarily in the Middle Atlas region.In addition, there has always been a certain disconnect between the socio-cultural demands emphasized by of the urban-based Amazigh associations, spearheaded by intellectuals and educated professionals, and the health, economic, infrastructural and environmental problems of the villages and towns of the mountains and valleys in the hinterland. This disparity acts as a brake on the movement’s mobilization capacities. This is not to say that the urban associations are unaware of or indifferent to these rural problems, only that the difficulties in mobilizing supporters in far-flung regions struggling for basic survival have been daunting. Nor can one rule out another impediment: the continued prevalence of local communal identities that come at the expense of a broader Amazigh identification.At the same time, Morocco’s peripheral regions are becoming better linked, however haltingly and unevenly, into the wider environs. This is primarily thanks to state penetration and, more recently, access to social media. As a result, the possibilities for increased collective action by social movements, including the Amazigh, are increasing. Indeed, we know that political upheavals set in motion by marginal and deprived groups often occur after a certain level of progress has been achieved. It would be rash to say that the foundations are being laid for a large-scale mobilization to address their socio-economic grievances. Nonetheless, the situation is increasingly fluid.With this general background in mind we can now examine how human insecurity issues in the mostly Amazigh periphery of Morocco are being addressed in specific cases. One of these cases concerns ongoing protests around the silver mine at Imider, in southeastern Morocco, to which we will return anon. Imider is not the only such case, and one cannot categorically rule out that various local protests will in time link up to change the texture of the Amazigh movement within Morocco.Most of these cases touch on longstanding grievances related to land and resources, which in turn are linked to the Amazigh culture movement’s efforts to recover and remember rural and tribal history. For example, the Moroccan authorities’ confiscation of the lands belonging to the Zaiane tribes in the Khenifra region has evoked comparisons to similar actions taken by the French Protectorate regime, in which the confiscation of communal lands, and the granting of preference to particular local leaders at the expense of others, had important negative effects on economic, social, and cultural life. Since the Moroccan government does not recognize customary law and views tribal lands as belonging to the state, it uses Royal dahirs—edicts signed by the King that have the force of law—to expropriate the territories in question. Student activists from the region emphasize the rights of local populations to benefit from the natural resources of the area in which they live, through mining, the use of water and forests, and so forth. They are challenging the Moroccan state to make good on its official promotion of administrative decentralization and regionalization, demanding the inclusion of locals in decision-making processes that affect them. Their militant discourse also includes insistence on proper compensation for the remaining elderly combatants of battles against the French conquerors, and demands for the rehabilitation and restoration of local kasbahs and palaces, concrete symbols of Amazigh culture and history, most of which are in an advanced state of decay.One particularly shocking episode occurred in the winter of 2007, when approximately thirty infants died within just a few days from an illness exacerbated by severe temperatures and the absence of basic medical services in the village of Anfgou in the Eastern High Atlas Mountains. The Moroccan national media sought to downplay the event, but Berber-speaking journalists and activists got the story out. The event went viral on social media, highlighting the village’s isolation and extreme poverty. The nearest hospital was seventy miles away, one could reach the village only via a rocky path alongside a riverbed that often flooded in the winter, and the village itself had no electricity, telephone network, or potable water. The shock reached the Royal Palace, generating a series of actions to ameliorate the situation, beginning with two visits by the King himself, and resulting in infrastructure projects that have substantially improved the life of the 1,700 villagers, although they remain deeply impoverished and dependent on others for their existence. For Amazigh militants such as Mouha Moukhlis, Anfgou and surrounding villages remain a symbol of what they view as the willful neglect of the periphery by the Arab-Islamic oriented authorities, including members of parliament who “read the Fatiha after the death of Saddam Husayn, but failed to do so after the Anfgou tragedies.” They cite as well as the neglect of the “city-dwelling” Amazigh who prefer to sit home and watch al-Jazeera and Arte TV.But let us now go to Imider as promised, the site of the most sustained grassroots protest against the authorities. The protest centers around an extremely valuable and profitable silver mine in the vicinity of Imider, which is a collection of seven small villages, total population 7,000, in southeast Morocco about 130 km northeast of Ouarzazate. The mine is owned by a subsidiary of Managem, the mining branch of the Société Nationale d’Investissement (SNI), a massive holding company whose largest shareholder is the Moroccan royal family. Established in 1969, the mine produces 240 tons of silver annually, and had a turnover in 2010 of €74 million, making it one of the most important silver mines in Africa. For villagers, the mine is a symbol of how the state authorities and allied elites extract enormous wealth from their traditional lands, literally the ground beneath their feet, while leaving them struggling to eke out an impoverished existence. Moreover, the mine’s operations require an enormous amount of water. And in the summer of 2011, it became clear that pumping ground water into the mine for silver extraction depleted the supply upon which local inhabitants depended.Earlier that summer, university students returning home following the end of the academic year found that their traditional seasonal jobs working at the mine were no longer available, which only added to the general sense of embitterment and discrimination. Then, as Ramadan approached, the faucets bringing drinking water to the village began to run dry, and the water that did occasionally emerge had an increasingly foul smell.The young people of the villages decided to act. They hiked up the 1,400-meter Mont Alban, where stood a water tower serving the mine. There they established what has become a permanent encampment and took control of one of the water pumps serving the mine. First they shut it down, and then they redirected the water to the village. Four years later they are still at it, organized under the banner of what they call “Movement on Road 96 Imider.”More than that, the organizers have succeeded in mobilizing sufficient numbers of local inhabitants to maintain the encampment and periodically conduct marches along the roads in the area. Tents have been replaced by stone structures decorated gaily with graffiti, and bear inspirational inscriptions from people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa. Among their global-oriented activities has been a special march by hundreds of women organized to mark International Women’s Day. They have also linked their struggle to global environmental concerns, pointing to the environmental degradation caused by the widespread use of poisonous substances such as mercury and cyanide in the mine’s operation. According to villagers, the damage to people’s health, crops, and livestock has been great. Ironically, perhaps, the villagers want both the jobs that the mine provides and an alteration of its basic operations so as to be protected from its harmful effects.They have achieved a measure of attention, including a lengthy article in the New York Times in which the Amazigh flag was displayed on a hilltop. In examining the ways in which the protest is articulated, it is clear that the activists view their Amazighité as integral to their identity, and instrumental for mobilizing support.The regime’s response has been moderate. The authorities crushed a similar, though smaller, protest back in 1996, with one fatality. The “new” Morocco uses more sophisticated methods to maintain order. The makhzen’s heavy hand is certainly present, but for the most part it is gloved. The security forces try to ensure that outsiders do not visit the site. Thirty protestors were imprisoned for a few months, and three of the activists, who had been subjected to a brutal arrest in March 2014, were convicted of disturbing public order and sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 60,000 dirhams each—sentences which were confirmed in July 2014 by a court of appeals. Their crimes included “establishment of a criminal gang”, “embezzlement”, “assembly without permit”, “disorderly conduct”, and ” premeditated aggression.” Freeing them has now become part of the movement’s agenda.In the midst of the crackdown on activists and the strong security presence in the area, the mine’s operators conducted year-long negotiations with the elected representatives of the Imider rural commune and a number of associations, producing what the management said was an agreement to promote human development in the region. This included the opening of summer camps and academic support programs for 720 children, and the provision of 2,000 school kits to students. “For us”, said a company representative, “the page is turned.” According to a spokesman, the company spends $1 billion in development projects for the region; the activists claim that nothing much has changed. The company also spent heavily in trying to burnish its image in the Moroccan and European media, and even helped served as a sponsor of the second World Human Rights Forum held in Marrakesh in late November 2014.Studies of social movements generally focus on three elements: grievances, political opportunity, and resource mobilization. In the case of Imider, one can certainly locate the grievances that triggered and focused the protests; one can also point to the increased opportunities for political expression that have evolved during the 15-year reign of Muhammad VI, and particularly the ferment that characterized Morocco’s public sphere during the first half of 2011 when the Imider protests first began. The protests are also part of a larger pattern of increasing anger about socio-economic issues in small towns over the previous decade. Koenraad Bogaert has cogently written about this phenomenon, emphasizing the contemporary form of global capitalism, class politics, and the relations of power and exploitation that produce food insecurity, poverty, and inequality.With regard to resource mobilization, however, the picture is more clouded, which perhaps helps us understand why the Amazigh movement has not become a mass movement in Morocco in the conventional sense. By way of comparison, it may be useful to look at the highly successful Movement of Rural Landless Workers in Brazil, which has won land for over 300,000 families since it first began organizing in 1984. One of its central pillars was the official support of the Catholic Church, which provided a crucial means of organizing movement activities throughout rural Brazil. No such comparable support from the state-controlled Moroccan religious establishment exists in the Imider case, or regarding Amazigh grievances in general. It should be noted, too, that much of the Amazigh movement’s discourse is broadly secular/modernist in character, and is often accused by its opponents of being anti-Islam.Indeed, the authorities are keen to prevent any linkage between religion and the Imider activists. This year, they banned a local Imam from conducting a prayer service at the protesters’ mountain encampment during the Eid celebrations; the activists did manage, however, to sneak in an Imam from a remote area to do the job, in the presence of 3,000 people. The strikers have received support from an Italian NGO and Italian and Spanish labor unions, which speaks to the ways in which local activists in peripheral regions can “go global” these days. However, the ground is apparently not ripe for the Imider strike to develop into a larger action. Even the various Amazigh associations that exist in neighboring towns and villages have largely kept their distance from the Imider protests due to a combination of fear of the authorities and a still-entrenched localism that inhibits the growth of a broader-based movement.More recent research on social movements seeks to understand the motivations of the participants, the ways in which they are personally affected and even transformed, and the attendant social dynamics of the protest groups. Why do people join, or not join, as the case may be? Are the social ties strong enough to make protest associations stick? How is it sustained? Is there a strategy besides just waiting for grievances to be addressed?The personal accounts of three of the male participants in the Imider protests interviewed for this study—one of whom has resumed his studies in Agadir after three years of on-site activity; another who, like the first, is in his mid-twenties, but suspended his studies for the time being, and a third, who is 31-years old and unemployed—add depth to the story and get at some of the answers to the foregoing questions. To be sure, their answers are themselves a part of their struggle to get their story out, and thus cannot be accepted uncritically; neither can they be dismissed, however.In general, they display a high degree of commitment and determination, and describe a degree of solidarity among the local population that cuts across age, gender, and the seven villages in the district. Their families are supportive, and indeed participate in the ongoing protest actions and marches themselves. When I asked about the “fear factor”, one of them was defiant: “There’s a time to live and a time to die, and it’s better to die in a fight for truth than to live lies.” Another acknowledged awareness of the long arm of the authorities, “which never forgets”, and can reach all the way to the university in Agadir, creating a climate of fear which does inhibit behavior.All three describe the evolution of the confrontation with the mining company going back decades, and which reached a state of desperation in 2011. One also emphasized that their initial actions were taken in the context of Morocco’s “Democracy Spring” protests, and a similar protest in recent years against the national phosphate company in Khouribja, near Khenifra. They describe a regularized weekly consultation and decision-making process—a general assembly (Agraw) in which anyone can participate and vote, and specialized committees, regular marches on the adjacent roads to call attention to their struggle, and an encampment that has been transformed into permanent structures, in which the number of inhabitants varies according to circumstances.I asked them what they think they have achieved thus far, and they speak proudly of having raised the consciousness and determination of the population, of their self-reliance in collecting donations of funds and supplies, and of the partial improvement to the state of their water supply. Yet they remain both defiant and cynical over the bad faith of the company and the authorities, which want to end the protests but not to do justice in the process.Most impressively, perhaps, they display an intimate knowledge of local history, while framing their grievances within the larger context of the struggle of the Ait Atta tribal confederation against French colonial conquest, and the subsequent expropriation of collective lands—a policy that was continued by the independent Moroccan state after independence in 1956. This is, of course, part of the larger Amazigh narrative. They also refer to a specific ethnic grievance: the authorities bringing in Arab workers from another regions to replace local labor.While one of them emphasized that theirs was a social protest, and not a political movement as such, he acknowledged that, for him, the movement was inseparable from the larger themes of promoting both Amazigh identity and democracy. Outside support—mostly moral—comes from sympathetic Europeans and Amazigh associations such as Tamaynut, but the degree of interaction and coordination with other civil society groups has actually declined since 2011, they said, owing to preventative actions taken by the authorities.1 Recent actions include preventing a delegation of the French branch of Tamaynut from visiting the site, and the arrest of two activists who had left the encampment to seek medical attention in the town of Tinghir, 30 kilometers away.In late November 2014, the heaviest storms to hit Morocco in decades resulted in sudden massive floods in the south of the country, in the foothills of the Anti Atlas Mountains. Over 50 people perished, hundreds of homes were destroyed or heavily damaged, livestock was lost and numerous roads were washed away. Although the authorities undertook rescue and relief operations, they were generally deemed insufficient and part of a larger pattern of neglect. People were particularly angered by the use of a garbage truck to remove many of the dead bodies. One month afterwards in downtown Casablanca, approximately 200 Amazigh activists from around the country, male and female together, demonstrated in solidarity with the victims of the floods and denounced the authorities’ treatment of them. Their chants included the following: “We are not Arab”, and “Men and Women are equal”; they had signs that read, “Billions go to Palestine and we seek sugar so we can eat”, and, “We are the natives to the land, we want our rights.”2 The demonstrators were met by a large number of policemen, who roughed some of them up and arrested a few more.Overall, it appears that the Amazigh movement’s efforts to address the very real insecurity facing the Amazigh population in the Moroccan periphery, and to do so in ways that will support the movement’s overall goals, remain Sisyphean. The activists are held back by both exogenous and endogenous factors. Still, given the increasingly contested public space of today’s Morocco, the state’s partial legitimation of Amazigh identity, and the very real issues of insecurity in the mostly Amazigh periphery, it would be foolish to assume that local protests will remain limited and easily containable in the future. That, after all, is what a lot of people said about another non-Arab, fissiparous mountain folk just a few years ago: the Kurds.

1Drawn from email interviews I conducted with three participants in the protests.

2A journalist present at the protests conveyed this to me.

D.C. Court Allows NSA Metadata Collection

The legal battle over the NSA metadata surveillance program continues, as a DC appeals court has allowed the program to continue operating—albeit for technical reasons. The Washington Post reports on the ruling, which kicked the case back to a lower court after finding that the person who filed the suit lacked standing:

The panel’s ruling also reversed a ban on the NSA’s collection that had been imposed — and temporarily stayed — by a district court judge in December 2013.

The strictly procedural ruling does not address the constitutionality or legality of the program.

But while this case winds through court, some of the issues it involves may already be largely moot. In June, President Obama signed into law the USA Freedom Act, which will put strict new controls on data collection and is set to take full effect in December after a “transition period”:

At the end of the transition period, the NSA will be barred from collecting domestic phone records in bulk under the Patriot Act. Instead it will be required to obtain court approval to ask companies for phone numbers of individuals with suspected links to terrorism. The companies under court order will return to the agency metadata related to those calls and potentially calls linked to them.

The fusion of information with state power will be one of the driving forces of the 21st century, in both foreign and domestic politics. Corporations like Google already know much more about what people think and how they behave than any government in the past; both in the liberal west and in authoritarian countries we don’t need to name, governments will be increasing their own access to the troves of information now available on the web.

This will force us into nothing short of a redefinition, in some respects, of civil liberty. When, sitting in your own living room, you are interacting with people from all over the world, and when, every time you venture onto the internet, you are entering a wilderness as full of predators and dangers and powerful actors as any Enchanted Forest in any fairy tale ever told, what is the meaning of privacy? Solitude isn’t private in the age of the web, at least as things are shaping up now.So how do we manage the tradeoffs between the limits of government power, the boundaries of individual freedom, and protection against the new capacity to commit crimes against individuals (fraud), companies (hacking), and the common safety (terrorism and cyberwar) that we already face today and will face in an even larger scale in the future?The basic answer is that nobody knows yet. This is all too new, happening too fast, and the changes in technology are outpacing the changes in our ability to process and legislate them. And that is likely to be the case for some time. In spite of the techno-pessimists who tell us that innovation is fading away, the world of the internet continues to develop in new and surprising ways, bringing new challenges as well as new benefits—think, for example, of the future of car-hacking in a world of autonomous vehicles.But the news from the U.S. on this front is not that bad. We have a 300 year tradition of balancing civil liberties, government power, and the safety of the community through a mix of legislation, judicial oversight, and public debate. We don’t always get it right—just ask the Japanese who were interned during World War II. But as a society we’ve developed a reasonably good track record at dealing with the social, political, and legal consequences of technological change.The old system seems to be working even now. The NSA suits winding their way through the courts show that serious people are asking the right questions; we’ve had some legislative change and it’s likely that more will come. The situation is complex. The questions on these issues are important, and we don’t know the answers. Moreover, policy is, and must remain, a moving target as both the technological and the security situations shift. Given all that complexity, we are probably doing about as well as can be expected as American society tries to find its way forward. But success can’t be taken for granted, either. The courts, the Congress, and the supreme American tribunal of public opinion will have to stay engaged.

Defying the EU the Italian Way

“Reform, yes; change, no.” As this excellent Reuters report by Gavin Jones makes clear, this has been the slogan of Italy’s bureaucrats and big industrialists for many years now. Laws are passed, prime ministers take bows for the camera, and then…nothing.

Why? For one thing, even after parliament passes a bill and the president signs it into law, it isn’t quite law yet. The bureaucrats still have to issue an implementation decree that defines how, exactly, the law will be carried out. This can take months, years, even forever—and by the time the implementation protocols emerge from the bowels of the bureaucracy, they have often been amended and weakened to the point that they change little or nothing.And the bureaucrats have an easy time of it; Italian reform laws tend to be thought through poorly and drafted poorly, and they are then amended in a complicated legislative process that usually both weakens the intent of the law and complicates its execution. All of that provides plenty of grounds for the bureaucrats to “interpret” what’s left into something bland and ineffective.The second big reason is that the Italian state is weak—it is not very good at making people do what they don’t want to do, especially in the South. After all, the Mafia and other organized crime associations have been defying governments since the Middle Ages. They are still at it today, and Italy is a prime case. The politicians and even the bureaucrats in far away Rome may have decreed reforms, say, in the trash hauling business, but what matters much, much more to the officials on the ground in South Italy is what Tony Soprano thinks about the reforms.Beyond that, Italy has far too many local governments. It has twice as many municipalities and towns, for example, as the much larger and more populous United States. The central government doesn’t have enough inspectors and overseers to keep them all in line, and even if it did, the inspectors and the overseers would often sympathize more with their fellow bureaucrats than with the grandstanding politicians in parliament. Beyond that, firing a tenured civil servant in Italy is virtually impossible, meaning that bureaucrats can pretty much run their offices to suit themselves.Italy is far more sophisticated and clever, that is, than the hot-headed Greeks. Syriza is a party of naifs who made the mistake of attacking Germany and Brussels head-on. Italy is savvier than that: it knows how to say “yes” and look busy while doing little or nothing. Italy has a long history of using that strategy. The Goths conquered Rome and did a lot of damage—but they didn’t change Italy much. German emperors strutted through the halls of Italy’s palaces and issued decrees to both princes and popes—and Italy kept on being Italian all the same. The idealists of the Risorgimento who fought for Italian unification in the 19th century dreamed that a united Italy would become a modern great power, but what they got instead was more of the same. Mussolini tried to make Italy organized, disciplined, and modern, but his efforts made little difference in the end. The Italian Communist Party became steadily more Italian and less Communist over time; the mani pulite scandal was supposed to provoke a wholesale shake-up of the Italian political class. The scandal ended, and with a few minor changes the political system rolls on.It is very hard to see how Germany or Brussels could pressure Italy actually to make the kind of deep and meaningful change they want the country to make. It is much easier to see how Italy can go on indefinitely holding them at bay with cosmetic reforms. Getting Italy to turn itself into the kind of economic partner Germany wants in the eurozone really is like trying to nail Jello to the wall. It’s the nature of Jello to slither down walls and nails have nothing to do with that fact.In other words, if Germany’s problem in the eurozone was as simple as its problem with Syriza—beating back an open challenge from incompetent blowhards—Berlin could rest easy. But the real problem is that the social transformation that Germany demands in the name of the euro is one that many eurozone members do not want to make—and perhaps could not make if they tried. Even Greece seems to be learning this lesson: A smarter strategy for Greece, and one it appears to be reverting to, is the Italian approach of saying “yes” and then failing, of looking endlessly busy with reforms but ensuring that whatever you do always falls short. Germany can’t replace the Greek bureaucracy with German bureaucrats, and it can’t micromanage a society that it doesn’t understand. Germany is stronger than France, stronger than Italy, almost infinitely stronger than Greece. But it isn’t stronger than culture and it isn’t stronger than inertia.This cultural argument, of course, shouldn’t be taken to mean that nothing ever changes, or that nothing could ever be different, in Italy. Like all countries with living cultures, Italy changes over time. Feudalism ended. The industrial revolution reshaped North Italy dramatically, while it brought notably less industrial development in the South. The Church has lost much of its power. Immigration will shake up Italy even more. But the shifts can’t be guided, and they certainly can’t be timed to suit the plans of technocrats. They come in their own time, and in their own way—and, so far at least, it isn’t easy to argue that cultural change is making Italy more German.If Europe is going to have a single currency, it must be one that is permissive enough for Italians to go about their business as they see fit without violating German expectations of order and honesty. There probably is no magic meeting place that makes both sides happy; the German proposal is that the Italians reform to fit the euro and the Italian counter-proposal is that they pretend to reform and the Germans pretend to believe.The problem with the euro isn’t, and never has been, one of interest rates and austerity. It has always been at its core cultural and not administrative: it is a political problem and not a technocratic one. Unfortunately, the only effective institution for managing the eurozone’s affairs is the ECB, a technocratic institution that can only deal in the decisions that central banks make. It can raise and lower interest rates; it can take a more or less accommodating stance to the deficits of its member states. It cannot reconcile the conflict between cultures and values that is the heart of the matter.All this, then, adds up to a simple forecast: There’s more trouble ahead for the eurozone, with greater disenchantment with the European project very likely in both the north and the south.