Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 648

Uighur Muslims and China’s Expanding Authoritarianism

The age of Xi hasn’t been easy time for China’s Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority which lives primarily in the Western region of Xinjiang. Ramadam has been curtailed, Uighurs have been forced to sell booze and cigarettes, passports have been seized, and the area has seen violence that’s claimed “hundreds” of lives. But the rhetoric on the Uighurs seems to be shifting into especially high gear lately, according to Reuters:

China’s military must bring “modern civilization” to the restive southern areas of the Xinjiang region, where Muslim ethnic Uighurs are in majority, and help develop its economy, two senior army officers wrote in an influential journal […]

Writing in the latest edition of the bimonthly Communist Party magazine Qiushi, the commander of the southern Xinjiang military region Li Haiyang and its military commissar Miao Wenjiang said that soldiers must “ardently love” the area. […]The article promised an even greater zeal in fighting terror.“The struggle against terror and to maintain stability is severe and complex. It is a real war with knives and guns, a life and death war,” it said. “Strike early, strike at the small and strike at the roots.”

This article comes as Reuters also reports that some Xinjiang authorities have issued another round of Ramadan controls, including, apparently, on fasting. The crackdown is beginning to become a geopolitical issue with some of China’s friends and neighbors in the Middle East:

Turkey’s foreign ministry said it had been “saddened” by these reports and passed its concern on to the Chinese ambassador in Ankara.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China wanted to have a good relationship with Turkey.“China has already demanded that Turkey clarify these reports and we have expressed concern about the statement from the Turkish foreign ministry,” Hua told a daily news briefing.“You should know that all the people of Xinjiang enjoy the freedom of religious belief accorded to them by the Chinese constitution,” she added.

We’ll leave it to you, the reader, to square the circle of “religious freedom” and whatever it takes to enforce “restrictions on fasting.” As we’ve noted before, China has some legitimate worries about the radicalization of the Uighurs, who have connections to Pakistan and Afghanistan. But crackdowns like this won’t forestall radicalization; rather, they could make it more likely.

The Amazing Vanishing Climate Change Fund!

This was a big week for pledging to solve climate change, as some of the world’s biggest economies promised to get greener by conveniently round-numbered degrees. The NYT reports:

In [a] joint announcement by Brazil and the United States, the two nations committed to increasing the use of wind, solar and geothermalenergy to make up 20 percent of each country’s electricity production by 2030, which would double power generation from renewable sources in Brazil and triple it in the United States. Brazil also pledged to restore about 30 million acres of Amazon rain forest, an area about the size of Pennsylvania […]

China’s plan included a broad commitment to decouple economic growth from the use of fossil fuels, and a move to lower its carbon intensity, or the amount of the pollutant generated by each point of economic growth, by 60 to 65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. It also laid out plans to develop a national cap-and-trade system, a market-based program for reducing emissions in which companies must pay for permits to pollute, and can buy and sell those permits among themselves.

But these announcements are not a cure-all for the problems that threaten to bedevil the climate summit. Conspicuously absent from all of these announcements were any concrete contributions to a proposed $100 billion fund intended to assist the world’s poorer countries in coping with climate change. As it’s currently sketched out, the developed world would pay into this massive fund annually, and that money would go towards helping the developing world mitigate and adapt to climate change. But as Bloomberg reports, little progress has been made towards seeing this policy realized:

With five months to go before a critical conference that’s expected to result in a global emissions pact, developing nations say they’re still waiting for proof the richest countries will meet a $100 billion-a-year pledge to help them curb greenhouse gases and adapt to a warming world. The concerns threaten to undermine talks aimed at reaching an agreement in Paris in December. […]

Wealthy economies, including the U.S. and Europe, first promised the funding in 2009, committing to mobilize both public and private financing. So far, the countries have pledged about $10 billion for one UN agency, the Green Climate Fund, but not all the money has actually been delivered.

With not even a tenth of that annual fund accounted for, the world’s poorer nations will head into December’s climate summit in Paris with a certain amount of mistrust and skepticism. The divide between the developed and developing worlds lies at the very heart of these climate talks, and the fact that more progress hasn’t been made towards filling up this green wallet should alarm everyone involved with the negotiations.

Iran Extends $500 Million Credit to Venezuela

When and if a deal delivers sanctions relief, Iran is expected to pocket north of $100 billion in a windfall in released funds—and reap further profits from no-longer-sanctioned industries such as oil. What they want to do with the money might go beyond even the standard pessimistic take of many U.S. commentators (who notice small, inconvenient things such as that Iran is already doing pretty well running its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen right now). An important, under-reported story from last week gives a clue. According to Reuters:

Venezuela has signed an agreement with Iran for a $500 million credit line to fund joint investments and help improve supplies of goods “necessary for the Venezuelan people,” President Nicolas Maduro said on Friday.

Declining oil prices have crimped Venezuela’s cash-flow and aggravated shortages of consumer goods ranging from dish soap to milk, leaving Maduro’s government seeking financing from allies around the world.“We’ve signed (an agreement for) an open credit for $500 million that will begin to function immediately,” Maduro said during a televised address following a meeting with an Iranian delegation.

As a deal has looked more and more likely this spring, Iran has been able to start spending a bit against its expected future earnings. The Venezuelan agreement, for instance, would look foolish for a nation under sanctions for the indefinite future. But for a regime that’s a bit more flush, it’s a good way to start causing trouble in non-Middle Eastern areas.

The Venezuelan regime has been a traditional thorn in America’s backside (and back yard), but it’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. By supporting it, Iran both perpetuates a distraction for America (which has more than its share of them right now) and signals its intention to reassert its role as one of the leaders of the broader “non-aligned movement.”As Michael Rubin recently pointed out at Commentary in regard to the Iranian press’s activities in Africa, there are a lot more places out there open to Iranian influence—provided a little money can get involved—than one might at first think:

Cold, hard cash also plays a role. Iranian officials, for example, have long pursued a strategy to cultivate Africa. Tehran has sought to buy the votes of non-permanent African members of the UN Security Council and members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors, for example, beyond seeking logistical bases for its military and potential uranium exporters.

If the “new global disorder” continues to increase, and if the U.S. seems to be having more trouble in more places, Iran’s opportunities to cause headaches with a little cash and influence will likely expand. When and if the Administration decides to sign a deal, we hope that someone in the West Wing has plans for how to counter moves like this one.

What to Make of Cuban Intransigence

As the Obama Administration celebrates its milestone agreement with the Castros to open a U.S. embassy in Havana, it is important to remember the magnitude of the obstacles that remain before relations between the two countries are fully normalized. Consider the statement put out yesterday by the Cuban government:

In order to normalize relations, it will … be indispensable for the United States Government to return to Cuba the territory illegally occupied by the Guantánamo Naval Base; cease the radio and television broadcasts, which violate international regulations and are harmful to our sovereignty; stop the implementation of programs aimed at promoting internal subversion and destabilization and compensate the Cuban people for all the human and economic damages caused by the United States policies.

These radical demands are not new—the Castros released a nearly identical list of asks in January—but they are nonetheless a reminder that, despite the recent moves toward a rapprochement , the Cubans still want to keep the U.S. at arms-length. As Walter Russell Mead wrote last December, a full economic opening of Cuba could be devastating to the regime’s command-and-control economy. It is in the the Castros’ interest for relations between the U.S. and Cuba to normalize slowly, rather than all at once.

One interpretation is that the Castros are deliberately making outsized demands in order to make sure the normalization process does not proceed too quickly, in the interest of self-preservation. The opening of the embassy—far from the triumph that some of the President’s supporters crowed about— is just the beginning of what is sure to be a drawn-out diplomatic dance between the U.S. and its former Cold War adversary in the Caribbean.

Audit Alleges Eurogreens Mismanaging Carbon Market

The European Union unveiled a bloc-wide carbon market ten years ago, but has so far failed to live up to the vaunted eco-expectations surrounding it. Now EU auditors are warning that the carbon trading system needs better oversight to protect its integrity, as the WSJ reports:

The auditors looked at the implementation of the second phase, which began in 2008 and ended in 2012, and observed that despite major improvements, the bloc’s main policy to fight climate change still lacks efficient oversight of the emissions market at an EU level. The report focuses on the integrity of the market, rather than its effectiveness in reducing emissions or creating incentives for low-carbon investments.

The report says that a clearer legal definition of emission allowances and tighter EU-wide monitoring of cross-border transactions are needed for the system to be further improved.

Carbon markets are a favorite eco-tool of many economists, but predictably their implementation is more difficult than their green boosters might expect. China made waves when it announced seven regional pilot markets with the hope of soon creating a national scheme, but that experiment is already running into trouble. Things are even more complicated in the EU, which has to weigh the various concerns of its members against the already precarious balance between economic imperatives and green ambitions.

The EU market, called the ETS, has been plagued by problems from the beginning, most centering around its inability to set a market-responsive carbon price. The 2008 financial crisis dealt a blow to Europe’s economy and by extension its emissions, but the market lacked a mechanism to account for that recession, and as a result the price of carbon plunged to levels too low to really incentivize companies to go green.According to this latest audit, Brussels isn’t just struggling to find the carbon price sweet spot, it’s also mismanaging the system and leaving it open to abuse. The EU should take this warning seriously—green policies often rely on state- or institution-backed subsidization that leave the door wide open for unscrupulous parties interested in capitalizing on that cash cow.

Another EU Problem Where the Numbers Just Don’t Add Up

The number of migrants reaching European shores has shot up sharply in the first half of the year, according to new figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.N. agency said 137,000 migrants have reached Greece, Malta, Italy and Spain since January, an 83% increase compared with the same period last year.

“Europe is living through a maritime refugee crisis of historic proportions,” the U.N. said.From January to June, 68,000 migrants entered Greece from Turkey, while 67,500 landed on Italy’s southern shores after crossing the Mediterranean from Libya.

As Athens’ finances and its relations with its EU partners are a mess, Greece overtaking Italy (by a hair) as the main entry point for migrants does not bode well for it or Europe. But more broadly, these numbers illustrate a crisis that has grown beyond quick fixes, at least as currently on the table.

Just a week ago, we wrote about the high-profile, highly contentious summit of European leaders that just barely managed to pass a one-off resettlement plan for 60,000 people—after fighting until 3 a.m. At the time, we noted that, “while substantial as an absolute number, [60,000] is small as a percentage the overall number of asylum-seekers now on Europe’s shores.”With summer coming, these raw intake numbers will increase—perhaps rapidly. And there are still backlogs to deal with. This is, unfortunately, another major European crisis where the numbers just don’t add up.

A Poor Report Card for Obama’s Foreign Policy

How is “leading from behind” going, anyway? The Pentagon has updated America’s National Military Strategy for the first time since 2011. It’s an interesting reflection on how the world has changed on Obama’s watch. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey penned the introduction:

Since the last National Military Strategy was published in 2011, global disorder has significantly increased while some of our comparative military advantage has begun to erode. We now face multiple, simultaneous security challenges from traditional state actors and transregional networks of sub-state groups – all taking advantage of rapid technological change. Future conflicts will come more rapidly, last longer, and take place on a much more technically challenging battlefield. They will have increasing implications to the U.S. homeland.

[…T]he application of the military instrument of power against state threats is very different than the application of military power against non-state threats. We are more likely to face prolonged campaigns than conflicts that are resolved quickly[….C]ontrol of escalation is becoming more difficult and more important[….A]s a hedge against unpredictability with reduced resources, we may have to adjust our global posture.

Translation: The world is getting more dangerous, and we may be losing our edge.

That the President’s top man in the military thinks that the world order is deteriorating is not a ringing endorsement of Obama’s foreign policy. The last century of history shows that American power, for all its many faults shown by its all-too-frequent misapplications, tends on balance to make things better rather than worse. In fact, looking at the history of the 20th and 21st centuries a certain way, America’s moral sins of omission have often had direr consequences than her sins of commission. Yet this President seems to think that things don’t and can’t improve by way of unilateral American action and engagement.Obama has operated under the explicit theory that abstention is a not a choice with consequences that we have to take responsibility for (vide: “Don’t do stupid stuff”). That’s a philosophical idea, not a policy issue. But as Thucydides said, history is philosophy teaching by example. The Obama philosophy has been guiding the course for nearly seven years now, and unfortunately we must concur with Gen. Dempsey that the state of the world today is a poor example indeed.

Danes Slashing Immigrant Benefits

There has been some immediate fallout from Denmark’s remarkable election during which the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party came in a strong second:

Denmark’s new centre-right government will cut immigrants’ benefits by half as it named the founder of an anti-immigration party as Speaker of parliament.

Pia Kjærsgaard, the founder of the Danish People’s party who was once named “racist of the year” by a Swedish magazine, will be the new Speaker, the main political position outside of government.

These are the wages of failing to adopt sensible policies over immigration: it opens the door to radical measures, and to having the “racist of the year” serve as Speaker in your parliament. If Denmark’s political establishment had thought more carefully about its approach, the populists would not have gotten this far. This should serve as a reminder to political establishments everywhere: pay attention to the people. In the end, you can’t govern without them.

 

Grexit May Be Europe’s Teaching Moment

There is no denying that the Greek default—whatever its final outcome—will bring Greece economic dislocation and even more pain, and there’s no doubt that it will launch further shockwaves across the Continent and the Atlantic. But at its foundation the unfolding “Greek tragedy” is about more than the Athenian political class’s lies and pandering and the Greek citizenry’s unsustainable expectations. It is ultimately about the European Union, the limits of top-down state engineering, and European elites’ hubris and disregard for the effects of their schemes on the ordinary citizen. It is telling indeed that Europe’s postmodern elites, as they berate the Greek Prime Minister for daring to demand a referendum on his country’s most consequential decision in decades, seem still to believe in the non-negotiable character of the European Union project. For them, institutions will always trump cultures, and economic inducements will always overcome deeply rooted national identities. Germany and France are prosperous, and they surely have the right to engage in democratic processes. Does Greece not have that right, simply because it has driven itself into bankruptcy?

The European idea of a common market expanding into a larger community of nations remains as valid today as it was in the 1950s. Trade, cross-investment, and the sharing of resources for infrastructure projects, insofar as they benefit economic growth, are all part of the manifest successes of the original vision of a European community. Still, the EU as it is presently conceived has produced more than its share of hubris and bad ideas, beyond the notion of bringing Greece into the Eurozone. The partial de-nationalization of the state and the partial limits on state sovereignty in the name of peace still lie at the foundation of the original European project, but they have since given way, especially since the end of the Cold War, to a European bureaucratic fantasy of what should constitute the “Union.” The idea of a common market has been knocked out from its central place by the vision of a pan-European quasi-state entity, whose workings few in Europe understand, and which, most importantly, has consistently failed to generate a new Europe-wide identity in place of national allegiances. This is not just a Greek problem; bureaucratic empire building has its limits, and we call those limits “citizens.” The stirrings across Europe, from the United Kingdom through Spain to Poland, show that the issues at hand are not purely economic, and that traditional national identity, citizen participation and sovereignty remain just as relevant to democracy today as they were in years past.It is particularly poignant that Greece and its demos are what may ultimately force Europe to rediscover the original premises underlying the European project and the meaning of democratic processes. In the hubbub of the past months, as Grexit inched closer, commentaries emanating from Europe (and at times from the U.S.) often lost sight of the fact that in the final analysis Greece is a democratic society (one which has faults, not least a tendency to live beyond its means). The Greeks have the right to make their own choices, and likewise the responsibility to live with the consequences. The European project should be about creating a community of democratic nations whose voices and aspirations are not lost in the larger whole. Or perhaps the problem is that what analysts have often called Europe’s “democracy deficit” goes deeper than what they suspected. We shall know soon enough.It is perhaps pointless to re-hash the euro’s original sin of disconnecting fiscal and monetary policies, or whether this was an overreach from the start. Europe’s common currency, notwithstanding economic arguments then and now, remains a quintessentially political project. As it happens, a nation’s inability to control and thereby assume responsibility for the consequences of its monetary policy remains one of the most disruptive aspects of the euro when it comes to the functioning of a democracy. This is less about economics than about the deepest fundamentals of democratic politics and self-government. This dilemma could perhaps be glossed over in times of stability and prosperity (especially if the government, as in the Greek case, simply cheats and lies and others pretend they don’t notice). But to expect that, at a time of national emergency, Mr. Tsipras will bend to Ms. Merkel’s and Mr. Juncker’s will without a fight is to misread the basics of democratic politics. He may still fail, and Greece may still accept the terms of another bailout (desperate people can be cowed), but let us not confuse such a move with democratic process.Despite the dangerous economic winds ahead, there may ultimately be a silver lining to the “Greek tragedy”: Europe may begin to return the grand elite project it has always been to its proper and necessary democratic context. Economic market integration is a workable path to peace, but EU leaders should never have lost sight of the limitations of this project imposed by the enduring primacy of national sovereignty. In the end, the European Union is not a state but a treaty-based organization, and it is unreasonable therefore to expect that its members will surrender all sovereignty on the most fundamental aspects of their existence.Asking the Greeks to forgo for decades any reasonable prospects of economic recovery just so that the euro idea remains pristine is a bridge too far. For Greece, being on EU welfare for a generation is not a solution. It is time to let the Greeks return to the drachma and start the painful process of putting their economy back together. And for EU leaders, it is time to learn some humility as they craft policy.

China’s Carbon Markets Stumble

When China unveiled a pilot program for carbon trading in seven regional markets, greens were quick to seize on the experimental policy as proof that carbon markets could be easily installed globally, if only the political will existed. But Beijing’s experience is proving that assumption naive as it struggles to make the transition to a national carbon market. Reuters reports:

The national scheme should be ready by the end of next year or early 2017, but traders said the transition to a national system is already causing problems.

“The opaque policymaking process makes it confusing for trading companies, and without clarification on market integration, companies are not encouraged to make long-term trading plans,” said a senior trader who declined to be named.Four of China’s seven pilot markets have reached the end of their compliance year, which should have boosted trade volumes as firms bought permits to cover annual targets, but activity has remained slow.

It isn’t just the volume of trading in these pilot markets that has planners concerned. Prices for carbon permits have plunged recently:

Prices in five of the markets have fallen sharply, with the Shanghai market ending its compliance year on Tuesday at 15.5 yuan, down 38 percent from its launch. Permits in the biggest pilot exchange in Guangdong have dropped 73 percent to 16 yuan.

As Europe knows well, pricing is critically important in any carbon market. Too high a price for carbon and you risk incentivizing energy-intensive industry to outsource production (a process known as carbon leakage), but too low a price and firms find little reason to adjust behavior and curb emissions (as we’ve seen in Europe).

Beijing has made a lot of headlines recently for its eco-friendly target setting, and central to many of these plans has been the implementation of regional carbon markets, and eventually the creation of a national system. So far things are not going exactly according to plan.