Harvard International Review

At Home and Abroad

Janet Eom — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:22:13 +0000

Restoring American Political Exceptionalism

The United States’ preeminent position as the leading democracy in the world is threatened today by a breakdown in our politics that can be traced back to the 2000 election and the policy failures that occurred in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I have seen this erosion in America’s standing firsthand in my work abroad. For the last 17 years I have worked on campaigns outside of the United States as a political consultant. That work, regarding the way in which American consultants run high-level political campaigns abroad, has been the subject of a study group that I led this fall at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

While working on one of these campaigns abroad in 2001, I flew to Dublin, Ireland where I had consulted on the previous general election in 1997 and was working again for the leaders of Fianna Fáil, the party of the government at that time. I was headed for a series of political meetings in preparation for the upcoming general election in 2002. Since I was working for a client on the West Coast of the United States, when I began my trip to Dublin, my journey took me through the Denver airport on the way to Chicago to catch a non-stop flight to Ireland.

In early October of 2001, the Denver airport—like many airports in America—could fairly be described as an armed camp. Throughout the spacious main terminal, troops with automatic weapons kept guard in the wake of the attacks on America by Al Qaeda terrorists. The reality of those terrorist attacks was palpable to every passenger that day, and as I saw firsthand when I worked for Senator John Kerry, the events of September 11, 2001, would shape the framework of our own American presidential campaign three years later.

After arriving in Ireland, I had a scheduled meeting with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister, at his constituency office in the Drumcondra section of Dublin. The small and unpretentious office known as “St. Luke’s” was a convenient hideaway for the Taoiseach where he would frequently meet with both his local constituents and national political advisors. As I stepped out of my taxi at St. Luke’s, the Taoiseach was arriving as well and met me on the sidewalk in front of the building. As he approached, he said in the most sincere and somber tones, “Tad, I’m very sorry.” At first, I did not quite understand the meaning of the Taoiseach’s condolence, but then I quickly realized that his heartfelt sympathy, something that was later conveyed to me by so many people who I met in Dublin in the days I spent there during that 2001 trip, was a reference to the terrorist attacks on my own country during the previous month.

America’s Falling Standing in the Post 9/11 World

The United States’ standing in the world reached a highpoint in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. It was reflected to me not just in the sincere expressions of condolence from a Prime Minister to an American citizen on a business trip, but also in the way that so many people all across Ireland and elsewhere around the world expressed their heartfelt support for the United States in the wake of the terrorist attacks. During my career, I have worked on 14 foreign campaigns, which have permitted me to travel extensively to work for candidates for president and prime minister. I have seen firsthand how foreign leaders and the people who run their campaigns and nations feel about the United States. The time spent abroad also allows me to consume foreign media, not from the remote vantage point of a laptop computer in the United States, but rather,while watching local television broadcasts in hotel rooms and at campaign headquarters, listening to the radio news, and reading the hard copy broadsheets (which still play an important role in framing public opinion in capitals around the world).

While there was much sympathy for the United States in the days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America’s standing in the world fell precipitously in subsequent months and years. This view is supported by extensive research conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup Polling Organization.

The decline of America’s standing in the world was felt at home as well. The American people understood that the level of respect for our nation and our president likewise plummeted after decisions made by American leaders in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The results of Gallup’s poll on American perceptions of global respect for the US presidency from the mid-1990s until today confirm what polls of foreign respondents tell us—that the high point of respect and affection for America after the attacks was replaced by a trough of disaffection and disrespect towards our nation and its leadership.

Recent polling confirms the assertion that towards the end of President Bush’s second term, the United States’ global standing was eroded by policy choices made by the Bush administration, such as the decision to invade Iraq and by the tactics utilized by our nation in the war on terror—from legalized torture, to extraordinary rendition, to the Guantanamo Bay imprisonment of captured enemies. While America’s standing has been revived dramatically in the aftermath of the election of President Obama, recent events have begun to erode that improved perception of American leadership again.

American political consultants like myself have benefited from being abroad. Our long history as a birthplace of democratic institutions and America’s leading role in the economic, military, and cultural spheres have helped consultants not only in winning political business from foreign clients but in winning respect from leaders whom we were advising. Frankly to be an American political consultant in a foreign campaign is probably the single best pedigree for anyone in my business, given the general consensus shared by foreign leaders and campaign officials that our election contests are the most sophisticated and dynamic in the world and that our government actually still works. We have benefited from a form of American “exceptionalism,” a term which conservative commentators use as a wedge issue in politics but which more accurately describes the unique status that American democracy enjoyed before its slide downward in the first decade of this new century. However, the breakdown in our own politics now threatens the work that I, and other American consultants, conduct around the world. We, as American political consultants, no longer represent the gold standard of functioning democracies.

The Decline of American Political Exceptionalism

This American political decline can be traced back to the aftermath of the 2000 election, with the Florida recount’s “hanging chads” and the contested outcome of an election where the votes of 100 million people were decided effectively by a single vote on our Supreme Court. Needless to say, having spent the final five months helping run the Gore campaign in Nashville, I was disappointed in the outcome, especially after our comeback from a 17-point deficit in the polls as late as July. Having lived through a contested election in Colombia in 1994, when my candidate, Andres Pastrana, had the election stolen from him by documented collaboration between his opponent and Colombian drug lords, I recall wondering what the Supreme Court’s decision on Bush v. Gore would have looked like to Americans if it had happened in Colombia. Imagine a scenario where a candidate for election in Colombia lost by 527 votes in one state that would decide the election. Imagine also that the governor of that state was the brother of the presidential candidate. The election official in charge of counting the votes was the chairman of the presidential campaign in that state, and the father of the winning candidate, who had previously been president himself, appointed the Justice to the Supreme Court who provided the one vote margin that effectively ended the recount and sealed the election. Since Pastrana’s own father had been president of Colombia and the integrity of their democracy had been tested as recently as the 1994 campaign, I knew that story might have been credible to my Colombian friends. But when they saw it happen in the United States of America, the beacon of democracy, in many ways it was almost incomprehensible to them and so many others around the world. The result of the 2000 election was the beginning of the end of American political exceptionalism on the world stage.

Vice President Al Gore’s concession did much to stabilize a volatile political situation in America in December of 2000. While the civil unrest in the United States never got much beyond a so called “Brooks Brothers riot” in the Canvassers Office in Miami-Dade County and the hecklers on the street corner near the vice president’s residence during the recount, it is not hard for me to imagine how unsettling a scenario like that would have been in a country where the rule of law was not as well established as it is here at home. Indeed, while attempting to return to the United States from Bolivia, where I was working on a presidential campaign, the airport in La Paz was shut down by striking air traffic controllers and protesters before being occupied by armed government troops. I can easily imagine a scenario where electoral and political conflict can lead to military intervention and takeover. America in 2000 was not that kind of place. As Al Gore noted in his concession speech, the ruling principle of American freedom and the source of our democratic liberties is embodied in a quotation over the Harvard Law School Library: “Not under man but under God and law.”

The backsliding of American leadership is the product of many factors, but few can doubt that the slide began with that fateful decision of the Supreme Court on December 12, 2000 and accelerated through the next decade. The influence of our political system on democracies around the world, as well as America’s reputation within non-democratic regimes that yearn for freedom, is in decline. That reality is taking hold today, in the wake of a near government default on our debt, precipitated solely by politics, not economics.

For us to return to the status that we enjoyed only a decade ago, American exceptionalism is going to have to stop being a political tagline and start being a way of doing business in Washington again.

If we do not restore the functionality of our government, we run the risk of losing the mandate of leadership in the world that generations of Americans fought to establish and preserve. With so much at stake, we need to look at this challenge of restoring America’s role as the leading force for democratic government with a renewed sense of urgency. This can only happen if we again allow American democracy to function as a dynamic form of government that produces results—budgets that are passed on time; elections that are run in transparent ways so that the money in politics is disclosed to voters, not known only to the special interest contributors who raise it and the politicians who spend it; and burdens that are accepted by this generation, and not passed down to the next. Americans have always left the next generation better off, and that simple formula has been carefully preserved at the heart of American ascendency. It has ensured the upward trajectory of the American experience. Until that standard returns as a way of conducting political business, we will not be able to reclaim the mantle of leadership, and others will vie to replace America as the paragon of a successful democracy.

The Economic Risk of Continued Political Gridlock

There is a growing resentment in America today against the way our government works. The depth of fear and dissatisfaction expressed by now over eight out of ten respondents in ongoing national polling is a reflection of the deep concern and dark pessimism that citizens are expressing in the United States about their own government and future. The wrong track measure of public opinion in the United States, which for many months has been between net 50 to 70 points negative in polls, looks more like the numbers I got used to seeing in places like Bolivia, Colombia, and Honduras than what I ever expected to see in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history. There has been a disintegration of trust in our system, and the bond between elected officials and the citizenry has been stretched to the breaking point.

In my time as a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, I have been able to observe and participate in many different events discussing the polarization of our politics and how that polarization causes problems to the fabric of our democracy. Recently, I had the opportunity to meet privately with a European ambassador to the United States to discuss how our current political polarization and economic downturn was impacting America’s relations with our allies. Based not only on my recent conversation with that ambassador but on numerous conversations with elected officials around the world, it is clear that America’s friends in Europe and elsewhere want our nation to succeed particularly in terms of our economy and all that America represents for democracies around the world. They believe that the political paralysis in the United States is holding back our economy and are worried that if we don’t end the gridlock, there could be negative economic implications that would hurt their economies back home. Those impacts include the loss of trade revenue, the instability of markets that have affected the ongoing financial and fiscal problems in the European Union and elsewhere, and the collective negative impact that economic slowdown in the world’s largest and most advanced economy has in all parts of the globe. At a time when old totalitarian regimes are failing in the Middle East, long seen as one of the most dangerous regions in the world, the decline in American political exceptionalism and its attendant economic deterioration runs an even greater risk that the new political model for nations emerging from centuries of oppression and darkness will not be the beacon of American liberty, but the economic growth model and oppressive government embodied in modern controlled capitalist economies like China, where freedom is nether treasured nor practiced. That surely represents a serious short and long-term threat to American interests and security.

Our allies in Europe and friends in other parts of the world want and need American democracy to work like it has in the past, in order for their own democratic systems to succeed and for their own economies to flourish. The political gridlock that we are experiencing today in the United States is not just hurtful to our nation in the context of our domestic politics; it’s also undermining America’s standing as the leader of the democratic world. In an increasingly global economy this slide represents a real economic threat to our well being. This is not only a threat to the business of people like myself who work on campaigns in other countries, but also to large American businesses and interests that derive much of their revenue from markets outside of the United States.

Restoring American Political Exceptionalism

To return to the pinnacle where America stood after the terrorists attacked on September 11, we need to return to fundamental truths and basic principles that still work in the age of Twitter, Facebook and instant global communication. We need to re-establish America’s standing not only as a powerful nation, but also as the most functional democratic system. We need to return to a place where elections are run and waged vigorously by contestants, but where government is then separated from the partisan brinkmanship of all out political warfare. We should recall again the words that Al Gore quoted in his concession speech: “Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, ‘Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism.’”

We can only return to that place, where even prime ministers feel they need to express sincere sentiments about events in America in the most human terms to average citizens, if we recognize that our politics at home are part and parcel of our standing around the world. I have no doubt that we can regain the respect we have lost if we let government in the United States become the place where the representatives of this most diverse and pluralistic nation debate the issues while resolving, as Benjamin Franklin advised his fellow delegates to the Convention in Philadelphia, to “doubt a little of [their] own infallibility.” That lesson from the birthplace of American independence and the founding of our democratic institutions should be heeded at a time when the forces of modernity and the harsh tactics that define new politics are trying the great experiment of American democracy. Hopefully, if I ever see the leader of another country offer condolences about America again, it will not be for the failure of our system to come to grips with the challenges of our own age. I have no doubt that American politics and government can again become the standard by which working democracy is measured, but I believe that we must change course soon or risk losing our unique and exceptional status for many years to come.

Thomas A. (Tad) Devine is a media consultant who has produced political ads for candidates in the United States and around the world. He is President of Devine Mulvey, a media and strategic consulting firm in Washington, DC. Tad Devine has been recognized as one of “the most respected media consultants” in the nation by USA Today.

A Divisive Path: Why the BDS Movement Won't End Violence in Israel

Laura Logan — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:48:02 +0000

In response to "Israel Apartheid Week," a global student campaign that swept across university campuses last month, there has been a great deal of discussion among students and academics concerning Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. As stated in its call to action, the BDS movement seeks to "end the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantle the Wall, recognize the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, and respect, protect, and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194." What remains unclear, however, is the mechanism through which the movement plans to translate its numerous declared successes into actual policy change within Israel. Although the BDS movement points to apartheid South Africa as an example of a country that was profoundly influenced by cultural and academic boycott, it is important to realize that a very different reality exists in Israel.

In Israel, policy seems to operate through a negative feedback loop— one in which a culture of fear and volatility feed into ethnic nationalism. In times of war or perceived threat, self-defense rhetoric emerges in the public forum and fear and nationalism become mutually reinforcing. These elements are historical precursors to the election of right-wing parties, which leads to the construction of right-wing coalitions.

Right-wing coalitions tend to attract international criticism because they increase Israeli settlement and demolition activity. Every critical resolution that passes through the United Nations General Assembly, every rocket that flies over the Gaza border into Israel, every call for divestment (by which Israel is made to feel isolated from the democratic polity), feeds into the culture of fear in Israel— one that harbors memories of three thousand years of repression, the Holocaust, recent suicide bombings— and thus perpetuates oppressive policies.

The BDS movement has failed in its attempt to stop Israel’s negative feedback loop by using external pressure. In fact, its efforts may have aggravated the situation. Since the inception of the BDS movement seven years ago, Israel has actually expanded its settlement activity to an unprecedented level. According to Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, approximately 259,988 settlers lived in the West Bank in 2005. That number now exceeds 500,000. In 2011, Palestine's permanent observer to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, stated that "Israeli settlement activities have increased at least 20% over the past year, with construction initiated on 1,850 units and at least 3,500 units under construction…in 142 illegal settlements and so-called 'outposts' in West Bank." Another Israeli organization, Peace Now, reaffirms these statistics, further asserting that Israel "actually exceeded all past years of settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem."

The official BDS website contains a list of musicians who have canceled trips to Israel, universities that have voted in favor of divestment, and corporations that have ended contracts with partners "compliant with apartheid." However, these claimed "successes" have not translated into any type of meaningful policy change in Israel. If anything, the BDS movement has pushed the Israeli public toward an even more right-wing political climate in which Benjamin Netanyahu will likely remain Prime Minister after the next election.

While boycotts against South Africa were not a decisive force until 1984— twenty five years after the anti-apartheid movement began— the tide shifted only when the United States government jumped on the bandwagon, implementing economic sanctions that crippled the South African economy. It is not likely that the BDS movement against Israel will obtain a similarly powerful ally. The United States government has made it clear that it has no intention of breaking up with Israel, even despite international condemnation. It has vetoed resolutions in the United Nations Security Council that were passed almost unanimously in the General Assembly. A unique relationship exists between the United States and Israel—one that did not exist between the United States and South Africa— which is due largely to a vocal Jewish Diaspora and the United States' strategic interests in the Middle East. The United States supports the view that the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be solved through unilateralism, an idea that is antithetical to the BDS movement's belief that the conflict will be resolved by simply forcing Israel to change.

The BDS movement's desire to collectively punish all Israelis is problematic because it lumps all Israelis into the category of "occupier" or "oppressor." This ignores and impedes the fierce debate on the topic that is currently occurring within Israeli society. It implicitly denies the existence of Israelis who oppose occupation. It discounts the harrowing experiences of those Israelis who support military policies due to fear or previous trauma. These experiences need to be confronted and addressed by the parties involved— not by movie stars or foreign universities seeking to make a statement. Such external efforts are not a step in the direction of mutual respect or universal justice, nor are they likely to inspire a departure from ethnic nationalism.

Many organizations, such as Justice for Palestine, argue that engaging in dialogue "normalizes" occupation and presents it as a conflict between equals. While it is important to prevent Israel from controlling the narrative, the denial of dialogue is also a denial of legitimate experience, which in itself is a denial of humanity. Every Israeli and every Palestinian has been touched by the conflict, and every one of them has a story that deserves to be heard. Along these lines, it is important to have organizations that bring to light the human rights abuses that have been occurring in Israel and the Palestinian territories for an unacceptably long time.

However, BDS supporters often push their own narrative and justify academic boycott by stating that they are simply "educating" people about the conflict. The chief aim of Israel Apartheid Week, as stated on its official website, is "to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system." Such statements may be well-intentioned, but they are also quite condescending. To dictate truth is to suggest superiority over the experiences of others, and to do so with such disinterest in honest dialogue is unpersuasive and irresponsible.

Perhaps truth is found somewhere between these perspectives; even then, it is still subject to interpretation. When the influential actors in the Israel-Palestine discussion— Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, American Jewry, etc— embrace nuance and learn to respect rather than deny experience, then perhaps some headway can be made in putting an end to the violence through meaningful policy change. However, the BDS movement must also realize that the only way to alter the course of the negative feedback loop is by encouraging internal self-analysis in Israel. This process cannot be forced through alienating tactics like collective punishment.

There is no perfect solution to the conflict. However, it seems unlikely that the BDS movement's tactics will persuade Israel to allow a full right of return to all Palestinian refugees or the United States to pressure Israel into implementing such a policy. Doing so would essentially destroy Israel's existence as a Jewish state, since it would complicate Israel's demographic predicament. For that reason, it is difficult to view the BDS movement as an advocate for mere policy change. While its concern for human rights is genuine and admirable, the BDS movement's policy objective is tantamount to the dismantlement of the Jewish state – a goal that likely would not receive much public support in the United States. In this way, BDS professes to champion human rights while simultaneously denying the equally valid experiences and rights of Israelis.
Self-determination is one such right, and it is held by Israelis and Palestinians alike.

If the BDS movement is truly interested in ending the violence, it should look closely at the two-state solution and try to find a way to make it work. It should partner with pro-Israel, pro-peace groups—groups that seek to change the conversation in Israel— in order to work toward the establishment of a viable Palestinian state that can coexist with Israel next door. We can then focus on helping Israel fix its flawed democracy and achieve its dream of becoming a Jewish and a truly democratic homeland— two ideals that do not have to be incompatible.

After Apollo

rhaghighat — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:56:10 +0000

The American West in Devising a New Space Policy

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

Just over 200 years ago an American president initiated a program of exploration that sent two men to the Pacific Ocean. Fifty years ago, another American president initiated a program of exploration that sent two men to the Sea of Tranquility. Fifty years after Lewis and Clark we had the California Gold Rush, and it was just another 16 years to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad with the Golden Spike. But fifty years after the beginning of the Apollo Program, the New Frontier of space has been trailing far behind the pace of the frontier of the American West. Why the striking contrast?

From the beginning, the effective goal of the US space program was to dominate this new frontier against Soviet incursions. Despite the costs, it worked. Until recently, whether by accident or by design, it has suited the United States for space to be expensive. As long as no other country or regional bloc could rival US expenditure on space, US supremacy was assured by these high costs, which have formed a de facto US strategy for space, even after the Cold War. In this sense, we are still living in the Apollo era of space policy. What should our “After Apollo” space policy be? Perhaps no US response is needed? Our pride may be hurt, but realism suggests that space really doesn’t matter. After all, space is a small industry. The entire global space industry, by its own Space Foundation estimates in 2007, and including the GPS chips so common in cell phones, amounted to just two-thirds of Walmart’s turnover.

On the contrary, US competitiveness is threatened, including in space, and this matters. The US government should respond by playing to the nation’s strength and play the same role in space in the 21st century, that it played in the development of the American West in the 19th century: making the frontier safe for capitalism. This is not a Cold War style argument that attempts to scare the United States into a renewed space program based on military fears. Rather, the United States has made a huge investment in space, and now has a clear technological advantage. As the Chinese and others catch up with the United States, that advantage is eroding. At some point, which could be in the near future, the value of space resources will become commercially exploitable. When that happens, will US companies be the ones reaping the rewards?

The formal goal of the US space program, for nearly 30 years and under both parties, has been, as George W. Bush, stated clearly: “to advance US scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.” Of the three elements of this goal—science, security, and economic growth—NASA has done a great job promoting a robust scientific program in space. Military security, from spy satellites to the GPS system, is also robust; the United States Air Force (USAF) and National Reconnaissance Office space programs form a US $20-$30 billion-year enterprise.

The third interest, economic growth in space, has not fared as well. In fact, as Jeff Greason, CEO of XCOR Aerospace has emphasized, we have had no coherent strategy to achieve that goal. These resources are vast, and could be harnessed to the great benefit of the nation. Space resources will benefit not only American citizens but, through the networks of global commerce, all the peoples of the world. A strategy for achieving economic benefit from space must involve both government and industry, as did the development of the American West.

Imagine that the United States had ignored the territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. At first, this was a hostile territory and much of it was considered a desert. Ignoring the American West might have left the Native Americans better off, but the United States would be radically reduced. Other European nations were then actively exploring the territory, as other nations are today exploring space. In the hostile territory of space there is, fortunately, no indigenous population to abuse, and we already know that the resources are there.

What are these resources? They have been discussed for years, and are expertly cataloged in John S. Lewis’s 1996 book, Mining the Sky: beaming solar power to Earth, mining the Helium isotope, helium-3, for use in fusion reactors, and mining asteroids for iron to use in construction in space, water for astronauts, and methane for rocket fuel. These are truly vast resources, with trillions of dollars in street value, and capable of solving today’s oil-based energy crisis. Policy makers have not paid serious attention to these resources, as they have seemed more like tales of El Dorado than real opportunities. The possibility that the United States may soon lose leadership in space means that we should reconsider the facts of the matter and make a reasoned choice, lest we cede the bounty by default.

Developing space resources means enabling profits to be made from them. The paeans to the value of space resources have almost all been written by scientists, not by business people. And we scientists are financially naïve; we add up the value of the resource, but ignore the cost of bringing that resource to the market, or even the existence of a market. There are, for example, no fusion reactors to fuel with helium-3. In space, the large capital costs and long payback time make it impossible to turn a profit from almost any of them, as J.H. Hickman showed in 1999. Hickman does point out, though, that if, for example, solar power stations in orbit were already built, they would be profitable, and the space economy could grow. Getting to that starting point is the problem. Historically, governments have been able to provide long-term infrastructure development as a way to lower the cost and risk barriers for private enterprise.

The one problem that outweighs all others is the forbiddingly expensive cost of access to space. Today it costs US$10,000 to US$20,000 per kilogram, just to get to low Earth orbit (LEO). It is a rare industry that can make a profit with cargo rates this high. This price has barely changed since Apollo, in constant dollars. Could the cost come down? Space is not inherently expensive. Of the US$50 million launch price for a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX less than one percent is the cost of the fuel. We don’t need new technologies, either. Jet airplanes have been around about as long as rockets to orbit, and a ticket from New York to Los Angeles costs about a tenth of what it did in 1960, in constant dollars. Incremental improvements driven by competition made this happen. There are some hopeful signs: there is a nascent space tourism industry. Virgin Galactic will soon offer short sub-orbital flights for US$200,000 a ticket. Early demand is brisk. The business plan to go from sub-orbital to orbit is not obvious though; it takes 30 times as much energy to reach orbital velocity. Bigelow Aerospace is developing commercial space stations. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced plans to launch cargo to LEO for just US$2,000/kg. If realized, this would be a substantial price break. It is not enough to make space-based solar power pay off, however, which costs closer to $200/kg. After all, sunlight does come to the ground for free. Until there is an in-space market for iron, water and methane from asteroids, these resources cannot be profit centers.

We need to find a pump primer – some space venture that makes enough profit, on the ground, even at high access costs, to get the ball rolling. The profits will have to be as extreme as those of the luckier Gold Rush pioneers. It has to pay off right away, and so must have a very high price per kilogram. Does space have a ‘gold rush’ resource? The answer is a resounding “Yes. But…” In the Earth’s crust, gold, silver, platinum and similar heavy metals are rare because most lie out of reach in the Earth’s core, where they settled early on, when the planet was still molten. Only small amounts remain in the Earth’s crust, where they can be mined. As a result, some precious metals have prices of US$2000/oz, or US$70,000/kg. That’s a promising number compared with US$20,000/kg to launch, especially as a kilogram of mining equipment should bring back much more than a kilogram of ore.

But why go to space to mine them? Meteorites tell us that among the asteroids there are ores that are far richer than any mines on Earth. If we could find one of the smaller asteroids, just 200 meters in diameter, that was as rich in platinum and related metals as the richest meteorite, it would have a value of about US$30 billion, and provide nearly two year’s production of platinum at current levels. This is encouraging. The technical difficulties in bringing the ore back to Earth profitably are large, but perhaps not insurmountable. So: Yes. The platinum group metals (PGMs) could be the pump primers we need to build a profitable space economy.

What about rare earths? Strategically, the near-monopoly on rare earth production by China is a concern to other nations, as the recent sharp spike in prices has shown. Rare earths, however, are poorly named, as they are not particularly rare, just hard to mine. Normally the most expensive rare earths command only about a tenth the price of platinum, so they would not be profitable as a space venture. However, the strategic lesson is good. If demand for hydrogen fuel cells takes off for powering automobiles, then the demand for platinum could multiply several-fold. US strategic interests would be well served by ensuring a commercial supply from asteroids.

But, US$30 billion is not a big enough number, given the costs and risks involved. There have been, over the years, numerous articles studying the problem of mining the asteroids for PGMs. Jeffrey Kargel in 1994, Mark Sonter in 1998, and others, in scattered literature, have laid out the technical and economic challenges. In 2001, Sonter and Shane Ross began to set out the costs to determine whether a profit is likely. High risk, long term, venture capital requires at least a 20 percent per year return. That is, if I invest US$5 billion today I need roughly a US$30 billion return in 10 years (actually US$31 billion), with a high chance of success. US$5 billion is not an outsize investment for a new mine, but the risks and rewards are far better known on Earth, so today the likely profit from an asteroid mining venture is negative.

Bringing down this risk and cost barrier is where the US government can play a historic role. As Hickman says:

“Capitalization is a crucial problem for these projects because the total capital investment required is very large and the investment takes a very long time before producing economic returns. Very large space development projects are best understood as massive public works projects that are necessary to open frontiers. Despite the libertarian sentiments in much of the popular science writing on very large space development projects, government would likely have to play a large role in capitalizing such projects.”

Strategic government investment could “buy down the risk” over the next decade so that a venture capitalist could reasonably undertake an asteroid mining enterprise. This is a role the US Government has played well in the past, notably in the development of the American West. The late historian of the West, William H. Goetzman laid out the interaction of government and private enterprise in his masterpiece Exploration and Empire. From the Lewis and Clark expedition, through the detailed geological surveys, establishment of legal rights, security, land grants, and the development of infrastructure in the form of the railroads, the US government was highly involved in enabling the pioneers and prospectors who developed the American West.

This tells us that the United States can best respond to the international challenge it faces in space by playing to its strong suit: it is time to unleash capitalism in space. Modest efforts along this line have begun. NASA’s commercial crew vehicle program has just awarded US$275 million, somewhat over one percent of its budget, to develop private sector launch services. But because we have lacked a clear strategy, our legislators have not so far embraced this approach whole-heartedly. An earlier NASA commercialization initiative has paid off. SpaceX developed the Falcon-9 launcher and Dragon capsule for just US$600 million, and first launched them in 2010. They have a NASA contract to resupply the International Space Station, starting in 2012. The prospect of new profits engages creativity in space, as it does everywhere else.

Myriad Details & Thorny Questions

A program as large as taming a new frontier, be it the American West or space, involves getting many details right, and resolving numerous difficult issues. The economic development of asteroids, and of space resources in general, will take a wide range of skills. I outline some of them here, in five categories: technology, economic and market analyses, issues of law, justice and policing including property rights, ethics, and coordinating private and public efforts.

NASA is well positioned to create some of the necessary infrastructure, mostly by supplying new technologies. Other agencies, such as the Department of the Interior—via the US Geological Survey—will have expertise to contribute too. Many technologies overlap with NASA’s current goal of sending humans to an asteroid, so there will be little need for alteration of priorities. Others are driven by the specific needs of economically viable asteroid mining, and will be new to NASA. Some of these technologies will make use of the International Space Station, injecting new purpose to its mission. President Jefferson carefully gave both specific and general instructions to Lewis and Clark. We too should consider the larger picture in the execution of our program. This larger picture will put a new emphasis on other factors. For example, shorter flight times have higher priority. Interest payments on a US$5 billion loan impose a strong “time is money” imperative.

While the technological challenges are many, it is possible to outline a strategy to address them. Initially, astronomers will be needed to map out the territory, as only 10 percent of the nearby asteroids have been found so far and even fewer have known composition. Then space and mining engineers will need to test out ways to mine in space economically. Economists, mining companies, and marketing experts will need to make refined estimates of profitability, in the face of fluctuating prices and changing markets, and likely PGM recovery rates from asteroids. Economic considerations will have technical repercussions: the relative importance of accurate robotic assays will rise, for example.

Diplomats and international lawyers will need to establish a hospitable international legal framework. To Europeans, the Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a legal claim to the West. In space no state has any claim. Effective US sovereignty over the Louisiana Purchase was tenuous for quite a while, and was contested over large areas by Spain and Britain. The US response was active and multi-formed, and included, for example, legal licensing of trappers in the territory. The existing 1963 United Nations “Outer Space Treaty,” or the Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, is completely oriented toward the “common heritage of mankind” principle. This means that it is impossible to own a celestial body, at least de jure. This is a major disincentive to any venture capitalist, as their expenditures may be lost if the goods they return are forfeit. Virgiliu Pop, in his 2009 book “Who Owns the Moon?” argues that the “good of mankind” principle prevents the profitable use of space resources, and that establishing ownership de facto is the most likely route that resource development will take. He cites Locke, who argued that private development of land left “waste in common”, “does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind.” Such arguments have become dubious on Earth, as we realize the finiteness of its resources, but in space such limits are very distant indeed.

Once a single profitable asteroid mining venture succeeds, it will start an “asteroid rush”. The best ore-bearing asteroids will then suddenly become highly valuable properties, and all the usual legal, policing, and justice issues that apply in a gold rush will come into play. Central to a venture capitalist’s concerns are property rights. How could a company establish a mining claim? How can anyone own a piece—or all—of a celestial body? Are asteroids even “celestial bodies” under law? After all, if you can move it, is it still celestial? A Keck Institute for Space Studies report coming out soon will show that a small asteroid could be moved from its orbit around the Sun to an orbit around the Earth, so this is not a hypothetical or purely academic question. Is it enough to do a private survey? To land on an asteroid and plant a flag, as Westfall et. al have pointed out with terrestrial continents? Or is it necessary to return an ore sample to Earth? Is the whole asteroid claimed from a tiny sample? What if the asteroid is 1000 km across? How could claims be enforced? What if a rival alters the asteroid’s orbit to hide it? Is there a penalty? Once there are repair crews, to tend to the expensive mining equipment, there must be safety rules and emergency services. Public safety is a question too. If an enterprise moves an asteroid towards Earth for easier processing, what rules must they follow to avoid the “environmental impact” of an unintended crash onto our planet? If a piece of mined material lands in my back yard, does it become mine? Who gets to tax asteroid mining, and what are the most beneficial taxation regimes?

Establishing these rules will be a busy and necessary occupation for both diplomats and lawyers. Any rules we set up beforehand will surely need modifying as the exploitation of space resources grows. Remember that platinum group metals are just the pump primer. The tailings from mining them will include ultra-pure iron, already separated and ground into small grains suitable for in-space use at low incremental cost. But these essential preliminaries will help guide actual development and prepare our understanding of the options.

There are ethical issues too. Asteroid mining will destroy pristine environments containing clues to the early solar system, and possibly to the origins of life. If we grind up these asteroids for profit, will we have lost something as special as the Amazon rainforest or the Arctic wilderness? This is not a purely altruistic consideration; there may be materials on them of great potential value, but of which we are now ignorant. Take for example, quasicrytals. These are strange new materials, for which the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded. The only naturally occurring quasicrystal found to date may well have come from an asteroid. How do we avoid Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons?” Here the history of the American West is not a good guide for us. Indian Treaties were routinely worthless as soon as a hint of valuable resources was discovered in their territories. Can we, or should we, try to create the space equivalent of the far more successful National Parks? Who would serve as trustees for these parks? The United Nations? A seemingly mild proposal to reserve the Saha crater on the far side of the Moon for radio astronomy has already proved difficult. As Karen Cramer notes, “mining, astronomy, geology, solar power, manufacturing and landing rights are not all compatible.”

President Obama’s new National Space Policy (2010) directs NASA to “pursue capabilities, in cooperation with other departments, agencies, and commercial partners, to detect, track, catalog, and characterize near-Earth objects to... identify potentially resource-rich planetary objects [emphasis added].” The various activities that this commercial space focus elicits across the agencies of the US federal government requires coordination. The Department of Commerce already has an Office of Space Commercialization, though it is small. Extending federal interests to asteroids will require, at a minimum, an Inter-Agency Working Group, including Commerce, State, Justice, Department Of Defense , Interior, Transport and, of course, an economically re-purposed, re-focused NASA. To involve a wider range of actors, beyond the federal government, a Presidential Commission, like the 2004 Aldridge Commission, which defined the G.W. Bush Vision for Space Exploration, could be created. Such a commission could also draw on the expertise developed over the past decade by private US studies, for example at the Colorado School of Mines “Space Resources Roundtable”. More permanent institutions that support and regulate this vast new resource regime should, perhaps, wait until its specific needs emerge and are better understood.

Enacting a Capitalist Space Policy

President Obama has called for NASA to send astronauts to an asteroid by about 2025. As he said “in fulfilling this task, we will not only extend humanity’s reach in space -we will strengthen America’s leadership here on Earth.” But the President’s call has met a lukewarm response. The problem, I believe, is the lack of a “Why?” Why go to the asteroids? The 2009 Augustine report, “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation,” argued that the asteroids are valuable as stepping-stones to Mars, better than the Moon in various ways. But putting humans on Mars is so distant, and is only interesting as a prelude to settlement. And settlement is not particularly compelling for many. So the President’s program has had only mild appeal. The uncertainty over the value proposition of NASA today—given the end of the Shuttle, the current Federal budget crunch, and the ongoing arguments over free markets vs. public (cost-plus) development strategies—undergirds this weak public response. NASA’s US$18 billion budget seems large when it supports pure science and space spectaculars. But considered as an infrastructure investment to open up great economic possibilities, it is quite modest.

Redirecting NASA’s priorities towards a strategy of developing space resources for commerce may have a better chance of engaging the public and industry. And once profits flow, who needs public enthusiasm? Profitable asteroid mining ventures will be self-propelled, and will pay taxes. Within a decade or so, NASA can reduce the cost barriers to commercial exploitation of asteroids to a level that venture capital will be a viable path forward. Once a profit making industrial apparatus is in place, the government can step aside from that aspect, even as its role in the legal and diplomatic side of space capitalism will increase. Put simply, enabling profit should be the centerpiece of a 21st century national space policy.

Like the Apollo program, the Ming dynasty fleets of the early 1400s projected sovereign power, but they were costly, and brought no economic bounty. Bureaucrats argued that there were more pressing needs at home, and the fleet was dismantled. The challenges to Chinese seafaring supremacy were far closer than they imagined. Today, we know better about space, but we have to change our model. NASA’s first goal, as already legislated under President Reagan, in a 1985 update to the 1958 Space Act, is to “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.” With the challenges now arising to the nation’s economic leadership in space, the United States should organize a strategy around this established, but under-implemented, goal. US led capitalism in space can bring unprecedented benefits down to Earth for all its inhabitants. A far-sighted leveraging of government development, like that of Jefferson and the West, will let US capitalism lead economic development of the space frontier.

Dr. Martin Elvis is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The views presented here are those of the author, and should not be taken to represent those of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The author would like to thank Jonathan McDowell, for help drafting the article, and BC Crandall of Space Wealth, for valuable discussions and advice.

Leadership By Default

rhaghighat — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:49:43 +0000

The United States and the Final Frontier

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

The United States’ leadership in space is a natural result of its high standing among the world’s democracies and its vast wealth, which enables it to spend more than US$35 billion annually on civil and national security space activity, far surpassing all other nations. NASA’s manned space shuttle, representing tens of billions of dollars of investment, embodied US leadership in space. It was the foundation on which the International Space Station, the largest and most complex undertaking in space, was built. The shuttle’s retirement, while leaving the Space Station partners entirely dependent on Russia for crew access in the short term, has not fundamentally changed the United States’ position in the partnership, nor has it left a leadership void that another nation is eager or in a position to fill. Contrary to what many casual observers seem to believe, the United States is not abandoning human spaceflight. Rather, it is between astronaut-launching systems with NASA continuing to drive this activity.

Currently there is great uncertainty surrounding the US human spaceflight program, the result of a political battle touched off when President Barack Obama proposed handing astronaut transportation to and from low Earth orbit destinations—in other words, the Space Station—to the private sector, and having NASA focus on technologies for deep-space exploration. The dramatic policy shift raised no objections from NASA’s traditional international partners in civil space. The European Space Agency (ESA), for example, which felt shut out of the previous president’s plan to return astronauts to the moon, welcomed the new policy espoused by President Obama. However congressional reaction was decidedly swift and negative. US lawmakers had embraced former President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration, in part because the resulting hardware development program, dubbed Constellation, promised to absorb the workforce attached to the shuttle, which was marked for retirement. Without a similar promise from Obama, lawmakers from states with large NASA facilities or constituencies, suspicious of Obama’s intentions and skeptical of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, blocked Constellation’s dismantling even before it was formally proposed. They then came up with their own plan, codified in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, which restored key elements of the Bush program. Caught in the middle, NASA is now pursuing separate programs with insufficient funding to properly execute either, and no strategy that pulls them together to serve larger national objectives.

Things are equally unsettled in robotic space exploration, an increasingly important sphere of international cooperation where NASA enjoys a tremendous technological lead over other space agencies. NASA in 2009 signed on as a partner with ESA in a Mars exploration campaign dubbed ExoMars but a budget crisis has forced the US agency to scale back its involvement, prompting Europe to court Russia as a full-fledged partner. NASA has also declared a moratorium on flagship class probes—like the recently launched, US$2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory rover—and thus abandoned tentative plans to work with Europe on its next large science mission, concepts for which included an ambitious survey of Jupiter and its ice-covered moon, Europa.

Anatomy of a Partnership

But until 2020, at least, there is the Space Station, a partnership that includes, in addition to the United States, the 19 nations comprising ESA, along with Russia, Japan, and Canada. Conceived during the 1980s by the administration of then-US President Ronald Reagan, the station was a massive undertaking, with the roles of each partner spelled out in agreements painstakingly negotiated among the governments involved. During the 1990s, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, was invited to join as part of a US policy of engaging the former Soviet Union and its still-formidable military-industrial complex. International collaboration is often a complicating factor in large-scale projects, and the Space Station was no exception. But when cost overruns continued to test Washington’s will to see the program through, a powerful argument against cancellation was the damage that it would do to the nation’s international standing and foreign policy goals.

The Space Shuttle’s Central Role

The Space Station partnership is based largely on barter arrangements under which each participating agency contributes hardware and services in exchange for access to the facility’s resources. NASA’s biggest negotiating asset was the space shuttle, which before Roscosmos joined the program was the sole means of access to the Space Station, both for assembly and for crew rotation. But if the space shuttle, through the Space Station program, had become an indispensable tool of US space-related foreign policy and leadership, it owed its longevity to decidedly domestic political and economic considerations.

The shuttle was the centerpiece of the US civil space program for three decades, but it was flawed in many ways. Originally billed as a system that would make spaceflight routine and relatively inexpensive, its immense technical complexity made it anything but cost efficient. Flight delays were commonplace and the resulting low flight rates destroyed any potential it might have had to reduce the cost of space access. Following the 1986 Challenger disaster, the US government restricted the shuttle to missions requiring a human presence, further curtailing its utility. Moreover, the orbiter was incapable of supporting astronaut missions to destinations beyond low Earth orbit, thus severely limiting NASA’s future exploration options.

But the shuttle—not in spite of its flaws but, ironically, partly because of them—was a federally fueled economic engine, requiring a proverbial standing army to operate and maintain. Some 20,000 shuttle-related jobs, located primarily in Florida, Alabama, Texas, California and Utah, gave it a strong and fiercely protective congressional constituency. It had, in effect, become as much an end in itself as a means to an end. Even as the Space Station program achieved a stable political footing, thus giving the orbiter fleet a long-term mission, NASA flirted with several replacement concepts. But none of these got much traction; the government had no compelling reason to make the huge investment required to replace the shuttle.

Columbia: A New Direction for NASA

That changed with the February 2003 loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. Columbia broke up during atmospheric re-entry after what up to that point had been a routine mission. A blue ribbon review panel led by retired US Navy Adm. Harold Gehman determined that the direct cause was a piece of insulating foam that shook loose during liftoff and pierced the heat shielding on the orbiter’s left wing, allowing superhot gases to penetrate the craft’s structure during re-entry, causing it to weaken and ultimately fail. Investigators also found a number of underlying causes, prominently among them the lack of a guiding vision for NASA’s human spaceflight program. Gehman’s Columbia Accident Investigation Board listed an extensive series of costly safety modifications needed if the orbiter were to continue as the nation’s astronaut transportation system following completion of the Space Station. However the panel clearly felt strongly that it was past the time to replace the shuttle. The failure to do so up to that point was characterized in the report as a failure of national leadership.

In early 2004, with the orbiter fleet still grounded, President Bush rolled out his Vision for Space Exploration policy and the following year appointed Mike Griffin, the well-known and highly respected space technocrat, to execute the plan as NASA Administrator. Griffin oversaw the studies that ultimately yielded Constellation, an architecture that borrowed heavily from shuttle-heritage hardware and infrastructure. The program was to be implemented in phases, with development of the Orion crew capsule and its shuttle-derived Ares 1 launcher ramping up following the scheduled 2010 retirement of the orbiter fleet, which cost US$3 billion per year to operate. Griffin accepted, though not without reservation, that there would be a multiyear gap between the shuttle’s retirement and the replacement system. Once Orion and Ares 1 were in place, full-scale development would begin on the hardware needed to return to the moon: the heavy-lift Ares 5 cargo rocket, which would build upon the Ares 1 work, and the Altair lunar lander. Griffin protected a key political flank by assigning major roles in Constellation to NASA’s centers, whose directors traditionally have had close ties to their representatives in Congress.

Constellation was by most accounts well thought out and, if properly funded, executable. One thing it lacked, though, was a clear and prominent role for international partners. Griffin, a firm believer that a robust human spaceflight capability is strategically important for the United States, envisioned international participation in his moon program, but not in what he considered to be its critical-path elements—the hardware needed to deliver astronaut crews to the lunar surface. International partners, in Griffin’s thinking, would have contributed crew habitats and scientific equipment, such as telescopes and experimentation facilities.

In response, ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain turned to Roscosmos, which had dangled the possibility of a European role in developing Clipper, a follow-on to Russia’s venerable Soyuz crew capsule. Dordain was widely quoted at the time as saying he had chosen to work with Russia to avoid being relegated to second-class status in human spaceflight, ESA’s prominent Space Station role notwithstanding. The Clipper partnership was short lived, however; ESA pulled out after concluding that Roscosmos was looking primarily for an angel investor rather than an equal development partner, and the project has since gone nowhere.

It is not clear how serious Dordain was about Clipper—ESA has since shown little interest in investing in a human spaceflight capability—but he obviously had a point to get across. In any case, ESA’s full attention turned back to the Space Station with the space shuttle’s July 2005 return to flight after a two-and-a-half year hiatus. ESA’s long-delayed main hardware contribution, the Columbus laboratory, finally launched in February 2008, and was followed by Japan’s Kibo experiments module, which was deployed on the next two flights. In the meantime, ESA and Japan’s space agency debuted space station logistics modules that they launched aboard their own rockets.

But no sooner had they gotten their long-deferred chance to spread their wings on station, some of NASA’s partners began to openly fret over the fact that the US government had not yet committed to supporting the nearly completed outpost beyond 2015. Walking away from a US$100 billion investment after just five years of full-scale utilization was unthinkable, but NASA had a problem. Its post-2015 budget projections, which had funding ramping up for Ares 5 and Altair, did not account for the US$3 billion annual cost of operating the station. Meanwhile, Constellation’s affordability was being questioned by an expert panel tasked early in Obama’s administration to review US human spaceflight program and plans. In its final report, released in September 2009, the Augustine Commission—named for its chairman, former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norm Augustine—concluded that in the absence of a major, and highly unlikely, boost in NASA’s future year budgets there was no way to execute Constellation as planned.

Putting the Brakes on Constellation

The Augustine report, which also praised the progress made to date by the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, gave the Obama administration the cover to do what many suspected it had planned all along: cancel Constellation and farm out crew transportation to low Earth orbit to the private sector. In proposing to do just that in his 2010 budget request, President Obama disappointed many. However, Dordain, perhaps the most outspoken of NASA’s Space Station partner-agency heads, was not among them. The ESA director applauded the new budget proposal, primarily because it recommitted NASA to the Space Station through 2020. He also expressed enthusiasm over the priority given to Earth observation in the NASA budget – Obama’s first—saying it would provide new opportunities for trans-Atlantic cooperation that up to then had been limited primarily to the Space Station and robotic exploration.

“We do this in a systematic way in space science, and the results of the collaboration — Cassini-Huygens, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the future James Webb Space Telescope — are there for all to see,” Dordain said. “But for Earth science we have only an occasional cooperation. What I have talked about with [NASA Administrator] Charlie Bolden is the possibility of dividing up roles for future Earth observation missions.”

As an aside, the US government has since disappointed Europe on the Earth observation front. Budgetary pressures recently forced the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to cancel its planned sensor contribution to a European weather satellite program and hedge on its commitment to an ocean monitoring mission.

Generally speaking, the Obama Administration’s enthusiasm for international cooperation in space has been warmly welcomed by NASA’s partners. Bolden, a former astronaut who had replaced Griffin as NASA Administrator, went so far as to call Dordain and then-Roscosmos chief, Anatoly Perminov, prior to the release of the budget to outline the agency’s new direction.

Whether Europe, Japan or Canada share the US Congress’ skepticism about the emerging commercial space sector’s ability to take over Space Station crew transport is not clear. Notably, European industry has since teamed with a US company, shuttle solid rocket motor maker ATK, to pursue some of the money NASA plans to invest in commercial crew capabilities.

Nonetheless, Congress has all but assured that these commercial services will take longer than planned to materialize by directing NASA to fund Orion and the Ares 5-like Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, both ordered up in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, to the tune of US$3 billion a year. That means extended dependence on Russia for crew transport, with NASA footing the bill not only for its own astronauts but also for those from Canada, Europe, and Japan, thanks to a longstanding US obligation that did not expire with the shuttle’s retirement.

The Space Station and Beyond

Constellation’s demise effectively preserves the Space Station as the centerpiece of global civil space cooperation at least until 2020, and possibly well beyond. Less certain is what NASA’s next astronaut transportation system will look like, and this system likely will dictate whatever follows the Space Station. It might be a commercially operated vehicle, likely restricted to low Earth orbit; it might be a government-owned Orion launched atop the Space Launch System, which would make deep space accessible; or it might be a hybrid. But the United States remains likely to field some sort of manned spaceflight system in the next decade or so. US Space Station partners, meanwhile, could see their roles in the Space Station evolve as their capabilities grow. The European and Japanese cargo delivery programs, for example, could grow in importance should one of two US companies working on commercial Space Station logistics services stumble. But they have their economic problems as well; it’s hard to imagine any of them eclipsing US leadership.

China, whose space capabilities are growing perhaps faster than those of any other nation, represents a wild card. The Obama Administration has expressed interest in space cooperation with China as a possible way of engaging Asia’s emerging superpower, but the current Congress, large factions of which see Beijing as an increasingly aggressive adversary, is having none of it at the moment. India, with its own relatively mature space program, seems a more likely partner for the United States, at least in the near term.

Robotic planetary exploration might be a bellwether for US space leadership in the coming years. There is a growing consensus that no nation has the wherewithal to undertake grand endeavors such as sending robotic probes to return samples from Mars. ExoMars was and still is envisioned as the beginning of an international campaign culminating in a Mars sample return mission, cost estimates for which exceed US$10 billion. NASA’s retrenchment on ExoMars has doubtless caused considerable heartburn at ESA, but no more so than the various US-initiated Space Station overhauls of the 1990s and the early 2000s. The Space Station partnership has endured.

If there is to be a major human space exploration endeavor after the Space Station, it likely will be enabled, if not driven by, international cooperation. Budgetary pressures coupled with the steeply increasing difficulty of conquering new frontiers in space—landing on the moon was a turkey shoot compared to the challenge of putting people on Mars—will make it virtually impossible for any nation to go it alone. Barring a fundamental shift in the global economic and technological balance of power, the United States likely will have the leading role, with the resiliency of the Space Station serving as the model. The United States is facing uncertainty and pressures to scale back its space activities as it is increasingly reliant on foreign partners, but it remains the indispensable nation for human and robotic space exploration.

Warren Ferster is the Editor-in-Chief of Space News and has been with the publication since 1994. Prior, he worked for Phillips Business Information as editor of Space Business News and space reporter for Defense Daily.

Cleaning Up Space

pagarwal — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

The Development of International Space Debris Policies

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

In an unheralded action in December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed a comprehensive set of space debris mitigation guidelines, which had been adopted just six months earlier by the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). This landmark decision represented the culmination of a 10-year strategic plan by the United States that was as much unconventional as it was methodical. Today, all the world’s major space-faring nations and organizations recognize the need to control the creation of man-made debris in Earth orbit to protect the space environment for future generations.

The history of the growth of the planet’s orbital debris population and the subsequent need to manage it is a classical tale of the unintended consequences of man’s foray into a new frontier. The first object cataloged in Earth orbit in 1957 by the fledgling US Space Surveillance Network, as it was soon to be known, was not Sputnik 1, but a piece of space debris, namely the rocket body which placed the famous spacecraft into orbit. A half-century later, the orbital debris population that poses distinct hazards to the operation of the thousand satellites now providing invaluable services to the economy and security of the world numbers in the millions.

By the 1960s, a few individuals had the foresight to predict the accumulation of debris in Earth orbit, but not until 1979 did NASA begin a formal effort to investigate the nature and magnitude of the space debris population. NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, is now viewed as the center of excellence for orbital debris research for the entire US government. The first national orbital debris conference was held at JSC in 1982, followed in 1984 by the first international workshop on orbital debris at the 25th Scientific Assembly of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in Graz, Austria.

These initial and largely academic investigations into orbital debris soon took on a more urgent, operational character. Although NASA and the Department of Defense (DoD) had been examining the peculiar behavior of US Delta launch vehicles flown in the 1970s and 1980s to fragment spontaneously into hundreds of detectable debris after successful missions, the explosion of a dormant European Ariane upper stage in November 1986, into nearly 500 identified pieces served as a wake-up call to the world aerospace community. An international conference on the breakup of launch vehicle upper stages was held at JSC in May 1987.

A government interagency working group prepared the first US national-level report on orbital debris in 1989. Recommendation K of that report called upon the US to “inform other space-faring nations about the conclusions of this report and seek to evaluate the level of understanding and concern of other nations and relevant international organizations about orbital debris issues.” The recommendation went on to say that “where appropriate, the United States should enter into discussions with other nations to coordinate debris minimization policies and practices.”

NASA had begun in 1987 a series of technical interchange meetings with the European Space Agency (ESA) to discuss various aspects of orbital debris research. Less formal meetings with Japan had also already occurred. In the wake of the interagency report, additional bilateral meetings were held by NASA with the Soviet Union (late 1989) and with China (1991).

NASA soon realized that maintaining separate bilateral working groups was becoming increasingly difficult and inefficient. In late 1991 the NASA/ESA meetings became trilateral with the addition of Japan, where space activities were managed by three separate organizations: NASDA, NAL, and ISAS. At the NASA/ESA/Japan meeting in October 1992, NASA proposed the establishment of a formal coordination group with an official Terms of Reference. The concept was favorably received, and the next year the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), with charter members NASA, ESA, Japan, and the Russian Space Agency (RKA), was born. Within three years the IADC membership had doubled with the addition of the space agencies of China, France, India, and the United Kingdom.

During its June 1993 meeting, COPUOS reached consensus on a US initiative to place the topic of space debris on the 1994 agenda of its Scientific and Technical Subcommittee (STSC), which meets in February each year at the United Nations complex in Vienna, Austria. The UN General Assembly approved this plan in December 1993. The subject of space debris has remained on the annual agenda of the STSC ever since.

The seeds for developing international space debris mitigation guidelines were planted in the second half of 1995. In August of that year, NASA issued its first guidelines and assessment procedures for limiting orbital debris. Leveraging off the impressive 1993 position paper on orbital debris by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and a 1995 report by an international committee of the US National Research Council, this seminal NASA document translated the global objectives of orbital debris mitigation into specific, measurable requirements, which spacecraft and launch vehicle engineers and mission managers could understand.

Another watershed event of 1995 was the release of the second US government interagency report on orbital debris. The report was notionally an update to the 1989 document, but two of the five new recommendations would lead directly to the development of space debris mitigation guidelines by the United Nations.

The report tasked NASA and the DoD to draft design guidelines for the US government and industry to limit the creation of orbital debris. Using the NASA orbital debris mitigation guidelines as a foundation, in 1997 NASA and DoD agreed upon four overarching orbital debris mitigation standard practices addressing 1) the release of debris during normal operations, 2) debris generated by accidental explosions, 3) safe flight profiles and operational configuration, and 4) post-mission disposal. The other federal agencies and departments with strong vested interests in space concurred with the draft standard practices, and, as called for in the 1995 interagency report, a workshop was held in January 1998, to present the standard practices to industry. The standard practices were formally adopted by the US government three years later after a series of additional face-to-face talks with senior management of both major and minor US aerospace companies.

Another recommendation of the 1995 interagency report called upon NASA, the Department of State, and other relevant agencies to develop “a strategy outlining how the United States should seek to encourage other space-faring nations to adopt debris policies and practices…”. Under the leadership of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, an interagency group drew up a strategic plan for international cooperation on orbital debris. This plan evolved to define three principal goals: 1) the establishment of US government space debris mitigation standard practices, 2) the development of the first international set of orbital debris mitigation guidelines under the auspices of the IADC, and 3) adoption of orbital debris mitigation guidelines by the United Nations.

The first goal was well underway by October 1999 when the IADC held its 17th meeting in Darmstadt, Germany. At this meeting, the IADC Steering Group approved an action item to develop a consensus set of space debris mitigation guidelines. At the time NASA, the Japanese space agency NASDA, the French space agency CNES, and ESA had existing debris mitigation guidelines. The US government and the Russian space agency RKA had draft guidelines. These guidelines, not coincidentally, were quite similar. Therefore, the IADC, which by this time had grown to 10 members, anticipated that agreement on a consensus set of mitigation guidelines could be achieved within a few years. Work toward the second goal of the US strategic plan for international cooperation on orbital debris had now begun.

At the United Nations, however, initial progress on the space debris topic was about to hit a stumbling block. At its 1995 meeting, the STSC of COPUOS had adopted a multi-year work plan that called for focused discussions on the principal space debris research areas: 1) debris measurements, 2) debris environment modeling and risk assessments, and 3) debris mitigation measures. These topics were addressed in 1996, 1997, and 1998, respectively. At its 1999 meeting the STSC completed its Technical Report on Space Debris, based upon the information exchanged during the three prior years. This was a significant accomplishment for the UN and a benefit for the entire international aerospace community.

With the original multi-year work plan completed, the STSC reconvened in February 2000, without an objective for future work on the space debris agenda topic. Four Member States of the STSC submitted widely differing proposals for how the STSC should proceed with space debris. Despite considerable efforts both during official sessions of the subcommittee and during informal consultations, the two-week meeting ended with an impasse and no new space debris work plan.
To avoid a repeat performance at the 2001 meeting of STSC, fourteen Member States of the STSC gathered in Berlin in December 2000, to forge a multilateral proposal for a new work plan. Over the course of three days, numerous bilateral meetings were held before all attending States met together on the fourth day. With its own strategic plan for international cooperation on orbital debris in mind, the US proposed that the STSC should strive to endorse a set of space debris mitigation guidelines. If accomplished, this would complete the US strategic plan.

Specifically, the potential work plan envisioned exchanges of information on specific space debris topics at the 2001 and 2002 meetings of the STSC. In 2003 the STSC would receive the IADC space debris mitigation guidelines which were expected to be completed sometime in 2002. The hope was that the STSC would endorse the IADC guidelines at its 2004 meeting. This proposal was tentatively agreed upon in Berlin and later was accepted at the 2001 meeting of the STSC.
At this point, it is worth reviewing the nature of the IADC and its relationship with the United Nations. Contrary to the belief of some, the IADC is not an arm of and does not hold permanent observer status at the United Nations. The IADC is an independent association of space agencies with a primary purpose “to exchange information on space debris research activities between member space agencies, to facilitate opportunities for cooperation in space debris research, to review the progress of ongoing cooperative activities, and to identify debris mitigation options.” The IADC has been called upon by the STSC to provide expert assistance in matters related to space debris, and the IADC is regularly invited to make a technical presentation at annual STSC meetings.

The IADC is comprised of a Steering Group and four Working Groups, covering measurements, modeling, protection, and mitigation. The head of each member agency delegation to the IADC is a member of the Steering Group. In practice, the heads of delegation to the IADC often also serve as their country’s expert on space debris to the STSC and COPUOS. This wearing of two-hats might sometimes be confusing to outsiders, but it has been extremely beneficial to the advancement of the international dialogue on space debris. Like the STSC and COPUOS, the IADC works on a consensus basis, i.e., all members must agree with the totality of each IADC action or product.

In addition to its well-deserved reputation as the preeminent body on the subject of space debris, the IADC has been viewed as an example of how other technical topics of international interest might be handled, e.g., nuclear power in space. The successes of the IADC during its short period of existence have indeed been impressive. The fact that IADC members are space agencies is perhaps unique and one that affords direct, helpful support from national governments.
The effort needed to reach a consensus in the IADC on a set of space debris mitigation guidelines was substantial. When consensus could not be reached on a particular topic, e.g. a recommendation that spacecraft and rocket bodies should not remain in low Earth orbit for more than 25 years after end-of-mission, no guideline was established for the issue or the guideline was worded in a less specific manner. A suggestion that so-called smallsats (satellites with a mass of less than 500 kg) should face additional, restrictive guidelines was voted down in favor of the view that all satellites should be handled equally regardless of mass, size, construction, or mission.

Despite difficult negotiations, the IADC space debris mitigation guidelines were approved on schedule during the second World Space Congress in Houston in October 2002. The guidelines were immediately transmitted to the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs for consideration at the 2003 meeting of the STSC, but by the 2004 meeting of the STSC it was apparent that the STSC would not directly endorse the IADC guidelines. Instead, a decision was made at the 2005 meeting of the STSC to craft an independent set of space debris mitigation guidelines for the United Nations. However, a condition for the UN guidelines was that they not be more stringent than the IADC guidelines.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the creation of UN space debris mitigation guidelines proved to be an even greater challenge than had been encountered within the IADC. In fact, unforeseen complications quickly arose. One Member State of the STSC asserted that, although its national space agency had agreed to the IADC space debris mitigation guidelines, the agency did not necessarily speak for the nation as a whole. Thus, all topics were again open for debate. In some cases Member States whose space agencies were not members of the IADC had to climb a steep learning curve to understand better the threat posed by space debris and the range of potential solutions.

After two hard-fought years of negotiations, an incident at the eleventh hour almost derailed the creation of UN space debris mitigation guidelines. One month before the STSC was to reconvene and approve the draft guidelines, China unexpectedly conducted a test of an anti-satellite system that not only created the largest debris cloud in history, but also did so at an altitude sufficiently high to ensure that many of the debris would remain in orbit for decades, some more than a century. The test was not compliant with either the existing IADC space debris mitigation guidelines, which the China National Space Administration had approved in 2002, or the draft UN space debris mitigation guidelines. Not surprisingly, the world reaction to the test was extremely negative.

When the STSC did meet again in February 2007, the issue of the Chinese anti-satellite test was a matter of intense discussion. China was clearly on the defensive during the official sessions of the STSC and during the informal consultations aimed to finalize the draft debris mitigation guidelines. Perhaps because China did not want to be seen as being responsible for scuttling the guidelines, Chinese representatives joined the consensus with the other STSC Member States to approve the guidelines. The following June the full COPUOS accepted the guidelines, paving the way for the General Assembly action in December. In the end, the seven UN space debris mitigation guidelines were quite similar to those of the IADC.

Two questions which frequently arise concerning the handling of space debris mitigation guidelines in the United Nations are why was the Legal Subcommittee (LSC) of COPUOS not more involved in the creation of the guidelines and why are the guidelines only voluntary. The answers to these questions are closely intertwined. Some Member States of COPUOS did seek a greater role for the LSC during the discussions and even proposed that the guidelines be legally-binding. On the other hand, some Member States were of the opinion that reaching consensus on legally binding guidelines would likely be a tortuous and lengthy process, lasting as long as ten years. Many of these latter Member States felt that the most rapid path to implementation of the guidelines, which was the highest priority, was one that did not go through the LSC.

Although the COPUOS had a working definition of space debris, the existing space treaties and conventions did not address the term. Reopening any of the treaties or conventions was considered by many to be infeasible for a variety of reasons. Likewise, establishing a new convention was not an attractive course of action. Even raising the guidelines to the level of UN principles was viewed as problematic by many of those who had been involved in the formulation of principles for space nuclear power sources in the 1980s and 1990s.

The voluntary nature of the UN space debris mitigation guidelines is often misconstrued. The Preface to the United Nations guidelines states that they reflected the existing practices as developed by a number of national and international organizations and that the General Assembly invited Member States to implement the UN guidelines “through relevant national mechanisms.” The resulting national directives were envisioned to be of a binding or legal nature.

Orbital debris mitigation is now not a voluntary option in the United States, Japan, Russia, China, or most of Europe. In the United States, regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, long ago issued enforceable rules involving orbital debris mitigation, and the non-regulatory agencies, like NASA and DoD, have space debris mitigation requirements which are consistent with the US Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, as well as the IADC and UN space debris mitigation guidelines. Moreover, the IADC and the UN space debris mitigation guidelines also serve as the foundation for emerging industrial standards via the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One hundred percent compliance with all guidelines by all space-faring organizations for every space mission is neither realistic nor necessary to curtail the growth of the space debris population. On a positive note, the degree of world-wide compliance with the UN guidelines continues to increase each year.

What lies ahead for space debris policies at the international level? In 2010 the STSC began deliberations on a new agenda item concerning the long-term sustainability of outer space activities. An essential element in this new endeavor is once again space debris.

A related topic which has garnered renewed interest in the past few years is the removal of existing debris from Earth orbit. Although the eventual negative consequences of the accumulation of space debris have been well understood since the 1970s, a 2006 study by NASA, later validated by other space agencies, indicated that curtailing the generation of debris associated with new space missions, while certainly beneficial, would be insufficient to control the future population of space debris.
The accidental collision of the operational US Iridium 33 with the derelict Russian Cosmos 2251 spacecraft in February 2009, which resulted in the creation of thousands of additional debris hazardous to other space systems, has led to calls for removing large debris as soon as possible. NASA and DoD sponsored the first international conference on the removal of space debris in 2009, and similar conferences have since been held in Paris and Moscow. The US National Space Policy for the first time in 2010 included mention of orbital debris removal. Furthermore, the IAA has just completed a years-long study on the technical and legal issues associated with the remediation of near-Earth space. Unfortunately, the removal of orbital debris poses daunting technical and economic challenges.

In many ways, the handling of space debris policy at the international level has been an atypical, bottom-up approach, but one which might well be applicable to other issues. The technical community, first via informal exchanges at scientific fora and bilateral meetings, and later through the IADC, established a firm foundation for the issues that needed to be addressed along with reasonable solutions. During this process, the community worked closely with their respective governments and aerospace industries to gain the support necessary to move forward. Finally on the international level, at the United Nations, this same, small cadre of experts worked hand-in-hand with their diplomatic colleagues to bring consensus to a highly complex subject.

NICHOLAS L. JOHNSON since 1997 has served as the NASA Chief Scientist for Orbital Debris, the head of the NASA delegation to the IADC, and the US technical expert on space debris at the United Nations.

Strengthening Space Security

kzhou — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Advancing US Interests in Outer Space

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

Fifty years ago, the Space Age was not yet five years old but the broad outlines of US space interests were visible. The year 1962 saw the first US human orbital flight by John Glenn on a converted Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Telstar 1 demonstrated the first transatlantic television, telephone, and fax transmissions by an active satellite. The United Kingdom became the third country to operate a satellite with the US launch of Ariel 1. Later that year, both Telstar 1 and Ariel 1 were seriously damaged when the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear device 250 miles over the Pacific Ocean in what was titled the Starfish Prime test. The Glenn flight and the Starfish Prime test respectively represented the civil and military bookends of US space interests that were to shape international, commercial, and scientific space activities.

Fifty years later, the United States is facing new challenges and opportunities in integrating its civil, commercial, and national security space interests in a dynamic global environment. Space activities today play critical roles in US national security, economic growth, and scientific achievements. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is an integral part of several critical infrastructures and enables functions ranging from survey and construction, to farming, finance, and air traffic management—not to mention supporting US military forces worldwide. The International Space Station represents a unique collaborative partnership between the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and Russia. International space cooperation, space commerce, and international space security discussions could be used to reinforce each other in ways that would advance US interests in the sustainability and security of military and civil space activities.

The past five years have seen the emergence of new threats to US space activities, threats that are different from those of the Cold War and which have their own distinct dynamics. Some threats are intentional and others are accidental. In some cases, threats come from a known nation state while in others, it is impossible to attribute responsibility due to a lack of full “space situational awareness” to support intelligence needs.

In 2007, without prior notification, China tested a high altitude anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) against one of its old weather satellites. This test created tens of thousands of pieces of orbital debris and increased the risk of collision and damage to many satellites operating in low Earth orbit, including the International Space Station, for many years. In 2009, there was an accidental collision over the Arctic between a defunct Russian Kosmos communications satellite and an active Iridium communications satellite that added even more orbital debris to low Earth orbit. North Korea, faced with multiple UN sanctions, has continued developing ballistic missile capabilities under the guise of peaceful space launches. Iran continues to jam commercial satellite broadcasts in order to prevent foreign reports of domestic unrest from reaching its population. There have been reports of attempts at unauthorized access to US civil scientific satellites, e.g., Terra and Landsat in 2007 and 2008, but the source of these attempts has not been confirmed. Threats to the sustainability of space activities today come not from a single superpower but from a much more diverse group of actors whose motivations can range from deliberate to ambiguous and even accidental.

The global space community is a dynamic one with new capabilities and new entrants. Europe is building its own version of GPS, titled “Galileo,” and has long been a leading supplier of international commercial launch services with its Ariane family of launch vehicles. China has flown several astronauts, becoming only the third country with independent human access to space. China is constructing a space laboratory and has demonstrated unmanned rendezvous and docking operations in preparation for a fully manned space station in 2020—about the time the International Space Station may be ending its operations. Japan has announced plans to sell radar satellites to Vietnam while South Korea is seeking to sell an optical imaging satellite to the United Arab Emirates. Brazil and China are continuing many years of space cooperation in remote sensing, while India and South Africa are close to concluding their own space cooperation agreement. All of these countries recognize that space capabilities are important for both practical and symbolic reasons and that these capabilities are intrinsically “dual-use” in that civil, security, and commercial applications are based on similar skills and technologies.

Background: US Domestic Space Challenges

US space capabilities today are dramatically superior to what they were fifty years ago. However, in relative terms and compared to the importance of space to US national interests, the trends are worrisome as they represent shortfalls in US space capabilities and disconnects between US policy statements and actions. The second loss of a Space Shuttle, Columbia, in 2003 resulted in the decision to retire the system after completion of the International Space Station. The last Shuttle flight occurred in 2011 and the United States is now reliant on Russia for human access to space. Plans to replace the Shuttle were disrupted by the 2010 decision of the Obama Administration to cancel NASA’s Constellation program and shift to reliance on new private providers of crew launch services. While the Bush Administration contemplated a four to five year gap in US human access to space, the current gap may now be more than six years. In addition to the cost of paying Russia for crew transportation, the other Space Station partners are concerned with relying on a single country for access to the International Space Station. Four recent Russian launch failures—a Proton loss in December 2010, Soyuz and Proton-M failures in August 2011, and the Phobos-Grunt Mars mission loss in November 2011—have raised concerns that Russia’s traditional strength in reliable launch vehicles may be fading.

In addition to disruptions in US human space flight, the United States was unable to make a long-term financial commitment to Europe for a program of robotic exploration of Mars, despite years of involvement in the planning process. This prompted the European Space Agency to invite Russia to be a full partner in the ExoMars program in October 2011 after discussions with the United States reached an impasse. Budget constraints have similarly prevented domestic production of Plutonium-238 after Russian supplies ran out. This nuclear fuel is critical to providing electrical power to missions traveling beyond Mars and long-term exploration of the planets. There is enough fuel for one more “flagship” mission but that will be the end without new supplies. Finally, budget uncertainty has caused delays in the construction of the next series of weather satellites and the United States may be facing a multiyear gap in meteorological data that will result in less accurate near-term weather predictions.

Financial turmoil is not the only source of difficulty for US space operations. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering allowing a terrestrial broadband company, LightSquared, to operate in the spectrum adjacent to GPS. This spectrum has been previously allocated to satellite services that were compatible with GPS. Unfortunately, testing has shown that the proposed terrestrial broadband service would create unacceptable interference to many, if not all, GPS-enabled services. The regulatory uncertainty at the FCC has gone on for more than a year and prompted formal expressions of international concern from the European Commission, the Japanese Government, and the International Civil Aeronautics Organization (ICAO) over possible interference to satellite-based positioning and navigation. The international community has been puzzled by the US debate over possible interference to GPS, as the National Space Policy clearly requires the “protection of radionavigation spectrum from disruption and interference.”

US National Space Policy and Space Strategy

The current US National Space Policy, a comprehensive document that addresses the full range of US interests in space, was released in June 2010. The policy continues many long-standing principles, such as the right of all nations to engage in the peaceful uses of outer space, recognition of the inherent right of self-defense, and that purposeful interference with space systems is an infringement of a nation’s rights. The policy states that the United States “recognizes the need for stability in the space environment” and that it will pursue “bilateral and multilateral transparency and confidence building measures to encourage responsible actions in space.”

The policy made some important changes compared to the 2006 National Space Policy, notably with respect to arms control. The 2010 policy does not categorically reject space-related arms control that would constrain US space activities but states that any such agreements would have to be “equitable, effectively verifiable, and enhance the national security of the United States and its allies.” This is a traditional policy formulation that was also used during the Reagan Administration. There is nothing in the policy, however, about actively pursuing new international treaties, creating legal norms, or characterizing space as a “global commons” or being part of the “common heritage of all mankind”—ambiguous terms that are advocated in some segments of the international space law and policy communities. Use of these terms by US officials can lead to misperceptions or miscommunications as to US policy and strategic intentions.

The general coherence on the national security and foreign policy side is not matched in the section of the 2010 National Space Policy dealing with civil space exploration. The policy says that the NASA Administrator shall “set far-reaching exploration milestones. By 2025, begin crewed missions beyond the moon, including sending humans to an asteroid.” Unlike the carefully crafted text elsewhere in the policy, this section appears to have been directly taken from an April 15, 2010 speech by President Obama at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Subsequent technical work has shown that there are few scientifically attractive, technically feasible asteroids that can be reached on this schedule. Even worse, the international space community, which had been shifting attention to the moon in anticipation of that being the next US focus of exploration beyond low Earth orbit, felt blindsided. Countries in Asia, such as Japan, India, China and South Korea, saw the moon as a challenging but feasible destination for robotic exploration and a practical focus for human space exploration. The asteroid mission was, perhaps unintentionally, taken as a sign that the United States was not interested in broad international cooperation but would focus on partnerships with the most capable countries, such as Russia and perhaps Europe. As a result, spacefaring countries are increasingly making their own space exploration plans separate from the United States.

The National Security Space Strategy was released in January 2011 as a report to Congress and is intended to provide direction to the national security space community in planning, programming, acquisition, operations, and analyses. Despite being signed by the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence, it places a major emphasis on diplomatic activities as a responsibility of the Department of State—as well as dual-use capabilities that are promoted and regulated by the Departments of Commerce, Transportation, State, and the FCC. The implementation of the strategy says, in part, that (emphasis added):

•“We seek to address congestion by establishing norms, enhancing space situational awareness, and fostering greater transparency and information sharing.”

•“We seek to address the contested environment with a multilayered deterrence approach. We will support establishing international norms and transparency and confidence-building measures in space, primarily to promote spaceflight safety but also to dissuade and impose international costs on aggressive behavior.”

The problem with the phrase about establishing norms is that it goes beyond the terms of the National Space Policy. Furthermore, it presupposes there will be some authority by which the norms are established and that the United States will be bound along with other nations. Many harmful activities such as the intentional creation of long-lived orbital debris and intentional satellite jamming are already contrary to international law, notably the Outer Space Treaty and the Constitution of the International Telecommunication Union. Yet there has been little in the way of sanctions save for international complaints. A more useful statement might have been one about promoting compliance with existing international laws and agreements.

Unfortunately, the Defense Department also uses the legally problematic term “global commons” with respect to space in the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (February 2010). This term applies to the high seas and the air above them, but is not yet accepted internationally or even officially by the United States. Whether intentional or not, use of the terms “norms” and “global commons” sends mixed messages to international audiences about the US view of space, despite stated desires to reduce miscommunication.

Subsequent statements by Defense Department officials expanded on this new concept of “multilayer” deterrence with respect to US space systems. In an April 13, 2011 speech to the 27th National Space Symposium, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Greg Schulte, explained that: “The first layer of deterrence is the establishment of norms of responsible behavior, thus separating responsible space-faring countries from those who act otherwise. The second layer of deterrence is the establishment of international coalitions, thus forcing an adversary to contemplate attacking the capabilities of many countries, not just one. The third layer of deterrence is increasing our resilience and capacity to operate in a degraded environment… thus reducing the incentive to attack our space capabilities. The fourth layer of deterrence is a readiness and capability to respond in self-defense, and not necessarily in space, thus further complicating the calculus of a government considering an attack on our space assets.” The latter two points are arguably part of traditional deterrence theory in which an opponent is deterred through fear of retaliation or denial of attack objections. The first two points may seem plausible but in practice they can represent a gross oversimplification of possible foreign reactions, including those of our allies. Under threat of attack or denial of crucial space systems, other countries may move toward neutrality in a crisis. In the longer term, they may accelerate the acquisition of independent capabilities rather than be unwillingly “entangled” with the United States.

China and Russia have for many years advocated an international treaty barring space weapons as well as the use or the threat of the use of force against space objects. They have introduced a draft treaty at the UN Conference on Disarmament as part of deliberations on the “prevention of an arms race in outer space.” The United States has consistently opposed such a treaty as unnecessary, unverifiable, and not in the interests of the United States and its allies. A major flaw in the draft treaty is the difficulty in defining just what a space weapon is; even if defined, the Chinese-Russian text leaves out ground-based systems such as interceptors and lasers. Consideration of a verifiable agreement, based on behavior, to ban the intentional creation of long-lived orbital debris has not gained much traction due to the impasse over the Chinese-Russian proposal.

Potential International “Space Code of Conduct”

As a pragmatic alternative to the proposed draft treaty, the United States has sought to pursue various “transparency and confidence building measures” that could enhance space security and stability in ways that would be acceptable to both developing and developed spacefaring states. Orbital debris, regardless of origin, and radiofrequency interference are hazards to all space operations. Rather than a “top down” negotiation of a treaty among major space powers, the development “bottom up” of technical best practices to mitigate hazards can be a more effective means of engaging a wider range of space actors. This is the approach taken in the development of orbital debris mitigation guidelines over several years in the Scientific and Technical Committee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). The guidelines have helped mitigate the creation of new debris but more needs to be done.

The European Union has proposed a draft “Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities” that would be a collection of non-legally binding transparency and confidence building measures (TCBMs) for space. A draft code released by the European Union in October 2010 calls for states to “refrain from the intentional destruction of any on-orbit space object or other activities which may generate long-lived orbital debris” and for signatories to share information on their space policies and practices. Procedurally, the code is being discussed outside of both COPOUS and the Conference on Disarmament, as the former does not deal with security issues and the latter is deadlocked on other, non-space, security issues. This is a practical approach that avoids being constrained by the existing structures and internal limits of UN organizations.

The United States has expressed overall positive support for the idea of an international code of conduct and the initiative taken by the European Union, but there are a number of sticking points with the current draft. For example, there are phrases calling for “further security guarantees” that are undefined as well as technical ambiguities such as what constitutes “dangerous proximity” for satellite operations. Provisions for an international mechanism to investigate incidents could draw opposition from the major space states, including China and Russia as well as the United States.

Considerable expert-level consultation will be needed before consideration could be given to calling a diplomatic conference for a code of conduct. While the United States and its traditional allies could likely come to an agreement, it is also important to draw in other spacefaring nations outside Europe, Canada, Japan and the United States. The United States and its allies do not have space security concerns with each other as much as they do with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) - not to mention North Korea and Iran. A space code of conduct will be valuable to the extent it can create a consensus with other spacefaring states around the world. Establishing such a consensus, however, is likely to take longer with countries that do not have a history of close civil space cooperation with the United States.

There will also be skepticism from some in the US Congress toward a code of conduct. In February 2011, a group of 37 Republican Senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing concerns that US acceptance of a space code of conduct would constrain US space capabilities. They wrote, “We are deeply concerned that the Administration may sign the United States on to a multilateral commitment with a multitude of potential highly damaging implications for sensitive military and intelligence programs (current, planned or otherwise), as well as a tremendous amount of commercial activity.” In particular, the Senators were concerned with possible constraints on space basing of missile defense interceptors and anti-satellite weapons as well as the costs of compliance. A code that helps to single out rogue actors and reduces the risk of orbital debris to US space operations might be accepted. A code that tries to go further and limit ballistic missile defenses or which seems to discriminate against the United States will likely be rejected.

A more subtle concern with a space code of conduct is whether it becomes a pretext for avoiding costly improvements in space mission assurance and resilience of critical military functions during conflict. International political agreements are a poor substitute for having actual capabilities to, as the National Space Policy requires, “deter, defend against, and, if necessary, defeat efforts to interfere with or attack US or allied space systems.” It is both tempting and dangerous to believe that diplomacy alone can save money in times when total defense spending is under pressure and national security space capabilities may be reduced. Placing a heavy emphasis on norms and coalitions to ensure space security, as expressed in statements about multilayer deterrence and space as a global commons, increases the risk that words might be substituted in place of US capabilities to the detriment of the actual space security.

Integrating National Interests in Space

Negotiations over possible “rules of the road” in space will not occur in isolation from other aspects of the international environment. From the beginning of the Space Age, space activities have been “tools” of both hard and soft power for participating nations. Hard power is represented by alliances, military capabilities, and economic strength that can compel and pay others to do what we desire. Cultural, diplomatic, and institutional forces are aspects of soft power by which we are able to persuade others to do what we desire. In seeking to advance international security interests in space, the environment for civil and commercial space activities must be considered along with the environment for military and intelligence ones.

The United States undertook the Apollo program in the 1960s to beat the Soviet Union to the moon as part of a global competition for Cold War prestige. The Apollo-Soyuz program symbolized a brief period of détente in the 1970s. The Space Station program was established in the 1980s, in part, to bring the developing space capabilities of Europe and Japan closer to the United States and strengthen anti-Soviet alliances. Russia was invited to join a restructured International Space Station in the 1990s to symbolize a new post-Cold War, post-Soviet relationship with Russia. What might be the geopolitical rationale for the next steps in human space exploration?

It is well recognized that many of today’s most important geopolitical challenges and opportunities lie in Asia. States under UN sanction, for example, Iran and North Korea, are seeking to develop ICBM capabilities under the guise of space launch programs. China, India, and South Korea are demonstrating increasingly sophisticated space capabilities that serve both civil and military needs. Examples of these capabilities include satellite communications, environmental monitoring, space-based navigation and scientific research. Unlike Europe, there are no established frameworks for peaceful space cooperation across Asia. In fact, the region can be characterized as containing several “hostile dyads” such as India-China, North Korea-South Korea, and China and its neighbors around the South China Sea. At the same time, Asian space agencies have shown a common interest in lunar missions as the logical next step beyond low Earth orbit. Such missions are seen as ambitious but achievable and thus more practical than missions to Mars and more distant locations. A program of peaceful, multilateral exploration of the moon would be a symbolic and practical means of creating a framework for peaceful space cooperation in concert with dual-use discussions of space TCBMs.

While seeking realistic approaches to civil space cooperation with increasingly capable states in Asia, the United States should also take a realistic approach to international space security and deterrence. Deterrence in space is no different from deterrence on the land, seas or in the air: the focus is on understanding the thinking of an opponent. Ensuring adequate military capabilities requires understanding how space systems fit into joint and combined arms campaigns, as well as understanding the views and values of potential adversaries. This in turn may well suggest steps toward greater international cooperation with friends and allies. TCBMs and codes of conduct can be helpful in reducing the chances of accidental conflict and in providing cues to unusual activities. They cannot be seen as a substitute for the military capabilities necessary to deter potential adversaries.

Organizing a broad international approach to space exploration and space security will not be easy—not the least because of errors and confusion in recent US space policy statements, strategies, and programs. US global influence has been diminished by removal of the moon as a focus for near-term human space exploration efforts, a failure to cooperate with Europe on the next stage of robotic missions to Mars, some simplistic assumptions regarding deterrence in the National Security Space Strategy, and limitations in space object tracking and notification capabilities that would reduce the risk from orbital debris for all space users. This cannot help but affect perceptions of US leadership by other spacefaring nations, in particular China. The effective integration of national security and civil space interests in support of US foreign policy objectives would benefit from amending these recent mistakes. Doing so would in turn enable opportunities for creating strategic advantages for the United States and its allies. Space activities do not fit within a single policy domain, department, or agency, but it is the very fact that they engage so many aspects of a nation’s policymaking that make them so beneficial to the nation. In shaping the international environment for space activities, hard and soft power can complement each other to build a more secure, stable, and prosperous world in which our values are taken beyond the Earth.

Scott Pace is the Director of the Space Policy Institute and Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He researches civil, commercial, and national security space policy, and the management of technical innovation.

Managing Space

kzhou — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

International Space Law and Prospective Reforms

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke perceptively noted that “one day, we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world would’ve shrunk to a point and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for men would’ve ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute—they will communicate.” Clarke’s comment predicts rather accurately some of the achievements in man’s outer space activities since the Sputnik launch in 1957 and the signature of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. As the year turns into 2012, communications satellites allow personal communications and the mass distribution of information on a global basis—helping to remove the digital divide. Such characteristics now allow telemedicine by satellite in remote areas and in emergencies, teleconsultation and patient monitoring, and represent perhaps the best means of ensuring access to information and medical services for all.

Access to space is still a new resource whose users may be states, intergovernmental organisations and increasingly private entities and individuals. The international legal framework governing such activities needs to allow new activities, offer flexibility, and protect investment and creativity, while being accountable to the underlying principles enshrined in the 1967 Treaty. This article looks back at the progression of space law from the first Sputnik transmissions, through the development of outer space as a tool for communications, environmental management and commercialization, to the new plans for human spaceflight. The article then considers some challenges for the next 50 years and possible reforms in the international framework.

Progression of International Space Law

Launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957

The years between the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 were marked by fierce Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in military power, and in the space race. The Outer Space Treaty, though it was agreed upon at the height of the Cold War, is characterized by the freedom of outer space for exploration and use by all states for peaceful purposes without discrimination and on the basis of equality, the non-appropriation of outer space (no individual state or person can own it), and the rule of law. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, not only did the United States begin to stress the teaching of math and science in school curricula, but it launched its own space program. On July 16, 1969, the first astronauts to walk on the moon had an audience of millions of people around the world. Looking back, perhaps the greatest success of the space race was the technology revolution it catalyzed, particularly in communications and broadcasting.

The Creation of Space Law

These early years were also characterised by a global international relations achievement – the agreement on the United Nations Outer Space Treaty in 1967, resolving that outer space should be the common heritage of mankind to be used for peaceful purposes in the interests of all nations, limiting state sovereignty. Just as important was the need to assess the risks involved in outer space ventures, control space activities, identify space objects, deal with the return of space objects to Earth, and determine liability for damage caused by space objects to other space objects, aircraft, or even to persons or property on Earth. Thus consensus on the Agreement on the Rescue and Return of Astronauts 1968, the Liability Convention 1972, and the Registration Convention 1975 was reached. Each expands on the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, giving state parties a general framework for the rights and duties of states in the exploration and use of outer space.

Following the moon landing in 1969, there was the public excitement and perception that the exploration and the use of the moon would increase and therefore that some international regime governing activities on the moon would be needed. After reaching agreement on the treaties mentioned above however, and when it became apparent that there was no immediately planned exploration of the moon, interest in negotiating the Moon Agreement waned. The Moon Agreement was adopted by the UN General Assembly over ten years after the Outer Space Treaty, and it came into force in 1984. The provisions of the Moon Agreement go beyond that of the Outer Space Treaty in ways that have been a barrier to its ratification by states. The issue is Article 11, which expresses the principle of the common heritage of the moon and its resources, prohibiting national appropriation.

The formation of space law has been innovative in international law—moulding together often divergent legal traditions to agree on solutions to issues caused by technological advances in a rapid timescale. The current UN space treaties were adopted within 15 years. Of importance also is the UN Resolution on Nuclear Power Sources of 1992, and the Principles Relating to the Remote Sensing of the Earth from Outer Space of 1985. This package of space treaties is now decades old but, with the exception of the regulations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), remain the sources of international law on outer space. The underlying principles of the treaties remain consistent: that the exploration and use of outer space is to be governed by international law; that outer space and celestial bodies are free for use by all states, irrespective of their economic or scientific development; that national appropriation is prevented; and that exploration and use should be for the benefit and in the interests of all mankind and for peaceful purposes.

UNCOPUOS

Recognition of the particular issues raised by outer space activities was evident when the UN General Assembly tasked the discussion and drafting of space law to a new, specially denominated committee—the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS). It is UNCOPUOS that is responsible for the development of the legal regime governing outer space law. The Committee now has 70 members and is one of the largest committees in the UN. The membership is supposed to represent the interests of all nations, but as someone privileged to attend the Legal Subcommittee of COPUOS, such size can be cumbersome. If attendees do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the issues discussed, the productive work at such meetings can be minimal.

Nevertheless, it was an impressive feat of the Committee to agree on the Outer Space Treaty in a few short months—some principles of which were contrary to traditional principles of international law, such as the non-appropriation of outer space, compared to the state sovereignty in air law. It placed particular importance on the common purpose of space activities, including benefitting mankind, emphasizing the astronaut as an envoy of mankind, promoting international cooperation and assistance, and using outer space for the benefit of all states equally—principles that do not always encourage private commercialization.

Evolution in Global Space Activity

The Role of Private Commercial Activities

An interesting question would consider what the Outer Space Treaty would look like today if it had to be drafted from scratch to deal with current and future activities in outer space, and with the benefit of knowledge from the implementation of the current package of treaties. Would it even be possible to reach an agreement today? Since 1967, the players involved in outer space activities have evolved from the governmental to the private commercial. But the international treaties do not always sit comfortably in this new private commercial space industry.

The rights and obligations developed under the outer space treaties belong to states. Therefore, access to space is controlled at a state level. Pursuant to the Outer Space Treaty, space-faring states are responsible for the acts of their national public and private commercial entities. For this reason, many states have passed national legislation and implemented licensing regimes in order to pass some of this responsibility to private operators and deal appropriately with the state’s obligation to exercise continuing supervision over such activities.

One issue raised by this increase in private activity, and which was discussed by the Japanese delegation in the Legal Subcommittee of UNCOPUOS in 2011, is that the existing treaties did not foresee the transfer of private ownership of satellites in orbit. Under the Outer Space Treaty, the launching state retains jurisdiction of a space object, must exercise supervision of its private activities, and is internationally liable for any damage its space object may cause. This may lead to complex situations where a privately owned satellite is transferred to a new owner in a different state from the launching state, due to a consolidation, merger, sale or other commercial activity. The duties of the launching state continue even though the original launching state is no longer the appropriate state to supervise the satellite and may not be able to exercise control over it. The Outer Space Treaty also does not address the situation where a satellite is transferred from a private entity established in a launching state to an entity in a state that is not a party to the Outer Space Treaty.

In practice, transfers do occur, even though there is no internationally agreed-upon regime governing such transfers. AsiaSat 1 and 2 and Apstar-I and 1A satellites were transferred from the UK to China when Hong Kong was handed back to China. In this example, however, China was already the territory from which the satellites were launched, so the transfer did not cause any issues. The transfer of US Intelsat satellites, on its privatization, to New Skies NV in the Netherlands, however, illustrates some of the issues caused by the transfer of privately owned satellites. The Netherlands disclaimed being subject to the Registration Convention and the Liability Convention with respect to the satellites, but did accept that it was the national state of the entity New Skies NV and, therefore, responsible for the operation of the satellites and for exercising jurisdiction and control over them.

The Registration Convention assumes that the state of nationality of the private entity that owns the satellite carries the satellite on its national registry, but this is clearly not always the case in practice. The rights and duties under the outer space treaties are also framed in the context of the single ownership of a space object. However, in today’s industry, multiple ownerships may be associated with a satellite—for example, the multiple ownership of transponders, the joint ownership of a satellite, or an entity in another jurisdiction owning a piggybacked payload. The outer space treaties do not envisage this multi-ownership concept.

Applications: Remote Sensing, Telemedicine

Over the last decades of space activity, many legal regimes, which were devised for very different fields of human activities, now have an impact on space—or indeed vice versa. The law governing telecommunications is long established. With the increasing use of satellites for communications over the last decades, the law governing telecommunications has become relevant for the utilization of outer space. Intellectual property law, again well established terrestrially, is now also directed to cover the protection of inventions and creations in space—and to encourage investment in such activities.

In the field of environmental law, there is an increasing use of remote sensing by satellite for ensuring the sustainable development of the Earth’s natural resources, monitoring compliance with environmental treaties, and for the purposes of disaster response and recovery. The uses are consistent with the principles of the international space treaties. The European Space Agency’s Treaty Enforcement Services Using Earth Observation (TESEO) initiative, for example, has the objective to explore the use of satellite imagery to support the implementation of environmental treaties.

The emerging principles on environmental protection and sustainable development will assist in the interpretation and development of space law, including the remote sensing regime and may act as a catalyst for the practical modification of existing rules and for the enactment of new rules to cover the protection of the space environment.

The same can be said to apply to the use of satellites for telemedicine. The outer space treaties already afford a framework for such activities and the cooperation of states. This application is likely to have an impact on medical regulations and policies in various countries to the extent that we may begin to see more harmonized policies coming into place to allow the benefits of such applications to spread.

Human Spaceflight

The concept of the space tourist is a recent development—hardly envisaged in the original Outer Space Treaty or the Agreement on the Rescue and Return of Astronauts. Until recently, astronauts were trained personnel belonging to the military or civilian government employees. The commercial market for space tourism now attracts paying space flight participants, with little or no training and no operational function. The concept of an astronaut needs to be revisited, perhaps to define different categories and to assess which duties under the Agreement on the Rescue and Return of Astronauts apply to space tourists. Issues such as liability waivers and insurance of space flight participants need to be considered, and also the importance of certification of flights and safety issues more generally.

Militarization of Space

The potential use of outer space for military purposes is inherent in the development of technologies for space. Practically all of the technologies that can be used in, or in relation to space have a dual profile; they can be used for purely commercial/civilian aims, purely military aims, or a mixture of both. For instance, commercial satellite communications installations may be, and in practice often are, heavily integrated into military communications infrastructure.

Existing international legislation governing the use of outer space does, to some extent, restrict military activity and the use of force in outer space. Pursuant to the Outer Space Treaty activities of a military nature such as the testing of weapons, the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons), or the establishment of military bases in space, are prohibited. However, there is no catch-all prohibition or restriction with respect to militarization. Specific controversial issues, such as the transit of weapons through space, or the launch of weapons into space from Earth in order to destroy other weapons, are not expressly regulated. The position is similar with respect to the regulation of the use of satellite technologies and anti-satellite weaponry, or the use of standard military equipment and weaponry in space. Even where regulations are in place, they are not comprehensive.

The main difficulty in the establishment of appropriate legal regulations is that the mechanisms in place to regulate the militarization of space must not hinder the development of critical space-related technologies and infrastructure. It has been noted above that civilian commercial activities have dramatically increased since the space law treaties came into force. Such activities, communications, remote sensing, global positioning, disaster response, science and research, telemedicine, would be severely affected by military action in outer space and unilateral military activities of individual states. The years of international space cooperation for the common interest would likely be over—and this would be in no one’s interest.

Challenges and Possible Reforms

Committees and Commercial Space

UNCOPUOS: Disconnected from Space Industry?

Over 40 years after UNCOPUOS formulated the Outer Space Treaty at the height of the Cold War and in record time, it is unclear if it would be able to achieve the same today. The number of states, international organizations, and private entities now capable of space activities, and the applications of interest to these players, would have been unimaginable in 1967. This has led to an explosive melange of different and often conflicting interests in how space should be used and exploited. UNCOPUOS sits in the middle of this with increasing difficulties in achieving agreement on new international law.

One further difficulty, briefly mentioned above, is the increasing disconnect between UNCOPUOS and the commercial space industry. The rows of delegations are partly made up of permanent mission representatives, rather than individuals interested in and knowledgeable about the actual workings and concerns of the main space players. Frans Von Der Dunk, Professor of Space Law at the University of Nebraska, suggests that UNCOPUOS should take a “back to basics” approach “in structurally underpinning and strengthening the spatialist basis of space law.” This role could involve the continuing clarification of the outer space treaties and definitions of such concepts as “damage” and “space object.” In any event, UNCOPUOS provides, and will continue to provide, a valuable forum for international debate and cooperation.

UNIDROIT: Space Assets Protocol

The disconnect between the preparation of international regulation and the practice of the main space players is possibly most evident in relation to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Space Assets Protocol to the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment. The fundamental goal of the Space Protocol, as originally set by UNIDROIT, was to create an instrument to help foster space financing. As a result of a drafting process that lacked informed guidance from experienced satellite industry representatives, the draft Space Protocol is inconsistent with market practices of commercial space financing, and incorporates numerous impractical features that will likely deter potential investors in the satellite industry.

The satellite, insurance, and finance industries have in general been consistent in their cold stance towards the Space Assets Protocol. They view the Protocol’s benefits for the satellite sector as unclear and it may impose an unnecessary burden on the satellite industry. They believe there is no need for a new layer of supranational law addressing ownership and collateral security issues relating to certain space assets, referring to several existing legal regimes that they believe already address adequately the granting of security in space-based assets. They have not seen any failures or major inefficiencies for asset-based satellite financings due to impediments over the granting and perfection of security interests. Finally, they emphasize that the satellite and space sector is a vital component of economic growth, manufacturing, and the export industry, and should be developed and nurtured rather than subject to an additional layer of law. The Protocol includes vague and broad rules on ownership and security interests in undefined types of space property, which are likely to lead to uncertainty and even hinder space financings. Diplomatic Conference for the adoption of the Space Assets Protocol will be held in Spring 2012, and it will be interesting to see which and how many states ratify it.

Congested Space: Space Debris

With the legacy of over 50 years of space activities, the issue of space debris is of increasing importance. The issue was highlighted earlier last year with the uncontrolled re-entry of the six-metric ton decommissioned US Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, and also the defunct German 2.4-metric ton Rontgensatellit, or ROSAT. The legal issues of space debris are to some extent dealt with in current international space law, which confirms general obligations without creating clear rules. The provisions of the Outer Space Treaty alone are too generic to deal with the complex problems of space debris. In fact, despite efforts by legal writers to define the concept of “space debris”, no internationally agreed-upon definition or description exists.

Establishing the elements of a claim under the Liability Convention for damage caused by space debris would be challenging. Space debris needs to be identified and the launching state of the debris established, but the claiming state must also prove that the damage was caused by the fault of the launching state, or a private entity for which it is responsible. Any mandatory measures to mitigate space debris are likely to lead to an increase in the cost of space activities. An international solution to space debris, therefore, can only be achieved after the appropriate national or regional regulations are as far as possible harmonised internationally to avoid unfair competition. An international solution must be based on a level playing field.

Legal certainty can only be achieved through binding international law—a treaty dealing precisely with state responsibility, liability and the mitigation of space debris and ratified by all space faring states. However, as yet there are no binding mandatory international standards or guidelines to deal with the issue of space debris, and this is likely to be the case for some time. The next best solutions are voluntary guidelines and standards accepted by the international community or codes of conduct adopted at a regional level. Such voluntary standards can be used as indicators of the expected standard of care of satellite operators with regard to the generation of space debris. Several organisations such as UNCOPUOS, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), the European Network of Centres Space Debris Coordination Group, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have all been working on guidelines and standards, which are being implemented on a voluntary basis.

Competitive Space: ITU and Access to Spectrum

The ITU is, as Francis Lyall, Professor of Space Law at the University of Aberdeen, explains, “fundamental to virtually all space endeavours.” The ITU is, in short, the UN specialised agency responsible for the allocation of global radio spectrum and satellite orbits. Its goal is to ensure the rational, equitable, efficient, and economical use of the radio-frequency spectrum by all radio communication services, including those using satellite orbits—allowing, in effect, access to spectrum to conduct outer space activities.

Orbits and frequencies are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis provided that the use of the frequencies meets the criteria set out in the ITU Radio Regulations and the Table of Allocations. This principle has led to the problem of “paper satellites”, which is only slowly being dealt with. Once commercial entities began using the geostationary orbit, entities encouraged national administrations to the ITU to notify speculative filings that existed only as potential plans rather than actual, intended satellite networks. The intention was to secure a position on the ITU Master International Frequency Register, itself an asset. In order to deal with this issue, a notifying administration must now exercise administrative due diligence to ensure that there is a genuine intention that the filing be brought into actual use. The satellite industry would encourage continued lobbying of the ITU by member states to prevent the filing of “paper” satellites by other national administrations to the ITU and the imposition of penalties on such administrations. Such speculative filings are the major contributor to the administrative inefficiency of the ITU and delays in the bringing to market of innovative technologies.

Several industry members also believe that to encourage liberalization in the satellite sector and stimulate growth and investment, the ITU should allow for a mechanism to permit the transfer of filings between ITU member states. The current restrictions where filings are allocated to and “owned” by the member state are viewed by some as unnecessarily restricting the expansion and development of satellite services and hindering competition.

Final Comments

It is often mentioned that the outer space treaties should be revised and updated. Although the space industry has changed radically in the last 40 years, it is still probably premature to seek the revision of the outer space treaties. Perhaps instead, further UN space resolutions may be considered to add detail and certainty, for example on the transfer of space objects. It may also be risky to open up negotiations on the treaties, when at the moment the treaties at least provide a solid, known framework. Several issues are likely to be brought to the table that did not exist 40 years ago and which would make reaching an agreement more difficult today.

In relation to some applications, however, the law does need to be developed further, or for the first time. Environmental concerns, especially space debris, need to be considered, and an international level playing field of space mitigation measures created. The law and liability regime relating to human space flight also must be developed on both an international and national basis. Laws to allow and regulate applications such as telemedicine need to be considered. The applications of space technology are limited only by our creativity—perhaps we also need some more creativity from our legal minds.

Joanne Wheeler is a Partner at CMS Cameron McKenna, specializing in the regulatory and commercial aspects of space and satellite law. She is an expert representative for the UK Government at the Legal Subcommittee of the Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Commercialization in Space

pagarwal — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:00:00 +0000

Changing Boundaries and Future Promises

HIR Issue:

A New Empire

The concept of private enterprise exploiting space to build and grow thriving business ventures is nothing new. It has been around since 1965. That’s when the first commercial satellite, called Early Bird, went into regular revenue service with 240 telephone circuits.

Since then, the private sector has continued to expand its involvement in space activities beyond anything most people could have imagined 50 years ago, when President Kennedy exhorted the nation to land Americans on the moon and return them safely by the end of the 1960s. As celebrated as NASA’s Apollo missions were, climaxing in Neil Armstrong’s radio transmission, “That’s one small step for mankind…” from the moon’s surface in July 1969, it is easy to overlook the fact that private enterprise has designed, built and helped operate the spacecraft and infrastructure for every US civil and military space mission. And the same goes for every other space mission in the Free World.

Today, the commercial utilization of space is an essential component of telecommunications, financial markets, and a host of other critical sectors. But now the private sector’s involvement in space is fast approaching a new paradigm, courtesy of a growing number of entrepreneurial pioneers, mostly in the United States. They are combining a vision, a can-do spirit and varying degrees of technical knowledge to set the agenda. A few of them—each a high-profile figure in aerospace circles who have a track record of disruptive innovations and self-promotion—have been claiming for a decade that commercial space was on the cusp of a new paradigm, but it never quite materialized. That is about to change, and a new era in commercial space is dawning. This is the decade in which skeptics will witness various firsts in commercial space.

The Players

That the private sector is pushing the boundaries and are on the threshold of achieving what amounts to a critical mass should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying close attention. Enabling technologies, such as propulsion and aerodynamics, have made huge advances to the point where they can now be adapted to commercial ventures. The private sector also possesses the know-how developed over decades of collaborating with the government on manned and unmanned systems designed specially for space. Adding further impetus to the private sector’s expanding role was the decision by the US government last year to retire the Space Shuttle, despite having no other means to launch Americans into space than to rely on Russia.

Governments will still take the lead in some areas, of course, as in the ongoing militarization of space. In addition, they will continue to partner with private enterprise on many space initiatives and actively support the private sector’s efforts to broaden its participation. Moreover, only nations will be able to afford the most ambitious projects, such as exploring the universe, continuing the search for extraterrestrial life, and searching for asteroids that could be catastrophic on a global scale and developing possible defenses against them. All the same, it is the private sector that’s in the vanguard of opening a new era in space—and it is closer than you might think.

Just as the idea of space tourism was unimaginable 50 years ago except to science fiction writers, the evolutionary paths that commercial space could take in the next decade or two might seem equally far-fetched. But the projects currently taking shape are no fantasy. Even the most well-grounded space program veterans agree that space tourism—among other bold new commercial space ventures—is likely to emerge as a niche but growing industry within the next 10 years.

Like any nascent field of commerce, space tourism will begin modestly. As it now appears, Virgin Galactic, a spin-off of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is apt to lead the way. Within the next year or two, a Virgin Galactic SpaceShip will be carried aloft underneath a large aircraft flying high above the ground. After it is released, the unusual looking craft will fall freely to a safe altitude and ignite its rocket engine to transport eight people on a brief excursion to the edge of space. Two of them will be pilots; the other six will be paying customers. In the meantime, scientists and would-be space tourists are taking a short course in suburban Philadelphia to learn what they can expect on a suborbital flight. And on the desert flats outside Truth or Consequences, NM, a new commercial spaceport is nearing completion.

In addition to Virgin Galactic, Rocketplane Global—a venture led by cofounder Charles Lauer—is negotiating agreements to launch its suborbital Rocketplane XP from the Netherlands and Spain. Besides flying space tourists and spaced-based research experiments, the vehicle is being designed to deploy very small spacecraft, called nanosatellites. Lauer’s plan to establish a spaceport near Barcelona has the support of local airport authorities and the regional government. He envisions suborbital tours once or twice a week as early as 2015, with seats costing US$200,000 apiece. There is little question the target market is there—there already is a waiting list of customers. Keep in mind that manufacturers of exotic sports cars costing substantially more than US$200,000 also have multiyear waiting lists for their trophy products.

Russia’s private sector is trying to get into the act as well. Orbital Technologies proposes to build a modest orbiting hotel and commercial space laboratory and open for business before the end of the decade. Orbital is collaborating with Russian space agency Roscosmos and Rocket and Space Corp., Energia to develop the Commercial Space Station (CSS), with financing from private investors. The company is working with Vienna-based Space Adventures to market flights to the CSS, with prices comparable to flying tourists to the International Space Station (ISS)—US$50-60 million. That is the same price as top-of-the-line business jets, such as the Gulfstream 650 or the Bombardier Global Express.

“The commercialization of space is a fait accompli, and the thing that will change the whole equation is [space] tourism to low-Earth orbit, with revenue passengers circling our planet for a couple of days experiencing weightlessness and photographing Earth,” says futurist Norman R. Augustine A former aerospace industry executive, Augustine was appointed by President George W. Bush and more recently President Barack Obama to lead blue ribbon panels tasked with making recommendations on future US space policy. Augustine is famous for a book he published in 1984 called Augustine’s Laws, a series of often quoted tongue-in-cheek aphorisms spanning management, technology and defense spending that are proving to be remarkably prescient in the current resource-constrained environment. “There is enough interest by people worldwide that there is absolutely no doubt it will happen; it is a question of when, not if,” he says. “As it develops, prices will come down through economies of scale, safety will go up and the practice will become routine.”

Government and Private Sector Collaboration

Impossibly ambitious as some of these ventures may sound, the entrepreneurs pursing their vision of the future are finding increased credibility and acceptance from financial backers. In some respects, the profile of the commercialization of space mimics the birth of commercial air transportation, which can be traced back to the aviation pioneers of the early 20th century. Besides their love of flying, they were risk takers who shared a can-do spirit and a vision for how airplanes could be used commercially. Along the way, government was there to help.

In 1918, when the US Postal Service won the financial backing of Congress to begin experimenting with airmail service, adventurous aviators jumped at the chance to fly mail as private operators, using Curtiss Jenny aircrafts made mostly of wood and canvas. By the 1920s, the Postal Service had developed its own airmail network based on a transcontinental backbone between New York and San Francisco. To supplant this service, the government offered 12 contracts for spur routes to independent bidders. In 1925, the Ford Motor Co. purchased the Stout Aircraft Co. and began construction of the iconic, Ford Trimotor airplane, with its more durable, all-metal airframe that could better weather and potentially dangerous flying conditions. With a 12-passenger capacity—the same as Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip—the Trimotor made passenger service profitable for those who were able to manage the business properly. Through time and mergers, some of the independent bidders that won airmail routes would evolve into Pan Am, Trans World Airlines, and other iconic names in commercial air transportation.

Fast-forward 85 years, to private suborbital rocket rides launching from New Mexico and NASA astronauts getting ready for what eventually could become the equivalent of taxi rides to the ISS. In the United States, where NASA remains one of the most underfunded government agencies relative to its broad mandate, there is growing recognition that the time has come for the private sector to take on some jobs that only government has been allowed to perform. This recognition has led to a policy shift, going as far as funneling seed money into the development of commercial spacecraft capable of transporting humans. The principal motivations: reliability and cost. The United States pays its former Cold War adversary US$60 million to ferry each American to the International Space Station (ISS).

Until a private company is up for the job, Russia will have a monopoly. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, led by Elon Musk out of the Howard Hughes mold, figures his company can do the job for less than half the current going rate—and SpaceX is just one of several companies interested in the work. Currently the Federal Aviation Administration is working on the first license for a spacecraft to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. It is just the beginning of what’s in store in the next few years and almost certainly will accelerate beyond mid-decade.

The Strategic Benefits

One of the major conclusions of the most recent presidential commission led by Augustine was that NASA’s Constellation program for developing a spaceflight vehicle capable of carrying humans—essentially a successor to the Space Shuttle—was fiscally unsustainable. NASA has yet to issue requests for proposals for end-to-end crew services to and from the International Space Station. However, it expects to begin using commercial cargo services developed under a $500-million Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) seed-money program to resupply the ISS within the next year or two. Such a service would reduce, if not eliminate the need for US, European, Canadian, and Japanese astronauts to reach orbit via Russia’s costly Soyuz space capsules.

Of course, SpaceX isn’t the only game in town. It is in competition with Orbital Sciences Corp., which traces its roots to the early 1980s, when its founders met at Harvard Business School—much as Bill Gates and some of his collaborators did—and worked together on a project for NASA to examine the viability of commercial satellites. The founders believed they could make space technology more affordable. Both companies have signed Commercial Resupply Services agreements with NASA valued at US$3.5 billion. NASA will have its own requirements for human transportation to the ISS but will allow private developers to design spacecraft to meet not only its requirements, but those of other customers as well. Both NASA and space entrepreneurs know the market is there; the United States and Russia have been flying other countries’ astronauts to low-Earth orbit since 1978.

Still to be determined is whether NASA wants what amounts to a “taxi,” with a private crew piloting NASA astronauts to the orbiting space station, or whether it wants the ability to basically rent a privately designed and built spacecraft that NASA pilots could fly to the ISS themselves. The spacecraft would remain docked at the space station and serve as a lifeboat until the astronauts were ready for their return voyage to Earth. Along similar lines, Entrepreneur Robert Bigelow has invested more than US$200 million in the development of inflatable orbital habitats that he plans to lease to industry and countries who cannot afford to build their own human spaceflight hardware.

Whatever combination of private vendors NASA hires, there is no question the agency clearly is on a trajectory of bringing commercial cargo and crew vehicles developed by the private sector into US spaceflight operations. Planetary scientist S. Alan Stern, NASA’s former associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, believes it is just a matter of time before private operators begin providing some manned space flight missions. “That is when commercial space will move from the minor leagues into the big leagues,” he said.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and its member governments also are moving toward handing off more of what ESA has done historically to the private sector—from Earth imaging and commercial communications services, to launch and crew support. And European companies are anticipating the shift, just as they are in the United States. For example, the Astrium division of European aerospace and defense giant EADS, is spending millions of dollars of its own money to privatize satellite communications and remote sensing services. Astrium was created in 2003 after the UK Ministry of Defense decided to outsource secure satellite telecommunications to the private sector. Initially the company was guaranteed a market for its products but had to shoulder the risk building and launching the United Kingdom’s large military satellites. For Earth observation services, Astrium is funding 100 percent of the investment needed for a constellation of its SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 satellites, despite the absence of any guaranteed customers.

The Challenges

As private enterprise begins to undertake more of the space missions that only governments have performed—both manned and unmanned—they will be tested by the same rigorous measure of success that govern traditional business ventures: return on investment. Some financial backers will have the risk-tolerance to stick with projects that experience ups and downs before they begin earning a profit and can sustain attractive returns. Other venture capitalists will be more cautious; they will remember the loss of billions of dollars of private equity capital on commercial space projects that had all the earmarks of becoming hugely successful.

For example, in the late 1990s several deep-pocketed companies launched major ventures around providing satellite-based mobile telephone services globally, based on constellations of satellites in low-Earth orbit. Some of these ventures, such as Iridium and Globalstar, had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building those constellations when they were upended by the dramatic collapse of the business model. Technical problems played a role, as did the high cost of the service. But it was the failure of everyone connected with the projects to foresee the rapid global deployment of terrestrial mobile standards that was the business model’s main undoing—and made satellite phones unnecessary.

What could rattle the financial backers of commercial space projects to the core? The first accident involving the loss of life, for starters. Such an event is inevitable, just as commercial and business aircraft crash somewhere in the world every year. In regions where safety is the first priority, such as North America and Western Europe, fatal crashes are remarkably rare. Still, the flying public and aviation professionals alike generally understand the potential is always there and that risk is a part of flying commercially, albeit a very small risk.

Nonetheless, it remains to be seen how the public, government regulators, would-be customers, and private space transportation service providers will respond to the loss of a space plane and its crew and passengers. All stakeholders will need to learn how to keep such tragedies in perspective—assuming, of course, that project principals can show that safety is Job No. 1. As Stern correctly points out, risk is a part of all forms of transportation. If commercial space flight is to flourish, failure cannot be allowed to bring it to a halt, anymore than the fatal crash of a commercial airliner or a bullet train should stop either of those services, and doesn’t. As private enterprises continue to prepare for the day when they are taking tourists on excursions in space and ferrying astronauts to the ISS and other space habitats, an ongoing and unwavering commitment to safety will be paramount.

The other big challenge ahead of private enterprise in space is current international space law, which is based mainly on the doctrine of res communis of the Outer Space Treaty. Simply put, it means that space belongs to everyone. That is true, of course. But as a practical matter, it effectively will limit some kinds of commercial space ventures we otherwise might expect to see in, say, the decade starting in 2020. The reason is that reshaping international space law will be neither simple nor expedient. One need only consider how torturous it is for nations to reach agreements on matters of common interest on Earth to appreciate how challenging it will be for the global community to negotiate international treaties pertaining to the many possible uses of space. Under the Outer Space Treaty, anti-satellite weapons are banned. However, that didn’t stop China in 2007 from destroying one of its own dead satellites in orbit. In the process of demonstrating how to obliterate an adversary’s satellite—whether it is a telecommunications satellite serving millions of people, or a military satellite to warn of strategic missile launches—China greatly exacerbated the problem of space debris that threatens all manned and unmanned spacecraft orbiting Earth.

The Outer Space Treaty also forbids nations from claiming territory in space; a companion Moon Treaty extends the prohibition to private legal entities. The United States is not a signatory to the Moon Treaty, although it is widely perceived to be accepted international law. Curiously, the Moon Treaty does not forbid mineral exploitation, except under the oversight of an international body. But it does ban staking claims on exterrestrial property. So does the ban that applies to the moon also apply to, say, Mars, and how restrictive would it be in practice? One of Elon Musk’s long-range visions is to establish a human colony on the Red Planet. Those questions likely will be answered only after long and difficult negotiations involving multiple countries.

At a recent meeting of a special committee of the United Nations on the outlook for the peaceful uses of space, there was broad agreement that much worked was needed to hammer out a legal framework that is in step with the times. As it stands, the framework lags the development of new technologies, as well as the rapid pace that the private sector is making toward expanding the commercialization of space activities. Many member nations refuse to accept key treaties, which poses one type of problem. In addition, some nations believe there are possible loopholes in the current legal regime. Others are skeptical about the ability of the regime to effectively address current challenges to certain space activities. None of these hurdles, including the current framework of space law, may be roadblocks per se to the longer-term progress of the commercialization of space. But they are likely to govern the speed at which the private sector will be able to implement some of the bolder plans they wish to pursue. Perhaps that is just as well. Unlike the early days of commercial aviation, the next era in the commercialization of space is no activity to be done by the seat of the pants, no matter how ambitious or inspiring the project. All the same, there is little doubt that a greatly expanded role for the private sector in space is within sight and, as Augustine put it so succinctly, a fait accompli.

ANTHONY VELOCCI is Editor-in-Chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology and editorial leader of Aviation Week products. His awards include the McGraw-Hill Companies’ Corporate Achievement Award for Editorial Excellence, and the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year award.

Northern Juggernaut? A Look Inside the Canadian Economy with Don Drummond

leekristine27 — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:44:31 +0000

Don Drummond is the Matthews Fellow on Global Public Policy at Queen’s University at Kingston. From 2000 to 2010, he was the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist for TD Bank Financial Group. In March 2011, he was appointed Chair of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services.

When Canada is mentioned in the international business press, it is often mentioned in a positive light. We read about Canada’s sound banking system and relatively low public debt or we hear about its GDP and employment growth that has outstripped other G7 countries. But could you give us a more complete picture? What is going well in Canada’s economy and what is going not-so-well?

It is true that if you look at the so-called underlying fundamentals, we really seem to have distinguished ourselves from the major developed economies. But on the other hand, our record of output during the recession was not much better than that of the United States.

Historically our recessions have tended to be worse than those in the United States. This time we have been hit somewhat more lightly, and that was due to our sounder policies and stronger private sector business fundamentals. So, one could argue counterfactually that the recession might have been worse in Canada without those sound fundamentals.

The other aspect that distinguishes Canada sounds great at first but is more ambiguous in the long run, and that is that we have established a better employment record than the other developed economies, particularly the United States. The inverse of that, however, is that our productivity growth rate is fairly low. I think that is truly the Achilles heel of the Canadian economy. If we look at the Canadian economy over the last decade, we have had very little productivity growth—less than 1 percent a year. Despite everything that ailed the US economy, it had productivity growth of over 2 percent a year.

If we look back at the 24 OECD countries starting in the 1960s, Canada used to have the third-highest level of productivity. Now it is seventeenth. In fact, since 1980, only three of those 24 countries have had a slower productivity growth rate than Canada. So we may appear to be doing quite well in terms of output and employment growth rates, but in terms of productivity levels we’re still suffering. That translates into weak household income growth.

According to Statistics Canada, between 1997 and 2011, Canadian labor productivity declined 17% relative to the United States. What are some of the reasons for this, and what can Canadian policymakers do to close this gap?

Superficially, I would say the number one culprit is that we have underinvested in machinery and equipment in Canada. The best way to increase labor productivity it is to give workers a better stock of machinery and equipment to work with. On average, the Canadian worker has just a little more than half the stock of machinery and equipment to work with as his American counterpart.

But, as I said, that is the superficial answer because that just begs another question: why do Canadians have so much less machinery and equipment to work with?

Historically, Canadian companies have said that this is because the taxation of capital is very high in Canada. I have some sympathy with that as an historical argument, but that is not the case anymore. All Canadian governments started to bring down their rate of capital taxation beginning in 2000, and we now have much lower rates than the United States. So, in theory, we should have seen an increase in business investment.

We had a potential golden era of investment from 2003 to 2007 because we import much of our machinery and equipment, and the Canadian dollar was rising against the US dollar and almost all other currencies. This meant that imports in machinery and equipment were getting cheaper. Adding to that, corporations had a lot of retained earnings. Yet, they did not increase their business investment very much.

One reason for this could be the historical reliance of Canadian businesses on an undervalued Canadian dollar. This is certainly anecdotal, but a lot of businesspeople have given me the story that they thought the dollar would fall back down in value, so they did not need to make transformational changes. But by 2007, they realized the dollar was going to stay fairly high, and this is consistent with the numbers, which show a rise in business investment in 2007 until it got knocked off course.

A second distinguishing feature of Canada that accounts for some of the productivity gap is that we have a much heavier concentration of small businesses than the United States. As a percentage of GDP, the output of small businesses in Canada is roughly double what it is in the United States. Again, historically there has been a taxation reason for that. We have always had a much lower tax rate on small businesses than on large businesses, so if your business income rose and you started to lose the small business rate, the marginal corporate tax rate became quite high. Prior to 2000, it went up to about 56%, well above the top marginal personal income tax rate. So we actually had a feature of our tax system that gave an incentive to small businesses not to grow. If they did grow, they had an incentive to pay out earnings to their partners as bonuses so that it would count as personal income. That is the antithesis of what you want to do to grow your business.

But now the gap between the small business rate and regular rate has come down, and the marginal tax rate for small businesses no longer gets above the marginal tax rate for individuals. Yet businesses still appear to be disbursing retained earnings to partners, even though it is no longer advantageous from a tax perspective.

It could just be that old habits die hard. I think partly we are still living in the legacy of historical economic philosophies of Canada. If we go back to one of the founding fathers of the country, Sir John A. MacDonald, his economic plan was heavily based upon building the manufacturing system by protecting it through tariff barriers. So when a lot of industries started in Canada, they didn’t need to be particularly competitive because they had a captive market in Canada. To some degree I wonder whether that philosophy still governs some businesses, even though the tariffs have been gone for nearly two decades.

We do have some telltale signs of that philosophy. For example, only 4 percent of all the revenues from small and medium enterprise in Canada come from exports into emerging economies. And yet, as of 2009, emerging economies now constitute half the world economy. Our economic model still remains one in which we’re almost uniquely tied to the United States. Historically, that’s been a wonderful economic model because the US economy has grown very strongly, with very strong productivity growth. But I would not expect that over the next 15 or 20 years. The United States is not going to be one of the growth leaders in the world, and Canada will have to change its economic model. We are seeing that come about fairly slowly.

You mentioned the persistently strong Canadian dollar, which makes it cheaper to import productivity-enhancing machinery and equipment. Will the strong dollar independently lead to a closing of the productivity gap, or do you see a need for concerted policy action?

The stronger dollar should help very much in Canada. I do not believe the claim that it is a disaster. Other than the obvious advantage the United States has in economies of scale, I do not think there is any reason the Canadian economy should have a lower productivity level. Hence, there is not any reason we should not be competitive at a dollar at parity. And even on the issue of economies of scale, we have to remember that, despite a few obstacles, we do have free trade with the United States. A theory of free trade between the two economies would say that you could operate out of Canada and still achieve US-type economies of scale. So I am not even sure the economies of scale argument holds true for Canada.

On the policy side, you may want to have a look at an article I wrote in the winter edition of the International Productivity Monitor called “Confessions of a Serial Productivity Researcher.” I basically said that, if you go back to the 1980s and early 1990s and look at the list of things I said the Canadian government should do to raise productivity, it’s done about 70% of them. Some might not have gone as far as they should have, but I think that policy agenda has been tackled in a very serious way.

And yet productivity growth has continued to weaken. That does not mean the policy changes were wrongheaded—the record probably would have been worse without them—but it does suggest that the answers do not fully lie in that policy agenda. There are still some things left to do. For example, we still have a difference between small and large business taxes. We have an Employment Insurance scheme that basically dissuades people from going where the jobs are. We still have interprovincial trade barriers. And we still have large segments of the economy—including the industry I worked in for ten years, the banking industry—that are effectively protected from international competition.

But you have to wonder: if 70% of the agenda didn’t do the trick, why should we believe that the other 30% will? I think the time has come to realize that the answers may not even lie in the policy arena; they may come back to this business culture issue. I do not know what, if anything, you could do on the policy front to change Canadian business culture. Current practice will change eventually, because businesses will likely realize that the US economy is not going to grow very rapidly, and they will look for other opportunities. But our interactions with the emerging economies more or less consist of selling commodities, and in many cases we do very little processing here in Canada.

Let's move to the issue of debt and deficits. You are currently the Chair of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, which was convened to recommend ways to cut the province’s $16-billion budget deficit. The final report will contain recommendations for significant reductions in government expenditure. If reducing Ontario’s debt-to-GDP ratio is the ultimate goal, isn't the best strategy to increase growth rather than cut spending?

If I knew what to do to raise that growth, I would say yes. You want to do everything you can to increase the growth rate, but you also have to be realistic with your fiscal plan and not count on unduly optimistic growth anticipations. I was involved in budget-making at the federal levels for 23 years, and I can tell you that a lot of budgets got wrecked on the shoals because they had unrealistic expectations of growth.

There is a thought that the recession created a large stock of unused capital and labor, and I do not agree with that position. On the labor side, if that were true, you would be seeing declines in wages. Yet wages have been increasing fairly firmly—not rapidly, but firmly. On the capital side, much of the capital that got displaced during the recession was specific to industries like auto manufacturing, and that capital is not going to get redeployed in the same sector. And if it gets redeployed somewhere else, it’s not going to obtain the same value as before. So I don’t see these huge stocks of labor and capital that will allow the province to grow much faster than the potential growth rate. There might be some years of maybe 2.5 to 3 percent growth, but over the longer run I think Ontario can only count on 2 percent growth.

And you are right: you have got to do everything you possibly can to bolster that growth. But you cannot set a fiscal plan that depends on high growth, because it might not come. A lot of economists have studied how to increase the Canadian growth rate, and to their credit governments have implemented most of what we’ve recommended. Yet productivity growth has not gone up. If that has been the pattern over the last 20 years, why would you want to stake your budget plan on something different happening over the next ten years?

Income inequality has been getting a lot of attention lately. The top quintile of income-earners in Canada has significantly increased its share of national income over the last 20 years. What’s more, median household income increased by only 5.5% in the 33 years between 1976 and 2009. How serious a problem is this in your view, and what should be done about it?

There are three different issues here, and I think they are quite distinct. The flavor of the month is to talk about income inequality—the bottom compared to the top. And I do not dismiss that problem. There is a growing field of happiness economics that indicates that people self-assess their happiness largely in relative terms. But I think, economically, we also want to be very mindful of the absolute level. As you mentioned, the median income has gone basically nowhere in Canada over three decades, and I think that is very distressing, very troubling. But more troubling is the fact that the income of the bottom 20 percent has declined quite substantially, and it is continuing to decline. If you look at the real average or median incomes of the lowest quintile, they have been falling for quite some time. More recently, even the income of the second-lowest quintile has been falling. Inequality may be important, but I have a feeling that if I were living in that bottom quintile I would be more distressed that my real income is falling.

What do you do about that? Well, I think the primary response has to be on the education side because this is a reflection of the job market changing, in part because imports from emerging economies have erased a lot of the low-paying jobs we had before. The jobs becoming available are in the higher-value-added service industry, but those require higher education levels. So I think more education is the primary response that needs to take place, and, to the credit of the provinces, that is taking place.

A major area of concern for the Minister of Finance, Jim Flaherty, is record-high household debt. In the third quarter of 2011, the ratio of Canadian household debt to personal disposable income reached 153 percent. This is not something many people think of when they think of the Canadian economy. What can policymakers do to help Canadian households fix their balance sheets?

If you ask Canadians whether they realize that household debt in Canada is high as it is the United States, people do not believe you. We tend to think of ourselves as being very conservative and prudent when it comes to consumption. And there was a day when we were. That ratio you mentioned of over 150 percent was around 75 percent just ten years ago, so it has gone up an awful lot.

One of the reasons it has gone up in Canada and other countries is low interest rates. We have an offer right now of five-year mortgages at 2.99 percent interest, and that has never been seen in Canada historically. That is not a huge cost, so why not load up on debt? And of course there has been an explosion in consumer credit, mostly in the form of lines of credit.

So what can be done about it? Well, the first thing, which is the rule in public policy, is do no harm. A few years ago, the government actually extended the maximum amortization period of mortgages to 35 years. It then steadily reduced the minimum down payment from 10 percent to 5 percent. Finally it allowed people to borrow the 5 percent down payment, so that effectively people had no money in the home purchase whatsoever. I thought that was absolutely ridiculous policy, and ultimately so did the government because they changed both of those features. Now you are back to needing the 5 percent down payment, and the amortization period has been shortened to 30 years.

We have an anomaly in Canada in that we are one of the few major countries that has not had a decline in its housing prices. They are not increasing as rapidly anymore, but they went up in 2011. There was a survey that came out just this week that showed that Vancouver is the second-least affordable housing market in the world, only after Hong Kong. Way less affordable than New York. Some other Canadian cities didn’t fall too far behind Vancouver. So we could definitely stand to tighten up the housing market. You could require 10 percent down payments, for example. You could shorten amortization periods. There are several things the government could do, and they suggest every once in a while that they are prepared to do something.

The current Conservative government has a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, so it has a lot of room in which to work. Are there any specific policies that you would like to see it enact going forward?

Well, it is interesting you ask that. Our prime minister was at the World Economic Forum in Davos today, and he made some references to upcoming policy changes. I would agree with most of them. The one that caught everybody’s attention was the musing about changing the age of entitlement for Old Age Security from 65 to 67.

More pertinently, one of the difficulties I think we have in Canada right now is how immigration works. As a percentage of our population, we have one of the biggest intakes of immigrants in the world. But immigrants have not been doing very well economically in Canada. We used to have a pattern that every generation of immigrants made more than the previous one. And in a fairly short period of time, they actually used to make more than Canadian-born citizens. On paper they’re coming in with wonderful qualifications—they actually have more education than the Canadian-born. But after five years in Canada, immigrants with university degrees are making only a little more than 50 percent of what Canadians with university degrees are making. Their education credentials and foreign experience are not getting recognized.

The number one factor is difficulty with English and French. That was not really relevant up until the 1980s because most immigrants came from the United States or Europe. But as they come from other places now, there is definitely a language barrier, and the government has responded by increasing the points awarded to immigrants who speak English or French. I would say we need to take a closer look at the immigrant selection criteria and also improve the immigration settlement processes. Coming back to productivity, immigration is actually lowering productivity because immigrants are working almost as much as Canadians but earning much less income. I think that’s a major thing that needs changing.

The second thing we need to do is diversify our trade partners. We cannot succeed, as we have historically, with just the singular approach of selling to the US market. It is just not going to grow enough. Ironically, our only major trade negotiation in the works right now is with the European Union. If you think the United States is going to grow slowly, Europe will do even worse. It is still a good thing to do, but we must broaden our trade discussions. The Canadian government is making forays in that area, trying to build better relationships with India, China, Brazil, and other emerging economies. It is going to be a lot of work, but I think it is an area we need to make a great deal of progress in.

On the issue of interprovincial trade barriers, the government has run into difficulty in the courts. For a number of years it has been trying to establish a single securities regulator. The Supreme Court ruled that securities regulation was in the provincial domain, so perhaps we may not get rid of these remaining interprovincial trade barriers. But most of them have been eliminated by the provinces themselves. Even the security regulators in the provinces have more or less worked out a way to recognize each others’ requirements. So it would perhaps be nice to have a national securities regulator, but not critical.

One thing that’s on the horizon for Canada’s economic outlook is the fallout from the European sovereign debt crisis. How do you think it will affect the Canadian economy?

Not that much. We do have some trade relationships with the Eurozone, but they are mostly with the larger, more stable economies. We also do not have a lot of holdings of European debt in Canada. So it would impact us in the second round, but not as directly as what we saw in 2008 and 2009 because our financial linkages are pretty much singularly with the United States.

Saving Spain's Economy

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:18:57 +0000

The Political Cost of Reform

HIR Issue:

Labor

After the Portuguese government requested a bailout from the European Union, many argued that Spain would be next in line. Although recent reforms led by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero provide reason to be optimistic about Spain’s economy, they have come at a high political cost. In fact, Zapatero has announced that he will not run for a third term as Prime Minister to keep his party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), in power; however, current polls indicate that the PSOE will lose the next election anyway. Despite this weak standing, Zapatero is determined to continue pushing forward controversial economic reforms.

The fear that Spain could fall into a deep economic crisis is not unfounded. Spain’s budget deficit is the third highest in Europe. This is partly due to the global financial crisis, as well as the increase in government spending during Zapatero’s first term in office. Before 2008, Spain had been growing at a rate of 3.2 percent every year. At the end of 2004, Spain had a budget surplus of 2.2 percent. Unemployment and inflation were also low, which created optimism for the country’s future. However, unemployment started increasing after the economic crisis and has now reached a historical high of 20 percent. In addition, the Spanish economy seems to be recovering slowly. For 2011, the government predicts economic growth of 1.3 percent. This situation has not only contributed to the decline of Zapatero’s popularity in the country, but has also led many to question whether Spain will be next to request a bailout from the European Union.

However, it is too soon to declare the economic collapse of Spain. Immediately after the economic crisis that hit Greece and Ireland, the Spanish government started to push forward a set of reforms to counteract a potential economic breakdown. These reforms aim to reduce government spending by cutting public workers’ wages and slashing welfare payments, among other measures. One of the most controversial reforms establishes an increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67 years. The reform was so unpopular that a nationwide general strike was organized in September 2010 in protest. Zapatero’s reluctance to eliminate the policy added to his declining popularity. According to a survey by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), 80 percent of the population disagreed with the packet of reforms proposed by the Prime Minister. In spite of the great political cost of these reforms, Zapatero seems determined to carry them forward.

Although the full impact of the reforms will be determined in the long run, short-run measures adopted by the government are beginning to improve Spain’s economic outlook. Certainly, they have contributed to decreasing the budget deficit, which has gone from 11.1 percent in 2009 to 9.3 percent in 2010. Zapatero’s government aims to further decrease the deficit to 6 percent this year. Members of the European Union and private investors see this improvement as a sign that Spain is taking the necessary steps to avoid a deeper crisis. Although the reforms are indispensable to improving consumer confidence in the economy, Zapatero knows that budget cuts are not the only reform needed. Measures to increase productivity and job creation must also be adopted. The time is particularly auspicious for Zapatero to implement such bold reforms since he has decided not to run for a third term and risks no political backlash. Although likely to become one of the most unpopular prime ministers in Spain’s history, Zapatero recognizes that the fate of his country, and even that of the European Union, may rest in his hands.

Even then, Zapatero will still have to overcome various political obstacles to successfully implement his reforms. One of these obstacles is the high degree of fiscal independence enjoyed by the autonomous communities, especially the Basque Country and Catalonia. The 17 autonomous communities in Spain control 37 percent of overall government spending. Zapatero has tried to convince local politicians to cut their spending, but to no avail. Although these politicians recognize the need for reforms, they are not willing to let the central government extend control over their economy. For example, Arturo Mas, the new president of Catalonia, has promised to decrease his budget by 10 percent in 2011. However, he boldly asserted that the Zapatero administration must first fulfill its financial responsibilities before asking others to do so. Given the central government’s lack of control over many of Spain’s local economies, Zapatero will need a great deal of political finesse and bargaining to achieve a consensus with his opposition and other regional governments.

The reforms implemented by Zapatero have undoubtedly begun to improve Spain’s economy. However, as a result of his policies, Zapatero’s popularity has markedly declined and he has decided to not to run for a third term in office. Most polls suggest that the leader of the opposition party, Mariano Rajoy, will become Spain’s next president. Whether he, or a new Socialist president, will be able to save Spain from a bailout is not yet clear. What is certain is that the long run success of Zapatero’s reforms would be in everyone’s interest. A bailout to Spain would be too expensive for the European Union, especially at a time when German and Finnish citizens have started to question why their tax money is sent to other countries. Zapatero’s critics fail to understand that austerity measures, though unpleasant, are vital to Spain’s economic recovery. A collapse of the Spanish economy would indeed cause an economic disaster of major proportions that ripples around the world.

No Revolution Here

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:16:34 +0000

Beyond Kim Jong Il's Cult of Personality

HIR Issue:

Labor

In late February, dozens of helium-filled balloons drifted on southerly winds into North Korea. The seemingly innocuous incident drew a fierce response from Pyongyang, as North Korean officials threatened to target and kill those responsible for releasing the balloons.

The “perpetrators” were members of the South Korean military who were leading a massive propaganda campaign to channel messages denouncing totalitarianism into the country. South Korean military personnel and human rights activists worked together to fill each balloon with thousands of leaflets, cassettes, and video tapes containing unnerving information about President Kim Jong Il’s private life, news of the populist uprisings in the Middle East, and messages drawing attention to their lack of basic freedoms. The absolute lack of civil society in North Korea, however, augments the challenge of conveying a coherent populist message to the people. Further limiting the North Korean people’s exposure to external ideas is Kim Jong Il’s usage of elaborate military posturing to divert the attention of the international community from North Korea’s domestic problems to its hyper-militarized security apparatus.

South Korea’s populist provocations came in the wake of the North Korean military’s shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last November, as well as its torpedo attack of a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, earlier in the year. The propaganda balloons released leaflets at approximately the same time that nearly 13,000 US troops and 200,000 South Korean forces were due to begin an annual series of joint air, land, and sea military exercises around the Korean peninsula. While these military exercises were certainly not welcomed, Pyongyang’s official news agency responded with particular enmity to the propaganda campaign.

The North Korean government seems to have a profound understanding of the threat that psychological warfare poses to their current regime. One senior South Korean official likened the leaking of information into the country to a virus penetrating its “iron curtain,” behind which there is scarce knowledge of anything besides malnutrition, political persecution, inflated prices, and meager food rations. The currency devaluation that Kim Jung Il implemented in the fall of 2009 was ostensibly an attempt to stimulate a foundering state-run economy. In reality, it resulted in one of the worst economic disasters that the country has experienced since its so-called “Great Famine” of the mid-1990s—a time in which more than 900,000 North Korean citizens are reported to have starved to death. Recent reports from the Bank of Korea in Seoul have indicated that North Korea’s economy is still hurting from the 2009 currency revaluation, as it is reported to have contracted by 0.9 percent in the past year with few signs of recovery at the horizon.

Despite ongoing economic grievances and reports of growing resentment toward Kim Jong Il, there has been a marked lack of social unrest in North Korea. Based on the scanty information available to the outside world, it seems as though all of the elements of social unrest are aligned: widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation, and political uncertainty stemming from Supreme Leader Kim’s expected installment of his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor in 2012. The South Korean military’s revamped propaganda campaign was geared toward taking advantage of these destabilizing elements, as they made a point of disseminating information about the pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East that North Korea’s Central News Agency unsurprisingly overlooked.

While popular resistance against the government of North Korea is a distant prospect, it is worth noting that the country’s self-imposed isolation has, in recent years, been punctuated by the spread of cell phones and DVD players within Pyongyang. Citizens marginally exposed to the outside world have developed an incomplete awareness of how poor and backward their country has become. For the first time in the history of the country, for example, relatively “privileged” North Koreans living in the country’s capital have gained knowledge of re-escalating tensions between North and South Korea. However, North Koreans’ access to information has been incomplete at best, and their marked lack of reliable channels of communication with the outside world, coupled with crippling economic woes, has left the citizenry as powerless as ever.

By contrast, the ongoing propaganda campaigns launched by the South Korean military and the Arab Spring in the Middle East have emboldened North Korea’s authoritarian regime in its attempts to overhaul its security apparatus. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has determined North Korea to be a full-fledged nuclear power since April of 2009. Since then, its foreign policy has revolved around brinksmanship, diverting the attention of the international community from the deprivation of the citizenry to the flamboyant posturing of the country’s leader. Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions and largely unchecked belligerence toward South Korea has had a diversionary effect on the international community. Discussions on North Korea’s abuse of human rights have, in recent years, been overrun by the six-party talks (a group consisting of North and South Korea, China, the United States, Russia, and Japan) concerned solely with Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

In spite of South Korea’s ongoing propaganda efforts geared toward subverting North Korea’s authoritarian stronghold, it is difficult to predict the direction that the country is headed, especially given the abrupt emergence of Kim Jong Il’s heir apparent. While North Korea has been caricatured by the international community as a belligerent state with a psychotic leader, its severely impoverished population wallows in relative obscurity. Kim Jong Il’s carefully crafted cult of personality continues to overshadow the economic stagnation and the political persecution that is so pervasive in North Korea. Ultimately, however, the international community needs to look beyond North Korea’s security apparatus and adopt a stance toward the country that transcends the military fray—like the activists’ propaganda balloons that drifted above and across the Military Demarcation Line.

Democratic Dishonesty

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:13:53 +0000

Manipulating Economic Data in Argentina

HIR Issue:

Labor

President Cristina Fernández Kirchner has reason to be optimistic. The first female president of Argentina is very likely to be competing for reelection in October and the latest opinion polls show that she is significantly more popular than her political rivals. Although the President’s popularity has taken dips in the past and her political career has seen its share of scandal, the government has been able to quickly recover its levels of popular approval. In 2009, President Kirchner achieved only slightly more than 30 percent approval in opinion polls; however, in a more recent Ipsos-Mora y Araújo poll, 65 percent of those interviewed described the presidential image as “good,” or even “very good.”

This image turnaround did not occur without considerable effort and care to ensure the constant flow of uplifting news in the country. After Kirchner took power in 2007, Argentina has faced increasing problems with the believability of information disseminated to the public. This economic stronghold of Latin America—ranked third largest economy in South America—may have improved its markets, but threats of inflation still exist and may be exacerbated by a government that disguises economic realities behind the rosier images it presents the public.

Inflation in Argentina has slowed to ten percent, reports Indec, the government-controlled statistics office. Contrary to the official number, however, private-sector economists estimate that inflation has shot up to 25 percent. Independent estimates of poverty at 30 percent are also well above the official 12 percent estimate. Ever since former President Nestor Kirchner dismissed several Indec statisticians and replaced them with political appointees in early 2007, the office has been accused of fabricating economic reports. The former president of the central bank, Martin Redrado, has also accused the government of manipulating data from the statistics agency. Doubts about the validity of Indec’s calculations of the consumer price index have caught the attention of international organizations.

The government insists that price increases, such as the 40 percent rise in food-prices since the beginning of 2011, are normal in a booming economy that had grown 9.1 percent in 2010. Argentina has long dealt with problems of inflation. Argentina’s hyperinflation from 1975 to 1991 sometimes caused storeowners to adjust their prices at an hourly basis. Today, a return to hyperinflation seems unlikely. Nevertheless, the government is cautious when handling issues of inflation, even taking care to step around the word with phrases such as “price dispersion.”

Despite the booming economy, there are still fears of inflation as the central bank increases money supply. Indec’s unreliability has only made things worse. Though Argentina may be Latin America’s third largest economy, it is only sixth in the region for foreign direct investment. In addition, economists say that the government has worsened inflation by providing unreliable economic data; suppliers and producers operate on their own perceptions of inflation and raise prices “seemingly at will,” according to the New York Times. In February, the government even fined economic research firms US$125,000 for publishing inflation measures that differ from the official count.

Unfortunately, the fining of private economic research firms is only the latest in a series of government attempts to silence information contrary to what it reports. In 2009, the President pushed through a controversial “Media Law” that gave the government more power over broadcast media. The new law was meant to replace an old dictatorship-era law that concentrated media power in the jurisdiction of a few companies. The government claims that the Media Law will diversify public media. Though the old law was outdated, the new law gave the Kirchner government exceptional powers over the regulation of broadcasts. Scholars have noted that the new rules could restrict freedom of expression, especially the provision giving the president authority to appoint members of the broadcast regulatory body. Ironically, Argentina’s press freedom award went to Hugo Chávez this year. This award lauded the Venezuelan president for dismantling media monopolies, when the president only recently set new regulations that forced the closure of many pro-opposition radio and cable television stations.

In March, Argentina’s leading newspapers Clarín and La Nación were forcibly prevented from being distributed. La Nación’s circulations suffered long delays, and Clarín failed to be delivered altogether. The organizations blamed the government for strict censorship that interrupted deliveries. The truck drivers’ union, whose leader had close ties with the government, had in fact carried out the censorship.

In November 2009, the Association of Newspaper Editors of Buenos Aires issued a statement in which it claimed that the actions of the truck drivers’ unions had been the fiercest attack on the free circulation of newspapers the country had seen since its return to democratic rule in 1983. Kirchner’s conflict with Clarín can be traced back as early as 2008. The government considers Clarín a media monopoly, which has historically wielded much political influence in Argentina. La Nación had reported that the cumulative rate of inflation has been 120 percent through the last four years, though the government has reported it to be 39 percent in the same period. Such press censorship, in addition to the government’s fining of private economic research firms, does not make it seem like a reliable inflation rate will circulate the country soon.

As the election approaches, economic conditions in Argentina seem to be improving. In March, Goldman Sachs forecasted that Argentina’s gross domestic product would grow 6.8 percent, a marked increase from its previous forecast of 5.6 percent. Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Argentina forecasts a growth of at least six percent this year.

However, the government’s attempts to manipulate economic data and silence criticism not only dismantles its credibility, but may also worsen its inflation as foreign investors become more skeptical about Argentina’s true economic situation.

Shifting Loyalties

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:10:40 +0000

Libya's Dynamic Tribalism

HIR Issue:

Labor

The recent uprising in Libya has highlighted Muammar Qaddafi’s expert ability to manipulate tribal rivalries to maintain his grip on power. In Qaddafi’s early days as leader, he tried his best to build a unified national identity that trumped tribal sentiments; however, when Qaddafi’s popularity declined at the national level, he realized that manipulating tribal loyalties was his best hope for remaining in power. Following a coup attempt in 1993 staged by military leaders in the Warfalla tribe (Libya’s largest), Qaddafi started emphasizing tribal loyalty as a major identifying factor for Libyans. He then cemented his hold on power by setting rival tribes against each other, rewarding those loyal to him with political appointments and excluding those that opposed him. As a result, tribes competed for Qaddafi’s favor, and tribal identities began to reassert themselves in the Libyan national consciousness.

With the onset of protests in February, Libya’s tribal loyalties began to shift. The Warfalla were the first to defect to the rebel cause, and many others soon followed. Resentment over the disproportionate influence given to Qaddafi’s own tribe (the Qaddafah) and his allies had simmered under his repressive regime for years. Many tribes were eager for the opportunity to increase their influence over national affairs, especially tribes from eastern Libya who felt marginalized by Qaddafi’s reliance on support from his hometown Sirte in central Libya and Tripoli in the western part of the country. Indeed, the history of the country is one of regional conflict between western Tripolitania, eastern Cyrenaica, and southern Fezzan. More than tribal relations, the regional conflict has significantly fractured Libyan society. Qaddafi has used these regional politics to “divide and conquer” the disparate tribes of Libya in order to remain in power.

In order to realize its potential as a nation, Libya must have a government that legitimizes its authority by unifying national interests rather than systematically suppressing regional interests. In the past, tribal rivalries have made this goal seem unattainable; however, Libya, like other modernizing countries, has seen the tribal dynamic gradually fall in importance. With increasing urbanization and education, ties between Libyans and their tribes are not as strong as they have been in the past. Qaddafi’s strategy for maintaining power through political manipulation will ultimately fail, as citizens increasingly recognize the oppressive regime as a common enemy. Instead, the interests of modernization and economic development may unify the majority of Libyans and serve as a foundation for their long-term cooperation.

Indeed, the experience of neighboring countries shows that tribalism and ethnocentrism can be brought under control in less authoritarian ways. North African countries like Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania, for instance, do not face the same level of self-destructive tribalism as Libya, especially among youth—the same group that is leading protests all over the Arab world. States that equitably distribute their resources without patronage are better able to avoid intertribal violence. The opposite can be seen in states throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where corrupt, autocratic governments also face the strongest ethnic tension. Libya has the highest Human Development Index (a measure of quality-of-life compiled by the United Nations and based on per-capita GNP, education, and life expectancy) in Africa, showing that it has the resources and infrastructure to advance as a country, if the government acts responsibly.

In an ideal world, governments would build nationwide loyalty through providing security, stability, and services for their people rather than manipulating a corrupt political system to remain in power. However, when governments fail to satisfy their people, power-hungry individuals, such as Muammar Qaddafi, will use any means necessary to maintain authority, even if it means undermining national identity. After the violent suppression of the rebels, Qaddafi has, in the eyes of many Libyans and the rest of the world, lost any claim to legitimacy. An organic government sprung from the will of the Libyan people will be better able to overcome fragmented tribal identities and solidify a more unified national identity. Few outside of Qaddafi’s circle of supporters will be sad to see this happen.

Licensed to Kill

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:08:16 +0000

Sanctified Sexism in Syria

HIR Issue:

Labor

The image of hundreds of Syrian women, carrying white cloths and olive branches in a protest against the government’s mass arrests of the men of their village in April, was indeed powerful. There, in the town of Baida, the women had seemed to be political equals of their men in the way they stood up, side by side, for their cause. Yet such seeming equality proves only to be an illusion for most Syrian women in their domestic lives. In fact, gender discrimination in Syrian law serves to institutionalize the social and cultural stigmas associated with sexual abuse, honor crimes, and divorce.

Sexual abuse has long been a hidden crime in Syria. Official statistics on spousal rape and abuse are virtually non-existent, although recent studies show that one in four Syrian women surveyed reported that they have been victims of sexual abuse. Most of these violence and assault cases have gone unreported, for few victims choose to seek redress in court due to partiality of the law. Sharia laws treats men and women differently, and some personal status laws in Syria use Sharia regardless of the religion of the parties involved in the case. According to Article 508 of the Sharia penal code, “If there is a contracted marriage between the man who commits rape, sexual abuse, kidnapping, sexual harassment and the victim, then there is no charge or the punishment is stopped.” In other words, there is no law against spousal rape; rather, the law encourages rapists to marry their victims.

Since the law fails to prevent domestic violence, honor crimes have also taken place at an alarming rate. Honor crimes are often cases of homicide of women and girls by family members who believe that the victim has brought humiliation upon the family or community. Dishonor, especially for a family, can include adultery, refusal of an arranged marriage, or even marriage by free will. It is important to note that victims of honor crimes have included gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. In Syria, between 300 and 400 cases of such honor crimes occur annually, according to the 2010 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). For instance, Hasso Abdal, a resident of Hassakeh, shot his 21-year-old daughter last May because she filed a divorce and decided to elope with her lover. Most perpetrators such as Abdal were convicted under Article 129 of the Syrian penal code, which allowed judges to reduce the severity of the penalty sentence when “honor” is a motive for the murder. Women have no opportunity of defending themselves, while men have no other socially acceptable alternatives to regain their honor except by attacking the very objects of their dishonor.

Furthermore, marriage has become both the cause and the focal point for discriminatory practices. Divorce and criminal laws have made clear distinctions between men and women. Even if a man and a woman each committed the same act of adultery, punishment for the woman will be twice that of the man. The Syrian court will accept any evidence from a man claiming his wife’s adultery; however, when a woman files a divorce due to adultery, her husband must confess to the crime. As stated in the 2009 US Department of State Human Rights Report of Syria, there were no cases in which a woman succeeded in obtaining a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Moreover, a divorced woman is often not entitled to alimony and will lose all physical and legal custody of her sons when they reach age 13 and of her daughters when they reach age 15. A husband can even lawfully prohibit his wife from leaving the country or traveling abroad.

In spite of such measures to impede women from filing divorces and tie them to the bonds of their marriage, no laws prohibit practices that seem to violate the very premise of matrimony. The UNHCR has observed a growing practice of temporary “pleasure marriage” conducted by some Shi’a clerics. These marriages have a predetermined duration of as little as one day and the marital contract becomes null after the agreed-upon term has passed. They practically serve as a justification for men who seek to patronize prostitutes. The country has also become a popular destination of sex tourism for men and sex trafficking for women.

As such, the Syrian law encourages and further institutionalizes the oppression of women in a traditionally paternalistic society. Some may point to President Bashar Al-Assad’s recent amendment of the honor killing law, Article 548, in January as a new step towards reform. Under the provisions of the new legislation, those convicted of killing a relative for having illicit sex will now receive a sentence of between five and seven years, instead of the original two years. Yet the regular sentence for non-premeditated murder is at least 10 to 15 years. Bassam al-Kadi, the Director of the women’s rights group Syrian Women’s Observatory, said that such an article should not merely be amended, but rather omitted altogether.

The fight for women’s rights in Syria is far from over; in fact, it is just beginning. As the resounding cries of the Damascus protesters have demanded in the past months, “more needs to be done.” Such will be the battle hymn of Syrian women for years to come.

Trouble in Palestine

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:01:59 +0000

The Implications of the Arab Spring

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Labor

The revolutions that have swept across the Middle East and North Africa to create the “Arab Spring” of 2011 have left virtually no corner of the region untouched. From Qatar and Algeria to Syria and Tunisia, a surge of newfound pride and energy has fundamentally reshaped the political environment of the Middle East and forever altered the course of the region’s history. It is hardly surprising, then, that the dynamic of the region’s omnipresent issue—the question of Palestine—has also been affected. But just what the Arab Spring will bring for Palestine remains to be seen: the Arab Spring may herald a new trend of non-violence on the tentative path toward peace; just as likely, it may portend a summer of resurgent violence and misery.

A House Divided

Just days after the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak following massive popular protests, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority sought to demonstrate that he is aware of the changes sweeping the Middle East and the ramifications they could have for the legitimacy of his own leadership. Abbas announced that he was accepting the resignations of all of the members of the Palestinian cabinet and instructing Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to quickly assemble a new cabinet. At the same time, Abbas called for new elections for the Palestinian National Authority to take place by September. The elections are currently scheduled for July 9.

Unsurprisingly, Hamas immediately announced that it would not participate in the elections. Hamas claims that Abbas has no legitimacy to call elections and refuses to lend legitimacy to the vote by participating. According to Jon Donnison, the BBC News correspondent in Ramallah, West Bank, Abbas’ bold response to the fall of his longtime ally Mubarak may be more an example of cosmetic changes and political gamesmanship than genuine concern for responding to the needs of the people: many of the Palestinian ministers who resigned are expected to be reshuffled within the Cabinet or even return to their old positions. Likewise, by calling for new elections and forcing Hamas to preemptively reject the proposal, Abbas makes it look as if Hamas is the faction not holding back democracy in Palestine. Elections were already cancelled in 2010 because of the continuing rift between Hamas and Abbas’ Western-backed Fatah faction. The Palestinian parliament has not been able to sit for four years, which has put “democracy on hold,” says Donnison.

The Fatah-Hamas conflict has been the single most important factor influencing Palestinian politics since the split began in 2006 with Hamas’ legislative victories in national elections. The feud came to a head in July 2007 with the Battle of Gaza, a brief military conflict between Fatah and Hamas that led to a Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip and the removal of Fatah officials. Since then, Palestine has been divided, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas the Gaza Strip.

Reconciliation talks between the two factions have progressed little since 2007. Indeed, the gulf between the two sides on key negotiating points is so wide that compromise is hard to imagine. According to Al Jazeera, Fatah insists that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept existing agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Hamas has made no indication that it will agree to any of these conditions. While Fatah has tried, unsuccessfully and to the frustration of many Palestinians, to reach an agreement with Israel, Hamas has publicly reserved the right to use force in response to Israeli aggression and has refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a state.

Some analysts saw a silver living in Hamas’ 2006 election victory: Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the US government, would be forced to replace agitation and loud rhetoric with practical services and effective governance. By taking on a position of responsibility, Hamas would either be forced to moderate itself and rule effectively or face widespread unpopularity if it were unable to improve the lives of Palestinians. While Hamas has demonstrated a certain willingness to work with Israel to limit violence, the change has not been drastic. Rocket attacks into southern Israel continue.

Worse still, Hamas may be losing its grip on Gaza to even more extreme groups. Dennis Ross, an American diplomat who served as special Middle East coordinator under President Clinton and is now a special adviser on the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Clinton, says that there are at least 47 different militias in Gaza alone, and while Hamas may serve as the public face of Gaza, the internal dynamic is never certain.

If the recent murder of a pro-Palestinian activist in Gaza is any indication, Hamas’ hold is more tenuous than ever. On April 14, 2011, Hamas discovered the body of Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian citizen with extensive experience in Gaza who had arrived in 2008 to protest the Israeli blockade. Arrigoni had been captured by a radical Salafi-Jihadist group that threatened to kill him unless Hamas released the leader of their movement. Salafi-Jihadist groups consider Hamas to be too moderate and have often fired homemade rockets into Israel in an effort to stir up conflict with Israel. While Hamas has often cracked down on such groups, the murder of Arrigoni is likely to embarrass Hamas, says Fares Akram of the New York Times. Hamas has prided itself on “restoring security and ending years of armed chaos in Gaza,” and the kidnapping was the first of a foreigner in Gaza since Hamas took control in 2007.

Operation Cast Lead, Part II

Arrigoni’s murder was just the latest example of a recent surge of violence between Gaza and Israel that began in earnest in early March with the murder of an Israeli settler family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. Five people, including a three-month-old baby and two other children, were stabbed to death in their beds. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades-Imad Mughniyah Brigades took responsibility and claimed their actions were justified in light of ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians. In response, Israeli government officials vowed to expand settlement into the West Bank.

Then, on March 23, 2011, Jerusalem suffered its first bombing in seven years when a busy bus stop was attacked, killing one. The Al Quds Brigades, an armed wing of the radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, took credit for the attack and said there would be more bombings deep within Israel in the future.

Ongoing rocket attacks into southern Israel, including a militant attack on an Israeli school bus with an anti-tank missile, have provoked a strong response from Israel and tit-for-tat retaliation across the Israel-Gaza border. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, has said repeatedly that his country would take “all necessary action” to protect itself and its citizens. After the school bus attack, Israeli aircraft and tanks struck Gaza, killing seven Hamas militants and five civilians, according to Time magazine.

Hamas has struck back with a fury. Since April 7, 2011, militants in Gaza have fired more than 120 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel, the largest single surge in strikes since 2009. Breaking a two-year-old policy, Hamas has also publicly taken credit for some of the attacks, perhaps so as not to alienate Palestinians who have found Hamas too weak-willed compared to more radical local groups. Israeli reprisals have killed a total of 19 Palestinians, including six civilians, and wounded 65 others, says Time. At the same time, Israel’s new Iron Dome missile defense system has proven a success, stopping numerous attempted rocket attacks into cities across southern Israel, including Ashkelon.

The last time Israel was faced with such a spate of violence from Gaza, it responded with Operation Cast Lead, a highly controversial three-week military action intended to stop rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. Israel struck with coordinated ground, air, and naval forces, killing more than 1,000 (including a large number of civilians) and wounding more than 5,000. After the conflict, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a Fact-Finding Mission led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone to investigate accusations of war crimes. The Goldstone Report, released in September 2009, accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, but the majority of the international attention focused on accusations that Israel had targeted civilians.

The risk of a revival of conflict is real. In late March, the International Crisis Group put out a briefing paper called “Gaza: The Next Israeli-Palestinian War?” in response to the recent rise in violence. Hamas may be losing control of Gaza, as evidenced by Arrigoni’s murder, or it may believe that Israel will back off before invading again, given the harsh international response to Operation Cast Lead. On April 10, 2011, a senior member of Hamas made an appeal for calm and peace on Israeli radio, but it is unclear how his call will be received. As a senior Israeli official in the Southern Command told Time in 2010, a renewed conflict would be “harder and more painful than the last one.” He added that Cast Lead One was just a small part of the IDF’s power, and 80 percent will not be withheld in the next attack. Neither Israel nor Hamas wants to go to war—but the inextricable tug of retaliation and the necessity to respond just may push both sides into renewed conflict despite the irrationality of war.

The widespread fear is that, given the current environment, a single incident could provide the spark to initiate an Israeli offensive. Cross-border retaliations have developed into a calibrated, almost performance-like, aspect since 2009, but as Israeli leaders have said, if an Israeli kindergarten is hit with a rocket attack from Gaza, all bets are off.

Words as Weapons

With Al Jazeera’s release of the Palestine papers in late January, a less violent, but equally explosive, ingredient was added to the mix. The trove contained almost 1,700 files, including meeting minutes, draft agreements, reports and studies, internal e-mails, talking points and preparatory notes for meetings, and more dating from 1999 to 2010, according to a release by Al Jazeera English. Much like document releases by WikiLeaks, the Palestine Papers have become an issue in and of themselves, and their release may mark a turning point in the ongoing peace process. The question is whether it will be a turning point for better or worse.

As Ben Smith of Politico put it, the main revelation of the Palestine Papers can be summarized as follows: during negotiations, both the Palestinians and Israelis have privately offered far greater concessions than they have ever admitted to publicly. Despite the private offers of far-reaching concessions on both sides, however, the gaps between the two groups remains wide.

The big winner from the release of the papers was Hamas, which was able to position itself as the true representative of the Palestinian people, while Abbas and other leaders of the Palestinian authority have come under criticism for offering to concede to Israel on many questions that Hamas considers non-negotiable. Indeed, Abbas even said that the release of the papers by Al Jazeera was an attempt to bring down the Palestinian Authority government. At least one member of Abbas’ team suffered direct repercussions: top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was forced to resign after it was revealed that the source of the leak was in his own office.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is playing an ever-larger role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In February, the Security Council very nearly passed a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as “illegal” and ordering all settlement construction there to stop; the United States was the sole dissenter, causing the resolution to fail with its veto power. Though Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations, strongly rejected the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, she said the passage of the resolution would not improve the likelihood of a peace agreement and would only harden resentment on both sides. The United States had threatened to support the resolution in the lead-up to the vote in order to leverage pressure against Israel to stop building, but Israel has nonetheless resumed construction after a ten-month building freeze ended in September 2010. Even more importantly, there is growing expectation that the United Nations General Assembly will endorse a unilateral Palestinian declaration of an independent state within the 1967 borders by September. If the United Nations endorses the declaration, Israel would be in violation of international law by occupying a sovereign state recognized by that body.

To head off this move and calm international furor—even Israel, after all, is not entirely immune to international outrage—Prime Minister Netanyahu is considering a military withdrawal from the West Bank. It is not only the Palestinians who face internal turmoil and division, however. According to Haaretz, hard-line Israeli settlers have threatened a possible takeover of parts of the West Bank if the military were to withdraw. As September approaches and the possibility of a UN resolution in support of a Palestinian declaration of statehood becomes more likely, tension between Israelis hoping for a compromise and hard-liners will only increase.

A New Voice

If the Arab revolts and the recent surge of violence have heightened tensions in Israel and Palestine and made the specter of renewed war more likely, another trend has revealed a possible path forward. Palestinian students inspired by the movements in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya called for huge public demonstrations on March 15, 2011 to force an end to the internal Palestinian divisions that have crippled united action; like the other young revolutionaries they sought to emulate, the organizers of the movement used Facebook to mobilize supporters and spread information.

The rallies held in March were met with decidedly mixed results. Only a couple thousand Palestinians attended the demonstration in Ramallah in the West Bank, and fewer than 10,000 attended a parallel demonstration in Gaza City. Nonetheless, the movement has already seen some gains as both Hamas and Fatah attempt to blunt public pressure: according to Time, both sides felt sufficient public pressure that each made very public moves toward unity. Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of Gaza, issued an invitation to Abbas to visit Gaza. Abbas accepted and the details of the journey are being arranged. Hamas and Fatah were also threatened enough by the demonstrations in March that they chose to co-opt them, flooding the demonstrations with loyalists chanting party slogans and waving flags and signs. The demonstrations were supposed to be nonpartisan, but members of both factions arrived with loudspeakers and microphones and tried to turn the events into public rallies in support of their faction. Hamas even went so far as to break up the Gaza City protests. The demonstrations may not have gone as intended, then, but they have certainly touched a nerve.

The leaders of the March 15th Movement are young, networked, and nonviolent; they see the recent uprising in Egypt as an example of the power of non-violence and united action. In order to settle grievances with Israel, they say, Palestinians must first settle the issues that divide their own ranks. In this vein, leaders of the movement have called for the revival of the Palestinian National Council, a governing body that was largely abandoned after the Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority. According to The Economist, young Palestinians are tired of both Fatah and Hamas and the rule-by-decree style that has characterized Palestinian life recently, as both factions seek to consolidate power in their respective areas of control. If the young leaders of the March 15th movement can unite enough Palestinians around these common grievances, it will be a major step. Divide-and-conquer may be a useful strategy for warfare, but it has proven untenable in negotiations. The only hope for peace is through negotiations by leaders of both the Israeli and Palestinian sides that can truly speak on behalf of their people. It is far too early to pin hope on the movement as either moderate or powerful enough to broker any type of sustained and lasting peace, but the outburst of a grass-roots, popular movement like the March 15th movement represents a positive first step.

It would be foolhardy to attempt to predict with any certainty what the future holds for Israel and Palestine. The energy unleashed by the Arab Spring was bound to find its way into the dynamic of the region’s omnipresent conflict, but whether that energy is directed toward violence or reconciliation remains to be seen. If attacks from and into Gaza continue to escalate, it is only a matter of time before a rocket finds its way to a kindergarten and unleashes a wave of harsh Israeli retaliation like Operation Cast Lead. If the international community can responsibly pressure Israel into accepting compromises and the Palestinians can present a united front in calls for peace, the first tentative steps toward a long-term solution may be possible. The alternative is more violence and suffering for a region that has seen more than its share.

Mirage or Reality?

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:55:04 +0000

The Malaysian Reformation

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

With a harsh legal system that is hostile to governmental opposition, Malaysia is known as one of Asia’s most politically conservative countries. However, it may soon retire from this position of dubious honor, given Prime Minister Najib Razak’s recently announced plans to revolutionize Malaysia’s political climate. With political reform following so swiftly after Najib’s succession of economic reforms last year, political activists and leaders of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance have been willing to offer praise, though their appreciation is tempered by wariness. Najib has built a reputation for grand gestures while in office, and one cannot assume the purity of his intentions. It is only logical to evaluate Najib’s pronouncements in light of the circumstances under which he became Prime Minister, and his need to appeal to the electorate before the 2013 deadline for the next election.

In the 2008 Malaysian general election, the Barisan Nasional coalition (BN) lost the two-thirds supermajority in parliament for the first time since the country’s independence in 1957. Under party pressure, the previous Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi stepped down in favor of Najib, who succeeded to the post without a mandate at the polls—one major political weakness that has dogged him during his tenure as prime minister. By law, Malaysia must hold elections no later than 2013. However, Najib has indicated that he might call for early elections and aim to win the electoral mandate by a large majority, one which will grant him more leverage against the discontented elements within the BN coalition. His new proposals all aim to cultivate support from moderate middle-class voters in Malaysia.

This is not the first time Prime Minister Najib has upturned the status quo in Malaysia. Last year, Najib introduced the ongoing Economic Transformation Program (ETP), including projects that ranged from the creation of a Talent Corporation to investment in wafer fabrication plants to the introduction of tax incentives on Malaysia’s oilfields. The initiative combines infrastructure upgrades and education advancements to address Malaysia’s underlying problems, improving its competitiveness in the region and its attractiveness to foreign investment. The Malaysian government optimistically forecasts that, by 2020, the ETP is projected to lead to the transformation of Malaysia into a high-income country and the creation of 3 million jobs in the middle- and high-income brackets.

On September 15, 2011, Najib went even further by promising to repeal a myriad of Malaysia’s security laws, many of which have been implemented for decades and integrated into the political and law enforcement infrastructure of the country. The Internal Security Act of 1960 was passed in order to deal with a communist insurgency at the time, allowing police to detain suspects indefinitely. However, this has since been turned into a weapon against activists and members of the opposition to keep them out of the way. The Banishment Act of 1959 permits the expulsion of non-citizens, and the Emergency Ordinance of 1969 allows two years of detention without trial. The repeal of all three laws would set drastic limits on the heretofore expansive powers of law enforcement. Najib has also promised to repeal the stricture that requires media companies to obtain a yearly permit, a law widely perceived as an effective gag on the media’s reporting.

At the surface, these reforms appear to be a great leap forward for Malaysian political freedom. Yet many laws remain in place, some equally as stringent as those repealed. The Sedition Act, the Official Secrets Act, and the Criminal Defamation Act facilitate imprisonment of the opposition, while the effects of the repeal of yearly media permits are severely undermined by the fact that the Malaysian government owns many of the country’s largest media outlets. Furthermore, the repealed laws are offset by the government’s announcement of two new laws next year, which still allow detainment of suspects under “revised limits”—the specifics of which are yet to be determined. That upcoming debate promises to be a political free-for-all.

Nor can the past be hidden. Najib’s commitment to reform does not appear to be wholly driven by idealistic zest in light of his reaction to political rallies earlier this year. Actions speak louder than words, and the punitive government crackdown on the Bersih 2.0 rally in Kuala Lumpur in July indicated that the government’s patience (or lack thereof) in dealing with public demonstrations was not to be tested. Protesters at the rally demanded electoral reform—the overhaul of postal voting, introduction of a minimum campaign period, free access by all parties to the media, and a clean-up of the electoral roll. By the end of the rally, some 1,700 protesters had been arrested and the rest dispersed by tear gas and other chemical sprays. Falling in line with the government view, the Malaysian media proceeded to denounce the protesters for disturbance of the peace and creation of distrust.

All things considered, Najib Razak’s initiative must be treated cautiously, although it is notable that he is willing to propose such reforms in the first place to appeal to middle-class voters for a electoral mandate, rather than to the old hardliners within his party. If Malaysians elect Najib in the next election—and thus grant implicit approval to his initiatives thus far—he will face the daunting task of persuading his own coalition to back his reforms as a united front. We must look not only at whether or not the nominal legal reforms go through, but whether Najib can transform that sentiment into a de facto peaceful revolution of Malaysian politics.

Pressing for Change

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:52:27 +0000

Russia's 2012 Presidential Election

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

On September 24, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev announced that he would step aside for his mentor and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to reclaim the presidency in 2012. Since he first took over the presidency in 2000 from Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics. With exceptional political finesse, Putin has systematically marginalized all opposition and built up the powerful United Russia Party. As it stands now, Russia can hardly be considered democratic. United Russia holds 315 of the 450 seats in the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, making Russia effectively a one-party state. Corruption abounds because government officials are not held accountable for their actions as long as they maintain their standing with United Russia. Furthermore, the Kremlin exercises complete control over state television by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses for uncooperative networks, while dissenters face violent suppression by the government. In spite of all of these free speech violations, Putin remains enormously popular, with approval ratings hovering around 80 percent. From a Machiavellian perspective, Putin’s leadership has been phenomenal. During his first two terms as president, Russia experienced a 72 percent increase in GDP, an eightfold increase in average monthly salary, and a restoration of government stability. However, the political corruption, human rights violations, and propaganda that Putin has used to strengthen his regime threaten to undermine the foundation of Russian democracy.

Many had hoped to see Medvedev compete against Putin in the upcoming elections on a liberal modernization platform. If these two titans of the Kremlin were to run against each other, the contest would reinvigorate Russian democracy. A functional democracy requires elections that are competitive enough to make elected officials accountable to voters. With Medvedev out of the race, Russians can expect a landslide victory for Putin and several more years of his increasingly authoritarian rule. In February 2011, Mikhail Gorbachev broadly criticized Russia’s electoral system, particularly the undemocratic way in which Putin and Medvedev privately decided who would stand for the presidency in 2012. Additionally, Medvedev’s recent announcement that he will step aside for Putin lends credence to the commonly held belief that Medvedev has been a mere puppet for Putin throughout his presidency. Putin has also manipulated the electoral system by changing the Russian constitution’s provision for direct election of provincial governors to a presidential appointment system. This new model allows Putin to reward loyal supporters and further inhibits government accountability to the electorate.

A former KGB officer, Putin is no stranger to the use of violence as a means to achieve political objectives. In fact, a 2008 Human Rights Watch report ranked Putin’s human rights record on the same level as the leaders of Pakistan and Zimbabwe. Dissidents, such as former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been arrested on questionable grounds, and journalists who report negative stories about the government’s policy on Chechnya, for instance, have the tendency to be assassinated. Putin has even promoted a high school Russian history textbook that downplays the atrocities committed by Stalin and renders him a harsh but effective leader. Although Putin’s strong-arm tactics pale in comparison to Stalin’s massive purges, it is not too much of a stretch to call Putin a new “man of steel” who seeks to restore Russia’s prominence in global affairs.

Putin’s careful attention to his public image has always been a vital aspect of his political strategy. Lately, he has made appearances throughout the country to foster the popular notion that he is some sort of superhero. Whether he is scuba diving, climbing a rock wall, arm wrestling, or flying a fighter jet, Putin crafts the personal image of an awe-inspiring man of action. If he can drive a Formula One race car, perform skilled judo maneuvers, stare down wild animals, and swim across freezing Siberian lakes, it seems entirely plausible that he can solve all of Russia’s problems without breaking a sweat, or so the logic goes. A recent popular comic in Russia features “Super Putin,” a hero who saves the world from both zombies and terrorists. This comic captures the true adoration that many constituents feel for Putin and the sensational propaganda techniques that make him such a formidable threat to democracy.

Those who regard Putin as Russia’s savior are not entirely misguided. After all, Putin did salvage Russia from what many considered to be a failed democratic experiment in the 1990s. After a severe economic crisis during which GDP fell by 50 percent, the Russian people sacrificed liberty in favor of stability under Putin. His guidance has consistently led to good results, even when his methods have been less than desirable. However, Putin’s reign has had drawbacks as well. For example, regardless of how effective he has been, his United Russia party obstructs progress because it does not leave room for constructive public discourse.

Through clever political scheming and tireless self-promotion, Putin has taken on the role of a superhero whose mission is to enhance the power of Russia. It remains to be seen whether the return of “Super Putin” to the presidency will be the “kryptonite” of Russian democracy.

Russia Rising

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:49:43 +0000

Moscow's Quiet Resurgence

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

When a calamitous earthquake and tsunami struck the east coast of Japan in March 2011, few could have guessed just how far the aftershock would reach. Japan, one of the world’s largest economies and a powerhouse in East Asia, was left utterly devastated and economically crippled, with entire regions flooded and thousands dead or missing. The disaster also set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, under pressure from a mobilized German public and a growing green movement, to announce that Germany would close all its nuclear power plants by 2022.

Just a few weeks later, Poland signed an agreement with Germany and France to create a joint military force. This came two months after Poland committed itself to the formation and leadership of a battle group with Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Then, in early July, Russia stepped up its efforts to act as a mediator in the Libyan conflict, welcoming the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of South Africa, who has offered to help negotiate with Colonel Qaddafi. The president of the World Chess Federation, a former president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, traveled to Tripoli for a second time to discuss the possibility of a negotiated end to the conflict with Qaddafi.

Taken together, these seemingly disparate developments point to an important trend that has been overlooked in a year filled with revolutions, natural disasters, and fiscal crises: the slow but steady resurgence of Russia. With the United States tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan and focusing its attention on the Arab Spring and debates on domestic spending, and Europe lurching from one debt crisis to the next, Russia is taking advantage of opportunities to reassert itself throughout Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Compared with the roar of headlines pronouncing default and impending deadlines, however, Russia’s slow rise has gone largely unnoticed.

More Than a Man

There is a popular theory, both in Russia and around the world, that any signs of a resurgent Russia are thanks to the strong and charismatic leadership of former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin, a former KGB agent with an eccentric personality and a flair for dramatically machismo tasks like fishing shirtless and practicing judo, has nurtured a cult of personality since first becoming president in December 1999. Though Dmitry Medvedev formally took over as President in 2008, it is widely acknowledged he remains one of, if not the key power player, in the Kremlin. Indeed, deputy administration chief Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin power broker and aide to President Medvedev, went so far as to tell Chechen television that Putin was sent to the Kremlin by God to help address its troubles in the post-Soviet period. According to an article by Alexei Nikolsky of the AFP news agency, Putin has been made the hero of pop songs and brands of vodka, and a small female sect even believes him to be the reincarnation of Paul the Apostle.

According to George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR global intelligence, a resurgent Russia is due less to Putin’s skilled leadership than to the geopolitical forces that were certain to restore Russia to a position of global prominence after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. “Had Putin been hit by a car in 2000,” Friedman says, “another Putin would have emerged. The direction in which Putin took Russia, rebuilding the security apparatus to control the state, rebuilding the state to control Russia, rebuilding Russia to dominate the former Soviet Union—this was a natural course for any Russian president to follow.” Putin may be a dominant, beloved figure, Friedman says, but Russia is simply too large—politically, economically, and geographically—to be entirely at the whim of one man.

But Putin was not hit by a car, and his influence on the development of Russia since 2000 has been profound. It is important, therefore, to examine exactly what he has built in Russia and how he has built it over his decade in power.

Putin’s perceptions of the modern world, and Russia’s place in it, are shaped by his experience living through the fall of the Soviet Union. In his State Address in 2005, Putin declared that the end of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” “As for the Russian people,” Putin continued, “it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

For Putin, the fall of the Soviet Union was not a fitting end for a corrupt and poorly-functioning empire stretched beyond its means, as it has often been portrayed in the United States. Rather, it was a departure from the natural order of the world, a geopolitical disaster that created only chaos and confusion within both Russia and its proper sphere of influence throughout Eurasia. Separatist movements like Chechen nationalism are, therefore, directly attributable to Russia’s failure to reclaim its rightful place in the world order, and ordinary Russians have suffered as a result.

It is these considerations that have motivated Putin to craft what Friedman describes as an empire without the traditional burdens of empire. “What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire,” Friedman explains, “was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine.” There were certain things these countries could not do—become a part of NATO or house hostile forces, for instance—but Russia was not directly responsible for their future, as the Soviet Union had been with its satellite countries. By aligning former Soviet states with Russia without suffering the economic drain of empire, Putin has positioned Russia to achieve maximum influence at minimum cost. Partly as a result, governments friendly to Russia have popped up across the former Soviet Union, including in Ukraine.

This is not to say that Russia is afraid to use force, however. In August 2008, Russia shocked the world by sending troops into neighboring Georgia in support of separatist movements in South Ossetia and Abkhazia that sought to align those territories more closely with Russia. Though the war was brief and small in scale, it demonstrated Russia’s willingness to balance finesse with force and soft influence with hard power. It was an effective warning to other potential adversaries in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Russian presidential elections are scheduled for March 2012, and as of July 2011 neither Putin nor Medvedev has publicly discussed who will run for president or what the configuration of power will be in the Kremlin after the end of Medvedev’s term. The elections themselves are more a formality than a test of democratic will, and whatever the outcome, the influence of Putin, and his vision of a new Russia reclaiming its rightful place in the world order, will remain strong.

Gaining Energy—Literally

In addition to a concentrated effort to rebuild power, Russia has also taken advantage of a confluence of events and crises that have strengthened its position in Europe.

The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and ensuing nuclear scare at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant caused worldwide panic about the safety and security of nuclear reactors. In Germany, the disaster energized a growing green movement, leading to mass rallies in 21 German cities demanding the closure of nuclear power plants. On May 30, Chancellor Angela Merkel, mindful of her 2012 reelection prospects, announced that all nuclear power plants in Germany would be closed by 2022, and that seven stations built before 1980 would be closed immediately. German leaders have been forced into a corner regarding nuclear power by the green movement before, but the visceral reality of daily images from Fukushima throughout the crisis and a newfound national momentum for the green party seem to indicate that the closure may stick this time.

The question now is how Germany will replace the closed nuclear power plants, in both the short- and long-term. In 2010, nuclear power accounted for 23 percent of all electricity consumption in Germany. With Germany, the workhorse of the European economy, attempting to rebuild and recover from the global financial crisis, a steady flow of energy will be more important than ever.

Germany will either need to make a massive investment in developing the infrastructure for a durable system of renewable energy, or increase gas supplies from Russia, north Africa, and the Middle East. Natural gas currently supplies 13 percent of Germany’s electricity.

With the Middle East and north Africa in turmoil over the Arab Spring, however, increased dependence on Russian natural gas appears to be the only viable option. As Vadim Trukhachev wrote in Pravda, “The German Greens do not like Russia, and criticize it for everything. Would they have to become dependent on the Russian gas? Chancellor Merkel says that the dependence on Russia will not increase. Yet, then they would have to buy from the Middle East and North Africa. The situation in those regions leaves much to be desired. Hence, the head of the German government is simply saying what people want to hear.” Next door, the devoutly anti-nuclear Austrians are already facing the prospect of electricity shortages. A similar problem in Germany would have a catastrophic effect on Germany, Europe, and the world economy. Russia stands ready to reap the economic and geopolitical benefits of an increasingly-dependent Germany and Europe. In mid-July, for instance, Russian energy giant Gazprom began negotiations with the government of Belarus for control of Belarus’s natural gas transportation network, a move the Belarusian government accepted.

Likewise, the economic emergency that has swept across the Eurozone, derailing Greece and heading next toward Spain, Portugal, and Italy, has left Europe more vulnerable than ever. In late June, Gazprom announced its interest in purchasing power-generating plants in Germany and German-operated power plants in central Europe, according to STRATFOR. Though the deal will likely generate significant backlash from the European Commission and central European nations for violating EU energy security directives, the deal would be beneficial to Germany in the form of lower consumer energy prices. If Germany continues to bear the burden for bailing out failing European economies, it will need the cheaper goods and services that Russia can provide.

In line with EU energy security directives, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite recently signed a law requiring the diversification of the Lithuanian natural gas supply. Currently, Gazprom provides 100 percent of Lithuania’s natural gas. How Russia responds to this move may prove telling regarding both the likelihood of the Gazprom deal in Germany as well as Russia’s wider intentions for the European energy sector. Other European countries will certainly pay close attention to how Russia reacts.

Pushing West—and East, and South, and North

At the same time, with the United States bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and paying close attention to the events of the Arab Spring, the countries of the former Soviet Union have begun to look elsewhere for protection and security, and Russia has stepped up its efforts to establish itself as a clear world power.

Poland, for instance, has signed two defense agreements in the past two months, both with other European countries to the west and south. President Bush’s controversial missile defense shield has become less and less of a priority for NATO—the item was not even on the agenda at a recent NATO-Russia summit, according to STRATFOR—which Poland and other eastern European powers have taken as a sign of wavering NATO commitment and growing uncertainty regarding the ability and willingness of the United States and its allies to stand up to Russia should a confrontation arise. At the same time, Poland has used its recent elevation to the role of EU President to try to pull Ukraine away from Russia’s sphere of influence through economic agreements.

Just as importantly, in 2007 Russia announced its intention to annex the North Pole. According to Time Magazine, a group of 50 Russian scientists who spent time exploring the area in and around the North Pole discovered that an underwater ridge called the Lomonosov ridge directly links Russia’s Arctic coast to the North Pole, thus legitimating Russian claims to the North Pole and its vast deposits of oil and natural gas. Though the UN commission in charge of regulating and preserving the North Pole has repeatedly denied claims that any one country owns or controls the North Pole, the fact that Russia nonetheless claims ownership—and goes to so much trouble to prove it—should leave no doubt about the seriousness of their intentions. According to an article in the Toronto Sun, even Canada is aware of Russia’s growing role in the Arctic and taking moves to counter the threat. “You’re seeing a buildup of capabilities that simply hasn’t been there before, period,” said Rob Huebert, University of Calgary Arctic security expert. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has promised a stronger security presence in the north, including a new military port, a new icebreaker ship, and more military exercises, but such promises have been slow to catch up to the reality of Russian expansion.

Meanwhile, to the south of Russia, violence caused by an Islamic separatist insurgency continues to ripple across the North Caucasus. Russia has responded with an increased security presence and more resources devoted to preventing the spread of terrorism within Russia. In late July 2011, Russia began its largest air force training exercise in the North Caucasus in 15 years as a show of strength and as an effort to beef up military capabilities in advance of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Putin made his reputation early on by crushing insurgency in the North Caucasus, and if the festering violence in the region spreads or grows out of control, a rapid and forceful Russian response is likely.

Russia’s self-appointed role in trying to mediate the Libyan crisis is emblematic of the role the country envisions for itself even outside the borders of the former Soviet Union. Prime Minister Putin has said the UN resolution authorizing NATO intervention in Libya resembled “medieval calls for crusades”—a remark which drew a sharp rebuke from President Medvedev—and Russian diplomats and officials have been at work since the start of the NATO intervention to bring an end to the conflict. Russia has sent multiple diplomats to Libya to negotiate with Colonel Qaddafi, including Mikhail Margelov, Russia’s envoy to Africa, who made the startling announcement that Qaddafi has a “suicide plan” to destroy Tripoli should the tide of battle turn against him.

This role—as a good-faith mediator bridging the divide between an autocratic government and Western powers—is one that Russia feels itself uniquely suited to play. Russia itself it a mass of contradictions and confusions uniting East and West, and has been known both to decry Western attempts at intervention, as is the case in Libya, but also to occasionally support them, as in Kosovo. This flexibility gives Russia an advantage and a niche, and as revolts continue to swell throughout the Arab world on the heels of the Arab Spring, Russia will be happy to offer its services as a strong, credible mediator, lending further weight to the country’s self-perception as a world power.

The Endgame

At a time of uncertainty around the world, Russia finds itself poised to reclaim a position of power and influence not seen since the end of the Cold War. Thanks to geopolitical undercurrents, Putin’s adept maneuvering, energy and fiscal crises across Europe, and American preoccupations with the Middle East and the domestic budget battle, Russia has the opportunity to slowly, surely, and silently expand its sphere of influence around the world and grab tighter and tighter hold of Europe and other areas of strategic importance. To be certain, Russia faces its own problems, both domestic and external, many of them stemming from the world economic crisis that left no corner of the globe untouched. But while the rest of the world panics and jumps from crisis to crisis, Russia’s long-term ambitions and its clear vision of itself as a rightful and important world power will continue to guide Russian policy toward steady objectives. While countries like China, Brazil, and India may be receiving most of their attention for their strong economic growth and expanding political influence, it may well be the rise of Russia that crucially defines the next century. The Russian bear may have been in hibernation, but at the end of every winter comes a new spring.

The Chavez Paradox

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:46:11 +0000

Assessing the Bolivarian Revolution

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

In June, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, traveled to Cuba for emergency surgery. A month later, the announcement that he was undergoing cancer treatment threw the apparent hegemony of his revolution into disarray and began to cast doubts on the future of his radical social agenda. Since then, updates concerning his health have been scarce, leading to rife speculation as to the exact nature of his illness and his political future. As Venezuela faces its greatest period of political uncertainty in close to a decade, the debate over the influence of 21^st century Latin American socialism and its emblematic leader rages more intensely than it ever has. Well into his third term and thirteenth year in office, Chávez is the longest serving head of government in the Americas, inheriting the distinction from his maitre à penser and mentor, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Throughout this period, he has proven to be a resilient figure, overcoming public anathematization, rabid—albeit unorganized—political opposition, and even a coup attempt in 2002. His political brainchild, the Bolivarian Revolution, has brought substantial change to Venezuela, but has been contentious on several grounds.

The very notion of the Revolution is a source of disagreement. Whereas some consider it to be a quasi-cartoonish illustration of the government’s limits and an assured catastrophe, others see it as the strongest element of the Chávez presidency and the greatest agent of change in a country that has been greatly pauperized over the last fifty years. Others doubt whether it is genuinely revolutionary, while its greatest detractors see it as a demagogical, populist front for the mass appropriation of power by Chávez. Almost fifteen years after its inception, Chavez’s Revolution strives to present itself as a viable alternative to the liberal-democratic model championed by the United States. In The Revolution in Venezuela, Thomas Ponniah notes that common analysis of the chavista reforms has been largely too Manichean to capture the essence of the movement, which he argues cannot be understood in unequivocal terms. The crux of the argument concerning the value of the revolution thus lies in an evaluation of the government’s statist policies and the degree to which they have brought forth a genuine amelioration of the Venezuelan population’s condition.

Some view these changes as a growing threat to Venezuelan democracy, especially when seen in concert with some of the other measures enacted by the Chávez government. In 2009, after several failed attempts at doing so, Chávez finally passed a referendum allowing him to run for the office of President for an indefinite number of successive terms and has indicated his intention to keep running for several decades to come. Furthermore, the Chávez government has arrested a number of high-profile opponents to the regime, such as his 2006 election challenger Manuel Rosales, under the pretext of corruption, and media mogul Guillermo Zuloaga, for issuing remarks deemed to be offensive by Chávez. The latter was the owner of Globovision, one of the few remaining media outlets taking a strong anti-chavista stance before the government acquired a 20 percent share of it, and Chávez’s interactions with the network have drawn scrutiny and criticism from international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Catholic Church. However, proponents of the government argue that accusations levied against these individuals are accurate and that the Revolution needs to give itself the tools to defend itself.

Furthermore, those who defend the Bolivarian Revolution point to the social progress that has been accomplished under Chávez’s leadership. Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, Venezuela’s Human Development Index (HDI) had fallen below the regional average at the beginning of the 1990s and largely plateaued during the subsequent decade. Since 2000, it has risen considerably faster than it had at any point since 1980, and has now largely caught up to the regional average. Furthermore, an 8.5 drop in Venezuela’s Gini coefficient over the course of the Chávez presidency has positioned its level of income equality above that of the United States and most other countries in the region. However, critics of Chávez’s policies question how meaningful these figures actually are, given the general economic expansion in the region. Indeed, many other nations in Latin America and the Caribbean saw improvements on these fronts, and despite pursuing far less radical policies, countries such as Brazil and Colombia experienced similar drops in inequality and increases in HDI.

Meanwhile, the Chávez government, which intended to redistribute the prodigious oil wealth that Venezuelans feel they are entitled to, has largely benefited from very high revenues due to heightened prices throughout the 2000s. Tellingly, at certain periods of his presidency, Chávez has had a public approval rating that mirrored national oil prices. The question of petroleum in Venezuela has had particular, and at times counterintuitive, political and cultural ramifications, as Professors Terry Karl and Fernando Coronil have each explored in depth. Chávez’s reforms of the national petroleum industry fall within the conception Venezuelans have of their country’s rich subsoil as the “national body,” as argued by Professor Coronil. However, the waves of petroleum nationalization and the nationalistic language used to justify them have not been reflected economically, as the trade balance with the United States, which is presumably constituted almost exclusively of barrels of oil, continued to grow year after year, even at the peak of anti-Americanism in Venezuelan rhetoric, until the financial crisis of 2008. According to the US Census Bureau, this figure went from US$6 billion the year Chávez came into office to nearly US$39 billion the year Bush left office.

One of the most significant challenges for Chávez in the coming years remains the issue of security. In the past decade, the incidence of violent crime, including kidnapping and murder, has risen dramatically in Venezuela, in part due to its proximity to the Colombian cocaine trade and its emergence as a transit nation for drug traffickers. This indicates an alarming corruption problem within the Venezuelan government, as a report for the US Congress concluded in 2009. Furthermore, the surge in the murder rate has hit the poor populations extremely hard, with most estimates putting Venezuela’s rate far above the regional average and some going so far as putting it above that of Colombia. A 2010 study by Roberto Briceño-León, a sociologist at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, puts the homicide rate in Caracas at 200 for every 100,000, far greater than Bogotá’s 22.7 and São Paulo’s 14. Chávez’s policies concerning this issue have repeatedly been questioned and criticized as the statistics continue to worsen. This phenomenon severely threatens the revolution as it attacks the core of his support base, and largely undoes much of the progress made during the last decade. The success of the movement thus largely relies on turning this situation around by allaying the mounting fears that are driving the middle and upper classes away, and ensuring the safety of those who sustain the revolution.

Much has been said over the years concerning the anti-American and anti-capitalist rhetoric of the Bolivarian Revolution, but an assessment of the scope of its actions has proven to be much more difficult. In some domains, the Chávez presidency has provided vectors for social change in ways that represent a real departure from the policies his predecessors had put forth, as indicated by the increase in equality among social strata. In other domains, particularly the foreign oil market, the Chavez administration has been quite content to take more conventional avenues. In The Revolution in Venezuela, Jonathan Eastwood compellingly argues that from a Marxian understanding—and the Bolivarian Revolution increasingly self-associates with Marxism— it is in fact not a revolution at all, as it fails to bring radical change to the country’s social structure. He notes that supporters of the movement claim that Chávez has empowered the disenfranchised lower classes and that his policies have improved their quality of life, even if he has not yet been successful in providing fundamental change to the way in which Venezuelan society is structured.

The danger for 21^st century socialism thus lies in the distance between its message and its action. In espousing some of the most radical language in modern political speech, Chávez has alienated a number of local and international powers, despite advancing a program that is reliant on local cooperation and fueled by profits from the international oil market. His government will have to continue to carefully juggle the socialist discourse that makes him overwhelmingly popular among the lower classes and a more tempered and inclusive approach when interacting with foreign nations that have not espoused 21^st century socialism as fondly as Venezuelans have, at the risk of ending up as isolated as Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

As the issues of domestic security and the weight of the financial crisis intensify, it may only be a matter of time before Chávez is forced to choose one over the other. Furthermore, with the political future of its founder and talisman in doubt, the paradigm has changed altogether. Both chavistas and the opposition may have to prepare for a Venezuela without Chávez, undoubtedly one of the central figures in Venezuelan political history. What the Bolivarian Revolution will become without its figurehead may likely force the movement, which has so carefully treaded the line separating radical socialism from pragmatist liberal commerce for years, to make a fundamental choice and decide how revolutionary it truly is, at the risk of disappearing altogether.

Trading Up

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:42:20 +0000

Nigeria's Infrastructure Fix

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

During its half-century since independence, Nigeria has gained a reputation for inefficient use of its natural resources and a weak government system of patronage and high corruption. However, with the democratic election of previously de-facto President Goodluck Jonathan, experts believe that the country will finally be able to take off in growth. According to the economist Jeffrey Sachs, Nigeria has the potential to join the BRIC countries, turning it into BRINC (Brazil, Russia, India, Nigeria, China) by the end of the decade. Despite the country’s reforms since the death of the dictator Sani Abacha in 1998, it has been slow to develop its core infrastructure, with funds allocated for public projects often lining the pockets of government officials.

With 250 ethnic groups and division between the Islamic north and Christian south, Nigeria has a history of conflict. The possibility of conflict between parties that share different group identities is often aggravated by a lack of basic residential infrastructure. In the Nigerian state of Lagos, with a current population of 15.5 million and a UN-projected population of over 24.5 million by 2015, many lower-income residents occupy tenement properties with minimal functionality due to lower costs. The most common design of such properties, known as you-see-me-I-see-yous, is characterized by overcrowding and multiple families with different socio-cultural backgrounds sharing the same common room—a design said to have been imported from Brazil at the end of the slave era.

In a recent study by Covenant University Professors Oni Ayotunde Olawande and Durodola Olufemi Daniel, which focuses on the causes of frequent conflicts in the low-cost tenements, residents of lower-income housing across multiple neighborhoods of the Lagos metropolis ranked eight reasons for the various causes of conflicts, including misrepresentation, threats to parties’ interests and concerns, and non-settlement of bills. The relative importance indices were between 53 percent and 81 percent, with 81 percent of respondents naming inadequate infrastructure (e.g. kitchen and bathroom facilities) as the primary cause of clashes within residents represented by the study group. The results emphasized the role an adequate quality and supply of housing could play in reducing problems in rapidly growing Lagos. Subsequently, the Lagos state government has started providing land and support to developers with the capacity to increase housing inventory, especially units for low-income residents. The country’s Federal Housing Authority will increasingly rely on private developers to do this.

In order to productively accommodate its high annual population growth rate of four percent, under the direction of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, the Lagos state government has busied itself with urban planning and coordinated with international developers to expand its road system, that will increase real estate value and accessibility to its central business districts. New projects include the expansion of the Lekki Airport, which is being managed by the Lagos Airport Development Company (LADC), a project company created under the Lagos state government. The creation of this new hub will complement and support the Murtala Mohammad International Airport (MMIA), currently the only functional international airport in western Nigeria. The proposed site of Lekki Airport is within the Lekki Peninsula, 10-15 km away from the mainland at various points and around 30 km northwest of MMIA in Ikeja, the capital of Lagos state and a large component of the Lagos metropolis. The project is part of the government’s planned Lekki Free Trade Zone, which is set to be a industrial, commercial, financial, and recreational hub for Nigeria. Projects such as this and Eko Atlantic City, another project using land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean to feature new residential developments, modern infrastructure, and business centers, will give Nigeria a big push forward in its modernization.

Nigeria’s accumulation of infrastructure through these and other large-scale development projects will be very costly. According to the Financial Times, in the past four years, the Jonathan administration and that of Umaru Yar’Adua before him spent over US$200 billion in government revenues, including over US$23 billion from the excess crude amount reserves left by previous administrations to save revenues due to higher than budgeted oil prices. In addition, the Jonathan administration borrowed excessively, increasing external debt from US$3.719 billion at the end of 2009 to US$5.227 billion by March 2011. However, not one policy initiative or major infrastructure project has been completed. Inflation of the naira currency has destabilized the economy and decreased foreign and domestic investment.

However, optimism for Nigeria is not unwarranted. According to the World Bank, Nigeria accounted for 30 percent of foreign direct investment to sub-Saharan Africa last year. China and India’s rise have brought Nigeria along by driving demand for Nigeria’s vast hydrocarbon deposits, as well as its various agricultural products and manufactured goods. China has also strengthened ties to the country by providing aid to help develop its industrial capacity and to finance core infrastructure systems such as railroads, highways, and power grids. During President Hu Jintao’s visit to Nigeria in April 2006 and the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in November of the same year, Chinese leaders expressed cooperation and support for the construction of the Lekki Free Trade Zone.

The amount of federal revenue allocated to Lagos state increased from 2004 to 2007, before decreasing until 2009, in part due to the global economic crisis and oil worker kidnappings. The Lagos state enacted property tax laws that allowed internally generated revenues to increase steadily during the same years as funds from the federal account were diminishing. In Lagos, at least, growth is persistent. While accumulating infrastructure is not a one-step fix to Nigeria’s problems, it is a major platform upon which the resource-blessed country can realize its potential.

Big Brother Politics

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:38:21 +0000

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

As Egypt moves from the euphoria of revolution to the less heady questions of timetables, candidates, and elections, the Arab world’s oldest and dominant Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, is again stepping into the Egyptian political and global media limelight. The country’s military rulers have just announced that voting for the People’s Assembly will begin on November 28 of this year, marking the first parliamentary elections since the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. Amid fears that the vote would divide Islamist parties and youth secular groups, however, the Muslim Brotherhood appears confident in its role in the transition process from military to civilian rule. Although attention has centered predominantly on the group’s future policy directions, the Brotherhood’s key significance lies with its historical role in shaping the very institutions that will determine the power of Egypt’s democracy.

As the best organized force among Egypt’s political actors, the Muslim Brotherhood, with its widespread and deeply entrenched grassroots network, is eager to play its part in Egypt’s post-revolutionary regime. Western commentators are quick to raise apprehensions about the Brotherhood’s potential for radical Islamist, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli policies, potentially akin to post-revolutionary Iran. However, the Brotherhood’s composition, structure, guiding ideology, and political history discount such fears.

The Brotherhood has revoked violence as a legitimate strategy decades ago under leaders such as Hassan al-Hudaybi and Umar al-Tilmisani, and radical groups such as Al Qaeda have long scoffed at the Brotherhood’s involvement in politics. Moreover, the Brotherhood recruits members from lay professionals instead of clerics, and its guiding ideology affirms the belief that an ideal politics will follow, not lead, a society polished by Muslim values, belying the idea of a government that will strong-arm its people toward more overt expressions of faith. Under the Brotherhood, shari’a law may have greater influence in legislation , but as a complex organization deeply imbedded with its grassroots and parliamentary procedure, this influence will do more to reflect than force popular beliefs. Finally, while the Brotherhood’s views on Israel are negative, this is hardly the mark of an outlier in the region.

More importantly, whether publicly supported or not, personal or organizational attitudes are not the only factor that will influence the Brotherhood’s Peace and Justice Party when in government. The Brotherhood’s participation in the People’s Assembly reveal a shift over the decades from religion and morals to practical issues of legal and political reform, socioeconomic policies, and human rights. It will likely continue to act in a politically pragmatic manner, and any new government will be aware of the significant economic and bureaucratic issues it must prioritize before catalyzing geopolitical challenges.

In sum, the Brotherhood’s political history foretells a group that will govern in the pragmatic, wary way it has thus far guided itself. Moreover, the dominance of inquiries regarding the Brotherhood’s likely actions in government unfortunately overshadows the immediately relevant question of where, in the coming months, it will stand. The stability and depth of the transition will largely depend on both the youth and the liberals, who want larger social and political change, and the military, which has a status quo bias as it currently benefits from involvement in many of Egypt’s key industries. Such a spectrum includes elections as well as a more fundamental shift in Egypt’s power structure that encompasses trials of former regime members, reforms targeted at correcting institutional corruption, and potential retreat of the military’s influence in the economy. The Brotherhood has the organizational incentive to favor stability and avoid risky behavior that could jeopardize its political lead or further taint its international reputation. However, as Egyptian youth continue to mobilize, the Brotherhood faces the challenge of holding its own complex internal currents together while preserving legitimacy in the face of the public.

Therefore, its political stance will not only influence how far the transition process will proceed, but also reflect whether the Brotherhood can move beyond its savvy for self-preservation to lead, instead of simply ride, the wave of democratic change.

Thus far, those internal dynamics seem not so much flexible as divisive. During the May 27^th protests in Tahrir Square over trials of old members of the regime, the Muslim Brotherhood chose not to join in, remaining skeptical of the movement. However, hundreds of its youth decided to participate anyway. The Muslim Brotherhood youth have again stood in solidarity with the youth movements in response to the military’s June communiqué (which declared that April 6 is receiving foreign funds and accused it and Kifaya, youth movements heavily involved in the protests early this year, of attempting to divide the army and the people), declaring on their Facebook page that it is inappropriate to question the movements’ intentions. The Brotherhood is not beyond casting off its own, as evidenced by the expulsions of several of its youth leaders due to their support for former Brotherhood member and current presidential candidate Abdel Aboul-Fotouh, their decision to form the Egyptian Current party, and even deeper questions regarding disagreement with the organization’s policy.

Yet, even if the Brotherhood is unable to move with the youth for deeper political change, and Egypt’s first democratic years see more energy expended in managing instability than significant institutional reform, the Brotherhood’s lackluster leadership during the transition process can have unintended, long-term boons for democracy.

Members of the Brotherhood will leave the organization when they feel that it is no longer the most effective conduit for change amid this window of opportunity. Already, various breakaway parties have emerged, such as the Hezb al-Wassat or Center Party, which was blocked from party status in 2000 but has now re-emerged, and Al Nahda, the Renaissance. Such groups not only diversify the political spectrum, but also transport the Brotherhood’s significant organizational knowledge through former members to the work of building effective parties, another significant challenge for the establishment of a vibrant democracy.

Egypt’s democratic transition continues to face obstacles at this critical juncture of institutional destruction and creation. Unfortunately, it seems so far that the Muslim Brotherhood has focused more on preparing itself for the coming political competition than taking a significant role in managing the transition process. Continuing protests and incipient signs of irritation between the youth and the military reflect the lack of effective mediation among actors in this drama. While scholars can debate the causes of the Brotherhood’s modest presence, it brings to light the unfortunate fact that our debate has, by its focus on what the Brotherhood may do once in power, failed to judge it as a forceful and legitimate player in the establishment of democracy, and has subsequently also alleviated it of the responsibilities of this role.

Potential for Progress

Michael Mitchell — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:33:49 +0000

Opportunities for Economic Growth in Bangladesh

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

Precarious topography, political turmoil, and a struggling global economy are tough conditions for any state, let alone a young democracy of 140 million citizens. In light of these problems, Bangladesh’s sustained economic growth becomes all the more impressive. Over the past five years, Bangladesh has enjoyed an average real GDP growth of six percent. Labor-intensive industries, in particular textiles, have fueled growth as Bangladesh’s tremendous reserves of cheap, low-skill labor have attracted foreign investment. Educational attainment rates are on the rise and Bangladesh has a particularly vibrant political culture, as a vast majority of citizens vote.

Continued economic progress, however, is by no means assured. For all its economic potential and political vibrancy, Bangladesh suffers from a virulent party conflict. Bangladesh’s two major parties, the Awami League (AWL) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), figure at the center of this conflict, and their respective leaders, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, persist in a blood feud that stretches back to the inception of the nation. Their personal vendettas have embroiled a poor but promising country and threaten future growth. In particular, the charged political atmosphere and instability hinder governmental commitments to long-term infrastructure projects and discourage foreign investment. More importantly, the animosity between the AWL and BNP endanger Bangladesh’s potentially most important regional relationship, namely ties with India. The parties vary wildly in their stances towards their powerful neighbor—and as tensions intensify, their differing positions become further entrenched. This is surely foreboding for future relations with India, as a leadership change in Bangladesh may lead to cooler relations at best with a key strategic partner.

Economic Progress and Potential

To be sure, Bangladeshi economic growth pales in comparison to the roaring successes of regional giants, India and China. For the latter two countries, double-digit annual GDP growth has been expected, with anything below a cause for concern. Nevertheless, Bangladesh’s six percent average compares favorably with other high-growth states such as Vietnam and Malaysia, both at seven percent. Moreover, Bangladesh has managed to achieve consistent growth in spite of its government, a far cry from the government-aided and -directed expansion in China and other export-oriented East Asian tates. This economic growth, in turn, has been a boon to a population that has struggled with pervasive and crippling poverty for most of the nation’s existence. The percentage of the population living below the poverty line has decreased from a 15-year high of 45 percent in 2004 to 40 percent in 2010.

The crucial driver of Bangladeshi growth has been a thriving textiles industry that relies on the country’s vast amount of cheap, unskilled labor. Garment exports accounted for US$12.3 billion dollars, nearly 12 percent of GDP. Furthermore, the rate of textile exports accelerated in 2009, despite the world economy floundering in the throes of a deep recession, as textile exports to the United States increased by 10 percent.

The growth of Bangladesh’s most robust industrial sector is especially encouraging given the expiration of the Multi Fibre Agreement (MFA). This arrangement, which lasted from 1974 through 2005, imposed quotas on textile exports from developing countries to the developed ones. This, in effect, helped propel Bangladesh to a thriving textile industry in the 1990s through the early 2000s. However, experts feared that the expiration of MFA in 2005 would effectively cripple Bangladesh, leaving it uncompetitive against bigger textile producers like China. These fears were ultimately unfounded, as Bangladeshi labor proved to be both cheaper and just as effective as their bigger Asian competitors. In fact, textile exports actually increased by US$500 million immediately after the expiration of the MFA.

Not only do textile exports and profits contribute to a significant portion of overall GDP, but they also help employ millions of Bangladeshis. More than 3.5 million Bangladeshis work in the garment industry, 90 percent of whom are women. The latter demographic is particularly important as steady employment and earnings have helped empower Bangladeshi women, who are among the most enfranchised in all of South Asia. The industry, however, is not without its flaws. For one, a lack of government involvement in regulating the industry has hurt labor. Wages remain relatively low, despite official increases in the minimum wage for entry-level workers, raising monthly pay from about US$24 to US$43. Disgruntled workers rioted throughout the summer of 2010, destroying property throughout Dhaka and disrupting regular traffic. Their dissatisfaction with the wage increase revealed deeper issues in the government relationship with labor. The Bangladeshi government, involved in its own inter-party squabbles, has failed to ensure fair and transparent arbitration between capital and labor. There is a disturbing lack of accountable unions, and allegations of corruption on the part of government regulators abound. Not only do these issues expose a fundamental problem between workers and owners, they also contribute to the staunchly national ownership of the industry. Foreign investors have by and large avoided investing in textile factories, as over 95 percent of the industry is domestically owned.

The lack of foreign investment in textile industries also extends into other crucial sectors, such as infrastructure and energy. Foreign investors remain wary of the inter-party strife and pervasive corruption and are warned off by the lack of policy stability. This will prove to be especially problematic as Bangladesh attempts to augment growth in the future. Despite the solid progress of the last five years, International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates indicate that Bangladesh needs to achieve eight to nine percent growth in order to drastically reduce poverty. Bangladesh remains low on the UN Development Index, ranking 129^th out of 169 countries. The country has historically depended heavily on foreign aid and loans from developed countries such as the United States and Japan, and international organizations such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the UN Development Program. Nevertheless, in order for Bangladesh to take the next step and progress to a middle-income state, foreign investment is crucial. With investment booming in emerging markets, Bangladesh must make itself an attractive spot for capital.

Over the last 15 years, the government has taken steps to make itself an enticing investment opportunity for foreign firms and banks. For example, “export processing zones” have been established in Dhaka, Comilla, Mongla, Iswardi, Uttara, and Karnafully. Among the incentives intended to attract foreign firms are tax holidays that last up to five years. While these steps are encouraging, it should be noted that the last of these zones were set up more than four years ago in 2007 under the aegis of a non-partisan caretaker government. These zones are in principle exactly the type of government action needed to lure foreign investment. However, legislative measures are not enough. Foreign investors also need to be convinced that the country’s overall political climate and governance are stable. Bangladesh is riddled by corruption stretching through all levels of government, and according to Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Index, Bangladesh ranks 134^th out of 154 countries, tied with states like Zimbabwe, which is notorious for its corrupt government. Given Bangladesh’s increasing energy usage and considerable gas reserves, future prosperity depends on attracting foreign investment. It is up to both the BNP and Awami League to seriously address corruption if they hope to make due on Bangladesh’s substantial economic potential.

Courting the Neighbor

While internal reforms will play a critical role in pushing Bangladesh forward, the country’s poisonous politics also threaten the future of any fruitful relationship with it’s neighbor, India. Bangladesh’s ties with the regional power stretch back to the 1970s, as India was instrumental in helping defeat Pakistan during the Bangladeshi war for independence. These initial ties, however, were not to last. The past 30 years of the relationship have been marked by bloody incidents concerning Bangladeshi refugees, haggling over water, and border disputes and terrorism. Furthermore, domestic attitudes towards India have gradually turned from gratitude to apprehension. Even Indians recognize as much, as Indian President Manmohan Singh recently let slip that he believed “at least 25 percent of Bangladesh swears by the Jamiat-ul-Islami and are very anti-Indian.”

Nevertheless, the past few months have seen a gradual and encouraging thawing of relations. This past July, Sonia Gandhi, scion of India’s most famous family and leader of the ruling Indian National Congress, visited Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka, the nation’s capital. Gandhi’s visit set the stage for both Manmohan Singh’s historic visit in early September and future relations between both states. Both Gandhi and Hasina could potentially be in office through the mid-2010s. While Gandhi’s recent visit may have been purely symbolic, a good working relationship between the two could figure key to sustained Bangladeshi growth.

Despite their shared borders, Bangladeshi and Indian trade and investment are surprisingly low. Experts estimate billions of dollars of illegal trade occur across the 2,500 mile Indo-Bangladeshi border, and legalizing such exchanges could encourage greater interstate commerce. Furthermore, Indian direct investment in Bangladesh is relatively small. In fact, states like South Korea and Saudi Arabia, whose major relationship with Bangladesh is their shared Sunni faith, invested four to forty times more respectively during 2009 to 2010. Moreover, Bangladesh has also attracted the attention of the other regional power, China, their biggest trading partner. Chinese foreign direct investment has more than doubled India’s. India’s economic relationship with Bangladesh, however, has experienced some changes. India has committed an unprecedented US$1 billion dollar loan to Bangladesh, which intends to use it for infrastructure. And while President Singh’s visit to Bangladesh did not culminate in a much-hoped for agreement on water sharing from the Teesta River, he did emphasize that a “strong, stable, and prosperous Bangladesh” was beneficial to India.

The recent advances from India and the consistent investment and loans from China leave Bangladesh with an enviable set of options. If the Bangladeshi government behaves wisely, it could potentially play the two regional rivals against each other in order to secure more lucrative trade arrangements and investment opportunities. India’s tariff barriers have long been a bone of contention with the Bangladeshi government—and, if reduced, they could be a tremendous boon to Bangladesh’s attempts to become an export-oriented economy. Furthermore, many of Bangladesh’s poorest districts line the border with India. If Chinese trade with Bangladesh can be leveraged into greater legal commerce with India, those border towns could benefit from an explosion in economic activity and help lift countless Bangladeshis out of poverty.

Regardless of the seemingly rosy outlook for relations with India, trouble potentially looms an election away. Unlike Sheikh Hasina, who has stressed the importance of positive relations with India, Khaleda Zia is resolutely anti-Indian. The BNP was allied with the Islamist Jamiat-ul-Islami in the most recent elections, and both share a common hostility towards their predominantly Hindu neighbors. Instead of stressing the advantages of increased economic activity and peace with their regional power, the Zia-led coalition emphasizes cultural and religious differences and bristles at perceived slights. While President Singh may have erred in shunning Zia and the BNP in the past, Sheikh Hasina would be well advised to involve Zia and her BNP subordinates in future policy discussions regarding India. A continuation of domestic rivalries into foreign policy, especially when it concerns something as crucial as economic rapport with an emerging power, would be devastating for Bangladeshi economic prospects. Although Hasina seems like a good bet in the 2013 general elections, if in the odd chance Zia does assume the presidency, a reversion to previous antagonism with India is certainly possible. Not only would that jeopardize links that are only in their developmental stages, but it would also endanger future relations with Bangladesh. The Indian government and investors would be hesitant to invest in a country with a deeply mercurial stance toward them.

Towards the Future

Bangladeshi prosperity and progress will require a careful alchemy of domestic reconciliation and foreign rapprochement. That can only begin with a political atmosphere less informed by political blood feuds but rather by sober long-term thinking. Moreover, it will require an honest self-evaluation by both parties and an admission of mutual guilt in the country’s persisting and pernicious corruption. Currently, the signs are not very encouraging. Despite vowing to fight corruption regardless of its political affiliation, Sheikh Hasina has gone after predominantly BNP targets. While the arrests and exile of Zia’s two sons Tareque and Arafat Rahman are based on significant amounts of incriminating evidence, the persistent and ultimately successful attempt to evict Zia from her ancestral home raises significant questions about the sincerity of Hasina’s anti-corruption pledges. Furthermore, her recent attempts to enshrine portraits of her father, the late Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in every governmental office raises suspicions of political maneuvering. Ultimately, Bangladesh will move forward only when its two most powerful leaders let go of the past.

Cholera Vaccination in Haiti

Kate Vinton — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:41:15 +0000

Evidence, Ethics, Expedience

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

The cholera epidemic in Haiti will be a year old in October and is far from under control. As cases spiked across the country during the summer rainy season, the ranks of cholera relief workers grew thin. Too few patients reach healthcare facilities with enough time to be sure that treatment—simple rehydration in most cases—can restore them to health. Access to clean water and to modern sanitation is dwindling. We must redouble existing efforts at cholera prevention and care—case-finding and treatment, water and sanitation projects, education and surveillance—while simultaneously integrating vaccination into the ongoing response. Even prior to this epidemic it was clear that waterborne pathogens posed great risks to communities across the country, including those not affected directly by the January 2010 earthquake. All steps to protect Haiti’s vulnerable population needed, and still need, to be taken.

One of these steps is vaccination. Oral cholera vaccines have been proven safe, effective, and deliverable in resource-poor epidemic settings. They can help protect poor communities that lack clean water and modern sanitation, and they bring collective as well as individual benefits. There is no evidence to suggest, as some have warned, that adding vaccination to the cholera response would take resources from other pillars of prevention and care, such as case-finding, treatment, and water and sanitation efforts. Yet, cholera vaccines remain unavailable in Haiti to date. We propose a vaccine demonstration in urban and rural Haiti, with a discussion of ethical considerations and possible objections. The Haitian cholera epidemic is the largest the world has seen in recent history; Haiti deserves nothing less than a comprehensive, integrated response using all of the tools in the armamentarium, including oral cholera vaccine.

Background

Founded in the aftermath of the largest and most successful slave revolt in history, modern-day Haiti is marred by extreme poverty, political unrest, a high burden of disease, and weak infrastructure. Haiti’s chronic afflictions were exacerbated when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated its capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding regions on January 12, 2010, killing an estimated 220,000 people and displacing some 1.3 million more. Massive rescue and relief efforts ensued: UN agencies, multilateral organizations, bilateral aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations rushed from around the world to help. These relief efforts averted substantial suffering and death, and the outpouring of solidarity—an estimated 50 percent of American households donated to the earthquake relief and recovery efforts—was heartening. But acute relief did little to address the profound deficiencies of Haiti’s public health infrastructure, and the often chaotic and splintered response to the quake complicated the situation in other ways. To help realize lasting improvements, NGOs and international aid groups must work with and be coordinated by the government, the only institution charged with providing rights to all Haitian citizens.

As aid workers shifted from immediate rescue and relief to the longer road of reconstruction, challenges such as providing safe shelter, food, clean water, and sanitation in the IDP camps remained. Today, nearly 600,000 people still live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, which fill most of the open spaces in the beleaguered capital. Before the earthquake, Haiti had poor health indices, including the highest infant (57/1,000) and maternal mortality (620/100,000) rates in the region, and one of the lowest immunization rates in the world (53 percent). Now, pathologies that often crop up among displaced populations, such as diarrhea and respiratory infections, have become common in the IDP camps and elsewhere in the ruined city. Water is no longer provided for free in most IDP camps, increasing the risk of outbreaks of waterborne disease. But there have been notable achievements, too. Prostheses and wheelchairs have become more common, although, as before the quake, long-term rehabilitation and follow up was limited; ongoing efforts to control HIV and tuberculosis continue, and seem to have prevented the spike in new infections that some had predicted. Thanks to effective immunization efforts in Haiti and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, measles did not play the same deadly role after the earthquake as it has in many other similarly disrupted settings.

Although the quake brought new attention, and new resources, to Haiti’s “acute-on-chronic” health problems, emergency relief could not replace public health infrastructure. The great majority of those living in rural regions have never enjoyed access to potable water; in 2001 the Water Poverty Index named Haiti the most water-insecure country out of the 147 that were ranked. In March 2011, with a million people still unhoused, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicted that cholera was “very unlikely to occur.” But in late October, ten months after the earthquake, a surge of patients with profuse watery diarrhea presented themsleves at healthcare facilities in the Artibonite River basin. Cholera, never previously documented on Haitian soil, had come to Haiti.

The waterborne bacterium Vibrio cholerae causes profuse, watery diarrhea in an estimated 3 million to 5 million people worldwide each year, killing more than 100,000 of them. Typically spread by ingestion of contaminated water or food, the disease may have been introduced in Haiti when untreated human waste from a camp housing peacekeepers from cholera-endemic countries leaked into the Artibonite River. Laboratory analysis of a sample from central Haiti revealed that the strain active in Haiti is practically identical to strains circulating in South Asia. Cholera is frequently imported into non-endemic areas without causing outbreaks of disease, but in this case widespread use of river water for drinking, bathing, and washing—in the absence of safe water supplies—facilitated the spread of cholera throughout the Artibonite basin and, before long, the whole of Haiti. The lack of immunity in the population made individuals especially vulnerable to infection.

Within weeks, cholera spread throughout the country’s ten departments. As of September 18, the Haitian health ministry reported 452,189 cases and 6,334 deaths (and these are official figures, which almost certainly underreport the actual number of cases and deaths). The initial case-fatality rate of 7 percent—among the highest recorded in recent history—has dropped to 1.7 percent nationally, though regions vary between 0.8 percent and 7.7 percent. But the disease is far from under control: after a decline in cases from January to April of 2011, there was a resurgence of cases across the country beginning in May. Such seasonal variation in incidence—rising in the rainy season, falling somewhat in the dry season—is likely to continue as cholera becomes endemic in Haiti. Now, more than 600 new cases, and more than 10 deaths, are reported every day, making this the largest cholera epidemic the world has seen in decades. On the western third of Hispaniola, cholera seems here to stay.

Cholera Prevention and Care

Comprehensive and integrated prevention and care can curb the spread of cholera and the suffering and death it causes, even in settings with minimal medical infrastructure. Active case finding and treatment with oral rehydration and/or (for moderate and severe cases) intravenous rehydration and antibiotics can bring case-fatality rates well below one percent. Building water treatment systems and providing point-of-use purification technologies can substantially reduce transmission, as can improving waste management and installing modern sanitation infrastructure. National surveillance and education campaigns can increase the efficacy of these interventions. Finally, safe and effective oral cholera vaccines exist and could be delivered alongside the other components of prevention and care. To date, however, vaccination campaigns have not been rolled out in Haiti. During any epidemic of cholera, we should deploy all tools in the medical and public health arsenal. During the epidemic in Haiti, the largest in recent history and one that shows no signs of slowing, vaccination is an essential complementary intervention as water and sanitation infrastructure are strengthened in the long term.

Cholera Vaccines

Older cholera vaccines were injectable, caused local side effects, and produced limited protection for a short period. But two oral cholera vaccines, Dukoral (~US$6/ dose) and Shanchol (~US$1.85/dose), developed in the last two decades, are easier to administer and offer approximately 70 percent protection for two to three years after two doses given two weeks apart. Observed so-called “herd immunity” effects suggest that additional community-level protection would come with large-scale immunization. Cross-country studies that include herd immunity indicate the cost effectiveness of cholera vaccination in resource-poor settings. Both vaccines have been successfully administered to hundreds of thousands of persons in multiple randomized controlled trials, and have excellent safety profiles. But oral cholera vaccines are not magic bullets: Dukoral has the disadvantage of requiring ingestion of 150 ml of a buffer solution (75 ml for children 2-5 years of age) at the time of vaccination. Refrigerated storage is recommended for both vaccines, though ongoing studies are testing their stability at higher temperatures. Currently there are only an estimated 400,000 doses of both vaccines available, but production could be ramped up rapidly with increased demand.

Increasingly, global health policymakers have endorsed the use of oral cholera vaccines in endemic and epidemic settings. In March 2010, the WHO endorsed vaccination in conjunction with other control priorities in endemic settings: it suggested local health authorities consider integrating reactive vaccination with treatment, water, and sanitation efforts in epidemic settings depending on health infrastructure. In April of 2011, the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) launched a working group on vaccination in humanitarian emergencies. Their report concluded that “not vaccinating [in Haiti] may have cost lives and represents a lost opportunity to gather more experience in responding to outbreaks in non-endemic situations as well as innovative use of vaccination strategies to control outbreaks.” Most recently, in July, the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional arm of the WHO, suggested that “cholera vaccination be considered as an important complementary tool for the control and prevention of cholera on the island of La Hispaniola.”

Current Proposal

To examine the efficacy of integrating vaccination into the ongoing response to cholera in Haiti, the authors and a group of Haitian and American colleagues working in government ministries, aid agencies, multilateral organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and research universities have proposed an urban and rural vaccine pilot using the 200,000 available doses of Shanchol. Although its health system was weakened by the 2010 earthquake, Haiti could accommodate a large-scale demonstration of reactive vaccination because there are sufficient health providers—nurses, doctors, pharmacists, community health workers—in country to deliver the two-dose course effectively. GHESKIO, an NGO, would run the urban pilot in the Port-au-Prince slum Cité de Dieu; Zanmi Lasante (the Haitian branch of Partners In Health) would run the rural pilot in Bocozel, located in the Artibonite River valley. The Haitian Ministry of Health would supervise the project, along with external cholera experts and public health officials. If this demonstration were deemed successful, we would suggest the production of cholera vaccine be ramped up to supply a larger campaign across Haiti—integrated, perhaps, with ongoing childhood immunization efforts—and the development of a global strategy (possibly including a stockpile) for prevention and control of endemic and epidemic cholera around the world. Strengthening the immunization program and creating an international stockpile would be intended consequences of the pilot roll-out.

The Ethics of Cholera Vaccination in Haiti

Should this demonstration project move forward? If it proves effective, should the government of Haiti and international partners implement a nationwide vaccination campaign? Ethical principles, such as “do no harm” and patient autonomy, can help answer these questions and also guide program design.

“Do no harm”—primum non nocere, in Latin—is a cornerstone of medicine and public health. Before assuring that a vaccine will benefit individuals, we must be certain that it will do them no harm. Many health interventions have side effects; patients must be aware of any risks associated with a vaccine, and must decide, along with their health care providers, that the expected benefits outweigh potential harm.

According to the WHO, Shanchol is a safe vaccine with no significant side effects. A number of randomized controlled trials have confirmed the safety of the vaccine on hundreds of thousands of people in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Most recently, from February-April of 2011, 263,737 doses of Shanchol were delivered in Dhaka, Bangladesh and no adverse events have been recorded.

In addition to ensuring that individual participants would not face harmful side effects, a vaccine campaign must be careful not to disrupt or have adverse consequences on families or communities. For example, could, as some have suggested, a demonstration project that vaccinates only a specific population trigger resentment among those who are not vaccinated? Experience suggests this would not be the case: previous clinical trials of oral cholera vaccine, and of other vaccines and medical interventions, have not commonly led to such social frictions, even though they have not included everyone. Indeed, the introduction of a novel diagnostic or preventative or therapeutic invariably occurs in stages, with blanket coverage a rare achievement except in the case of a few vaccines. A demonstration project is the first step toward a universal vaccination campaign. If successful, vaccine production could be increased and delivery scaled nationwide.

In addition to avoiding harmful consequences, a vaccine demonstration must be designed to maximize potential benefits for its participants. Abundant evidence suggests that Shanchol is effective in endemic and epidemic settings. Protection begins 7-10 days after receiving the second dose and lasts at least 2-3 years. After an epidemic in Vietnam, on open, controlled trial using an earlier variant of the vaccine found 66 percent protective efficacy for people of all ages 8-10 months after receiving two doses; three to five years after vaccination, protection remained at 50 percent. A randomized controlled trial in Kolkata, India, that vaccinated 31,932 people in 2006 found a 67 percent protective efficacy during an interim report two years after vaccine courses were completed. In addition to protecting individuals who are immunized, large-scale vaccination confers further protection—herd immunity—on the general population. By reducing the number of people who become infected, vaccination decreases production of viable cholera organisms deposited into the environment through fecal contamination.

The WHO has not fully recommended reactive use of cholera vaccine—that is, vaccinating during an ongoing epidemic—but recent studies suggest efficacy in epidemic settings, especially when integrated with the other pillars of prevention and care. A case-control study of reactive vaccination during an outbreak in Vietnam found a protective efficacy of 76 percent. A modeling exercise suggested that, if widespread vaccination had been launched during the 2008-2009 Zimbabwe epidemic, 40 percent of both cases and deaths could have been averted. Two recent models of the epidemic in Haiti have predicted substantial benefits from vaccination: one estimated that 10 percent coverage would avert 63,000 cases and 900 deaths; the other estimated that 30 percent coverage would lead to a 55 percent reduction in cases. The positive results of these past vaccination campaigns and modeling exercises makes a strong case that cholera vaccination would significantly help, not hurt, populations that receive it.

In addition to “do no harm,” the principle of autonomy demands that health interventions not encroach on the self-determination of individuals. Participants in vaccination campaigns must not be coerced, nor should extravagant claims of efficacy be made. All must be free to decline participation without fear of retribution. Providing sufficient and balanced information about the vaccine to potential participants, many of whom may be illiterate, is a precondition of autonomous decision-making. Maintaining privacy with respect to the decision to participate is also necessary to safeguard participants’ autonomy. That said, a lack of access to effective vaccines during the world’s largest cholera outbreak must also be seen as an ethical challenge. We are doing harm by failing to act.

Vaccination and Social Justice

In addition to principles from medical ethics—autonomy and “do no harm,” for example—an honest appraisal of the cholera epidemic in Haiti must consider global inequities, such as the lack of access to the fruits of modern medicine among poor communities around the globe. The poor quite literally embody many of the ethical challenges inherent in medicine and public health. For example, the question of rationing health care—a political flashpoint in discussions of US healthcare reform—reaches its logical end when considering the gap in access to healthcare between the rich and poor worlds. Each year OECD countries spend about US$4,000 on healthcare per person (the United States spends more than US$8,000); low-income countries spend an estimated US$27 per person. At times the disjuncture between debates within medical ethics and the pathologies of poverty brings to mind George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion: “Have you no morals?” the governor asks, to which Doolittle answers: “Can’t afford them, governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

Social justice grapples with inequities in the distribution of resources, including those dedicated to health care. For example, John Rawls’ “difference principle,” which has been extended by Thomas Pogge and others to a global level, demands preferential treatment of the most disadvantaged members of society. Is it just, Pogge asks, that an estimated 18 million people around the world die prematurely from poverty-related causes every year? We live in a world in which pathogens move freely across borders while the fruits of medical research, including vaccines, are blocked at customs. Cholera is a poignant example of this contradiction: the disease was introduced in Haiti from without, yet not all of the tools in the armamentarium are available to protect Haitians from infection.

Cholera prevention and care ought to follow the contours of Rawls’ difference principle; that is, caregivers ought to make a preferential option for the poor. Invariably, the poorest members of society bear the highest burden of disease while having the least access to medical care, prevention services, clean water, and modern sanitation. Cholera fatalities occur when people lack access to simple rehydration; it is no surprise that the vast majority of the more than 6,000 Haitians who have perished in the cholera epidemic were extremely poor before they became sick. Aggressive case-finding and prompt treatment can bring case-fatality rates below one percent. Strengthening water and sanitation infrastructure can slow the spread of cholera and prevent epidemics of waterborne disease in the future. No private or NGO initiatives can replace a robust public water supply. However, rebuilding the water and sanitation systems in Haiti will take resources and time, and an estimated 600 Haitians contract cholera every day. Integrating vaccination into the cholera response could provide poor, vulnerable Haitians with some degree of protection from cholera infection. Vaccination campaigns could target the places in which water and sanitation infrastructure is weakest: urban slums and rural areas. In other words, integrating vaccination into the ongoing cholera response could provide the greatest benefits to those least well off.

Because only 200,000 doses of Shanchol are currently available, some have argued that it isn’t fair to protect some people if you can’t protect everyone. (20 million doses would be needed to vaccinate the entire population.) We believe this logic is specious and circular. Shantha has only produced only 200,000 doses of Shanchol because there is insufficient demand for more; there is insufficient demand because the 200,000 available doses are too few for a large immunization campaign, and so forth. The proposed demonstration could be a way to break the cycle: if deemed successful, the Haitian government and international partners could order more doses, Shantha could increase production, and the vaccination campaign could be scaled up nationally.

Such “limited good” arguments are, in this case, more a manifestation of neglect than a legitimate cause for concern. It was not difficult to predict the explosive spread of cholera back in late October of 2010, and had vaccines been ordered then, millions of doses would currently be available. Millions of doses can still rapidly be made available if we order them. The moral point is that Haitians lack access to an affordable, safe, and effective vaccine that could protect them from a debilitating and sometimes deadly illness that was unwittingly introduced by relief workers seeking to help after the earthquake.

Conclusion

One unintended consequence of the injunction to “do no harm” is a bias towards inaction among the institutions that govern the landscape of global health. If an organization does nothing, it is unlikely to be blamed for hurting anyone. The tendency of bureaucracies to attend to their own self-perpetuation as much as they attend to their stated goals, as sociologist Max Weber noted, compounds this inertia. Bill Foege, who masterminded smallpox eradication in India, noted that “we frequently worry about the problems of commission, but we fail to even think about the greater harm that gets done through the problems of omission.” The cost of inaction is high when attempting to control an explosively infectious disease like cholera. Had a large-scale vaccination campaign begun soon after cholera hit Haiti in late October 2010, perhaps large numbers of cholera cases and fatalities could have been averted. Perhaps also healthcare providers would not be spending millions of dollars every month treating patients admitted with severe watery diarrhea.

Some uncertainty is endemic to the field of medicine and public health. We can never know everything about an intervention, and the consequences—favorable and unfavorable—it will have among individuals and populations before delivering it. Foege said, “If we had to wait until we could be absolutely certain that we could eliminate smallpox, then we never would have been able to do it. HIV/AIDS came along and it would so have complicated the eradication process that it might have become impossible.” Integrating vaccination into the ongoing response to cholera in Haiti is the ethical and expedient thing to do. Although its healthcare system was weakened by the 2010 earthquake, Haiti could accommodate a large-scale vaccination campaign because there are still large immunologically naïve populations, and there are sufficient healthcare providers in country to deliver the two-dose course effectively. If the demonstration were deemed successful, we would suggest production of cholera vaccine be ramped up for use across Haiti—perhaps in conjunction with childhood immunization programs—and in other countries (and possibly for the development of a global stockpile). Yellow fever and meningococcal vaccine stockpiles have helped reduce the incidence of those diseases, and a cholera vaccine stockpile could be developed in the same way: a coalition of donors guarantee the purchase of necessary doses; manufacturers expand production capacity; and healthcare providers integrate vaccination with delivery of care and other prevention services.

By mid-October 2011, one year after cholera hit Haiti, nearly 7,000 Haitians will have perished in the epidemic. But next year, and the year after that, need not continue this grim trajectory. Our response must be comprehensive and integrated; we must move rapidly, and together.

Photo Courtesy Reuters

The Impact of Change

Kate Vinton — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 17:31:01 +0000

Shifting Global Architecture and HIV

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

AIDS has now been with us for a quarter of a century, and there are people still alive who were among the first people to be diagnosed with HIV after the retrovirus was discovered and named in 1983. Think back to the world of that time: Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, and still locked in what seemed to be a permanent state of hostility with the USSR, whose collapse at the end of the decade was almost entirely unexpected. The greatest economic challenge to the United States was thought then to be Japan, and very few people anticipated the rapid rise of China.

AIDS had almost certainly existed in parts of Africa long before it appeared and was named in the United States, but it remains an epidemic particularly marked by its US history. The stigma that developed around its association with male homosexuals and drug users would be widely disseminated, and remains even today. US initiatives, including the development of a People with Aids (PWA) movement, AIDS activism, major progress in biomedical research and funding for international responses through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Gates Foundation, and so forth continues to frame much of the global response, although other countries have often been far more progressive than the United States in their policies. This is true of Brazil’s early development of widespread treatment access, and of several countries’ policies towards homosexual men, drug users, and prisoners. In its policies for injectors within prison, Iran is ironically more progressive than the United States, although deeply repressive of sexual behaviour outside marriage.

In the first decade or so the United States was not a major presence internationally in the fight against AIDS, although the founding director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Program on AIDS, Jonathan Mann, was an American. Mann established the connection between health and human rights as a dominant paradigm for the international approach to the epidemic, one of the most significant moves in recent public health. The decision of the United Nations in the early 1990s to establish UNAIDS, as a unique hybrid body that is intended to coordinate and lead the efforts of all UN agencies in their responses to HIV, was led by others, and its founding director, Peter Piot, was Belgian.

US attention increased during the Clinton Administration, which played a significant role in putting HIV and AIDS on the agenda of the Security Council, with its first ever debate on a health issue in January 2000. That debate was followed a year later by a special meeting of the UN General Assembly, where the United States under the new president adopted a cautious position on both prevention and treatment access. Indeed, the final statement released by a coalition of most civil society representatives in New York signalled out the Bush Administration for criticism: “The United States was particularly damaging to the prospects for a strong declaration. Throughout the negotiations they moved time and again to weaken language on HIV prevention, low-cost drugs, and trade agreements and to eliminate commitments on targets for funding and treatment. It’s death by diplomacy,” said Eric Sawyer, veteran activist and 25-year survivor of HIV/AIDS, as highlighted in Global Network 2006. Specifically, the United States joined with conservative Islamic nations in refusing to name sex workers, men who have sex with men, and drug users as particularly at risk.

The establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria owed a great deal to advocacy by US academic experts in public health and development, especially Jeffrey Sachs, but it was the UN secretary-general, not the president of the United States, who took the political lead in its establishment, nor was the United States particularly generous in its initial pledges. However, over the next few years, President Bush greatly increased bilateral assistance for AIDS programs, and total US public and private expenditure on AIDS programs and research now amounts to over half of all global spending on the epidemic. The Gates Foundation is a bigger donor to the Global Fund than countries such as the Netherlands and Australia. Pressure from the original “stakeholders,” such as gay organizations and some African-Americans, for American involvement was reinforced by the religious right, who developed considerable interest in the issue. The United States has become central in defining new paradigms and responses to the epidemic as the Bush Administration made the issue theirs, and cloaked it with a particular moral agenda.

While PEPFAR was admirable in its efforts to increase access to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), its emphasis on prevention stressed sexual issues: abstinence outside marriage as a desirable goal, and particular hostility to all forms of commercial sex, which were often equated with sex trafficking. Whatever one’s moral position on these issues, these were unrealistic goals that denied the social, cultural, and economic realities that made middle class Protestant morality irrelevant for millions of people. There has been a gradual shifts in PEPFAR’s emphases, which are now closer to those pushed by UNAIDS and most other donor countries.

As the global impact of AIDS became more evident in the 1990s, the expectation was that western countries, lead by the United States, should lead and fund much of the response. Few countries were prepared, as was Brazil, to refuse US assistance if it came with conditions attached. Today the United States, through both government and foundation funding, is the dominant source of international funds for HIV, although government support is likely to decline under the combined pressure of financial stringencies and new priorities.

The well-publicized Security Council and General Assembly sessions were followed by increasing attention from the G8, the group of the world’s leading economies (including Russia since 1997) who at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 pledged universal access to anti-HIV drugs in Africa by 2010. The G8 meeting saw the coming together of a number of factors which allowed this achievement, in particular the mobilization of extensive civil society networks through the Make Poverty History campaign, and the personal commitment of the host country, the United Kingdom, led by Tony Blair and strongly supported by Presidents George Bush and Jacques Chirac. This year may well have marked the high point of the developed world’s concern for African development in general, and HIV in particular: this particular confluence of interest may never be repeated.

The work at Gleneagles was facilitated by the adoption by the United Nations in 2000 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have come to form the basic “global operating framework for development.” The sixth MDG specifies:

“Target 6A: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, and Target 6B: Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it.”

Additional MDGs, particularly those relating to the empowerment of women, reduction of child mortality, and improving maternal health, are all closely related. The MDGs will come to an end in 2015, and there are already extensive discussions about what goals might be set by international agencies and donors in a post-MDG world. There is no reason to assume that a future set of international priorities will include HIV/AIDS. However, the AIDS community might well reflect on how the lessons we have learned about the connections between human rights and health could be enshrined in a post-MDG declaration.

Six years after Gleneagles, the world is a very different place. Two aspects in particular are relevant to this discussion: declining concern with AIDS globally, and significant shifts in the balance of economic and cultural power.

It is no longer possible to suggest that HIV is a global pandemic that will see the horrific figures from southern and eastern Africa reached in other parts of the world. Even in Papua New Guinea, probably the worst affected country in the Asia-Pacific region, infection prevalence is less than a tenth of that in many African countries. Yet less than a decade ago in 2002, the conservative scholar Nicholas Eberstadt warned in Foreign Affairs of a major pandemic in Eurasia that “will alter the economic potential of the region’s major states and the global balance of power.” This did not occur, and the tragedy of AIDS today is that it is unequally affecting the most vulnerable and marginalized, both in terms of geography and behavior, and it is increasingly difficult to persuade most people that it is a global priority on the same level as climate change, food and water shortages, and the growing collapse of viable states across many parts of the world.

In the same way, simplistic arguments that HIV would be spread through a breakdown of security and alarmist stories about the very high rate of HIV among soldiers and peace keepers have been largely discredited by careful research, as summarized in reviews produced by the AIDS Security & Conflict Initiative. However, this does not mean that dislocations of conflict do not increase vulnerability to infection while making it more difficult to establish effective programs or even provide basic information and resources. The long-term impact of growing needle use and commercial sex in parts of the world ravaged by conflict—think of the huge population shifts across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over the past decade—are likely to lead to increasing HIV infections among the population, and once a certain number of people is infected, the epidemic has the potential to escalate rapidly.

It is not simply a matter, as some AIDS advocates have suggested, of using the skills of climate change advocates to better sell the demands of HIV. The political reality is that we cried wolf too often, and the more dire warnings have failed to materialize. In most parts of the world AIDS is not a major crisis, and the perception that it has received too much attention and funding is growing. It is absolutely true, as the eminent group who prepared the AIDS 2031 Report of the book, AIDS: Taking a Long-Term View, have argued: “Closing the looming funding gap for AIDS would require only about one percent of annual global spending on armaments.” In the absence of new generalized epidemics affecting large parts of the adult population, as is true across southern Africa, such appeals will fall on deaf ears. When there were plausible arguments that HIV threatened political and military stability in significant countries, it shot to the top of international attention. It is hardly surprising that as these fears have failed to materialize, so interest in the epidemic has lagged.

It is a further tragedy that as the biomedical means to control HIV increase, the resources available are likely to further decrease, which suggests the absolute imperative of concentrating resources on cost effective prevention programs. Unlike many of my biomedical colleagues, I remain unconvinced that these should depend upon testing and treating. One of the most experienced HIV clinicians and researchers, Jonathan Weber of Imperial College and St. Mary’s Hospital, believes that the widespread use of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis might actually increase the spread of HIV if users feel protected enough to dispense with condoms, as quoted in the New Scientist of July this year. The danger, he suggests, is that emphasis on new biomedical technologies will lead us to forget the proven impact of condoms and clean needles, and the imperative of explaining the risk factors for HIV transmission.

Not only are traditional donor countries cutting back on their contributions to international development assistance, they are doing so within a world in which political and economic power is shifting rapidly. The G8 continues to meet, but it has been essentially replaced by the G20 as the steering group of major economies.

Given that the G20 includes several countries with significant epidemics, most notably South Africa, and others with strong commitment to universal access, in particular Brazil, one might expect it to take a position of leadership on global efforts—both South Africa and Brazil are core countries in emerging new partnerships linking a number of middle income countries with increasing global political and economic influence. So far there is no sign that this is happening; the G20 may push for greater access to therapeutic drugs and greater support for generics, but it is unlikely to see HIV as a major concern. The G8 was able to mobilize donor countries in ways that the G20 is unlikely to do.

In part this is because the shifts in global power are creating new nationalisms and undermining western norms of individualistic human rights. Countries like China, Korea, and the Gulf states (which are becoming more important as donors to developing states) are more committed to protecting state sovereignty and far less likely to demand basic human rights than are more traditional western donor countries. While we see increasing pressure from western countries around issues such as sexual rights and protection of confidentiality, these are likely to be undermined by money from countries for whom these are not priorities, either domestically or internationally.

Thus, if there is to be continuing scale up of access to treatments, and in particular if treatment is to become a serious means of prevention, there will need to be far more emphasis on countries meeting the demand from their own resources. It is absurd that a country as rich as Russia receives funding from PEPFAR, which allows it to avoid obligations to its own citizens. This may be justified as a way of pressuring the government towards better policies, but at a time of declining resources there will need to be some careful triage amongst traditional donors.

Global “AIDS Community”

Over the past quarter century the threat of AIDS has created an extraordinary community of activists, experts, and officials. What began as a grassroots movement, largely growing out of the gay communities of rich western countries, has now become a truly global set of organizations and people, with new forms of activism pioneered in movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. Organizing around HIV was the impetus for building movements among some of the world’s most stigmatized populations—homosexual men, sex workers, drug users—and has allowed for debates on human rights to expand considerably to include a serious consideration of their issues. There are significant international organizations, such as UNAIDS and the Global Fund, which would not exist without the movement that drew attention to AIDS, and international and regional conferences continue to bring thousands of people together to reaffirm their mutual commitment to working together. For all the tensions that exist, there are few issues in which scientists, activists and governments have been able to create as many viable and enduring partnerships.

Cynics, of whom I am sometimes one, refer to “ the AIDS industry,” which suggests the way in which AIDS communities and activist groups have increasingly become professionalized and are led by people with the skills required to manage complex funding and bureaucratic negotiations rather than those people most immediately affected by the epidemic. There is need for more analysis of the way in which the various institutions created to meet the challenges of AIDS have evolved and are functioning. While at one level there is an increasing amount of monitoring and evaluation linked to donor funding, at the same time there is remarkably little critical literature which asks larger questions about the underlying questions on the frameworks within which these evaluations take place. Whilst there is a great deal of rhetoric around terms like “civil society participation” and “political commitment,” it is rare to see any critical debate about what these terms really mean and how they are best achieved in a rapidly shifting terrain. In practice too often these terms become shorthand for maintaining the same circle of experts, who spend large amounts of time flying around the world to attend consolations at which the same shibboleths are reasserted without sufficient reflection on the changing nature of both the epidemic and the larger political environment.

Institutions sometimes age faster than humans, and even though those created to fight AIDS are no more than two decades old, they are showing signs of sclerosis, whereby the need to perpetuate what already exists takes over from an analysis of new possibilities. I can immediately think of three crucial areas that are worth discussion but rarely surface:

Has UNAIDS outlived its purpose? Its website proclaims that UNAIDS “is an innovative partnership that leads and inspires the world in achieving universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.” Whether there remains a need for a separate agency to do this is a question that needs analysis, not just evaluations conducted by UNAIDS itself.

Is the influence of the Gates Foundation, now a major funder of global health programs, inimical to community empowerment, given its heavy emphasis on technical and biomedical solutions? More generally, how does the emphasis on “prevention science” limit possible applications to fund prevention programs that rely upon social and cultural research and transformations?

And finally, are the current round of AIDS Conferences worth the time, effort, and resources invested in them? This year it would be possible to spend almost one’s entire time jetting round the world to attend one AIDS Conference after another, and a genuine audit of their costs and efficacy is badly needed. The biennial Conference, scheduled to be held in Washington next year—the first Conference to be held in the United States since 1990—will attract over 25,000 people to what is essentially the trade fair of the AIDS world.

I do not have firm views on the answers to any of these questions. However, they are central questions about global governance that deserve to be analyzed and debated. The International AIDS Society proclaims a commitment to supporting research in “social and political sciences,” but so far there have been only small steps, and there is a continuing confusion between “social” and “behavioral” research. Unless we manage to frame HIV within a broader framework of development and social justice, it will inevitably be relegated to just another problem of African poverty, and lose the urgency and commitment that have been so dramatic over the past quarter century. Millions of people will die as a consequence of such neglect.

Development in Pakistan

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:51:48 +0000

Perspectives on the Financial Future

HIR Issue:

Disease

What are the key developmental challenges Pakistan faces today, and what solutions has the Finance Ministry posed to address these challenges?
Our developmental challenges cover both the long term and short term. The long-term challenge is to develop the economy and bring prosperity to our citizens. We are a people-rich country and need to work harder to make our people realize their full potential, which can be achieved by greater investment, enhancement of skills, and access to opportunities. We know that it is not possible to be a developed country with underdeveloped people. This is the critical challenge if we want to get on a long-term sustainable path for economic growth. A related long-term challenge is to reorient the role of the state in the economy. We have to ensure that private businesses play a central role in the economy, and that they own and manage all commercial enterprises while the state is confined to the performance of important tasks of policy, regulation, and design of incentives.
Our immediate challenge is to maintain stability—achieved after considerable effort—and to navigate the economy safely through the current global turmoil. We need to build upon the record export performance of last year, continue with aggressive expenditure-management, and mobilize domestic taxes to keep fiscal discipline and check inflation. We also have to move faster in overcoming electricity and gas shortages to increase production and create jobs and growth, and ensure that the transitional burden does not fall disproportionately on the weaker groups. Therefore, while eliminating many general subsidies, we continue to provide social safety nets for the very poor and the vulnerable.
Indeed, these challenges are interlinked. For example, the fiscal deficit is to a large extent a reflection of low tax effort and untargeted subsidies on electricity and fuel consumption. This in turn has led to a circular debt that is threatening the viability of the otherwise highly profitable energy sector. The deficit also displaces private investment as government borrowing “crowds out” businesses by raising their cost of credit from the banks. The inefficiencies of the public sector corporations further aggravate the situation in the sector. The solutions are therefore complex, requiring a simultaneous attack—and success—on many fronts.

Currently we face an unprecedented security challenge, for which Pakistan is paying a heavy price in terms of lives, perception, and diminished economic activity in certain parts of the country. We will overcome this problem, but in the meantime it has slowed the pace of our economic progress.

What do you consider to be the main challenges the Finance Ministry will face over the next few years?
I think the stabilization we have achieved has to be protected. It will take some time for us to consolidate and move to a trajectory of higher economic growth. There are no quick fixes. We may be paying a price with a lag for our failure to take actions when those were warranted. In particular, when world oil prices peaked in 2008 at nearly US$150 per barrel, we did not rationalize prices due to political expediency and allowed a crisis-like situation to emerge.
During the stabilization phase, we hope to do away with regulated prices and untargeted subsidies. We have frozen all government expenditures in nominal terms, simplified the structure, and expanded the tax base. We are dealing with chronic problems of circular debt, injecting transparency in fiscal relations between states and the federation. Above all, with the comeback of democracy, we are allowing institutions to work. The government has given autonomy and mandate to institutions such as the State Bank, the Competition Commission, and the Security and Exchange Commission. Thus, a platform is being provided for long-term inclusive growth.

Today in Pakistan, lack of confidence in government has resulted in trends such as tax evasion that undermine the financial health of the country. What agency does the Finance Ministry hold, beyond the central government, to counteract such trends?
It is true that, as a country, our tax-to-GDP ratios have been low. This is not so much due to lack of confidence in government but due to a combination of limited effort, convoluted tax structures, and weak enforcement. We are trying to redress this historic failure. We have taken steps to simplify the tax system and improve the performance of the tax agency, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR).
Recent advances in technology and development of a population database have made it possible to acquire information on registered persons through a multitude of sources (home ownership, bank accounts, travel records). Using this data, we have identified 0.7 million potential taxpayers (living in posh areas, having several cars, multiple bank accounts, frequent international travel). Given that we only have 1.5 million taxpayers, this initiative can fundamentally enhance income tax revenues. Of the 0.7 million targeted for this fiscal year (July-June 2012), 0.1 million have been approached and several thousand new taxpayers have been added.
Other measures include expansion of the sales tax regime to previously exempt sectors, stricter audits, rigorous checks on input adjustments for sales tax, fast-tracking of stalled litigation in courts, and better use of technology to increase the pace of processing and minimize instances of corruption.

It is said that the main job of a finance ministry should be to raise adequate revenues to keep the country running. Do you agree? To what extent is revenue raising a challenge in Pakistan?
In Pakistan, the Finance Ministry complex is a cluster of the associated ministries of Finance, Economic Affairs, Revenue, and Planning and Development. Thus the overall role is broader than in many countries. It includes the management of the economy, the coordination of economic activities across provinces and federal ministries, optimal management of government debt, allocation of public investment, medium-term planning, and fiscal discipline including expenditure management and mobilization of taxes.
Nevertheless, it is true that revenue mobilization is a key component of the economic management performed by the FBR, under the Ministry of Revenue. The answer to the previous question has highlighted some of the steps taken by the government to increase tax revenues, which have increased from 1,327 billion to 1,550 billion Pakistani rupees, an increase of roughly 17 percent.

Public debt has become a big issue for many countries (e.g. Greece) in the wake of the global financial crisis. Are you comfortable with the level of Pakistan’s external debt? How can it be reduced?
By international standards our debt-to-GDP ratio (55 percent) is quite moderate and the share of external debt is less than 40 percent. Thus, while the situation requires careful management, it does not pose a serious challenge. The extraordinary performance on the external accounts front, with exports growing at 30 percent last year and remittances reaching US$1 billion a month, have helped raise reserves at an all-time high of US$18.3 billion. However, we cannot be complacent and are mindful that a Stand-By Program from the IMF has helped in the build-up of these reserves.
To guard against slipping into an external account problem, we have to remain on course with reforms to be internationally competitive, further boost our exports, attract foreign investment, and preserve the confidence of overseas Pakistanis.
We are also closely watching international capital markets and would look for opportunity to raise capital. We have an exchangeable bond linked to one of our best corporations (Oil and Gas Development Corporation), whose shares are already traded internationally. This bond will be launched as soon as the markets are stabilized.

You were previously an economist at the World Bank. What have you observed in moving from the world of policy advice to the world of policy-making and implementation?
In some ways, both jobs require similar skills. These include technical knowledge, an understanding of economic principles, detailed awareness of the issue at hand, and communication skills. As a World Bank official advising governments, there is greater reliance on international best practices, the development of confidence of government ministers, and the ability to motivate strong team members to deliver results. You are supported by international quality staff with strong institutional capability. As a government minister, you face greater pressures to solve complex problems and are under constant scrutiny by the media and Parliament, and endure criticism—often unjustified—of political opponents. Making decisions on a regular basis requires the quality of judgment and and understanding of the local institutional environment and political economy critical to success. It is also important to communicate effectively across multiple audiences and to develop coalitions for the passage of difficult decisions.

Are Pakistan’s development challenges mainly technical and capable of being solved by putting well-trained people in policy-making positions, or mainly political and thus requiring different solutions and capabilities?
The lessons of global development, including work done at international institutions, is that in order to develop you have to do many things right. This includes governance, institution building, design of appropriate incentives, and the right balance in the roles of the state and the markets. It also includes factors such as political stability, developments in the region, and luck.
Pakistan’s development challenges are both technical and political. On the political side, we are going through a transition where democracy has made a comeback, the media is free and providing a high level of scrutiny, the provincial governments have been empowered, and institutions are functioning independently.
The rules of the game are evolving in the right direction but the transition has to be managed so that economic considerations remain paramount. On the technical side, it is important that merit is not compromised for political considerations. Fortunately, Pakistan has a large pool of professionals both at home and abroad who can be motivated to enter into government service as well as develop civil service

Instruments of Peace

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:47:26 +0000

The Use of Health for National Security

HIR Issue:

Politics of Disease

As the hunt for Osama bin Laden began to focus on the now infamous compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA desperately sought confirmation that he was there. The agency came up with an idea: hire a local doctor to conduct a fake vaccination campaign, which it hoped could lead to obtaining blood samples from bin Laden’s grandchildren that could be analyzed for a DNA match to bin Laden. One could dismiss the campaign as just another imaginative tactic used by the CIA in the search; the fact that it involved a population health ruse could be of no more significance than had the CIA hired agents to sell lottery tickets door to door in the neighborhood. But the selection of a vaccination campaign may not have been mere happenstance, just another case example of the increasing use of a health intervention to advance a specific national security objective.

A clue to such thinking emerged after the United Kingdom’s Guardian revealed the ruse. After at first refusing to comment, a senior administration official told United Press International that it had been intended as “an actual vaccination campaign conducted by real medical professionals.” The statement was only half true. Medical workers were recruited to organize and conduct a vaccination initiative to provide real vaccines for hepatitis B, but the campaign nevertheless was fraudulent from the start as it failed to follow standard immunization procedure, which requires a follow up vaccine that was never administered.

Health and Diplomacy
The relationship among health, national security, and foreign policy has recently gained attention from scholars as well as diplomats. The most obvious use of diplomacy in the health context has been to prevent cross-border infectious disease transmission, and to protect economic interests of domestic corporations in connection with health products. Since the SARS epidemic, diplomatic efforts have strengthened international and regional cooperation to limit transmission of infectious diseases through the World Health Organization’s international health regulations (WHO). The negotiations addressed traditional areas of state concern, especially whether outbreak reporting would continue to be constrained by state sovereignty or rather would yield to a more global approach to information dissemination. This past year, further agreements were reached at the World Health Assembly to address sticky issues about sample sharing and access of poor countries to vaccines. Other contentious subjects of international health negotiations include the marketing of tobacco, and the effort to reconcile patent rights of manufacturers of drugs for HIV/AIDS and other diseases predominant in poor countries with the legitimate demand for affordable life-saving drugs.

In other circumstances, diplomacy has been invoked not to resolve disputes pitting economic interests against health, but simply to advance health, both for its own sake and to promote the emergence of well-governed states that can serve the needs of their populations. In 2009, the National Intelligence Council issued a report on Global Health as a Security Issue, arguing that chronic, non-communicable diseases, neglected tropical diseases, maternal and child mortality, malnutrition, sanitation and access to clean water, and availability of basic health-care were significant to US national security. In Nigeria, for example, diplomatic tools were invoked to overcome politically inspired resistance to a polio vaccination program. An effective health system contributes to long-term economic growth and, arguably, political stability.

In all these cases, health is seen as an independent good, and diplomacy is used to promote it or reconcile it against other interests. But there is another variation on health diplomacy where health benefits are not the primary focus. Health interventions are used as a means of accomplishing other national objectives. The United States has especially sought to use health interventions to improve its image and influence, to counter extremism and terrorism, or to stabilize a country or region in the short-term. These instrumental uses of health—principally to advance national security—have received little scrutiny. That is largely because it is typically assumed that even with the subordination of health as the main policy objective, health benefits will accrue to the affected populations, creating a win-win situation, a version of doing well by doing good.

For example, so long as disaster relief programs are structured to meet real needs and are not manipulated for the purpose of gaining favorable publicity, there is no conflict between aiding victims and advancing the image of the United States among the affected population. Similarly, so long as they follow accepted principles of international aid, public health, and human rights, global health programs can promote health while advancing US influence. Indeed, the United States can sometimes leverage health assistance to promote other goals as well, such as protection of women’s rights. In the realm of long-term stabilization, there is some evidence that health programs can bring about a healthier workforce and thus contribute to economic development. In some circumstances a well-run health system can contribute to people’s confidence that the national government is meeting their needs, and thus contributes to the government’s legitimacy.

The Emergence of Health Instrumentalism
The idea of using health intervention to advance other national objectives has become so mainstream that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to global health investments as a means of protecting the nation’s security, and as a “tool of public diplomacy.” She argued that for many people, health programs are perhaps the “main experience of us as a country and a people,” and can be very powerful. US assistance in prolonging life and preventing disease, she said, “conveys as much about our values as any state visit or strategic dialogue ever could.”

Fair enough. But not all instrumental uses of health interventions demonstrate congruence between the national security objective and the proposed health benefit. The CIA operation in Abbottabad is the most spectacular case with a fraudulent health purpose. But it is not the only example. Take, for example, health programs designed to reduce the risk of terrorism and extremism, or support counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and in the horn of Africa. These health programs are conducted by the military and civilian agencies. In Afghanistan, the military conducts a large number of health assistance programs; US Agency for International Development (USAID) policy evolved to require that development and health programs serve counterinsurgency goals to win over the population and reinforce central government authority. Health projects as part of the campaign include training local providers, supplying medications to clinics, and constructing facilities, and are employed to achieve either a short-term objective such as security, or a strategic goal to deny potential terrorists the allegiance of the population.

These instrumental uses of health interventions are premised on three assumptions, only the first of which is articulated. First, they assume that health interventions can achieve the national security purpose of influencing the population to invest their support in their own (US-friendly) government, or decrease the attractiveness of extremist or terrorist groups. Second, they assume that the health interventions employed are consistent with the health needs of the population and are beneficial to them. Third, they assume that, even if the interventions do not have positive health benefits, they will at least be neutral, not harming health.

There is reason for skepticism as to whether these assumptions are correct. There is scant evidence that health interventions contribute substantially to achieving objectives like increasing security, securing the allegiance of the population, or stabilizing a region. Two studies conducted by the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University shed some light on the question. In a review of a US military program in Kenya that offers health and education interventions to communities as a means of countering the attractiveness of violent extremism, Mark Bradbury and Michael Kleinman concluded that although people were positive about the initiative, they recognized that the health programs were not sustainable. They were not naïve about the programs’ purpose and were not influenced to change behavior or political allegiances. Bradbury and Kleinman report that the people viewed the modest assistance as “indicative of a lack of serious intent to improve their welfare and develop their communities.” Indeed, the authors conclude recipients recognize that the purpose is to advance “counterterrorism interests of the US and Kenyan governments, rather than their own well-being or security.”

A study by Stuart Gordon of UK assistance in Helmand Province in Afghanistan found that local insecurity was a product of maldistribution of power and resources among tribal groups. The people are exploited by predatory taxation, political influence, and violence, as well as the use of development funding as patronage. As a result, afflicted people were made vulnerable to Taliban infiltration and offers of protection. Additional grievances were stimulated by uneven eradication of opium poppy, the inability of the international community to stop predatory behavior, and civilian casualties caused by NATO military activity. Development-type interventions did nothing to address concerns about power, security and justice, and thus did little to accomplish their purposes. Indeed, some people perceived the development interventions as contributing to insecurity because of corruption and lack of equity in distribution of aid benefits.

More broadly, it is reasonable to question how significantly health interventions can affect either population allegiances or stability in comparison to personal security, opportunities for jobs, a fair justice system, or the distribution of local power. There is considerable evidence that services like education and health, if of high quality, can create positive perceptions of government in the long-term, but the contribution of health programs to a sense of government legitimacy in the short-term is highly speculative. In part this minimal impact may be a product of a disjunction between means and ends, where relatively modest services are expected to affect entrenched power dynamics, personal security, and economic opportunities. Programs are typically too limited in scale to have any impact on a counterinsurgency goal of fostering stronger allegiance to government.

Even when the ends sought are more modest, such as gaining the support of a particular village, there is a paucity of knowledge whether and how health interventions can benefit them, or whether they are structured to achieve the goal. Indeed, we do not even have good metrics for measuring the impacts of those interventions. Moreover, as former USAID global health director, Dr. Anne Peterson, who evaluated civilian and military programs in Afghanistan, has pointed out, even where programs successfully increase the level and effectiveness of health services, they may fall short of the expectations created in communities about the expansion of services. In such cases, the limited assistance provided may breed resentment and anger rather than appreciation and allegiance.

As a result, USAID’s infatuation with development grounded in counterinsurgency policy, however nicely dressed up in “whole of government” language, is starting to recede. Earlier this year USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah acknowledged that power dynamics, not lack of schools and roads, are the drivers of conflict. The same could be said of health. The military, too, though hardly abandoning the use of health as an element of counterinsurgency strategy, is beginning to recognize that at least some of its health programs are too minimalist, or even counter-productive, to have an impact. For example, it has largely abandoned Medical Civil Action Programs (MEDCAPS), which swoop down into a community for a couple of days, treat people, and leave with no prospect of follow up. The military is also becoming somewhat more sophisticated, beginning to resist building clinics that become useless because no provision has been made for supplies and staff in the intermediate term. It is focusing more on programs to provide health care where insecurity has made it impossible for civilian agencies to do so.

Benign Failures or Serious Dangers?
So should these programs be judged merely as benign failures, the equivalent of giving a few lollipops to kids expecting to change the attitude of the population? The assumption that health interventions employed instrumentally actually improve health remains unproven. Warm anecdotes about an operation performed on a child or a clinic newly supplied with drugs mask the fact that counterinsurgency health interventions are typically short-term and unsustainable. Indeed, they are often labeled “quick impact” projects and might be characterized instead as “short-impact” projects. Especially in military-run operations, given short deployments, pressures to act quickly, lack of expertise in systems building, and difficulties of coordination with civilian agencies, the health benefits may thus be marginal at best.

The contrast between counterinsurgency and systemic approaches is evident in Afghanistan, where counter-insurgency health interventions are not harmonized with a major initiative by the United States, the World Bank, and the European Commission to support the Afghanistan Ministry of Public Health in significantly expanding primary health care and reducing child mortality. This long-term initiative in capacity building and service development, which began well before the counterinsurgency strategy was in place and is rooted in community support, is far more likely to advance health and support long-term legitimacy than counterinsurgency interventions. An otherwise highly critical majority staff report for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on development assistance in Afghanistan noted earlier this year that the health development initiative is a “remarkable success.” The report noted that by coordinating donor activities and unifying Afghanistan’s health system, the program has dramatically increased access of the Afghan people to primary health care. This initiative had nothing to do with counterinsurgency, and indeed was not coordinated with it; it was designed to improve the health of Afghans, and has done so.

The third assumption is that, at worst, instrumental use of health interventions is neutral; that it doesn’t make health worse. But the possibility of harm should not be discounted. The instrumental use of health interventions to purchase loyalty of local leaders or groups in the name of security or stabilization can exacerbate inequality and inequity, which undermines effective and just health service development. Geographical distortions can also result from an instrumental use of health programs. In Afghanistan, the counterinsurgency policy resulted in concentrating more than 80 percent of development resources to the south and east, and for a time jeopardized the successful national program of health services development.

The bin Laden case also illustrates the most serious risks of using health interventions instrumentally in the service of national security. Pakistan is one of a handful of countries where polio remains endemic, hindering efforts to eradicate the disease from the world. Polio vaccination programs are essential, but depend on the trust of the population, and are highly vulnerable to doubts and hostility sown and exploited by demagogues. Muslim countries in particular have been subjected to claims that vaccination programs are part of a Western conspiracy to control women’s fertility, introduce HIV, or advance some other nefarious purpose. It is no surprise, then, that officials of the WHO, UNICEF, and other groups active in polio campaigns in Pakistan expressed concern whether the CIA’s stunt would undercut their efforts. We can speculate that these consequences were never even weighed by the CIA against the potential intelligence gained about bin Laden’s location.

The United States has shown exemplary leadership in addressing some of the most widespread sources of morbidity and mortality in the world, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, death in childbirth, and others. It is investing tens of billions of dollars in the effort, developing ever more sophisticated approaches to building health systems rather than just one-off interventions against a particular disease. The success of these programs, of course, depends both on the values and purposes by which they are operated, and the perception that they are managed in good faith to advance health. Officials that take great care to build trust and design programs based on population health needs can achieve significant results. In Afghanistan, for example, with the help of an intermediary, polio vaccination programs involved very quiet cooperation among government officials, local leaders, and the Taliban. The goal of such an effort is not to gain a tactical advantage over the Taliban, but to vaccinate children. That is the goal that should drive policy. The use of health interventions for short-term national security objectives is not only a fantasy, but a dangerous one.

From Seoul to Cannes

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:43:09 +0000

What Has the G20 Delivered So Far?

HIR Issue:

India in Transition

As the Sherpa of the Republic of Korea, I found one of the most rewarding outcomes of the Seoul Summit was that it delivered on all of the commitments made at previous Summits. For instance, member nations reached an agreement on quota reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); it was a difficult endeavor because reform was long viewed as a “zero sum game.” The G20 nations also adopted new international standards for bank capital adequacy, leverage ratios, and liquidity standards. They agreed upon general principles for regulation of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). These IMF quota and core financial regulatory reforms were originally scheduled for early 2011, but the Seoul Summit facilitated a November 2010 agreement on these issues. In short, the Seoul Summit adhered to the fine tradition established at the Washington Summit in 2008—the principle that subsequent G20 Summits should deliver on the commitments made at the previous Summits in a timely fashion.

The Seoul Summit also strengthened our ability to ensure macroeconomic policy coordination, thus alleviating the concern and uncertainty related to the implementation of the Framework for Strong, Sustainable, and Balanced Growth and our Mutual Assessment Process (MAP). “Currency wars” became a “hot button” headline issue in October 2010, and many predicted that the success of the Seoul Summit would depend on its ability to achieve policy coordination to address global imbalances. Pessimists said that while it was possible for the G20 to muster policy coordination in the immediate aftermath of the subprime crisis due to looming fears of a global crisis, effective and amicable resolution of the “currency wars” and global imbalance issues would be far more difficult since members’ positions and interests were much more divergent with respect to these matters.

However, at the Seoul Summit, the G20 nations agreed to maintain current account imbalances at sustainable levels and to establish indicative guidelines under the French Presidency. To be sure, the media has delivered different assessments of this achievement. However, as someone who was intimately involved with negotiations, I am certain that it would have been impossible to reach this agreement without the strong belief among the leaders that concerted policy action is essential to solving the problems of the world economy.

The Seoul Summit’s third main achievement was that it demonstrated the G20 is not just about crisis management, but also about global economic management beyond crisis. For example, for the first time ever, the Republic of Korea placed development at the center of the G20 agenda. Doing so helped to demonstrate that the G20’s leadership actively engages with all the stakeholders in the global economy, not just its members. The Republic of Korea took seriously its historic responsibility to demonstrate that emerging economies can successfully lead global discussions.

Global Imbalances and Indicative Guidelines
The sudden media focus on exchange rates and the “currency wars” caused serious concern in the lead-up to the Seoul Summit. Just as the financial crisis in southern Europe loomed large at the Toronto Summit, the centrality of the currency tensions immediately prior to the Seoul Summit demanded the G20 reach a political consensus on how to address such tensions. That is why the Republic of Korea proposed current account targeting at four percent of GDP as a fundamental alternative solution. I have been asked numerous times how we came up with the number four. This figure was based on economic forecasts that member nations themselves submitted as part of the MAP exercise. Most of the non-oil-producing nations estimated that their current account balance for the next several years would be in the range of four percent. It appeared that if the G20 members could agree to try to abide by the forecasts that they had themselves submitted, then the global imbalance issues could be largely alleviated. Accordingly, it seemed counterproductive to spend too much time solely discussing exchange rate issues at the expense of other important issues. Allowing each member country to choose its own policy option, including exchange rate adjustment to reduce its imbalances, seemed a more politically feasible option.

However, as expected, there was significant resistance to the four percent numerical target. Critics pointed out that the current account imbalance is a result of international competitiveness, as well as a result of inter-temporal optimization of private sectors that reflect age profiles and savings-investment gaps. Accordingly, critics argued that as long as governments do not intervene in the foreign exchange market, current account imbalances should not be viewed as a problem that requires a coordinated policy response. The same critics likened the phenomenon to the trade imbalance between the state of New York and other states in the United States. Why, they argued, should the trade surplus enjoyed by New York be viewed as a problem? However, in the United States, fiscal consolidation is possible and labor is mobile across state lines. This is why persistent trade surpluses enjoyed by certain states (attendant imbalances in job creation) do not result in heightened political tension among the various states. However, since this is not true in international trade, it does not seem appropriate to apply the US states’ trade imbalance analogy to international trade.

After all, the G20 did not agree on a specific quantitative target, but leaders did agree in a broader sense to reduce persistently large current account imbalances and to develop indicative guidelines for that purpose with a designated timeline. This provided political momentum to reduce global imbalances, an objective that has long been declared but has lacked follow through. More importantly, from a theoretical standpoint, this is intimately related to one of the main agenda topics of the Cannes Summit, which is how to build a more stable and resilient international monetary system.

One of the shortcomings of the current international monetary system is that when imbalances occur, the adjustment mechanism is not only ambiguous, but also asymmetrical. First, the onus to address the imbalance falls disproportionally on the deficit nations. Second, as Jacques Rueff, former advisor to French President Charles de Gaulle, once famously said, a country with an international reserve currency can have a “deficit without tears”—it could avoid the burden of adjustment by printing more money. However, by agreeing to develop a guideline for adjusting undesirable excessive current account imbalances, the Seoul declaration made it clear that both deficit and surplus nations bear the responsibility of making adjustments.

To my pleasant surprise, there has been significant progress in establishing indicative guidelines under the French presidency. As promised by leaders in Seoul, the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors agreed in February of this year upon a set of indicators that will allow them to focus on persistently large imbalances. In April, they arrived at a broader consensus on the set of indicative guidelines against which these indicators will be assessed. In particular, countries that are identified as having persistently large imbalances by at least two of the four approaches will be evaluated in the second step of the process to determine the nature and root causes of their imbalances and to identify impediments to adjustment. The first step has already been completed, and seven countries have been flagged for deeper analysis in the second step. The agreements reached in February and April serve as a touchstone that will affect evaluations of the Seoul and Cannes Summits and help reaffirm the legitimacy of the G20 as a premier forum and the usefulness of the MAP.

Financial Safety Nets & Monetary System Reforms
During the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the subprime crisis, even developing countries without structural problems in their financial sector suffered severe liquidity constraints when developed countries withdrew their money from emerging markets. This highlights the importance of a liquidity supply mechanism that developing countries can rely on when such events occur. Last year, the Republic of Korea focused on the IMF’s crisis-prevention toolkit by enhancing the flexible credit line (FCL) and establishing the precautionary credit line (PCL). It was a proud moment for the Republic of Korea when it introduced the crisis prevention mechanism at the Seoul Summit after being forced to accept the IMF’s crisis resolution package in a wholesale fashion just a decade ago during the 1997 crisis. In particular, the introduction of the multi-country FCLs, to simultaneously provide precautionary liquidity to many countries exposed to a common shock, marked an important step to resolve the first-mover problem where countries hesitate to ask the IMF for financial support for fear of being stigmatized.

The Cannes Summit must focus on two additional Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN) issues that leaders introduced in the Seoul Declaration. We must further explore structural approaches to cope with shocks of a systemic nature and ways to improve collaboration between regional financial arrangements (RFAs) and the IMF. Early last year, when we first introduced the GFSN issue, we considered institutionalizing bilateral swap arrangements with the Federal Reserve. This is because it is impossible to avoid discussing the role of the central banks in the provision of global liquidity if we were to deal with global liquidity shocks. However, most major central banks were opposed to this idea, pointing out that providing support to emerging economies by printing money may not be politically feasible and that this approach raised serious moral hazard issues. In order to ensure we achieved tangible results within the year, we focused our discussions on instituting measures to improve the IMF’s lending facilities.

However, the decision of the European Central Bank to provide liquidity and extend its bilateral swap arrangements in dealing with the financial crisis in southern Europe in the second half of last year demonstrated that this issue affects not only emerging economies but is also essential for the stability of advanced financial markets. As the Cannes Summit will develop ideas for a new international monetary system, the discussion will turn inevitably to identifying a framework for providing global liquidity. To give one example, at the Seoul Summit, in reaction to the quantitative easing II announced by the Federal Reserve, there was much discussion about the responsibilities of nations with international reserve currencies. It may therefore be necessary to consider whether it would be appropriate to have a similar discussion regarding the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing, which was undertaken in connection with stabilization of the European financial market in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis in Ireland, or quantitative easing by the Bank of Japan, which was undertaken with the purpose of reducing the volatility of the Japanese yen.

In light of the fact that the euro and yen also function as international reserve currencies, in order to build a more stable and resilient international monetary system, it may be necessary to discuss cooperation among major central banks. Two main questions were regrettably not addressed at the Seoul Summit. First, was the cooperation and coordination among central banks in addressing the sub-prime crisis sufficient, or is there room for improvement? Secondly, is there any way to coordinate the function of central banks in providing liquidity with the IMF’s crisis prevention tools?

One question facing the Cannes Summit regarding the international monetary system reform is whether discussions can go beyond the “academic” and offer practical and applicable solutions—an outcome that has eluded us for over a century. In this connection, it is very fortunate that the establishment of a European Financial Stabilization Mechanism and European Financial Stability Facility has highlighted the necessity for RFAs, such as the Multilateralized Chiang Mai Initiative Mechanism (CMIM). When Asian countries raised the possibility of establishing the Asian Monetary Fund and the Chiang Mai Initiative in the immediate aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the initial reaction of the international community and the IMF was negative. Although long overdue, we are finally paying attention to this important topic.

The issue of cooperation between RFAs and the IMF involves not only establishing a crisis management system, but also initiating larger discussions on the international monetary system. Strengthening RFAs offers a practical solution to lessen demand for foreign currency reserves, diversify reserve currencies, and enhance the role of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as a reserve asset. Asia can be a good testing ground this year. Ways to better coordinate the CMIM and the IMF are currently being discussed in Asia. In particular, introducing ex ante crisis prevention mechanisms in the CMIM and linking them with the IMF’s ex ante mechanisms can be an important topic to study. Further discussion on the establishment of a regional settlement infrastructure, and the expansion of local currency trade payment settlement schemes such as the one between the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong, China into a regional trade settlement system could be a practical solution to international monetary system reform.

Development
Ethopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s comment that the Seoul Development Consensus dovetails with the “African Consensus” was one of the most memorable moments of the Seoul Summit. The Seoul Consensus reflects the view that inclusive growth is overwhelmingly the single biggest contributor to poverty reduction. The Seoul Consensus is an attempt to ensure that international development efforts revolve around economic factors—such as infrastructure, private investment, and skills—in achieving poverty reduction through growth. The presence of countries in the G20 such as the Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of China, India, and Brazil that have recently experienced many different types of development models demonstrated recognition of the fact that there is no universal model for growth and development. In order to ensure that the Seoul Summit’s discussions on development do not culminate in a mere announcement of an initiative or a “photo opportunity” and that our efforts can deliver real progress, we must give heed to the voice of developing countries.

Accordingly, the Republic of Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak advocated a “consumer-oriented approach” based on extensive inquiry into what developing countries sought. The Seoul Consensus reflects the view that low-income countries are an important part of the solution to global imbalances as new sources of aggregate demand, and should be equal partners for achieving a more resilient and balanced global economy; that economic growth is the most effective means of achieving the millennium development goals (although alone not sufficient) and that the role of public interventions must be re-emphasized in achieving low income countries’ growth; and that, in particular, addressing bottlenecks in infrastructure investment are extremely urgent and must be prioritized. These views that are articulated in the Seoul Consensus reflect the message we have consistently received from our developing country partners in Africa and elsewhere.

To ensure effective implementation of the ideas expressed by the Seoul Consensus, the G20 has drawn up a Multi-Year Action Plan with nine key pillars of economic growth including infrastructure, food security, and human resource development, among others. These action plans have concrete timelines and implementation mandates for G20 members and relevant international organizations, most of which will have a delivery or reporting deadline at the Cannes Summit. To accomplish these many tasks within these very strict timelines will not be easy. Accordingly, it will be important to use the 47 item multi-year agenda on financial regulatory reforms announced at the Washington Summit, on which the London and subsequent Summits delivered, as a benchmark.

At the same time, the emphasis of the Seoul Summit is on promoting key economic drivers and tackling bottlenecks to inclusive growth. Therefore, more emphasis should be placed on infrastructure, given the particular importance low-income countries themselves have placed on this pillar—an importance they have clearly communicated to the G20. In that regard, the G20 High-Level Panel should play an important role in identifying institutional bottlenecks to cross-border infrastructure investment, evaluating bankable projects, and promoting public-private partnerships.

There certainly has been criticism about the effectiveness (especially after the global financial crisis) and legitimacy (because it does not represent all countries) of the G20. Looking at the bright side, however, the G20 has had notable achievements. The global governance structure implemented after World War II had not changed and did not reflect the growing role of emerging economies. The G20 is a belated recognition of the multi-polar state of the world, and emerging economies are now better represented in global international fora. In addition, unlike in other organizations where coalitions are characterized either by income—high, middle, and low—or region—Asia, Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, and North America—in the G20, coalitions among members change depending on the issues under debate in an ever-changing variable geometry. While emerging economies’ voices have strengthened in the G20 discussions, each state’s own interest can still be reflected differently for different issues. Each nation in the G20 thus enters into dynamic coalitions with others that share its views, raising the potential of the G20 to reach agreement on key global issues.

In order to secure its footing in the international arena, the G20 must deliver on its commitments with concrete outcomes to present itself as a valuable global forum. Happily, the Seoul Summit delivered on the Toronto Summit commitments. Hopefully, France and Mexico will continue this fine tradition to ensure the G20’s firm foothold in the world governance structure.

The Chilean Way

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:40:37 +0000

A Look at Social Democracy in the 21st Century

HIR Issue:

The United Nations

Over the past 20 years, Chile has established a successful social democracy in which public policies complement and temper market forces. Economic growth and targeted social policies have led to a major reduction in poverty, while other reforms have improved the judicial system and expanded cultural liberties.

This article offers a reflection on the construction of Chilean social democracy and the country’s accomplishments over the past two decades. A contrast is drawn between social democracy––in which public policies are designed in accordance with citizens’ aspirations to both complement and temper market forces––and neoliberal democracy––in which the market is prioritized above all and citizens are viewed primarily as consumers. Social democracy in Chile has entailed the implementation of well-targeted social policies in the areas of income support, education, housing, pensions, and health care, along with economic growth, which have led to an important reduction in poverty. Advances have also been made toward improving the judicial system and expanding cultural liberties.

Social Democracy
The first critical aspect of social democracy is the construction of a democratic political system. In Chile, the 17 years of dictatorship under Augustin Pinochet represented an interruption of a democratic system with origins in the 19th century. Democracy in the 19th century of course placed strong restrictions on the concept of citizenship due to literacy requirements and the exclusion of women. However, Chile’s prior democratic roots facilitated the construction of a well-functioning, modern democratic regime after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. Chile’s transition back to democracy arose out of a civilized and pacifist opposition to the dictatorship, organized around the “NO” campaign in the 1988 plebiscite that decided whether or not Pinochet would continue in power. Given the success of the “NO” campaign and the fact that the citizenry had organized to place trained observers in every polling booth, the dictator was left with no other option but to acknowledge his electoral defeat.

The policies that were enacted in Chile after the reinstatement of democracy rested on four essential pillars: political reform, economic growth, well-focused social policies, and the expansion of cultural liberties. The implementation of successful policies in these four areas required that citizens properly define the type of society in which they aspired to live.

Accordingly, the defining characteristic of social democracy in the 21st century is that the citizenry, not the market, defines the basic characteristics of society. In neoliberal democracies, society is defined in terms of the market, on the basis of consumers’ acquisitive power. This type of society reproduces the inequities of the market, since consumers with greater acquisitive power wield more influence. However, when a society is defined by citizenship, everyone is equal; a vote does not depend on capacity for consumption. Everyone has equal rights and obligations. It is the will of the majority, not the interests of those with the most resources, that defines public policies. Social democracy of the 21st century, in which the citizen plays a fundamental role, requires clear rules through which conflicts or different visions among the citizenry can be resolved. These rules, embedded in the constitution, allow society to adjudicate among a diversity of opinions and to ascertain the views of the majority, which is the essence of democracy.

The modern world is characterized by tensions between the market and the state. In neoliberal democracies, society is structured by market values. Public policies are viewed as unnecessary or treated as secondary in importance, because it is believed that the spontaneous, unregulated behavior of the market should determine the type of society that will emerge. This view of markets and society was that espoused by the Pinochet dictatorship. However, this model suffers from a central problem: because citizens are considered consumers, and consumers possess very dissimilar purchasing power, the market society reinforces existing inequalities. The Chilean experience supports this view; inequality increased during the dictatorship, and the neoliberal economic model was popularly viewed as benefiting only a few.

In a social democracy, in contrast, the market is viewed as a useful tool for allocating resources that is subject to the interests and wellbeing of a society and its citizens. In other words, in a social democracy, citizens are equal and are heard in the same way through the representatives that they themselves have elected. The market is an efficient tool for allocating resources within the economy, but it is not useful for obtaining greater degrees of equality, fighting poverty in the short term, overcoming climate change, or promoting world peace. Certainly, some of these tasks can be performed through market mechanisms, but public policies are crucial and must be determined by citizens.

Moreover, there is a set of basic goods and services that citizens believe must be made available and affordable for everyone in order for society to be considered just. As Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio explains, all societies define a minimum civilizatorio, a basic level of provision for all citizens without which civilization and democracy lose meaning. Needless to say, the minimum civilizatorio increases as a society becomes richer, leading citizens to believe that more goods and services should be available to everyone. Democracy and freedom are essential to achieve a minimum civilizatorio. To my knowledge, there are no “progressive” dictatorships.

While citizens must determine public goods, they need not necessarily be produced by the state. They can be produced mostly by the private sector, but the state may seek to subsidize those citizens who are not otherwise able to obtain them. This is a very important point. For orthodox leftists who believed that the state was omnipotent and that the goal of equality was worth more than freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 20th century put an end to the ideal of extreme statism. Yet on the other hand, the crisis of 2008 and 2009 demonstrated that extreme neoliberal ideology, which ruled important developed countries in the world during the last 20 years, was mistaken in the belief that the market could regulate itself and hence that no public policies were required to seek the common good. The fall of Wall Street was to many neoliberals as the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communists. Chile during the last 20 years has avoided the extremes of both statism and neoliberalism.

Economic Growth
The need to achieve economic growth is of paramount importance for all societies. Growth is particularly important in underdeveloped countries that require a greater amount of goods and services to improve the living conditions of their citizens. Growth is therefore necessary for distribution and the provision of a minimum civilizatorio. Growth in turn requires investment, and investment can only be secured if rule of law and guarantees for the private sector are established. Chile has provided these conditions, and private sector investment has accordingly reached high levels. The private sector accounts for 80 percent of investment, whereas only 20 percent of investment is public. High levels of investment have contributed to very strong economic growth over the past 20 years, which has helped make Chile a paradigm of development within Latin America.

Because Chile is a country with a comparatively small internal market, insertion into the global economy has been critical for growth. Firms are not isolated entities; they interact with other firms at the international level. Chile has sought greater integration within Latin America and the rest of the world through free trade agreements that provide rules and regulations in the global commercial game. It must be understood that for small countries pursuing export-led growth, it is imperative to strengthen international institutions that are responsible for generating an international rule of law––in particular, the United Nations and regional authorities. Multilateral institutions are critical because they provide opportunities for small and developing countries to achieve a level playing field in the international arena on critical issues such as subsidies. Bilateral agreements, in contrast, leave small countries subject to prevailing imbalances of power. It was Chile’s commitment to strengthening multilateral institutions that made the country unwilling to participate in an invasion of Iraq without prior approval by the United Nations. Beyond their importance for leveling the playing field for international trade, strong multilateral institutions are critical for addressing global problems such as climate change, disease pandemics, and terrorism. The social democratic vision does not entail utopian aspirations at the international level; it simply sees the strengthening of multilateral agencies as an essential step towards regulating multilateral relations.

While the social democratic vision embraces the need to promote investment and growth, it also emphasizes that growth must go hand in hand with well-targeted policies that distribute the benefits of growth among all citizens to avoid excluding disadvantaged sectors of the population. Distribution reduces social tension and builds a cohesive society, which is essential in the process of development. Growth alone is not sufficient to produce a trickle-down effect. Once growth has been achieved, the focus must be on social policies, defined by the citizens. Thus, through increased education, better healthcare, improved pensions, more equal opportunities, and better employment opportunities, growth will lead to better social welfare, particularly for the middle class and the poor.

Social Policy
In the past 20 years, well-targeted public policies in Chile have allowed for great social progress and a strong decline in the number of citizens living below the poverty line. The population living in poverty declined from 40 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2010, according to government statistics, or to 11 percent, according to the United Nation’s 2010 statistics. There was also progress in educational indicators, health care, income support for poor families, access to housing, and access to social infrastructure.

In the past decade, new anti-poverty policy instruments have been designed with the goal of helping people overcome adverse economic conditions. The idea that social assistance was the first step for citizens to help themselves was a central element. Yet these new instruments also entailed responsibilities for the recipients of subsidies, including medical checkups, family counseling, and school attendance for children. At the same time, subsidies have been focused more precisely toward those in greatest need. Targeted anti-poverty policies have allowed not only Chile, but also many other countries in Latin America, to substantially reduce poverty levels over the past decade.

In education policy, the guiding principle was to provide primary and secondary education for everyone. As a result, a law in 2003 established 12-year compulsory education. Notwithstanding this effort, there is still a very close relationship between income level and educational achievement. The challenge has been guaranteeing quality education, specifically targeting the provision of more financial resources, teachers, texts, and food supplies where they are most needed. Some progress in reducing the gap has been highlighted in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the McKinsey Global Education reports.

In the area of housing policy, the aim was to ensure access for low-income families. Progress was achieved in the first ten years through a mortgage system. In early 2000, it was deemed essential to reach out to the poorest 20 percent of the population, which due to precarious employment status could not qualify for loans from the private sector. State-subsidized houses were designed with less than 40 square meters of space. However, after a very low down payment, the property could be acquired without a mortgage. These houses were delivered with pre-approved plans for extensions, so that when their owners achieved higher and more stable incomes they could expand the size. This policy was a tremendous advance. So many houses were built per year that almost all campamentos, or slums, in Chile were eradicated by 2010. The February 2010 earthquake was a setback, but Chile’s clear policy of ensuring decent housing for every family provides a framework for reconstruction.

Progress was also made in social security policy to ensure better retirement plans for citizens. Because social security had been based on a privatized capitalization system since 1980, not everyone was able to obtain a sufficient pension. Unemployed or low-income individuals and those who had not paid contributions for a period of at least twenty years were not effectively covered. Chile recently introduced reforms that significantly extended pension coverage and improved minimum pension benefits. The state now provides a non-contributory “basic solidarity pension” to the poorest 60 percent of senior citizens.

Great strides have also been made in terms of healthcare. In the 1990s, the government made major investments in hospital infrastructure and primary healthcare centers. Beginning in the year 2000, a great emphasis was placed on the need to ensure access to healthcare on three different fronts for a wide range of pathologies: guaranteed treatment in quality hospitals, guaranteed treatment within a given timeframe depending on the disease, and guaranteed co-payments provided by the state when the patient’s income is too low. These three guarantees were implemented for a total of 56 pathologies that account for approximately 70 percent of hospital care. Implementation was carried out as realistically as possible given the state’s resources, and hence gradually. At first, three health conditions were covered; this number was expanded to 40 by 2006 and 56 in 2008. There have been difficulties with some waiting lists, but the guarantee ensures that if patients do not receive assistance, they may sue the state and seek assistance in the private sector, which will be paid by the public sector.

At the time, this healthcare reform was seen as very radical and highly complex. It had to include both the public healthcare system and the private healthcare system, in which private companies provide insurance. However, it was decided that in order for the reform to succeed, it needed to include all sectors, not just those most in need due to low income. The case of failed healthcare reform under President Clinton in the United States showed the importance of designing policies that draw support from broad sectors of society, not only the poor or uninsured. The development of social democracy in Europe also entailed providing widespread coverage and benefits, which generated solid political support for the welfare state.

The most significant changes in healthcare occurred at the primary care level. Only 12 percent of the health care budget in 2000 went to primary healthcare. Thanks to investment in infrastructure during previous years, it was possible to transfer a huge amount of resources, leading to an increase to 30 percent of the 2006 health budget for primary healthcare. The bulk of attention at the primary care level was devoted to disease prevention, with priority given to children under one year old and adults over 65 years old due to their assessment as higher-risk populations. Primary health care policy in Chile has not yet achieved levels similar to those in developed countries like the United Kingdom, where 50 percent of the healthcare budget goes to primary care. However, Chile’s reforms constituted a substantial advance in healthcare, an area in which the country has traditionally had very modern policies.

Justice and Culture
Chile has also made progress in improving the judicial system and promoting cultural development. Regarding the judicial system, a set of reforms promoted transparency in the criminal, labor, and family justice systems. Criminal justice reforms changed the system from the Spanish model to a model similar to that of the United States. The old system was based on written presentations of evidence, and the same judge who investigated the crime was charged with imputing the accused and, ultimately, resolving the case. The new Chilean criminal system is based on oral proceedings and prosecutors presenting evidence in front of a panel of three judges who decide the case. The accused has the right to a public defender. This reform improved the decision-making process by separating the role of the investigator or prosecutor from the role of the judge who issues decisions. The reform has made the criminal justice system more expedient and provides opportunities for settlement before cases go to trial. A conciliation mechanism was also established to resolve cases prior to trials in labor and family courts. Finally, a divorce law was passed in 2004; until then, divorce had not been legal in Chile.

In the cultural realm, social democracy has reconciled the market’s role in promoting economic efficiency with the state’s role in promoting the development of cultural industries. In this model, artists do not depend on the market alone; they help to define cultural policies themselves and ensure that these policies do not simply broadcast government propaganda.

An active cultural policy, through comprehensive measures developed by artists themselves, eliminates the temptation toward “state-led cultures.” In a broader sense, a policy of expanding cultural freedoms stimulates the country’s ability to look at past experiences. A stronger and more solid society dares to look at a past when human rights were violated and to learn from that experience; it is also capable of understanding that it should implement policies that lead to greater gender equality, and acceptance of sexual minorities and ethnic diversity. In other words, the need to ensure freedoms and generate respect for minorities––in a context where they feel they have been marginalized––and the need to elaborate policies of affirmative action for these minorities are central goals for public policies.

Challenges for the Future
Notwithstanding Chile’s advances, the country faces multiple challenges for the future. Perhaps the most difficult is to improve the distribution of income, which has remained largely unchanged despite successful poverty reduction. Although some progress has been made––the Gini index showed a modest advance from 0.58 to 0.54––the average income of the richest quintile in 2000 was 14.4 times the average income of that of the poorest and was reduced to 13.1 in 2006. A substantial rise in per capita public spending on education and healthcare, aimed essentially at the poorest quintiles, explains this reduction. Consequently, when corrected for non-monetary items, income distribution improves considerably, bringing down the gap between the richest and poorest quintile from 13.1 to 7.1 for the CASEN (National Socio-Economic Characterization) survey of 2006 (considering the monetary transferences such as pensions of non-contributory seniors, family allowances, and unemployment insurance). In contrast, in the United States, the difference between the richest quintile and the poorest is about eight times, whereas in Japan or Scandinavian societies it is only around four times. Achieving a more equitable distribution of income will require a new fiscal pact designed not only to increase tax revenue available for social spending, but also to make the tax system more progressive. At present, taxation in Chile leaves the distribution of income essentially unaltered.

Additional challenges include electoral system reform, further improvements in education, and sustainable energy policy. Chile’s “binominal” electoral system, which disproportionately favors the coalition receiving the second-highest vote share in parliamentary elections, must be reformed to better reflect the will of the voters and to deepen democracy. Further reforms are necessary to improve the quality of education and thus to ensure that all citizens have equal access to opportunities. Chile must also develop clean and renewable energy sources; the country’s very high electricity prices currently constitute a major obstacle to competitiveness and development. Addressing the energy challenge will require joint efforts on the part of the state and the private sector, as well as concerted efforts to move away from dependence on carbon-based energy sources.

Conclusion
Social democracy, which emphasizes the importance of public policies in addition to market forces, has allowed Chile to make remarkable progress toward providing a minimum civilizatorio for all members of society. Targeted social policies have dramatically reduced poverty. Well-designed public policies have also led to improvements in education, healthcare quality and coverage, pension benefits, access to housing, and access to justice. These policies and the results they have achieved explain the success of the coalition that governed Chile for the last two decades. The popularity of these policies is demonstrated by the fact that the new government has not sought to alter them in significant ways. While much remains to be done, the past twenty years will be remembered as a period of rapid progress.

Throughout this period, furthering freedom while generating increasing levels of equality has been Chile’s goal. Freedom and equality cannot be antagonistic. In the 20th century, we learned the hard way that freedom cannot be sacrificed on the pretext of achieving equality, because individual freedom is the most important principle. Both must go hand in hand, and they must be accompanied by a third essential element, solidarity, which may also be necessary for promoting equity. Social policy ultimately seeks to end the fears that afflict society. We do not fear injustice because there is a rule of law. We do not fear ignorance because education is available to all. We do not fear disease or accident, thanks to a healthcare system to which everyone has access. We do not fear old age because there is a social security system for all. Fearlessness is the essence of progressive policies. And it is only through politics, with a capital P, that progressive policies can be implemented.

Beneficial War

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:37:51 +0000

The Conceit of US Counterinsurgency

HIR Issue:

India in Transition

In 1925, crusader for American airpower Brigadier General William Mitchell argued that using an independent US air force to attack an enemy nation’s industrial and economic works would benefit not only the United States but also the enemy nation. The benefits of airpower, according to Mitchell, would arise from avoiding costly land battles along the lines of World War I, shortening wars by attacking the heart of the enemy nation instead of its military forces, and ultimately saving blood and treasure on both sides. It was an idea grounded upon the ideals of American Progressivism, a school of thought that places full faith in expert opinion, efficiency, and humanitarian motives for making wars less costly. Mitchell and other US airmen derived their progressivism-inspired notions of airpower from the US tradition of reform and reinvention. According to this view, increased reliance on airpower could give rise to a new and more humane type of warfare.

World War II, however, and the firebombing of German and Japanese cities which culminated in the United States’ dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, served to refute their claims. War during this second Great War proved just as destructive, chaotic, brutal, and friction-ridden as ever. Airpower could not change the basic nature of war, but blind faith in its efficacy prevented US airmen from perceiving this reality. It was a seductive and inherently US concept that experts adorned with expert processes and programs to transform war into a more purposeful foreign policy instrument. As historian Mark Clodfelter argues, airpower became a sort of religion to US airmen. US airpower had its prophets, its bibles of strategic bombing doctrine, and its true believers, both military and civilian. Even when facts did not necessarily align with reality, their faith in the doctrines of this airpower religion shrouded their perception of reality.

One sees very troubling similarities between the faith in US airpower to make war new, and the newest wave of progressivism-based US warfare: counterinsurgency (COIN). Implicit in both paradigms is the idea that war can be made less destructive and more efficient. However, both operate in the realm of religion and faith while failing to fully acknowledge the reality of the friction, brutality, and inherent destructiveness of war. If crusader for airpower, William Mitchell, saw airpower as beneficial to humanity because it could shorten wars and reduce associated costs, current prophets of COIN are also trying to cast a similar light on counterinsurgency-based warfare. The modern argument for beneficial war by COIN experts like retired Army Colonel and Center for a New American Security President John A. Nagl is that US power at the barrel of a gun doing counterinsurgency can go into the troubled areas in the world and, to use Nagl’s exact words, “change entire societies”—or in Mitchell’s language, benefit other societies and civilizations.

The conceit of counterinsurgency, and that of US airpower in the past, is augmented by the fact that it does not actually work in practice as touted by its proponents. Historical evidence suggests that the purported goal of using counterinsurgency to win the hearts and minds of local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thereby quash insurgencies, is yet to be realized. Moreover, if history is to judge, such a favorable transformation will not occur in the near future.

In popular narratives, counterinsurgency is delineated as a strategy that prevails upon local populations by providing security along with economic assistance, bridges, schools, roads, other elements of infrastructure—and, ultimately, good governance. The theory of US counterinsurgency says that if a counterinsurgent force is able to accomplish these goals simultaneously, it will win the allegiance of the local population. Subsequently, according to theory, the population will ally itself with the government and the counterinsurgent force, forcing insurgents to fight in the open where they can be killed or captured with greater ease. As the US Army’s doctrinal field manual on counterinsurgency, “FM 3-24,” states, successful counterinsurgency requires the coordinated application of army efforts in economic, paramilitary, political, psychological, and civic spheres of life. The army’s counterinsurgent divisions must help develop and support local institutions with “legitimacy and the ability to provide basic services, economic opportunity, public order, and security.”

Though the general public has only just become aware of the counterinsurgency doctrine in the wake of the 2007 surge in Iraq, US counterinsurgency is in fact grounded in a long history—the capstone of decades of experience. The learning curve spans 60 years, from the British campaign against communist insurgents in Malaya during the mid-20th century to the US War in South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973—and now, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The major breaking point in this narrative is the United States’ defeat in Vietnam in the late 20th century. In the years following the conflict in Vietnam, the US military—especially the Army—undertook a slow motion and painful search for the reasons it lost its first war. A powerful consensus emerged that the US Army blundered in Vietnam because it focused excessively on big-unit operations aimed only at killing the communist enemy while failing to win hearts and minds. However, according to this consensus, after the 1968 Tet Offensive, a “savior” of a general named Creighton Abrams appeared on scene to replace the largely ineffective William Westmoreland. Abrams revitalized the US Army’s war strategy and ultimately won the Vietnam War through effective implementation of counterinsurgency tactics. As this “better war thesis” has it, weak US politicians and protesting hippies on college campuses should be held responsible for breaking the US spirit and precipitating defeat. The British campaign in Malaya in the 1950s, during which the British defeated a communist insurgency, became enshrined as the preferred model of counterinsurgency. Along the same pro-counterinsurgency vein, it can be argued that the United States would have won the war in Vietnam if it had followed the conduct of their predecessors in Malaya, instead of squandering popular will while awaiting the arrival of a savior general to turn the tide of the war. During the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of military officers and defense experts made sustained and strenuous arguments about the need to focus the US military on counterinsurgency, but very few were paying attention at the time. Then the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, and, ultimately, the Iraqi quagmire transformed the international security landscape in which the US military was operating.

According to the revised wisdom of proponents of counterinsurgency, the first three years of the Iraq War were disastrous because the US Army ignored the lessons in counterinsurgency from Malaya and Vietnam. Fortunately, according to the narrative, the landscape of the war in Iraq was completely transformed—the war was revolutionized. First, General David Petraeus and a number of other leading counterinsurgency experts had produced, by the end of 2006, a new counterinsurgency doctrinal manual for the US Army that heavily drew upon lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. In February 2007, with the Iraq surge, General Petraeus took command in Iraq, empowered his army with the new counterinsurgency doctrine, and much like in Malaya and Vietnam after Abrams’ take over, altered the tide of war, “sav[ing] Iraq from a desperate situation,” in the words of Petraeus himself.

This narrative now continues in Afghanistan. In 2010, two US Marine Corps Captains returned from Afghanistan and reported that after almost nine years of botching the counterinsurgency, the US military, under the direction of newly minted and savvy generals, is finally making significant progress in dismantling the Taliban. Victory will come, according to these marine captains, so long as the US military continues to implement counterinsurgency strategies by the book.

After General Petraeus assumed command of US forces in Afghanistan in June of 2010, he proclaimed that finally, after nearly nine years of war in Afghanistan, “we have the right inputs in place.” The statement implies that prior to his arrival and during the tenure of his immediate predecessor General Stanley McChrystal, these so-called “right inputs” were nonexistent. With a few more brigades of troops, correct methods, and above all, better generals, the promise of success in Afghanistan may finally become a reality.
Not surprisingly, Petraeus’s “inputs” are channeled into counterinsurgency—the most discussed, lauded, and powerful military doctrine to arise in generations. Its canon, Field Manual 3-24 (FM 3-24), has become an essential foundational document. Additionally, any US reader strolling through the aisles of a Barnes and Noble bookstore can come across the Field Manual and sip a latte while perusing US Army doctrine. The Internet further bolsters its accessibility, as the Field Manual was downloaded 1.5 million times within the first few months after its release in January 2007. Samantha Power, special advisor to President Obama, wrote a New York Times review in March of 2007 in which she lauded the manual as “21st century strategy.” In a jacket cover endorsement in the Chicago Press edition, General Petraeus boasts that the manual is surely “on the bedside table of the President, Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense” and, according to the General, should also have a place on the bedside table of every US citizen. One of the architects of the Iraq surge, retired Army General Jack Keane, added that the US Army after the Vietnam War had rid itself “of everything that had to do with [counterinsurgency] because it had to do with how we lost that war.”

General Keane’s mournful reference to the war in Vietnam represents one of two recurring themes in today’s COIN narrative. The first theme is of armies starting off on the wrong boot, fumbling, failing, and nearly becoming entangled in a catastrophic defeat. The second theme, operating in tandem with and reinforcing the first, depicts an army that learns and adapts by virtue of stronger leadership by effective generals. The “tide” of a war is turned, hearts and minds are won, and victory is achieved. The “savior general,” noted popular historian Victor David Hanson, transformed the military dynamic in both Malaya and Vietnam. Now, in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, he has arrived on horseback. As the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual states—perhaps too optimistically—US warfare has risen to the ranks of “the graduate level of war.”

Counterinsurgency can also be viewed as a reinvention or overhaul of the status quo. The progressive inclination to reform and transform the nature of warfare also emerges in counterinsurgency convictions. Former US President George Bush’s claim that once Petraeus took command in Iraq in early 2007 there was a “reverse” of “existing strategy” neatly summarizes these highly optimistic notions of reinvention and reform. Other necessary and arguably more important conditions become secondary or forgotten altogether. General Petraeus’s “right inputs” embody the reinvention of the US Army, and in the case of Afghanistan, all but assure victory. In this manner, counterinsurgency, at least since the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, has become the “New American Way of War.” Armed with the methods of success from Iraq that are finally being applied in Afghanistan, and based on the lessons learned from Malaya and Vietnam, counterinsurgency promises to succeed where competing strategies have been tested and found wanting. The rise in political prominence of military leaders from the counterinsurgency school has been meteoric and it speaks to the extent to which the consensus has gained traction. There is even talk, not all of it loose, of General Petraeus eventually running for president.

As a new and widely commended “American Way of War,” counterinsurgency threatens to transform the US Army and other sectors of the defense establishment into a force organized for nation building, equipped to export stability to the troubled and obdurate precincts of the globe. In accordance with this principle, the US Army has already shifted its organizational structure to favor light infantry over mechanized armored forces. Today, light infantry and the shock troops of counterinsurgency comprises two-thirds of the active US Army, with the remainder being comprised of heavy brigades of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

There are, however, numerous and irreparable defects in this narrative. To begin with, it finds little support in the historical record and is, in large measure, a work of historical fiction. Whether in Malaya or Vietnam, what the record does show is more continuity than not between commanders and methods of warfighting. There were no tectonic shifts toward counterinsurgency operations, no savior generals, and no reinventions. To the contrary, Western victories or defeats can only be attributed to reasons unique to each conflict. In Malaya, the British won because they used military might to crush the communist insurgents. In Vietnam, a “better war” never emerged—only an unwinnable war prolonged by a dysfunctional strategy. In Iraq, violence diminished in 2007 not because of General Petraeus’ role as a savior general, but rather because conditions such as the Anbar awakening and the Shia militias’ decision to stand down concurrently reduced violence. Finally, in Afghanistan, the assessment of former US Ambassador Thomas Pickering that counterinsurgency is a fruitless strategy seems to be gaining traction.

Nevertheless, the allure of counterinsurgency persists. Elites and opinion makers have come to believe in the promise of counterinsurgency as though it were a religion (as did the prophets and true believers of airpower from decades ago), complete with its very own bible, high priests, Messiah, and hope of rebirth in the face of a foundering war effort. Confidence in the promise of counterinsurgency to “change entire societies” seems to have permeated all spheres of policymaking, as retired US Army General James Dubik and neoconservative pundit Max Boot have both called for a US nation building effort in Libya. As with most religions, followers try to glean evidence of its veracity from the most unusual of circumstances. In 2010, a magazine writer was traveling in Afghanistan with US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, when on a rural road outside of Kabul a bevy of young children pelted the admiral’s vehicle with stones in anger over US presence in the country. When the writer asked why this was happening, the admiral’s press officer, sitting in the front of the vehicle, remarked that it “shows the children have confidence in the security situation [produced by US counterinsurgency efforts] that they feel they can throw stones.”

More worrisome than the delusions of an individual US military press officer—or individual generals and think tank pundits, for that matter—is the monopoly that counterinsurgency retains over Americans’ approach to strategy and policy. In 2010, President Barack Obama sought from his military leaders an alternative to nation building in Afghanistan. His senior military leaders, transfixed by the promise that counterinsurgency can work in Afghanistan, supercharged by the myth that it has worked in history—namely in Malaya, Vietnam, and Iraq—could offer no alternative. They simply reiterated variations on a single theme built upon a vision of long-term US counterinsurgency and nation building at the barrel of a gun.

The cult of counterinsurgency troubles itself with issues largely unrelated to national security. Advocates of US intervention in the world’s troubled spots tend to be quite fond of counterinsurgency tactics. After all, a focus on the mechanics of intervention and state building—namely, counterinsurgency operations—means that the underlying motives and ideologies of US intervention will seldom be called into question. Instead, the focus remains on the procedures, tactics, and logistics of interventions, rather than on the causes, ideologies, and motives that bring them into being.

President Barack Obama seems to be fully aware of the nonsense behind US counterinsurgency and the fact that it does not work. His recent speech announcing eventual US withdrawal from its nation-building mission in Afghanistan, coupled with the assassination of Osama bin Laden, has helped to remove the smoke screen surrounding the efficacy of US counterinsurgency. Only a few short days after making his speech that outlined withdrawal from Afghanistan, the President’s senior generals were hedging and qualifying his decision with talk of only withdrawing from Afghanistan if the ground conditions are conducive to it. The senior US Army General in Afghanistan responsible for training local security forces, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, lectured politicians in Washington on the way the war was being conducted just weeks after President Obama’s announcement. Caldwell told his political masters that “Washington will need the political patience to maintain a substantial [American] military presence in Afghanistan for the indefinite future.”

When a field military’s operational framework for fighting a war starts to dictate strategy and encroach on presidential policy, this is known as “militarism”—a course of action that is inimical to democracy. In 1917, French President Georges Clemenceau highlighted the importance of political management over an army’s wartime operational methods, advising President Woodrow Wilson that war is “too important to be left up to the generals.” Decades later, Stanley Kubrick riffed on Clemenceau by offering a withering critique of US militarism in his movie Dr. Strangelove in which the character, General Jack D. Ripper, proclaims war to be “too important to be left up to the politicians.” The conceit of structuring strategy solely around counterinsurgency and the US Army’s obsession with the operational framework of counterinsurgency has given rise to a very troubling strain of militarism.

A stake needs to be driven through the heart of the notion that counterinsurgency represents effective strategy. Only then will the United States disassociate itself from the Svengali effect of savior generals thrusting counterinsurgency tactics upon their armies. Only then will it cease to launch itself into the troubled spots of the world, touting its responsibility to slay insurgents and build new societies, even when it is not in the strategic interest of the United States to do so.

War is, by its very nature, about death, destruction, and pain for both individuals and societies. Despite what proponents of counterinsurgency might argue, war cannot be recast as a foreign policy tool that is beneficial to societies. It is something to be avoided, and only used as a last resort in the pursuit of national security interests. Experts should not giddily pursue wars as a means of testing their new theories of warfare in the name of transforming warfare and the foreign societies that are placed in its path of destruction. All of this is a strategic fool’s errand. To presume that there is such a thing as “better” and “beneficial” war is to operate blindly on faith rather than drawing upon an understanding of history and clear strategic thinking toward current and future security problems.

Thailand

Kate Vinton — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 19:24:34 +0000

The Die-Hard Absolute Monarchy?

HIR Issue:

Disease

Siam, the former Thailand, abolished its centuries-old absolute monarchy and adopted a constitutional democracy through a bloodless revolution in 1932. As the only country that had never been officially colonized by Western powers, Siam was proud of its independence. Much of this pride was attributed to, as most conservative Thai historians would argue, the farsightedness and the wisdom of the Siamese kings. In particular, King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910), who ruled the kingdom during the high tide of colonialism in Southeast Asia, was extolled for his shrewd strategy in managing his relationships with external powers. But Chulalongkorn’s unsurpassed ability to safeguard his kingdom from the threats of colonialism was not translated into a guarantee of a long-lasting royal institution. 22 years after Chulalongkorn’s death, Thailand witnessed the collapse of the absolute monarchy. The two successive reigns, under King Vajiravudh (1910-1925) and King Prajadhipok (1925-1935), sons of Chulalongkorn, proved incapable of adapting themselves to the changing political environment. Today, almost 80 years since the fall of absolute monarchy, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the grandson of King Chulalongkorn, who was earlier successful in restoring and strengthening the power and prerogatives of the royal institution, is now facing an emerging anti-monarchy sentiment that has swept across the kingdom following the military coup of 2006. Can the monarchy this time prove its flexibility and, more importantly, relevance in the modernized Thai society, bearing in mind that kings and queens elsewhere in the world have largely fallen into obscurity?

This article seeks to explicate the role of the Thai monarchy in the political context. It aims at untying one major conundrum: What are the legacies of absolute monarchy and how have they shaped the Thai political culture over the years? It argues that despite the fall of the absolute monarchy many decades ago, its impact has continued to overwhelmingly dominate the political body, even to the point of acting as an obstacle to democratization and deepening the ever growing political polarization in the country. This has been one of the root causes behind the rise of political violence in the past few years. The advent of Thaksin Shinawatra in 20o1 was subsequently perceived as a threat to the Bangkok royal elite. One way of eliminating this threat was to accuse Thaksin of being disloyal to the King. In this process, the lèse-majesté law has become an indispensable instrument, discursively employed to curb political dissent and disagreement. Paradoxically, using the monarchy as a political weapon has not only severely weakened the institution itself, but it has also helped propagate the anti-monarchy sentiment among the victims of the law. The study suggests that, for the endurance of the monarchy, the old establishment must be wholeheartedly ready to initiate serious reforms of both the monarchy and the anachronistic lèse-majesté law. The monarchy and its defenders must abandon their unrelenting self-denial of the assumption that all Thais still love their King—this is no longer the case. Failing to do so could result in an inevitable breakdown of the royal institution, and most likely, a new round of violence between the royalists and the anti-monarchy elements.

The Ghosts of Absolute Monarchy

The absolute monarchy, as a political system, might have long come to an end, but its influence has remained immense and authoritative. While the original purpose behind the abolition of the monarchy was to overthrow the supposedly uncivilized form of governance and to embrace the Western concept of democracy, Thai royalists recognized the necessity of maintaining certain aspects of the absolute monarchy in order to shore up their own positions of power. In Thailand today, there are two conflicting views of the monarchy—these views have come to define the relationship between the King and his people. On the one hand, there is a standard and normative view of the monarchy. This view emphasizes that the monarchy has made exceptionally great contributions to the Thai kingdom, mainly to unite all Thais and to preserve Thai territorial integrity. In the study conducted by Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager, Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand (2010), this normative view exists: the King is described as a protector of tradition, the nation and democracy; as an egalitarian development king who modernizes as he instructs the government to care for the welfare of its subjects; and as an institution as natural to Thailand’s political and social culture as rice is to the Thai diet. On the other hand, the almost unrestrained power of the King, encapsulated within the protective walls of the lèse-majesté law, has produced a more critical perspective of the monarchy. It reflects the belief that the excessive power of the King has greatly hindered the democratic progress. The royalist elite is viewed as having glorified the King’s power at the expense of dwindling elective institutions. The elite, in collaboration with conservative historians and a powerful media, has consistently painted a somber picture of the political domain as tainted by bad and immoral politicians. To them, the flaws of the Thai political system do not derive from intervention of non-elective institutions like the monarchy, but from irresponsible and unethical politicians. From this point of view, the end of the absolute monarchy does not really mean the end of the monarchy’s power. It instead appears to have given birth to a new political culture in which the monarchy and its defenders have collectively claimed their legitimate right to intervene in politics whenever they feel necessary, even when their actions are in reality no less immoral than that of their political rivals. The ghosts of the absolute monarchy continue to stalk Thai political life in the present day.

It is imperative to reiterate at this initial stage that when discussing the “monarchy,” the term does not refer exclusively to the monarch, but to the entire system of the royal institution. This includes other members of the royal family, the Privy Council (an advisory and implemental body serving the King), and their defenders in other segments of society with vested interests in the monarchy, such as the military, various state agencies, pro-royalty political parties and big businesses. These assorted royalist groups, while sharing the same aspiration of preserving the power of the monarchy, are not however homogenous; they possess differing interests, ideologies, and ways of looking at politics. In his seminal work “Network Monarchy and Legitimacy Crisis in Thailand,” published in the Pacific Review in 2005, British scholar Duncan McCargo calls this entire system the “network monarchy.” McCargo argues that the best way to understand Thai politics is to perceive it through different networks that interact, bargain power, and even clash with each other. For him, the most influential network in Thailand in the past few decades has been the network monarchy, with King Bhumibol sitting on top of the highly hierarchical network. The chief operator of this network has been General Prem Tinsulanonda, former army chief and prime minister, who is currently President of the Privy Council. But long before the formation of the network monarchy à la Prem, monarchists of older generations embarked on entrenching the legacies of the absolute monarchy at the same time as they attempted to form a new kind of Thai-styled democracy revolving around the prerogatives of the King. In other words, even with the end of the absolute monarchy, its other characteristics have lived on and are well conserved. In the Thai journal Fah Diew Kan, Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul says in his article “The Legacies of Absolute Monarchy,” that social and political ideology, historical knowledge, cultural intellect, discourses, and the monarchical institution itself have, until now, their roots deeply entrenched in the absolute monarchy. But upholding the role of the monarchy as the epitome of Thai life is like a double-edge sword and contributes negatively to the political development of Thailand.

Because of the incessant, histrionic glorification and sacralization of the monarchy evident throughout the current Bhumibol reign, the intimate attachment of politics and society to the monarchy has served as, metaphorically speaking, a cell that prevents Thais from expressing unconventional thoughts. “Thinking outside of the box” has been forbidden, simply because it threatens the position of the network monarchy. Those who break the convention are often punished with up to a 15-year jail by the strict lèse-majesté law, considered the harshest punishment in the world; ironically, this punishment is only found in the Land of the Free (“Thailand” literally means “Land of the Free”). The convention ranges from the most trivial to the most serious forms of compliance, from having to stand up in the cinema when the song extolling the monarchy is played to having to stand still at 8 am and 6 pm daily when the national anthem is broadcast. Most of all, citizens must remain submissive in the face of outright royal intervention in politics with the backing of the military. The absolute monarchy did collapse, but the royalist and elitist class goes on to survive. As part of the survival tactic, they have proclaimed that the country must select ideas that are suitable for the country, especially those of foreign origin. Foreign ideas, such as democracy, must be adapted to coexist with local beliefs, customs, discourses and traditions. Otherwise, they claim that Thailand will lose its identity, or “Thainess.” It is important to note that the concept of Thainess has revolved around what are perceived to be the three components constituting Thailand—the Nation, Buddhism and the Monarchy. These make up the trilogy first crafted during the reign of King Vajiravudh. Based on this concept, foreign ideas must be compatible with the Thai nation, Buddhism and the monarchy, even when the real function has been to ensure the longevity of the vestiges of the absolute monarchy.

Old Wine in a New Bottle

The new political order in the post-absolute monarchy period has witnessed the rise of democracy, but only on the surface. The actual content has been intrinsically monarchist and thus antithetical to its outer look. This is what many Thais would like to call “royal democracy”; while there is a democratic form of government, the monarchy still plays a central role in politics. Royal democracy has been constructed according to the Bangkok-centric vision of power, royalist-nationalist historiography, and belief in Buddhism as the national religion. In all these cases, the monarchy represents the indispensable factor connecting all the discourses that demand popular submission without conditions. To elaborate, the royalists have successfully created a unitary Thai state with a profound emphasis on the monarchy. For example, the declaration of Buddhism as the national religion was instigated in order to suppress other perceived minority religions, while at the same time, the King has been a patron and protector of Buddhism and the sangha (community of ordained monks). More importantly, a duty of safeguarding Thai sovereignty and independence has been ingrained in the Thai mind. This has a direct link to the monarchy since past Siamese kings were endlessly eulogized for their bravery in defending the kingdom’s territorial rights. Thus, the Thai elite has often stirred up a sense of nationalism by emphasizing the loss of some supposedly Thai territories in the past, even when much of the so-called lost territories have remained just a myth. These discourses have not only stipulated a strong sense of nationalism but also of royalism to the point that the Thais must be prepared to sacrifice their lives for the protection of the country as much as the monarchy. With this philosophy, there is no room left for those who may think otherwise, especially for some who may question the monarchy’s place in politics.

Over the years, the lionization of the monarchy has dangerously intensified. The King has become more than just a Head of State. He is now a semi-god. A highly moral figure, he must not be violated. Meanwhile, there is another persona of King Bhumibol: he is the king of the people and the father of the nation. This was demonstrated in the early years of his reign when he paid countless visits to different parts of Thailand, hoping to create a direct connection with his subordinates. In many ways, the King has been competing with successive governments over the years to win over the public which sees him as the “ultimate fixer” whenever the country encounters crises. But the conflict between the King’s two personas has led to great confusion. As much as the King wishes to build a personal relationship with his people, his other divine image performs as a barrier that separates him from them. Old uncivilized rituals have been restored, such as the use of overly eloquent royal language and the prostration before the King. Ironically, such a practice was abolished in 1873 by King Bhumibol’s grandfather, King Chulalongkorn, who saw it as barbaric. King Bhumibol is arguably no longer Phra Dhammarajadhiraja (king of Dhamma, known as the teaching of Buddha), but more of a Devadhiraja (king of god). The situation has turned more complicated as the King himself has become directly involved in the game of politics. Paul Handley, in his revealing book about King Bhumibol, The King Never Smiles (2006), rightly explains that the King has always been a political player. The notion that the King is above politics is therefore untrue. As the King has entered the public sphere as a political actor, a conflict of interests has emerged. For example, when Thaksin came along and won massive popular support in 2001 and 2005, he immediately became a threat to the old absolute monarchy; this is not to mention that his sister, Yingluck, the present prime minister, could also pose a similar threat to the palace. One way of ridding Thaksin from politics was the military coup in 2006. In the post-coup period, monarchists continued to manipulate state institutions to undermine their enemies, including exploiting the hand of the courts in removing the two pro-Thaksin regimes of Samak Sundaravej and Somchai Wongsawat in 2008 and abusing the law which inevitably led to the rapid rise of lèse-majesté cases. Statistically, in 2005, 33 charges came before the Court of First Instance; they later handed down 18 decisions on these. In 2007, the number of charges increased almost fourfold to 126. This number jumped to 164 in 2009 and then tripled to 478 cases by 2010.The most dramatic increases came under the government of the Democrat Party led by Abhisit Vejjajiva (2008-2011). According to American scholar David Streckfuss, there may have been hundreds jailed for lèse-majesté in this post-coup period.

The attempt to further strengthen the monarchy has been carried out as much by royalists as by the King himself, who has always been an “active monarch.” In his recent study on hyper-royalists, “The Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy: Two Elephants in the Room of Thai Politics,” Thongchai discusses the resumption of royalism as public culture as “some ancient royal rituals and new royal festivities, performances and public appearances [have been] promoted.” Thonghchai further explains an increase in King Bhumibol’s popularity, noting that his “sympathy with the student movement and his intervention to end the widespread unrest in October 1973 eventually made the [monarch] the pinnacle of political and social life.” The regional environment also enabled him to play a crucial role in politics. With the spread of communism inside and outside the Thai border, the King reinvented himself as a chief strategist fighting with communists and in the process denounced them extrinsic to Thai nationhood. Even after the end of the Cold War, while a myriad of governments have crumbled along the way, the King has relentlessly consolidated his place in politics. The royal intervention in 1992, shortly after bloody clashes between the army and pro-democracy groups, won him another trophy as a stabilizer in politics. It is apparent that monarchist ambition cannot be separated from politics. But a question must be asked: Does royal democracy really function in Thailand? As emphasized earlier, many aspects of absolute monarchy, now being merged into a new political order, seem to be irreconcilable with modern values of democracy such as popular mandate and accountability. Thongchai also argues that the term royal democracy is in itself an oxymoron, calling it a contradiction that is “like a black-hole sucking the whole political system into its vortex.”

The “Awakening” Moment

Since the military coup of 2006, the kind of politics based on legacies of absolute monarchy has shown signs of failing. At first glance, as it rallied on Bangkok streets, the royalist yellow-shirt People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) kept on exploiting royal symbols to topple Thaksin. Slogans like “Fight for the King” were used to legitimize the PAD’s dubious political objectives at the expense of the monarchy being disturbingly politicized. But at a deeper level, as I argue, the real challengers to the legacies of the absolute monarchy are not really Thaksin or the so-called anti-monarchy movement, but the hyper-royalists themselves. They have failed to face the new reality in politics. Is history repeating itself? This inability of the monarchy, as an institution, to cope with the change of political circumstance was the very same reason responsible for the downfall of the absolute monarchy in 1932 in the first place. The difference is that the decline of the monarchy today is accelerated by the latest development in politics, known as the “awakening,” or ta sawang. In short, ta sawang is a phenomenon in which many Thais have awakened to realize that after all, Thailand has never been truly free from absolute monarchy and democracy is still chained. The fact that the King has been actively participating in politics does not allow him to be above criticism. The growing criticism against the King, either in public or private, induces a diminishing reverence of the monarchy. More than in any other periods in Thai history, anti-monarchy voices are being heard louder and clearer.

In exploring the role of the monarchy, the issue of succession must be touched upon. Putting aside the question of suitability of the incoming king, the continued re-glorification of King Bhumibol not only unveils the desperation on the part of the monarchists to try to cling onto the glorious past, but also serves to de-legitimize the next king who will find it hard, if not impossible, to fill the big shoes of his father. He has failed even before he will be enthroned. The solution to the crisis within the walls of the palace comes down to the understanding among those in the network monarchy of the real political situation and their willingness to undergo self-reforms by abandoning, once and for all, the obsolete legacies of the absolute monarchy.