Michael Moore (unsurprisingly) backs Tim Groser for WTO director-general

mmoore

Former World Trade Organization director-general Michael Moore — a former New Zealand prime minister and the country’s current ambassador to the United States — spoke Friday afternoon at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies about world trade, regional trade and the future of the WTO’s Doha development round of negotiations — a round that begin under Moore’s tenure in 2001.new zealand iconWTO flag

The Doha round seems more hopeless than ever today, and the United States is currently ramping up for the biggest round of regional trade agreements since the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, with high hopes for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union as well as for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The latter, currently a free-trade agreement among New Zealand, Chile, Singapore and Brunei, would expand to create a Pacific free-trade zone to include the United States, Canada, México, Perú, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and others — including, quite possibly, Japan, given prime minister Shinzo Abe’s enthusiasm to join negotiations as well.

Moore (pictured above) joked that though he’d written in the past as WTO director-general against regional trade agreements — they are sometimes thought to distract from the push for global reductions in tariffs and other barriers to trade — New Zealand’s been rather promiscuous about regional trade over the past decade, noting the irony that in his current role, he’s now involved with TPP negotiations.

He cautioned that if the WTO’s member states don’t get moving in Geneva soon, the WTO’s dispute system could suffer, and he now argued that TTIP and TPP could actually point the way forward for the world trade regime.

Moore affirmed his support for New Zealand’s candidate for WTO director-general, Tim Groser, who previously served as ambassador to the WTO from 2002 to 2005, currently serves as New Zealand’s minister for trade and climate change issues, though he has nearly 30 years of experience prior to his appointment as WTO ambassador working on trade policy.  So Groser clearly known trade policy and he clearly is on the front lines of policy issues in the Asia/Pacific and TPP negotiation.

Moore added, however, that any number of candidates can do the job, and he noted that the selection process has much improved from the days when the United States and Europe would essentially decide, perhaps in tandem with Japan — Moore said it was a good thing that nominees feel they have to visit the capitals of small countries as well as large countries to make their pitch.

Three regions — the Middle East, Latin America and Africa — are vying for their candidates to become their region’s first respective director-general of the WTO (or its predecessor regime before 1995, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade).

Notably, Africa and Latin America are thought to have a decent shot.  Ghana’s former trade minister and former ambassador to the United States, Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, is believed to be the most credible candidate to emerge from sub-Saharan Africa.  Three candidates from Latin America include Costa Rican trade minister Anabel González, who was her country’s chief negotiator to the Central America-U.S.-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA); Brazil’s current permanent representative to the WTO, Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo; and former Mexican trade minister Herminio Blanco, who previous served in the 1990s under former president Ernesto Zedillo.  Continue reading Michael Moore (unsurprisingly) backs Tim Groser for WTO director-general

Suffragio has won ‘Honorable Mention’ in OAIS’s ‘Most Promising New Blog’ award

disordered-ducks

It appears as if the results for the Online Achievement in International Studies blogging awards have been announced as of a reception last night, and so I can share some very good news.

I’m happy to report that Suffragio was the runner-up in the ‘Most Promising New Blog’ category, winning Honorable Mention — that’s pretty high praise as far as I’m concerned for a project that started as a part-time blog in between billable hours at a law firm.

The winner? Political Violence @ a Glance, a blog authored by two political scientists, Barbara F. Walter at the University of California San Diego and Erica Chenoweth at the University of Denver.  So go check them out!  And really, go check out all of the blogs nominated for this award and the other awards, finalists and non-finalists alike.  I was especially delighted to discover  Ottomans and Zionists (which, as you might guess, has had plenty of material of late on Israeli-Turkish relations).

Many thanks to the following folks:

  • the readers and fans who voted for my blog in the awards and powered it into the finalist round.
  • the final-round judges (whose identities still remain somewhat mysterious) who liked what they saw at Suffragio.
  • Georgetown University’s Dan Nexon, the International Studies Association and the Duck of Minerva for putting together the awards in the first place.

If you’re wondering, The Disorder of Things won the ‘Best Group Blog,’ Daniel Drezner at Foreign Policy won ‘Best Individual Blog,’  and John M. Hobson over at The Disorder of Things won the ‘Best Blog Post’ award for ‘Eurocentrism, Racism: What’s in a Word?

To anyone from the ISA who stumbles upon my blog as a result: let me know what you like (or don’t like).  Or if you want to contribute, I’m always looking for guest posts on non-U.S. politics and policymaking.

Finally, one quick shameless plug: be sure to catch all of Suffragio‘s coverage of the Venezuelan election next week — I’ll be in the thick of it reporting and writing from Caracas.

Photo credit to SAGE Connection.

 

CAR debacle a military, diplomatic and political blow to South African leadership

zuma

For the past two weeks, while Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s legendary first post-apartheid president battled pneumonia, at age 94, in a Pretoria hospital, the successors of his political inheritance have squandered yet a bit more of the moral power Mandela bequeathed to them.centrafrique flagsouth africa flag

It’s not the first time that South African president Jacob Zuma and the current iteration of the governing African National Congress (ANC) have failed to live up to the larger-than-life image of Mandela, but the death of 13 South Africans troops (or quite possibly more) in the Central African Republic, along with 27 additional injured soldiers, out of a contingent of around 200 that came to Bangui in January, has come to a shock to South Africans — the action was South Africa’s deadliest since clashes resulting from the end of minority rule in 1994.  The deaths occurred in late March when the Séléka rebel coalition ousted current president François Bozizé (pictured below, left, in happier times with Zuma) from office, bringing to an abrupt end a short-lived January ceasefire between the Bozizé government and rebels.

bozize zuma

South Africans, moreover, aren’t used to seeing dead South African soldiers in bodybags, not least of which resulted from the defense of an autocratic president — who took power himself in a 2003 coup — against another group of rebels in a small, landlocked central African nation half a continent away.

So Zuma’s announcement this week that South African troops would withdraw from the Central African Republic entirely has been welcome news, but South Africans are still asking asking pointed questions about why South African troops were defending François Bozizé’s regime by fighting against a rebel force that included, in part, child soldiers.  Defense minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula last weekend rejected critics by mockingly asking if the troops should give sweets and blow kisses to the child rebels.

The truth seems to be that the troops were defending cozy contracts between the Bozizé administration and South African businesses, including top ANC leaders.  Zuma’s story has already changed since January: first, the troops were part of a training mission, then they were part of a security contingent to protect the trainers.

At a memorial earlier this week for the fallen troops, Zuma struck out at his critics in some fairly unsettling terms that indicated he didn’t want any further public discussion of the matter:

“The problem in South Africa is that everybody wants to run the country,” [Zuma] told a memorial service for the 13 soldiers killed in the Central African Republic (CAR) last week.

“There must also be an appreciation that military matters and decisions are not matters that are discussed in public, other than to share broader policy.”

The resulting furor has been an incredible embarrassment for South Africa — in diplomatic, political and military terms alike — drawing considerable international criticism: Continue reading CAR debacle a military, diplomatic and political blow to South African leadership