Monthly Archives: September 2013

Italy

Does this week’s political crisis in Italy represent Berlusconi’s last stand?

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The United States isn’t the only country in the world hurtling toward a governance crisis this week.Italy Flag Icon

On Saturday, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi pulled the five center-right members out of the governing coalition that’s been headed for five months by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta (pictured above, right) and called for snap elections.  The Italian stock market plunged this morning, Italian debt yields are already slightly rising and, once again, Italy, despite the best efforts of president Giorgio Napolitano, may well be headed to its second set of elections within 12 months — a move that would introduce new uncertainty within the eurozone at a time when most European leaders and global investors hoped the worst of the European economic crisis was over.

The big question is whether this truly marks the onset of another government collapse in Italy’s long-running political drama.  There’s reason to believe it’s more the last gasp of a disgraced former leader than a principled stand over competing visions for Italy’s budget and finances.  Berlusconi will shortly begin a year-long prison sentence (though due to his age, it’s likely to be house arrest or community service) after exhausting his appeals of a tax fraud conviction stemming from his leadership of Mediaset.  Berlusconi also faces appeals for conviction on charges of paying for sex with a minor and abuse of power in trying to cover it up that carries a seven-year prison sentence.  Most immediately, however, Berlusconi is angry that Italy’s parliament hasn’t lined up to lift a public service ban that now applies to Berlusconi in the wake of his tax fraud conviction.  At age 77 and 19 years after he first become Italy’s prime minister, Berlusconi faces the indignity of being stripped of his senatorial seat in October and being banned from the next election.

It’s never smart to bet against Berlusconi, whose wealth, media power and longevity in power makes him easily the most influential political leader in Italy — even today.  In the February parliamentary elections, he boosted the Italian center-right (centrodestra) coalition to within a razor-thin margin of defeating the center-left (centrosinistra) coalition.  But it’s not hard to see the latest political moment as Berlusconi lashing out in order to pull one last rabbit out of his magical political hat.  Earlier today, Berlusconi accused Napolitano of colluding with Italian judges against him.

If Berlusconi can bluster his way to early elections, he could potentially bring about a new parliament, especially with the center-left fractured ahead of a leadership election on December 8.  But that’s a big ‘if,’ and as Monday closed in Rome, there were signs that members within Berlusconi’s ranks were none too pleased with his strategy.

The center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), which narrowly won February’s parliamentary elections, holds a strong majority in the Camera dei Deputati (House of Deputies) due to election laws that provide a ‘winner’s bonus’ to the party with the most support.  It’s more chaotic in the Senato (the Senate), where seats are allocated on a state-by-state basis and where no party holds an absolute majority:

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Realistically, that means no government can form without the Democrats, but that the Democrats alone cannot govern without allies in the Senate.  When the protest, anti-austerity Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) refused to enter a governing coalition with the Democrats, the only potential coalition was a ‘grand coalition’ between the Democrats and Berlusconi’s Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  Berlusconi has since rechristened the PdL as Forza Italia, the name of his original center-right political party in the 1990s.

So Berlusconi assented and Letta formed the government in May after a gridlocked spring when Italy had merely a caretaker government and its parliament failed numerous times to elect a new president — it ultimately reelected Napolitano to another seven-year term.  For good measure, five regional senators and 19 centrist senators from the coalition headed by Mario Monti (the former pro-reform, technocratic prime minister between 2011 and 2013) joined the coalition.  That gave Letta a coalition in the upper house that includes 233 out of the 315 elected senators.

But the coalition has never been incredibly stable, as you might expect.  On the surface, the current crisis revolves around the budget (just like in the United States) — Letta and the Democrats want to allow Italy’s VAT to rise from 21% to 22%, and Berlusconi prefers to find savings within the budget to keep the VAT from rising.  The failure to find those savings last Friday precipitated Berlusconi to pull the PdL’s ministers out of the government.  The risk is that the budget deficit will rise above 3% of Italian GDP, violating the European Union’s fiscal compact and potentially causing a rise in Italian debt yields. Continue reading Does this week’s political crisis in Italy represent Berlusconi’s last stand? →

United States

How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world

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The People’s Republic of China doesn’t do government shutdowns. USflag

Neither does India, the world’s largest democracy.  Neither does Russia nor Japan nor the European Union.

The crisis that the United States faces over the next month — the nearly certain federal government shutdown set to begin on Tuesday and the US government’s potential sovereign default if the US Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling — is almost completely foreign to the rest of the world.

The vocabulary of the government budget crises that have sprung from divided government during the presidential administration of Barack Obama — from ‘sequester’ to ‘fiscal cliff’ to ‘supercommittee’ — is not only new to American politics, it’s a vocabulary that exists solely to describe phenomena exclusive to American politics.  As the Republican Party seems ready to force a budgetary crisis over the landmark health care reform law that was passed by Congress in 2010 and arguably endorsed by the American electorate when they reelected Obama last November over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, the rest of world has been left scrambling to understand the crisis, mostly because the concept of a government shutdown (or a debt ceiling — more on that below) is such an alien affair.

If, for example, British prime minister David Cameron loses a vote on the United Kingdom’s budget, it’s considered the defeat of a ‘supply bill’ (i.e., one that involves government spending), and a loss of supply would precipitate his government’s resignation.  If Italian prime minister Enrico Letta loses a vote of no confidence in the Italian parliament later this week, his government would also most likely resign.  In some cases, if cooler heads prevail, their governments might form anew (such as the Portuguese government’s reformation earlier this summer following its own crisis over budget austerity).  Otherwise, the country would hold new elections, as will happen later this month in Luxembourg after the government of longtime prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker fell over a secret service scandal.

So to the extent that a government falls, in most parliamentary systems, the voters then elect a government, or a group of parties that then must form a government, and that government must pass a budget and, well, govern.  Often, in European and other parliamentary systems, the typically ceremonial head of state plays a real role in pushing parties together to stable government.  Think of the role that Italian president Giorgio Napolitano played in bringing together both Letta’s government and the prior technocratic government headed by Mario Monti.  Or perhaps the role that the Dutch monarch played in appointing an informateur and a formateur in the Dutch cabinet formation process until the Dutch parliament stripped the monarchy of that role a few years ago.

But wait! Belgium went 535 days without a government a few years ago, you say!

That’s right — but even in the middle of that standoff, when leaders of the relatively more leftist, poorer Walloon north and the relatively conservative, richer Flemish south couldn’t pull together a governing coalition, Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme stayed on as prime minister to lead a caretaker government.  The Leterme government had ministers and policies and budgets, though Leterme ultimately pushed through budgets that reduced Belgium’s budget deficit.  No government workers were furloughed, as will happen starting Tuesday if congressional members don’t pass a continuing resolution to fund the US government.

To the north of the United States, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper caused a bit of a constitutional brouhaha when he prorogued the Canadian parliament in both 2008 and 2009 on the basis of potentially political considerations.  In Canadian parliamentary procedure, prorogation is something between a temporary recess and the dissolution of parliament — it’s the end of a parliamentary session, and the prime minister can prorogue parliament with the consent of Canada’s governor-general.  Harper raised eyebrows among constitutional scholars when he hastily prorogued the parliament in December 2008 after the center-left Liberal Party and the progressive New Democratic Party formed a coalition with the separatist Bloc Québécois in what turned out to be a failed attempt to enact a vote of no confidence against Harper’s then-minority government.

The governor-general at the time, Michaëlle Jean, took two hours to grant the prorogation — in part to send a message that the governor-general need not rubber-stamp any prime ministerial requests for proroguing parliament in the future.

Harper again advised to prorogue the parliament from the end of December 2009 through February 2010, ostensibly to keep parliament in recess through the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, though critics argued he did so to avoid investigation into his government’s knowledge of abusive treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.  Again, however, proroguing parliament didn’t shutter Canadian government offices like the US government shutdown threatens to do.

Moreover, in parliamentary systems, it’s not uncommon for a government to survive a difficult vote with the support of the loyal opposition.  But in the United States, House speaker John Boehner has typically (though not always) applied the ‘majority of the majority’ rule — or the ‘Hastert’ rule, named after the Bush-era House speaker Denny Hastert.  In essence, the rule provides that Boehner will bring for a vote only legislation that’s supported by a majority of the 233 Republicans in the 435-member House of Representatives, the lower congressional house (Democrats hold just 200 seats).  So while there may be a majority within the House willing to avoid a shutdown, it can’t materialize without the support of a majority of the Republican caucus.  That means that 117 Republicans may be able to hold the House hostage, even if 116 Republicans and all 200 Democrats want to avoid a shutdown.

Realistically, that means that anything that Boehner can pass in the House is dead on arrival in the US Senate, the upper congressional house, where Democrats hold a 54-46 advantage.

There’s simply no real analog in the world of comparative politics.  Even the concept of a debt ceiling is a bit head-scratching to foreign observers — US treasury officials say that the government will face difficulties borrowing enough money to achieve the government’s obligations if it fails to lift the debt ceiling of $16.7 trillion on or before October 17.

Denmark stands virtually alone alongside the United States in having a statutory debt ceiling that requires parliamentary assent to raise the total cumulative amount of borrowing, but it hasn’t played a significant role in Danish budget politics since its enactment in 1993:

The Danish fixed nominal debt limit—legislatively outside the annual budget process—was created solely in response to an administrative reorganization among the institutions of government in Denmark and the requirements of the Danish Constitution. It was never intended to play any role in day-to-day politics.

So far, at least, raising Denmark’s debt ceiling has always been a parliamentary formality, and it was lifted from 950 billion Danish kroner to 2 trillion Danish kroner in 2010 with support from all of Denmark’s major political parties.

Contrast that to the United States, where a fight over raising the debt ceiling in summer 2011 caused a major political crisis and major economic turmoil, leading Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+.’  The Budget Control Act, passed in early August 2011, provided that the United States would raise its debt ceiling, but institute a congressional ‘supercommittee’ to search out budget cuts.  When the supercommittee failed to identify budget savings before January 2013, it triggered $1.2 trillion in ‘sequestration’ — harsh across-the-board budget cuts to both Democratic and Republican priorities that took effect earlier this year, though they were originally designed to be so severe so that they would serve as an incentive for more targeted budget adjustments.

Despite the fact of the dual crises facing the US government in October, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note has actually declined in recent weeks, indicating that while US political turmoil may spook global investors, they still (ironically) invest in Treasury notes as a safe haven:

Screen Shot 2013-09-30 at 1.42.25 AM

Continue reading How the US government shutdown looks to the rest of the world →

India, Pakistan

Sharif, Singh meet in New York, agree to cooperate over terror attacks

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Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh met as planned in New York Sunday morning to discuss bilateral relations — even after 12 Indians were killed by suspected Pakistani terrorists in Kashmir last week. Pakistan Flag IconIndia Flag Icon

Accordingly, the resulting understanding between the two was far wider than a mere handshake of the kind rumored last week to be in the works between US president Barack Obama and Iran’s new moderate president Hassan Rowhani:

The leaders agreed that their military chiefs should meet and investigate any attacks in disputed border regions in order to prevent a recurrence, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Jalil Jilani told reporters after their one-hour breakfast meeting, held three days after the latest deadly raid in Kashmir. Jilani didn’t specify when the military officials will meet.

The two also invited each other to their respective countries, Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon said after yesterday’s meeting.  “We have actually achieved a new stage and now have some understanding of how to improve going forward and I think that is an advance on one and a half years ago,” Menon said.

It’s important to note that both sides downplayed the significance of the meeting, but there’s reason for optimism — if such a strong statement resulted as a formal matter from the meeting, there’s reason to believe that Sharif and Singh could have discussed and agreed on much more.  Sharif, in addition, agreed to ‘movement’ on Pakistan’s role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Sharif only began his third term as prime minister in June 2013, but he has indicated he wants to strengthen relations that have been strained since Partition in 1947 — primarily over India’s control of the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir along the Pakistani-Indian border, over which the two countries have gone to war twice.  In an address earlier this week to the General Assembly, Sharif said that the nuclear arms race between the two countries was a waste of massive resources.

Singh, who has been hesitant to embrace Sharif’s overtures and claimed earlier this weekend that Pakistan is an epicenter of south Asian terrorism, is in his final months after what will be a decade as prime minister in India, and he’ll be succeeded by May 2014 by either the Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) standard-bearer Rahul Gandhi, the fourth-generation scion of the party’s (and perhaps India’s) leading political family or the chief minister of Gujarat state, Narendra Modi, who will lead the conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) into next spring’s elections and whose plucky style could mean a tense period for the bilateral relationship, given his alleged role in anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002.

So even though the meeting’s potential was always limited, there’s good reason to welcome it — for at least five reasons, as I argued over the weekend in The National Interest:

  • Boosting regional security will be even more important as the United States draws down troops from the Af-Pak theater in 2014.
  • Aside from Pakistan’s election in May, Iran’s election in June and India’s elections next year, Afghanistan will elect a president next spring and Bangladesh will hold elections in January.  That means we could see five new leaders in the span of one year in southwest Asia, in addition to this year’s leadership transition in the People’s Republic of China.
  • Greater ties between India and Pakistan could boost both countries’ underperforming economies.  Freer trade is low-hanging fruit.
  • The meeting can cement Sharif’s credentials as a strong — and democratic — leader as he contemplates who will succeed Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as the next army chief of staff.
  • Finally, while the world cares more about the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, it’s easy to forget that both Pakistan and India have had nuclear weapons for a decade and a half.  Cooperation between the two countries not only improves regional stability, but global stability.

Guinea

Guinea holds successful elections after six-year delay

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Though we don’t have any election results yet, Guinea successfully held long-delayed parliamentary elections on Saturday, which in itself marks a milestone in the west African country’s democratic development as the first direct parliamentary vote since independence from France in 1958.

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Originally scheduled to be held in June 2007, and then allegedly to be held following Guinea’s first direct presidential election in 2010, the elections were rescheduled time after time until earlier this summer, when the government of Guinea’s president Alpha Condé finally agreed to a UN-brokered deal with supporters of his rival Cellou Dalein Diallo (pictured above) to provide for a peaceful, free and fair set of elections — the vote will clear the way for around $200 million in financial aid from the European Union.

Politics in Guinea, a country of just 10.25 million, largely falls on ethnic lines.  Condé counts on the Malinke ethnic group (around 30% of Guinea’s population) in the northeast to support his Rassemblement du Peuple Guinéen (RPG, Rally for the Guinean People). Diallo counts on the Fula group (around 40% of the population) in the northeast to support his Union des Forces Démocratiques de Guinée (UFDG, Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea), with Condé consolidating support from among the coastal Susu group (around 20%) in the 2010 election to defeat Diallo.

This weekend’s vote to determine the members of Guinea’s Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) will set the stage for the next direct presidential election scheduled to take place in 2015.

Despite relative mineral wealth — chiefly through bauxite, an aluminum ore that constitutes over three-fifths of Guinean exports — the country’s GDP per capita is almost one-half of neighboring Senegal’s.  There are a lot of historical and institutional reasons for that disparity — Guinea was the only country in west Africa to elect independence in 1958, which severed the links between Guinea and France, even after African independence became a fait accompli two years later.  That meant that Guinea took a turn toward an authoritarian, socialist economy under the aegis of the Soviet Union through the Cold War under its first post-independence leader Ahmed Sékou Touré.  Economic reform and a somewhat less harsh political environment under the rule of Lansana Conté between 1984 and 2008 improved the lives of Guineans, but the country lags behind its potential output.

Conté’s death allowed Guinea’s turn, after a half century, toward democracy, though it’s been a difficult transition.  Saturday was the four-year anniversary of the killing of around 150 pro-democracy activists in Conakry, the Guinean capital, and around 50 activists have been killed in the leadup to Saturday’s elections.

Though Condé fought for years to bring democracy to Guinea, Diallo has challenged his government for ruling the country as an autocrat, and there are fears that the progress, however fragile, of the past four years may already be unraveling, especially if the government and opposition cannot agree whether the election was fundamentally fair, exacerbating historic ethnic tension between the Fula and Malinke groups:  Continue reading Guinea holds successful elections after six-year delay →

Austria

Austrian election results: grand coalition reelected, Freedom Party solidifies gains on far right

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With nearly all of the votes counted in Austria’s election today, it appears that the current grand coalition led by center-left chancellor Werner Faymann will continue — for up to another five years.austria flag

Just one week after Germans massively supported chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-right Christian Democrats for steering Germany largely unscathed through the worst of the economic crisis, Austrians appeared ready to do the same for Faymann, though his Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria) did not score the kind of overwhelming victory that Merkel’s Christian Democrats won last week — the SPÖ lost over 2% of the vote since the September 2008 election.

But their coalition partners, the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party), also lost 2.2% of the vote from 2008.  Together, however, the two parties won enough seats (99) to continue to hold an absolute majority in Austria’s 183-member Nationalrat (National Council), the chief house of the Austrian parliament.

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But the far-right, anti-EU, anti-immigrant Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria) won just four seats less than the People’s Party and it won over 21% of the vote.  That’s largely because voters on the far right abandoned the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future of Austria), the splinter group that former Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider founded in 2005.

Believe it or not, today’s election was the first one without Haider in nearly two decades following his sensational death in October 2008, and the BZÖ lost over 7% from the 2008 election — and missed the 4% electoral hurdle required to hold seats in Austria’s National Council.  Given Haider’s absence from the political scene, many BZÖ supporters turned back to the Freedom Party.  In any event, it’s certainly a huge victory for FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache (pictured above), whose party gained more support than any of the parties that contested the 2008 election.  Strache is one of the big winners in today’s election, and that will amplify his voice as the chief opposition leader in Austria.

nationalrat

Continue reading Austrian election results: grand coalition reelected, Freedom Party solidifies gains on far right →

Austria

Austria election tomorrow likely to result in grand coalition, reelection for Faymann

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Austria goes to the polls tomorrow to select 183 members of the Nationalrat (National Council), the lower house of Austria’s parliament — but by far the most important.  What better musical selection than Johann Strauss II’s Kaiserwaltzer?austria flag

Austria’s elections are determined on the basis of proportional representation, so no matter who wins, Austria will have a coalition government.

The most likely result, according to polls, is the continuation of a ‘red-black’ or ‘grand’ coalition between the two dominant parties in Austrian politics, the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria) and the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party).

Polls also showed the anti-EU, anti-immigration, right-wing Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria) gaining ground, but still in third place.

Though Austria’s chancellor Werner Faymann leads a consensus-driven government, he’s in some ways the opposite of German chancellor Angela Merkel, whose own center-right party won a huge victory just last weekend.  With an approach that’s leaned away from the austerity budgets of much of the rest of Europe, Faymann has boosted Austrian spending over the past five years on stimulative measures, including a massive commitment to job training.  That’s left Austria with the lowest unemployment rate among the 28 member states of the European Union.

Even if the SPÖ and the ÖVP win the largest and second-largest shares of the vote, they may still not win enough seats to form a majority because up to seven parties could win seats today.

Austria’s Die Grünen – Die Grüne Alternative (Green Party) will likely be the fourth-largest party in the National Council, but three smaller parties could also enter the parliament — the new eurosceptic Team Stronach, founded last year by Austrian-Canadian businessman Frank Stronach; the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future of Austria), a liberal splinter group of the FPÖ; and Das Neue Österreich (NEOS, The New Austria), a new liberal party that formed last year as well.

India, Pakistan

Forget Obama-Rowhani — this weekend’s about the Singh-Sharif meeting

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While we still bask in the glow of tectonic movement between the United States and Iran, as well as an apparent resolution among the Security Council over Syria’s chemical weapons, there’s a third diplomatic front to keep an eye on.Pakistan Flag IconIndia Flag Icon

For all of the hype over the potential meeting between US president Barack Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rowhani earlier this week at the United Nations General Assembly, tomorrow’s meeting between Pakistan’s new prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India’s outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh comes at a crucial time — in the wake of an attack by Pakistani militants earlier this week in contested Jammu that seemed designed to keep the two south Asian neighbors at odds.

Sharif is just barely 100 days into his third term as prime minister and Singh is a lame-duck who will leave office no later than May 2014 after India’s next elections.  While there’s a limit to what the meeting can accomplish, it’s important for at least five reasons, I argue this morning in The National Interest:

  • Boosting regional security will be even more important as the United States draws down troops from the Af-Pak theater in 2014.
  • Aside from Pakistan’s election in May, Iran’s election in June and India’s elections next year, Afghanistan will elect a president next spring and Bangladesh will hold elections in January.  That means we could see five new leaders in the span of one year in southwest Asia, in addition to this year’s leadership transition in the People’s Republic of China.
  • Greater ties between India and Pakistan could boost both countries’ underperforming economies.  Freer trade is low-hanging fruit.
  • The meeting can cement Sharif’s credentials as a strong — and democratic — leader as he contemplates who will succeed Ashfaq Parvez Kayani as the next army chief of staff.
  • Finally, while the world cares more about the potential of a nuclear-armed Iran, it’s easy to forget that both Pakistan and India have had nuclear weapons for a decade and a half.  Cooperation between the two countries not only improves regional stability, but global stability.

 

Iran, United States

Obama-Rowhani call a historic first step in securing better US-Iranian relations

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Today, for the first time since 1979, the leaders of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran held a bilateral discussion when US president Barack Obama called Iranian president Hassan Rowhani to discuss a potential solution to the international stalemate over Iran’s nuclear energy program.USflagIran Flag Icon

It wasn’t the handshake that everyone thought might have been possible earlier this week in New York at the United Nations General Assembly, but it’s still a remarkable step — and could result in real movement between Iran and the ‘P5 + 1’ countries over the future of the Iranian nuclear program and crippling UN sanctions.

It’s important to remember that there’s a long history of misfires on US-Iranian relations, with former Iranian presidents like Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami making overtures to the United States that went unrewarded — everything from Iranian assistance to Bosnian fighters in the 1990s to Iranian assistance to bring the Northern Alliance to support the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Even Rowhani, as Iran’s first nuclear negotiator in 2003, was burned when he offered a moratorium on further Iranian enrichment.  That concession led to nothing but the empowerment of anti-American hardliners, who came to power with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005.

It follows a relationship that, even before the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite ayatollahs to power in Iran, was troubled — Iranians, even today, haven’t forgotten the role that the United States played in toppling former Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and boosting the repressive regime of the Iranian shah through the 1979 revolution.

As I wrote shortly after Rowhani’s staggering election as president in June 2013:

The Obama administration’s challenge is to forge a strategic path with Iran’s new president that undermines the hardliners in both Iran and in the United States.  Whether Iran likes it or not, it has to demonstrate to the world that it’s not pursuing clandestine nuclear weaponry.  But whether the West likes it or not, it must ultimately acknowledge that Iran — a sovereign nation of 75 million people — has a right to its own nuclear energy program on terms that respect the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic, and Obama will have to back up his weekend olive branch with substantive alms that show the United States is serious.

The discussion follows a potentially even more historic meeting between US secretary of state John Kerry and Iran’s even more moderate, English-speaking foreign minister Javad Zarif (pictured below) over a potential breakthrough in the standoff over Iran’s nuclear energy program.

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One telephone call between presidents and one meeting between foreign ministers doesn’t exactly mean that Iran and the United States will have solved all of their issues.  Rowhani’s reluctance to meet with Obama in New York earlier this week demonstrates that, while Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (who remains the most powerful leader in Iran) may have blessed Rowhani’s diplomatic initiatives, strong opposition remains within the Islamic Republic, including within the conservative ‘principlist’ camp and from within the Revolutionary Guards.  The Obama administration will also face opposition — from its Middle Eastern ally Israel (which boycotted Rowhani’s largely conciliatory speech to the UN on Monday) and from neoconservative hawks from within the Republican Party in the United States.

But there’s a deal here: the United States doesn’t want to go to war with Iran, Iran doesn’t necessarily want nuclear weapons (and it especially wants Israel to give up its not-so-secret nuclear weapons) and Iran desperately wants an end to the sanctions that have harmed its economy.

This week’s diplomatic advances also follow the surprisingly moderate response from Iran over the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, even as the United States was considering a unilateral strike Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the time:

Although Iran has become a pariah state in recent years over its nuclear energy program (and the corresponding US and European fear that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapons program as well), many Iranians were the victims of the last major chemical weapons attack in the Middle East when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein deployed mustard gas and sarin against Iran during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s — with the knowledge and acquiescence of the United States, which wholeheartedly supported Iraq in the 1980s.

Rowhani made clear through his presidential Twitter feed this week that he condemned the use of chemical weapons, in Syria or elsewhere.

Rowhani, a former Rafsanjani aide who united both the moderate camp and Khatami’s more liberal camp (including the ‘Green movement’ supporters from the contested 2009 election), was elected in large part for the perception that he could negotiate an end to international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.  He handily defeated five other challengers to win a first-round victory in the June election, including two principlists — Iran’s former hardline nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and populist (and popular) Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf:

Continue reading Obama-Rowhani call a historic first step in securing better US-Iranian relations →

Venezuela

Show us the long-form, Nicolás! (In which ‘birtherism’ comes to Venezuela.)

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So birtherism isn’t limited to the United States and the tea party movement’s nutty claim that US president Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and not in the US state of Hawaii. Venezuela Flag Icon

As it turns out, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is taking some heat over accusations that he was actually born in Colombia, not in Caracas, the capital of the country that he leads.

Maduro’s government is sinking under the weight of power outages, a return to expropriation (including a local toilet paper factory) and continued shortages of basic goods due to inefficient foreign currency exchange and a gap between the real and official value of the Venezuelan bolívar, which has led to ridiculous means to game the Venezuelan currency — one story earlier this week demonstrated how flights out of Venezuela are nearly 100% booked for months in advance as a way to arbitrage the difference in the official and actual rates.

Maduro, whose country is essentially locked out of conventional global debt markets, went to Beijing earlier this week (pictured above) to procure another $5 billion in financing (and $14 billion in development of Venezuela’s oil-rich Orinoco belt) from the Chinese government.  He picked another odd fight with the United States and came up with a truly nutty excuse for skipping the UN General Assembly meeting this week, which follows the possible implication of Venezuela’s government in the brazen attempt to transport 1.3 tones of cocaine from Caracas to Paris on an Air France flight earlier this month.

Rumors have swirled over the past months about Maduro’s birthplace and his nationality, but his chief rival in the April presidential election, Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, is ratcheting up the pressure.  Capriles and Walter Márquez, an opposition member of Venezuela’s Asamblea Nacional (National Assembly), took up the claim yesterday that Maduro was born in Bogotá:

Márquez claimed that he has documents and testimonies attesting to Maduro’s dual nationality.  “Nicolás Maduro lived in the Carora neighborhood, in Cúcuta (Colombia). There are testimonies of people who spent time with him. We found the record of the birth certificate of Nicolás Maduro’s mother. She was born in Cúcuta. I contacted people who can testify that Maduro was born in Bogotá,” Márquez stressed.

Márquez added that so far the supporting documents attesting that Maduro’s father is a Venezuelan have not been found. “We have a copy of the marriage certificate of his (Maduro’s) parents, and the birth certificate of his older sister. Later on, I will disclose documental and testimonial evidence proving Maduro’s Colombian nationality,” he stressed.

Maduro’s doing a pretty good job of discrediting himself these days, so further discrediting Maduro (instead of chavismo more generally) won’t by itself do much good for the opposition — and it could backfire against them.  By pursuing a ‘birther’ strategy, the opposition is giving the Venezuelan military or rivals within the chavista elite, such as National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello, an opportunity to remove Maduro and start anew once Venezuela’s basketcase economy truly hits rock bottom.

Even if Márquez and Capriles somehow had smoking-gun proof that Maduro was somehow ineligible for the Venezuelan presidency, it’s also pretty clear that Maduro could claim that he renounced his Colombian citizenship or he could do so and still remain eligible for the presidency.  But even if he didn’t, does anyone think that a chavista-dominated court system would even entertain removing Maduro from office?  It’s hard to see just why the opposition is pursuing this strategy, because it telescopes to the Venezuelan electorate that Capriles and the opposition are less interested in making their lives better than scoring political points — or even plotting a strategy that could win power.

But under the constitutional process for nationality in Colombia and Venezuela, it’s easy to see how Maduro might wriggle out of any ‘birther’ scandal, even without leaning on Venezuela’s corroded state institutions.

Article 41 of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian’ constitution — promulgated by late president Hugo Chávez in 1999 — states that only Venezuelans by birth who have no other nationality shall be permitted to hold the offices of President: Continue reading Show us the long-form, Nicolás! (In which ‘birtherism’ comes to Venezuela.) →

Austria

Meet Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, Europe’s Superman of Keynesian economics

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Austrians go to the polls on September 29, and just as with Germany’s election last weekend, voters seem inclined to reward a government that has largely kept Austria’s economy strong through a time of recession and unemployment throughout much of the rest of Europe.austria flag

But German chancellor Angela Merkel has steered a largely moderate, pragmatic course over the past eight years in Germany, and it’s arguable that Germany’s economic success owes much to its position as Europe’s largest economy and its role as a leading global high-tech manufacturer than to any Merkel-era economic policies — if anything, Merkel’s center-left predecessor Gerhard Schröder pushed through the policies (including the Hartz IV labor and welfare reforms) that steeled Germany for the economic storm of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

In Austria, however, it’s been an even more sanguine story.

The country has a 4.8% unemployment rate, according to Eurostat, the lowest among all 27 countries in the European Union.  Its GDP dropped just 3.8% in 2008 (a narrower drop than in Germany), and it returned to growth thereafter — even in 2012, it managed to record GDP growth of 0.8% while most of the eurozone was mired in recession.

So what has Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann and his government done over the past five years in order to steer Austria out of the straits of the eurozone morass?  As it turns out, a lot.

While several European countries have served as battlegrounds for harsh transatlantic battles among economists over economic policy (the usual suspects, but also places like Iceland, Latvia and Estonia), you would think that neo-Keynesian economists would be shouting from the rooftops about Austria’s economic stewardship.  Don’t confuse Austria’s economic policy today with Austrian economics, as such, which is something very much the opposite.

Since his election in September 2008, Faymann has led a grand coalition between his own center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria) and the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party), and it’s about as anti-austerity a government as Europe has seen.

Given the strength of the Austrian labor movement, Austria immediately pursued the kind of work-sharing policies that Germany also adopted in the aftermath of the crisis when aggregate demand tumbled — the idea that shorter working hours for everyone would be a way to disperse the slack in the economy, thereby avoiding the wave of layoffs that we saw in the United States.

But Faymann also pushed through job training legislation that massively empowered Austria’s Arbeitsmarktservice (AMS, Austrian Employment Service), including strong benefits for the unemployed and the guarantee of a paid training internship for young Austrians in the marketplace.  Austria’s labor market has performed exactly the opposite of that in the United States — unemployment rose in Austria because more workers were seeking jobs, while the US unemployment rate has dropped partly because so many American workers have given up on finding employment.

Faymann also allowed Austria’s public debt to rise from around 60% in 2008 to 75% today in order to finance the jobs legislation and other stimulative measures to shore up Austria’s economy.  His government also took the lead in convincing the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to provide up to €125 billion to stabilize banks in the Central European and South Eastern European (CESEE) region, a strategy that worked to reassure global investors.  A financial panic in CESEE region countries, such as Hungary, would have led to massive losses for Austrian banks as well.  The idea is that a credible commitment from government at the outset of a financial crisis will stave off a larger financial panic.  Contrast the far less proactive European response to the wider sovereign debt crisis — it was only in July 2012, the eurozone crisis’s third year, that European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said he would do ‘whatever it takes’ to save the euro.

Faymann is campaigning on a platform of instituting a wealth tax on millionaires and institutionalizing a levy on the assets of large banks, both of which Faymann hopes will keep income inequality relatively low in a society that already has one of the world’s lowest Gini coefficients.

With a record like that, why isn’t Paul Krugman cheerleading for Faymann from the op-ed pages of The New York Times?  Here’s a European leader who has pursued as close to a Krugmanite economic policy as anyone.

For one, you could easily argue that Austria’s just been lucky.   Continue reading Meet Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, Europe’s Superman of Keynesian economics →

Austria

Austrian NEOS may win seats in Nationalrat in resurrection of liberal politics

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While Germany’s major liberal party suffered a historic defeat in last weekend’s parliamentary elections, a new Austrian party may win enough seats to return a liberal voice to Austria’s parliament for the first time in nearly 20 years in Austria’s national elections this weekend.austria flag

If it can win 4% of the vote on Sunday, the Das Neue Österreich (NEOS, The New Austria) could enter the Nationalrat, the key 183-member chamber of Austria’s parliament, which would mean that free-market and social liberals would have a voice in Austrian parliamentary politics for the first time since the Liberales Forum (Liberal Forum) lost all of its seats in the 1999 parliamentary elections.  Polls in the lead-up to Austria’s election show the NEOS gaining strength, but still hovering between 3% and the 4% electoral hurdle, and the NEOS continues to gain credibility and momentum in the final days of the campaign.

What’s more, if the NEOS enter the parliament, and the two current governing parties, the center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria) of chancellor Werner Faymann and the center-right Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, Austrian People’s Party), fail to win an absolute majority of seats to continue a two-party grand coalition, the NEOS could conceivably enter government as well in Europe’s first ‘red-black-pink’ coalition.

Given the coziness of Austria’s political elite, and the fact that grand coalitions have dominated Austrian governance in the postwar era, there’s much to recommend the return of a fresh and liberal voice to Austrian politics — or even Austrian government.  Not too shabby for a party that didn’t exist one year ago.

The NEOS were founded as a political party in October 2012, mainly as an alliance of what remains of the Liberal Forum and the Young Liberals, another small party, under the leadership of Matthias Strolz.  Since September, the party’s lead parliamentary candidate has been Hans-Peter Haselsteiner, the CEO of Austrian construction company Strabag and a Liberal deputy in the Nationalrat in the 1990s — it was a stunning reversal for Haselsteiner, who had previously remained somewhat aloof from the NEOS earlier this year.  Not only does Haselsteiner have the deep pockets to finance a strong showing, he’s also one of the most well-known liberals in the country.  Austrians vote for parties through an open-list proportional representation system, so if the NEOS surpass the 4% threshold, the NEOS should count on at least seven seats in the Nationalrat.

Moreover, if the NEOS do enter the Nationalrat, they could lower the total number of seats that the SPÖ and ÖVP can hope to win, making it even more likely that the SPÖ and ÖVP will be forced to look for a third coalition partner to cobble together a governing majority.

In an ironic twist, the NEOS could well enter Austria’s parliament just days after Germany’s Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) narrowly failed to win 5% of the vote and, accordingly, Germany’s liberal party failed to win a single seat in the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, for the first time since 1949.  Continue reading Austrian NEOS may win seats in Nationalrat in resurrection of liberal politics →

Switzerland

Why do the neutral Swiss love military conscription so much?

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With most of my writing efforts focused on Germany for the past week, I neglected to spend much time writing (or thinking) about last weekend’s referendum in Switzerland, where voters once again rejected an effort to abolish mandatory conscription in the Swiss military.swiss

Swiss voters overwhelmingly opposed abolition — by a vote of 73.2% to 26.8%.

Here’s more background from Reuters:

Under Swiss law, all able-bodied men are required to take part in compulsory military service between the ages of 18 and 34. Recruits complete 18-21 weeks of basic training followed by yearly refresher courses of around 19 days.

Critics say the concept is antiquated, and question the need for an army, which at roughly 150,000 troops is the same size as the Austrian, Belgian, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish armed forces combined.

It’s a pretty staggering defeat for the anti-conscription and pacifist forces in Switzerland — in December 2001, 21.9% of the electorate voted to replace the Swiss army with a more benign peace force, and in November 1989, fully 35.6% of the electorate voted to abolish the Swiss army altogether.

Why would the Swiss cling so tenaciously to its military force?  After all, the Swiss army fought its last war in the Napoleonic Wars in alliance with Great Britain and Russia — and that war ended in 1815.  Its tradition of neutrality in international affairs is so strong that it’s not a member of the European Union (though it is part of the European single market and a party to the Schengen free-travel zone) and it joined the United Nations only in 2002.

Swiss defense minister Ueli Maurer argues that abolishing military service could break the link between the Swiss people and its army.  But it turns out there are a lot of decent reasons for keeping conscription in place, and they don’t all have to do with the vague notion of ‘tradition.’

At the outset, it’s important to keep in mind that conscription in Switzerland isn’t exactly the same thing as, say, the three-year tour of duty that most Israeli men begin at age 18 (it’s two years for Israeli women).  From an economic standpoint, there are opportunity costs to maintaining Swiss conscription, but those costs are far smaller than in a place like Israel because the Swiss conscription commitment is so much smaller.

But there’s also a difference in the nature of the risk as well.  Since 2007, Swiss conscripts aren’t even issued a box of ammunition.  The risks of a shooting war with neighboring Austria aren’t exactly the same as the very real risks of any number of security challenges that conscripts in the Israeli Defense Forces could face — and have faced in Lebanon and from the Shiite Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas in recent years.

There’s also something to the idea that mandatory conscription forces governments to think harder about the consequences of deploying troops into foreign misadventures.  There’s a reason why antiwar Democrats in the 2000s in the United States kept pushing for the reintroduction of a military draft — it’s a way to force all segments of society to feel the gravity of military engagement, and it increases the political costs of putting your military forces in the line of danger.  Nonetheless, it’s hard to believe that, but for conscription, Switzerland would have otherwise spent the 20th century engaged in ill-advised martial exercises. (Nor is it necessarily credible that the Swiss army effectively deterred an invasion from Nazi Germany — instead, there’s mounting evidence that the Swiss and their banks were complicit with the Nazi regime).

It’s also important to remember that Switzerland is a federal confederation of 26 highly autonomous cantons with four language-speaking groups of citizens — German, French, Italian and Romansh.  The conscription requirement is a way to pull together young individuals from Switzerland’s multiple traditions, so you can think of conscription as less a military obligation and more of a nation-building exercise — or even an exercise in personal and social growth.

There’s something to this, too.  Since the end of the Lebanese civil war, the Lebanese military has had this effect, and it’s helped contribute to the wide respect that the military holds in Lebanon.  Military service in the United States during World War II brought together young men from very different parts of the country and served as a key catalyst in isolating the American south’s segregation — if black men were capable of fighting and dying in Europe, why shouldn’t they have the same rights as everyone else?  Though conscription in the Yugoslav People’s Army until 1992 didn’t stop the disintegration of the Balkans, imagine how much stronger Bosnia and Herzegovina might be today if it instituted the tradition of conscription in a nation-building peacekeeping force.

Continue reading Why do the neutral Swiss love military conscription so much? →

Germany, United States

That ‘transcending ideology’ thing from Obama 2008? Angela Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t.

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Last Sunday’s election wasn’t just a victory for the German center-right — it was a very personalized victory for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who will become just the third postwar chancellor to serve three terms.*  USflagGermany Flag Icon

Germans largely saw Merkel as the only viable chancellor candidate (sorry, Peer Steinbrück!), and they flocked to support Merkel for steering Germany largely unscathed through a global financial crisis and a subsequent eurozone crisis in an export-oriented economy that’s still growing and producing jobs for Germans.  They admire the fact that she’s steered the eurozone through the worst of its sovereign debt crisis and avoided the single currency’s implosion, all while tying bailouts for Greece and other Mediterranean countries to austerity and reform measures that would make more profligate countries (like Greece) more ‘German’ in their approach to state finances.

But beyond the infantilizing ‘Mutti’ meme or the idea that Merkel represents a ‘safe pair of hands,’ she has won over many Germans because she’s been such a pragmatic and non-ideological leader.  Though Merkel leads the ostensibly center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party), it’s really hard to know what the CDU stands for these days other than the continuity of another Merkel government — and that’s likely to pose a difficult challenge for Merkel’s successor in 2017 or 2021 or whenever.

Merkel’s made some ideological compromises to her Bavarian counterparts, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union)  — for instance, she has avoided the question of marriage equality, preferring that the German constitutional court largely deliver equal rights and benefits to same-sex partners at a time when both conservative governments (in the United Kingdom) and leftist governments (in France) deliver legislative solutions.

By and large, though, Merkel eschews ideological litmus tests.  Merkel campaigned on an economic agenda that varies only slightly with that of her rival center-left Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party).  While the SPD favored a €8.50 minimum wage, Merkel pushed a sector-by-sector minimum wage approach.  Both parties supported increasing elements of the German social welfare model, such as child allowances and a rise in pensions.  While the SPD and other leftists pushed for tax increases, Merkel has been content to draw a line at merely no tax increases, to the disappointment of Merkel’s liberal coalition partners, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), who were completely wiped out of Germany’s parliament in Sunday’s elections.  After the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima reactor in Japan in 2011, Merkel announced that Germany would phase out nuclear energy, thereby accomplishing in one fell swoop one of the German left’s top priorities since the 1970s — and perhaps the top policy goal of the Die Grünen (the Greens).

German political scientists refer to it as ‘asymmetric demobilisation‘ — Merkel has so blurred the lines between her position and the SPD position that on the top issues — economic policy, Europe, foreign affairs — the SPD can’t draw an effective contrast to her.

Merkel, in essence, has governed as a perfectly non-ideological leader.

Sound familiar?

It should to most Americans, who elected Barack Obama in 2008 in large part due to his pledge to transcend the increasingly polarized politics of the United States.  Here’s what Obama said upon accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president that summer:

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past…. For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past. You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.

In effect, Merkel has done, in her quiet and unassuming way, what Obama has utterly failed to do — govern in a way that transcends traditional ideological divides.

You could say that Obama’s rhetoric is the standard boilerplate that any change candidate serves up in American politics — the same ‘Washington-is-not-the-answer’ tropes that Republicans and Democrats have rolled out since Ronald Reagan swept to power 33 years ago on an appealing anti-government message.  But Obama’s reputation in 2008 came mostly from his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention on this precise issue:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that Obama genuinely believed he could transform the political dynamic in American politics.

But his absolute lack to do so is perhaps Obama’s greatest failure as a president.  Say whatever you want about his policies, the Obama era in many ways constitutes a high-water mark for American political polarization.  Republicans now lean even more to the right, in the thrall of a tea party movement that demands no compromise from Republican officeholders.

There are all sorts of rationales that explain why Merkel has succeeded in becoming non-ideological and why Obama hasn’t — but none of them are completely satisfying.  Continue reading That ‘transcending ideology’ thing from Obama 2008? Angela Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t. →

Rwanda

RPF win in last week’s elections doesn’t pull Rwanda any closer to a stable democracy

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Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) overwhelmingly won last week’s elections with a staggering 76% of the vote.rwanda

That’s not surprising, given that Kagame’s been so intent on keeping any real opposition from gaining any real power.

One opposition party, the Green Party, won official recognition as a political party only earlier this summer, and its deputy in Rwanda’s parliament was murdered before prior 2010 elections — it’s hard not to conclude that it was intimidated from running this time around.  Another opposition party, the FDU-Inkingi, was not permitted to run in the elections, and its leader Victoire Ingabire sits in prison on politically motivated charges.

Even in a world where sub-Saharan African democracy is growing stronger, Rwanda’s result is disappointing.  The most you could take away from Rwanda’s elections are that they are somehow building the norm of regularized elections.  In most sub-Saharan African countries, we’d call Kagame what he is — an anti-democratic strongman.  His party, which springs out of the rebel military force that spent much of the early 1990s fighting against Rwanda’s central government and that took power in 1994, will control the lion’s share of the 80 seats in the unicameral Chamber of Deputies.

All signs point to his genuine popularity, however, and it’s hard to argue with an average GDP growth rate of over 8% since he formally became Rwanda’s president in 2000.  In economic terms, Kagame’s delivered the best results of perhaps any African leader in the past decade — and he’s done it without oil or other mineral wealth.

But as I wrote before Rwanda’s elections, for all of the success Kagame has made in pacifying Rwanda (after all, we are only 19 years removed from the devastating genocide that took 800,000 lives in three months) and for building its economic infrastructure, there’s a nagging sense that all of Kagame’s progress could unwind if he leaves office without having built a political infrastructure as well:

But Kagame’s third task is perhaps the most important of all — crafting a political system that will guarantee and institutionalize the gains that Rwanda has made in the past two decades under Kagame.  Kagame himself is term-limited to just two seven-terms in office as president, which means that, barring constitutional amendments, he will step down in 2017 — that’s just four years away.  So we’re now entering a crucial time for Rwanda and for Kagame.  And next month’s elections are the sole opportunity for electoral participation between now and 2017.

It’s easy enough to understand why Kagame fears the role of a truly free media or political parties, because both supposedly benign institutions played a major role in amplifying the Hutu interahamwe militias in the early 1990s that carried out most of the 1994 genocide.  All too often, Western good-government types don’t understand how the liberalization of Rwanda’s political sphere and open radio airwaves accelerated the genocide.

Even if you accept that Kagame’s restrictions on freedom are acceptable in light of Rwanda’s very unique experience, or that a little authoritarianism goes a long way in stabilizing an economy (think of Kagame as a kind of 21st century, central African Park Chung-hee), you can still doubt whether Kagame is doing enough to build a formal political structure for Rwanda.  Even in non-democratic countries like the People’s Republic of China, a (surprisingly responsive) political system still exists to tend to policymaking, provide stability, deal with issues of succession, and the like.

Though it’s now a faux pas in Rwanda to make reference to ‘Hutu’ or ‘Tutsi,’ the fact remains that the RPF is a chiefly Tutsi force that liberated Rwanda from the grip of a largely Hutu-based wave of terror.  While Kagame’s administration has worked to approach justice very gently through the use of gacaca community-based trials, the absence of many high-level Hutus in government risks putting Rwanda in the same position that it was throughout the colonial era — a largely Tutsi elite and an increasingly resentful Hutu mass.  Today, Kagame remains popular with a wide swath of all Rwandans, but that could one day change.  Or a successor to Kagame could not be as fortunate in office.  What may work today for Rwanda may work only because of the legitimate role Kagame played in healing such a broken nation.  That’s why it’s even more important for Kagame to build a lasting, broad-based political system for his country, even if it’s an artificially choreographed system designed to keep both Hutu and Tutsis committed to stability — think of Lebanon’s stage-managed democratic system, for instance.

All of which makes last week’s parliamentary elections a missed opportunity to build whatever follows the Kagame era.

Books, United States

Light posting day

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It’s one of those autumn days in Washington, DC when you want to pull away from General Assembly speeches (though they’re important) and world politics to just take a moment to live — or grab a book and enjoy one of those post-summer sublime days.Washington_DC_Icon

Luckily, I had one of those books in my hands already: Tyler Cowen’s new book, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

It’s superb, as expected.  If the message of his January 2011 book The Great Stagnation was we aren’t as rich as we thought we were, the message of Average is Over is we aren’t as smart as we thought we were.