Betting on Different Horse

Today, only the most ideologically committed, old-school liberal internationalist would hold that we have not moved out of the world of the “rules-based international order,” in which countries were all meant to obey a set of common rules — rules established by Western powers during the Cold War and thought to be triumphant after that war’s end.

As Julien Barnes-Dacey and Jeremy Shapiro, both of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Foreign Policy:

[T]he West has embraced a comforting illusion about a liberal rules-based order . . . International law could tame war, defend sovereignty, and protect human rights, all the same time.

It was a wonderful vision, but it never had a chance. The temptations of power meant that the West repeatedly violated its own rules. Western actors invaded countries when they felt the need (Iraq), hired fancy lawyers to exempt themselves from the laws they expected others to follow (Kosovo), preached human rights while cutting deals with authoritarian regimes (Saudi Arabia), and set up an International Criminal Court to try African leaders (including those from Sudan) while refusing to recognize its jurisdiction over themselves (the United States). For the less powerful countries, the rules-based order based was always little more than hypocrisy on a global scale . . . [and they] have become increasingly vocal in their frustration about the hypocrisy at the core of the global order.

They have taken particular issue with the West’s demand that they sacrifice core material interests in defense of this so-called order, a step that the West has always been wholly unwilling to do itself. So U.S. and European entreaties that global states cut financial and energy ties to Russia following the invasion of Ukraine have fallen on deaf ears, while Western attempts to rally international support behind Israel have faltered.

A key point that is now fully evident — as discussed in a recent post on the SIGnal blog (see “The Pulling Apart,” 1 November 2023) — is that we cannot even agree what the rules might be for a rules-based international order. And it has become clear that many of us do not really want to agree, because different rules reflect different identities. In effect, they say :“I am different from you, I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t follow your rules.”

So if we have moved de facto if not yet entirely de jure out of the rules-based order, then what have we moved into?  

We now live in a multi-polar world, with two superpowers, possibly two other major powers (Russia and the EU), and many more middle powers — countries such as Turkey, India and Brazil, with powerful economies and sometimes powerful militaries. Most of these are in no mood, and see no need going forward, to kowtow to Western interests, policies or rules. We have moved into a world that is fragmented and continues to splinter, very probably with more transitory international alliances based on the practical or Realpolitik needs of the moment — a world, unfortunately, of more conflict  between states, among states and non-state actors, and within states themselves.

It is also a world in which economic factors will probably not move nearly as much in tandem. In a de-globalized world, what is sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander. Events that significantly disadvantage one region or nation have always had the potential to significantly advantage another region or nation. The tightly coupled globalized order has to some extent dampened this effect. The dampening is now likely to decrease or even end.

Climate change and related resource challenges will exacerbate this “performance decoupling” and will do so in ways that are largely unpredictable. Expanded geopolitical conflict — related to all the factors mentioned above — will add fuel to the fire. Finally, these and other factors are rife with feedback loops that can intensify effects, again, in ways that are often not detectable until they are manifest in events.

All of this means that the performance of economies and of investments in different places — and in different sectors in different places — are likely to be far more variable, discontinuous and uncoupled than has been the norm during the past 30 years.

This brings both risk and opportunity. Investors who keep their eyes on the ball can take advantage of opportunities related to performance discontinuities, arbitrage and the like. In other words, they can bet on different horses. Nevertheless, we will not be living in the simpler environment of the past few decades, a time when stable trends could be projected to drive overall macro performance. Change closes off old possibilities and opens up new ones. We need to think differently to maximize them.

An Unexpected Unity at Riyadh Summit

An Unexpected Unity at Riyadh Summit

On Saturday, 57 Arab and Muslim nations called for a halt to military operations in Gaza, dismissing Israel's self-defense rationale for its actions against Palestinians. In an extraordinary joint summit in Riyadh, the 22-member Arab League and the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (to which all Arab League members belong) unanimously called for the International Criminal Court to probe “war crimes and crimes against humanity” being perpetrated by Israel in the Palestinian territories. The summit also urged an arms embargo against Israel and the establishment of an Arab-Islamic committee to supervise diplomatic efforts aimed at securing a ceasefire in Gaza. The summit called for the immediate entry of humanitarian aid convoys to bring food, medicine and fuel into the Gaza Strip. Leaders including Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attended: the Sunni and Shia worlds alike, and the newly welcomed-back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Raisi’s trip to Saudi Arabia is the first by an Iranian head of state in more than a decade. Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman presented himself as leader of the Arab-Muslim world, inviting both allies and foes.

Led by Algeria, certain Arab nations advocated for a total severance of diplomatic ties with Israel. However, other Arab countries that have established diplomatic relations with Israel resisted this stance, emphasizing the importance of maintaining open channels with the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Just as interesting was the abrupt resurgence of the Palestinian cause in the awareness of Arab and Muslim nations. Deep divisions continue to impede the formulation of a shared vision to conclude the ongoing conflict and establish a diplomatic framework for what lies ahead. But what led to the merging of the Arab League and OIC conferences was precisely disagreement. The lack of unity created political pressure, and MBS and others responded with a move to show unity. The surprising thing is not that there are still sharp regional divisions but that the joint summit occurred at all.

Hamas’s action on 7 October, grotesque as it was, did have a rationale: To upset the emerging consensus, as the Abraham Accords continued to bring Israel and various Muslim states into a new and less hostile configuration, that the fate of Palestinians could safely be ignored. That message was sent not just to Israel but also, perhaps primarily, to Arab states like Saudi Arabia. The illusion that the Palestinians could be ignored indefinitely as the Abraham Accords process expanded has now been dispelled.

The global community is confronted with a radical Israeli government uninterested in compromise, an ineffectual Palestinian leadership further weakened by recent events, and a U.S. administration preoccupied with impending presidential elections. The conditions for a political initiative are unfavorable.Therapidly diminishing window for peace and regional integration signals a heightened risk for Israel of regression to the conditions of 1948. The swift reversal of the United States' role as a security provider has invited comparison in the region to the speed with which France in West Africa went from the center to near the margins of the regional security balance. What was really striking, then, about the Arab League-OIC joint summit was that it showed the regional players, large and small, willing to get together with some urgency and compromise on reaching a modest common platform. What that might mean for Palestinians is unclear but it does suggest a certain reflex for peaceful discussion and a minimal unity that have not been features of regional politics before.

Going Global Goes South

Going Global Goes South

Recently Joseph Nye, a venerable and influential Harvard professor and former government official, and the Financial Times’s senior trade writer, Alan Beattie, have taken against the popular political term Global South. They attack it as inaccurate, misleading, and “deeply unhelpful” (Beattie). They are not exactly wrong, but getting rid of the term will not make any difference. Another will replace it, because, like “less developed countries” and “developing countries” and “emerging markets” and “frontier markets” and the Third World, it serves a genuine need. Unlike globalization 1.0 (1830-1914), which concerned a world divided into imperial powers and colonies, globalization 2.0 (1960 -?) has taken place in a world of relatively stable sovereign states among poor as well as rich, and with much higher rates of capital mobility, common education, and intellectual-property transfer. Very crudely put, the colonized of the 19th century have enough power and shared experience in the 21st century to constitute a kind of collective. Banning the use of Global South won’t change that, and ignoring the realities that generated the term and its many ancestors will lead to bad analysis.

Nye and Beattie rightly point out that much of the Global South is in the North. China and the U.S. are at about the same latitude. China, India and most of Africa are above the Equator, as is most of the world, while prosperous countries like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are south of it. (Nye’s article is here. Beattie’s Trade Secrets columns are behind a paywall but appeared on 14 September and 5 October.) If you were to mark out the Global South on a map the result would be interesting but also a bit silly. On political-economic grounds, the attack on the Global South is less compelling. The inclusion of Russia, because Jim Neill put it in the BRICS in 2001 and Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit this position to harry his wealthy enemies, is scarcely credible, even to Russians. More plausibly, Nye and Beattie underline that the Global South’s aspiring champions, India and China, are at odds with each other and opportunistic in their support for other Southerners. China, indeed, is not looking very Southern any more along its prosperous eastern seaboard, where its world-beating high-technology companies gather. And its Belt and Road Initiative, useful as it was for off-loading excess heavy-industrial capacity a decade ago, no longer looks much like disinterested solidarity.

All this may be granted. However, Global South and its terminological ancestors did not come into being for geographical reasons or to satisfy the ambitions of the largest players. The Global South would still be a thing under whatever name even if China were to move on, which it well might as it pursues autarkic policies of self-sufficiency (zili gengsheng, a revived Maoist term) under Xi Jinping. Global South exists primarily because Global North exists. The U.S. under Trump and now Biden has been moving toward its own zili gengsheng, what Trump called “economic nationalism”, for seven years. One of the core reasons for the European Union was to create a common market that could rival the North American one is achieving economies of scale, growth through the refinement of internal comparative advantages, and efficiencies of regulation and distribution.  Intensification of anti-immigrant policies in Italy, Britain, Germany and Austria — the Netherlands might join in after 22 November elections — only increases the sense that the non-South wants to take its winnings and leave the table. Given the size and centrality of Northern markets, capital, and technology, their clear desire to withdraw inside themselves will only increase the importance of the Global South concept if not its current name.

But there is a twist. The Global South is not just about staring forlornly at a border wall or dying on a raft near Lampedusa. As Beattie acknowledges, in analyzing possible changes in voting shares at the International Monetary Fund, the Global South has a large and growing share of global production. He cites this as more evidence of its misleading nature. But the idea of the West didn’t weaken as its wealth increased. Neither, interestingly, has the idea of Asia. (See Parag Khanna’s The Future Is Asian.) Nor, in a global context of both splintering and forms of consolidation like large-market self-sufficiency, will the idea of a Global South. It should be able to generate its own credibility for some time to come.

https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/21/omtzigt-calls-firm-cap-many-forms-immigration-50000-people-per-year 

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-south-is-a-misleading-term-by-joseph-s-nye-2023-11

The Pulling Apart

The Pulling Apart

By Dee Smith

We live in a singular moment in history: the world has been knitted together by technology and commerce, but it has become in the process an extraordinarily unhappy human family. And that brings a huge, largely unrecognized, problem.

From the 1940s onward, there was an assumption, particularly in the West, that trade and consumerism would bring convergence. The universal desire for washing machines and the like and the triumph of American popular culture would make life in Jakarta very similar to life in Miami.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the true age of globalization arrived and with it the American unipolar moment. The US was the only superpower, militarily, economically and culturally. American-style market economics were ascendant. Production could be located where costs were lowest; products could be sold where prices were high. To make global markets work smoothly, rules were required and readily accepted as necessary for participation in global prosperity. Economic self-interest reigned and everyone would play nice because it was in their economic interest to do so. “People who trade don’t fight” became an article of faith. This was The End of History and the world was flat.

But a series of signal events—the dot-com bust, the 9-11 attacks, the global economic crash of 2007 and 2008, and the arrival of widespread social media—were harbingers of a sea change. For many sophisticated observers, such events had to be seen as anomalies, so strong was their faith in the economics-based and rules-based global system, and so convinced were they of its inevitability. Why was it thought to be inevitable? Because we believed that we had finally discovered and mastered the true drivers of human activity: economic need and desire. So, when trouble arrived, the tendency was to double down and keep going. The systems had to be right; they just needed to be tweaked. In the intelligence world, this is called confirmation bias. It is a failure of imagination.

But there is more than one kind of self-interest and more than one driver of meaning and purpose. Some are more compelling than economic self-interest. Perhaps the most important is the need for identity. The desire to gather into groups based on similar beliefs and passions (the latter often to redress past or current wrongs) can be more powerful as a driver of human action than the supposedly cooler forces of economic self-interest. Even some economists are now saying this.

The networking technologies that have become globally ubiquitous over the past 25 years — first visual telecommunications, then social media — have had the opposite of the effect they were meant to have. They have led people to compare, and then to celebrate and intensify their differences rather than their similarities. They have increased attachments to identity, rather than decreasing them. And they have provided just enough evidence to falsify the claims of politicians without providing the facts and discipline to counter and improve on them. Social media provide people with enough evidence to conclude they are being betrayed but no means to do anything about it except to create grievance communities. This has led to an immediacy of visual and visceral information about attacks, wars, political disturbances, and so forth, self-selected by adherents to these new groups to reinforce the beliefs they share. Such effects can and do have triggering and multiplying effects across the planet, literally in seconds.

We do not all believe in the same rules. We never did, actually, but now we are no longer prepared to pretend that we do, even for the sake of almighty trade.

How is it possible to have a rules-based order — international or domestic — when we can’t even agree on the rules under which we are to live and by which we are to be governed?

Simply put, it isn’t.

So where will this lead? It is hard to see how it leads to anything other than much more pronounced splintering and fragmentation, both within societies and between nations. Groups within countries may separate into smaller societies that internally share beliefs and rules. As with the USSR at the end of the past century, some nation-states and political units — even large ones — may collapse due to internal stresses. Resource depletion, especially of food and water, and climate change — addressing either of which would require global rules-based agreements — as well as vastly increased numbers of displaced and migrating people, plus a nostalgia for the old world and politicians who exploit this emotion by making impossible promises about restoring it, are adding to the feedback loops driving a political and social pulling apart. Because the problem is global as well as internal and often intensely local, it is hard to discern what possible countervailing forces there might be. We are moving from a largely centrifugal world to a largely centripetal world.

To survive this with an intact civilizational system of some kind — or at least without ubiquitous and utterly devastating conflict — will require us all to think far outside the proverbial box. The solutions to these problems have not yet been found. They are probably not to be found in the structures of the past.

Rising India and a Murder in Canada

Rising India and a Murder in Canada

Canada is embroiled in an increasingly bitter diplomatic argument with India. As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accused India of murdering a Canadian citizen on Canadian territory, this is hardly surprising. For many observers the most curious aspect of the scandal is a lack of support for the Canadian position, apparently due to the failure of Justin Trudeau to present convincing evidence. But there is more support than meets the eye, and Trudeau has moves yet to make.

The murder in question was the shooting of Hardip Singh Nijjar on 18 June in Surrey, a southern suburb of Vancouver, BC. The incident was recorded on security cameras that confirmed the involvement of at least 6 individuals and 2 vehicles. Nijjar died at the scene. The assassins, who were masked, drove away and have not been apprehended. The identity of the individuals or institutions behind the murder has not been revealed. The evidence is closely guarded, although the Canadian government claims to possess signals intelligence as well as human intelligence that confirm the involvement of Indian diplomats or agents in Canada.

Nijjar was a plumber. He was also the president of Surrey’s Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara, a “residence of the guru” that contains a copy of the Sikh scriptures known as the Guru Granth Sahib. Nijjar was not only the president of a gurdwara, he was also a Sikh nationalist who claimed to support a peaceful referendum in India but had been designated a “terrorist” by India.

More Sikhs live in Canada than in any country other than India and 82 gurdwaras have been built in British Columbia alone. The number of Sikhs in Vancouver is almost a quarter of a million, nearly 10 percent of the total population. They are there, in the main, as a response to persecution in India.

The Sikh community emerged in the Punjab at the end of the 15th century and follows the teachings of Guru Nanak and the nine Sikh gurus who succeeded him. As their beliefs were distinct from those of Hindus or Muslims, they have been subject to intense persecution throughout their history. They have responded by emphasizing military prowess, creating a Sikh ideal that embodies the virtues of soldier as well as saint. 

Hopes for a separate Sikhistan were discussed formally in 1944 while plans were being prepared for a post-colonial India. They were never ratified. Sikh aspirations were frustrated by official indifference and corruption, as well as by the narrow confessionalism of political parties such as the RSS and the inability of the Congress Party to counter it. Attempts by successive governments to suppress Sikh militants reached a bloody climax in 1984, when Indira Gandhi sent troops into the Golden Temple at Amritsar to remove fighters who had gathered around Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and turned the shrine into a military complex.

Two months later, Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards, an event that provoked anti-Sikh riots across northern India. Sikhs sought refuge in Canada, where they retained their dreams of an independent Khalistan, or “Land of the Pure.” They brought the conflict with them. In June 1985, Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to London was destroyed by a bomb that caused the death of 329 passengers. The attack was often seen by Canadians as a foreign affair and is barely remembered, although the casualties were mostly Canadian and the atrocity was planned in British Columbia. It has not been forgotten in India.

Since 1985, Indian politics have changed dramatically, the ideals of an earlier generation of Indian politicians replaced by the more rigid ethnic and religious nationalism of Hindutva. Narendra Modi’s agenda offers citizens who are not Hindu – such as Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs – little more than a second-class status. But if the hopes of Sikhs in India for an independent Khalistan have been suppressed, they survive in British Columbia.

How important a question is Sikh political aspiration for Canada or India? Is it of any significance to anyone else? The Sikh community is undoubtedly a political force in Canada. The 33rd premier of British Columbia, Ujjal Dosanjh, was a Sikh who also served as a federal member of Parliament and cabinet minister. More important at the moment is the prominence of Jagmeet Singh, an MP from Burnaby, a Vancouver suburb. He is the national leader of the New Democratic Party, on whose support Trudeau’s minority government depends. Trudeau, no less than Modi, sees the Sikh community in terms of domestic political issues rather than international diplomacy.  

Elsewhere, however, interests vary. India is being courted because of its economic power, huge markets, its strategic position in Asia generally and its rivalry with China in particular. With so much at stake, there is little desire outside India and Canada to enter an argument over the death of a plumber in Surrey. Nevertheless, the US ambassador to Canada stated “there was shared intelligence among Five Eyes partners that helped lead Canada to making the statements that the prime minister made” and that US intelligence in particular had been sent to Ottawa.

This was an unusually explicit commitment that could make the case even more difficult to address. Would Modi be any more likely to admit culpability if detailed evidence were released? The activities of Sikh militants have been murky and may have included affiliation with Pakistan intelligence as well as international crime syndicates. The Indian position has been that the death of Nijjar involved enemies among the latter. What if this position were no longer tenable because the involvement of the Indian government was exposed?

The various parties involved have relatively weak motivations for fueling the controversy, India and Canada having now gone through some diplomatic tit-for-tats over the case. But releases of evidence could interrupt the desire to move on.