Refocusing the development agenda

The current global financial crisis has led to an economic age of unprecedented austerity, mounting uncertainty and rising inequality. Today, there is a pressing need to forge a new global consensus on how best to build Africa’s productive capacity. In essence: supporting the continent to develop and employ its productive resources, harness and grow its entrepreneurial capabilities and build robust and dynamic networks and linkages essential for supporting the production of goods and services to power national and regional economies. In order to move beyond the Millennium Development Goals, no longer can addressing the multiple challenges of how to promote development transformation, cultivate entrepreneurship and drive employment-led growth continue to be considered in isolation. How can the physical, social and human capital needed to expand business and enterprise development in the formal sector be promoted? How might access to, as well as the distribution of appropriate business education, skills and training across Africa be improved, replicated and scaled-up?

Mounting global concerns about inclusive growth are illustrated by the World Bank’s 2013 World Development Report, focused on jobs and the G20 development agenda’s training strategy explored developing employment related skills. Yet, there are a number of issues which need to be considered. How can national development strategies focus on job creation? How best can their impacts be measured and scaled-up? Beyond micro-enterprise, how best can entrepreneurship be developed and fostered within and beyond national borders? Which investment and trade sectors have the greatest development impact potential, particularly with respect to creating professional employment for young people and women? How best can such sectors be developed and supported? What type of investments are required in education, training and skills development to enhance business infrastructure, expand networks and build the innovations required to transform long term employment prospects?

Dr Stephen Royle, who has been a consultant to the outgoing Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, gives his views on the progress made over the last year under Hamdallah’s leadership.

FPC Research Associate Stephen Minas analyses the growing and dynamic area of climate change cooperation in the Global South. His briefing looks at the role of the BRICS and a growing range of other regional groupings that are sharing policy best practice, creating innovative finance arrangements and developing new institutions to tackle the challenges of climate change.

Arguments towards a way out of the darkness have surrendered to the cold hard geopolitics of a conflict that is layered in both character and complexity. A US military observer described Syria as an arena for three simultaneous conflicts; localised fighting, often between elements of the Opposition, a larger civil war and finally a regional fight with international connections and ramifications. Crucially the conflict’s current equation is balanced enough to fuel continued fighting with no side believing that compromise or serious commitments to peace talks are necessary. A former Syrian minister on a trip to London proposed that a unjust peace is preferable to a just war, but with a cacophony of voices and players involved nobody is clear who is able to spend the political capital needed to change the conflicts dynamics and more importantly why would they do so now.

The UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, is perhaps as good a diplomatic chess player as they come but even he is struggling to keep into the notion of a peace process alive. Geneva 2 with all its hubbub and media attention came and went with little feedback into what was happening on the ground. Rumours abound that Assad will stand for another Presidential term, a nail that would surely close the coffin of a negotiated transition and force the Opposition and their backers to reassess tactics. Against this backdrop of various fronts opening and closing on the ground, with the general narrative one of steady regime gains, the chances for a diplomatic solution have been further battered by the events in Ukraine. The crisis there has not only brought back memories of Cold War tensions but has also blown apart the Moscow-Washington dente that was crucial in securing the Geneva process in the first place. Behind the scenes ‘proximity talks’ between Opposition and Regime figures were quickly shut down when the crisis emerged and the tit for tat unwinding of the meagre progress that had been made continued when the Americans expelled the remaining Syrian Diplomats and closed their Embassy in March.

The Ukrainian crisis has relegated Syria’s war to media oblivion and has essentially created another hurdle to the success of diplomacy over the use of force. However it also comes at a fascinating crossroads of US-Saudi relations with Obama’s visit to the Kingdom and the appointment of Prince Nayef to the Syria file suggesting to many observers both a rapprochement between Washington and Riyadh and a change of Saudi tactics towards Syria could be in the offing. The fundamental unknown remains Obama’s decision making horizon and whether he is willing to be influenced by the Editorials of the main US papers which are increasingly critical of his hands off approach to the conflict. Questions over US support, both lethal and non-lethal, continue to pop up but are lost in both the politics of the Beltway and an inability to see clearly how they translate into an outcome inside Syria itself.

It is of course a cliché to compare one war to another but it is worth remembering how long the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) went on for. A deadly equilibrium within a grinding conflict that is seeing the country endure both an exodus and a collapse cannot be in any ones geopolitical interest. However without a significant change to the current equation to the crisis it would appear that Syria has further bloody anniversaries to endure ahead.

FPC Senior Research Associate Dr Chris Ogden analyses what a possible victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming April/May 2014 Indian Parliamentary elections would mean for India. He examines the implications of a new BJP- led coalition (or outright majority) on India’s domestic and foreign policy, building on the experience of its past coalition from 1998-2004.

Today EU leaders are back in Brussels. It is now fourteen days later. Russian forces are not only on the streets but Crimea has also been annexed. But the European Union looks fundamentally unable to carry out its threat. The rhetoric from London, Brussels and Washington may have been of ‘costs’ and ‘consequences’.

But the more relevant language may be that coming from Russia ‘laughing’ at the restrictive measures already announced, calling the European Union ‘all bark and no bite’ and even ‘the Wizard of Oz’. Ukraine has labelled our response ‘a mosquito bite’.

It is right for the European Union to look beyond the war of words. Each step at a very dangerous moment in European history should be calibrated on the likelihood of it provoking or deterring a further escalation of the crisis. It is possible but impossible to know that the steps taken so far may have contributed to Moscow hesitating to send its troops in to Eastern Ukraine already.

It may be that Vladimir Putin’s chosen alternative is to foment discontent amongst Russian minorities in the region’s other frozen conflict areas. This has already seen Transnistria apply to join the Russian Federation. What started with Crimea may also extend to Russian-occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia in coming days or weeks.

Europe has rightly been cautious in not wanting to portray its Eastern neighbourhood policy to strengthen its relations with former Soviet states as a ‘tug of war’ with Russia. The problem for Brussels is that it may indeed suit Putin to treat it as such – as his personal popularity soars to record levels at home in a trial of strength he believes he can win.

The European Parliament in a resolution I co-sponsored already referred to a Russian ‘invasion’ and not the ‘incursion’ preferred by our Governmental colleagues, and voted in favour of actions against Russian companies and their subsidiaries. The argument for EU economic sanctions is that they could have sufficient impact on Putin’s inner circle and on the oligarchs who yield real influence in the Kremlin, to genuinely start to curtail Russia’s behaviour.

But negotiations before and after Monday’s EU Foreign Affairs Council leave no sign that Europe has the political will to take the ‘third step’ it pronounced. Talk of unity can’t disguise Europe’s failure to achieve a unified position. Although names of further political and military figures are expected to be added to the list, I do not expect the ‘restrictive measures’ to be extended to business figures such as the Chief Executive of Gazprom. These were completely excluded by the Foreign Ministers who whittled down a proposed list of 120 names to just 21 earlier this week and the dinner table in Brussels is set to see EU leaders do exactly the same. Nevertheless, at their last meeting the leaders showed a degree more incisiveness than their own Foreign Ministers, and it is possible they will do so again today.

So what can they do?

First, it is sensible to take further diplomatic moves to indicate Russia is isolating itself, including confirming action to block Russian participation in international institutions such as the OECD, IAEA and the G8.

Second, even if there is no stomach for economic sanctions at present, the military situation could quickly alter the balance of argument, and it may be possible for detail on specific trade measures being considered to be specified now which could have a significant deterrent effect.

In any case, EU leaders must mandate urgent work if sanctions are to be agreed, on the consequent impact on Europe’s trade if reciprocal measures are taken. Fear of the ‘consequences’ not on Russia but on ourselves, symbolised by the embarrassing leak from a Downing Street official, appear to have prevented such work from even beginning in earnest. The results should be used to plan mitigating measures, not to add to the argument against taking the measures in the first place.

And I find it very surprising that EU member states at least say they are discussing economic sanctions, but have yet to announce an arms embargo against Moscow. Surely an obvious step is to avoid supplying arms to a country which in short shrift may use them to carry out more aggressive military actions, which we deem to be illegitimate and illegal?

However, I do expect today’s meeting to be specific on announcing energy diversification measures, to send a long-term message that Europe will not let itself be held hostage by dependence on Russian gas. Informed opinion in Brussels is that alternative sources are and will exist. Europe has used the time since Russia turned off the gas taps in 2009 to build up its reserves, in much the same way that Britain’s Thatcher Government did after the first miners’ strike all those years ago.

The most persuasive argument in favour of Europe’s approach is that Putin’s grand vision for a Greater Russia may best be challenged by showing Europe’s own long-term resolve for a different future. However, in the short-term that is today, the pictures on the TV screens will be of the European leaders signing the association agreement with Ukraine, whose rejection by Yanukovich sparked the crisis in the first place. It is being carefully choreographed to include political not trade elements only, but it is an open question how the same pictures will be greeted in Moscow?

It is to be hoped that we are not signing an agreement with a state that very quickly ceases to exist.

Richard Howitt MEP is Labour Foreign Affairs Spokesperson in the European Parliament and a member of the Socialist and Democrat Group Ukraine Task Force.

March 2014

And yet, Kremlin policymakers should have known better; everyone in Moscow would have been well aware of the manifold splits and contradictions within Ukrainian society. In much simplified language: much of the East looks East, much of the West looks West, and much of the Crimea – which only became part of the country in the 1950s as, quite literally, a Soviet-era ‘present’ from Russia> – sees its current position an unfortunate quirk of history. While realities on the ground are much more complicated than what such neat geographic line-drawing would suggest – the East-West division is actually more of a gradual transition – the basic point on a deeply conflicted society remains acutely valid: Ukraine could not move towards Eurasia without first tearing itself apart.

Ever since it emerged from the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been an incoherent state. And incoherent states have a peculiar problem: they are unable to generate the security practices or, in  Joel Migdal’s terms, the collective “survival strategies” required for the state to function as a coherent institutional and social corpus. If the state is to enjoy a monopoly of legitimate force over a given territory and population, such a monopoly would require some measure of agreement on the values and identities it is meant to safeguard, as well as the means through which such safeguarding should occur. That minimal amount of consensus on state identity has been woefully absent since 1991.

As a result, Ukrainians remain in fundamental disagreement over which values and identities their state should secure; and this, in turn, shapes their diverging threat perceptions to a considerable degree. If you define Ukraine as Western, and see Moscow as the West’s other, you will tend to see Russia – especially Putin’s Russia – as an autocratic neo-imperial threat; if, on the other hand, you place Ukraine in the Russian/Eurasian cultural sphere, you will see the liberally decadent West – as it has widely come to be portrayed in Putin’s Russia and beyond – as a fundamental menace to that identity. Needless to say, such selective and contradictory world-views present benign policymakers with complications, and, conversely, those of a more malicious bent with fertile opportunities for meddling and provocation.

What has been remarkable over the past few weeks has been the way both sides in this conflict – including their Western and Russian supporters – have generated the sort of selective narratives that, in the context of an incoherent state, are pregnant with danger, regardless of the relative merits of closer European ties or membership in the Eurasian Union. The pro-Russian press has latched onto the (admittedly highly disturbing) presence of right-wing extremists among the Euromaidan demonstrators <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxOl9daoMo to dehumanise the Euromaidan opponents of Yanukovych’s volte-face as ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’>. The Kremlin’s policymakers had clearly over-estimated their point man’s ability to repress the large part of the Ukrainian population that had adopted values and identities fundamentally at odds with Putin’s plans for his ‘Near Abroad’. Resistance to a perceived existential threat to those values – membership of the Eurasian Union – had to be conveniently explained away, delegitimised and marginalised, so as to allow for its repression without affecting the narrative of  shared economic interests and ‘shared Soviet/Russian values’ on which the Eurasian project is supposedly based.

The danger now is of events swinging to the other extreme. Just as Yanukovych provoked his Western-leaning countrymen onto the streets by ignoring their sensitivities, Ukraine’s parliament – or Verkhovna Rada – risks inflaming similar ‘securitisations’ in the Russian-speaking parts of the country. Russian has already been demoted as a regional language, and deputies from the virulently right-wing Svoboda party have proposed an end to the retransmission of Russian Television channels. Presenting a government consisting entirely of pro-European elements as one of “national unity” when it is clearly not further complicates matters. Such selective perception should not remain unchallenged; it risks repeating those mistakes that were made earlier in places like Georgia and Moldova, where nationalist post-Soviet governments needlessly excluded and provoked their minorities in avoidable blunders that then led Ossetians, Abkhazians and Trasniestrians to break away in response to perceived existential threats to their divergent values and identities – with, as is now widely accepted, the help of elements in Moscow.

Could these elements do it again – on a much larger scale – in Ukraine? Russia is emphatically not interested in a violent, uncontrolled breakup of its large neighbour; but the key words here are violent and uncontrolled. The stakes for Russia being what they are, some in Moscow’s corridors of power could see the Crimea in particular as a place where Georgian- or Moldovan-style meddling could be feasible. It is the most clearly pro-Russian corner of Ukraine. As a peninsula, it is geographically separated from the rest of the country, and, therefore, relatively more self-contained than the Eastern regions. With the Black Sea port of Sevastopol acting as the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since Tsarist times, it is seen as absolutely crucial to the Kremlin’s military capabilities (not to mention its prestige).

The Kremlin is interested in keeping ‘Little Russia’ within its orbit. Ukraine is not just an essential part of Russia’s creation myth. More significantly, it is a westward transit corridor for Russian and Central Asian gas, still central to the hydrocarbon-powered strategy that Moscow has been pursuing under Putin, targeted at stemming (and partially reversing) the effects of the ‘geopolitical disaster’ that the fall of the Soviet Union is still seen as by large parts of the Siloviki elite. The Kremlin could simply not allow Ukraine to follow Poland, Hungary and Romania – in a continuation of 1989-1991 – without putting up a spirited fight. In terms of Russia’s territorial sensitivities, the Western frontier would otherwise move far too close to Moscow for comfort.

This does not necessarily mean playing the separatist card: there are several other punitive levers of influence at Moscow’s disposal – Ukraine’s energy dependence, its weak financial position, its largely Russian export market. Moscow is not interested in a violent breakup of Ukraine, and the ethnic variant remains unlikely because of the enormous risks involved. However in the Crimea at least, some could come to think these risks manageable and proportionate in light of the enormous stakes involved. The new authorities in Kiev should therefore aim to maximise their inclusiveness in the weeks and months to come, and prudently avoid any moves that would present the ethnic card on a silver platter. Marginalising the extreme right and its provocative nationalist bravura would be a good place to start.

February 2014

Dr Simon Mabon explores the geo-political competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, looking at how this struggle impacts on local sectarian tensions in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon.

Gilberto Algar-Faria explores the current situation in Northern Kosovo where ethnic Serbs feel excluded from the state. He examines some of the available options to encourage stability and integration.