Beneath the rows and gesture politics, Europe’s big three countries have stealthily begun to make the EU a serious force in the world, as the secret negotiations last autumn with Tehran over its nuclear program made clear. At the Brussels summit last December – while the world focused on the clashes over voting weights – EU leaders quietly agreed to establish a military planning capability, put in place a mutual defense clause and, most importantly, a European security strategy.
Iraq may have hastened progress towards a new consensus on the EU’s long-term security goals. Britain, France and Germany have recently demonstrated a solidarity that Tony Blair tried–but failed–to engender in the late 1990s. This shows that the Iraq-era divisions between “Old” and “New” Europe need not be permanent or unbridgeable.
The December agreement to the EU’s Security Chief Javier Solana’s new security strategy marked a real departure for a continent that always preferred to discuss its institutions rather than its role in the world. Though the agreement has been diluted from earlier drafts and mentions of “pre-emptive engagement” replaced with the less threatening “preventive action,” the document remains almost Rumsfeldian in its warnings about terrorism and rogue states.
Most importantly, it sets out two overarching goals for the EU. First, transforming authoritarian and failing states – particularly in the Middle East and former Soviet bloc – into democratic and well-governed ones. Secondly, ensuring that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organisation and the International Criminal Court are “relevant” enough to avoid being sidelined by great powers such as the U.S., China and Russia. The significance of the document is that it moves on from the traditional idea of multilateralism for its own sake to a determination to achieve results. It boldly declares that “We should be ready to act when their rules are broken.”
Such targets are easier to agree on than to achieve. But the paper’s goals are not necessarily unrealistic. Having helped convert most of the Warsaw Pact into well-functioning democracies, the EU has the capacity repeat its success in its new “near abroad”. And on tough multilateralism Europe has recently shown how it can achieve results by flexing its collective muscles. George W. Bush capitulated on steel tariffs – after a WTO judgment – when the EU stood firm and threatened to boycott U.S. imports. Equally, Iran’s apparent willingness to sign the IAEA protocol had more to do with the determination of Europe’s big three than a Pauline conversion in the mullahs’ attitude to nuclear weapons.
But to realize Solana’s targets, Europe must get better at being consistently tough. In the run-up to the March 2002 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, the EU failed to use the threats of a reduction of aid, the deployment of election monitors, or either targeted and full economic sanctions in a co-ordinated way. In spite of the fact that the security strategy defines climate change as our biggest strategic threat, the EU did not threaten any economic consequences when Russia, a huge beneficiary of European aid, refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
Europe could become a multilateralist superpower tomorrow without spending any more on defense. It would need to play more of the cards it already holds, from access to an $8 trillion market to an aid budget that dwarfs that of the U.S. In the words of British diplomat Robert Cooper, Europe “speaks softly and carries a big carrot,” placing its faith in trade and aid inducements rather than the threat of force. But this would be more effective if the EU was willing to withdraw its largesse from countries that violate standards of democracy and human rights or willfully undermine the international rule of law.
Under a tougher regime the EU could automatically enhance its influence over developing countries by tying aid deals and preferential trade agreements to states’ progress toward democracy and rule of law. This could be measured through an annual audit carried out by the European Commission. Making this publicly available would make it more difficult to fudge demands on human rights – for example maintaining aid flows to the Algerian Government in spite of its repression of opposition forces – because the media will hold any inconsistencies up for scrutiny.
Greater European toughness is demanded with reference not only to democratization, the WTO but also the ICC and, above all, the U.N. The year 2003 saw a small French force carry out a UN mandate in eastern Congo. The establishment of the proposed planning cell may indicate that more such operations -and bigger ones – are to come. But if the EU is prepared to revitalize the U.N., the U.N. will have to change. The EU should also be able to decide the conditions for its engagement with New York, ending anomalies such as Libya’s chairmanship of the human rights committee.
In the future European countries must make it clear that multilateralism is a central part of their national interests rather than simply a tool to achieve particular policy goals. Others should understand that attempting to undermine or take malicious advantage of multilateralism is not very different to meddling in the politics of Brussels or even national capitals.
Europe needs to show that it is not constrained by a psychology of weakness. The Solana strategy is a first attempt to demonstrate this. If the EU is prepared to take stock of its current and potential capacities, it may at last find the political will to become a global force.

Mr. Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Center in London (www.fpc.org.uk), where he runs the Global Europe Program.

At the end of last year, the Baghdad bureau of the Al-Arabiya news channel was shut down when twenty Iraqi policemen stormed the building in protest at what Donald Rumsfeld described as its “close proximity” with attacks against US soldiers and its “violently anti-coalition” tone. More recently, an Al Jazeera cameraman, arrested at the scene of an explosion, was held in a maximum security prison for two months.

Accusing the Arab media of colluding with terrorists has become something of a regular habit for the Bush Administration. Tensions with al-Jazeera date back to the airing of bin Laden tapes during the war in Afghanistan, when Condoleezza Rice warned his hand movements could be passing on clandestine instructions to followers. Last April, after broadcasting footage of injured US POWs, the station’s Baghdad bureau was destroyed in a US attack.

Critics in Washington fail to realise that that Al-Jazeera and other independent stations are far preferable to the state-sponsored alternatives. Regimes from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Morocco have attempted to ban the channel’s reporting of women’s rights and corruption in government. With its blend of phone-in debates and adversarial talk shows, Al-Jazeera offers the region’s intellectuals the rare opportunity to make their cases without governments breathing over their shoulders. The majority of broadcasts centre not on the evils of the West but on issues ranging from the legitimacy of state boundaries to divorce and homosexuality. Programmes often feature US, European and even Israeli representatives in order to fulfil the station’s motto ‘Akthar min Ra’i’ (more than one opinion).

Objections to Al-Jazeera from Washington have been coupled with a far from scrupulous attitude towards press freedom in Iraq. The US gave $20 million to the old Iraqi state broadcasting service in May to relaunch itself as an independent station under the banner of Al-Iraqiya. But its credibility has been destroyed ever since the Washington-based Index on Censorship revealed that vox-pops with those critical of the US had been edited out, Coalition press conferences were broadcast unedited, and all content had to be approved by the wife of a US Friendly Kurdish leader prior to broadcast. An independent US journalist who worked on the station last summer, Don North, has called it “an irrelevant mouthpiece of CPA propaganda, managed news and mediocre programmes”. Eighty-eight per cent of Iraqis rely on television as their primary source of information, a figure increased by the decline in literacy in during the 1990s. Unsurprisingly, they are voting with their remotes against its perceived bias and giving it a mere 12% audience share.

The belief that independent channels will be irrevocably anti-western and that the US should only encourage broadcasters over which it retains control is deeply counter-productive. Radio stations over which the State Department retains right to intervene in editorial decisions,(even if rarely exercised) can only increase cynicism about Western motivations. Proponents of this strategy often point to the impact of US funded radio stations in Eastern Europe. However, populations in Eastern Europe were much more sympathetic to the West and thus much more receptive to overtly pro-Western media even if it was one sided. In fact the most popular Western media in the Arab world is the relatively even-handed BBC World Service.

Some parts of the US administration seem to believe that public opinion in the region will somehow be seduced by showcasing attractive products of US culture – whether boy bands or the ballot box. Therefore Radio Sarwar will mix the Backstreet boys with current affairs, and Voice of America will profile the happy lives of Muslims living in the West. But this misdiagnoses the problem. The population in the region are very clear about what they like and dislike about America. They admire its economic success and envy its freedoms, whilst also objecting to American foreign policies. After all, the BBC World Service has retained a large audience share in the region for years whilst attitudes towards western governments have become increasingly hostile.

Arguments for democracy and human rights could be won in the Middle East, but only through fair debate between Arabs themselves. According to the World Values Survey, a higher percentage of Muslims (around 88%) agreed with the statement “I approve of democratic ideals” than Western Christians. After all the mixed messages, any initiatives funded by the West risk being so discredited that a panel of experts might be required – made up of respected journalists from the region and the West – to monitor whether media outlets are altering their editorial slant according to pressure from the coalition authority.

Reactions towards a free press in Iraq are the clearest illustration of the painful choices that supporting democracy in the Middle East presents to the West. For Western political leaders the temptation to silence “destabilising” voices is an obvious one. But indulging this temptation contradicts the stated goal of political reform in the Arab world and hurts rather than helps the advancement of Western, particularly U.S, interests. Instead of making the voices of opposition go away, it gives their arguments more credence and a greater following.

The case for moderation is an extraordinarily strong one and the West must not be afraid to allow it to be tested by free debate. It is too late for propaganda and media control in the Middle East. Attitudes are too hard and the cynicism is too deep for these tactics to work. Only when our actions match our words can the battle for Arab hearts and minds be won.

Mark Leonard is Director of the Foreign Policy Centre.

It’s a great honour for me to open this first conference of the Civility Programme.

I want to talk today about why modernisation and reform in the Arab world matters to Britain and to the whole international community. I do so with some humility. It is not for me or for any Foreign Minister from outside the region to lay down prescriptions. That would neither be right, nor productive, nor would it show respect. I am therefore fully conscious of the sensitivities of this issue. But we are bound to take an interest in the matter, given that Europe and the Arab world are neighbours, and our interests in many areas, such as our economies and our security, are international and inter-dependent.

So I want today to try to correct some of the misperceptions that surround this complex subject; and to stress the importance of our relations with the Arab World, and of the need to build a partnership to address this shared agenda, working with the processes of change already underway. By partnership I mean one across government, among the international community, and, most important of all, partnership with Arab governments and peoples themselves.

The world is changing more quickly than at any time in its history. As Arab leaders themselves have recognised, the challenge, in the Arab world as elsewhere, is to manage change in a way which preserves the best in society, gives ordinary people ever-greater freedom and choice while protecting them from violence and injustice.

It is the people of the Arab world who are best placed to understand the challenges they face, and to decide how best to deal with them. The ideas must come from our Arab friends. We in Europe or the West cannot and must not dictate to them; but we can, and will, work with them to support and nurture reform.

The Arab World now matters more than ever

So we in Britain, and in Europe, want the Arab world to be stable and prosperous. As many in the region recognise, if it falls behind the global trend towards greater freedoms and development its stability and prosperity will be under threat. The challenges differ from country to country across the region – but there are worrying common threads. Regional economic growth is failing to keep pace with a growing population. In some countries, 60 per cent of the population is under 18 years of age. Youth unemployment averages over 50 per cent: according to the World Bank, the region needs to create 100 million jobs over the next 20 years to provide for this burgeoning workforce.

The last decades have seen the spread of representative and accountable government in many parts of the world, but less so in the Middle East. In some Arab countries, women are prevented from realising their potential in society – which means that fully half of the population is unable to play its part in economic growth and social development. Despite impressive gains over the last decades, literacy rates in some countries are now falling, and fast-growing populations are straining public services.

Many in the region realise the extent of these challenges and are working for reform so that they can be addressed more effectively. Many governments have already taken important steps on economic, social and political reform, and others are following. And as we heard in the introduction, it was Arab intellectuals who set out the challenges facing the region in the Arab Human Development Report of 2002, and the follow-up report published last year. The Declaration issued by the Sana’a Conference on 12 January was a further important contribution to the debate, calling among other things for greater empowerment for women, a strengthening of democracy and pluralism, the effective application of the rule of law and greater efforts to improve education.

Representative Government

I welcome all of that. But as many in the region recognise, much more needs to be done – and with a sense of urgency. Governments and peoples are talking about the need for more open, participative and representative government supported by a stronger civil society; for action to make the rule of law effective and transparent; for greater respect for human rights; for economic reform to create jobs and stimulate growth; for improved standards of education, in order to prepare young people for life and work in the twenty-first century; and for imaginative changes to enable women really to fulfil their potential in society.

No-one imagines this will be either quick or simple. As I said at the outset of this speech, we in Europe should always show some humility about the pace of change; after all, representative government is a very recent phenomenon in 11 of the 25 EU states, and the whole of our continent suffered the twin traumas of fascism and communism in the last century. It is not for us to preach.

It is for the Arab world itself to decide how best it can pursue a process of reform, development and modernisation. There is no template which fits each of the different countries in the region. The task for us in Britain and in the international community is to help to support it, drawing on our own experience of change – because we too have a vital interest in its success.

We need to recognise that this is a complex and sensitive subject. The pace of change is going to vary between different countries and regions, as it has in the EU. Change may be necessary, but it is never easy, and it can be seen as a threat to deeply-held beliefs and traditions. Moreover, history has left some in the Arab world with a perhaps understandable distrust of Western motives.

All that means that we must start by correcting some of the misperceptions and myths which have arisen, both in the Arab world and elsewhere, around this subject. Of course these misperceptions are by no means universal – but they do need correcting, so as not to become obstacles on the path to reform.

Change is possible

The first myth is that Islam is in its very nature incompatible with change. I reject that notion entirely. It seems to me that resistance to change comes not from Islam itself, but from those who claim religious justification for clinging to outmoded traditions. Christian societies in the West had to evolve in order to meet the challenges and problems that arose in a changing world. The moderate Islamic community has shown the same capacity to let society evolve. By contrast, extremism in any religion is not only a block on necessary change; it also feeds off those who are marginalised in society, to breed intolerance and resentment which in its turn can fuel violence. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Morocco have suffered, at least as much as some European countries, at the hands of terrorists who pervert a peaceful religion to spread destruction and hate.

We all have a shared interest in defeating these extremists; which means we also have a shared interest in building the kind of pluralist, stable and tolerant societies which are the best bulwarks against extremism and violence. There are deeply-rooted traditions of consultation and consensus within Islam that make it far from incompatible with progressive change towards more open and participative government.

If I can be allowed one historical suggestion, the concept of Shura – or consultation – was established far earlier than in the Christian world.

Indeed there is nothing in Arab culture which makes change impossible – the region has in some senses changed beyond recognition over the last decades. Only 907 boys attended school in Oman in 1970; today about 600,000 boys and girls do so. Dubai had little or no modern infrastructure before the 1970s; today it is a thriving, ultra-modern transport and trade hub. Egypt has transformed itself from a state-controlled to a largely free-enterprise economy. And free speech and a free media have operated for many years in parts of the Arab world. (One of the great things that has happened in Iraq is that instead of state-controlled media there is now a burgeoning independent press which is contributing to change and political debate.)

Arab societies have adjusted to change, and will continue to do so.

Promoting values within traditional cultures

But even those who accept that change is right and inevitable sometimes argue that it can come only at the expense of religious and traditional values – that reform will necessarily breed individualism and the degradation of a traditional and devout way of life.

Again, the evidence shows this to be another misperception. Countries all around the world have managed to evolve towards pluralist and representative government without rejecting religion. Let me come back to the example of Europe. There is hardly a country in Europe without a Christian Democratic Party. A number of European countries accord a formal status within their constitutional arrangements to the church – as is the case within the UK for the Church of England and the Church of Scotland.

In the United States, where separation of church and state is a constitutional principle, large percentages of the population attend church regularly and cite religion as a central part of their daily lives. Pluralism and tolerance allow religion to flourish, as they have done for the over 2 million Muslims who practise their religion in Britain today. My own constituency has 25 mosques in it and I live opposite a madrasah. Indeed I am particularly proud of the fact that the Foreign Office every year sends a delegation to the Holy Places to offer support, consular help and medical treatment to the over 20,000 British Muslims performing Hajj. It is one example of the close partnership we have with British Muslim communities.

Promoting the values we believe in – good governance, human rights, tolerance and the rule of law – is not an attempt to impose ‘Western’ or ‘Christian’ values on Arab countries at the expense of their traditional culture. The values set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are just that – universal, and drawn from the traditions and values of countries around the world. They are values for which people around the world strive; and which are compatible with every single faith in the world. We want to see them fully realised everywhere.

Change does not have to come at the expense of the unique traditional culture which those in the region prize. Japan is no less Japanese today for having embraced democracy after the second world war. Indeed adapting to a changing world environment is the best route to ensuring that the Arab world’s unique culture and identity can continue to prosper, and exert a greater influence for the good on us in the West. Without change, the build-up of political disillusion and economic stagnation can only threaten what Arabs hold so dear.

In recent years several Arab countries have struggled successfully with challenges to their immediate stability. I suggest that the new challenge is that of longer-term change. Change is in any case inevitable and therefore the choice is one between managed and unmanaged change.

There are risks involved in any reform. But the risks of doing nothing are far greater.

Reform will not come overnight – it will take place over the period of a generation, and it must proceed at a pace which societies can bear. Like all change, it will not be easy. We in the West need to support our Arab friends in every way we can as they lead the process of change in their countries.

We need to work in partnership to address this shared agenda. Indeed that is for me the key to this whole issue: partnerships across government and within the international community; and, most important, partnerships with Arab governments and institutions themselves.

A role for Britain and the International Community

Britain can play an important role. Our imperial past has left some understandable sensitivities in parts of the Arab world. But our history has also given us a network of friendships across North Africa and the Middle East, and an understanding of the region. We can offer our expertise in adapting to a changing world, for example on educational standards, legal reform, the participation of women, market regulation or youth policy.

But whatever we do in Britain, we need international partnerships to achieve our aims.

For Britain, working through the EU will be crucial. The European Security Strategy endorsed last December makes the Middle East a priority – and rightly so. The EU is already strongly engaged. The so-called ‘MEDA’ programme of aid totals around €700 million per year; the Barcelona Process and our partnership with the GCC give us frameworks for closer partnership; and bilateral Association Agreements link us even more closely to individual countries in the region. We now need to use these instruments more coherently and effectively to promote our shared goals – for example by focusing MEDA funds on our strategic objectives, and deepening the relationship with the Gulf states through the EU-GCC dialogue. The new European Neighbourhood Policy should also give us new opportunities to build partnerships for reform in the region. We need to work first of all with those countries which have shown a clear wish to reform; and we need to make sure the partnerships include conditions by which both sides are prepared to abide.

The United States will also have a crucial role. We in Europe should make clear that we share America’s recognition of the need for reform, but that we need to work closely together and with the Arab world to ensure we get our approach right. The G8 also can also play an important part. For example we have put forward a suggestion for the G8 to work with business and with Arab governments to identify and reduce barriers to trade and investment, and to deepen local financial markets. The UN too has much to offer, and UN bodies have the expertise, resources and legitimacy which are necessary for success. NATO should also be able to offer help in some areas, for example closer cooperation in the fight against terrorism, proliferation and smuggling.

So the international community has the will and the ability to help those in the region to manage a process of change. But we must match our common engagement in support of reform with renewed international efforts to make progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides have suffered far too much, and the Palestinians are still without the state which is their right. We continue to urge both sides to uphold international law and human rights. Despite the difficulties of the situation, and the mistrust and hatred which it can breed on both sides, I also want to encourage greater understanding and mutual respect between Islam and Judaism. One of the fascinating things for me as a Christian, brought up with the Old and New Testaments, is when I attend Islamic ceremonies and listen to the recitation of the Koran. I am struck not by the differences in the messages of our respective holy prophets but by the similarities.

We cannot let the violence in Israel and Palestine be a block on the process of change which the region needs. But equally, we have to recognise, quite aside from its terrible human cost, that the continuing conflict makes change only more difficult than it already is, and clouds the whole relationship between the Islamic world and the West.

As long as the current stalemate continues, the situation in Palestine will be cited by many to argue that a region still in conflict needs stability, not reform. Getting Israelis and Palestinians to re-engage on the Road Map is vital, not just for their own sake, but for the process of change in the whole region. A new Palestinian state could be a leading example of reform in the Arab world. Even under uniquely difficult circumstances, Palestinians have shown in the past a genuine thirst for free institutions and education.

Both on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on reform in the region, our international partnerships will play an important role. But I want to emphasise again that our most important partnerships for reform must be with Arab peoples and governments themselves.

To take the example of the Foreign Office’s own programme for engaging with the Islamic World, we have sought to make central in the development of our Global Opportunities Fund, the principle of partnerships with Arab societies and institutions. So for example we are working with Saudi Chambers of Commerce to organise seminars on accession to the World Trade Organisation. In Egypt we are backing a programme for legal training in human rights and civil liberties cases: this is particularly timely as Egypt has just established its own high-level Human Rights Council. In Yemen, we are funding a management and leadership training course for businesswomen.

These are just a very few examples of projects we are supporting – but they demonstrate how we are working in partnership with local organisations, responding to the demands of local people.

Conclusion

As many of these projects show, there is now a recognition across the region, and around the world, of the need for reform in the Arab world to meet the daunting challenges it faces.

Arab governments now have a great opportunity to take the lead by setting out a vision for long-term change, and mobilising their people behind it.

It is not for me, or anyone in the West to tell the Arab world exactly how that vision should look. But the international community can do a great deal to support Arabs in the necessary process of change.

We need now to strengthen our shared commitment to partnerships for reform with the Arab world, based on strong foundations of friendship, understanding and mutual interest. Reform will be difficult; and it will take time. So we must not only engage now: we must also, over the coming years, stand by that commitment and further strengthen our shared engagement.

As a student in the 1970s at London’s Architectural Association, Rem Koolhaas had to produce a “Summer Study” to get his diploma. Koolhaas wrote about the Berlin Wall, then the most potent built symbol in the world. Recalling that project 20 years later he wrote: “Were not division, enclosure (i.e. imprisonment), and exclusion – which defined the wall’s performance and explained its efficiency – the essential stratagems of any architecture? In comparison, the 1960s dream of architecture’s liberating potential – in which I had been marinating for years as a student – seemed feeble rhetorical play.”

His unorthodox choice of project reflects an impatience with the rules of a profession that he entered only late in life. The son of a famous novelist, Koolhaas went to school in Indonesia, returning to Holland as a teenager. He initially eschewed university, finding work as a journalist and film scriptwriter, and was in his 30s by the time he moved to London to study in 1968. After further studies in New York (including a stint of literary theory under Michel Foucault), Koolhaas shot to global prominence as an architect without building a single building, on the back of a best-selling book about the architecture of New York. And his books, which continue to make as many waves as his buildings, document the peripatetic existence he has enjoyed since then – a house in London, offices in Rotterdam, New York and China, teaching at Harvard – with graphs showing the number of nights spent in hotel rooms.

He recently returned to Berlin for the opening of his award-winning Dutch Embassy and a retrospective of his work in one of the shrines of modernist architecture, Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Koolhaas warms to the theme of political power: “There is no city that I know better than Berlin and no place I care more for. It brings out the relationship between architecture and power. Berlin is the capital of guilt. There is a horrible industry of memory here.”

His words could be taken as a veiled attack on Daniel Liebeskind, whose Jewish Museum in Berlin set him as the unofficial architect of memory – with commissions for the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester and a new World Trade Center following swiftly on. Liebeskind is one of a handful of “superstar” architects operating at the same level as Koolhaas – designing buildings that make a conceptual statement that is as strong and as important as its aesthetic form. While Frank Gehry’s buildings – like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – marvel visitors with the boldness of their design, the beauty of their geometrical shapes and the luminescence of their materials, it is the ideas underlying the physical form that make Liebeskind and Koolhaas buildings a lived experience. And if Liebeskind has made a name for himself painstakingly recording the trauma of the 20th century, Koolhaas’s ambition is to become the chief architect of political power of the 21st. Three recent projects – the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the CCTV tower in Beijing, and the EU headquarters in Brussels – act as case studies for his granulated understanding of power, and show how he can interpret its subtleties with the same clinical precision that Liebeskind brings to pain.

I join him in the lobby of his latest commission – the Dutch embassy in Berlin – where builders add the finishing touches before the official opening on the next day. I have known Koolhaas for five years (and worked with him on the Brussels project) and though he has been showered with prestigious commissions and awards (including the Royal Institute of British Architecture’s prestigious Gold Medal last month) he has managed to retain an edgy relationship with an establishment that fetes and fears him in equal measure. The embassy is a truncated glass cube – elegant and perfectly formed – but trying not to get in the way of the city around it. Chunks cut out of the building’s interior and the neighbouring apartments he designed simultaneously to preserve the view of the city’s iconic Communist-era television tower, the river Spree and the former Nazi headquarters. This perfectly encapsulates the Dutch position in Europe and the rest of the world. Koolhaas explains: “The Netherlands is a country with a super-placid history with no incidents and the embassy is in the city that carries drama in its genes. This building is all about soaking up the environment.”

The foreign ministry had asked for an expression of “Dutch openness” – and Koolhaas’s building delivers it with a very modern twist. His latest book Content gently mocks this central Dutch self-perception by drawing a parallel between the two greatest exports of Dutch culture: Vermeer and the reality TV series Big Brother: “Through an alchemy of transparency and daylight, Dutch painters like Vermeer turned, in the 17th century, the everyday into a Low Countries sublime; a world with nothing to hide – inside and outside separated by mere sheets of glass – its only intolerance for what is hidden. Three centuries later, the Dutch still trade on intimacy – perhaps their last resource after agriculture has become ornamental, the seas over-fished, the waters tamed, industry disappeared into sweat-shops… when they unleash Holland’s contribution to the late 1990s – Big Brother – ruthlessly engineering exposure to industrial- strength exhibitionism.”

Embassies are meant to be sites of national projection – but the sort of power the Dutch are comfortable wielding is understated and liberal. Koolhaas has tried to compensate for the lack of ambition of his compatriots by giving the building a few coups de theatre that would not look out of place on the set of a James Bond film. Halfway up the ramp on the west side, concealed doors open with the flick of a button to let you into the antechamber of the ambassador’s office. Go through the next door and you walk into a suspended VIP room that protrudes into the void like a plank on a pirate’s ship. Continue up the ramp a little further, and at an unmarked part of the wall there is what looks like a light switch which, when pressed, causes the aluminium walls to swing back to reveal a set of small glass offices. This is the political department protected from the public space by double-thickness metal doors. The building oozes cool and modernity. When I point to the influence of 007, Koolhaas smiles and says: “They need some glamour – but please don’t write that – this is our first serious building.”

As the Dutch prepare for their reception to open the embassy in Berlin, the bulldozers in Beijing’s Central District are clearing the way for Koolhaas’s next pro- ject – the 10 ha site that will be the new headquarters for the Chinese State Television network (CCTV). Koolhaas’s 553,000 sq m headquarters will be among the first of 300 towers to be constructed in Beijing’s new central business district – and ranks with the space project and the Olympic stadium as a flag-carrier for a new assertive, outward- looking modernised China. The total construction cost is estimated at E600m.

This project has none of the ironic, semi-detachment of the Dutch Embassy. The design will become an iconic rebuke to the ultimate physical representation of American capitalism and hyper-power – the skyscraper. Koolhaas and his team have developed a building that forms a continuous loop echoing Chinese calligraphic shapes. Koolhaas explains that he felt that the skyscraper is being hollowed by a meaningless competition to build higher and higher: “There is an aggressive thing about the skyscraper and its deadness and its redundancy and how it makes everything look the same and how it is fundamentally unnecessary because it can be distributed in other forms.”

Koolhaas’s moral rejection of the US – and his public boycott of the competition to design a replacement for the World Trade Center – is remarkable given that he made his reputation with a gushing paeon to the founders of that style. His book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan gloried in the boundless ambition of those who built the city. But Koolhaas has come full circle. In a special issue of Wired magazine that he edited last summer he is devastating about the competition: “New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure.”

Again the building seeks to embody the values and ambitions of the country he is working for. The scale is as monumental as China itself. The technical requirements stretch engineering to its limits. And the construction must be completed in a mere five years – the time it would take to get planning permission in central London. I ask him if he thinks it is absurdly ambitious, and he throws it right back at me: “Why do you use the word absurd? I think it just shows a different reality there. It is a different way of doing things.”

Koolhaas’s defensiveness reflects his realisation that this project is a big gamble. He has attached himself to the Chinese political project and doesn’t want anybody else to be able to retreat into the comfortable space of the critic. When I show him a piece in the magazine Prospect criticising him for taking on the construction of the mouth-piece of a totalitarian state, he refuses to answer until I have pinned my colours to the mast: “You have visited China recently, do you think I should have built it?”

Instead of giving him a direct answer, I play for time by saying it is too early to know. The Chinese government is embarking on a breathtakingly ambitious political project and has already taken more people out of poverty than any government in history. It is a juggernaut that is unstoppable and is changing the shape of the modern world. However, like all juggernauts, its progress is marked by a brutality and lack of humanity that is shocking. People must get on board or out of the way, and we tend to focus on the people who are crushed on the road rather than the final destination.

He agrees but is impatient. For him the Chinese government offers a new hope: “In the CCTV building there is a utopian nostalgia that is the foundation of architecture and in my work in the past there have been very few triggers for that. There has been a sort of distance. What attracts me about China is there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative of a scale and of a nature that almost no other body that we know of today could ever afford or even contemplate.” He claims that this allows the architect to focus on the public interest – rather than retreating into aesthetics as a cover for the sacrifice of their principles to a capitalist regime that puts the profit motive above all else: “Everywhere else – and particularly in architecture – money is everything now. So that is blatantly not a good situation as it leads to compromises of quality or interconnections or integration. An overall dismantlement of ties that had a richness because there was a willingness to support them either on an individual level or on the level of the state. Money is a less fundamental tenet of their ideology.”

Koolhaas has been pilloried for this project. Ian Buruma in the Guardian puts it bluntly: “It is hard to imagine a cool European architect in the 1970s building a television station for General Pinochet without losing a great deal of street cred.” But in Content, there is an aggressive rebuttal. Amid the usual mix of humorous imagery, verbal and visual puns, the section on China has an almost earnest quality: “Participation in China’s modern- isation clearly does not have a guaranteed outcome. The future China is the most compelling conundrum; its outcome affects all of us, a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental… On our own we can at most have good intentions, but we cannot represent the public good without the larger entity such as the State… To make matters worse, the more radical, innovative, and brotherly our sentiments, the more we architects need a strong sponsor.”

It is this lack of a strong sponsor that makes his third political project, defining an imperial capital for the European Union, the most ambitious yet. Instead of a single sponsor, Koolhaas must deal with a fragmented European bureaucracy, the governments of 25 countries, the central government of Brussels, and the 19 communes that make it up. If CCTV is the epitome of a modernist political project – projecting the power and ideology of the most centralised and powerful government on the planet – Koolhaas’s European project is the defining experiment in postmodern political architecture – capturing the essence of a network of interdependent states without a single political centre.

This project began in 2001 with an invitation from Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, and Guy Verhofstadt, prime minister of Belgium, to join a group of intellectuals charged with discussing the needs and functions of a European capital and how to express them. The trigger was the decision by the European Council to formalise Brussels’ de facto role as capital of Europe and to hold all European Council meetings there (ending the European roadshow which saw each meeting take place in a different capital). Prodi, who has an academic’s fondness for abstract discussions and conceptual conundrums, indicated that if the results were daring, so much the better.

Koolhaas took the invitation very seriously. Shortly after he was recruited, I got a telephone call asking if I would like to get involved. Armed with a pile of textbooks and pamphlets on Europe and European identity, I travelled to his offices in Rotterdam to lead a seminar on the institutional structure of the European Union, the process of “co-decision”, the balance of power between the Commission and the member states, and the workings of the convention on the Future of Europe. Over the months that followed we held more brainstorms, visited Brussels to map the buildings and institutions and gradually Koolhaas and his colleagues started to form an alternative language to describe the intricacies of the EU.

His group spent months trying to define the problem: “One of the difficulties that Europe currently has is that it is in a perpetual process of redefining itself. Somehow it seems an unstable identity and it is notoriously difficult to capture unstable identities in physical form. That is why it is really critical to first help to try to represent the whole idea of Europe, not perhaps in architecture, but more in terms of a narrative to its own population and maybe at that point you can begin to define both how certain institutions should function and also how it should look.”

Koolhaas argues that the representation of the EU is “flat and without eloquence” – articulating neither the unity nor diversity of Europe in convincing ways. On the one hand there is a “mosaic Europe” emerging, which breaks the EU down into ever smaller blocks of regions, languages and local identities. On the other a “plain blue Europe” that flattens all differences, represented by an image of groups of elderly ministers standing for photos; politicians getting in and out of cars; or long lists of names in all the official languages. He contrasts the EU’s uncertainty and inability to project itself with the self-confidence of the US administration – and its systematic attempts to portray Europe as a weak limp- wristed continent.

At the same time, the buildings of the EU say nothing of its nature. Brussels has accumulated an ever-growing stock of real estate, but this demand was implemented without the institutions ever trying to choose or design any of the buildings: “Brussels is today a European capital by default, a curious aesthetic landscape, sometimes generic and sometimes of such a scale that one can only talk of megalomania. In this condition, it is impossible to articulate any idea of Europe.”

Koolhaas explains the dilemma: “Brussels has suffered from a triple trauma. First, Brussels’ architecture was built at a time when people hated development, so Brussels was hated by its inhabitants. Second, the rotating presidency of the EU showed that even on an institutional level Brussels was being spurned for other cities. Third, Brussels became a term of abuse for national politicians who sought to blame it for unpopular policies.”

Brussels is in many ways a microcosm of Europe – representing and encapsulating European history. Every single invasion and political project – from the Roman Empire, through Napoleon to the Third Reich has come through and absorbed Brussels. And today its population, architecture and ideology represents their remains: a haphazard overlayering of architectural styles; a third of its population is foreign (with the rootless, well-paid elite of Eurocrats living side-by-side with the socially excluded immigrants of European empires past – Congolese and Rwandans – who have come home to roost); and its role as the capital of a country with no real sense of national identity (and a constant jockeying for positions between the Walloons and Flemings who inhabit it).

However, Koolhaas now detects a re-emergence of hope. At public meetings he has attended with local groups who have blocked many of the developments in the past, there is an end to the trauma and a real desire to engage. The official confirmation of Brussels’ role as capital of Europe should mean that the institutions will need to engage with its development in a more concerted way. And most importantly, he argues, the trauma of Iraq means that national politicians see the European Union as the key to their survival in an era of US hegemony.

At a popular level he sees the large majorities that opposed the war in all European countries as the emergence of a European political identity. And at the level of governments, he is heartened by the growing attempts to abandon the divisions of the past and focus on building a common European foreign policy: “The Americans tried to humiliate Europeans by showing that their power is different, but people are all of a sudden aware of another definition of power. The current confusion of Europe looks not only like confusion but a subtler and more advanced form of deliberation. Its creative ambiguity has become more attractive and this is also visible to the rest of the world. The real significance of Iraq is the waning of the attractiveness of the American Model.”

Koolhaas’s project had two concrete recommendations. First an attempt to construct an iconography that shows Europe as an opportunity for citizens and countries to expand themselves rather than as a threat. One idea was to represent the EU as a bar-code made up of all the national flags rather than with the blue stars. When the report came out with this symbol, it prompted a tabloid ruckus with The Sun leading a chorus of Eurosceptic opprobrium.

Second was a recommendation that instead of moving to a new Euro- Quarter, the EU should take responsibility for its own buildings and plan over time to create a quarter that makes sense (he argues that as buildings become old and obsolescent they can be replaced so that in 30 years a new quarter could be created). He calls for a new conceptual framework with a physical path that links all the existing institutions: “This should create an area that does justice not only to bureaucratic needs but also to aesthetic quality, openness, political representation and improves the links with the rest of the city.” Inspired by the demonstrations against globalisation and the war in Iraq, he even argues for creating an official space to house demonstrations outside the buildings.

Many meetings followed on from these proposals and many promises have been made about follow-up and implementation. A competition was launched by Verhofstadt to develop the European district (but the shenanigans of the Brussels local government system saw the contract being awarded to an all-Belgian shortlist). Prodi has invited Koolhaas back several times to talk the ideas through. I accompanied him to a meeting in the summer where Prodi was visibly moved by the presentation and declared his intention of organising a repeat performance in front of the whole Commission. But so far it has been impossible to build the momentum for the ideas to become a reality.

As Bert Muynck, a Belgian architectural commentator who has followed the process closely, comments: “A few months down the road and the results could not be more bewildering: no results, top bureaucrats who consider missing signatures a lack of vision, compromises, and last, but not least, the sale of land on ‘Ground Euro’ to the chief contractor.” Koolhaas’s ideas have become victims of the complexity of the political system he is trying to simplify and communicate. We will see over the months ahead whether Europe’s political leaders will have the courage to give Koolhaas the means to realise his vision for a post-national iconography – a Europe united in its diversity.

Koolhaas’s political projects reveal an uncanny ability to grasp the essence of political power in its different stages of development – from the modest wit of the Dutch Embassy through the vaulting ambitions of the Chinese model to the emerging greatness of a Europe that is re-writing the rules for power and sovereignty. But his designs do more than soak up the demands of their clients. They chart out a pathway from the modern politics of the 20th century to the postmodern of the 21st. Though Koolhaas himself would never make such a pompous claim.

Mark Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Centre

Many Americans will see the backlash against Aznar as a victory for Al-Qaeda or further evidence of the limp-wristed nature of European allies. But the fact that it happened in the country in Europe that is most sensitized to terrorism should give them pause for thought. The reasons the Spanish did not treat the terrorist outrage with their usual reserve need to be studied – and understood – if America is to preserve its few remaining friends. And the furious debates that are raging in London, Rome and Warsaw – who are all asking if they will be next – are shaped by the same issues that troubled their Spanish neighbors.

First, all Europeans saw the Iraq war as a “discretionary war” – one we chose to fight rather than a classic war of self-defense (and many questioned the link between Iraq and terrorism). One of the consequences of getting involved was to put ourselves in the firing line. It is easy for Americans, who are already targets for global terrorism, to see a reluctance to get involved as cynical cowardice – an echo of Munich in 1938. But it is legitimate to note that the threats to Europeans and Americans were not analogous – how many bombs would have gone off in Madrid if Aznar had not supported the war in Iraq? Even in Britain, America’s staunchest ally, leading voices warned of the risk of becoming a magnet for terrorism by supporting the war. In the run up to the war, Kenneth Clarke MP, the former finance minister and one-time candidate for leader of the Conservative Party, opposed military action: “We should avoid it because of the consequences of war. How many other terrorists will we recruit? Next time a large bomb goes off in a western city, [we will be asking] how far did this policy contribute to it?”.

Secondly, there is the issue of trust – and the way the controversy over the case for war has contaminated the relationship between political leaders and their citizens. In an editorial entitled “Of Lies”, the leading Spanish newspaper, El Pais, declares that it was “the manipulation, the lies, the offensive use of the argument of the war against terror to justify just about any policy, the blatant opportunism and puerile arrogance that caused those in power to lose it yesterday”. The controversy over WMD and terrorism became linked with the PP’s attempts to pin the bombing on ETA, rather than Al Qaeda. The Crowds gathering outside the Socialist Party’s headquarters to celebrate were united in a chorus of ”Ganamos sin mentiras!” (We have won without lies). The same issues have spread to Britain. Tony Blair, the most trusted political leader in British history, has had negative trust ratings for over a year. His concern over the corrosive impact of Iraq was captured with brilliant economy in the diary of his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell: “It was grim, grim for me and grim for TB [Tony Blair], and there was this huge thing about trust”.

Third, political leaders in Europe are treated as “just politicians” – rather than as father-figures who unite the nation. The dual role of the American President – as head of state and CEO – often leads to a rallying at times of national crisis. The extraordinary political unity that came over America after 9/11 shocked many Europeans who thought that America became a country incapable of political dissent. The brutal retribution handed out by Europeans to their leaders in times of crisis will no doubt shock Americans. This has more to do with a difference in our constitutions that our temperaments or values. In many European countries there is a division of labor. The Prime Ministers head the governments and take the flack when things go wrong. The Heads of State (monarchs in Spain and Britain, Presidents in Italy and Poland) stand above the political fray and unite the nation.

If 9/11 changed America, it was the Iraq war that changed Europe – and left all the US allies looking very exposed. At the top of the “least-wanted” list is the Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi who, like Aznar, defined his countries’ public opinion and political establishment to support the American intervention. With his right-of-centre Casa delle Liberta government expected to suffer losses in the June European Parliament elections, and with the possibility of a general election by the end of the year, he must be a very worried man. In Britain and Poland, where the main political parties and a majority of the public supported the Iraq war, a terrorist attack is unlikely to force Blair or Miller out of office.

But the fall-out from Spain will affect these countries too and make support for Bush ever-more difficult to rely on. Unless there is a major re-haul of the Administration’s approach to unilateralism and “ally-diplomacy”, the people in the Whitehouse will not just see the four European friends they had at the beginning of the year reduced to two. They might find that nobody is left at all.

Mark Leonard is a transatlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and founder of European think tank, the Foreign Policy Centre.

March 2004 may mark a crucial month in the evolution of Europe’s post-Cold War strategy. Visiting Kosovo Polje, Javier Solana announced that the international community “cannot tolerate and will not tolerate” inter-ethnic brutality. He faced jeers: Balkan familiarity with such lofty sentiments from foreign politicians has bred contempt.

There are good reasons for scepticism. Recent events have re-concentrated minds on the use of military force: two months after Britain, France and Germany agreed to form “battle groups” for peace operations, the three countries rushed troops into Kosovo. Here was the tougher Europe touted by Solana in his 2003 European Security Strategy. But Jose Zapatero’s threat to withdraw from Iraq is a reminder that, for much of Europe, the desire and ability to deploy troops remains in question.

Though Europe often agonises about its lack of military hardware compared to the Americans, it is not our crude strength that is being tested. It is our ability to spread European norms of democracy and human rights in post-conflict zones. The recent BBC poll of Iraqi opinion found a small majority in favour of last year’s invasion – and a larger one against the Coalition’s continuing presence. State-building can be more controversial than intervention.

Europeans like nothing more than to mock the US’s lack of interest in the “social work” of reconstructing societies. Yet in Kosovo, European, American and UN administrators share responsiblity for a failure to establish faith in the rule of law since 1999. When NATO forces entered the province, they opted for an easy life by failing to confront the Albanian rebels who had, in part, precipitated the crisis there. Since then, the distribution of power in Kosovo has been contested.

The international community has attempted to keep power off the agenda, insisting that Albanian and Serb politicians should focus on “standards not status”. As Carl Bildt has noted, “a decent, multi-ethnic Kosovo” has been the goal. But, on the ground, local strength has all too often appeared to trump abstract standards. The final status of Kosovo is already under negotiation – but it is being negotiated through force rather than dialogue, with Albanians pushing Serbs into the north of the province, permitting partition.

Solana, Bildt and others have underlined that this is unacceptable, and that renewed toughness is required. All agree that “extremist factions” must be disciplined. But we should also appreciate how far our policies have created space for extremism in Kosovo. Our defence of property rights (particularly those of Serbs) has been particularly weak. It has long been common for Albanian gangs to drive through Serb enclaves, firing into the air, pressuring the residents to sell up and move out. Intimidation has become a widespread norm – and an easy theme for Belgrade’s nationalists.

Facing this, the international administration has been inconsistent. Its representatives have often looked for ad hoc local political deals to maintain security. Legal practice has frequently appeared to be dictated by expediency rather than fairness. David Marshall, head of legal systems monitoring in Kosovo from 2000 to 2001, warned that “the continued use of arbitrary detentions by the executive and the rejection of lawful court orders set a precedent that the UN may come to deeply regret”. Not enough local leaders have developed a stake in building a legal system that would genuinely place standards above status.

It should not be difficult to identify and punish at least some “extremist factions” for recent events. But if these punishments are not followed by an overhaul of how day-to-day justice in the province, they will be seen as one more arbitrary political gesture. The space for “extremism” (and opportunism and criminality) will re-emerge. Western leaders must not only resort to military peace-enforcers but evaluate the extent to which their civilian peace-builders can sustain state-building that works.

The EU has a key role to play here. It has established a civilian rapid reaction mechanism to compliment its emergent military capacity – Norway is experimenting with a similar mechanism with a specifically legal focus to handle judicial and penal challenges. Such a legal rapid reaction force might help to make law more central to peace operations from their inception.

The European leaders must now demonstrate that they have not only the institutions required to build civilian peace efforts, but the political will. They should declare that if the UN and other international organisations cannot bear the burden of Kosovo – where the EU already has a formal role and considerable leverage – Europe will lead the way in reinforcing and reforming them. We should not be prepared to sustain civilian structures than cannot maintain our values.

In time, and beyond Kosovo, the EU should develop greater capacities for effective legal work and human rights monitoring. Currently, more commitment and prestige are placed on how quickly Europe can get troops to a crisis zone, rather than how effectively we can export European values to those areas that we already govern. The events in Kosovo give us the opportunity to change.

Richard Gowan is a Europe Researcher at the Foreign Policy Centre and co-author of Global Europe: Implementing the European Security Strategy (www.fpc.org.uk)

“Everything about our world is changing – its economy, its technology, its culture, its way of living”, the Prime Minister told his Sedgefield constituents on the fifth of March. In a speech which was principally a detailed defence of his decision to take military action in Iraq – with just a casual reference to sweeping away the Westphalian system of statehood in place since 1648 – Tony Blair warned of the “mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the world in which we live”. In doing so, he also highlighted one of the major global issues to have suffered from post-9/11 neglect: the direction of globalisation.

Globalisation can be a force for tremendous economic, social and even cultural good, a case made by writers such as Jagdish Bhagwati, author of In Defence of Globalization, and bodies such as the International Labour Organisation with its report A Fair Globalization: Creating opportunities for all. Even Joseph Stiglitz, proponent of globalisation’s discontents, has written of the pressing need to manage globalisation in a way that benefits everyone. So the question is how this can be achieved when no one institution or country – not even the US – can control or shape the direction of globalisation on its own.

First, there needs to be a comprehensive reassessment of what globalisation is. This will require looking at it in its entirety and no longer seeing it primarily as a trade issue. Virtually every consumer item, industrial product, theory or idea produced in one part of the globe is now readily capable of being reproduced or transmitted to any other part. This is as true for Coca-Cola as it is for Pakistani nuclear know-how. So a new inclusive assessment of globalisation needs to encompass everything from the free movement of people, goods, jobs and capital around the world to the internationalisation of markets for common goods, such as education and health care. It needs to look at terrorism, tax and tourism, as well as international law, military technology and even democracy itself. Moving beyond a pure trade agenda will demonstrate that governments, NGOs and consumers are now as influential in driving globalisation forward as corporations have been in the past.

Second, it follows from this that the traditional antagonism between the Ayes and the Nays on globalisation is a bar to any progress. New coalitions and partnerships and new ways of thinking will be required to address this. All parties need to recognise their dependence on the others. In this world turned upside down, the challenge will be to marry peoples, businesses, governments and NGOs in new forms of civil, political and commercial partnerships which can harness the globalisation’s wild energies. Much of this is already occurring piecemeal with positive change springing from unexpected places. In France, the fast food giant MacDonalds pioneered the introduction of salads and fresh fruit to its menus. Distinctions between profit-making and non-profit-making enterprises and between public and private ownership are being challenged. Café Direct, the Fairtrade Company and one of the foremost social enterprises in the UK, and communist China’s largest computer chip manufacturer, SMIC, are preparing to list their shares in London and New York respectively. Anglo American is collaborating with the London School of Tropical Medicine and Johns Hopkins University in the US on the provision of HIV/Aids healthcare to its African workforce, of whom 30,000 are estimated to be HIV positive. These transformations should be welcomed and not greeted with cynicism about the corrupting power of the profit motive. A concert of globalisation’s major participants should not try to put the genie back in the bottle but should be better placed to enlist her in the cause of the common good.

Finally, a broad coalition of interested parties needs to re-establish the case for all that economic, technological and cultural change. The global audience, which is at turns sceptical of the benefits and fearful of the implications of globalisation, needs to be engaged. The advocates of the wider definition of globalisation must demonstrate that, through new coalitions of the eager, they can deliver together opportunities for better education, health care and security as well as greater wealth. That is the way to overcome the negative sentiment which dogs efforts to create a fairer and a more prosperous world.

Keith Didcock is Deputy Director of the Foreign Policy Centre and coordinator of the Keeping the World

Buried deep in the new draft European Union constitution is a single sentence that could bring California-style democracy to Europe. Article I-46 states that if you can collect a million signatures in favour of a policy, the European Commission must put forward a proposal to the Council of Ministers.

True, this is a very mild form of direct democracy, given that the council is at liberty to reject the proposal. However, if it did so, it would risk further accusations that the EU is anti-democratic and elitist. If you doubt the importance of the provision, consider that the UK delegation to the constitutional convention took it seriously enough to oppose it tooth and nail. In the end, it was included at the insistence of the German Green Party, which has a long-standing commitment to ‘people power’ (perhaps a curious stance, given that the German federal constitution specifically outlaws referendums because of their associations with the Nazis).

Before you get too excited at the prospect, note that, in California, those who make the greatest use of citizens’ initiatives are right-wingers and people who want to constrain state power. Among more than a hundred initiatives passed by Californians are the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ life sentences for repeat offenders; dramatic cuts to property taxes; and a ban on public universities using positive discrimination in favour of minorities. The famously quirky Californians have also passed proposals to outlaw the slaughter of horses for human consumption as well as the sale of horsemeat; to ban certain kinds of traps and poisons used for bear-catching; and to sanction the medicinal use of marijuana.

In 2003, Governor Gray Davis was unceremoniously booted from office by a popular vote triggered by a citizens’ initiative and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Austrian-born bodybuilder soon realised that his powers were hamstrung by the very direct democracy that had swept him to office. Voter-mandated initiatives, along with compulsory state spending on federal policies such as Medicaid and welfare, swallow between 60 and 80 per cent of the state budget.

Which proposals would find favour in Europe? We can hazard a few pessimistic guesses: a ban on genetically modified crops, perhaps; a reduction in the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers; a return of capital punishment; a ban on abortion; or a limit on EU spending. Certainly, it would not be hard for a big NGO or lobby group or a wealthy businessman to raise a million signatures from among Europe’s 480 million citizens. Yet, for all the dangers, citizens’ initiatives, if they take off, could open the EU to a new form of participatory democracy, and start to solve the legitimacy problem that has long plagued the European integration project.

Jack Thurston is a senior research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre and is writing a book about the Californian gold rush.

Published in The New Statesman on 30 August 2004, http://www.newstatesman.com

Though Egypt’s President Mubarak ridiculed the State Department’s Middle East Plan as “push-button democracy” that would “open the door to chaos”, and this year´s Arab League collapsed for daring to mention democracy in the mildest form, leaders that are bellicose in public are presiding over quiet reform. Despite Mubarak´s anger, he has freed the press by suspending jail terms for libel, and has even suggested that political parties will be legalised. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and others are reportedly preparing an Arab declaration to “spur individuals through participation” – shorthand for granting more political rights. Even in Saudi Arabia, it has been described as the “year of the petitions”, such is the increased pitch in lobbies to the King. Some Commentators have claimed that change is fomenting on a scale unheard of since the 1950s.

But at the same time as these home-grown trends, US politicians espousing a democratic revolution have never been more distrusted. The dilemma for President Bush is stark: how can he hope to promote democracy when (even before the war) only 11% of the people in the region trust him? Won’t any policy championed by the West become tarred with accusations of imperialism and backfire? Ironically, the Bush White House has made considerable progress on previous US administrations in correctly diagnosing the ills of the Middle East, even if their chosen course of treatment has prevented them from alleviating the symptoms. They rightly saw that the marginalization of young Arabs from the economic growth and political liberalization shared by the rest of the world was breeding terrorism. According to the UN´s 2002 Arab Human Development Report, 51% of Arab youths say they want to emigrate, and the Arab League have predicted that in ten years there unemployment will rise by more than 300%.

Despite Bush´s unpopularity and the universal cynicism about Western foreign policy, many young people see Western societies as attractive and full of opportunity. The USA, Japan, Egypt, UK and France were named by Young Arabs as the country’s they value most highly after their own – four of them among the world’s five largest economies. And almost 80% of Iranians were in favour of restoring ties with the United States even though less than 5% regard the US as friendly. Instead of preaching about abstract values, there is a whole range of services that the West could offer which would be promote reform and be appreciated in the region. An EU/US initiative to distribute tens of thousands of personal computers free of charge to Arabs under 25 could, for instance, improve the reputation of the West and kick-start some of the entrepreneurialism needed to promote growth. Though Arabs represent 5% of the world’s population, they make up only 0.5% of its internet users.

Education was described by the Arab Human Development Report as the Middle East’s “Achilles heel”. Funding should therefore be made available for free English lessons, Western government could give special incentives for American or European countries to invest in the region, and a regional venture capital fund could promote entrepreneurship and business development. But economic progress won’t be enough if the humiliation felt in the Arab world through political impotence is not addressed. The frustrations of living in a region where autocratic rule is aggravated by a feeling that Arabs are subservient to US interests. The grainy image of an Arab man at the end of a leash held by an American soldier corresponds powerfully to the perception that the region as a whole is tied to a leash that leads all the way to the Pentagon. And given the patronizing and righteous way in which we have communicated with the Arab world for so long, it is hardly surprising that this view is so widely held.

Iraq’s transition to democracy has been compared by the Bush administration to a child riding a bike who one day needs to take the stabilizers off, and any group opposed to the occupation have been branded as “jihadists” and “terrorists”. Though this might play well for Bush in his re-election campaign, lumping them all together dilutes the gravity of the term and makes it more difficult to resolve complex problems with the sensitivity required. There needs to be a change in language, and more of an effort to communicate seriously with Arab public opinion. Though the West pays lip-service to “dialogue” in the Middle East, the language of condemnation has been far more prevalent. The recent imposition of further US sanctions is hardly going to aid the forces of reform. Instead of proselytizing about the glories of the West, it would be better to discuss issues of mutual concern, such as development, and not just hold up the West as providing a model. It would be useful if successful societies in the region – like Malaysia, Bahrain, Dubai and Qatar, were used to discuss issues like educational reform.

Above all, the West needs to be seen as respecting the right of free speech even if it hurts. The closure of demagogic cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s newspaper on the grounds that it “incited violence” succeeded both in increasing his influence and deepening cynicism about US motives. It would help dispel these impressions if the EU, with less of a propagandist reputation than the US, were to fund internet access for schools and libraries in the region. Allowing democracy and free speech free rein in the Middle East is not without its risks in the short-term. But it is the only approach that has a change of success.

Rob Blackhurst is Editorial Director at the Foreign Policy Centre.

www.fpc.org.uk

In a month in which US hubris has met its nemesis in Najaf, Europhiles are indulging in some of their own. Speaking to the Financial Times, Gustav Hägglund, outgoing chief of the EU’s staff, speculated that Brussels may oversee a UN sponsored intervention in Sudan this year.

Sudan, as the former home of Bin Laden, is a better candidate for the “war on terror” than Saddam’s Iraq ever was. For six months International Crisis Group has been calling for action as some 670,000 people flee ethnic cleansing in the west of the country. While a defeat of ethnic cleansing in Africa ten years to the month after the Rwandan genocide would be a triumph for the nascent EU foreign policy – there are serious questions about how the EU should conduct an intervention. Robert Kagan’s formulation that Americans intervene leaving the Europeans to nation build afterwards, or ‘wash up’, no longer holds. Now, it seems Europe’s own dishes are mounting in the sink.

European countries did act decisively to stabilise both eastern Congo in 2003, in last year’s EU-flagged if largely French ‘Operation Artemis’ – and Kosovo last month. While German politicians refuse to send troops to Iraq, 2800 were deployed in Afghanistan. Every member state – Luxembourg included – has fielded soldiers abroad in the last five years. The EU is now committed to taking over security from NATO in Bosnia.

But it is the follow through of European operations that should be questioned. That European soldiers had to be rushed to Kosovo raises doubts about the efficacy of the 1999 intervention in the province. In the eastern Congo, the impact of the EU’s intervention was marred by poor co-ordination between civilian and military agencies.

In both cases, Europe has proved that it can shift troops to crisis spots, but that it can’t necessarily deal with the political and legal problems needed to build a lasting peace. Its new battle-groups, agreed as part of January’s hawkish European Security Strategy, will number up to 1500 troops each and be sustainable for 120 days: excellent for short-term operations but hardly proof of the EU’s commitment to nation building.

It is a long-term approach that Sudan requires. The current bout of violence follows some progress on peace talks between the countries’ factions – a theoretical ceasefire exists in the region of ethnic cleansing. If European governments are to give some substance to that ceasefire, they must also address the issue of what non-military support they will offer to move from a ceasefire to a more durable peace regime. Few would imagine that Sudan will be another Kosovo or Bosnia, in which soldiers are accompanied by a large-scale civilian peace-building effort. But if the EU’s intervention is to convince local leaders of their lasting interest in the country, their troops must be accompanied by at least a minimum grouping of human rights observers and rule of law monitors. The UN has launched a ten-day mission to investigate human rights abuses in western Sudan – only a much more durable monitoring presence can guarantee stability.

Soft security resources may now be harder to locate than military: there are growing fears in Brussels, for example, that having implemented police support operations in Bosnia and Macedonia, the EU lacks the manpower to mount similar activities elsewhere. Western governments will not easily provide vulnerable civilian peace-builders to Sudan after this month’s events in Iraq. The UN’s civilian capacity is already overstretched. If the EU sends soldiers to Sudan their presence may have little long-term impact – long accused of being too soft, we risk being seduced by the illusions of being hard.