Stony silenceThe dog of Alcibiades
If you go into the British Museum and walk towards its famous domed reading room, youll pass a 2,200 year old statue of a dog with no tail. The dog belonged to Alcibiades, an ancient Greek who was one of the greatest charmers and con artists of all time. The story goes that Alcibiades docked the animals tail simply to give the Athenian people something else to talk about other than himself.
You had to walk past the stone dog if you were attending this years BP Lecture on World Civilisation delivered by Sergio Vieira de Mello, the new United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. de Mello argued that people of goodwill should focus on, highlight and better appreciate the universality of human dignity rather than look for some elusive definition of World Civilisation.
It was an impressive and thoughtful speech. But no one mentioned the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, a controversial project proposed by a BP-led consortium which has roused widespread concern, not least for its potentially adverse effect on human rights in several Caucasian countries (see Globolog Beyond Pinocchio in the Caucasus).
The US$3bn plus project needs a subsidy of $1.5bn to go ahead. Earlier this month campaigners opposed to it wrote a memo to Britains Department for International Development (DFID), Treasury and Export Credit Guarantee Department - the organisations that would be stumping up public money to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to finance Baku-Ceyhan.
We find the use of public money to support a project that explicitly denies any public interest requirement impossible to justify, say the campaigners. And theres more. They say the project will not contribute to poverty alleviation, which, since the Labour Party came to power, has been DFIDs fundamental mission objective: "the potential for exacerbating social divides as a result of the unequal distribution of benefits is high".
The campaigners urge DFID to delay any decision on the project until four tasks are completed: a review of tax and revenue agreements; a review of macro-economic national and regional impacts; negotiation of social development programmes with affected communities; and the appointment of an international advisory group. They have nine other areas of concern.
Globolog asked DFID for a response. They said:
We take [the concerns expressed by local and international NGOs] seriously. We have not received project proposals from the IFC or the EBRD. And no decision has been taken by the Department about whether or not to support any future proposals. We will be replying formally to the memorandum in due course.
Next week Globolog will be talking to BP.
Did somebody mention carpet bombing? see
Imagining War
What could be the consequences of a US attack on Iraq? Paul Rogers outlines some disturbing possibilities in his openDemocracy column this week. Globolog asked the same question of Joseph Nye, the author of The Paradox of American Power. A former Assistant Secretary of Defence, Nye who would probably have held high office in the administration had Al Gore won the presidency rather than merely the popular vote.
For some people in Europe, Joseph Nye is the good American a man who believes in the importance of soft power (influence through co-operation, persuasion and example as distinct from force). The paradox, Nye told an audience in London this week, is that the United States, the strongest state in the world since Ancient Rome, can only succeed through co-operation.
This, he says, is because the modern world is like a three-dimensional chess game. Imagine three chessboards stacked on top of each other, with three games played simultaneously and interacting with each other. One board is the game of state-controlled military power and on this level the US is clearly predominant. The second board is the economic one, and here the US does not call all the shots. The European Union, for example, is a formidable counterweight: it was the European Commission that prevented the merger of GE and Honeywell even though US authorities had approved the merger.
The third board in Nyes game is where global interactions take place outside government control. These can be for good such as the non-governmental organisations which now organise globally thanks to advances in information technology. For example, NGOs have brought into being initiatives such as the Landmines Convention in the teeth of opposition from the Pentagon and the military establishment. But the new players on this board can also be for ill. Terrorists, for example, operate globally, and are developing the ability to kill not just thousands but, soon, millions of people. And global terrorism, says Nye, cannot be overcome by purely military means. It can only be dealt with effectively through co-operation. Atempts to impose America's will by force won't work.
In Nyes view, the Bush administration has a one-dimensional view of the current Iraqi crisis. It thinks that there is a military solution, and that a durable democratic settlement can be imposed on Iraq. The thinking driving this approach comes from the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary for Defence, and other Wilsonians of the Right (Woodrow Wilson, US President from 1913 to 1921, was an idealist who played a central role in democratisation of the old European empires after the First World War). Yes, oil is a factor - but not the main one:on a scale of one to ten Id give it a one.
[I am doubtful - see the section on Russian-US Tango in an earlier Globolog. Then again, consider that Paul Wolfowitz was once a civil rights activist who joined Martin Luther Kings rally in Washington DC in August 1963 ... or that the US has been able to buy as much oil as it wants from Iraq at affordable prices since the last Gulf War.]
Nye thinks that the US could prevail after a fairly short campaign against the Iraqi military. But military conquest is only a small part of the picture, and if the administration continues to play chess in only one dimension it will lose in the longer term. So, Globolog asked, where would a US conquest of Iraq lead? I very much do not want the US to be a controlling power. Occupation and control is profoundly corrupting to the people who rule, whether they be Americans or others.
Some weeks ago, the writer Joseph Fallows published a sobering articleon the consequences of a US conquest of Iraq. It would, says Fallows, lead to a stupendous commitment, on a par with having a 51st state...but much more dangerous and expensive. I have been pressing Fallows's article on all and sundry since Globolog's first edition ) and Prof. Nye said yes, he would go and read it too.
Another provocative bit of thinking about the Iraqi crisis is The Economic Consequences of War , published in the 5 December edition of the New York Review of Books. William D. Nordhaus (known to some for his attempts to estimate the costs of climate change), puts the costs of war at between $121 billion for a short war favourable to the US, and $1,595 billion for a protracted war in which the US runs into major difficulties. The estimates exclude impacts on the US business cycle, costs to other countries and "worst case" impacts on the oil markets. They also exclude the quantified costs of both civilian and military casualties suffered by Iraqis and any fallout that comes from a worldwide reaction against perceived American disregard for the lives and property of others. The Bush administration, Nordhaus concludes, is completely ignoring fiscal realities, among other things.
Globologs instinct at this point is to say OK, weve heard more than enough; a US attack on Irag cannot be justified. What about the voices of Iraqis themselves? At a press conference organised by the Paris-based International Alliance for Justice, facilitated by openDemocracy, women from all the major ethnic and religious groups (Kurdish, Turkoman, Assyrian, Sunni, Shia) described their terrible experiences at the hands of Saddam's regime and their hopes for future.
A journalist from Red Pepper asked what the women thought about a US military attack on Iraq. Safia Al Souhail, Advocacy Director for Middle East and Islamic World at the International Alliance for Justice, said We are for regime change by all means. We prefer the peaceful option. We have urged Saddam to resign. We know very well he will not listen to this plea. Ask any Iraqi woman [who can speak freely] what she wants. She will tell you regime change at any price.
Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam TalbotChrist on a bike
Estimates of the economic costs of climate change by William D. Nordhaus - or more specifically those who have taken his findings and used them uncritically - have beensharply criticised . But that certainly does not mean that the tools of economics are useless to thinking about how to deal with this challenge (for a couple of the more radical examples, see Benito Müller and the New Economics Foundation ).
Still, it is hard to make a case using economics alone for action on climate change in a way that will make people stop and think. Perhaps appeals to emotion and morality will help. A few years ago, one commentator suggested that a trans-Atlantic flight on an aeroplane was tantamount to child abuse. Maybe he had a point, but the idea lead me to suggest, unhelpfully, that on this basis one could construct a Climate Change Sliding Scale of Moral Equivalence. A long car journey, for example, would be tantamount to, say, neglecting a domestic pet for a couple of days.
Now the US Evangelical Environment Network and Creation Care Magazine have brought religion into the picture. Their campaign What Would Jesus Drive? has succeeded in attracting widespread attention in the dominant media, where established environmental groups have often failed. Good luck to them. But I think they are missing the main point. Christ would surely ride a bicycle.
Do you have a story about globalisation? Are you outraged or elated? Contact globolog@opendemocracy.net