Diplomacy & Crisis News

Levels of the three main heat-trapping gases emitted into the atmosphere – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide – have reached yet another high, the UN meteorological agency, WMO, said on Monday.

Plusieurs milliers de ressortissantes des pays de l'Est et de l'ex-URSS sont victimes de la prostitution forcée en Union européenne. Né après la disparition du rideau de fer, ce phénomène s'est beaucoup développé dernièrement en raison de la paupérisation des populations. Anvers, en Belgique, est la (...) / Europe de l'Est, Criminalité, Femmes - 1999/02

Presidential impeachment in the United States has always seemed to be a domestic matter. President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sexual misconduct. President Richard Nixon resigned to avoid certain impeachment in the wake of the Watergate scandal. And in 1868, the House of Representatives leveled 11 articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson for defying a Republican-led Congress and its positions on Reconstruction.

The current inquiry into President Donald Trump is different. Sometime in December, it is likely that a U.S. president will for the first time be impeached for misusing his foreign policy authority in the service of personal political interests. The evidence laid out in House Intelligence Committee hearings establishes that Trump conditioned the release of congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine on an announcement by the Ukrainian government that it would conduct investigations of Trump’s political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and of the baseless allegation that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

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For three weeks in October, hundreds of Catholic bishops and priests mostly from the countries of the Amazon River basin convened at a special synod at the Holy See. The meeting signaled Pope Francis’s deep concern for the indigenous peoples of the South American rainforest. In his own words, the pope sought “drastic measures” to avert further harm to these communities. “Every kind of injustice and destruction,” he said, “has been practiced upon these people.” Francis knew this synod would upset some traditional believers who have little patience for his moral investment in the protection of indigenous groups. Although his opponents created audacious distractions, the pope persevered in advancing an agenda that facilitates concrete gains for officials, activists, and community leaders dedicated to saving the Amazon.

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A UN worker was killed and two people were injured when their vehicle was attacked in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Sunday.

Violence against women and girls is among the most widespread, and devastating human rights violations in the world, but much of it is often unreported due to impunity, shame and gender inequality, the UN highlighted ahead of Monday’s World Day to stamp out abuse of women and girls.

A campaign to vaccinate some 1.7 million children in Somalia was launched on Sunday by the country’s government, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Du conflit opposant l'Iran aux Etats-Unis et à certains de leurs alliés, les médias iraniens et internationaux ne donnent qu'une image simplifiée. En insistant sur la rhétorique anti-occidentale des dirigeants de la révolution islamique ou sur les scandales des livraisons d'armes, ils oublient le (...) / Iran, Commerce international - 1988/04

The launch of the Syrian Constitutional Committee could be a “door-opener” to finally providing a solution to the country’s brutal conflict, UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen said on Friday in a briefing to the Security Council.

A recap of Friday’s stories in brief: WHO raises fresh Ebola concerns, UN envoy raises hopes of Yemen political settlement, WFP makes urgent Venezuela appeal, hundreds of migrants discovered in boats off Libya coast.

You don’t have to be from New York or even the United States to be a Harlem Globetrotter. Yet in the team's 93-year history, less than two dozen players have been born overseas, UN News learned, during an impromptu visit by the legendary basketball role models to UN Headquarters this week.

The momentum to reach a political settlement in Yemen “has been building”, the United Nations Special Envoy to the country told the Security Council on Friday, attributing the positive development to compromises on “a range of issues”.

Reports of killed and maimed demonstrators, and a continuing nationwide internet shutdown in Iran’s now week-long protests are of “grave concern”, and the Government and authorities must ensure rights of expression and opinion are protected, a UN group of independent experts said on Friday.

Will Beijing’s Mandarin-centered conception of ‘Ecological Civilization’ truly respect and appreciate neighboring countries’ cultures? (Photo Credit: China.org.cn)

Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive transcontinental infrastructural investment project focused across Eurasia, stretching from Asia to Europe to Africa. According to a 2019 World Bank report on the BRI, the project has created economic opportunities for 71 “corridor economies” that account for 35% of global foreign direct investments and 40% of global merchandise exports (including China) at the investment cost of US $575 billion (excluding China). When completed, the project’s contributions to the affected regions are expected to include a reduce in travel time by 12%, a boost in trade from 2.7% to 9.7%, and a raise in income by 3.4%, helping 7.6 million people to escape from extreme poverty. Despite its boons, the project also poses commensurable challenges to the recipient economies’ debt management, global/regional governance, and most importantly, their regional-level enhancement of environmental standards. A 2017 WWF report asserts that the project’s potentially devastating impacts on the affected regions’ biodiversity cannot be overemphasized; the regions overlap with 1739 important bird areas, 46 Global 200 Ecoregions, and the natural habitats of 265 endangered species, of which 39 are critically endangered. Nevertheless, the political features of the BRI’s approach to regional ecological and environmental cooperation are dominantly guided by the ideological principle of an “ecological civilization,” which prioritizes Mandarin-centric values over the globally shared value of “sustainable development.” Such a hyper-nationalist conception of environmental sustainability is also substantively manifested in a BRI document published in May 2017, The Belt and Road Ecological and Environmental Cooperation Plan. The document reads, “To 2025, we will integrate the concepts of ecological civilization and green development into Belt and Road Initiative and create a favorable pattern of well-grounded cooperation on eco-environmental protection.” Here, the meta-analytic “integration” of a “favorable pattern” leaves room for reasonable suspicion that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) aims to promote a process-disregarding, politically coercive environmental policy convergence in the corridor economies affected by the BRI.

The genealogy of the term “ecological civilization” dates back to the early ‘80s when its root term, “ecological culture,” was first coined in a Soviet Marxist ecological work. An “ecological culture” was suggested as a possible way to cope against the “nuclear winter” (global cooling in the aftermath of the then possible nuclear war). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet optimism towards the role of communist technocratic rationality has been gradually succeeded by Chinese Marxist ecologists. During the 2000s, when the world’s most centralized technocratic country started to suffer both socially and environmentally from its one-dimensional hyper-economic-growth, the Chinese ecologists caught sight the political opportunity to put forward a similar idea. The term “ecological civilization” gained its political eminency in 2007 when it was endorsed in Hu Jintao’s work report to the 17th Communist Party Congress. It was later applied to legitimatize Xi Jinping’s “green” power concentration in 2013; a CCP organizational vehicle, the Task Force for the Promotion of Economic Development and Ecological Civilization was established to oversee business activities under the partisan manifesto for the “construction of ecological civilization.” Since the CCP’s adoption of the Central Opinion Document on Ecological Civilization Construction in 2015, a national campaign titled “Central Environmental Inspections” has earned the party US $216 million in fine revenues from the exceedingly high number of 29,000 companies and at the cost of imprisoning 1,527 citizens. The term, which was in its onset intended to complement the post-materialist themes of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms (such as “spiritual civilization”) in the ‘80s, has erroneously evolved into strategic redistributive rhetoric for the concentration of the CCP’s authority over domestic environmental regulation.

Recently, some Chinese scholars have shown the tendency to conflate Marxist ecologism with constructive postmodernism as a way of accentuating state responsibility (CCP’s executive mandates) over legalism in domestic environmental regulation. Although criticizing legal standards for their lack of concern for social, political and anthropocentric aspects of environmental policy regulation, these scholars abuse the postmodern emphasis on “complexity” to advocate increasing state oversight of domestic businesses. They believe such a “manipulative frame” “can help Chinese ecological Marxists avoid the fallacy of ‘turning ecological Marxism into a weapon’ that only points at ‘foreign capitalist countries.’” In addition, they misapply the postmodern emphasis on “cultural diversity” to the Confucian notion of a “harmonious society” in their partisan aim of fostering Mandarin-centric domination over the country’s numerous indigenous cultures. Such strategies, albeit their current limitation to Beijing’s domestic governance, have dangerous implications for the BRI’s future role in Eurasia’s regional development, as well as in South–South cooperation. The postmodernist condonation of Mandarin-centrism during the process of interregional and international policy diffusion could ultimately lead to socioeconomically and socioculturally iniquitous policy convergence.  

Socioeconomically speaking, the BRI has already been long criticized for its now notorious “debt trap” diplomacy. In Central Asian countries in particular, Chinese economic power has filled the power vacuum left by Russia’s waning regional influence by way of lending loans and making investments in the region. What Beijing has consistently propagated as exemplary positive economic soft-power influence has nonetheless created chronic debt management and political corruption problems in the region, mainly due to the Chinese governments’ lack of transactional transparency. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, for example, whose national debts are 41% and 53%, respectively, are now controlled by Beijing, and the countries are identified as two of the eight “debt-distress” corridor economies. Frequent corruption scandals in the two countries also testify to the fact that a significant portion of loans and investments from Beijing continuously flow into the pockets of local elites, fostering rigid economic cartels between Beijing and Central Asian elites. Such seamy aspects of Beijing’s “debt trap” diplomacy, along with other concomitant socioeconomic problems, have caused the spread of anti-Beijing sentiments across the region. This January’s outbreak of Kyrgyzstan’s largest anti-Beijing protests in history clearly demonstrates the public’s rising indignation against the cartel-fabricated reality. Overall, the BRI’s latest developments in Central Asia portend an emotionally unappealing, sociocultural inappropriate future for BRI-led interregional policy diffusion.

International society and regional stakeholders, including Russia, must together keep keen eyes on the possible moral damage caused by the BRI’s environmental policy diffusion (Russia, although a proponent of multiversalized contestation of science, endorses a secular scientific approach towards sustainable development ). Besides holding the BRI projects accountable to global standards in a rule-based manner, the stakeholder countries’ policy practitioners should also scrupulously evaluate and monitor whether the BRI projects’ agenda-setting democratically reflects regional constituents’ policy preferences rather than those of the interregional cartels between Beijing and Central Asian elites. Meanwhile, the stakeholder countries’ policy scholars should innovate new theoretical frameworks that preclude Chinese scholars’ possible abuse of postmodernism in justifying the coercive imposition of Mandarin-centric values on corridor economies.

The post The Myth of Beijing’s “Ecological Civilization” appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Amid multiple deadly attacks on civilians by armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an Ebola death “unlinked to any chain of transmission” risks reversing major gains against the epidemic, which is now down to just a handful of cases, a top UN medic said on Friday. 

Thirty years ago this month, the opening of the Berlin Wall ushered in the last great diplomatic struggle of the Cold War. As cheering crowds danced atop what was left of the Iron Curtain, the fate of Germany hung in the balance. In retrospect, it is easy to see that triumphal moment as part of an inevitable march toward German reunification. At the time, however, the future felt anything but certain. 

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An alarming lack of exercise among adolescents across the world risks seriously compromising their health into adulthood, the UN said on Thursday.  

There is a clear link between the seedy underbelly of the seafood industry, and fishers’ safety, now ranked as the second deadliest profession in the world; and more must be done to ensure people dependent on this type of labour are working in safe conditions, UN partners urged on Thursday. 

The recent 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit and other related summits in Bangkok fell below expectations, providing fodder to armchair sceptics who believe such summits are a waste of time. But on closer inspection, these summits can still be viewed as a glass half-full in reasserting ASEAN’s regionalism in the Indo-Pacific.

 

ASEAN centrality at its finest

The centrality of ASEAN was in all its full glory in Bangkok under the current chairmanship of Thailand. The agglomeration of ASEAN-centered multilateral summits, which were convened from 31 October to 5 November, included the principal ASEAN Summit, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea) Summit, ASEAN-China Summit, ASEAN-US Summit, ASEAN-India Summit, Mekong-Japan Summit, ASEAN-United Nations Summit and the East Asia Summit. The primacy of ASEAN in shaping the regional affairs of the Indo-Pacific was underscored at this slew of summits, with some yielding better outcomes than others.

 

As with past ASEAN summits, the focus of the joint statements was intended to reaffirm the commitment of individual countries to fortify the centrality of ASEAN, principally through the three community pillars of political-security, economic and socio-cultural. Continuing the theme from the 34th ASEAN Summit, the focus was on pursuing sustainability of meeting needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of succeeding generations to meet their needs. These include managing existential threats not only to traditional, but also to non-traditional security such as climate change and natural disasters.

 

Efforts to re-imagine ASEAN as less elite-driven and more people-centric and people-friendly by way of promoting people-to-people diplomacy especially among youths had also intensified all through 2019.

 

Far from being seen as a proxy for the major powers, ASEAN is a useful fulcrum that manages great power relations in the Southeast Asian region. At a time when US-China trade spat shows little sign of receding, ASEAN provides a multilateral protective shield for its individual member-states through strengthening its regional institutions and fostering deeper regional cooperation both within and beyond Southeast Asia. 

 

India disappoints ASEAN

India’s decision to bow out of the mega-regional trade agreement known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) leaves behind a big void as India is one of the world’s fastest-growing trillion-dollar economies. India’s pull-out also dashed hopes of potentially sealing the RCEP deal in Bangkok after years of laborious negotiations, including direct talks with India to allay concerns and achieve a resolution.

 

But India’s open announcement on RCEP finally gave the green light for the other RCEP member-countries to now move ahead to resolve any remaining issues and reach a deal among themselves. India may even be doing them a favour by getting out of the way so as not to be a hurdle in getting RCEP over the line.

 

Although the other RCEP member-countries would prefer India to come on board, principally Singapore which has acted as the interlocutor from the beginning and Indonesia which has strengthened its maritime relations with India, they reaffirmed their commitment to get this trade deal done, with or without India. They are looking to reach an agreement by the next round of summits in 2020, which will occur in Vietnam.

 

While the door remains ajar for India to join the RCEP in the future, this is unlikely to take place under a Narendra Modi-led BJP government due to domestic political exigencies, as evidenced by a wave of anti-RCEP protests and lobbying by local businesses. It is unlikely to occur even under a Congress government, which has sought to take credit for compelling the BJP government to pull out of the RCEP. At this point, it is a delusion to think India will join RCEP, as RCEP + India seems more and more like a pipe-dream.

 

Rebuffing the RCEP contradicts India’s ‘Act East’ Policy of engaging eastwards, particularly Southeast Asia. Had India brought the RCEP into fruition, it could have been the pinnacle of the country’s ‘Act East’ Policy. Rather, India’s ‘Act East’ Policy suffered a setback with Prime Minister Modi pulling India out of the RCEP. India will now focus more on strengthening bilateral relations with individual countries in Southeast Asia, and on prioritizing minilateralist regional organisations such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) and the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation.

 

It was also a missed opportunity for India not to have leveraged on the RCEP to bring closer the diverse regions of South Asia and Southeast Asia. This is because India can actually serve as a strategic gateway and act as a torchbearer of South Asian countries economically engaging Southeast Asia in a big way.

 

The disinterested United States

The absence of the US President Donald Trump from the ASEAN-US Summit reiterates the notion that he does not prioritize Southeast Asia in US foreign policy, and finds multilateralism to be unimportant. As a further affront to ASEAN, Trump dispatched a non-Cabinet member of his administration to represent him in Bangkok. As a tit-for-tat, most of the ASEAN heads-of-state chose to give the ASEAN-US Summit a miss.

 

Trump’s strategic ambivalence towards Southeast Asia, as evidenced by his no-show at two consecutive ASEAN Summits, signaled the receding US interest in the region and the reluctance to provide hegemonic leadership in the Indo-Pacific. The unavoidable outcome of American regional disengagement was ceding more geostrategic space to China. Trump’s insistence on transactional diplomacy premised on a quid pro quo has frustrated even countries, including those in the Indo-Pacific, that are sympathetic to US Interests.

 

Trump’s Bangkok absence may actually be a good thing as it has made ASEAN finally realize that engaging the US multilaterally is like flogging a dead horse. As an alternative, countries in Southeast Asia should strengthen their bilateral relations with the US. A network of overlapping bilateral linkages could provide a useful substitute to multilateral diplomacy in keeping the US engaged in the Southeast Asian region.

 

Governing conduct in the South China Sea

The ASEAN leaders accentuated the importance to finalize the Code of Conduct (COC), as the South China Sea (SCS) remains an arena for maritime contestation over disputed islands and waters. The SCS dispute remains an existential regional security matter that can destabilize the Southeast Asian region, especially if there continues to be outright naval confrontations, most notably between ASEAN members and China.

 

Notwithstanding the South China Sea fatigue, there is political fortitude among ASEAN members to keep a lid on this regional dispute before it goes out of hand as it would have dire geopolitical consequences. As such, the COC is meant to put in place a regional framework to govern the conduct of disputants in the SCS, including deescalating any conflicts diplomatically so as to keep the regional peace and stability.

 

The difficulty however is the lack of clarity on the legally-binding nature of the COC and the disagreements among claimants on how to bring the SCS dispute to a close. It remains a work in progress, but the longer the COC negotiations go on, the more likely there will be further eruptible regional flashpoints in the SCS. 

 

Expanding the Russian footprint in Southeast Asia

One other discernible positive from the Bangkok summits is that Russia has begun to take the Southeast Asian region more seriously though the auspices of ASEAN. This was evidenced by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev attending the East Asia Summit in Bangkok, and the declaration by Russian President Vladimir Putin to pivot towards Asia in its diplomatic strategy to “Turn to the East” beyond just China.

 

Right now, Russia’s footprint in Southeast Asia is moderate and unexceptional as opposed to other big powers, but the potential is immense for deeper engagement in Russia-Southeast Asia relations. One is in the area of arms and weaponry which Russia has been exporting to Southeast Asian countries. Perhaps at some point, Russia may want to step up bilateral defense exercises with Southeast Asian countries. The other is in trade, either conducted bilaterally or multilaterally between ASEAN and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). The EEU-ASEAN collaboration is the path forward for Russia to engage Southeast Asia in a more incisive way whilst also providing Southeast Asia with a gateway to engaging Central Asia.

 

Thailand’s growing regional stature

Hosting a plethora of summits as ASEAN Chairman reflects the rising diplomatic stock of Thailand as an important player in regional affairs, and an aspirant middle power from Southeast Asia. Concomitantly, Thailand has been beefing up its bilateral relations with the much bigger countries namely China and India and to an extent, the US which is its ally. Thailand’s foreign policy posture has rejuvenated in recent years.

 

Especially after the 2019 Thai general election, there is now some semblance of domestic political stability within Thailand, which has enabled the country to conduct a more active foreign policy in bilateral and multilateral terms. The trilateral naval exercise which was conducted recently between Thailand and the other two countries of India and Singapore is a case in point. Known as SITMEX, the main aim is to enhance maritime relations between India and Southeast Asian countries in hopes of augmenting regional security.

 

Looking ahead to Vietnam 2020

As the next chair of ASEAN in 2020, Vietnam is likely to build on the progress made in Thailand 2019, but may carve out its own imprint on regional affairs. A primary litmus test post-Bangkok summits is whether ASEAN can bring RCEP into fruition sooner rather than later. Sealing the RCEP deal would underline the centrality of ASEAN in advancing Southeast Asian affairs. With India bowing out, concluding RCEP should now be a low-hanging fruit for ASEAN in 2020 when RCEP member-countries descend in Vietnam.

 

One high-hanging fruit for ASEAN however would be to enact the COC by 2021. The task will indeed be difficult but not impossible to achieve. As Vietnam is also a claimant in the SCS and shares a land border with China, it has a vested interest to hasten the progress of the COC in 2020 so that it can be enacted in Brunei, which will be ASEAN Chair in 2021. No doubt Vietnam’s diplomatic prowess will be tested in 2020.

 

Like Thailand in 2019, Vietnam will underline the paramount importance of mainland Southeast Asia in shaping regional affairs of Southeast Asia, principally through the auspices of ASEAN. To be sure, countries in mainland Southeast Asia have begun to play a more progressive role in recent years, and this can only bode well for ASEAN, which for many years were the preserve of countries from maritime Southeast Asia.

 

Under Vietnam’s stewardship, the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation will likely be rejuvenated, and as Thailand and Myanmar are also members of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), the Bay of Bengal may well become a critical node for inter-connectivity and hive of maritime activity, and importantly, enhance regional cooperation between South and Southeast Asia.

 

Above all, the Bangkok summits have clearly demonstrated that ASEAN is greater than the sum of its parts although every individual Southeast Asian country must pull its own weight to preserve ‘ASEAN centrality’. Despite challenges confronting regionalism such as domestic politics influenced by excessive nationalism and globalization which has threatened to make borders and regions irrelevant, regional cooperation has not been hampered. It will not be smooth-sailing for ASEAN going forward, but as the recent ASEAN-linked summits have shown, the potential for regional cooperation is immense and it has intensified. Regionalism has reasserted its importance, with ASEAN being the paragon of regional cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.

The post The Highlights and Lowlights of the ASEAN Bangkok Summits appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

In the absence of a magic potion for development, the best way for a country to profoundly transform millions of lives is not to try in vain to boost growth. It is to attempt to raise living standards with the resources it already has.