Democracy is in Trouble in Western Countries

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Dissatisfaction with democracy is at its highest level in almost 25 years, according to University of Cambridge researchers in Britain. The report, “Global Satisfaction With Democracy,” was released by the university’s Centre for the Future of Democracy at the end of January.

Academics have analysed what they say is the biggest global dataset on attitudes towards democracy, based on four million people in 3,500 surveys. The research covered 154 countries around the world.

They tracked views on democracy since 1995. The figures for 2019 showed the proportion dissatisfied rising from 48 per cent to 58 per cent, the highest recorded level.

“We find that dissatisfaction with democracy has risen over time, and is reaching an all-time global high, in particular in developed countries,” stated the report’s lead author Roberto Foa.

Many American political scientists have reached the same conclusion. At a conference held at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, last November, Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University professor, argued that American democracy is facing challenges similar to those that brought down Latin American democracies in coups during the last century.

A key turning point for many democracies was the moment when political rivals began to see themselves as enemies rather than competitors, losing a key norm Levitsky calls “mutual toleration.” This often plays directly into the hands of authoritarians.

Yascha Mounk, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Studies in Washington D.C., locates the current democratic crisis in the rise of social media, the growth of identity politics, and economic stagnation in general-- social inequality in particular. 

Much of this has been fuelled by economic uncertainty since the Great Recession of 2008, along with the migration crisis in Europe a few years later. 

After a brief period of decline after the Second World War, inequality measured as concentration of wealth and income is rising. Less than 100 billionaires now own as much as does 50 per cent of world’s population, down from around 400 billionaires a little more than five years ago. The ultrarich represent an emergent global aristocracy.

A working aristocracy of politicians, business leaders, professional and bureaucrats dominate public affairs. These include graduates of elite educational establishments such as America’s ivy league schools or Britain’s Oxbridge. Class, privilege and wealth still determine life chances.

On the other hand, in many countries today, there are entire regions of desolation, and large sections of the population are impoverished. This world is far removed from the democratic capitalism that dominated the era after 1945.

Political polarization, based on economic and political problems, has led to, among other outcomes, the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump’s election in the U.S. They were an outcry and protest by those who feel alienated in their own country. 

The fracturing of the United Kingdom into regional political constituencies, each with their own leaders and policies, has gained momentum and the union may break apart within the foreseeable future.

The last decade was an economic disaster in the United States. It experienced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Unemployment spiked to 10 per cent, and it took most of the last ten years for it to come back down.

Employment may be widely available again, but a lot of that employment is fundamentally worse than it was in decades past. Americans’ wages still aren’t growing as fast as they were before the crash.

The American project rested on the hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason. But this seems increasingly a forlorn hope.

Over the past couple of decades in America, the divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper and more ominous.

All these differences have created two tribes, balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to defeat the other.

The intellectual elites are now little better. The intellectual right and the academic left have dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Even though liberal democracy remains the official ideology, intellectuals on both the right and left are dissociating themselves from its legacy. This year’s coming election will only make things worse.

Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

As the war in Afghanistan, though now in its 19^th year, continues to wind down, we read less about the country.

It exists in its present configuration because it was a 19^th century borderlands separating the Russian Empire in central Asia from the British one in the Indian subcontinent. 

This rivalry between these two powers became known as the “Great Game,” a term immortalized by Rudyard Kipling. 

The delineation of the final borders of the buffer state of Afghanistan would end a period of enmity between them. 

In the north, an agreement between the empires in 1873 effectively split the historic region of Wakhan by making the Panj and Pamir Rivers the border between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire. It was finalized by the 1895 Pamir Boundary Commission.

In the south, the Durand Line agreement of 1893 between Britain and Afghanistan marked the boundary between British India and Afghanistan. This left a narrow strip of land ruled by Afghanistan as a buffer between the two empires, which became known as the Wakhan Corridor.

It stretches from Afghan Badakhshan to the border with China, between modern-day Tajikistan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan was considered by the British as an independent state at the time although the British controlled its foreign and diplomatic relations.

Though extremely remote and largely inaccessible, this odd border construction essentially served one important purpose in the geopolitical struggle between the two European powers by ensuring that the British and Russian Empires did not touch at any point.

The Wakhan Corridor, covering 8,936 square kilometers but in some places barely 15 kilometers across, is a part of the Pamir Mountain region. Its average elevation is about 5,400 metres.

Due to its altitude and extreme isolation, one author, Johannes Humlum, has characterized the corridor as “the most elevated, the wildest, the most inaccessible, and the least populated” place in Afghanistan.

The Panj River, 1,125 kilometres long, forms a considerable part of the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border.

Effectively, this border, stretching across most of northern Afghanistan, divided every ethnic group that depended on this river and its tributaries. Wakhi, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Uzbeks all were divided between Russian (and later Soviet) Central Asia and Afghanistan, thus severing family and economic ties.

Today, official estimates by the United Nations put the population at approximately 10,590, of which about 1,200 are Kyrgyz.

The native Wakhi are of Iranian origin and, unlike the generally Sunni Kyrgyz, follow the Ismaili Shiite sect of Islam.

The Wakhjir Pass, 5,000 metres above sea level at the eastern end of the Corridor, serves as the 76-kilometre border with China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. It was historically part of the Silk Road trade route between China and Europe.

In 1895 it became the border between the British and the Russians, although the Chinese and Afghans did not finally agree on the border until 1964.

There is no road across the pass, though in 2009 the Chinese constructed a new road to within 10 kilometres of the border for use by border guards. No other traffic is allowed, though there is some smuggling across the pass.

Remote both physically and politically, the Wakhan population feels alienated and economically marginalized within Afghanistan.

Is Italy's Populist Movement on the Ropes?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner
 

Have Italy’s populist and right-wing political movements begun to falter? 

Matteo Salvini’s League failed to overturn decades of leftist rule in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna in an election on Jan. 26. 

This followed Salvini’s decision last August to leave the coalition government he had formed with the Five-Star Movement after the 2018 national election, expecting to trigger another election that polls predicted Salvini would win. 

Instead, Five-Star opportunistically joined up with the center-left Democratic Party (PD) in a new coalition, shunting him into opposition.

In Emilia-Romagna, the League’s candidate, Lucia Borgonzoni, took 43.6 per cent of the vote against 51.4 per cent for the incumbent PD Governor Stefano Bonaccini.

Salvini’s rightist bloc did secure a resounding victory in a separate regional election in the underdeveloped southern toe of Italy, Calabria.

Five-Star is in far bigger trouble as a result of joining forces with the “establishment” in a national government. It has seen its support slide in recent months, leading to a wave of defections amongst its lawmakers, including some to the League.

This has led to the resignation of its leader Luigi Di Maio. Its caretaker leader Vito Crimi admitted that the movement was in disarray. In the Emilia-Romagna and Calabria elections, it had a disastrous day.

But Italy has not seen the last of Salvini. This previously obscure municipal councillor from Milan became the most powerful figure in the country in the past decade, with an anti-immigrant message that resonated with millions of Italians as refugees from Africa and the Middle East crossed the Mediterranean.

Since 2014, more than half a million people have landed in Italy, a country that is home to 60 million people and is 80 per cent coastline.

The party’s previous iteration, as the Northern League, was founded in 1991. Its goal was to split the north, an industrious and prosperous society, away from what it described as the backward and dependent south.

In 2013 Salvini became the party’s leader and reshaped it. To achieve national prominence, Salvini needed a new electoral strategy. The Northern League was a separatist movement targeting Rome as a nest of bureaucratic corruption, and the south as a land of idlers and parasites.

By the early 2010s, it was clear this approach had led to an impasse. There had been no separation from the south and none looked remotely likely.

So Salvini changed course: The League changed its name and abandoned the opposition between the two halves of Italy. It started courting, and winning over, voters in the Italian south, land of economic stagnation and high unemployment --the same southern regions from which his party once wanted to secede.

Salvini began to tap the country’s growing frustration with the European Union in a country where every budget had to be approved by the European Commission; he started to attack the EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Salvini has long been obsessed with immigration as a negative force in Italy. So instead of southerners, he targeted immigrants, thus positioning the party to speak for all Italians, the whole nation, against “oppressors and intruders.”

Salvini’s formula has been to combine tough talk on immigration and emotional defenses of national identity.

The general election of 2018 was a milestone. Its main base remained the north, but the League was now also present in the south, though it gained fewer votes overall than its populist rival, the Five-Star Movement.

The two joined forces in a government whose main point of agreement was hostility to the EU and its single currency, the Euro, which they held responsible for the imposition of austerity on Italy. Salvini became a deputy prime minister and minister of the interior.

But eventually Salvini went too far in trying to impose his will on his Five-Star partners; the latter had, after all, won more votes.

So the Five-Star Movement, putting aside their disagreements with the Democratic Party, formed an alliance with them based solely on sidelining Salvini, who has mocked it as a government “made in Brussels.”

Meanwhile, Italy’s Senate on Feb. 12 voted to allow prosecutors to try him on charges of illegally detaining migrants at sea last summer. They “will be defeated by history,” asserted a defiant Salvini.

Is the Khalistan Movement Gone?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the movement for an independent Khalistan, a Sikh nation in Punjab, threatened to sever this vital region from India.

Its major proponent, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had been head of the orthodox Sikh religious school Damdami Taksal, would symbolize the Sikh separatist movement. 

To some, Bhindranwale is remembered as a martyr to a movement which stood up to Indian state dominance. To others, he represents a dark period in Punjab’s history of militancy, violence and state repression in that period.

When India became independent in 1947, Punjab was partitioned. East Punjab with a Hindu and Sikh majority population became a part of India and the Muslim majority West Punjab became a part of Pakistan.

When the Indian Punjab was reorganized after independence as a Punjabi speaking state in 1966, the Sikhs for the first time became a majority religious group there.

But the failure of the moderate constitutionalist Sikh Akali Dal to make progress in advocating for further Sikh demands contributed to the rise of popularity of Bhindranwale. 

These included the transfer of Chandigarh as a capital city to Punjab—it was serving as the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana states – and the restructuring of federal arrangements to allow more administrative and financial powers to the states.

This last demand was articulated in the 1973 Anandpur Sahib Resolution.

Initially, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party supported Bhindranwale in a bid to split Sikh votes and weaken the Akali Dal, its chief rival in Punjab.

In 1982, Bhindranwale entered the political struggle against the policies of the central government. He took up residence in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar and his popularity grew.

Gandhi decided to take action. In October 1983, emergency rule was imposed in Punjab. Operation Blue Star, the military assault on the Golden Temple began June 1, 1984.

Bhindranwale and most of the militant leadership were killed. It also resulted in the deaths of a large number of Sikh civilians, while the heavy artillery severely damaged the Temple.

In response Gandhi’s two Sikh bodyguards assassinated her on Oct. 31. This was followed by anti-Sikh riots that lasted four days in many parts of India. Upwards of 2,000 Sikhs in Delhi and several other cities were murdered by rampaging mobs.

The following decade saw thousands of civilian casualties, hundreds of detentions without charge or trial, and thousands of extrajudicial executions and “disappearances.” It is estimated that upward of 25,000 people were killed, the majority of them Sikhs.

In the 1990s Punjab began a process of recovery from the previous two decades of violence and draconian police actions. 

But Operation Bluestar has not been forgotten, and the symbol of Bhindranwale has re-emerged. 

His defiance and sacrifice has been hailed as resembling those of the great Sikh martyrs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The many Sikhs in support of him should caution us from believing the demand for a sovereign Khalistan has ceased completely.

This ideal has a long-term attraction to Sikhs who feel a strong identity as a nation and draw on their historical 19^th century Sikh kingdom under Ranjit Singh as a precedent.

Egypt, Ethiopia May Not Rumble Over Nile Dam

By Henry Srebrnik, (Fredericton, NB) Daily Gleaner

Ethiopia is currently building a giant dam on the Blue Nile, close to its border with Sudan. But this has become a polarizing political issue between the country and Egypt.

The $4.6 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) was announced in early 2011, when Ethiopia took advantage of Egypt’s distraction with the Arab Spring uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

A dream since the 1960s, the dam, which will be the largest in Africa,  is meant to provide huge amounts of electricity for the power-starved nation, energy that could both fuel economic development and bring in cash through international electricity sales.

Ethiopia has an acute shortage of electricity, with 65 per cent of its population not connected to the grid.

It is the centerpiece of Ethiopia’s bid to become Africa’s biggest power exporter, with a projected capacity of more than 6,000 megawatts.

The dam has become a must-have project politically, especially since Ethiopians themselves underwrote its cost with a popular bond issue.

Ethiopia has said it will start filling the reservoir behind the dam in July, though construction has been hit by delays.

The reservoir, which has a capacity of more than 74 billion cubic meters, will be flooded to form an artificial lake.

The first stage of the filling process is expected to take two years and bring the water level in the reservoir to 595 metres out of an eventual 632 metres.

But for Egypt, which has a rapidly growing population nearing 100 million, the dam represents a potentially existential threat. 

Some 90 per cent of Egypt’s fresh water comes from the Nile, and about 57 per cent of that Nile water comes from the Blue Nile, the river that Ethiopia is going to dam. Even without taking the dam into account, Egypt is short of water. 

Egypt accuses Ethiopia of not factoring in the risk of drought conditions such as those that affected the Nile Basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While acknowledging such a scenario is unlikely, Egypt says it could lose more than one million jobs and $1.8 billion in economic production annually. 

Egypt’s farmers are already facing dry fields because of water scarcity due to a combination of factors such as rapidly growing population, climate change, and antiquated irrigation systems.

The Egyptian government fears that Ethiopia's dam will make the situation worse. It therefore wants the first, two-year stage of the filling process to be extendable.

At one point Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi even threatened to use military force to stop the dam’s construction.

Ethiopia, with a population of more than 100 million people, accuses Egypt of trying to maintain a colonial-era grip over the Nile’s waters, based on a 1929 treaty (renewed in 1959) gave Egypt and Sudan rights to nearly all of the Nile waters. Addis Ababa says Cairo is trying to hold the project hostage by imposing rules over the filling and operation of the dam.

It also noted that while it could fill the reservoir in two to three years, it made a concession by proposing a four to seven-year process.

After Egyptian President al-Sisi met Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the sidelines of a summit in Russia in October, the two sides agreed to restart technical talks. Egypt then accepted an invitation from the United States for further talks in Washington.

Three days of intensive discussions beginning Jan. 13 laid the groundwork for a preliminary agreement that could defuse the growing tensions.

 “The filling of the GERD will be executed in stages and will be undertaken in an adaptive and cooperative manner that takes into consideration the hydrological conditions of the Blue Nile and the potential impact of the filling on downstream reservoirs,” the parties announced.

On Feb.1, a day after the latest talks ended, Abiy declared that Ethiopia was drawing ever closer to “our continental power generation victory day.”

Sudan, caught in the literal middle between the other two countries, initially opposed the dam but later came to support it since it promises irrigation and electricity benefits and a way to regulate irregular flows of water that often lead to devastating floods in that country.