Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
University of Arizona historian Oscar Martinez, in his 1994 book Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, developed four models of interaction in the borderlands between countries: alienated, coexistent, interdependent and integrated. There may be elements of more than one in each case, but one usually predominates.
Alienated borderlands have virtually no cross-boundary interchange, due to warfare, political disputes, or ideological or religious animosity. Tension prevails and there are rigid controls over cross-border traffic. North and South Korea share such a border, as do Israel and Syria.
Coexistent borderlands have limited cross-border interaction. There may still be disputes about the location of the border. The Russian-Chinese and Indian-Pakistani borders are examples.
Interdependent borderlands: In this case the borderlands of the two countries are symbiotically linked and there is a mutually beneficial economic system. Often the productive capacity of the wealthier country is matched with raw materials and cheap labour in the poorer one. Such has been the Mexican-American border.
Finally, there are integrated borderlands, where most existing barriers to trade and movement are eliminated and capital, products and labour move without restrictions. Internationalist ideology emphasizes peaceful relations and each country relinquishes a significant part of its sovereignty for the sake of mutual progress. This is largely the case within the 27-member European Union.
In interdependent and integrated borderlands, relatively unimpaired interaction makes it possible for people to participate in social systems that foster trade, consumerism, tourism, migration, cultural exchanges, and personal relationships.
Ethnic or cultural affinity enhances transnational interaction. Thus the American-Mexican border has always had intense activity because of the presence of large numbers of people of Mexican descent on the American side. They fused a highly interdependent bi-national system.
A strong border culture set the area apart from the main culture in either the United States or Mexico. Some cities have been almost unified entities: for example, Brownsville-Matamoros, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, in the Rio Grande Valley; and Calexico-Mexicali and San Diego-Tijuana along the California border.
But things have changed for the worse in recent years. With increasing pressure on this border through illegal immigration and narco-trafficking, the frontier is becoming highly militarised. Is an interdependent border becoming a coexistent one?
There has been an anti-immigrant backlash on the American side. When Americans think of “the border,” they think of Mexico, not Canada. And it only too often relates to undocumented migrants and drug smugglers.
This has become a major political issue, and has become part of the larger debate about immigration reform. Washington now spends $18 billion a year trying to secure its border with Mexico; some 20,000 border patrol officers now guard the border. As well, a 1,030-kilometer barrier has been built between the two countries.
U.S. President Barack Obama met with his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, in early May. U.S. officials are concerned that the new Mexican government, in office since last year, seems less inclined to provide the same level of deep coordination with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies as its predecessor.
The border stretches for 3,169 kilometres, 595 of them in Arizona, and that state has gone furthest in attempting to control illegal movement across the border. The mistrust is exemplified by the high concrete and steel fence that now separates Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Sonora.
The writer Paul Theroux visited Nogales last year. He wrote about his experience in “The Country Just Over the Fence,” in the New York Times of Feb. 26, 2012. “In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen — more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction.”
In the 1990s, I visited the border between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas twice, once at Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the other time between McAllen and Reynosa. Though it’s just a short walk or drive across the Rio Grande River, the difference is indeed astounding. It is a divide between an industrialized country and one far poorer.
The border cities were already dangerous places, and I didn’t tarry. Drug gangs have since made them considerably worse.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Monday, May 27, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
America: Land of Guns and Murders
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Many years ago, an author whose name I’ve since forgotten, figuratively threw up his hands in despair at the increasingly fractured American political landscape, and remarked in a magazine article that “there is New York City, a couple of neighbourhoods in Boston, and the rest of the country is the South.” (Actually, he could have included a few more liberal cities, such as San Francisco.)
By this he meant that the United States was becoming ideologically an increasingly right-wing country. Imagine what he would be saying today.
Despite two horrific mass shootings last year, one in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the other in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, by young men with military-grade assault weapons, the United States Senate on April 17 refused to even consider the possibility of tightening gun controls. Even background checks seem too radical!
This defeat occurred despite the fact that upwards of 90 per cent of Americans, according to recent public opinion polls, backed the failed legislation. One wonders whether the National Rifle Association, which opposed the legislation, not Congress, is the legislative branch of American government.
Today the NRA, with five million members, is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. Annual revenue tops $200 million. Its mission, states the organization, is “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.” To that end, it produces numerous pamphlets, magazines and television shows.
The NRA is heavily supported by the country’s thousands of gun manufacturers and dealers. NRA lobbying in the 1980s led to American manufacturers increasing the production of military-style weapons, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols.
One Pennsylvania gun maker, Keystone Sporting Arms, even produces rifles geared toward children!
In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in political races, backing (mostly Republican) opponents of gun control.
The NRA has turned the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1791, which refers, somewhat vaguely, to the “right to bear arms,” into a rigid doctrine that proclaims the right of every individual American to, effectively, be armed to the teeth. Today’s guns, of course, have firepower unimaginable to the founding fathers.
Its solution to gun violence is – more guns. After the Newtown massacre, it recommended placing armed guards in American schools, and suggested that even teachers carry weapons.
Americans today possess some 270 million privately held firearms. They have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. There are four times as many federally licensed firearms and ammunition dealers in the U.S. as there are grocery stores.
Not surprisingly, the country’s gun-related murder rate is the highest in the developed world. There are approximately 45 murders committed in the United States every day, mostly with guns.
The U.S. is a statistical outlier: Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.
It wasn’t always this way. Until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, guns were not a major cultural issue in the country.
True, there was a history of violence: after all, the United States emerged after an armed revolution against Britain.
This continued as Americans moved across the West, battling native peoples, Mexico, and each other in the Civil War. Hollywood films often glorified the John Wayne loner settling matters with a rifle.
But by the mid-20th century, it was assumed that this was all in the past, a matter of temporary lawlessness before proper political institutions were in place.
The culture wars following the 1960s changed that. In rural America, in the old South, and elsewhere, people frightened by the rapid changes in American life and fearful that they were “losing the country” to rich elitists on the coasts, new immigrants, and minorities, became easy targets for the purveyors of guns.
Some, spinning conspiracy theories, even formed militias, convinced that “Washington” had fallen into the hands of “un-American” enemies willing to abandon them to a UN-based “world government” that would take away their rights and impose “socialism” on the country.
We saw echoes of this type of thinking in the debate over “Obamacare” a few years ago, though the president’s health care reforms were, by the standards of most of the Western world, very mild indeed.
The NRA held its 142 annual convention in Houston the first weekend of May, attended by some 70,000 members. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” incoming president James Porter told them, but rather part of a larger “culture war.” Added Wayne LaPierre, the association’s executive vice president, “We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation fight for everything we care about.”
In 1964 the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He asserted that American politics “has often been an arena for angry minds.” Such people emerge into the political arena whenever they perceive “enemies at the gates.”
The NRA and the gun lobbyists did not gain their power by accident – they have had fertile fields to plow.
Many years ago, an author whose name I’ve since forgotten, figuratively threw up his hands in despair at the increasingly fractured American political landscape, and remarked in a magazine article that “there is New York City, a couple of neighbourhoods in Boston, and the rest of the country is the South.” (Actually, he could have included a few more liberal cities, such as San Francisco.)
By this he meant that the United States was becoming ideologically an increasingly right-wing country. Imagine what he would be saying today.
Despite two horrific mass shootings last year, one in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the other in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, by young men with military-grade assault weapons, the United States Senate on April 17 refused to even consider the possibility of tightening gun controls. Even background checks seem too radical!
This defeat occurred despite the fact that upwards of 90 per cent of Americans, according to recent public opinion polls, backed the failed legislation. One wonders whether the National Rifle Association, which opposed the legislation, not Congress, is the legislative branch of American government.
Today the NRA, with five million members, is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. Annual revenue tops $200 million. Its mission, states the organization, is “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.” To that end, it produces numerous pamphlets, magazines and television shows.
The NRA is heavily supported by the country’s thousands of gun manufacturers and dealers. NRA lobbying in the 1980s led to American manufacturers increasing the production of military-style weapons, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols.
One Pennsylvania gun maker, Keystone Sporting Arms, even produces rifles geared toward children!
In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in political races, backing (mostly Republican) opponents of gun control.
The NRA has turned the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1791, which refers, somewhat vaguely, to the “right to bear arms,” into a rigid doctrine that proclaims the right of every individual American to, effectively, be armed to the teeth. Today’s guns, of course, have firepower unimaginable to the founding fathers.
Its solution to gun violence is – more guns. After the Newtown massacre, it recommended placing armed guards in American schools, and suggested that even teachers carry weapons.
Americans today possess some 270 million privately held firearms. They have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. There are four times as many federally licensed firearms and ammunition dealers in the U.S. as there are grocery stores.
Not surprisingly, the country’s gun-related murder rate is the highest in the developed world. There are approximately 45 murders committed in the United States every day, mostly with guns.
The U.S. is a statistical outlier: Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.
It wasn’t always this way. Until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, guns were not a major cultural issue in the country.
True, there was a history of violence: after all, the United States emerged after an armed revolution against Britain.
This continued as Americans moved across the West, battling native peoples, Mexico, and each other in the Civil War. Hollywood films often glorified the John Wayne loner settling matters with a rifle.
But by the mid-20th century, it was assumed that this was all in the past, a matter of temporary lawlessness before proper political institutions were in place.
The culture wars following the 1960s changed that. In rural America, in the old South, and elsewhere, people frightened by the rapid changes in American life and fearful that they were “losing the country” to rich elitists on the coasts, new immigrants, and minorities, became easy targets for the purveyors of guns.
Some, spinning conspiracy theories, even formed militias, convinced that “Washington” had fallen into the hands of “un-American” enemies willing to abandon them to a UN-based “world government” that would take away their rights and impose “socialism” on the country.
We saw echoes of this type of thinking in the debate over “Obamacare” a few years ago, though the president’s health care reforms were, by the standards of most of the Western world, very mild indeed.
The NRA held its 142 annual convention in Houston the first weekend of May, attended by some 70,000 members. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” incoming president James Porter told them, but rather part of a larger “culture war.” Added Wayne LaPierre, the association’s executive vice president, “We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation fight for everything we care about.”
In 1964 the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He asserted that American politics “has often been an arena for angry minds.” Such people emerge into the political arena whenever they perceive “enemies at the gates.”
The NRA and the gun lobbyists did not gain their power by accident – they have had fertile fields to plow.
Monday, May 06, 2013
Nigeria's Ethnic and Religious Divisions Are Difficult to Manage
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Africa’s most populous country, independent since 1960, is also one of its most troubled.
The 923,768 square kilometre nation of Nigeria is riven by ethnic rivalries, religious divisions, and extremism. Officially a federal republic of 36 states plus the capital, Abuja, for much of its post-colonial history Nigeria has been ruled by military men and kleptocrats.
Europeans, particularly the British, brought Christianity to the south, while in the north powerful Muslim entities like the Kano emirate and the Sokoto caliphate became bastions of Islam.
Frederick Lugard, who was the British governor from 1912 to 1919, developed the policy of indirect rule. If the emirs accepted British authority, the colonial power was willing to confirm them in office.
Though Nigeria’s 170 million people comprise some 500 ethnic groups, the three most powerful (and rival) ones are the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.
In the north, the Hausa, numbering 40 million, are almost entirely Muslim. Nine northern Muslim-majority states, as well as parts of three Muslim-plurality ones, adhere to various forms of figure in Nigeria.Islamic shari’a law; Sa’adu Abubakar, the current sultan of Sokoto, remains the most powerful religious
The Yoruba, in the southwest, are more divided religiously, with some two-thirds of their population of 35 million professing Christianity (mainly Protestant faiths), and one-third Islam.
The 30 million Igbo, living mainly in the southeast, are mainly Roman Catholic Christians. Subjected to horrific massacres following a coup in 1966, in which tens of thousands were killed, they formed the breakaway nation of Biafra in 1967, which was crushed by the Nigerian army three years later.
Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who became Biafra’s president, fled but returned to Nigeria from exile in 1982 and died two years ago. The world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, also an Igbo, published There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, not long before his own death this year.
Altogether, the country is about evenly divided between Christianity and Islam, with the so-called middle belt of the country an area of mixed Christian-Muslim population.
Attempts of extend Islamic law elsewhere in the country has been a major source of discord. Recurring religious conflict has claimed many thousands of lives over the years. In the city of Jos alone, thousands of people have died and tens of thousands have lost their homes in the last decade.
Much of the violence is attributed to Boko Haram, the Islamist armed group operating in northern Nigeria, in particular in Kano. Boko Haram’s main goal is to overthrow the federal government and impose Islamic law throughout northern Nigeria.
Formed in 2002, the group has killed thousands of people, including more than 2,600 in the past two years alone. Clashes in April in the northeastern town of Baga between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram left more than 200 people dead and some 2,000 homes destroyed. Many people accused the army of dousing houses with gasoline, setting them on fire, and shooting residents when they tried to flee.
The government is hoping to strike a deal with Boko Harem which would include an amnesty as well as a ceasefire. But previous attempts at dialogue have failed. As well, Ansaru, an even more extreme jihadist group that broke away from Boko Haram, is also now active in the north.
Corruption has been deeply engrained in the political culture of this oil-rich country. While those in power grew fabulously rich, most Nigerians remain poor, and the Nigerian state itself has been blamed for the inequality.
The most corrupt of Nigeria’s presidents was General Sani Abacha, from Kano, who ruled from 1993 until 1998. After his death from a heart attack, it was alleged that he and his family had enriched themselves to the tune of $3 billion, reportedly siphoned out of the country’s coffers and sent abroad. Some $473 million was discovered in Swiss bank accounts alone.
After emerging from nearly three decades of uninterrupted military dictatorship, the country returned to civilian rule under Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999.
Upon the death in 2010 of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a Muslim Hausa from the north, his vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, assumed the office. He is a Christian from the Niger delta region in the southeast, a member of one of the country’s smaller ethnic groups, the Ijaw.
Militants in Boko Haram, displeased with the idea of a Christian as head of state, in August 2011 bombed the UN building in Abuja. Jonathan asserted that it was not merely an attack on Nigeria, but on the international community.
Given the immense problems that beset Nigeria, Jonathan needs all the luck he can get.
Africa’s most populous country, independent since 1960, is also one of its most troubled.
The 923,768 square kilometre nation of Nigeria is riven by ethnic rivalries, religious divisions, and extremism. Officially a federal republic of 36 states plus the capital, Abuja, for much of its post-colonial history Nigeria has been ruled by military men and kleptocrats.
Europeans, particularly the British, brought Christianity to the south, while in the north powerful Muslim entities like the Kano emirate and the Sokoto caliphate became bastions of Islam.
Frederick Lugard, who was the British governor from 1912 to 1919, developed the policy of indirect rule. If the emirs accepted British authority, the colonial power was willing to confirm them in office.
Though Nigeria’s 170 million people comprise some 500 ethnic groups, the three most powerful (and rival) ones are the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.
In the north, the Hausa, numbering 40 million, are almost entirely Muslim. Nine northern Muslim-majority states, as well as parts of three Muslim-plurality ones, adhere to various forms of figure in Nigeria.Islamic shari’a law; Sa’adu Abubakar, the current sultan of Sokoto, remains the most powerful religious
The Yoruba, in the southwest, are more divided religiously, with some two-thirds of their population of 35 million professing Christianity (mainly Protestant faiths), and one-third Islam.
The 30 million Igbo, living mainly in the southeast, are mainly Roman Catholic Christians. Subjected to horrific massacres following a coup in 1966, in which tens of thousands were killed, they formed the breakaway nation of Biafra in 1967, which was crushed by the Nigerian army three years later.
Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who became Biafra’s president, fled but returned to Nigeria from exile in 1982 and died two years ago. The world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, also an Igbo, published There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, not long before his own death this year.
Altogether, the country is about evenly divided between Christianity and Islam, with the so-called middle belt of the country an area of mixed Christian-Muslim population.
Attempts of extend Islamic law elsewhere in the country has been a major source of discord. Recurring religious conflict has claimed many thousands of lives over the years. In the city of Jos alone, thousands of people have died and tens of thousands have lost their homes in the last decade.
Much of the violence is attributed to Boko Haram, the Islamist armed group operating in northern Nigeria, in particular in Kano. Boko Haram’s main goal is to overthrow the federal government and impose Islamic law throughout northern Nigeria.
Formed in 2002, the group has killed thousands of people, including more than 2,600 in the past two years alone. Clashes in April in the northeastern town of Baga between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram left more than 200 people dead and some 2,000 homes destroyed. Many people accused the army of dousing houses with gasoline, setting them on fire, and shooting residents when they tried to flee.
The government is hoping to strike a deal with Boko Harem which would include an amnesty as well as a ceasefire. But previous attempts at dialogue have failed. As well, Ansaru, an even more extreme jihadist group that broke away from Boko Haram, is also now active in the north.
Corruption has been deeply engrained in the political culture of this oil-rich country. While those in power grew fabulously rich, most Nigerians remain poor, and the Nigerian state itself has been blamed for the inequality.
The most corrupt of Nigeria’s presidents was General Sani Abacha, from Kano, who ruled from 1993 until 1998. After his death from a heart attack, it was alleged that he and his family had enriched themselves to the tune of $3 billion, reportedly siphoned out of the country’s coffers and sent abroad. Some $473 million was discovered in Swiss bank accounts alone.
After emerging from nearly three decades of uninterrupted military dictatorship, the country returned to civilian rule under Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999.
Upon the death in 2010 of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a Muslim Hausa from the north, his vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, assumed the office. He is a Christian from the Niger delta region in the southeast, a member of one of the country’s smaller ethnic groups, the Ijaw.
Militants in Boko Haram, displeased with the idea of a Christian as head of state, in August 2011 bombed the UN building in Abuja. Jonathan asserted that it was not merely an attack on Nigeria, but on the international community.
Given the immense problems that beset Nigeria, Jonathan needs all the luck he can get.
Thursday, May 02, 2013
The Demise of the Canadian Jewish News
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
The demise of the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is as sad as it is unexpected. Obviously the major reason for this has to do with the changing nature of the newspaper business. The rise of the internet has enabled people to get their news (mostly for free) on various electronic devices from all over the Jewish world.
I was a long-time contributor to the CJN – from 1975 to 2006 I published 91 articles, mostly op-eds, in the paper. I have been a very close friend, for 55 years now, of their best journalist (in my opinion). Since 2006, though, I’ve been writing for the Jewish Tribune.
Living far away from the Jewish centres of Toronto and Montreal, people like me have no inside knowledge about the business decisions that may have prompted this move.
But is it possible the changing face of the Canadian Jewish community might also be a factor? There has always been a perception – one to which I subscribe – that the CJN tended to be a voice of the Jewish ‘establishment,’ one closely tied to the Liberal Party. These people were particularly enamoured of the country forged by Pierre Trudeau, and many of them supported his son Justin in the recent party leadership contest.
The Jewish Tribune, on the other hand, has backed the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, in particular for its steadfast support of Israel. In the last federal election, much of the community followed suit.
But one senses that many of the ‘machers’ still hanker for the ‘good old days’ of Liberal hegemony and have some disdain for the Tribune. In one e-mail I received, a well-known Toronto communal figure made some unflattering references to its publisher, Frank Dimant, and bemoaned the fact that with the closure of the CJN the community will lose “the voices of some of our esteemed” figures.
Are the contributors to the Jewish Tribune just burnt toast? I’m sure the Tribune will continue to do its best to continue to serve the community well.
The demise of the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is as sad as it is unexpected. Obviously the major reason for this has to do with the changing nature of the newspaper business. The rise of the internet has enabled people to get their news (mostly for free) on various electronic devices from all over the Jewish world.
I was a long-time contributor to the CJN – from 1975 to 2006 I published 91 articles, mostly op-eds, in the paper. I have been a very close friend, for 55 years now, of their best journalist (in my opinion). Since 2006, though, I’ve been writing for the Jewish Tribune.
Living far away from the Jewish centres of Toronto and Montreal, people like me have no inside knowledge about the business decisions that may have prompted this move.
But is it possible the changing face of the Canadian Jewish community might also be a factor? There has always been a perception – one to which I subscribe – that the CJN tended to be a voice of the Jewish ‘establishment,’ one closely tied to the Liberal Party. These people were particularly enamoured of the country forged by Pierre Trudeau, and many of them supported his son Justin in the recent party leadership contest.
The Jewish Tribune, on the other hand, has backed the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, in particular for its steadfast support of Israel. In the last federal election, much of the community followed suit.
But one senses that many of the ‘machers’ still hanker for the ‘good old days’ of Liberal hegemony and have some disdain for the Tribune. In one e-mail I received, a well-known Toronto communal figure made some unflattering references to its publisher, Frank Dimant, and bemoaned the fact that with the closure of the CJN the community will lose “the voices of some of our esteemed” figures.
Are the contributors to the Jewish Tribune just burnt toast? I’m sure the Tribune will continue to do its best to continue to serve the community well.
Monday, April 29, 2013
The Unique Version of Governance in Switzerland
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
Arguably the most successful, and certainly the most peaceful, nation in Europe, is the Swiss Confederation, or Switzerland.
Since it is rarely in the news, most people, if they think of Switzerland at all, call to mind the Alps, banks, cheese, chocolates, cuckoo clocks, Geneva-based international organizations like the Red Cross, watches, and the story of William Tell. (Also, in my case, Swiss postage stamps, which I collected as a youth; they are artistic gems.)
But there’s a lot more. It is a country which, though diverse in ethnicity, language, and religion, has held together in relative peace for centuries – perhaps a model for less fortunate places.
Switzerland comprises three distinct ethnic groups -- Germans, French and Italians; four official languages – German, French, Italian, plus Romansh (a Romance language); and two established religions – the Protestant Swiss Reformed Church and Roman Catholicism.
About two thirds of the country’s eight million citizens speak German, some 20 per cent French and seven per cent Italian. The country is historically about evenly balanced between Catholic and Protestant regions.
Switzerland is a true confederation. The 1999 constitution guarantees the sovereignty of the 26 cantons, leaving the federal government only those powers that the cantons entrust to it. Each canton has its own constitution, and its own parliament, government and courts.
Most of the cantons are historical entities that predate the formation of the confederation and hence have first call upon the patriotism of their citizens -- in a quarrel between themselves and the confederation, they take precedence in terms of the loyalty of their population.
There is no overall state religion, though all of the cantons except for Geneva and Neuchatel recognize either the Catholic Church or the Swiss Reformed Church as official churches.
It is also the cantons, not the country, that preserve ethnicity and language. Language rights in Switzerland are accorded on a strictly territorial basis, by canton, and in 22 of them, territorial unilingualism is the price of linguistic peace. (All but nine cantons are in their official language German only.)
Indeed, since the French and German language communities make few concessions towards each other, when francophones and German speakers do business, they often end up speaking English to each other!
The nucleus of the Swiss confederation dates back to three cantons which came together some seven centuries ago. From 1515 to 1798 there was a Helvetic Confederation of 13 cantons. French armies imposed a unitary republic in 1798 but in 1815 the Congress of Vienna recognized the modern state, with its 25 cantons. (In 1980 this rose to 26 when the French-speaking Jura was carved out of German-majority Berne.) The modern Swiss state dates back to a constitution promulgated in 1848, following a brief civil war.
Cantons strengthen the feeling of localism in many ways. For example, there is a hereditary cantonal citizenship that existed prior to the creation of the modern confederation. There are all sorts of professional and other qualifications that vary from one canton to the next, making mobility difficult. Switzerland has no capital city as such -- Berne, Zurich, and Geneva all house different government branches and offices.
Also, referenda have been a central component of Swiss cantonal decision-making since the 1830s; they have existed at the country-wide level since 1891.
Given all this, politics at the national arena are relatively unimportant. The members of the country’s 200-member lower house, the National Council, are elected via proportional representation, but the constituencies into which the country is divided are the cantons.
The Council of States, the 46-member upper house, also represents the cantons. Twenty cantons elect two members each, while the remaining six – the so-called half-cantons -- elect one each.
The Federal Council is a collegial body of seven members, elected by the two houses of parliament, and functions as the Swiss collective head of state, with each councilor, in rotation, serving a one-year term as confederation president. So at the top, in an arrangement known as the “magic formula,” a coalition of parties (now five) has governed by consensus since 1959.
In 1848 Switzerland declared itself neutral and, though bordered by Austria, France, Germany, and Italy, managed to keep out of both 20th century world wars. It is not a member of the European Union and only joined the United Nations in 2002.
The Swiss are an insular people and have not been overly welcome to outsiders. Swiss officials said recently that they planned to restrict immigration from Western European countries; they already impose quotas on residence permits for people from eight Eastern European countries.
Situated in the heart of the continent, Switzerland is indeed a European country like no other.
Arguably the most successful, and certainly the most peaceful, nation in Europe, is the Swiss Confederation, or Switzerland.
Since it is rarely in the news, most people, if they think of Switzerland at all, call to mind the Alps, banks, cheese, chocolates, cuckoo clocks, Geneva-based international organizations like the Red Cross, watches, and the story of William Tell. (Also, in my case, Swiss postage stamps, which I collected as a youth; they are artistic gems.)
But there’s a lot more. It is a country which, though diverse in ethnicity, language, and religion, has held together in relative peace for centuries – perhaps a model for less fortunate places.
Switzerland comprises three distinct ethnic groups -- Germans, French and Italians; four official languages – German, French, Italian, plus Romansh (a Romance language); and two established religions – the Protestant Swiss Reformed Church and Roman Catholicism.
About two thirds of the country’s eight million citizens speak German, some 20 per cent French and seven per cent Italian. The country is historically about evenly balanced between Catholic and Protestant regions.
Switzerland is a true confederation. The 1999 constitution guarantees the sovereignty of the 26 cantons, leaving the federal government only those powers that the cantons entrust to it. Each canton has its own constitution, and its own parliament, government and courts.
Most of the cantons are historical entities that predate the formation of the confederation and hence have first call upon the patriotism of their citizens -- in a quarrel between themselves and the confederation, they take precedence in terms of the loyalty of their population.
There is no overall state religion, though all of the cantons except for Geneva and Neuchatel recognize either the Catholic Church or the Swiss Reformed Church as official churches.
It is also the cantons, not the country, that preserve ethnicity and language. Language rights in Switzerland are accorded on a strictly territorial basis, by canton, and in 22 of them, territorial unilingualism is the price of linguistic peace. (All but nine cantons are in their official language German only.)
Indeed, since the French and German language communities make few concessions towards each other, when francophones and German speakers do business, they often end up speaking English to each other!
The nucleus of the Swiss confederation dates back to three cantons which came together some seven centuries ago. From 1515 to 1798 there was a Helvetic Confederation of 13 cantons. French armies imposed a unitary republic in 1798 but in 1815 the Congress of Vienna recognized the modern state, with its 25 cantons. (In 1980 this rose to 26 when the French-speaking Jura was carved out of German-majority Berne.) The modern Swiss state dates back to a constitution promulgated in 1848, following a brief civil war.
Cantons strengthen the feeling of localism in many ways. For example, there is a hereditary cantonal citizenship that existed prior to the creation of the modern confederation. There are all sorts of professional and other qualifications that vary from one canton to the next, making mobility difficult. Switzerland has no capital city as such -- Berne, Zurich, and Geneva all house different government branches and offices.
Also, referenda have been a central component of Swiss cantonal decision-making since the 1830s; they have existed at the country-wide level since 1891.
Given all this, politics at the national arena are relatively unimportant. The members of the country’s 200-member lower house, the National Council, are elected via proportional representation, but the constituencies into which the country is divided are the cantons.
The Council of States, the 46-member upper house, also represents the cantons. Twenty cantons elect two members each, while the remaining six – the so-called half-cantons -- elect one each.
The Federal Council is a collegial body of seven members, elected by the two houses of parliament, and functions as the Swiss collective head of state, with each councilor, in rotation, serving a one-year term as confederation president. So at the top, in an arrangement known as the “magic formula,” a coalition of parties (now five) has governed by consensus since 1959.
In 1848 Switzerland declared itself neutral and, though bordered by Austria, France, Germany, and Italy, managed to keep out of both 20th century world wars. It is not a member of the European Union and only joined the United Nations in 2002.
The Swiss are an insular people and have not been overly welcome to outsiders. Swiss officials said recently that they planned to restrict immigration from Western European countries; they already impose quotas on residence permits for people from eight Eastern European countries.
Situated in the heart of the continent, Switzerland is indeed a European country like no other.
Monday, April 22, 2013
What Constitutes Sovereignty in Today's World?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
We think of nations as being either independent or not. But in actual fact, some jurisdictions that are not entirely sovereign possess many -- in some cases most -- of the attributes of statehood.
They are to all intents and purposes independent actors in the global community, unconstrained by the fact that they are legally still bound to some other entity. But for a variety of economic, ethnic, geographic or political reasons, they choose not to become fully sovereign states. Most are small islands.
This is the case with many British territories, such as Bermuda and the Isle of Man. These islands run their own show with virtually no interference from London. Denmark allows the Faroe Islands and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) complete autonomy. The Swedish-speaking Aland archipelago is part of Finland, but enjoys a high degree of “home rule.”
Caribbean islands such as Aruba and Curaçao are constituent self-governing units of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The African island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, which united with mainland Tanganyika in 1964, is a self-governing region that elects its own president, who has control over internal matters.
The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has the anomalous status of a “Commonwealth.” Its inhabitants are American citizens but it has no representation in the U.S. Congress. Whereas some Puerto Ricans wish to opt for full independence, others would like to see the island become the 51st American state.
Even more curious is the relationship between the U.S. and three former island chains in the Pacific that it governed as United Nations trusteeships. Now fully sovereign states, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, have entered into Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) with the United States.
These allow the U.S. to station armed forces in Compact areas; Washington is also responsible for administering all international defense treaties and other relations. In turn, the U.S. provides financial assistance and access to many U.S. domestic programs. Citizens of these three countries are also able to work in the U.S.
Queen’s University political scientist Ronald Watts has noted that some 87 islands or archipelagoes are involved in some combination of autonomous self-government combined with formal collaboration in a wider political partnership.
Such mutual interdependence may be more suitable for many islands. The trick, he maintains, is to find the appropriate collaborative institutions and processes that take into account the circumstances of each case, thus surmounting the limitations of the independence/dependence dichotomy.
In federations, of course, there is a constitutional division of powers. The self-governing status of the component units, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, are typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of either party.
Federations often include members that have a very powerful sense of their own identity, and which may even at one time have been countries – for instance, Quebec in Canada, Bavaria in Germany, and Texas in the United States. Devolution in the United Kingdom has given Scotland and Wales their own assemblies.
Really, sovereignty exists on a continuum, rather than being a binary “yes” or “no” attribute.
I’ve come up with what I call a “sovereignty index” which can be used to establish the degree of independence which a sub-unit of a larger state possesses. These are the variables:
The degree of constitutionally entrenched jurisdictional autonomy the entity is accorded, including executive powers, legislative powers, and judicial powers, including control over the legal system, both civil and criminal.
The territory’s ability to engage in autonomous relations with other jurisdictions, including the ability to sign international agreements and have representation abroad.
Its right to a separate electoral system and political parties.
The degree of control it has over the following:
Customs, duties, taxation and other revenues and fiscal resources; banking and insurance; the currency; international trade; the environment and natural resources (including offshore resources); citizenship, immigration, and rights of residency; land ownership and use; aviation, communications, postal services and transportation; defence, foreign affairs and security; culture and language; education and institutions of higher learning.
And, perhaps most important, the population’s sense of a distinct identity and shared history.
The diverse forms of governance around the world are more complex than is often realized.
We think of nations as being either independent or not. But in actual fact, some jurisdictions that are not entirely sovereign possess many -- in some cases most -- of the attributes of statehood.
They are to all intents and purposes independent actors in the global community, unconstrained by the fact that they are legally still bound to some other entity. But for a variety of economic, ethnic, geographic or political reasons, they choose not to become fully sovereign states. Most are small islands.
This is the case with many British territories, such as Bermuda and the Isle of Man. These islands run their own show with virtually no interference from London. Denmark allows the Faroe Islands and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) complete autonomy. The Swedish-speaking Aland archipelago is part of Finland, but enjoys a high degree of “home rule.”
Caribbean islands such as Aruba and Curaçao are constituent self-governing units of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The African island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, which united with mainland Tanganyika in 1964, is a self-governing region that elects its own president, who has control over internal matters.
The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has the anomalous status of a “Commonwealth.” Its inhabitants are American citizens but it has no representation in the U.S. Congress. Whereas some Puerto Ricans wish to opt for full independence, others would like to see the island become the 51st American state.
Even more curious is the relationship between the U.S. and three former island chains in the Pacific that it governed as United Nations trusteeships. Now fully sovereign states, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, have entered into Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) with the United States.
These allow the U.S. to station armed forces in Compact areas; Washington is also responsible for administering all international defense treaties and other relations. In turn, the U.S. provides financial assistance and access to many U.S. domestic programs. Citizens of these three countries are also able to work in the U.S.
Queen’s University political scientist Ronald Watts has noted that some 87 islands or archipelagoes are involved in some combination of autonomous self-government combined with formal collaboration in a wider political partnership.
Such mutual interdependence may be more suitable for many islands. The trick, he maintains, is to find the appropriate collaborative institutions and processes that take into account the circumstances of each case, thus surmounting the limitations of the independence/dependence dichotomy.
In federations, of course, there is a constitutional division of powers. The self-governing status of the component units, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, are typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of either party.
Federations often include members that have a very powerful sense of their own identity, and which may even at one time have been countries – for instance, Quebec in Canada, Bavaria in Germany, and Texas in the United States. Devolution in the United Kingdom has given Scotland and Wales their own assemblies.
Really, sovereignty exists on a continuum, rather than being a binary “yes” or “no” attribute.
I’ve come up with what I call a “sovereignty index” which can be used to establish the degree of independence which a sub-unit of a larger state possesses. These are the variables:
The degree of constitutionally entrenched jurisdictional autonomy the entity is accorded, including executive powers, legislative powers, and judicial powers, including control over the legal system, both civil and criminal.
The territory’s ability to engage in autonomous relations with other jurisdictions, including the ability to sign international agreements and have representation abroad.
Its right to a separate electoral system and political parties.
The degree of control it has over the following:
Customs, duties, taxation and other revenues and fiscal resources; banking and insurance; the currency; international trade; the environment and natural resources (including offshore resources); citizenship, immigration, and rights of residency; land ownership and use; aviation, communications, postal services and transportation; defence, foreign affairs and security; culture and language; education and institutions of higher learning.
And, perhaps most important, the population’s sense of a distinct identity and shared history.
The diverse forms of governance around the world are more complex than is often realized.
The Worse Things Get the Less They Are Noticed
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown PEI] Guardian
There must be a name for the political version of the law of diminishing returns, especially as it applies to warfare.
If 15 people were to die in a violent incident in Sweden today, that would be big news, spread across the front pages of newspapers outside that country.
But if 15 people get killed in Syria on the same day, it will hardly be noticed. After all, some 70,000 have already been slaughtered in that country's civil war, now into its third year. Two million more Syrians have been internally displaced and 800,000 have fled into neighbouring countries.
Last year Kofi Annan, the UN's former secretary general, was appointed a special envoy and presented a six-point plan under which hostilities would immediately cease within the framework of a ceasefire. Nothing came of it. President Bashar al-Assad will not cede any power because he knows he and his Ba'ath Party would be doomed.
Syria's major cities, including Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, and Hama, have seen entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Thousands more will die before one side or the other wins.
So, ironically, the worse things get, the less they get noticed. How many people even know that the endemic anarchic warfare in the Congo has taken many millions of lives? People get "violence fatigue" and tune out. It becomes the equivalent of a "dog bites man" story - nothing new there.
Such violence gets relegated to the back pages of newspapers; even the usual attempts at ending the violence through international efforts - United Nations "blue berets," peace talks in some foreign capital, appeals from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and You Tube videos - become passé. The term "peace process" after a while makes eyes glaze over and chases away insomnia.
Indeed, even the ultimate form of mass murder, genocide, after a while loses its unique ability to inspire horror. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was charged four years by the International Criminal Court for the crimes in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in "ethnic cleansing" operations by the Janjaweed militias.
An arrest warrant for al-Bashir was issued in 2009, charging him on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape) and two counts of war crimes.
Guess what: he's still running the country and Darfur remains a killing field, despite a so-called 2011 peace agreement signed between Sudan and one of the resistance groups in Darfur.
With great fanfare, the UN initiative known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was unveiled in 2005; former Canadian foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy was one of its main authors. It focuses on preventing and halting genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
But it has no real teeth. Unless war-weary western powers in NATO are willing to do something concrete - against expected opposition from China and Russia on the UN Security Council - the killings in places like the Congo, Darfur and Syria will continue.
There must be a name for the political version of the law of diminishing returns, especially as it applies to warfare.
If 15 people were to die in a violent incident in Sweden today, that would be big news, spread across the front pages of newspapers outside that country.
But if 15 people get killed in Syria on the same day, it will hardly be noticed. After all, some 70,000 have already been slaughtered in that country's civil war, now into its third year. Two million more Syrians have been internally displaced and 800,000 have fled into neighbouring countries.
Last year Kofi Annan, the UN's former secretary general, was appointed a special envoy and presented a six-point plan under which hostilities would immediately cease within the framework of a ceasefire. Nothing came of it. President Bashar al-Assad will not cede any power because he knows he and his Ba'ath Party would be doomed.
Syria's major cities, including Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, and Hama, have seen entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Thousands more will die before one side or the other wins.
So, ironically, the worse things get, the less they get noticed. How many people even know that the endemic anarchic warfare in the Congo has taken many millions of lives? People get "violence fatigue" and tune out. It becomes the equivalent of a "dog bites man" story - nothing new there.
Such violence gets relegated to the back pages of newspapers; even the usual attempts at ending the violence through international efforts - United Nations "blue berets," peace talks in some foreign capital, appeals from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and You Tube videos - become passé. The term "peace process" after a while makes eyes glaze over and chases away insomnia.
Indeed, even the ultimate form of mass murder, genocide, after a while loses its unique ability to inspire horror. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was charged four years by the International Criminal Court for the crimes in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in "ethnic cleansing" operations by the Janjaweed militias.
An arrest warrant for al-Bashir was issued in 2009, charging him on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape) and two counts of war crimes.
Guess what: he's still running the country and Darfur remains a killing field, despite a so-called 2011 peace agreement signed between Sudan and one of the resistance groups in Darfur.
With great fanfare, the UN initiative known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was unveiled in 2005; former Canadian foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy was one of its main authors. It focuses on preventing and halting genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
But it has no real teeth. Unless war-weary western powers in NATO are willing to do something concrete - against expected opposition from China and Russia on the UN Security Council - the killings in places like the Congo, Darfur and Syria will continue.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Imperial Conquests Were Less One-Sided Than People Think
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
Thanks in part to the 1978 publication of the seminal book Orientalism, written by the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, many people assume that European countries have been the main imperialist powers in history, conquering and pillaging throughout the African and Asian “East,” as well as the Americas.
A whole host of professors of “post-colonial” theory, often with little knowledge of history, have taken his thesis as gospel truth.
But over the past 1,400 years, more often than not, it was the “East” invading “Christendom.”
Fuelled by their conversion to Islam, Arab armies in the decades following the death of Muhammad in 632 conquered vast areas of the Middle East, extinguishing eastern rite Christian communities and pushing the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire out of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. They also gained control of the eastern Mediterranean islands of Crete, Cyprus and Sicily.
Arab armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 and had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula by788. Moving over the Pyrenees into today’s France, they were stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Arab rule over large parts of Spain lasted for centuries and did not end until the capture of Granada, the last outpost of Arab Al-Andalus, in 1492.
Arriving on the vast Russian plain from the steppes of Asia, the Mongols conquered all of present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by 1240 and ruled over its people for more than two centuries.
They moved further west, battling their way into Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Croatia, scoring further victories throughout the 13th century. Many European states became vassals and paid tribute to the Mongol Golden Horde. Infighting among various Mongol leaders finally led to their retreat from eastern Europe.
The Russian re-conquest of their lands began with Tsar Ivan III, who in 1480 formally refused to pay further tribute to the much weakened Golden Horde. Ivan IV in turn defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates between 1552 and 1556, pushing the Mongols eastwards and establishing Russia as a major power.
Meanwhile, the Seljuk Turks had moved into Anatolia in the 11th century, further reducing the lands under Byzantine control. The establishment of the Anatolian Seljuk state began the Islamic period in Turkey.
However, it was the Ottoman Turks who finally put an end to the Byzantine Empire, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Soon thereafter, Ottoman armies captured the Balkans and southeastern Europe; they would rule over most of Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Ukraine for centuries.
Even much of Hungary was under Turkish rule between 1526 and 1687, and the Austrian capital of Vienna was besieged twice, in 1529 and 1683.
During this period, the Christian states of Europe only went on the offensive in the Middle East during the Crusades between the 11th and 13th centuries.
But that was, after all, their attempt to recapture the lands, in particular Palestine, that had been the heartland of Christianity prior to their conquest by the Arab caliphates.
Only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War did the British and French take over much of the Middle East, and they controlled it for only three decades.
From the 16th century on, the tables did turn elsewhere in the world, as western European powers grew in strength and empires like China and Persia weakened.
It was in the Americas, and in South and southeast Asia, where European exploitation really took place, with the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the western hemisphere; the British in the Indian subcontinent; the Dutch in the East Indies; and the French in Indochina.
As well, almost all of Africa was partitioned in 1885 by the Belgians, British, French, Germans, Portuguese, and Spanish, and foreign rule there lasted for some 80 years.
Note that these were western European countries. Those in eastern and southeastern Europe were themselves under foreign rule and not involved in colonialism.
It’s easy to be captivated by a grand theory espoused by an academic with a political agenda. That’s why historical facts come in handy. It’s a much more balanced record than Said’s acolytes assume.
Thanks in part to the 1978 publication of the seminal book Orientalism, written by the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, many people assume that European countries have been the main imperialist powers in history, conquering and pillaging throughout the African and Asian “East,” as well as the Americas.
A whole host of professors of “post-colonial” theory, often with little knowledge of history, have taken his thesis as gospel truth.
But over the past 1,400 years, more often than not, it was the “East” invading “Christendom.”
Fuelled by their conversion to Islam, Arab armies in the decades following the death of Muhammad in 632 conquered vast areas of the Middle East, extinguishing eastern rite Christian communities and pushing the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire out of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. They also gained control of the eastern Mediterranean islands of Crete, Cyprus and Sicily.
Arab armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 and had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula by788. Moving over the Pyrenees into today’s France, they were stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.
Arab rule over large parts of Spain lasted for centuries and did not end until the capture of Granada, the last outpost of Arab Al-Andalus, in 1492.
Arriving on the vast Russian plain from the steppes of Asia, the Mongols conquered all of present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by 1240 and ruled over its people for more than two centuries.
They moved further west, battling their way into Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Croatia, scoring further victories throughout the 13th century. Many European states became vassals and paid tribute to the Mongol Golden Horde. Infighting among various Mongol leaders finally led to their retreat from eastern Europe.
The Russian re-conquest of their lands began with Tsar Ivan III, who in 1480 formally refused to pay further tribute to the much weakened Golden Horde. Ivan IV in turn defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates between 1552 and 1556, pushing the Mongols eastwards and establishing Russia as a major power.
Meanwhile, the Seljuk Turks had moved into Anatolia in the 11th century, further reducing the lands under Byzantine control. The establishment of the Anatolian Seljuk state began the Islamic period in Turkey.
However, it was the Ottoman Turks who finally put an end to the Byzantine Empire, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Soon thereafter, Ottoman armies captured the Balkans and southeastern Europe; they would rule over most of Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Ukraine for centuries.
Even much of Hungary was under Turkish rule between 1526 and 1687, and the Austrian capital of Vienna was besieged twice, in 1529 and 1683.
During this period, the Christian states of Europe only went on the offensive in the Middle East during the Crusades between the 11th and 13th centuries.
But that was, after all, their attempt to recapture the lands, in particular Palestine, that had been the heartland of Christianity prior to their conquest by the Arab caliphates.
Only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War did the British and French take over much of the Middle East, and they controlled it for only three decades.
From the 16th century on, the tables did turn elsewhere in the world, as western European powers grew in strength and empires like China and Persia weakened.
It was in the Americas, and in South and southeast Asia, where European exploitation really took place, with the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the western hemisphere; the British in the Indian subcontinent; the Dutch in the East Indies; and the French in Indochina.
As well, almost all of Africa was partitioned in 1885 by the Belgians, British, French, Germans, Portuguese, and Spanish, and foreign rule there lasted for some 80 years.
Note that these were western European countries. Those in eastern and southeastern Europe were themselves under foreign rule and not involved in colonialism.
It’s easy to be captivated by a grand theory espoused by an academic with a political agenda. That’s why historical facts come in handy. It’s a much more balanced record than Said’s acolytes assume.
Monday, April 08, 2013
Detroit Continues to Face Poverty-Related Challenges
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
With its 43,000 students, it shapes Ann Arbor’s economy. It employs about 30,000 workers, including about 12,000 in the medical center. Other employers are drawn to the area by the university's research and development money.
And of course there are numerous bars, restaurants, bicycle shops, and other businesses catering to the student population. When Michigan’s Big Ten football team, the Wolverines, play on a Saturday afternoon, 114,000 spectators fill the gigantic Michigan Stadium.
Health services are another major component of the city’s economy; numerous medical offices, laboratories, and associated companies are located in the city. High tech companies have been locating in the area since the 1930s.
There is also a wealth of cultural activity, with museums, theatres, art and film festivals, and bookstores (the Borders chain began in Ann Arbor).
We lived in Ann Arbor for two years in the 1980s, when my spouse Patricia was finishing her PhD at the university. There was no need to go to Detroit – Ann Arbor, like the other cities beyond Wayne County, had everything one could ask for.
A friend of mine once said to me,
“thirty miles outside of any city, you’re back in the middle ages.”
By this he meant that cities were the anchors of culture and progress. But, in the United States, this may not necessarily be true any longer.
By this he meant that cities were the anchors of culture and progress. But, in the United States, this may not necessarily be true any longer.
Right up against the Canadian
border, across the Detroit River from Windsor, lies a “dying” American city,
Detroit. It has become so destitute that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder recently appointed an emergency
financial manager for the city.
Detroit’s
prosperity in the 20th century was linked to the American automobile
industry. The “Big Three” – Chrysler, Ford and General Motors – made it the
centre of car manufacturing. It was “Motor City.”
But all that
changed in the 1960s, as German, Japanese and Korean companies began to
challenge the established auto companies. As their market share dropped and workforces
shrunk, and as many of their plants moved to places with cheaper labour, so too
did Detroit’s fortunes decline. By 2008 GM and Chrysler had gone bankrupt.
The decline of the auto industry
has seen the city lose population. Between
2000 and 2010, Detroit’s population fell by 25 per cent, and it dropped in size
from the country’s 10th largest city to 18th. From a total of 1.8
million people in 1950, it shrank to 713,000
people.
The July 1967 race riot, finally
quelled by National Guard and Army troops, also precipitated a mass exodus. Casualties
included 43 dead, 467 injured,
over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed in looting and
arson. Tens of thousands left the city in ensuing years.
As plants and
people moved, the property taxes and income taxes they had supplied went with
them. The city could no longer afford even basic services without going deeply
into debt.
Detroit is now running
a $375 million deficit, and its long-term debt is $14 billion. Median household
income in the city is $26,098, and the median income for a family is $31,011;
36 per cent of its residents live in poverty.
Urban decay is a
major problem. The city has some 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes, many
completely vandalized and beyond repair. Others have been turned into drug
dens. Crime is rampant.
As downtown stores
and businesses shut down, even the city’s centre began to look like a ghost
town. Some people have even suggested demolishing entire neighbourhoods and
turning the space into parkland.
Today, as journalist
Charlie LeDuff, author of the book Detroit: An American Autopsy, remarked, the
city is “an archaeological ruin.” He told the New York Times he was past
finding the city “frightening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic.”
Detroit has seen a
major demographic shift. In 1910, fewer than 6,000 Blacks called the city home;
by 1930 more than 120,000 Blacks lived in Detroit. Thousands of African-Americans
had come to Detroit from the South for jobs.
In 1950, Detroit
had 1.5 million white residents. By 2010, that had fallen to 75,585. The Black
population grew to 590,226 from 300,506 during that time. The city is now about
83 per cent African-American. And unlike in the past, jobs are few and not well
paid.
But this isn't the whole story. Most of the whites who left Detroit proper (Wayne County) moved to nearby suburbs. Surrounding the city are five predominantly white counties, making the population of the metro area 4.2 million. These towns now have the amenities Detroit lacks.
But this isn't the whole story. Most of the whites who left Detroit proper (Wayne County) moved to nearby suburbs. Surrounding the city are five predominantly white counties, making the population of the metro area 4.2 million. These towns now have the amenities Detroit lacks.
Oakland County (75
per cent white) is home to a variety of cities, villages and townships. These
communities range from blue-collar, inner-ring suburbs like Ferndale and Hazel
Park, to wealthy places such as Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Franklin.
The white-collar
cities of Southfield, Farmington Hills and Auburn Hills are home to many large
companies. The median income for a household in the county is $61,907, and the
median income for a family is $75,540.
Grosse Pointe, partly in
Macomb County, and home to auto company executives, comprises five upscale
individual communities.
Ann Arbor in
Washtenaw County, 56 kilometres west of Detroit, is a college town, home of the
renowned University of Michigan.
With its 43,000 students, it shapes Ann Arbor’s economy. It employs about 30,000 workers, including about 12,000 in the medical center. Other employers are drawn to the area by the university's research and development money.
And of course there are numerous bars, restaurants, bicycle shops, and other businesses catering to the student population. When Michigan’s Big Ten football team, the Wolverines, play on a Saturday afternoon, 114,000 spectators fill the gigantic Michigan Stadium.
Health services are another major component of the city’s economy; numerous medical offices, laboratories, and associated companies are located in the city. High tech companies have been locating in the area since the 1930s.
There is also a wealth of cultural activity, with museums, theatres, art and film festivals, and bookstores (the Borders chain began in Ann Arbor).
We lived in Ann Arbor for two years in the 1980s, when my spouse Patricia was finishing her PhD at the university. There was no need to go to Detroit – Ann Arbor, like the other cities beyond Wayne County, had everything one could ask for.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Legacies of Empire Fuel Conflict Among Southeast Asian States
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
It sounds at first like the plot of a comic opera: A group
of men from a small Filipino island chain attack a Malaysian village on the
nearby island of Borneo.
But there’s actually quite a long history behind this.
The Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,000 islands in
Southeast Asia, was a Spanish colony for centuries, until lost to the United
States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Occupied by the Japanese during the
Second World War, it attained its independence in 1946.
Though most of its people are Roman Catholics, thanks to
centuries of Spanish rule, the southern island of Mindanao is home to a large Muslim
population. It has been the site of a long-term insurgency against the Manila
government by rebels of the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, two
groups seeking to create a Muslim state on Mindanao.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Sultanate of Sulu, a
Muslim entity, controlled the southwestern part of Mindanao, the Sulu Islands off
Mindanao, and the northeastern part of Borneo, the world’s third-largest island.
While Mindanao and the islands of the Sulu Sultanate came
under the control of Spain and became part of the Philippines, Spain
relinquished all claims to the part of Borneo which had belonged to the
Sultanate in an agreement made with Great Britain and Germany in 1885.
The southern three-quarters of Borneo, known as Kalimantan,
is part of Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, and it was ruled for
centuries as part of the Dutch East Indies. The northern part, however, was divided
into two British possessions, Sarawak and North Borneo, as well as the tiny
Muslim protectorate of Brunei Darussalam.
North Borneo, which was proclaimed a
British protectorate in 1888, included areas that had been under
the jurisdiction of the Sulu Sultanate.
In 1963, Sarawak and North Borneo (now renamed Sabah), were
joined with the former British colony of Malaya, the Muslim-majority peninsula across
the South China Sea, as the Federation of Malaysia. Singapore was also, for a
time, part of this new nation, though oil-rich Brunei never joined.
While Sabah is inhabited by numerous indigenous ethnic
groups, about two-thirds are Muslim. Sarawak is the only state in Malaysia
where Christians form a majority.
While the Sultanate of Sulu is no longer a sovereign state,
many of its inhabitants still consider it a legitimate entity and recognize Jamalul Kiram III as sultan.
They also continue to claim Sabah, maintaining that it was
only leased, not ceded, to the British North Borneo Company in the 19th
century, with the Sultan’s sovereignty never being relinquished.
The 1963 Manila Accord signed by the heads of Malaysia, the
Philippines and Indonesia, at the time Sabah became part of Malaysia, stated
that “the inclusion of Sabah in the Federation of Malaysia will not prejudice
the interest of parties concerned until the issue of the Sabah claim is finally
resolved by the United Nations.” This has not happened.
The Philippines broke diplomatic relations with Malaysia
after the Federation had included Sabah in 1963; Malaysia, in turn, asserted
that the people of North Borneo had been polled and supported joining the
Federation.
Not wishing to continue the quarrel over territory with
Malaysia, the Manila government has not pressed its claim in recent years. (For
a time in the 1960s Indonesia, too, had claimed the entire island of Borneo and
launched armed incursions into Malaysian territory.)
So supporters of the
Sulu royal house decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling themselves the Royal Army of the Sultanate
of Sulu and North Borneo, about 200 men attacked and occupied the coastal Sabah
village of Tanduo on February 12 in order to reaffirm their claim to Sabah.
Some members of the Moro National Liberation Front were also involved.
After
days of sporadic fighting between the invaders and Malaysian forces, government
troops mounted a full-scale assault on Tanduo at the end of the month and retook
the village. “Our patience has reached the limit,” Prime Minister Najib
Razak of Malaysia declared.
Supporters of the Sultanate criticized Philippine President
Benigno Aquino III for saying that the incursion into Sabah was triggered by self-interest
and that the invaders had not considered the welfare of the 800,000 Filipinos working
in Sabah.
However, Aquino affirmed the country’s claim on Sabah,
stating that his administration would pursue it through dialogue and diplomacy.
Meanwhile, lawyers acting for the Sultanate of Sulu are preparing charges
against Malaysia for usurpation of authority and illegal development of natural
wealth in Sabah. They will be seeking a $25 billion “fine” from the Malaysian
government before the International Court of Justice.
So this obscure, centuries-old territorial dispute, like so
many others, will continue to fester and remain an issue between Malaysia and
the Philippines, providing one more source of instability in Southeast Asia.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Where Is Cuba Heading as Castro Era Draws to a Close?
Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
In the 1960s, many people around the world were inspired by the Cuban Revolution. It was the first state that had proclaimed itself a socialist society in the Americas, and the North American New Left looked to Cuba as a model for the Third World; some went to Cuba as volunteers. (Later, the Vietnam War would become its focus of attention.)
Many African-American intellectuals, then fighting for civil rights in the segregationist American South, were particularly enthusiastic, as Cuba proclaimed the elimination of racial discrimination as its official policy.
On New Year's Day 1959, the 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara had marched into Havana after more than two years of guerrilla warfare, and the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country.
The exuberant revolutionaries proceeded to nationalize agriculture and industry - mostly American-owned - at breakneck speed. As Washington reacted with economic and military pressure, including the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for help and protection and later that year Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist.
Cuba had become, as far as the U.S. was concerned, an outpost of ‘Soviet imperialism'.
As we know, the closest the Cold War came to becoming a nuclear conflagration was during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Indebted to the Soviets, in the 1970s Cuban troops fought on behalf of left-wing regimes in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, as surrogates for the Soviet Union. Communism, for many, appeared to be on the march.
Cuba back then saw itself as a vanguard of Marxist revolution - though when Guevara had tried to incite one in Bolivia, he was killed for his trouble in 1967. (Dead almost 46 years now, his image remains ubiquitous, thanks to the posters of him so many students had taped onto their dorm walls back then!)
Like many, I was caught up in the enthusiasm over Cuba. In the late 1960s, I wrote my MA thesis in political science at McGill University on Cuban-American relations.
I spent 10 days in Cuba in late December 1975, at a time when few North Americans could travel to the country. (I flew in via Jamaica.) I was able to walk around Havana, travel on buses, and speak to people at the university, without any hindrance.
The First Congress of the Communist Party was being held, December 17-22, and the various parks and sides of buildings were festooned with revolutionary slogans. The old Havana Hilton had been renamed the Hotel Habana Libre and was a hive of activity at the time.
This is all, so to speak, now ancient history. Announcing that "history is on our side" is a foolhardy enterprise. The Soviet Union and its east European allies were themselves nothing but history by 1991, leaving Cuba economically adrift. Very hard years followed, a time that came to be known as the "Special Period."
To survive, Cuba has in many ways reverted to what it was prior to the revolution.
The country now allows for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars.
Small businesses have sprung up everywhere. Tourism once again has become a mainstay of the economy, and foreign capital, from Canada, Spain, and elsewhere has flowed in.
Many socially unsavoury practices have followed in its wake, and (despite the continuing American trade embargo) the U.S. dollar is again king, fuelling an underground economy. The health and education systems, too, have suffered declines.
The country has moved backward in terms of race relations as well.
Cuba was a Spanish-ruled sugar plantation economy, with a largely black workforce, until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Slavery had only been abolished a decade earlier.
After independence in 1902 little changed. The population of African descent remained at the bottom of the economic and political ladder and whites at the top, with Mulattoes (of mixed European and African lineage) in between.
In the years following the triumph of the revolution the Cuban government was one of the world's most dedicated regimes in the fight against discrimination. It achieved significant gains in racial equality through a series of egalitarian reforms in the 1960s.
But today things are different - Afro-Cubans are often excluded from positions in tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies. They are relegated to poor housing.
"The government hasn't allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn't exist," contends essayist Roberto Zurbano in a recent article in the New York Times. After all, it's a socialist country!
Meanwhile, the aging and ailing Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul in 2008, and the latter has said he will step down in 2018.
What happens then? Many older Cubans in the largely white anti-Communist expatriate community in Miami foresee a triumphant return to their homeland, but it's doubtful that they will ever regain control of the country.
It is more likely that post-Castro Cuba will become a country with a mixed economy and a pluralist political system, on the Scandinavian model.
In the 1960s, many people around the world were inspired by the Cuban Revolution. It was the first state that had proclaimed itself a socialist society in the Americas, and the North American New Left looked to Cuba as a model for the Third World; some went to Cuba as volunteers. (Later, the Vietnam War would become its focus of attention.)
Many African-American intellectuals, then fighting for civil rights in the segregationist American South, were particularly enthusiastic, as Cuba proclaimed the elimination of racial discrimination as its official policy.
On New Year's Day 1959, the 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara had marched into Havana after more than two years of guerrilla warfare, and the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country.
The exuberant revolutionaries proceeded to nationalize agriculture and industry - mostly American-owned - at breakneck speed. As Washington reacted with economic and military pressure, including the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for help and protection and later that year Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist.
Cuba had become, as far as the U.S. was concerned, an outpost of ‘Soviet imperialism'.
As we know, the closest the Cold War came to becoming a nuclear conflagration was during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Indebted to the Soviets, in the 1970s Cuban troops fought on behalf of left-wing regimes in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, as surrogates for the Soviet Union. Communism, for many, appeared to be on the march.
Cuba back then saw itself as a vanguard of Marxist revolution - though when Guevara had tried to incite one in Bolivia, he was killed for his trouble in 1967. (Dead almost 46 years now, his image remains ubiquitous, thanks to the posters of him so many students had taped onto their dorm walls back then!)
Like many, I was caught up in the enthusiasm over Cuba. In the late 1960s, I wrote my MA thesis in political science at McGill University on Cuban-American relations.
I spent 10 days in Cuba in late December 1975, at a time when few North Americans could travel to the country. (I flew in via Jamaica.) I was able to walk around Havana, travel on buses, and speak to people at the university, without any hindrance.
The First Congress of the Communist Party was being held, December 17-22, and the various parks and sides of buildings were festooned with revolutionary slogans. The old Havana Hilton had been renamed the Hotel Habana Libre and was a hive of activity at the time.
This is all, so to speak, now ancient history. Announcing that "history is on our side" is a foolhardy enterprise. The Soviet Union and its east European allies were themselves nothing but history by 1991, leaving Cuba economically adrift. Very hard years followed, a time that came to be known as the "Special Period."
To survive, Cuba has in many ways reverted to what it was prior to the revolution.
The country now allows for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars.
Small businesses have sprung up everywhere. Tourism once again has become a mainstay of the economy, and foreign capital, from Canada, Spain, and elsewhere has flowed in.
Many socially unsavoury practices have followed in its wake, and (despite the continuing American trade embargo) the U.S. dollar is again king, fuelling an underground economy. The health and education systems, too, have suffered declines.
The country has moved backward in terms of race relations as well.
Cuba was a Spanish-ruled sugar plantation economy, with a largely black workforce, until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Slavery had only been abolished a decade earlier.
After independence in 1902 little changed. The population of African descent remained at the bottom of the economic and political ladder and whites at the top, with Mulattoes (of mixed European and African lineage) in between.
In the years following the triumph of the revolution the Cuban government was one of the world's most dedicated regimes in the fight against discrimination. It achieved significant gains in racial equality through a series of egalitarian reforms in the 1960s.
But today things are different - Afro-Cubans are often excluded from positions in tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies. They are relegated to poor housing.
"The government hasn't allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn't exist," contends essayist Roberto Zurbano in a recent article in the New York Times. After all, it's a socialist country!
Meanwhile, the aging and ailing Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul in 2008, and the latter has said he will step down in 2018.
What happens then? Many older Cubans in the largely white anti-Communist expatriate community in Miami foresee a triumphant return to their homeland, but it's doubtful that they will ever regain control of the country.
It is more likely that post-Castro Cuba will become a country with a mixed economy and a pluralist political system, on the Scandinavian model.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Some of the Reasons Why Nations Fail
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few.”
This is the thesis propounded by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” published last year.
In countries with “extractive” economies, those in power destroy incentives and discourage innovation by creating an uneven playing field.
The elites who gain from the extraction also benefit from rigged political institutions, “wielding their power to tilt the system for their benefit.”
However, this inevitably produces instability and failure because it creates the motivation for others to depose the existing elites and take over, often through a coup d’etat. One set of exploiters succeeds another.
So states that are at the mercy of “extractive” economic institutions eventually collapse, the authors contend.
They cite numerous examples to illustrate their argument.
North Korea is a kleptocracy controlled by the armed forces and the Kim family, and its economic institutions make it almost impossible for people to own property. The state controls everything, so people don’t work for themselves, thereby destroying their incentive to succeed.
Such a regime, regardless of its military prowess, will never acquire legitimacy, whereas its South Korean neighbour has created a society with economic institutions that “encourage private property, uphold contracts,” and allows for “the entry of new businesses that can bring new technologies to life.”
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who ruled from 1981 until deposed on 2011, allowed big businessmen known as the “whales” to use their power to create monopolies and block the entry of new people and firms.
This, the authors note, blocked opportunities for the vast mass of Egyptians to move out of poverty. The country’s economic future remains precarious.
Libya’s Gadhafi family looted their country’s resources, to its detriment. Oil-rich states are particularly prone to this type of behaviour on the part of despots.
Central American countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, where small elites rule over an impoverished peasantry and appropriate most of the wealth, also make sustainable growth next to impossible.
In other places, the problems result from the failure to maintain an effective state, assert Acemoglu and Robinson. In such circumstances, there is no hope of providing order, a system of laws, a market economy, property rights, mechanisms for resolving disputes, or basic public goods. Many African countries, such as the Congo and Somalia, fall into this category.
Countries with extractive economic and political institutions may achieve temporary success – the Soviet Union was one such case – but they eventually stagnate.
The authors emphasize that none of this is preordained; human agency is always involved. Had a rising economic class in Britain in the 17th century been unable to overcome a repressive monarchy, for example, things might have gone in a very different direction. Whereas Russia might have followed a more “inclusive” path after 1917, had the Communists not seized power.
So the jury is still out on whether China can continue its present rate of growth. It is contingent on the path its rulers will follow.
In a nutshell, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the wealth of a country depends on the degree to which the average person can participate in economic opportunities and share in the overall growth of its economy.
Economic opportunity sustains political democracy. This is a lesson even some developed nations seem to have forgotten in recent years.
“Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few.”
This is the thesis propounded by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” published last year.
In countries with “extractive” economies, those in power destroy incentives and discourage innovation by creating an uneven playing field.
The elites who gain from the extraction also benefit from rigged political institutions, “wielding their power to tilt the system for their benefit.”
However, this inevitably produces instability and failure because it creates the motivation for others to depose the existing elites and take over, often through a coup d’etat. One set of exploiters succeeds another.
So states that are at the mercy of “extractive” economic institutions eventually collapse, the authors contend.
They cite numerous examples to illustrate their argument.
North Korea is a kleptocracy controlled by the armed forces and the Kim family, and its economic institutions make it almost impossible for people to own property. The state controls everything, so people don’t work for themselves, thereby destroying their incentive to succeed.
Such a regime, regardless of its military prowess, will never acquire legitimacy, whereas its South Korean neighbour has created a society with economic institutions that “encourage private property, uphold contracts,” and allows for “the entry of new businesses that can bring new technologies to life.”
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who ruled from 1981 until deposed on 2011, allowed big businessmen known as the “whales” to use their power to create monopolies and block the entry of new people and firms.
This, the authors note, blocked opportunities for the vast mass of Egyptians to move out of poverty. The country’s economic future remains precarious.
Libya’s Gadhafi family looted their country’s resources, to its detriment. Oil-rich states are particularly prone to this type of behaviour on the part of despots.
Central American countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, where small elites rule over an impoverished peasantry and appropriate most of the wealth, also make sustainable growth next to impossible.
In other places, the problems result from the failure to maintain an effective state, assert Acemoglu and Robinson. In such circumstances, there is no hope of providing order, a system of laws, a market economy, property rights, mechanisms for resolving disputes, or basic public goods. Many African countries, such as the Congo and Somalia, fall into this category.
Countries with extractive economic and political institutions may achieve temporary success – the Soviet Union was one such case – but they eventually stagnate.
The authors emphasize that none of this is preordained; human agency is always involved. Had a rising economic class in Britain in the 17th century been unable to overcome a repressive monarchy, for example, things might have gone in a very different direction. Whereas Russia might have followed a more “inclusive” path after 1917, had the Communists not seized power.
So the jury is still out on whether China can continue its present rate of growth. It is contingent on the path its rulers will follow.
In a nutshell, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the wealth of a country depends on the degree to which the average person can participate in economic opportunities and share in the overall growth of its economy.
Economic opportunity sustains political democracy. This is a lesson even some developed nations seem to have forgotten in recent years.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Contending Territorial Claims are a Result of the Vestiges of Empire
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Boundary disputes and land claims often simmer between countries long after the major powers that collided over these regions are gone.
Two of the world’s largest empires, those of Great Britain and Spain, are, to all intents and purposes, no more. But in some cases, successor independent countries have continued the fight.
These claims and counter-claims stretch back centuries and often involve recourse to colonial maps and treaties as interpreted by each side to back its own position.
The best-known of these conflicts involves the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands, where a referendum held on March 10-11 reaffirmed the islanders’ desire to remain British.
But there are others. One vestige of the colonial demarcation of frontiers in South America concerns the old colony of British Guiana, which became independent as Guyana in 1966. Its western border with Venezuela continues to be a bone of contention (as does its eastern one with the former Dutch colony of Suriname).
The Guyana-Venezuela border largely follows theSchomburgk Line, so called after the German-born British explorer who sketched it in 1840.
The Venezuelans, however, have long maintained that the Essequibo River, further east, not the Schomburgk Line, is their natural eastern boundary. The area in between the line and the river, referred to as Guayana Esequiba on Venezuelan maps, covers fully 62 per cent of Guyana’s territory of 214,970 square kilometres!
In 1899 the dispute went to international arbitration. A tribunal, composed of two American, two British and two Russian judges, ruled largely in favor of the British. But Venezuela claimed they were biased.
Guyana’s 756,040 inhabitants consist mostly of English-speaking Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, who consider themselves to be part of the Caribbean, not Latin America, and resist the idea of having part of their country absorbed by Spanish-speaking Venezuela.
Venezuela maintains its position to this day, though two years ago President Hugo Chavez declared that Guyana and Venezuela were “two sister nations” and that the issue would be treated “in a responsible way.” It’s uncertain whether his recent death will change things.
A similar story in Central America involves Guatemala and the old colony of British Honduras, which gained its independence in 1981 as Belize.
This small nation of 356,000 English-speaking inhabitants in an area of 22,966 square kilometres, bordering Mexico and Guatemala, also considers itself more Caribbean than Latin American.
Most Belizeans are of multiracial descent, with Mestizos (mixed Mayan-Europeans) and Kriols, of African background, making up a majority of the population.
While all of Central America was part of the Spanish Empire from the 16th century onwards, the Spanish never settled in this region, however, and increased British trade and settlement finally resulted in British Honduras being formally annexed as a crown colony in 1862.
Meanwhile, Guatemala had declared its independence from Spain in 1821, and under the terms of the Anglo-Guatemalan Treaty of 1859, Guatemala agreed to recognize British rule, while Great Britain promised to build a road from Guatemala to the Caribbean port of Punta Gorda.
As this never happened, the territory of Belize has been claimed in whole or in part by Guatemala since 1940. When Belize became a sovereign state, the territorial dispute remained unresolved. Currently, Guatemala claims everything south of the Sibun River, a total 12,272 square kilometres – more than half the country.
There have been periodic border clashes, but this past January the two countries signed an accord agreeing to refer their territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice for binding resolution. (Voters in both countries must still ratify the accord in referenda this coming October before it can be sent to the Court for final settlement.)
Then there is Gibraltar. Still a British possession, it is located at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. It has an area of 6.8 square kilometres and borders Spain itself. At the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar sits the densely populated city area, home to almost 30,000 people.
Acquired by Britain from Spain “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibraltar guarded the sea lanes that led to the Suez Canal, at the other end, and the passageway to India.
Spain continues to lay claim to Gibraltar. Its dictator General Francisco Franco closed the land border in 1969, to put pressure on Britain. In 1982, it was reopened and in 2006 the Spanish government agreed to relax border controls.
Today, while Gibraltar’s strategic value to Britain is gone, its inhabitants, the descendants of Britons, Indians, Italians, Maltese, Moroccans, Sephardic Jews, and Spaniards, do not want to become Spanish.
In referenda held in 1967 and 2002, they have overwhelmingly reaffirmed their desire to remain British. But recovering Gibraltar remains a stated objective of successive Spanish governments.
The legacy of imperial rule still haunts many parts of the world.
Boundary disputes and land claims often simmer between countries long after the major powers that collided over these regions are gone.
Two of the world’s largest empires, those of Great Britain and Spain, are, to all intents and purposes, no more. But in some cases, successor independent countries have continued the fight.
These claims and counter-claims stretch back centuries and often involve recourse to colonial maps and treaties as interpreted by each side to back its own position.
The best-known of these conflicts involves the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands, where a referendum held on March 10-11 reaffirmed the islanders’ desire to remain British.
But there are others. One vestige of the colonial demarcation of frontiers in South America concerns the old colony of British Guiana, which became independent as Guyana in 1966. Its western border with Venezuela continues to be a bone of contention (as does its eastern one with the former Dutch colony of Suriname).
The Guyana-Venezuela border largely follows theSchomburgk Line, so called after the German-born British explorer who sketched it in 1840.
The Venezuelans, however, have long maintained that the Essequibo River, further east, not the Schomburgk Line, is their natural eastern boundary. The area in between the line and the river, referred to as Guayana Esequiba on Venezuelan maps, covers fully 62 per cent of Guyana’s territory of 214,970 square kilometres!
In 1899 the dispute went to international arbitration. A tribunal, composed of two American, two British and two Russian judges, ruled largely in favor of the British. But Venezuela claimed they were biased.
Guyana’s 756,040 inhabitants consist mostly of English-speaking Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, who consider themselves to be part of the Caribbean, not Latin America, and resist the idea of having part of their country absorbed by Spanish-speaking Venezuela.
Venezuela maintains its position to this day, though two years ago President Hugo Chavez declared that Guyana and Venezuela were “two sister nations” and that the issue would be treated “in a responsible way.” It’s uncertain whether his recent death will change things.
A similar story in Central America involves Guatemala and the old colony of British Honduras, which gained its independence in 1981 as Belize.
This small nation of 356,000 English-speaking inhabitants in an area of 22,966 square kilometres, bordering Mexico and Guatemala, also considers itself more Caribbean than Latin American.
Most Belizeans are of multiracial descent, with Mestizos (mixed Mayan-Europeans) and Kriols, of African background, making up a majority of the population.
While all of Central America was part of the Spanish Empire from the 16th century onwards, the Spanish never settled in this region, however, and increased British trade and settlement finally resulted in British Honduras being formally annexed as a crown colony in 1862.
Meanwhile, Guatemala had declared its independence from Spain in 1821, and under the terms of the Anglo-Guatemalan Treaty of 1859, Guatemala agreed to recognize British rule, while Great Britain promised to build a road from Guatemala to the Caribbean port of Punta Gorda.
As this never happened, the territory of Belize has been claimed in whole or in part by Guatemala since 1940. When Belize became a sovereign state, the territorial dispute remained unresolved. Currently, Guatemala claims everything south of the Sibun River, a total 12,272 square kilometres – more than half the country.
There have been periodic border clashes, but this past January the two countries signed an accord agreeing to refer their territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice for binding resolution. (Voters in both countries must still ratify the accord in referenda this coming October before it can be sent to the Court for final settlement.)
Then there is Gibraltar. Still a British possession, it is located at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. It has an area of 6.8 square kilometres and borders Spain itself. At the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar sits the densely populated city area, home to almost 30,000 people.
Acquired by Britain from Spain “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibraltar guarded the sea lanes that led to the Suez Canal, at the other end, and the passageway to India.
Spain continues to lay claim to Gibraltar. Its dictator General Francisco Franco closed the land border in 1969, to put pressure on Britain. In 1982, it was reopened and in 2006 the Spanish government agreed to relax border controls.
Today, while Gibraltar’s strategic value to Britain is gone, its inhabitants, the descendants of Britons, Indians, Italians, Maltese, Moroccans, Sephardic Jews, and Spaniards, do not want to become Spanish.
In referenda held in 1967 and 2002, they have overwhelmingly reaffirmed their desire to remain British. But recovering Gibraltar remains a stated objective of successive Spanish governments.
The legacy of imperial rule still haunts many parts of the world.
Friday, March 15, 2013
The Falkland Islands Remain Resolutely British
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Two of the world’s largest empires, those of Great Britain and Spain, left behind many contested areas. The best-known of these conflicts involves Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a 12,170 square kilometre archipelago located in the South Atlantic some 500 kilometres east of the mainland.
Over the past 400 years, the Falkland Islands, home to 2,841 people, have been variously claimed by the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Argentinians and the British.
In January, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, declared that the islands had been forcibly stripped from Argentina in “a blatant exercise of 19th century colonialism,” and accused Britain of defying a United Nations resolution by not holding negotiations on the handover of sovereignty to Argentina.
In response, the people of the Falkland Islands on March 10-11 again spoke of their desire to remain an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. They cast their ballots in a referendum in which they voted overwhelmingly to remain British.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said that Argentina should take “careful note” of the referendum result and that Britain would always be there to defend the Islanders.
“We believe in self-determination. The Falkland Islanders have spoken so clearly about their future and now other countries right across the world, I hope, will respect and revere this very, very clear result,” he remarked.
The Argentinian claim to the Malvinas, as they call the islands, is based on the fact that the Falklands had been Spanish possessions prior to their occupation by Britain in 1833. Spain had ruled the islands intermittently as part of its American empire and Argentina, after declaring its independence from Spain in 1816, was in control of the islands for a brief period.
Buenos Aires contends that the principle of self-determination is not applicable since the current inhabitants are not aboriginal and were brought in to replace the previous population.
On April 2, 1982, Argentine forces invaded and occupied the islands. The resulting conflict lasted 74 days and ended with the Argentine surrender on June 14, 1982. During the conflict, 649 Argentinian and 255 British military personnel died.
While there have been no further attempts to conquer the Falklands, Argentina has persuaded South American neighbours to turn away Falklands-flagged ships, curtailed over-flights and imposed sanctions on companies that exploit the resources of the islands. Its constitution maintains its claim over the islands.
This dispute, protracted as it is, will remain an ongoing concern for many more years.
Two of the world’s largest empires, those of Great Britain and Spain, left behind many contested areas. The best-known of these conflicts involves Argentina’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a 12,170 square kilometre archipelago located in the South Atlantic some 500 kilometres east of the mainland.
Over the past 400 years, the Falkland Islands, home to 2,841 people, have been variously claimed by the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Argentinians and the British.
In January, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, declared that the islands had been forcibly stripped from Argentina in “a blatant exercise of 19th century colonialism,” and accused Britain of defying a United Nations resolution by not holding negotiations on the handover of sovereignty to Argentina.
In response, the people of the Falkland Islands on March 10-11 again spoke of their desire to remain an overseas territory of the United Kingdom. They cast their ballots in a referendum in which they voted overwhelmingly to remain British.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said that Argentina should take “careful note” of the referendum result and that Britain would always be there to defend the Islanders.
“We believe in self-determination. The Falkland Islanders have spoken so clearly about their future and now other countries right across the world, I hope, will respect and revere this very, very clear result,” he remarked.
The Argentinian claim to the Malvinas, as they call the islands, is based on the fact that the Falklands had been Spanish possessions prior to their occupation by Britain in 1833. Spain had ruled the islands intermittently as part of its American empire and Argentina, after declaring its independence from Spain in 1816, was in control of the islands for a brief period.
Buenos Aires contends that the principle of self-determination is not applicable since the current inhabitants are not aboriginal and were brought in to replace the previous population.
On April 2, 1982, Argentine forces invaded and occupied the islands. The resulting conflict lasted 74 days and ended with the Argentine surrender on June 14, 1982. During the conflict, 649 Argentinian and 255 British military personnel died.
While there have been no further attempts to conquer the Falklands, Argentina has persuaded South American neighbours to turn away Falklands-flagged ships, curtailed over-flights and imposed sanctions on companies that exploit the resources of the islands. Its constitution maintains its claim over the islands.
This dispute, protracted as it is, will remain an ongoing concern for many more years.
Monday, March 11, 2013
What Does the Future Hold for Northern Ireland?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer:
The official name of the country usually referred to as Great Britain is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and the six predominantly Protestant counties in Ulster that remained part of the UK when the rest of Ireland, where Catholics were a majority, attained independence in 1922.
Ireland, for centuries ruled by Britain, had been incorporated as an integral part of the United Kingdom in 1801, when the Cross of St. Patrick was added to those of St. George and St. Andrew on the Union Jack, and Ireland was given representation in the Westminster Parliament in London.
Throughout the 19th century, though, Irish Catholics sought to govern themselves, either through “Home Rule,” a form of autonomy within the British state, or outright independence. Home rule opponents whipped up opposition with slogans like “Home rule is Rome rule.” Full sovereignty, on the other hand, became the rallying cry of Sinn Fein and its Irish Republican Army.
Following the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921 forced Britain into signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. But Ireland was partitioned, and only 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties (including three from Ulster) formed the Irish Free State. (It became the Republic of Ireland in 1949.)
In Northern Ireland, the Protestant majority retained their ties with Britain, with their own assembly at Stormont. “We are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State,” announced its first prime minister. In this “Orange State,” Roman Catholics remained second-class citizens, discriminated against politically and economically.
Ever since the partition, a key aspiration of Irish nationalists has been to bring about a united Ireland and erase the border, while Unionists, who consider themselves “British” and prefer to call the province “Ulster,” wish to remain part of the UK.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Catholics in Northern Ireland began to rebel against their situation. Violence on both sides, during the “Troubles,” resulted in the deaths of more than 3,600 people, with another 107,000 injured.
Finally, in 1998, the Belfast -- or Good Friday -- Agreement was signed by the governments of Britain and Ireland, and ratified by referenda in both the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland. It created a power-sharing system between Catholic (Republican) and Protestant (Unionist) parties in the Northern Irish Assembly.
It also stated that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland and of the Republic of Ireland wished otherwise. Should that happen, then the British and Irish governments are under “a binding obligation” to implement that choice.
The agreement thus acknowledges that Northern Ireland is not a permanent and inalienable part of the United Kingdom; its political future is contingent on the will of a majority of its population, which now numbers 1,789,000. (The Republic has 4,588,252 people.)
When the province was created, Protestants were the great majority of the population, but in the succeeding decades, the proportion of people in the Catholic community has increased. Today, they comprise 45 per cent of the population, and they now outnumber Protestants in half of Northern Ireland’s 26 districts. (In the south, about 84 per cent are Catholics.)
Protestant fears of being eventually outnumbered surfaced recently. In early December, the Belfast City Council decided to reduce the number of days the Union Jack would fly over the Council building. This was made possible by the fact that nationalists now hold 24 seats on the council, compared with 21 for the Unionists, reflecting the rapid growth of the Catholic population.
Weeks of Loyalist Protestant demonstrations have followed: firebombs and rocks were hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers’ offices; and neighborhoods were sealed off by police or protesters’ barricades.
Ulster Protestants fear that Britain – England in particular -- is losing interest in them. The Protestants who settled Ulster from the 17th century on came mostly from Scotland, and Presbyterians form the largest Protestant denomination. Geographically, Northern Ireland is very close to Scotland, not England and Wales.
So in cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds, many people might not be all that unhappy were the province left to its own devices.
Such attitudes would only intensify were Scotland itself ever to leave the UK -- a referendum on independence is scheduled there for next year. A rump “United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland” would look absurd.
Should the UK dissolve, die-hard Unionists in Ulster might opt for a unilateral declaration of independence, but this would, needless to say, be resisted by the Catholics, who would of course prefer joining the Irish Republic. (This would also be the preferred option in Dublin.)
All of this would most likely lead to yet another round of “Troubles,” even worse than the previous ones.
The official name of the country usually referred to as Great Britain is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and the six predominantly Protestant counties in Ulster that remained part of the UK when the rest of Ireland, where Catholics were a majority, attained independence in 1922.
Ireland, for centuries ruled by Britain, had been incorporated as an integral part of the United Kingdom in 1801, when the Cross of St. Patrick was added to those of St. George and St. Andrew on the Union Jack, and Ireland was given representation in the Westminster Parliament in London.
Throughout the 19th century, though, Irish Catholics sought to govern themselves, either through “Home Rule,” a form of autonomy within the British state, or outright independence. Home rule opponents whipped up opposition with slogans like “Home rule is Rome rule.” Full sovereignty, on the other hand, became the rallying cry of Sinn Fein and its Irish Republican Army.
Following the First World War and the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1921 forced Britain into signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. But Ireland was partitioned, and only 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties (including three from Ulster) formed the Irish Free State. (It became the Republic of Ireland in 1949.)
In Northern Ireland, the Protestant majority retained their ties with Britain, with their own assembly at Stormont. “We are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State,” announced its first prime minister. In this “Orange State,” Roman Catholics remained second-class citizens, discriminated against politically and economically.
Ever since the partition, a key aspiration of Irish nationalists has been to bring about a united Ireland and erase the border, while Unionists, who consider themselves “British” and prefer to call the province “Ulster,” wish to remain part of the UK.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Catholics in Northern Ireland began to rebel against their situation. Violence on both sides, during the “Troubles,” resulted in the deaths of more than 3,600 people, with another 107,000 injured.
Finally, in 1998, the Belfast -- or Good Friday -- Agreement was signed by the governments of Britain and Ireland, and ratified by referenda in both the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland. It created a power-sharing system between Catholic (Republican) and Protestant (Unionist) parties in the Northern Irish Assembly.
It also stated that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland and of the Republic of Ireland wished otherwise. Should that happen, then the British and Irish governments are under “a binding obligation” to implement that choice.
The agreement thus acknowledges that Northern Ireland is not a permanent and inalienable part of the United Kingdom; its political future is contingent on the will of a majority of its population, which now numbers 1,789,000. (The Republic has 4,588,252 people.)
When the province was created, Protestants were the great majority of the population, but in the succeeding decades, the proportion of people in the Catholic community has increased. Today, they comprise 45 per cent of the population, and they now outnumber Protestants in half of Northern Ireland’s 26 districts. (In the south, about 84 per cent are Catholics.)
Protestant fears of being eventually outnumbered surfaced recently. In early December, the Belfast City Council decided to reduce the number of days the Union Jack would fly over the Council building. This was made possible by the fact that nationalists now hold 24 seats on the council, compared with 21 for the Unionists, reflecting the rapid growth of the Catholic population.
Weeks of Loyalist Protestant demonstrations have followed: firebombs and rocks were hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers’ offices; and neighborhoods were sealed off by police or protesters’ barricades.
Ulster Protestants fear that Britain – England in particular -- is losing interest in them. The Protestants who settled Ulster from the 17th century on came mostly from Scotland, and Presbyterians form the largest Protestant denomination. Geographically, Northern Ireland is very close to Scotland, not England and Wales.
So in cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds, many people might not be all that unhappy were the province left to its own devices.
Such attitudes would only intensify were Scotland itself ever to leave the UK -- a referendum on independence is scheduled there for next year. A rump “United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland” would look absurd.
Should the UK dissolve, die-hard Unionists in Ulster might opt for a unilateral declaration of independence, but this would, needless to say, be resisted by the Catholics, who would of course prefer joining the Irish Republic. (This would also be the preferred option in Dublin.)
All of this would most likely lead to yet another round of “Troubles,” even worse than the previous ones.
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
Our Growing Concern for Animal Rights
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Referring to the recent brutal killing of some fifty seals on a beach in eastern P.E.I., and the 2010 incident involving snowmobilers who harassed and killed a fox, Jane Thomas, in a March 1 Guardian letter to the editor, asserted that “violence towards animals is a symptom of lack of compassion toward all beings.”
A day earlier, an opinion piece by Elizabeth Schoales criticized “the utilitarian animal welfare model that underpins our existing laws, a model that categorizes animals based on our subjective interpretation of their value to humans. The level of suffering that we are legally allowed to inflict on them is measured against our perceived -- often simply imagined -- benefit to ourselves.”
This manner of thinking, she argues, “has little to do with any impartial moral obligation to protect other species from harm.”
Our concern for other sentient beings, including those which are slaughtered for food, has become more pronounced in recent decades. Indeed, many people have opted to become vegetarians, or even vegans, as a result.
I think we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way we perceive our relationship with animals, one that is similar to previous changes in the way we perceive other human beings.
Since the beginning of recorded history, certain classes of people were regarded, like animals today, as property.
Until very recent history, women were treated as the possession of men, with few rights to property or the right to hold office.
It many countries, including Canada, they could not even vote a century ago. It took a great amount of political work by suffragists and others, to rectify this.
As well, chattel slavery was considered entirely acceptable as recently as the 19th century. The United States almost fell apart in a horrific civil war over this issue.
Today it seems incredible to us that anyone could condone the idea of owning another person and having the power of life and death over them.
How do such changes in attitude occur? Obviously, they involve a great transformation in bedrock moral values by vast numbers of people – indeed, the legal system usually plays “catch-up” with such ideological shifts.
In his book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson traces this incredible shift regarding slavery, noting that “it is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people.”
The same country that, for hundreds of years, condoned, and got rich from, the slave trade, by the late 18th century took to heart the admonitions of abolitionists like William Wilberforce, grew ashamed of its disregard for human life, and became an advocate for the eradication of this evil.
Let’s hope that our increasing concern for the welfare of animals will produce similar results.
Referring to the recent brutal killing of some fifty seals on a beach in eastern P.E.I., and the 2010 incident involving snowmobilers who harassed and killed a fox, Jane Thomas, in a March 1 Guardian letter to the editor, asserted that “violence towards animals is a symptom of lack of compassion toward all beings.”
A day earlier, an opinion piece by Elizabeth Schoales criticized “the utilitarian animal welfare model that underpins our existing laws, a model that categorizes animals based on our subjective interpretation of their value to humans. The level of suffering that we are legally allowed to inflict on them is measured against our perceived -- often simply imagined -- benefit to ourselves.”
This manner of thinking, she argues, “has little to do with any impartial moral obligation to protect other species from harm.”
Our concern for other sentient beings, including those which are slaughtered for food, has become more pronounced in recent decades. Indeed, many people have opted to become vegetarians, or even vegans, as a result.
I think we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the way we perceive our relationship with animals, one that is similar to previous changes in the way we perceive other human beings.
Since the beginning of recorded history, certain classes of people were regarded, like animals today, as property.
Until very recent history, women were treated as the possession of men, with few rights to property or the right to hold office.
It many countries, including Canada, they could not even vote a century ago. It took a great amount of political work by suffragists and others, to rectify this.
As well, chattel slavery was considered entirely acceptable as recently as the 19th century. The United States almost fell apart in a horrific civil war over this issue.
Today it seems incredible to us that anyone could condone the idea of owning another person and having the power of life and death over them.
How do such changes in attitude occur? Obviously, they involve a great transformation in bedrock moral values by vast numbers of people – indeed, the legal system usually plays “catch-up” with such ideological shifts.
In his book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson traces this incredible shift regarding slavery, noting that “it is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people.”
The same country that, for hundreds of years, condoned, and got rich from, the slave trade, by the late 18th century took to heart the admonitions of abolitionists like William Wilberforce, grew ashamed of its disregard for human life, and became an advocate for the eradication of this evil.
Let’s hope that our increasing concern for the welfare of animals will produce similar results.
Monday, February 25, 2013
When Was the State of Israel Established?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
When was the State of Israel established?
The official answer is easy: David Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, proclaimed the formation of the Jewish state on May 14, 1948, as the British were pulling down the Union Jack and departing Palestine, which they had governed as a League of Nations Mandate after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
But modern Israel is, in many ways, older than that. The World Zionist Organization, created by Theodor Herzl in1897, had been building the infrastructure of a Jewish country for many decades.
One document on the road to statehood was the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917. Signed by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, it stated that Britain was “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The text of the Mandate for Palestine (which incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration) was approved by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and Britain became the official Mandatory power. Jews arrived in Palestine, building cities, farms, and infrastructure – a de facto state.
One can also point to the Nov. 29, 1947 passage, by a vote of 33-13, with 10 abstentions, of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states to follow the termination of the Mandate. Among those in favour were the Soviet Union and the United States. The resolution was accepted by the Jews in Palestine but rejected by the Arabs.
Yet, to my mind, there is yet another, symbolic, date that predates the formal establishment of the state, though it is a day that surely ranks among the darkest in Jewish history.
By the end of 1942, most of the Jews of Poland, herded into ghettos after the Nazi conquest of the country in 1939, had been murdered in Hitler’s Holocaust. Those that remained, in cities such as Bialystok, Częstochowa, Vilna (Vilnius), and Warsaw, were mostly younger people, who knew the fate that awaited them, and, though knowing they could not prevail against the might of the Nazi war machine, were determined to fight.
In Warsaw, members of the Revisionist Zionist movement formed the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), and began to acquire arms, much of it from the mainstream Polish underground, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK). On the left, a number of political groups organized the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB); they gained some help from the Polish Communist-led Gwardia Ludowa militia.
When Nazi SS troops entered the ghetto in mid-January 1943, to deport more Jews to their deaths, they were met with gunfire and Molotov cocktails, and were forced to retreat.
Furious, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, on Feb. 16 ordered the entire ghetto destroyed. Two months later, the assault began. Though of course completely outnumbered and outgunned, the Warsaw Jews fought against these overwhelming odds for a month.
As the ghetto was being demolished, some Jews managed to escape through underground sewers into Warsaw proper, but at least13,000 were killed in the battle (almost half burnt alive in the collapsing buildings set on fire by the Nazis.
However, on April 19, 1943, during the battle, the ZZW raised two flags atop the highest building in the ghetto: the red-and-white Polish Eagle and the blue-and-white Zionist banner (today’s Israeli flag). That day, too, should be considered one of the founding dates of Israel.
When was the State of Israel established?
The official answer is easy: David Ben-Gurion, on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, proclaimed the formation of the Jewish state on May 14, 1948, as the British were pulling down the Union Jack and departing Palestine, which they had governed as a League of Nations Mandate after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
But modern Israel is, in many ways, older than that. The World Zionist Organization, created by Theodor Herzl in1897, had been building the infrastructure of a Jewish country for many decades.
One document on the road to statehood was the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917. Signed by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, it stated that Britain was “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The text of the Mandate for Palestine (which incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration) was approved by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and Britain became the official Mandatory power. Jews arrived in Palestine, building cities, farms, and infrastructure – a de facto state.
One can also point to the Nov. 29, 1947 passage, by a vote of 33-13, with 10 abstentions, of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, which called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states to follow the termination of the Mandate. Among those in favour were the Soviet Union and the United States. The resolution was accepted by the Jews in Palestine but rejected by the Arabs.
Yet, to my mind, there is yet another, symbolic, date that predates the formal establishment of the state, though it is a day that surely ranks among the darkest in Jewish history.
By the end of 1942, most of the Jews of Poland, herded into ghettos after the Nazi conquest of the country in 1939, had been murdered in Hitler’s Holocaust. Those that remained, in cities such as Bialystok, Częstochowa, Vilna (Vilnius), and Warsaw, were mostly younger people, who knew the fate that awaited them, and, though knowing they could not prevail against the might of the Nazi war machine, were determined to fight.
In Warsaw, members of the Revisionist Zionist movement formed the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy, or ZZW), and began to acquire arms, much of it from the mainstream Polish underground, the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, or AK). On the left, a number of political groups organized the Jewish Combat Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB); they gained some help from the Polish Communist-led Gwardia Ludowa militia.
When Nazi SS troops entered the ghetto in mid-January 1943, to deport more Jews to their deaths, they were met with gunfire and Molotov cocktails, and were forced to retreat.
Furious, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, on Feb. 16 ordered the entire ghetto destroyed. Two months later, the assault began. Though of course completely outnumbered and outgunned, the Warsaw Jews fought against these overwhelming odds for a month.
As the ghetto was being demolished, some Jews managed to escape through underground sewers into Warsaw proper, but at least13,000 were killed in the battle (almost half burnt alive in the collapsing buildings set on fire by the Nazis.
However, on April 19, 1943, during the battle, the ZZW raised two flags atop the highest building in the ghetto: the red-and-white Polish Eagle and the blue-and-white Zionist banner (today’s Israeli flag). That day, too, should be considered one of the founding dates of Israel.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
An "English Canada" in the South Pacific
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
An American friend of mine who teaches at a Pennsylvania college is in Australia on sabbatical at the moment. It’s his third time in the country and he loves it. Who wouldn't? The “lucky country” has, in most areas, a benign semi-tropical climate, unlike our more frigid one – and it’s summer “down under” right now.
It got me thinking about the other ways Canada and Australia differ. Along with different colonial experiences, these are the two most obvious ones: Australia does not have a distinct “country” within it such as Quebec, with its own culture, language, and sense of nationhood; and it is not next to the United States, and therefore endlessly (especially in English Canada) trying to differentiate itself from America.
When its six colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, none was a former European colony that had been conquered by the British. It has no equivalent to Quebec (or for that matter, the old Afrikaner republics in South Africa).
In many ways Australia is more “British” than Canada. The country retains its ensign flag, with the Union Jack in the upper left. Cars drive on the left side of the road. There are double-decker buses in the cities. Cricket and rugby are major sports. Even the accent is far more British than Canada’s.
On the other hand Australia has a far greater sense of nationalism. Its constitution, unlike ours, never required amendment by the British parliament. There are no endless ruminations about “identity” -- a perpetual Canadian pastime. And its national culture remains more robustly “militaristic” than ours.
Australia’s political system is a hybrid of the American and British ones. Its lower House of Representatives is elected by population, but its upper house, the Senate, is also an elected body, representing the states. It has a classical two-party system, with a permanent Liberal Party-National Party Coalition – similar to Britain's Tories -- on the right, and a Labour Party on the left. The latter is in power at the moment.
Unlike Canada, which lives in the shadow of its neighbouring superpower, and hence has in recent decades made a virtue of a mild form of pacifism, Australia is the South Pacific’s hegemonic power. Indeed, it even governed colonies, including the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, which only gained its independence in 1975, as Papua New Guinea.
Canberra, unlike Ottawa, participated in the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In more recent years, it has become a “Pacific policeman,” sending troops at various times to neighbouring islands in turmoil, such as East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
Aboriginal peoples have been -- and in many ways still are -- treated badly in both countries. Since the beginning of European settlement in 1788, Australia's indigenous peoples have at various times been murdered en masse, herded into reserves, and marginalized, with virtually no rights. Few could vote until the 1960s.
Both Canada and Australia were, until the 1960s, also quite racist in their immigration policies. In fact, in Australia, there was an explicit “white Australia” policy. But this has changed, and today cities like Melbourne and Sydney are vibrant, multicultural places. Trade with Pacific powers like China and Japan are essential to the country’s economic well-being.
By looking at the trajectory of Australian history, we can get a glimpse of the Canada that might have been, had it been founded as a confederation without Quebec, and far from the United States.
An American friend of mine who teaches at a Pennsylvania college is in Australia on sabbatical at the moment. It’s his third time in the country and he loves it. Who wouldn't? The “lucky country” has, in most areas, a benign semi-tropical climate, unlike our more frigid one – and it’s summer “down under” right now.
It got me thinking about the other ways Canada and Australia differ. Along with different colonial experiences, these are the two most obvious ones: Australia does not have a distinct “country” within it such as Quebec, with its own culture, language, and sense of nationhood; and it is not next to the United States, and therefore endlessly (especially in English Canada) trying to differentiate itself from America.
When its six colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, none was a former European colony that had been conquered by the British. It has no equivalent to Quebec (or for that matter, the old Afrikaner republics in South Africa).
In many ways Australia is more “British” than Canada. The country retains its ensign flag, with the Union Jack in the upper left. Cars drive on the left side of the road. There are double-decker buses in the cities. Cricket and rugby are major sports. Even the accent is far more British than Canada’s.
On the other hand Australia has a far greater sense of nationalism. Its constitution, unlike ours, never required amendment by the British parliament. There are no endless ruminations about “identity” -- a perpetual Canadian pastime. And its national culture remains more robustly “militaristic” than ours.
Australia’s political system is a hybrid of the American and British ones. Its lower House of Representatives is elected by population, but its upper house, the Senate, is also an elected body, representing the states. It has a classical two-party system, with a permanent Liberal Party-National Party Coalition – similar to Britain's Tories -- on the right, and a Labour Party on the left. The latter is in power at the moment.
Unlike Canada, which lives in the shadow of its neighbouring superpower, and hence has in recent decades made a virtue of a mild form of pacifism, Australia is the South Pacific’s hegemonic power. Indeed, it even governed colonies, including the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, which only gained its independence in 1975, as Papua New Guinea.
Canberra, unlike Ottawa, participated in the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In more recent years, it has become a “Pacific policeman,” sending troops at various times to neighbouring islands in turmoil, such as East Timor and the Solomon Islands.
Aboriginal peoples have been -- and in many ways still are -- treated badly in both countries. Since the beginning of European settlement in 1788, Australia's indigenous peoples have at various times been murdered en masse, herded into reserves, and marginalized, with virtually no rights. Few could vote until the 1960s.
Both Canada and Australia were, until the 1960s, also quite racist in their immigration policies. In fact, in Australia, there was an explicit “white Australia” policy. But this has changed, and today cities like Melbourne and Sydney are vibrant, multicultural places. Trade with Pacific powers like China and Japan are essential to the country’s economic well-being.
By looking at the trajectory of Australian history, we can get a glimpse of the Canada that might have been, had it been founded as a confederation without Quebec, and far from the United States.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Two African Countries That Descended into Anarchy
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer
Two small countries adjacent to each other along the northwest coast of Africa have histories very different from those of their neighbours.
The populations of most African states consist of the indigenous people who lived within their current borders before the advent of European colonialism.
But Liberia and Sierra Leone were both founded as places where former Black slaves from North America could start new lives in their ancestral continent.
Liberia was mainly the creation of the American Colonization Society. Settlement of freed slaves from the United States began in 1822, and by 1867, the Society had assisted in the movement of more than 13,000 Americans to Liberia.
In 1847, these Americo-Liberians were able to establish a republic. Nominally independent, it was in effect an American protectorate, governed for some 150 years by the descendents of the Americans who had brought with them the culture of the U.S. south.
The capital, Monrovia, was named in honour of American President James Monroe, a prominent supporter of the colonization project, while Buchanan, the third-largest city, was named for an early governor who was a cousin of another American president, James Buchanan. The country’s flag is a one-star version of Old Glory.
Sierra Leone became a British colony in 1808, and gained its independence in 1961. In 1787, Britain had started to resettle Black Loyalists from the American colonies who had been freed in exchange for their services during the American Revolution, in the new capital, Freetown.
The Crown also offered resettlement to former slaves who had settled in Nova Scotia; they would have a profound influence on the emerging Creole culture. As well, some colonists came from the Caribbean or from England itself.
Both countries would later be undone by ethnic strife. First destabilized by military coups, the civil wars that followed ushered in years of chaos, violence and mass murder.
Although founded by freed American Blacks, Liberia is mostly inhabited by indigenous Africans, with the slaves’ descendants comprising just five per cent of the population.
So in 1980, when President William Tolbert was overthrown by Sergeant Samuel Doe, a member of the indigenous Krahn people who had suffered discrimination at the hands of the Americo-Liberian elite, it marked the end of dominance by the minority.
But things got worse. By the late 1980s, Doe’s arbitrary rule had led to economic collapse, and a former political ally of his, Charles Taylor, formed an opposition group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. His armed militia overran much of the countryside, entering the capital in 1990 and killing Doe.
Taylor not only took control of Liberia, but also became involved with a civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. He was finally forced out in 2003, but not before an estimated 250,000 Liberians were killed.
Eventually extradited to the Hague, Taylor in 2012 was convicted by a special tribunal of war crimes as a result of his involvement in the Sierra Leone civil war, and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In Sierra Leone, the descendants of the Creole, or Krio, settlers, who continued to arrive in Freetown until 1855, today comprise just two per cent of the country’s population.
The country’s civil war began in 1991 with an invasion led by Foday Sankoh, of ethnic Temne and Lokko background. His Revolutionary United Front promised to end the domination of the country by the Freetown elite, considered corrupt and incompetent by many in the country.
But the RUF soon became more interested in the money to be made from the sale of “blood diamonds” and plundered the country’s resources. The fighting, which included incredible atrocities visited on people by the RUF, lasted about a decade. At least 70,000 people died; some estimates are much higher.
In 2000, amid increasing evidence of massive human rights violations, British forces were sent to the country by then Prime Minister Tony Blair and defeated the RUF. Sankoh was indicted for multiple war crimes but died in prison in 2003 before the trial took place.
The current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is obviously America’s choice. Educated in the U. S., she had served in the administration of Tolbert before leaving the country after Doe’s coup. She then worked as an economist at the World Bank in Washington. First elected president in 2005, she subsequently won re-election in 2011 in a vote that was boycotted by the opposition.
In Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma, a former insurance executive, won a second term as president in 2012. He has said that he is still thankful to Tony Blair for the role Britain played in securing peace for Sierra Leone, and the British are playing a major part in rebuilding the country’s economy.
In a sense, Liberia and Sierra Leone have come full circle. Both are again under the tutelage of their former patrons, the U.S. and Britain.
Two small countries adjacent to each other along the northwest coast of Africa have histories very different from those of their neighbours.
The populations of most African states consist of the indigenous people who lived within their current borders before the advent of European colonialism.
But Liberia and Sierra Leone were both founded as places where former Black slaves from North America could start new lives in their ancestral continent.
Liberia was mainly the creation of the American Colonization Society. Settlement of freed slaves from the United States began in 1822, and by 1867, the Society had assisted in the movement of more than 13,000 Americans to Liberia.
In 1847, these Americo-Liberians were able to establish a republic. Nominally independent, it was in effect an American protectorate, governed for some 150 years by the descendents of the Americans who had brought with them the culture of the U.S. south.
The capital, Monrovia, was named in honour of American President James Monroe, a prominent supporter of the colonization project, while Buchanan, the third-largest city, was named for an early governor who was a cousin of another American president, James Buchanan. The country’s flag is a one-star version of Old Glory.
Sierra Leone became a British colony in 1808, and gained its independence in 1961. In 1787, Britain had started to resettle Black Loyalists from the American colonies who had been freed in exchange for their services during the American Revolution, in the new capital, Freetown.
The Crown also offered resettlement to former slaves who had settled in Nova Scotia; they would have a profound influence on the emerging Creole culture. As well, some colonists came from the Caribbean or from England itself.
Both countries would later be undone by ethnic strife. First destabilized by military coups, the civil wars that followed ushered in years of chaos, violence and mass murder.
Although founded by freed American Blacks, Liberia is mostly inhabited by indigenous Africans, with the slaves’ descendants comprising just five per cent of the population.
So in 1980, when President William Tolbert was overthrown by Sergeant Samuel Doe, a member of the indigenous Krahn people who had suffered discrimination at the hands of the Americo-Liberian elite, it marked the end of dominance by the minority.
But things got worse. By the late 1980s, Doe’s arbitrary rule had led to economic collapse, and a former political ally of his, Charles Taylor, formed an opposition group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. His armed militia overran much of the countryside, entering the capital in 1990 and killing Doe.
Taylor not only took control of Liberia, but also became involved with a civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. He was finally forced out in 2003, but not before an estimated 250,000 Liberians were killed.
Eventually extradited to the Hague, Taylor in 2012 was convicted by a special tribunal of war crimes as a result of his involvement in the Sierra Leone civil war, and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In Sierra Leone, the descendants of the Creole, or Krio, settlers, who continued to arrive in Freetown until 1855, today comprise just two per cent of the country’s population.
The country’s civil war began in 1991 with an invasion led by Foday Sankoh, of ethnic Temne and Lokko background. His Revolutionary United Front promised to end the domination of the country by the Freetown elite, considered corrupt and incompetent by many in the country.
But the RUF soon became more interested in the money to be made from the sale of “blood diamonds” and plundered the country’s resources. The fighting, which included incredible atrocities visited on people by the RUF, lasted about a decade. At least 70,000 people died; some estimates are much higher.
In 2000, amid increasing evidence of massive human rights violations, British forces were sent to the country by then Prime Minister Tony Blair and defeated the RUF. Sankoh was indicted for multiple war crimes but died in prison in 2003 before the trial took place.
The current president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is obviously America’s choice. Educated in the U. S., she had served in the administration of Tolbert before leaving the country after Doe’s coup. She then worked as an economist at the World Bank in Washington. First elected president in 2005, she subsequently won re-election in 2011 in a vote that was boycotted by the opposition.
In Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma, a former insurance executive, won a second term as president in 2012. He has said that he is still thankful to Tony Blair for the role Britain played in securing peace for Sierra Leone, and the British are playing a major part in rebuilding the country’s economy.
In a sense, Liberia and Sierra Leone have come full circle. Both are again under the tutelage of their former patrons, the U.S. and Britain.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)