Sandip Kumar Mishra
To understand and evaluate the outcomes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s East Asian tour of China, Mongolia and South Korea, it would be useful to separate them into at least three domains: popular, economic, and security-strategic.
Overall, it can be said that Modi was able to create sufficient public attention on his visit to China. This may not appear important but by connecting India and China through various mediums such as Twitter, a momentum for people-to-people exchange between the two neighbours could be created. India and China both are rising powers in Asia and have big information as well as perception gaps - these gestures cannot therefore be called superficial. In Mongolia, which no other Indian PM has officially visited before, Modi’s first stop was Gandan Monastery where he gifted a Bodhi Tree. He talked about India and Mongolia’s historical linkages and addressed the Mongolian parliament, which was a first. He also talked about Buddhism and democracy as two important connectors between the two countries. In South Korea also, Modi visited the War Memorial and remembered the Indian soldiers who helped South Korea during the Korean War and referred to other historical connections. His visit to South Korea got remarkable coverage in the local media.
On the economic front, India and China signed 12 different agreements along with a promise of US$20 billion Chinese investment in India. India has been looking at possible investors for its infrastructure sector, which needs around US$1 trillion. China has a foreign reserve of around US$4 trillion, and during his visit to China, Modi tried to communicate India’s needs and opportunities for Chinese investments in a win-win dynamic. Modi also raised the issue of the imbalance in India-China bilateral trade which has reached around US$48 billion and which must be corrected. India is an eager partner in the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and looks forward to benefitting from this Chinese initiative.
India and China realise that the economic opportunities are immense and must be realised. Modi’s visit to China thus was largely in line with this understanding and trajectory. His visit underlined that economic cooperation must increase even if both countries are not able to reach consensus on political and security issues. During his Mongolia trip also, Modi’s visit resulted in several agreements in the economic, trade, transport, highways and energy sectors. He laid the foundation for an Information Technology Centre in Mongolia and gifted a Bhabhatron to the National Cancer Centre of Mongolia. Cooperation in the minerals sector was also sought; this includes cooking coal, copper, rare earths and uranium. The economic outcomes of Modi’s Mongolia visit may not look very impressive quantitatively, but they are definitely strategic. India, during Modi’s trip to South Korea, signed 7 agreements along with other several other proposals to connect economic and trade institutions of both countries. South Korea promised to invest around US$10 billion in India and both countries are going to revise their Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) by next year. Modi took special interest in South Korea’s shipbuilding sector and visited a Hyundai plant in Ulsan. Modi appears to be convinced that the role of South Korea would be crucial in India’s ‘Make in India’ project and this visit was also an attempt to display India’s commitment to it.
The third set of issues are related to security and strategy. In China, Modi had little success, though many observers were expecting ‘historic’ steps. India shares a long and disputed border with China and but nothing significant emerged on this front. Several other issues such as Chinese trade routes proposed under the One Belt One Route (OBOR) project, growing proximity between China and Pakistan and regional issues such as the South China Sea were not taken up during the visit. Modi’s Arunachal Pradesh visit before the China trip, his indirect reference to China during his Japan visit in 2014 and India’s common vision document with the US for the Asia-Pacific, there have been clear indications that there is little possibility of improvement in this area between the two countries. There are allegations that Modi’s diplomacy vis-à-vis China in particular and East Asia in general have been too loud and thus his visit to Mongolia along with China was given a special context by some observers. It is said that Modi is interested in forging a closer partnership with Mongolia on strategic issues and his visit brought out this dimension of India’s objective. On the security and strategic partnership front, Modi’s visit to South Korea can be considered quite successful. He raised the bilateral relationship to the ‘special strategic partnership’ level, with the provision of annual summit meets between the respective leaders and annual 2-2 meetings between the foreign and defence ministers. That the same provisions that are present in the India-Japan relationship have been incorporated into the India-South Korea relationship would be to the latter’s satisfaction.
Overall, it seems that Modi’s three-nation tour in East Asia has been successful in connecting their historic and popular bonds with India as well as forging more dynamic economic cooperation. The energy invested in the visits should hopefully bear positive results in the future. However, from the security and strategic points of view, only his South Korea visit might be called a success. Another important aspect of these visits are going to be the follow-ups, which are equally if not more important to realise these agreements. It would be interesting to see how India is going to implement these economic partnerships and whether they are going to have a spill-over effect in the security and strategic domains.
2 Jun 2015
India-China: Current Status and Expectations for the Future
Siwei Liu
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his first visit to China since assuming office, from 14-16 May 2015. The visit has a great significance for present-day Sino-India relations, and also has a high importance for the geostrategic dynamics of the Asia Pacific region. Both China and India should seize the opportunity to build closer bilateral ties and work together for the stability and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.
Modi’s three-day China trip created a positive and friendly atmosphere for Sino-India bilateral relations. Modi received a warm welcome form the Chinese government and people. It is worth mentioning that Modi had visited China twice before he took office and so he has some previous personal experience of interacting with Chinese people. For example, Modi opened his Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblog, saying "Hello China!" ahead of his visit. He successfully used social media to narrow the distance between him and Chinese people.
Modi’s first stop in China was Xi’an, a famous historic and cultural city in the country’s Shaanxi Province. Xi’an is the incumbent Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hometown. There is no denying that Modi’s Xi’an trip easily echoes Xi’s September 2014 India trip in which the latter travelled to Modi’s home state Gujarat before flying to the capital, New Delhi. Previously, President Xi had never welcomed a foreign leader in Xi’an. The extraordinary arrangement demonstrated that the two leaders want to strengthen their personal relations in the future.
It is worth mentioning that as an ancient Chinese capital, Xi’an has an important link for cultural and economic interactions between China and India. So choosing Xi’ an as Modi’s first stop in China also demonstrated the two sides purposely emphasise their cultural exchange and economic cooperation.
Modi’s cultural diplomacy was indeed impressive. In Xi’an, Modi not only visited the Da Ci'en Temple and the Wild Goose Pagoda – built in commemoration of the Buddhist monk, Xuan Zang, and his efforts to popularise Buddhism in China – but also visited the famous Terracotta Warriors and Daxingshan Temple. In Beijing and Shanghai too, there were many cultural and educational exchange activities in Modi’s itinerary. They included attending the Yoga-Taichi demonstration event; addressing students at Tsinghua University; and participating in the opening ceremony of the Center for Gandhian and Indian Studies at Fudan University.
Doubtlessly, Modi’s attendances in these activities were welcomed in China. The Chinese media and the Chinese people were positive in their views of Modi’s visit.
Modi’s China visit has had fruitful results. Twenty-four agreements were signed during the visit. Both sides emphasised their cooperation in various fields, ranging from cultural and educational exchange to trade and investment. Additionally, Indian and Chinese companies inked 21 agreements worth $22 billion during the India-China Business Forum in Shanghai. Both sides also agreed to boost increased cooperation between Chinese provinces and Indian state governments and inked agreements towards the establishment of sister-state/province partnership between Karnataka and Sichuan, and sister-city relationships between Aurangabad-Dunhuang, Chennai-Chongqing and Hyderabad-Qingdao.
Predictably, these agreements will help deepening the bilateral and will benefit local communities as well.
Additionally, Modi announced a new electronic visa scheme for Chinese nationals in his speech at Tsinghua University. Obviously, China appreciated Modi's decision, though the e-visa decision had not figured in the aforementioned 24 agreements. If Modi’s promise is kept, it will help enhance people-to-people ties.
Admittedly, Modi’s visit has begun a new era in bilateral relations, but the fact that the two sides have different interests and trust deficits on some issues could be neglected. In recent years, the increasing geopolitical competition between the two nations is apparent. India has concerns over China’s growing influence in South Asia and the India Ocean and the Chinese strategic community is concerned about Indian closer defence relations with US and Japan. Even in economic relations, the two nations have to deal with various challenges such as the potential energy competition and trade deficit. In addition, although the two sides have underlined enhancing border defence cooperation during this visit, their differences on border issues are still big.
Perhaps, national interests, competitions and trust deficit between New Delhi and Beijing cannot be resolved overnight; but given that India and China have common interests in various fields, there are possibilities for more cooperation between the two. In fact, many Asian experts and business leaders in both countries are positive in their views of a deeper cooperation between the two countries.
Modi’s visit has come at a very critical time, one that coincides with the rise of the two Asian giants – China and India – in a changing Asia-Pacific architecture. The visit has provided a good and positive platform for the two sides to promote the cooperation relations.
Both sides should recognise that pursuing a win-win approach to intensify cooperation is not only beneficial for the two countries, but also can contribute to regional stability, development and prosperity. If possible, the two sides should discuss more practical ways to deepen cooperation and perfect related-regime construction. For example, given that the two sides are likely to link the Chinese 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative with India's Project Mausam and the Spice Route Project together, they need to undertake more dialogues and interactions both through Track-I and Track-II channels and let the other side know more details about projects.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid his first visit to China since assuming office, from 14-16 May 2015. The visit has a great significance for present-day Sino-India relations, and also has a high importance for the geostrategic dynamics of the Asia Pacific region. Both China and India should seize the opportunity to build closer bilateral ties and work together for the stability and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.
Modi’s three-day China trip created a positive and friendly atmosphere for Sino-India bilateral relations. Modi received a warm welcome form the Chinese government and people. It is worth mentioning that Modi had visited China twice before he took office and so he has some previous personal experience of interacting with Chinese people. For example, Modi opened his Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblog, saying "Hello China!" ahead of his visit. He successfully used social media to narrow the distance between him and Chinese people.
Modi’s first stop in China was Xi’an, a famous historic and cultural city in the country’s Shaanxi Province. Xi’an is the incumbent Chinese President Xi Jinping’s hometown. There is no denying that Modi’s Xi’an trip easily echoes Xi’s September 2014 India trip in which the latter travelled to Modi’s home state Gujarat before flying to the capital, New Delhi. Previously, President Xi had never welcomed a foreign leader in Xi’an. The extraordinary arrangement demonstrated that the two leaders want to strengthen their personal relations in the future.
It is worth mentioning that as an ancient Chinese capital, Xi’an has an important link for cultural and economic interactions between China and India. So choosing Xi’ an as Modi’s first stop in China also demonstrated the two sides purposely emphasise their cultural exchange and economic cooperation.
Modi’s cultural diplomacy was indeed impressive. In Xi’an, Modi not only visited the Da Ci'en Temple and the Wild Goose Pagoda – built in commemoration of the Buddhist monk, Xuan Zang, and his efforts to popularise Buddhism in China – but also visited the famous Terracotta Warriors and Daxingshan Temple. In Beijing and Shanghai too, there were many cultural and educational exchange activities in Modi’s itinerary. They included attending the Yoga-Taichi demonstration event; addressing students at Tsinghua University; and participating in the opening ceremony of the Center for Gandhian and Indian Studies at Fudan University.
Doubtlessly, Modi’s attendances in these activities were welcomed in China. The Chinese media and the Chinese people were positive in their views of Modi’s visit.
Modi’s China visit has had fruitful results. Twenty-four agreements were signed during the visit. Both sides emphasised their cooperation in various fields, ranging from cultural and educational exchange to trade and investment. Additionally, Indian and Chinese companies inked 21 agreements worth $22 billion during the India-China Business Forum in Shanghai. Both sides also agreed to boost increased cooperation between Chinese provinces and Indian state governments and inked agreements towards the establishment of sister-state/province partnership between Karnataka and Sichuan, and sister-city relationships between Aurangabad-Dunhuang, Chennai-Chongqing and Hyderabad-Qingdao.
Predictably, these agreements will help deepening the bilateral and will benefit local communities as well.
Additionally, Modi announced a new electronic visa scheme for Chinese nationals in his speech at Tsinghua University. Obviously, China appreciated Modi's decision, though the e-visa decision had not figured in the aforementioned 24 agreements. If Modi’s promise is kept, it will help enhance people-to-people ties.
Admittedly, Modi’s visit has begun a new era in bilateral relations, but the fact that the two sides have different interests and trust deficits on some issues could be neglected. In recent years, the increasing geopolitical competition between the two nations is apparent. India has concerns over China’s growing influence in South Asia and the India Ocean and the Chinese strategic community is concerned about Indian closer defence relations with US and Japan. Even in economic relations, the two nations have to deal with various challenges such as the potential energy competition and trade deficit. In addition, although the two sides have underlined enhancing border defence cooperation during this visit, their differences on border issues are still big.
Perhaps, national interests, competitions and trust deficit between New Delhi and Beijing cannot be resolved overnight; but given that India and China have common interests in various fields, there are possibilities for more cooperation between the two. In fact, many Asian experts and business leaders in both countries are positive in their views of a deeper cooperation between the two countries.
Modi’s visit has come at a very critical time, one that coincides with the rise of the two Asian giants – China and India – in a changing Asia-Pacific architecture. The visit has provided a good and positive platform for the two sides to promote the cooperation relations.
Both sides should recognise that pursuing a win-win approach to intensify cooperation is not only beneficial for the two countries, but also can contribute to regional stability, development and prosperity. If possible, the two sides should discuss more practical ways to deepen cooperation and perfect related-regime construction. For example, given that the two sides are likely to link the Chinese 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative with India's Project Mausam and the Spice Route Project together, they need to undertake more dialogues and interactions both through Track-I and Track-II channels and let the other side know more details about projects.
US-GCC Summit: More Hype than Substance
Ranjit Gupta
On 17 April, the White House announced US President Barack Obama’s invite to GCC monarchs for a summit on from 13-14 May to reassure the Saudi Arabia-led GCC bloc about the nuclear framework agreement with Iran and against the backdrop of the then three-week-old war against Yemen embarked upon by Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies without consultation with the US. Reflecting the widespread sentiment amongst GCC governments, a senior Arab diplomat had said, “We don't have to ask America's permission… we won't wait for America to tell us what to do.”
GCC expectations were well summed up by the Ambassador of the UAE Youssef Al Otaiba who, on 7 May, said in Washington that, “We are looking for (some form of) security guarantee given the behavior of Iran in the region. In the past, we have survived with a gentleman’s agreement with the United States about security ... I think today we need something in writing. We need something institutionalized.”
On 7 May, US Secretary of State John Kerry met King Salman; on 8 May the US announced fixing the King’s special meeting with President Obama at the White House. On 10 May Saudi Arabia announced the cancellation of the King’s visit. With Bahrain now under complete Saudi tutelage, Bahrain’s king preferred to go to London to attend the derbies. Only the Emirs of Kuwait and Qatar went, though the latter attended the derbies in London too. The rulers of Oman and the UAE could not attend due to genuine health reasons. Two rising stars, the Crown Prince, and Deputy Crown Prince – who seems to be running the war in Yemen – represented Saudi Arabia. All this was a strong public manifestation of the growing Saudi/UAE exasperation with US policies towards the region, particularly in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring.
What did the GCC countries actually get? Some extracts from the lengthy Joint Communiqué and a lengthier Annexe provide an answer:
“The United States is prepared to work jointly with the GCC states to deter and confront an external threat to any GCC state's territorial integrity that is inconsistent with the UN Charter…. to determine urgently what action may be appropriate, using the means at our collective disposal, including the potential use of military force, for the defense of our GCC partners”. The US also agreed to support GCC countries “to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region.” These statements, the strongest language in the Joint Communique, can hardly be construed as the US “ironclad commitment” that President Obama spoke of as a Summit outcome; particularly as another of his comments clarified that "the purpose of security cooperation is not to perpetuate any long-term confrontation with Iran or even to marginalise Iran."
The US will be particularly pleased about paragraphs: “The United States and GCC member states also affirmed their strong support for the efforts of the P5+1 to reach a deal with Iran by June 30, 2015, that would verifiably ensure that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, noting that such a deal would represent a significant contribution to regional security…. At the same time, the United States and GCC member states reaffirmed their willingness to develop normalized relations with Iran should it cease its destabilizing activities and their belief that such relations would contribute to regional security….”. And, “With regard to Yemen, both the United States and GCC member states underscored the imperative of collective efforts to counter Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, and emphasized the need to rapidly shift from military operations to a political process…..(there is) a shared recognition that there is no military solution to the regions’ civil conflicts, and that they can only be resolved through political and peaceful means…”
However, these sentiments are likely to remain mere aspirations as Saudi Arabia resumed its intensive bombing across Yemen within minutes of the conclusion of the five-day ceasefire. If anything, the intensity of the bombing has been steadily increasing, inflicting greater casualties, causing ever increasing damage to the already weak infrastructure and displacement of increasing numbers of people, already in the thousands; all of this is going to engender long-term bitterness, even enmity towards Saudi Arabia. The Houthis remain undaunted. Saudi Arabia cannot succeed in reinstalling the Al-Hadi administration through this approach. Meanwhile, al Qaeda is gaining ground by the day.
Frankly, the only elements of the joint communiqué that could be implemented soon are those related to the greatly expanded supply of weapons, and the installation of a GCC-wide Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. In his first term, the Obama administration agreed to sell over $64 billion in arms and defence services to the GCC countries with almost three-quarters of that going to Saudi Arabia. New offers worth nearly $15 billion were made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Now, even more weapons will be made available. The US military-industrial complex is celebrating.
Thus, the summit ended with the US coming out a winner, Iran not losing anything and little for the GCC countries beyond lots more weapons. Saudi Arabia’s new assertiveness will increase in the short term as paranoia and pique continue to override rationality; President Obama will persist with his top foreign policy priority, a deal with Iran; the increasing misery of the peoples of the region will continue unabated; and prospects for meaningful political processes to end conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in the foreseeable future remain bleak.
On 17 April, the White House announced US President Barack Obama’s invite to GCC monarchs for a summit on from 13-14 May to reassure the Saudi Arabia-led GCC bloc about the nuclear framework agreement with Iran and against the backdrop of the then three-week-old war against Yemen embarked upon by Saudi Arabia and its GCC allies without consultation with the US. Reflecting the widespread sentiment amongst GCC governments, a senior Arab diplomat had said, “We don't have to ask America's permission… we won't wait for America to tell us what to do.”
GCC expectations were well summed up by the Ambassador of the UAE Youssef Al Otaiba who, on 7 May, said in Washington that, “We are looking for (some form of) security guarantee given the behavior of Iran in the region. In the past, we have survived with a gentleman’s agreement with the United States about security ... I think today we need something in writing. We need something institutionalized.”
On 7 May, US Secretary of State John Kerry met King Salman; on 8 May the US announced fixing the King’s special meeting with President Obama at the White House. On 10 May Saudi Arabia announced the cancellation of the King’s visit. With Bahrain now under complete Saudi tutelage, Bahrain’s king preferred to go to London to attend the derbies. Only the Emirs of Kuwait and Qatar went, though the latter attended the derbies in London too. The rulers of Oman and the UAE could not attend due to genuine health reasons. Two rising stars, the Crown Prince, and Deputy Crown Prince – who seems to be running the war in Yemen – represented Saudi Arabia. All this was a strong public manifestation of the growing Saudi/UAE exasperation with US policies towards the region, particularly in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring.
What did the GCC countries actually get? Some extracts from the lengthy Joint Communiqué and a lengthier Annexe provide an answer:
“The United States is prepared to work jointly with the GCC states to deter and confront an external threat to any GCC state's territorial integrity that is inconsistent with the UN Charter…. to determine urgently what action may be appropriate, using the means at our collective disposal, including the potential use of military force, for the defense of our GCC partners”. The US also agreed to support GCC countries “to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region.” These statements, the strongest language in the Joint Communique, can hardly be construed as the US “ironclad commitment” that President Obama spoke of as a Summit outcome; particularly as another of his comments clarified that "the purpose of security cooperation is not to perpetuate any long-term confrontation with Iran or even to marginalise Iran."
The US will be particularly pleased about paragraphs: “The United States and GCC member states also affirmed their strong support for the efforts of the P5+1 to reach a deal with Iran by June 30, 2015, that would verifiably ensure that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, noting that such a deal would represent a significant contribution to regional security…. At the same time, the United States and GCC member states reaffirmed their willingness to develop normalized relations with Iran should it cease its destabilizing activities and their belief that such relations would contribute to regional security….”. And, “With regard to Yemen, both the United States and GCC member states underscored the imperative of collective efforts to counter Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, and emphasized the need to rapidly shift from military operations to a political process…..(there is) a shared recognition that there is no military solution to the regions’ civil conflicts, and that they can only be resolved through political and peaceful means…”
However, these sentiments are likely to remain mere aspirations as Saudi Arabia resumed its intensive bombing across Yemen within minutes of the conclusion of the five-day ceasefire. If anything, the intensity of the bombing has been steadily increasing, inflicting greater casualties, causing ever increasing damage to the already weak infrastructure and displacement of increasing numbers of people, already in the thousands; all of this is going to engender long-term bitterness, even enmity towards Saudi Arabia. The Houthis remain undaunted. Saudi Arabia cannot succeed in reinstalling the Al-Hadi administration through this approach. Meanwhile, al Qaeda is gaining ground by the day.
Frankly, the only elements of the joint communiqué that could be implemented soon are those related to the greatly expanded supply of weapons, and the installation of a GCC-wide Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. In his first term, the Obama administration agreed to sell over $64 billion in arms and defence services to the GCC countries with almost three-quarters of that going to Saudi Arabia. New offers worth nearly $15 billion were made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Now, even more weapons will be made available. The US military-industrial complex is celebrating.
Thus, the summit ended with the US coming out a winner, Iran not losing anything and little for the GCC countries beyond lots more weapons. Saudi Arabia’s new assertiveness will increase in the short term as paranoia and pique continue to override rationality; President Obama will persist with his top foreign policy priority, a deal with Iran; the increasing misery of the peoples of the region will continue unabated; and prospects for meaningful political processes to end conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in the foreseeable future remain bleak.
The Public Speaking Racket
Binoy Kampmark
“The eye-watering fee works out at £275 a second for the proposed 20-minute speech.”-Daily Mail, Jun 1, 2015
He may well have been one of the most insincere of political figures, but that has not stopped Tony Blair filling his money bags with heft since the days when New Labour seemed to be the only force in British politics worth looking at. It was the highpoint of hypocrisy and cant, of swindling effects and spinning deceptions. Taking Britain to war with Iraq on President George W. Bush’s belligerent ticket topped it off.
Then came the lecturing circuit, that money-laden trail of rich gravy and cost that has typified the retirement, if one can term it that, of political figures who capitalise on their supposedly hard won wisdom. They know; they were there.
The mundane, the mediocre and the disingenuous rock up the receipts, uttering banalities on behalf of openings, the addressing of clubs, and conferences where six figure price tags are commanded. They tend to feature the insoluble themes: retaining peace; abolishing hunger; alleviating poverty. Organisers and the speakers are entirely complicit in this endeavour – neither intend resolving the difficulty whose purpose sustains them. An entire industry, rooted in public relations deception, has grown up, gold plating speakers with coaching tips and suggestions.
One product of this system is Scott Berkun, who gives lists on the hireable types for speaking, and cost scales. His Confessions of a Public Speaker observes that the circuit itself transformed with free market tremors and technological stresses. “Lecture series, training conferences, and corporate meetings created thousands of events that needed new speakers every year.” Grass-roots community services vanished before the monetary flood. Value became meaningless to fluff.
The recent rejection by Blair of an engagement that would have cost £330,000 returned the public speaking circuit to the lime light. If ever an event says it all, with its message, and its participants, this had to be the Eat Food forum in Sweden. The gathering deems itself a forum where “science, politics and business can share insight and ideas into achieving our common goal of sustainability feeding a healthy world population.”
Suspiciously, it looks like a forum where failed figures go to preach, a communion of disaster in session and subsidised sermonising. Blair had just finished up his stint as Middle East Envoy, a position that seemed to entail a trail of cock-up and woe. Adding spice to that are his other sources of revenue, raked in for the strategy consulting concern Tony Blair Associates, advisor to such clients as Kuwait and Kazakhstan. Blair may speak of advice and reform; his clients are otherwise disposed.
For all that, Blair demanded, through Kruger Cowne talent agency, over two hundred thousand pounds, in addition to eighty thousand pounds in expenses for a twenty minute address.
In that, he was joined by another man of silver tongue and persuasion, Bill Clinton. In an address to the same forum last year, Clinton netted around the same fee – Kruger Cowne were certainly not going to let that amount go by, though it was reported by an unnamed source in The Express (Jun 1) that “Blair is not Clinton” and that his appeal was “fast diminishing.”
This is the world of public speaking speculation, stock chips that provide regular returns, or gradually tail off into the investment sunset. “So for his talent reps to think Eat was going to pay massive bucks for him shows they overestimated his worth.” Eat itself suggested that the deal failed to materialise because “the fee they wanted was quite high.” As a result, claimed the organisation’s executive producer Odd Arvid Stromstad, “we didn’t want to go into it” (Daily Mail, Jun 1). No talk, naturally, about the theme of the conference: to alleviate hunger and forge sustainable consumption. A conference about hunger could not feature the starving.
The response from Kruger Cowne has deflected the light on plain avarice and shifted it to charity. When in need of a good cause, charity will step in to provide the suitable alibi for greed. Not that the choice of where Blair’s planned fee was destined to go non-partisan. The agency had requested that Eat pay the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women his fee. Yes, equal opportunity for women and all that.
Blair’s office simply cited logistical impediments as to why this “donation” was never finalised. “Prior commitments meant it would be logically impossible.” Nor did his office negotiate “the amount of money that he would be earning” as he was not going to earn anything in any case. The spinning hand of Alistair Campbell still works its spectral magic.
Such form of public speech making acts as a racket, a form of verbal colonisation and graft. For 20 minute talks, Blair finds himself earning tens of thousands of pounds. In 2007, he is reported to have received £327,000 from Chinese property developer Dongguan Guangda to address 600 Communist party officials, business figures and bankers. Two years later, the Philippines was the site of the next Blair public speaking invasion – one which cost £400 thousand for two engagements.
It is a sign of modern measurement that in terms of public good, worth lies not in the content, or the sagacious nature of the speaker, so much as the delivery and name. Signatures, not substance, count. In this way, faecal matter resembles gold dust. It is a form of cost-laden ventriloquising. And it is bound to continue.
Inside the Belly of the Beast
Vince Cherniak & Henry A. Giroux
When Western University president Amit Chakma’s jaw-dropping income was posted recently on the Sunshine list, it put a spotlight on the inequities and conflicts that exist in the contemporary university between the administration and faculty, contract instructors and students. The corporatization of the university means the administrators are well off, while those responsible for actual education, doing the teaching, are struggling to survive.
But that may just be the tip of iceberg in this scandal. Prof. Henry Giroux, a renowned and formative thinker in critical pedagogy notes that the role of the university president has diminished into a fundraising machine and is just part of the disturbing decline in the university. “What we need to do is reimagine that the university is a place to think,” he says, “a place for peace, a place that has something to say about critical thought, about educating people to being engaged citizens. I think the public nature of the university is under siege.”
The McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest is the author of over 60 books, including the recent Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, and The Violence of Organized Forgetting. Giroux discusses how we might retake agency in our universities and in the zombie culture at large.
Vince Cherniak: Is it fair to say this situation of discord between administration and faculty is not unique to Western?
Henry A. Giroux: No, it’s a trend that’s highlighted both in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also increasingly true in Canada. What we basically see is a business model taking over the universities in which power is being concentrated more and more in the hands of administrators and faculty are basically becoming more powerless. I think the real issue here is as Noam Chomsky points out is what you have is a model in which labour costs are being reduced and what’s being increased at the same time is labour servility. I think this increasing casualization of faculty is horrendous in terms of its implications; not only are faculty powerless, their incomes are increasingly being reduced. Now, that’s not as bad in Canada as it is in the U.S. In the U.S. 70 percent of faculty are either part-time or non-tenure track. That’s horrendous. That basically is about the death of the university in my estimation as a critical institution.
So you have a neo-liberal model at work there and increasingly now under the Conservative government in the U.K. that really is destroying education as a public good. It’s no longer seen as a public good, it’s seen as a training centre for corporate interests.
VC: You’ve said 10 years ago that the university president has become a technocratic fund-raising machine. That wouldn’t have been the case a few decades ago?
HG: If you look at the university presidents of the ’60s and ’70s what you see are a number of people who are well known for producing big ideas. People who wrote books about the university, who saw it as a public good. Or at least were struggling with what it meant to maintain it as a public good in an economy that was increasingly coming into the power of financial interests. But I think what we increasingly see now is presidents being reduced to fund raisers. Of course fund raising is important but what you want to see is presidents who have some sense of vision, that can provide a model of what it means to talk about the university in ways that suggest it’s connected to public life, that address important social problems, that it’s a public good, a public trust. This is not what the Harper administration wants from universities, he wants to turn them basically into car factories. I think you have a lot of university presidents in Canada who are caught in the middle of that, who don’t buy that assessment. Certainly not the president of McMaster University. But at the same time I think the pressures are so overwhelming to instrumentalize the university, to turn it into a business culture and at the same time, produce a faculty that’s practically powerless is an ongoing problem that has to be addressed.
VC: It might be that the vociferous outrage here in London isn’t so much about Chakma bringing in a half-million or a million a year in salary, but that his job mostly entails just such fundraising and that he and the board of governors supporting him are out of touch with the real issues on campus. Before a non-confidence vote Chakma even admitted that. But when government support has been in decline, is that such a bad thing—to hire the guy who’s going to bring in revenues? What are the alternatives?
HG: The faculty have to mobilize, along with the students, like they did in the’60s and take the university back. The university is a site of struggle. I think those people who are most affected, the faculty and students, have got to find ways to link up with social movements outside of the university to be able to educate the public, mobilize, do everything they can to say, ‘Look, sorry, the model that we have now defining the university is a model that is not healthy for democracy, and it’s not healthy for students and faculty. Faculty are more than casual labour, students are more than customers and the university is more than simply a training centre for big business.’
We can’t become like Margaret Thatcher, we can’t fall into the argument that there’s no alternative. What we need to do is reimagine that the university is a place to think, a place for peace, a place that has something to say about critical thought, about educating people to being engaged citizens. I think the public nature of the university is under siege.
VC: Faculty and students are agitating to get the board of governors to see that they have lost sight of the purpose of the university. And while Chakma has said he will work diligently to understand the complaints, he recently declined a meeting with the faculty of Media and Information Studies because the faculty allowed media to observe. He’s in damage control mode and his advisors are clearly trying to protect “the brand.” It looks like administration isn’t just suppressing critical and creative thinking from the faculty, they’re almost at war with faculty.
HG: It’s sad to say that when the administrators shut down any possibility for dialogue, when administrations withdraw into cocoon-like gated communities in which they’re always on the defensive, I think that it’s probably not unreasonable to say that this is not just about an assault, this looks like a war strategy. It looks like power is functioning in such a way as to both stamp out dissent and at the same time concentrate itself in ways in which it’s not held accountable.
VC: You’ve noted the branding extends down to the student body: “the school looks like a mall.” The students are branded, and the curriculum is written by corporations. “Where are the public spaces for young people to learn a discourse that’s not commodified?” you ask. “To think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. There’s no room for the imagination, for creativity.”
HG: That’s an enormously important issue. If the university is going to be a space that takes seriously what it means to educate young people to be critically engaged citizens it can’t construct the university around a set of structures and spaces and organizing principles that seem to suggest the opposite of that — that basically they’re just consumers. The reason that that’s so deadly is that when you instrumentalize and commodify the university like that and you just see students as clients who have to make choices for the marketplace, you’re really talking about the death of a formative culture that is essential for educating people to live in a real democracy. So the issue is not just that branding is becoming an organizing principle of the universities, the real issue is, at what cost? What price is paid for that? What kind of disservice do we do to students? For instance, I was reading today that between 2001 and 2013 the Koch Foundation provided $70 million to 400 campuses — they’re buying faculty, they’re buying courses — in some cases, some of these major corporations have suggested that they’ll give a donation but everyone in the freshman class has to read Atlas Shrugged. What happens when a university is so susceptible that corporate interests step in and decide who is going to be hired, what’s going to be taught? That’s truly the death of the university.
VC: One thing that’s come up under scrutiny through this Western scandal is the prioritizing of STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) faculty funding. I believe German post-secondary education may involve such a split between humanities and the technical or professional streams. Do we have an outmoded idea of the university, one that needs a fundamental restructuring?
HG: I think it’s outmoded, entirely. I’ll give you an example. People often talk about health faculties as simply being instrumentalized faculties, professional faculties that are really bogged down in doing practical things. If you look at health faculties today like at McMaster, they’re involved in community work, public services, interdisciplinary work…so I think that when administrators begin to separate these faculties out in ways in which they say things like, ‘Well, the humanities and liberal arts are concerned about things that are non-instrumental, non-functional, we need to diminish their power in the university… the real work is being done by professionals,’ I think that’s a joke and it’s a misrepresentation. The organizing principles in the liberal arts are so entrenched now in the professional faculties that you can’t separate them anymore. It doesn’t make any sense: nuclear scientists are obviously going to have to take in ethical considerations, right? Professional people don’t work in an ethical void. The liberal arts, people can’t simply live in gated communities and write in languages that nobody can understand. There’s going to be a melding, a bleeding into each other in these faculties in ways in which we say, okay, how do we merge questions of public values and professional skills.
But let me go back to your question. You’re right in the sense that increasingly what we see administrations doing are favouring STEM faculties as an excuse to diminish and eliminate the liberal arts and humanities. I’ll give you one example that is unbelievable. In the States you have a governor that’s instituted a policy in which he said that if you take a course that’s in the field of business, that has a direct application to the business world, we will lower your tuition. If you take courses in the liberal arts then you’re going to pay a higher tuition. Can you believe this?
VC: A lot of kids might be avoiding university these days for more practical trade school or college training that’ll lead to employment. Distinguish the value of education versus training.
HG: When I claim that education is simply a form of training I think that what I’m arguing is that you get people sort of educated to learn very specific skills in ways that completely remove from larger socio- political and economic conditions or questions or disciplines, so that people are learning how to be plumbers but they’re not learning about the nature of work and what it means to have meaningful work in a society. I think that when you place the emphasis on simply a kind of instrumental rationality and you refuse to deal with larger questions, conceptual questions about what it means to be well-rounded educationally and what it means to get a general education and what it means to be able to cross disciplines, what it means to learn how to govern and not simply be governed, I think something terrible happens and that distinction is very important. Education is not simply about an immediate fix, i.e., getting a job. Education is about preparing people for life, it’s about preparing people for the future. And I’ll tell you something else, even the rationale that education is training is not good because often the skills people get in five years, those skills are obsolete. Who wants a doctor who can’t think? I mean we don’t want to turn out Joseph Mengele. You want to have people who have some sense of compassion, who understand the world in terms of power relations, who understand that their work is always enmeshed in political relations and relations of power and never can escape from questions of ethical and social responsibility. When we cut that element of education out, I don’t know what you have. You basically have training schools. I don’t want to create mechanics, I want to create people who can think but also can fix your car.
VC: In his book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford notes that much of work today is mere training in following rote procedures, conceived by a systems engineer and perhaps better done by robots than humans. He argues that there can be more human excellence in working with your hands, in practical work that involves actual thinking and coming up with creative solutions.
HG: John Dewey said the same thing, he said in true experience people learn how to think. Multiple things happen when you have to solve problems and you put things together and you apply them to the real world. We do see a lot of that in the university but I think those economic, political and religious fundamentalists who really see the university as a threat… you know, look, the kind of discussion that we’re having in some ways has to have a historical context and I think that what we often forget is that in the ’60s something happened that blew the lid off the conservative mentality. All of a sudden the ’60s were an era of enormous turbulence, people were struggling over the meaning and the purpose of the university, they were arguing for more ethnic and racial representation, they wanted to broaden courses in what was available in terms of academic disciplines in ways that had something to do with the real world, and all of a sudden the university opened up in a way in which all kinds of people were now coming to the university, in the past they were excluded, ethnic groups, religious groups, minorities.
The right never got over this. I mean they never got over this. That’s why you have the Powell Memo of the 1970s saying that the right has to get together and do something about these cultural apparatuses including schools so that we indoctrinate people for capitalism, we don’t let this happen again. I think that much of what we see all over North America and increasingly in Europe is the legacy of that backlash. This is really a counter-revolution. When you talk about doubling up the salaries, all that, I get it, yeah it’s offensive morally and politically but there’s a larger issue here. When you put the context together what’s happening all over North America you have to say two things, you have to say, one, the university as a site for creating the formative cultures that make a democracy possible is a) under siege, that’s for sure. Democracy is dangerous, and the institutions that produce people who engage in it basically are dangerous. Secondly, neoliberalism as we know it is not just about the governing of the market, it’s about the governing of all social life.
VC: Let’s mention zombies for a bit: zombies are back in a big way in the cultural zeitgeist since at least the beginning of the recession in ’09. You referenced them in Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism. I think originally George Romero cheekily used this metaphor for the numbed conspicuous consumer in the ‘60s and the age of the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Tell us how the zombie is recast in your book in contemporary times.
HG: The zombies suggest two or three things. At one level, zombie becomes a metaphor for talking about the way in which life is being sucked out of a society by a financial elite who really represent the walking dead. They really have produced a death-saturated age, and in that sense the zombies, they’re unthinking, they’re unfeeling, they have no sense of the social and I think in that sense they’re reproducing both an enormous amount of misery and violence in the world and also against the planet itself. Secondly I talk about zombies in ways that suggest a kind of sleeplessness, people basically are so tied to simply surviving that in some ways they have no… time has become an utter deprivation rather than a luxury. They’re so focused on just simply staying alive as opposed to the ’50s and the ’60s when people talked about moving up, that they’ve become zombie-like in the kind of political comas that they find themselves in. They lose all sense of agency, at least a kind of agency that would be individual, collective and engaged towards addressing the world in which they live in. I think we don’t even need to use the word ‘zombie’, we can say this is a population marked by horrible precarity. I mean, we see it in students who are so burdened by debt now that their radical imagination has been eliminated. They’ve become zombies in a sense. They’ve become zombies as victims. And I think ‘zombies as victims’ because it becomes very difficult for them to think about anything else than simply paying back this debt and being able to survive. When you live in a world in which survival of the fittest is the only logic available to you, that’s a form of depoliticization.
VC: One could say we’re living in an age of mass psychopathy, madness. From the short-term thinking of governments, self-serving corporations and down to the wretched individual waiting to win the lottery, we seem to be in a very dark place culturally. Is this a terminal state of the human condition?
HG: No, no, no, it’s not terminal. I mean we see all kinds of movements that basically are fighting against this, and let me just say something about that, it’s an important question. I think first of all you can’t sort of universalize power as only a form of despair. Power is also a form of resistance and I think that what we see all over the world right now, we have seen movements fighting against this kind of neoliberal ‘juggernaut’, we see that with Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, we see it with the Black Lives Matter movement, we see it all over the United States. I think young people are waking up. I’m actually more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time. I think the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are now so severe, so unbelievable that nobody’s fooled anymore, it’s difficult to be fooled. You know when you don’t have food, you don’t have health care, you don’t have social provisions, people are chipping away at your life to make your life miserable, eliminating the conditions that would enable some sense of security, then it seems to me the space of politics opens up in a way like we haven’t seen before. Now, it doesn’t offer any guarantees, I mean, people could become Nazis, right? They could be like Golden Dawn in Greece, they could join right-wing movements. But I do think that space is opening up, that the alternative media is opening up, I think that a lot of youth movements are now all of a sudden mobilizing in ways to try addressing the most immediate problems they find themselves in, there’s an environmental movement. But the real issue here is not whether we have resistance. There’s resistance. It’s local, it’s invested, it’s serious, but it’s got to be unified. I think from the Occupy movement to the Quebec student movement, what we’ve seen is that these movements tend to fizzle out quickly. They need focus. There’s no long-term organization. The other side of this is that we don’t talk about power enough. There’s an enormous attempt to sort of talk about leaderless revolutions. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what it means to claim that everybody is empowered, that we don’t need organizations to sort of address the issues that we find ourselves in. We’ve got to rethink something about horizontal power, to seize it in ways that suggest that power has to be seized. You have to fight for it. Do you really believe these ruling classes are going to sort of just step down? And that’s not a call for violence; that’s a call for non-violence. That’s a call for street actions, for mobilizations, people developing third parties, trying to imagine political systems outside of the traditional liberal notion of capitalism. Liberalism is dead. It’s dead. It’s simply a center-right movement now. It’s all about accommodation with Obama being the ultimate spectacle of that accommodation. And so the time does exist for reinventing the very meaning of politics and what that might mean.
VC: Do you think the digital revolution we’re going through is aiding that process?
HG: I think it has enormous potential, I really do. I think it has an enormous amount of potential. I think it has to be seized. I mean right now that revolution is in the hands of both the surveillance industry and people who in fact are wedded to privatization, putting everything up on the web, from if you wiped your baby today to when you went to the movies last night. I think that what people have to realize is that that site itself is not about entertainment, it’s not just about happiness, it’s not about instant pleasure, it’s also a site of struggle and that we know the cultural apparatuses that dominate neoliberal societies are really in the hands of financial elites. We need to educate a generation of young people who are not just cultural critics but are also cultural producers. They have to learn these technologies. They have to learn to create their own radio stations, they have to learn how to do alternative media, they have to learn how to open up alternative sites. I look at sites like TruthDig and TruthOut and Counterpunch. These sites are growing like you can’t imagine because there are very few sites that are offering up the kind of alternative languages and modes of understanding that young people really need. They need a new language. The alternative media offers enormous possibilities for that.
VC: You gave a talk at Fanshawe College last year, “A World Beyond Violence in Media.”
HG: What I was trying to say is that we need to really reclaim the radical imagination, we need to rethink the world in terms that don’t simply define it through exchange values, through privatization, commodification, deregulation. We need to invent new modes of solidarity, we need to reclaim public values, public trust, we need to reclaim a sense of the common good and we need to do it globally. We need a new understanding of politics, one that refuses to equate capitalism with democracy. I think that one of the great changes that marks the 21st century is that power is global and politics is local. The global elite, they’re not indebted to anybody, they don’t believe in political concessions anymore because they float. They’re not tied to nation states, and I think there’s an enormous need to really rethink democracy in global terms and not just simply local terms, that’s not going to work. And I think one of the greatest things we’re beginning to see is, if you look at the movements that are now developing against police brutality, I mean these kids are talking to people in Mexico, they’re talking to youth groups in France. What the internet has opened up is the possibility for creating global alliances and I think that that matters. The real crisis that we face is not simply about the crisis of economics, it’s about the crisis of ideas. The crisis of ideas does not match the crisis of economics. And I think that’s an educational and pedagogical issue. We need to make education central to politics. Central. And I don’t just simply mean that we need to recognize that education takes place outside of the schools, I think it means that we need to build those kind of sites, those kind of cultural apparatuses in which education is crucial in which it mobilizes people, it educates people, and it offers a sense of alternative and a space for agency that we haven’t seen before.
VC: You have a new book, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism. There’s a quote, “There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.”
HG: t comes from Hannah Arendt. One of the things that Arendt said that I love is, she said at the base of fascism was a kind of thoughtlessness. An inability to think. An inability to understand the world in terms that related different issues, that brought things together. I think what we have to recognize is, thinking is not simply a by-product of actions, it has to inform action, and thinking has to be central to how we talk about a whole range of things from education to a number of public spheres. Thinking is so crucial in that once you eliminate it or you place it under siege or you repress dissent, then what you do is you create the foundation for a kind of authoritarianism in which thinking is seen as dangerous. And I think we’re increasingly seeing that. I think that thinking is dangerous in many places, not only in the most authoritarian states like Iran and others that we can mention but increasingly in the West. When you have a Harper government that wants to censor what scientists are saying about climate change, who are criticizing it and saying it’s man-made, that’s thinking that’s dangerous. You have in the United States the head of the Senate committee on the environment who says that only God can change the environment — believe me, that’s not just an argument for religious fundamentalism, that’s an argument against critical thinking itself.
Poisoning the Democratic Well
MURRAY DOBBIN
Opponents of so-called free trade deals have always struggled with the question of why these international treaties don’t generate more alarm and vocal opposition from Canadians. These treaties, after all, trump all other Canadian authority to make laws — provincial legislatures, Parliament, the courts and even the Constitution. If, instead of being bored by news of another ho-hum “trade deal,” Canadians were told that a panel of three international trade lawyers would be reviewing all new laws and determining, in secret, which ones passed muster by meeting with the approval of their giant corporate clients, would they react differently?
That is effectively what all of these corporate rights treaties establish: extra-judicial rulings whose objective is to protect the profits against laws passed in the public interest. The clauses that allow such suits are referred to as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). This is not hyperbole — that is the actual, stated objective of ISDS: if a new law affects the expected future profits of a foreign owned company, it can sue the federal government for damages. And the decision is made by a panel of trade lawyers whose bias is, naturally, in favour of facilitating corporate interests — because that is who they normally work for. They aren’t environmental lawyers or labour lawyers or human rights lawyers. They’re trade lawyers. Foxes judging the right of other foxes to kill chickens.
Twenty years after NAFTA — the first free trade agreement to include ISDS — came into effect there are many examples of laws duly passed by legislatures in the public interest that have been ruled in violation of NAFTA. Some are more egregious than others — but they all challenge and assign financial penalties against laws that one government or another thought were important enough to implement.
According to Scott Sinclair with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, “Canada has been the target of over 70 per cent of all NAFTA claims since 2005. Currently, Canada faces eight active claims… Foreign investors are seeking several billions in damages from the Canadian government. These include challenges to a ban on fracking by the Quebec provincial government…” Canada has never won a case against the U.S.
The rate of challenges is increasing and the rulings are actually getting worse. In 2007, the Nova Scotia and federal governments rejected a proposal to create a huge quarry in an environmentally sensitive area important to local communities. The company won before a NAFTA tribunal and is seeking damages of over $300 million. But the reasoning was even more outrageous than usual. The company successfully argued that an environmental review panel relied on “community core values,” which company lawyers argued was unacceptable. Adding insult to injury, the panel ruled on the basis that there was a “possibility” the review panel’s decision might have been overturned in federal court. Effectively, the company just did an end run around Canadian environmental laws and the Canadian judicial system by going straight to NAFTA.
Thousands of jobs lost
And what did we get for all this pain? By the late 1990s Canada had lost hundreds of thousands highly paid industrial jobs due to NAFTA. The trade numbers look even worse today. In our largest export market — the three NAFTA countries — Canada has steadily lost ground to Mexico. According to data from Bloomberg:
“In 1997, the United States imported twice as many goods from Canada than Mexico — an $82 billion gap. For the month of February 2015, this gap has narrowed to just $781.5 million.”
If the medicine doesn’t work, increase the dose. That seems to be the position of the Harper government on these corporate rights agreements. He has signed one with South Korea, and another with China (FIPA), shoe-horned his way into another, the Trans Pacific Partnership (not yet signed) and is still waiting for the European Union to decide on yet another, Harper’s most ambitious — the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or CETA. Harper also wants one with Japan but that country has apparently lost interest in continuing negotiations.
Trade and investment agreements were designed to be the quintessential globalization mechanism aimed at effectively erasing borders and making the nation state increasingly irrelevant — and impotent. But something happened to the globalization imperative in 2008. The economic meltdown suddenly challenged the notion that the only entity that could efficiently allocate capital (that is, make economic decisions for all of us) was the “market place” – a.k.a. global finance and its international institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The crisis demonstrated decisively that globalization and its neoliberal ideology simply could not deliver the goods. But there was no one with power willing to declare that the emperor had no clothes. Globalization has failed spectacularly but its momentum carries it forward despite the fact that for capitalism to actually succeed (that is, to grow) it needs the check on financial power that the states can provide. The continued lack of accountability of global finance weakens nation states’ capacity to respond to economic fall-out.
There are signs that at least a few countries are trying to get some of their governing power back from transnational corporations. The deal that Harper has pinned so much of his economic reputation on, CETA, is in trouble. Germany and France were the first to express grave reservations about the investor state dispute settlement provisions. They have now been joined by Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands (where the Parliament passed a resolution condemning ISDS) and the new left-wing government of Greece. The Harper government has implied that without ISDS the deal is off. We can only hope: CETA would give enormous anti-regulatory power to the oil and gas industry, increase Canadian drug costs by $2 billion a year and make it almost impossible for local governments to give preference to local suppliers.
Another deal may fail
The Trans Pacific Partnership may also be in trouble. In order to pass in the U.S., it has to be given “fast track” status by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Fast track means that the deal goes to an “up or down” vote — it is either passed or defeated exactly as negotiated. Without fast track it is subject to hundreds of amendments, which would almost certainly kill it. The senate has passed fast track. The upcoming House vote is too close to call.
There are cracks appearing, however tentative, in developed nations’ free market consensus with some returning to the use of state powers. But no country seems as determined as Canada to jettison the powers of government. Unlike Australia, for example, whose previous Labour government stated it will not sign any trade and investment agreements containing an ISDS clause, Canada stipulates it won’t sign one without it. Given its appalling record of losses and even worse future challenges under NAFTA it seems that weakening state power is precisely what the Harper government intends. Canada loses against the U.S. on NAFTA challenges in part, simply, because the U.S. is an empire and Canada is not. Demanding an ISDS clause with Europe invites even more challenges from states that are far more powerful and will be investing more in Canada than vice versa.
The same is true in spades with the deal Canada has already ratified with China — the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA). This agreement breaks the mold by being even more lop-sided than other agreements in several respects — all of them making it more difficult for future governments to regulate investment by what will soon be the most powerful economy on the planet.
Unlike NAFTA, which can be exited with six-month notice, FIPA lasts for 31 years binding governments for the next seven elections. China will have an enormous advantage because the deal locks in existing restrictions and China’s “rules” are so arbitrary it will be extremely difficult for Canadian companies to navigate them or successfully challenge them.
As trade expert Gus Van Harten points out, given the size differential, FIPA is basically a capital-importing agreement as Canadian investment in China will be minimal. That means potentially dozens of huge Chinese state enterprises gaining access to the ISDS clause and challenging environmental regulation, First Nations rights and labour rights.
There are already many such investment protection agreements in place and there have been many dispute panel awards of over $100 million and two billion dollar-plus awards. These could make awards paid by Canada under NAFTA (approximately $190 million to date) look like stamp money.
Companies targeted with a hostile takeover often use a “poison pill” strategy to make their stock less attractive to the acquirer. What better poison pill for a right-wing libertarian prime minister than to tie the hands of future governments with a string of corporate rights agreements.
The EU, Greece and the Trap of Hubris
Adam Warren
In Francis Bacon’s Oresteia triptych we might interpret, in the central panel, Agamemnon’s fated, and reluctant, advance along the red carpet laid out for him by his wife, Clytemnestra, on his victorious return from the siege of Troy. In the left panel a fleshy form that is difficult to interpret hovers before a half opened door, from below which a channel of blood winds its way across the floor. The image evokes the foreboding words of Cassandra for whom the palace towards which Agamemnon has just advanced ‘exhales a smell of murder and blood’. A Cassandra who, brought back from the sacked city of Troy as part of the king’s loot, is cursed with the power of prescience and clairvoyance. In that sense, the carcass like form set before the door is perhaps a symbol not only of the carnage to come, but of the carnage that has plagued the house as part of the curse that has long hung over it. A curse that will not be lifted until Orestes is later tried, symbolically, in Athens under the auspices of Athena herself. The third and final panel shows a human figure entering a similarly half opened door. Perhaps the fulfillment of the bloody prophecy of the first panel that it mirrors, as Agamemnon enters the palace to his own death. Or perhaps it is an Orestes approaching in order to enact bloody revenge on his own mother.
“Oresteia” by Francis Bacon.
Interpreting any work of art in any definitive sense is naturally always a difficult, if not impossible, task. The same might also be said of interpreting the events taking place around us at any given time. Let alone how those events might turn out. In the case of Francis Bacon’s triptych, and the poem that inspired it, Aeschylus’ Oresteian Trilogy (a poem, and author, of which Francis Bacon was a life long admirer), if we are able to hazard any sort of interpretation it is perhaps due to the fact that the poem, at least, takes place within and evokes a long established cosmological order. An order which defines and dictates the events and machinery of Athenian tragedy. And that is central to the concept of tragedy itself. At least, in its 5th century Athenian form.
In the case of Athenian tragedy, that cosmological order was one driven by what might be loosely termed ‘fate’. As well as an overarching cosmological mechanism of justice, whose infringement brought into action a reflexive and irrevocable punitive backlash upon the offending individual. At the best of times obscure, and at others, seemingly arbitrary (at least in the eyes of the mortals in the thick of the drama), those that get caught up in the mechanism of this order might often appear ‘more sinned against than sinning’. As is certainly the case of Oedipus in Sophocles’ treatment of the subject, in which the the self-blinded and exiled king is finally vindicated, again symbolically, in the sacred groves of Athens.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s beautiful working of the latter myth, in his 1967 Edipo Re, the sense of the arbitrary and irrevocable is poignantly suggested by his young Oedipus’ game of chance that he plays at each cross roads that he meets along the course of his first exile. This time in the (futile) attempt to escape the prophecy that he was destined to commit both patricide and incest. Along his dusty road of exile, Pasolini has his young, and as yet innocent, Oedipus (Franco Citti) choose his path at each fork in the road by shutting his eyes and turning on the spot. Abandoning himself to chance. A chance, however, that only serves to lead him inevitably into the trap of his foreseen destiny.
This was the sort of sense of the inherently irrevocable, and therefore ‘unfair’, nature of the order governing the world of tragedy that Kafka would express with typical fatalism and brutality in his late aphorisms:
‘The dogs are still playing in the yard, but the quarry will not escape them, never mind how fast it is running through the forest already.’(The Zürau Aphorisms, 43)
Or again:
‘A cage went in search of a bird.’(The Zürau Aphorisms, 16)
It is perhaps this sense of the seeming ‘unfairness’ underlying the tragic hero’s fate, as he or she becomes irrevocably caught up in the mechanism of their destiny, or of an absolute punitive order, that led Aristotle to outline that the inspiring of ‘pity’ in the spectator of the tragedy was to be one of the goals of tragedy, and of the tragedian.
It was also Aristotle who, in his fragmentary Poetics, was to formulate such concepts as hamartia (the making of a mistake) and hubris(excessive pride) as central to the hero’s becoming entangled in such a punitive absolute order. And their ultimate fall within it. It was, after all, to be represented as an ultimately ‘just’ order. However unfair it may have seemed from a human perspective.
And it is perhaps these latter concepts of commiting a fatal mistake, or of the hero’s excessive pride, that leads us back to the dramatic problem evoked in the central panel of Francis Bacon’s Triptych. For within the dynamics of the drama that inspired the piece, if Agamemnon’s slaughter is fated, there is also a human hand in the unfolding mechanism. For Clytemnestra, who is to be the agent of the slaughter, if she is to carry out ‘justice’ as she sees it (in revenge for the murder of her daughter, Iphigenia) she wants to make sure that she is on the right side of the existing cosmological order. That is, in coaxing Agamemnon on to pace across the luxurious red carpet she has laid out before him, it is because she knows that this would constitute an act of hubris, or offensive pride, in the eyes of that order, and would therefore justify her own crime. A device which adds a very human, political dimension to the play’s central crisis which unsurprisingly caught the attention of an artist painting in the shadow of the disasters of politics and the resultant bloodshed.
It is, of course, a dimension of both works of art (both that of Bacon and Aeschylus) that might resonate for many today. Though few of us will still see the affairs of man as governed by any sort of absolute cosmological order (and, indeed, the increasingly political dimension to Athenian tragedy might suggest that even for the 5th century Athenian such an order was increasingly taking on a more human, political dimension), the realities of a very real political and economic, and ultimately hegemonic, ‘world order’ are becoming ever more apparent. A hegemonic order that is widely felt and perceived as acting upon the lives of individuals and communities with a similar arbitrariness and irrevocable power. Driven by the economic and geo-political interests of an overbearing West, and still largely governed in its ideology by an imperialist mindset, its economic doctrine is that of the neo-liberal system ushered in from atleast the Reagan-Thatcher era.
It is also an order that has shown to wield an equally brutal and inflexible ‘punitive’ mechanism against any form of perceived ‘deviation’ from its principles. Indeed, those who are seen as not toeing the line are almost universally represented (with the help of their own state propaganda mechanisms, as well as an increasingly subservient corporate media) as ‘offenders’ who are ‘justly’ dealt with by either political or, increasingly, military means.
Again, similar to the political crisis at the centre of Aeschylus’ play, this process is more often than not played out in an uncompromising form of realpolitik, where the existing order, its laws and mechanisms are skilfully and cynically manipulated in order to reach a desired end, whether it be the removal of a non-compliant government or economic player.
Topically (and perhaps symbolically) as negotiations are set to intensify between the EU and Greece, many have interpreted the inflexible stance of the EU (and the ‘Institutions’) as an unjustified punitive measure against Greece’s utterly justified demands for an alleviating of crippling austerity. Similarly, as many observers have also pointed out, should the EU continue along the same lines of such unjustified inflexibility they could well be leading themselves into their own trap of hubris.
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