Globalization

Africa Economics Globalization International Trade The International Economy

African Debt Sustainability: A Chinese Problem?

In the past two decades China has invested unmatched resources into the African continent, exploiting underutilized opportunities and markets. China, the world’s largest creditor, has granted 148 billion USD in commercial and concessional loans to African countries, now holding 60% of the world’s poor country debt. As of December 2020, eighteen African countries are at risk for high debt distress, a figure that has doubled since 2013. Evidently, Chinese investment has come at a cost, and it’s one African countries must now pay back with interest.

The Debt Trap

The inherent issue in debt sustainability for developing countries is an inability to pay debts without structural transformation, and the inability to transform economies without huge investments in infrastructure and human capital. This unfortunate predicament places nations in a vulnerable position in which they must accept unfavorable agreements that may leave them highly indebted. For example, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway in Kenya, funded by Chinese investment, loses 9.2 million USD every month. As a result, Kenya has not been able to effectively repay its loan.

The failure of the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, along with similar failed projects, has triggered accusations from the West that the Chinese are engaging in “debt trap” diplomacy, in which one country becomes deeply indebted and loses some degree of sovereignty to its’ creditor. Moody’s, one of the world’s top credit and bond rating agencies, has warned: “Countries rich in natural resources, like Angola, Zambia, and Republic of the Congo, or with strategically important infrastructure, like ports or railways such as Kenya, are most vulnerable to the risk of losing control over important assets in negotiations with Chinese creditors.”

Accusations of “debt trap” diplomacy are supported by the fact that Africa receives a disproportionate share of Chinese development assistance in loans, in comparison to other regions. China invested 18 billion USD in foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America in 2017, versus only 3 billion USD in FDI in Africa in 2017. The total amount of all investments in Latin America was 200 billion USD, double that of the 100 billion USD in Africa. Moreover, Africa has nearly double the population of Latin America, making the per capita rate of capital transfers, on average, one-fourth the rate awarded to Latin America. The implication here is that the Chinese are offering proportionally more loans to Africa, whereas more favorable FDI, and higher amounts of assistance in absolute terms, are being directed more heavily to other regions.

Chinese Opacity

However, to suggest Africa’s debt crisis is solely the result of Chinese lending is a gross oversimplification. The reality of the situation is much more complicated and the full picture remains unclear. Before discussing the other factors contributing to debt distress, it’s essential to acknowledge that complete information is not available due to the non-transparent nature of Chinese lending and the Chinese government. According to the Centre for Economic Policy Research, as of 2016, nearly half of Chinese loans may be unreported, a supposed 200 billion USD (Note: 200 billion USD represents hidden debt from all debtors, not just Africa). Further complicating the picture is that the Chinese distribute commercial and concessional (low interest, extended repayment period, often government to government) loans primarily from the same three state run banks: the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China, the Chinese Development Bank (CDB) and the Agricultural Bank of China (AgBank). Having the same banks make both concessional and commercial loans (rather than development banks making concessional loans, and commercial banks making commercial loans, as in the West), again makes it difficult to determine the exact debt figures. Furthermore, knowing whether a loan is commercial or concessional is vital as it will determine the payment and refinancing options available to the debtor.

How China Does Debt…

The Chinese do not follow international norms for debt defaults and renegotiations, however they do provide debtors options, especially on concessional loans. They have up until this point only canceled interest free loans, for a total of about 3.4 billion USD (out of 148 billion USD total) in 94 separate cases, between 2000 and 2019. Unlike Western countries and international organizations, the Chinese do not cancel entire portfolios of loans, but instead renegotiate each loan on a case by case basis. It is common for Chinese creditors to enter into public private partnerships (PPP) or extend the timeframe of repayment, but uncommon for them to cut interest, principle, or engage in refinancing. Chinese creditors have not taken part in asset seizures or enforced payments through courts up to this point, despite clauses included in loan agreements mandating arbitration.

Yet, there exists a popular misconception that Chinese creditors have repossessed assets. This notion was highly popularized through the media coverage of Sri Lankan port, Hambanthota Harbor’s, transition to Chinese ownership. In reality, Sri Lanka’s predicament was instead exemplative of how debt distress represents a systemic problem within the financial system, rather than solely a Chinese problem.

The port’s sale was not a repossession but a competitive process in which a Chinese company bought a 70% share of the port at market value. Moreover, the Sri Lankan’s inability to repay their loan was not related to irresponsible lending by the Chinese. Chinese loans represented only 10% of Sri Lanka’s total loans and 60% of the Chinese loans were concessional loans. Sri Lanka’s debt crisis actually originated when the country entered “middle income” status and started borrowing high interest commercial loans. By 2017, Sri Lanka had 39% of GDP tied up in high interest debt, including Eurobonds (see Eurobonds section). A similar situation has taken place in Laos, where a Chinese company will now own the majority of what should’ve been the state electric grid. PPPs, such as these, are not particularly beneficial to debtor countries and do not represent poor inclusive growth. Many countries decide to restructure loans instead.

In Africa, the Chinese have historically been charitable in their rescheduling and renegotiation of loans. By the end of 1998, China had rescheduled 2.65 Billion USD worth of loans, sometimes up to 10 times, with only 14% being paid back. China has even restructured debts in healthy economies, restructuring Ethiopian debt when the economy was growing at 8% and Djiboutian debt when the economy was growing at 7.5%. Additionally, China has implemented integral changes to encourage sustainable debt repayment. In some cases, Chinese creditors have mandated that 25% of export revenue from China goes to refinancing Chinese loan payments. As well, the Chinese use a loan insurance agent, Sinosure, that requires existing loans are paid before new ones will be insured.

Both PPPs and debt restructuring are preferable to defaults, which downgrade debtors credit and make it more difficult to attain loans in the future. For this reason, only 22 of the 77 eligible countries have accepted G-20 assistance for debt relief (as of 2020). Many countries prefer to unilaterally negotiate, so they do not lose the market access that they have worked so hard to gain.

Eurobonds: The Real Problem

While Chinese loans are a significant contributor to African debt distress, the greatest contributor may be Eurobonds. Eurobonds are issuance of sovereign debt denominated in a foreign currency. In 2017, 31% of Africa’s debt was denominated in bonds, 17% in China, and only 5% in Paris Club countries (The Paris Club is an association of Western creditor countries). Years of low interest rates in Europe and North America have meant that many African countries can continue to take out greater amounts of debt on the bond market. Ghana, for example, has extracted 1 billion USD in bonds denominated in euros, despite having one of Africa’s worst performing currencies. Twelve countries in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, have taken out 12 billion USD in sovereign bonds. These bonds, unlike government to government loans, cannot be re-negotiated, making them a huge financial liability. In order to mitigate this problem and handle debt in a more sustainable fashion, countries should instead issue debt in their national currencies, which are inherently backed by state assets, and issue them with the greatest possible maturity.

Why Do We Care About Debt?

Yet all this begs the question, why are developing nations allowed to take on unsustainable levels of debt? Well, lenders are incentivized to issue non-viable loans in order to attempt to collect interest, repossess collateral, or exert future political or economic influence. For example, between 1980 and 2017 banks collected 4.2 trillion in interest alone from developing countries. To put this in perspective, this is a greater sum than all the aid given to developing countries in that same period. As well, creditors almost always have more intimate knowledge of the market and the associated risks than debtors. The asymmetrical information and power relationship between creditors and debtors is reminiscent of the gambling colloquialism: the house always wins. With this in mind, it’s curious that the narrative surrounding debt distress is that of shame and irresponsibility on the borrower, rather than on the creditor. Blame should be leveled against creditors, Western, Chinese, or otherwise, that make non-viable loans.

And still there is another underlying premise here to reconsider: What’s so wrong with high levels of debt anyways? High levels of indebtedness, along with lower levels of growth, are becoming the global norm, especially in developed countries. The debt to GDP ratio in France is 98%, in the U.S. it is 104%, and in Japan it reaches an astronomical 237%. These debt figures are greater than most African countries that are considered highly indebted. For example, Djibouti, which is considered at risk for high debt distress by the IMF, has debt at just 77% of GDP.

Developed and developing countries are treated differently with regards to debt for a number of reasons. In developed countries there is a greater sense of consumer confidence in the government’s abilities to pay back their debts. Developed countries often issue debt in their own currency, and most of the debt is held domestically rather than abroad. Regardless, allowing some countries to hold significant debts freely, while assigning stigma to others, reinforces existing inequalities within the global financial system. A double standard such as this may ultimately impede development and cooperation much more than arbitrarily selected benchmarks for “high debt distress.”

May 5, 2021 0 comment

Economics Europe Globalization Society and Culture The International Economy

So you want to be European? A challenge to the perceived success of the European model over the U.S. model in leftist discourse.

written by Katherine Jones

Imagine life in Switzerland: an idyllic alpine country in which gun ownership is legalized, immigration and multilateralism are frowned upon, healthcare is privatized and costly, and military service is compulsory. Staunchly independent and conservative, Switzerland is a right wing paradise. Yet, it is often liberal politicians and voters that yearn for a more European America, citing the success of “democratic socialism” in European societies. However, given the example of Switzerland, albeit extreme, the notion that Europe is necessarily “socialist,” and the success of existing “socialist” policies, should be challenged.

Bernie Sanders, former presidential candidate and arguably the most celebrated socialist in America, stated that the future of American democratic socialism “should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” The Danish Prime Minister retorted that Denmark “is far from a planned a socialist economy,” and “it is a market economy.” The dissonance here relates to two different definitions of the word socialism. Socialism can connote a system of increased government administration of public goods, rather than private sector administration of public goods, as well as a robust social safety net. Infrequently, socialism can be used to refer to communism, a system of complete government control over the economy. This article will contend with the former, focusing on socialism as European government intervention in the market and social services.

When it comes to economic policy, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, actually have greater economic freedom than the United States and are in this respect even more market driven or “capitalist” economies. A study by JP Morgan Chase, using data from the World Bank, found that on average these nations have a greater degree of business freedom. Greater business freedom means these economies protect property rights more aggressively, exercise less control over private enterprise, allow for greater concentration in the banking sector, and distribute a smaller share of total earnings to workers than the U.S.. As well, the Nordics have minimal corporate taxation and no wealth taxes. The U.S. in comparison boasted the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, 40%, prior to the 2017 Trump tax cut, at which point the corporate tax rate was slashed to 21%, still above the European average. The reputation of high taxes in Nordic countries comes from the high value added taxes (VAT), similar to sales taxes, which are in their nature, regressive taxes. VATs disproportionately impact the lower and middle classes because these groups spend a higher proportion of their income than the upper class does. Thereby, it is the lower and middle classes which finance the generous social safety nets present in these countries. The essential takeaway here is that operation of the economy is extremely market friendly, and social benefits are being paid for not by the wealthy or corporations, but by their beneficiaries.

Yet these bountiful social safety nets, rather than actual economic policy, are generally what politicians and everyday people mean when they refer to European socialism. It is undeniable that in the Nordic countries, as well as Europe more generally, there are greater government transfers as a share of GDP. This takes the form of free or low-cost college, healthcare, child care and favorable unemployment benefits. However, these policies come at a cost. Not only are they financed primarily by the middle class as aforementioned, but these social programs are sometimes inefficient or even ineffective in comparison to alternatives.

For example, the European healthcare system, enviable for it’s widespread accessibility, is unfortunately often not the same quality or even necessarily always more cost effective than the U.S.. The healthcare policies in Europe range from country to country, from nationalized systems to health care mandates similar to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the perception of healthcare as “free” is a fallacy across the board. In Sweden, where healthcare is significantly nationalized, average out-of -pocket cost is 15%, the U.S. average in contrast is 11%. In other European nations, such as the Netherlands, which have mandates similar to the ACA, they end up paying less than nationalized systems, 11% out of pocket as well. Moreover, the problem with single payer healthcare, especially in larger and more diverse economies, is that the health systems do not reach a satisfactory quality, so citizens end up bearing a double burden of paying for the nationalized system through taxation and private healthcare when they get sick. In France for instance, 95% of the population has private insurance to help pay the deductibles and copayments of the public system. In the UK, 11% of citizens have private insurance in addition to public insurance in order to gain faster access to specialists and elective procedures such as hip replacements. Commendably, nearly all European countries provide some form of universal basic coverage, yet to say a “medicare for all” system reflects the European model is inaccurate.

European universities present a similar story. While they are more authentically “free” than healthcare, they sometimes can not provide the same quality of education or versatility of degree as an American university. American universities’ high tuition (though arguably exorbitant), allows them the financial resources to attract the best faculty, research, technology, and top students from around the globe. Eight of the ten best universities in the world according to 2021 U.S. News’ edition of Best Global Universities, are in the United States. The London-based Times Higher Education, placed 16 of the World’s top 25 universities in America and the Shanghai-based Academic Ranking of World Universities placed 18 of the top 25 universities in America. The high costs of healthcare and education in the United States, while admittedly having distinct disadvantages, make U.S. institutions world class.

And can the United States afford these costs? Yes. The American middle class is comparatively richer than the European middle class. Even after the significant costs paid in the United States for healthcare, education, child care, etc. the average disposable income of Americans is much higher than Europeans. In fact, the United States has the highest average disposable income of any OECD country. The United States is also among the most highly ranked when it comes to housing and employment opportunities, not to mention more consistent and robust GDP growth, while Europe lags with stalling competitiveness.

Europe could possibly improve GDP growth and international competitiveness through decreasing state spending and encouraging the private sector; the direct antithesis to their “socialist” reputation. Sweden has successfully done this before. In the period the 1970s to the 1990s, Sweden had a much more “socialized” economy. During these years the country’s growth lagged far behind most other OECD countries. In 1990 and 1991, Sweden introduced tax cuts and business incentives to boast the economy, which was highly effective and allowed for the regionally impressive growth and economic strength that is present today. However in this period inequality in Sweden also rose significantly, the highest percentage growth in inequality in the world at the time, yet it was matched by a boast in the overall economy. This is not to say that cutting social programs and taxes will always increase productivity and growth, or that the increase in growth will be distributed fairly, but simply that there is a trade off with growth and productivity on one side and government social benefits on the other. Each country must decide where they feel comfortable within this trade off and what sacrifices they are willing to make. It seems that Americans want the lifestyle of southern Europe, the social benefits of northern Europe, at the level of prosperity of the United States, which is unrealistic.

However even if the U.S. wanted to accept the bargain of low growth for benefits, many European countries are able to maintain these systems based on historical and institutional reasons that would not apply to the United States. Europeans are capable of having expensive social programs in part because of their reliance on American defense spending. As of 2017, the United States contributes a greater proportion of GDP to NATO than any other country at 3.3%. 23 of the 28 countries in NATO fail to meet even the 2% of GDP goal. Many former presidents inducing George W. Bush and Barack Obama took issue with this, with Obama stating “Free riders aggravate me.” As well the comparatively smaller size of European countries allows for more centralized and efficient government distribution of benefits. Not to mention some countries, like Norway, have become very wealthy through natural resource extraction.

All of this is not to reflect a personal political agenda, in fact quite the opposite. I do not advocate for cutting social safety nets, but it must be acknowledged that these safety nets, aside from their many quality of life benefits, often fuel costly and inefficient bureaucracies and hurt international competitiveness. It is even more important to remember that the U.S. is not, and never will be, Europe. We shouldn’t strive to blindly emulate an imperfect system especially in a country facing such different conditions.

Additional Discussion….

A quick digression to social and political issues; it is often argued that Europe’s political spectrum is shifted further to the left than the U.S.. However, on social issues such as the legalization of gay marriage many European nations lagged behind the U.S.. Germany didn’t legalize gay marriage until 2017, and gay marriage is still illegal in large European countries such as Italy and Greece. Abortion similarly is not universally accessible in Europe, and some countries have only just recently legalized it. Ireland, a county with a strong religious tradition, most notably legalized abortion in 2018.

Politically, Europe has suffered from the same issues with right wing populism and xenophobia as the U.S.. From the infamous Brexit protest vote, to the rise of right wing governments in Austria, Italy, and other large countries, attitudes in Europe have been increasingly conservative. The illusion that the far left holds control in Europe may be attributable to many countries’ parliamentary systems giving fringe political parties a voice. Overall, Europe has a diverse array of political landscapes from country to country and region to region. Just like the U.S., Europe as a monolith cannot be characterized as necessarily liberal or conservative.

February 17, 2021 0 comment

Europe Globalization Human Rights Humanitarian Aid Immigration Populism Syrian Civil War

Greece’s Migrant Crisis: A Combination of EU Policy Failures & Populism

written by Caroline Mendoza

On September 8, Moria, a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, was engulfed in flames that burned down a majority of the camp and left more than 12,000 Syrian refugees sleeping on the streets of Greece. Although the destruction of the camp initiated promises from European Union officials for new measures to prevent refugee influxes in Greece, it also sparked conversation around the EU’s ineffective policies and Europe’s increase in populist sentiment.

While Syria’s civil war has raged on since 2011, the over 5.6 million refugees that have fled the country exist in a state of limbo between the jurisdiction of multiple countries, perhaps most notably Greece and Turkey. In 2015, the EU experienced a mass influx of close to 100,000 refugees fleeing predominately from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, prompting the bloc to form the 2016 EU-Turkey deal- to prevent the entrance of refugees at Greece’s shores, the EU bargained with neighboring Turkey to provide monetary aid in return for Turkey accepting all refugees attempting to seek asylum in Greece. Turkey received 6 billion Euros (6.7 billion USD) to aid the now 3.6 million Syrian refugees registered in the nation.

While the deal worked in Greece’s favor for several years succeeding its conception, recent dynamics have changed- Turkey has expressed that the monetary support from the EU is insufficient compared to the burden of millions of Syrian refugees as well as migrants from Afghanistan. In March 2020, Turkey opened its borders with Greece and openly bused refugees to the nations’ shared northwestern border as a means of exerting pressure on Greece and showcasing the threat of additional refugees. Many have accused Turkey of utilizing the struggling refugees as political pawns, prompting the EU to reassert that the bloc would not be “blackmailed” into exacerbating the migrant crisis for Greece.

While the current situation remains politically fragile and is only heightened with the threat of COVID-19, the challenges Greece is facing as its camps crowd with thousands of desperate migrants are reflective of the EU’s overall structural issues and policies on asylum-seekers. The EU’s Dublin Regulations, which mandates that the first nation an asylum seeker enters must process the asylum seeker’s registration, disproportionately places large responsibilities on Mediterranean states whose borders are common points of entry for those leaving North Africa and the Middle East. While the Regulations were originally conceived to ensure that those registering do not apply to multiple member states, nations, including Italy and Greece, have led the growing opposition to the Dublin Regulations.

In an attempt to create responsibility-sharing and ease pressures off of Italy and Greece, the EU initiated yet another lacking migration policy 一 the EU’s relocation scheme, devised after the 2015 influx of asylum seekers, planned to relocate over 160,000 asylum seekers across member states over two years. By the time 2017 arrived, a mere 29,144 people had been relocated.

In an attempt to remedy this, the EU released a new plan to improve its handling of Greece’s refugees following the incineration of Moria. The EU’s most recent migration pact will expedite pre-entry screening at borders by taking a maximum of five days while increasing responsibility sharing amongst member states by having nations contribute based on their populations and GDPs. Poland, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, however, expressed a staunch opposition to the plan in stating that the borders of the EU should remain “perfectly sealed.”

While the EU’s policymaking and failure to prioritize the rights of asylum seekers are to blame for situations like Moria, the EU’s member states have experienced a recent rise in populism that hinder the success of any relocation or migration plans. Poland, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic’s anti-immigrant stance is a trend across western Europe. In Denmark, the Danish People’s Party has introduced multiple policies to cut back on welfare for migrants- one law requires that migrant children, or those of a “non-Western” background, take Danish language classes for their families to receive welfare. In the Netherlands, a burqa ban was put in place in August 2019 that restricts face-covering clothing from being worn in areas including public transport, government facilities, and healthcare centers. Similar laws exist in Denmark, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, and France, and are representative of xenophobic and discriminatory policymaking implemented to highlight migrants as “outsiders.”

A similar sentiment was also seen in many “Brexiteers”一 for members of the UK’s conservative party, an incentive to leave the EU was that the UK would no longer be part of the EU’s “free movement of persons” right, which allows individuals to move and reside freely amongst the EU member states. The conservative argument promoted leaving the EU to prevent refugees who entered through eastern Europe from residing in the UK. Now that Brexit has passed, the UK has already begun implementing policies to prevent immigrants from entering. A new set of laws will close the UK’s borders to immigrants who do not speak English and are unskilled laborers.

While the EU itself has a history of failed migration plans, there is only so much the commission can do; with raging anti-immigrant sentiment and an increase in European populism, member states are increasingly unwilling to welcome any new migrants, much less carry out responsibility-sharing plans released by the EU. Close to 12,000 asylum seekers will be left on the shoulders of Greece and perhaps exacerbate the already tense relations with Turkey. As the European Commission has already begun financing the construction of new camps to replace Moria, the futures of many refugees may be in cramped, under-resourced camps while the EU attempts to persuade nativist leaders and member states or bribe neighboring states to ease some of Greece’s burdens. Either way, the EU has much work to be done to handle this migrant crisis adequately and humanely, perhaps starting with urgency for more tolerant and inclusive policies in its own member states.

November 9, 2020 0 comment

Featured Freedom of Speech Globalization Human Rights Internet Journalism Society and Culture Technology

Social Media, Protest, and the Freedom of Speech

written by Annabelle Werner

This article is the fourth of five pieces from our summer series for 2020. The theme this summer is “Challenging Narratives.” In the coming days and weeks, The Generation will publish more articles where our writers challenge various notions to provide new and different perspectives on the debates and events shaping your world.

State violence, racial protest, and debates on the freedom of speech are not novel phenomena, but with the advent of social media and its global proliferation, 2020 especially has witnessed a fundamental change in how citizens criticize their government and conduct political protest. In
order for citizens to actualize their fundamental rights in the 21st century, one must navigate the complex relationship between free speech, democratic institutions, and the broadcasting power of social networks. From the Arab Spring a decade ago to the Belarusian election and George Floyd protests of this summer, social media platforms have democratized the ability to rapidly spread information about injustice to millions. Yet as these platforms become increasingly inseparable from our lives, online spaces have become battlegrounds between governments and protesters, and between information and misinformation. Now, the private companies who created these virtual domains must take on a balancing act that was previously reserved for states: protecting the freedom of speech while maintaining public safety. The complication with this role shift is that as international corporations, they must balance many countries’ cultural norms regarding the freedom of speech. To what extent will individual domestic laws be able to influence private, global platforms? In addition, social media companies have the task of remaining politically neutral while protecting election security. They are responsible for codifying checks on their own industry which inherently profits off of scandalous, viral information. The U.S. has seen the influence of online conspiracy theories increase from the 2016 election until now, demonstrating that what goes on in online chat rooms can have effects in the physical world. Conspiracy theories, inflammatory accusations by state leaders, hate speech, and calls for revolutions all violate some sort of public order in physical space, so how will social media platforms design cyber policies that will actualize people’s right to speech while protecting public order? Overall, because social platforms have become whistles for injustice and democratic tools for political organizing, social media companies must develop social media policy that helps users to actualize these freedoms online while fighting against misinformation and hatred that could pose as threats to our democracies.

Social media has catalyzed social and political movements since the Arab Spring in 2011. A viral video filmed by a common bystander ignited this powerful and paradigm altering movement. Mohamed Bouazizi was a 26-year-old fruit vendor who lit himself on fire in front of a government building after refusing to pay a police bribe. He had been unable to find work as a lawyer due to his involvement in the opposition Progressive Democratic Party, and he publicly committed suicide in protest of police harassment and President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime. Bouazizi’s death and his funeral were both filmed and sparked mass protests across Tunisia; President Ben Ali fled the country after a 23 year long reign four days after Bouazizi’s funeral. Like dominos, protests erupted across Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, all objecting to autocratic regimes. Social media created the ability for common citizens, especially young people, to collect and share evidence of state brutality. This technology has served as a system for fact checking government propaganda and has allowed opposition movements of repressive regimes to quickly galvanize and organize people in real life. While the results of the Arab Spring did not result in the “political reform and social justice” that was hoped for (Tunisia was the only nation that gained substantial changes in the form of a new constitution), technology was intrinsic to sparking these revolutionary movements and defining a new, 21st century method of actualizing one’s right to speak and assemble.

More recent examples of how social media has empowered everyday people and helped corroborate state brutality can be found in Lebanon and Belarus. In Lebanon, the government’s handling of the harrowing August 4th explosion in Beirut’s port, in addition to existing outrage over the governmental fiscal policy decisions during the nation’s grim economic recession, has ignited protest around the country. Videos of the explosion were disseminated widely across global news, and soon after, videos of excessive uses of force such as the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters began circulating on social media. According to Human Rights Watch, researchers “observed security forces fire a tear gas canister directly at a protester’s head, in violation of international standards, severely injuring him.” A video of the aftermath of that event where the man is being treated for his injuries was posted on Twitter and currently has 119,000 views. In Belarus, protests have broken out after attacks on members of the opposition party and the corruption of the sitting president. Aisha Jung, Amnesty International’s Senior Campaigner on Belarus, said:

“The people who have gathered to denounce the elimination of opposition presidential candidates from the election list have every right to take to the streets…Protesters claim that the sole reason Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s political opponents have been purged from the campaign is so that he can seek a sixth consecutive term as President, effectively unopposed.”

Peaceful protestors are now camped out in front of the Minsk parliament building in what is known as Independence Square. Anyone in the world with access to Twitter can be witness to these powerful moments; they can see the overwhelming crowd from a bird’s eye view and hear the ringing echo of thousands of voices bounce off the buildings. Yet, one can also find graphic videos of unnecessary and excessive force on peaceful Belarusian protesters in the media. These videos and images serve as evidence of state violence, dispel propaganda, and have captured the world’s attention.

One final example of social media’s role in galvanizing protests includes the recent demonstrations for racial justice across the United States which may be the largest social movement in U.S. history. Everyday people of all races and backgrounds, in addition to celebrities, sports teams, and corporations, have been contributing their support for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. The protests were ignited by the George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police on May 25th. 17-year-old Darnella Frazier captured the shocking image of the killing, which showed one officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he begged for his life while three other police officers looked distantly on. In America, protests over police brutality and racism have been catalyzed in the past by similar videos taken by bystanders. The Rodney King Riots of 1992 erupted after four Los Angeles policemen were acquitted for a brutal beating of Rodney King, a violent act caught on camera that made national and global news. Since then, technology has become heavily integrated into our lives and vastly accessible to many, so now more than ever the everyday citizen has the ability to record chaotic and events that could later be used to inform others or corroborate eyewitness accounts.

In an analysis of these events, one can view social media and technology as a widely accessible, democratic outlet where nearly anyone can exercise their human right to the freedom of expression. The people can share their voices, experiences, and opinions in ways that can check political regimes. But social media platforms are also private companies that, especially after the 2016 U.S. election, are reviewing their policies and investigating how they will balance the. universal right to free speech and the need to maintain public safety as well as stopping the spread of maliciously false information that could lead to real life disasters and threaten civic
institutions.

In 2016, a bizarre example of how fake social media accounts and conspiracy theories could develop real consequences arose. Crazed rumors about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s connection to a child sex trafficking ring hidden in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor spread on social media. Bot accounts, which are accounts that “automatically create tweets without direct human oversight”, helped to share and promote information on what became known as “Pizzagate” along with radical online “personalities” like conservative radio host Alex Jones. Edgar Welch, a believer of such theories, showed up to the supposed center of this satanic ring, Comet Ping Pong Pizza, with a “Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a .38-caliber Colt revolver and a folding knife, [and] fired his gun two or three times.” No one was injured, but this strange incident serves as an example of how fake media accounts created for the purposes of smearing a political figure online can have real and violent consequences. More recently, a group founded on similar beliefs to “Pizzagate” called QAnon has amassed followers on mainstream platforms. The Washington Post defines QAnon’s beliefs as

“… a concoction of allegations against Democratic politicians, celebrities and supposed members of a ‘deep state’ government bureaucracy, against whom Trump is seen as waging a valiant battle. Purported pedophilia rings are central to the conspiracy theory, along with Satanism and secret judicial proceedings’. QAnon believers await the ‘Great Awakening,’ or the moment the general public realizes the conspiracy exists, and the ‘Storm,’ when thousands of wrongdoers face justice.”

Despite being labeled a domestic terror threat by the FBI, Facebook only began removing QAnon platforms in August of 2020; this included 790 groups and 440 pages. Conspiracy theorists with fringe opinions spread false information to promote their own interests, interests defined by a system where the more followers one has, the more money one stands to make from advertising deals. For example, Alex Jones was “permanently suspended” from Twitter in 2018 on the grounds that his tweets violated Twitter’s community guidelines against abusive behavior which states “you may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.” Recently in 2020, Alex Jones and his “InfoWars” app were banned from the Google Play store after spreading false information about the coronavirus; Jones also “lost an appeal in a defamation case about his claims related to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting” and racked up nearly $150,000 total in legal fees before the trial. Yet, cases where platforms that are actually taken down are the exception, and usually after significant harm has done. The spread of maliciously false information has terrible consequences in reality, especially during a pandemic that requires a collective effort and understanding which is constantly undermined by this misinformation complex.

The benefit of social media is that a single person has the potential to reach millions of people at once, but that also serves as a complication in the balancing act between protecting one’s right to self-expression and ensuring public safety. In America, hateful or inflammatory speech is usually thought of as “lawful but awful” and protected as long as it is not meant to incite imminent violence. But social media platforms span across many nations, all with differing regulations regarding one’s speech. An NPR podcast about free speech and social media discussed how hate speech is not protected in Europe and the EU has developed a solution of writing their guidelines into the terms of service that is signed by users of their regions; they warn platforms of passing restrictive laws against them if these rules are not factored in, while the Trump administration is also threatening legislative action if platforms do not conform to their own standards. This creates a tension unique to an international platform that has to balance the various cultural norms regarding free speech laws.

Another debate influencing free speech online is the one of the major components of Trump’s platform known as “Fake News” which is the idea that traditional media coverage and social media algorithms discriminate against conservative viewpoints. Despite this pervasive allegation from the Right, there has been no evidence to substantiate this claim. In one study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the National University of Singapore debunked this assertion of online conservative bias in their work “The Ideological Landscape of Twitter: Comparing the Production versus Consumption of Information on the Platform” where they found that “while partisan opinion leaders are certainly polarized, centrist or non-political voices are much more likely to produce the most visible information on the platform”. Online platforms are methods where both politicians and citizens of many countries can actualize their freedom of expression, but the struggle between governments and these private companies over algorithms and guidelines will only continue as these platforms age and grow.

Finally, other corporations are also weighing in on the issue as Coca Cola, Target and other major companies have recently limited or stopped advertising on Facebook in order to push Facebook to codify new rules regarding hate speech. This debate over the role of the platform in protecting the public order has not only been reactivated by false information about the COVID- 19 pandemic, but about the validity of the U.S. 2020 presidential election as well. Twitter has tacked two disclaimers on President Trump’s tweets this past year about voter fraud and the validity of US elections as well as a tweet “implying [that] protesters in Minneapolis could be shot.” A key factor in this debate over expression on online platforms involves the profile of the speaker. Should public figures with the ability to reach so many, compounded by the legitimacy of their position, have different standards of what they can say on social media than the average person?

Social media has equipped the everyday person with the ability to document injustice and corroborate their experience with evidence. It has catalyzed protests against racial injustice and state brutality in the United States, facilitating one of the largest social movements the world has seen. It has been utilized to ignite revolutions and check autocratic regimes. But social media platforms must practice a balancing act. They must protect the public against false information spread with malicious intent – like defamatory rumors about a political figure spread by an opposition party or hostile government – while also confronting structural incentives that encourage peddlers of misinformation to make millions by circulating hateful conspiracy theories. But who has the right to determine what is a lawful expression of one’s opinion and what are lies intended to incite violence? We know that social media has the power to stir revolutions and instigate social movements. Which movements should be allowed to grow at the risk of violating public order? We also know that social media has the power to make fringe opinions or conspiracies appear to be mainstream understandings. How will companies protect free expression and public safety? Should widely followed accounts of public figures be held to different standards of the acceptability of what they share? Ultimately, this election year will help define this gray area as private social media platforms write new cyber policies to govern virtual communities that have become inseparable from how we exercise our right to expression and protest in our physical ones.

October 27, 2020 0 comment

Featured Geopolitics Globalization History Human Rights Humanitarian Aid Security and Conflict

A Call to Amend the Security Council Veto

written by Annabelle Werner

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the global powers came together to create an intergovernmental organization, the United Nations, that would facilitate diplomacy and “save the world from the scourges of war.” The spirit of the UN Charter was to create an international community that would prevent a disastrous third world war in the nuclear age and establish legal procedures and forums to address the world’s darkest problems. Since then, the United Nations has saved countless human lives and acted as a mechanism for preserving and building peace. However, there are many significant structural problems in the institutions of the international community. Multilateral humanitarian intervention, or the deployment of a multilateral peacekeeping force to halt genocide and crimes against humanity, is one of the most controversial actions of the UN. One should be critical of the effectiveness of Article 27 (3) of the UN Charter which allows the permanent members of the Security Council to veto resolutions for this type of military intervention.

The victors of the war had the most influence in forming the laws for this new international agency and for establishing new diplomatic norms. For example, the Allied powers organized the Nuremburg Trials to hold leaders who committed genocide and crimes against humanity during the war accountable. But because the winners, the Allies, were holding the trials, only Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes. The Allied powers also created the legal structure for the Security Council, and the US especially advocated for the veto power because it was an added protection of American domestic sovereignty. But the veto power has continually inhibited the functions of the Council, especially humanitarian intervention, and conflicted with the spirit of the UN Charter.

Multilateral humanitarian intervention exists to protect those who are suffering from the worst of crimes, crimes which are perpetrated by the victim’s own state. And while the UN recognizes the sovereignty of each of its member states and functions in an anarchic international system with no higher enforcement, if a state were to begin systemically exterminating its own people, the UN has the authority under international law to intervene with peacekeeping forces. Thus, multilateral humanitarian intervention is one of the two exceptions to the UN Charter’s ban on the use of force. The deployment of peacekeeping forces is authorized by the Security Council, who is bestowed with this authority because of Article 42 of the Charter. The permanent five (P5) members of the Security Council, the U.S., the U.K., Russia, France, and China, all have veto power when considering resolutions that authorize multilateral humanitarian intervention. Ten rotating non permanent members also vote on related issues and nine affirmative votes are needed to approve a resolution, but one veto from any of the P5 stops it from passing. This presents a problem when factoring in geopolitics and international relations into how the Council votes.

If a P5 nation decides that an act of humanitarian intervention would not be in their interest domestically, or in the interest of their allies, they can stop it from happening. This hypocrisy has been cited as a reason for a failure of preventing or halting genocide in the Former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Syria among other cases. Some would argue that multilateral humanitarian intervention should rarely ever be used and that the veto power encourages the Council to keep this type of resolution as a last resort. However, because this intervention is only ever considered in emergency situations, delay only means death for those affected. The Security Council veto promotes inaction by allowing a select few states the ability to act in their own interests at the expense of protecting human life.

It’s also important to remember that humanitarian intervention, which is a use of force, is only allowed as an exception under international law. One of the fundamental purposes of the UN is to prevent war and thus the UN Charter bans the use of force in Article 2(4). This law states that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations”. Yet, the UN also codifies two major exceptions. The first is outlined in Article 51, which makes an exception for cases of individual or collective self-defense as no state would have signed a treaty that prohibited them from striking back after an attack. The other exception, outlined in Article 42, allows the use of force with Security Council approval if it is conducted in the spirit of Chapter V or “maintenance of international peace and security”. The UN gave themselves the power to intervene in another state if international peace is at stake. The exact law that details the structure of the Security Council veto on this type of force is enumerated under “Article 27 (3)…[which] establishes that all substantive decisions of the Council must be made with ‘the concurring votes of the permanent members’”; it also requires 9 affirmative votes out of both the 5 permanent and 10 rotating members to move forward with multilateral action, but the P5 are the only states with the ability to perpetuate inaction by dismissing a draft resolution. Historically, Article 27 (3) becomes problematic when most members (9 or more) will agree on a resolution and then one P5 state halts the process.

Syria has become a visceral example of how gridlocked the Security Council can become. The Syrian conflict began in 2011 when the revolutions of the Arab Spring reached Syrian borders. Assad’s regime began using violence against protestors and turmoil swelled. A civil war began, drawing in many other countries and ravaging the country for the last decade. According to the Human Rights Watch “World Report” that covered the events of 2018,

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a monitoring group based in the UK, estimated the death toll since the start of the war to be as high as 511,000 as of March 2018. Years of relentless fighting left 6.6 million displaced internally and 5.6 million around the world, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)”.

Despite the desperate circumstances and the mass migration into Europe, the Security Council was again deadlocked. Russia supported Assad’s regime and vetoed any military intervention. The Syrian people have since suffered from the following human rights violations, described in the The World Report, such as chemical weapon attacks, arbitrary detention, and forced disappearances conducted by Assad’s government, as well as indiscriminate attacks by a Syrian-Russian alliance, persecution by non-state armed groups, deaths and displacement from Turkish military offenses, and violations by US-backed and US-Led coalitions; all of these human rights issues contributed to the disastrous displacement crisis. Because Russia has domestic interests in backing Assad, the Security Council remains deadlocked and no legal military intervention can occur. Instead, other illegal uses of force are occurring, and Assad’s regime continues operating with impunity. In a July 2020 UN Report, the Commission of Inquiry on Syria found “fresh evidence of war crimes committed by all sides in the Syrian Conflict”. The conflict and humanitarian disaster continues on. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost and entire cities have been displaced as the veto power halts legal international help.

There are various proposed legal Security Council reforms including: abolishing the veto and then expanding permanent membership to five other states or supporting the resolution “Responsibility Not to Veto” where P5 members’ veto power would not apply to military intervention related to genocide prevention. While these propositions have their own faults, a change to the legal structure of the Security Council is needed to prevent further inaction.

One proposed solution is to abolish Article 27 (3) and expand permanent membership to five other states from differing regions of the world. The reasoning behind this solution comes from a historical analysis of the UN structure. During the creation of the UN in 1945, the Council consisted of five permanent members and only six non-permanent members because the total number of members of the UN was only 51. Following decolonization, the number of states in the UN grew and by 1963, there were 113 member states. In response, an amendment to the Charter was made and went into effect in 1965 to add 4 more elected seats of nonpermanent members; this expanded the total number of members in the Security Council to 15. But now, the UN has 193 members and the Charter hasn’t been amended in 55 years; there are no permanent member countries from Latin America, Africa, or Southeast Asia. One solution is to expand the number of states from 15 to 20 and abolish the veto power. This would provide more representation to other parts of the world and reflect the global changes in international relations that have occurred in the half of a century since the last amendment. In addition, this idea could help solve the gridlock problem caused by the veto, which realistically occurs when all countries are in agreement except for one P5 state. The complications associated with this resolution lie in selecting the states that would form this new Council. One scholar described the frustration of diplomats trying to pass Security Council reforms when he states, “Beyond the idea of expansion, any consensus falls apart, with fierce regional rivalries over who might gain new permanent seats making any changes problematic, if not impossible”. The decision of which states can be on the new Security Council has also produced gridlock in moving forward with reforms.

Another possible solution is the acceptance of the “Responsibility Not to Veto” or the RN2V initiative which is associated with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. R2P was a paradigm shift in the early 2000s that changed how the international community viewed state sovereignty when faced with atrocious human rights violations; it was in reaction to the failures of the UN to stop the genocides of the 90s, including Rwanda and Srebrenica. R2P claims that the international community has a responsibility to protect citizens of other countries if their states begin to commit egregious human rights violations against them; it thus views sovereignty as a responsibility which could be revoked by the international community on the grounds that the state is committing a crime so atrocious and offensive, they have disrupted international peace. The RN2V is an initiative to eliminate the deadlock of the Security Council veto so that humanitarian intervention can be effectively applied. More specifically, the RN2V requires that “‘[t]he Permanent Five members of the Security Council should agree not to apply their veto power, in matters where their vital state interests are not involved, to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing military intervention for human protection purposes for which there is otherwise majority support’”. This initiative has met resistance from most of the P5, but has actually found support from France. The Official French diplomatic website states,

“…in 2013 France launched an initiative proposing a collective and voluntary agreement by permanent members of the Security Council whereby permanent members shall not exercise the right to veto in the event of mass atrocities. The Security Council’s ability to prevent or put an end to situations of mass atrocities is key to its legitimacy. As of September 2020, the political declaration of support to this initiative, carried by France and Mexico, had been approved by 105 countries”.

Like the previous solution of expanding P5 membership, which France also supports, many of the complications lie in the process of implementing these new laws. What will convince the P5 to sacrifice their own power? In addition, the RN2V initiative “explores the interaction of power and law, and the role of secondary rules therein…. Hence, the legitimacy crisis of the Security Council is at the same time a legitimacy crisis of international law”. Circumventing international law, even to provide necessary action, only decreases the legitimacy of these conventions. The ability for the P5 to restrain their own power and reform the Security Council represents the complicated interaction of power, politics, and international cooperation.

In conclusion, the inaction created and perpetuated by the Security Council veto is deadly. While the Allied Powers had the most influence in creating new international norms 75 years ago, future international conflicts ought to have leadership that more accurately represents the current international community and not just the domestic interests of the P5. The evidence for reform is clear. There is already a legal precedent for Security Council veto reform as a result of an increase in membership in the United Nations. There are many case studies where the veto power cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and Syria specifically serves as an example of when human life was lost when military intervention could have stopped militias from systematically massacring their own people. The international community already accepts, as a result of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the idea of humanitarian intervention for the purpose of stopping or preventing the worst of humanity’s crimes is needed to maintain international peace. However, Article 27 (3) prevents the UN from fulfilling its duties because it codifies the ability for the most powerful states to act in their own interest at the expense of the most vulnerable.

The Syrian case study also presents another dilemma: how society interprets international law. If states and civil society see case after case of deadlock that is only alleviated by illegal uses of force, what precedent does that set for international norms? The validity of Article 2 (4)’s ban on the use of force will be questioned or even disregarded. The cornerstone purpose of the UN is to prevent war, but unless the Security Council reforms its veto power, the status quo for genocide prevention will be inaction until illegal action is taken: the world cannot afford either. Two possible reforms could include abolishing the veto and expanding permanent members or accepting and promoting the Responsibility Not to Veto. Either of these reforms provide solutions, yet may be difficult to instate because they would require the most powerful states to limit themselves.

The issues of the veto power thus represent the broader dilemma of international cooperation. There is no overarching power, only states with individual interests that must work together to solve humanity’s most complex and dark problems. But, reform has occurred before and these necessary changes could save millions of lives. Reforming the Security Council to check the most powerful will increase the validity of the UN and international law in the future, which will help ensure that international aid will not forget the most vulnerable. Beth Simmons perhaps describes this power dilemma and importance of international human rights law when she states,

“No other international legal regime has aimed quite so consistently, explicitly, and universally at improving the quality of human existence… The key question is not whether crime exists – that is an indubitable point. It is, what and how has international law contributed to the chances that human beings will enjoy their rights more fully than would have been the case in the absence of the major human rights treaties?”

While international legal institutions, like the Security Council, need reform, a world without global forums dedicated to protecting human rights would be much worse. Therefore, reforming these institutions is not a sign of failure, but a commitment to the laws that will protect the human rights of future generations.

October 25, 2020 0 comment

Economics Globalization International Trade

Globalization: its discontents and untapped potential

written by Kosi Ogbuli

The world continues to change in ways that make turning inwards and shutting the door virtually impossible, as is often said, we are more connected than ever. After World War Two, a consensus was formed that a convergence on liberal democracy would lead to a stable international political order. As the Soviet Union withered and the Cold War ended, U.S. President George H. W. Bush called for a “new world order,” a “Pax Universalis” founded on liberal values, democratic governance, and free markets. Pax Universalis or more accurately, Pax Americana brought staggering development, wealth and prosperity…relatively. In a panel titled Governing Globalisation, the economist Dambisa Moyo, otherwise a well-known supporter of free trade, forthrightly asked the audience to accept that “there have been significant losses” from globalisation. The integration of several billion workers into the global economy has pushed down labor’s share of income and pushed up the share flowing to company profits. The latter has provided an important prop to global equity markets, but the former has sparked the emergence of far-right political movements. Brexit, and the emerging Trumpism reiteration of isolationist policies are rallying the resurgence of economic nationalism. Now we stand at a crossroads, shaped by a tug of war between economic fundamentals and policy threats, with individual livelihoods and growing inequity the continuous fallout. Globalization, which champions open markets and democratic governance has instead suppressed the global south and replaced democratic governance with corporatism. Corporatism in turn has normalized the outsourcing of jobs from countries such as the United States, destabilizing those entering and fighting to maintain a modest way of life.

How did globalization come to this?

It all begins with the concept of economic nationalism. Economic nationalism should be understood as a set of practices to create, bolster and protect national economies in the context of world markets. The rise and institutionalisation (globalization) of economic nationalism in the 20th century was a product of economic crisis, nationalist movements and enlarged states. Globalization in essence was to ensure that the integration, complexity and extent of the world’s economy meant that a reversal of global trade policies would entail an economic Armageddon. Globalization sought to rid the global socio-economic model of protectionism by introducing open market flow, foreign investment, and integrated development policies through organizations and multilateral agreements. The United States, the global hegemon at the helm, espoused the idea that all countries should unequivocally move towards democracy as it would be the only way to benefit from this “new world order” of globalization. Nations of the “developed world”, irrespective of their governance ideology all took part in this system. As China, the EU, Russia and other regional powers integrated these policies, embolden corporations outsourced their producing capacity to “lesser developed” parts of the world. This hybrid of corporatism and capitalism was packaged in a politique commonly referred to as neo-liberalism. Globalization, relatively, increased trade and the standard of living, and resulted in national capital markets becoming increasingly integrated. The establishment of factories, plants, and offices by corporations in emerging countries brought significant numbers of people out of poverty.In large part globalization during Pax Americana, seemed to be unblemished and positioned to define socio-economics for years to come, until 2008.

The global financial crisis was a turning point, as it struck at Pax-Americana’s twin foundations of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. The 2008 global financial crisis exposed the danger of financialization or the creation of massive fictitious financial wealth, and of the hegemony of neoliberalism, based on self-regulated and efficient markets. Slow economic recovery, failing states, wealth inequality and rising unemployment provided a perfect platform for political leaders to appeal for nationalism as the solution to political and economic ills. With the onset of Covid-19, the fragility and flaws of global supply chains further placed focus upon the extractive trade policies of developed markets, leaving emerging markets in perpetual servitude. Frankly, globalization has made the rich richer while making the poor poorer. As of 2019, OXFAM reported that the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the world’s population. The multinational corporations borne from globalization have a growing list of offenses from social injustice, unfair working conditions (including slave labour wages, living and working conditions). Yet globalization posits that we should lay our trust in corporatism as the solution to emerging global issues. Ironically, the current administration is amongst the main proponents of economic nationalism to salvage the crumbling globalist institutions it helped build.

So, what’s next?

Given its enormous potential for economic gains, it would be a waste to categorically repudiate the phenomena of globalization. However, it must be acknowledged that globalization under Pax Americana has been a projection of the corporatism that has perpetuated the socio-economic inequities present in the West. We are already too connected with the rest of the world to just shutter our doors. Looking back at how we got here can provide us lessons to globalize in a way where the world benefits, not just a handful of big companies.

Jakarta is an illuminative case for understanding urban resilience towards the tide of globalization. The Kampungs (urban villages) are slums within the megacity with disproportionate rates of poverty and hardships in comparison to the rest of the capital. The Indonesian capital began to undergo reconfiguration for the socio-ecological project of ‘urban resilience’ to flooding through large urban infrastructures, land reclamation projects, and notably, forcible eviction of kampungs. Thus, kampung residents endured associated transformations such as eviction, land reclamation, and uneven access to basic and flood mitigation infrastructure. With development being a central tenet of globalization, a program established by the Jakarta governor, Anes Baswedan married urban development with effective community investment. The Community Action Plan (CAP) was a program of the governor to organize the Kampungs in Jakarta and ensure community involvement in the development of these areas as part of the greater cosmopolitan development efforts. As Jarkata endeavors to develop its cosmopolitan center as it becomes greater integrated in regional and global trade, the dynamics of the slum transition correlated with the uncontrolled growth of urbanization. However, Through the program, the principles of accessibility, freedom, and participation are prioritized in managing the villages while empowering the community to stay in proximity to the benefits of urban development and the influx of global connectedness.The veil of globalization has been lifted and we have seen its ugly truth, but at least we are connected enough now to build a better world. The CAP program in Jakarta offers optimism as how to flip the paradigm that defines the flow of capital from the bottom to the top. Globalization has opened up our world in ways that ensure we can all benefit and thrive. Community based development of infrastructure and economic activity will provide millions of people with the capital to benefit in global markets. Governance that invests in people more important than investment in corporations will enjoy dividends sparsely enjoyed by a great majority of the world. We should see globalization as the exposure to a world of opportunity, not for the few already successful but for the many that have the means to push globalization to its full potential.

September 9, 2020 0 comment

Africa China Geopolitics Globalization International Trade Security Technology The International Economy

Assessing China’s Belt and Road Initiative: threat or opportunity?

written by Corrado Chirico

In the early fall of 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping announced the launch of a new initiative aimed at fostering regional integration within the Asian continent and strengthening the economic cooperation with other regions of the world. Shortly after, this project was given the official denomination “One Belt, One Road”, which was then substituted by the formula “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2015. To most observers, the concept immediately sounded highly familiar. In fact, the initiative proposed by Xi was a clear reference to the ancient Silk Road, which had been the main connecting artery between Asia and Europe for centuries. Established during the western expansion of the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), it quickly became a crucial platform for economic and cultural exchange between East and West, until it gradually disappeared around the 13^th century.

As soon as the Chinese leadership started outlining the details of this majestic project, many analysts and politicians in the West began to express their concerns about the possibility of Beijing using the initiative as a tool to consolidate its hegemonic claims in Asia and expand its influence abroad. During an APEC-Summit in 2018 Vice President Mike Pence even labeled the BRI as a “constricting belt” and a “one-way road.” But apart from political biases and the anti-Chinese rhetoric that has marked the Trump administration’s approach toward Beijing, what are the possible threats emanating from the Initiative? And could the BRI have a positive impact on the participating countries?

Although many observers have linked the Initiative primarily to China’s expansionist ambitions, the main motivations behind Beijing’s project are strictly related to internal economic issues. In fact, after nearly three decades of unrelenting economic growth, the Chinese leadership now faces enormous challenges with regard to the future of the country’s economic development. Determined to avoid the so-called “middle income trap,” a scenario in which long periods of growth are followed by a phase of stagnation, Beijing is looking for new ways to stimulate the country’s economy. In this regard, the BRI represents an excellent tool to strengthen China’s economic condition.

Through this Initiative, the Chinese leadership intends to gain access to new markets, especially in Central and South East Asia. Additionally, Chinese leaders want an outlet to offshore some of the industrial overcapacity which Chinese companies have accumulated since the 2008 financial crisis. During that recession, the central government launched massive investments in the transport, infrastructure and real estate sectors in order to compensate the receding demand for manufacturing goods. Indeed, those companies are the real protagonists in the Initiative’s implementation, since most of the projects already underway in the various BRI-countries are being developed by Chinese firms, only seldom in cooperation with local partners.

It has been exactly this aspect, which has given many critics of the Initiative reason to believe that Beijing’s efforts are exclusively serving its own national interests. More specifically, skeptics have often pointed to the sometimes controversial methods of realization of the various BRI-projects. The most quoted example for China’s alleged utilitarian approach is the so-called “debt trap”. This formula describes those situations where Chinese banks lend exorbitant amounts of money in form of generous loans to the countries participating in the Initiative in order to secure the development of infrastructural projects crucial to strengthening connectivity in Eurasia. Nevertheless, critics have argued that these mechanisms are ultimately going to turn against the countries receiving the loans, given their already fragile economic conditions and inability to pay pre-existing debts. This has been the case in a number of BRI-partners, including Pakistan and Sri Lanka. While Islamabad owes China $6.7 Billion in commercial debt through 2022, but hasn’t yet suffered any significant coercions by Beijing, in 2015 Sri Lanka was forced to agree to a 99-year lease on its second biggest Port (Hambantota), given the unsustainability of its debt. By creating these conditions, China could in the long term generate unbalanced dependences and therefore exploit a country’s financial weaknesses to gain access to strategic facilities and control its internal affairs. Many observers have already recognized the phantom of Chinese imperialism looming over the less stable and most vulnerable BRI-countries.

Another questionable aspect related to the implementation of the BRI is the “strings attached”- mechanisms China has employed in its effort to bring the countries pivotal to the Initiative on board. This process has become known as “tied-lending.” Through this method, while Chinese banks have been lending large sums to target countries, Beijing has set constraining conditions for future cooperation. In Nigeria, for example, the China Development Bank granted a $200 million loan, yet the country’s government had to bindingly commit to buying digital infrastructure from Chinese tech giant Huawei. This rather unfair practice has also been deployed elsewhere and been considered by critics as proof of Beijing’s egoism and neo-colonialist ambitions.

Moreover, by closely monitoring the realization of several BRI-projects, the Initiative also appears to be of fundamental importance in China’s effort to secure energy supplies and find alternative routes, which could reduce its dependence on US-controlled chokepoints, above all the Strait of Malacca. In fact, despite its immense territory, the PRC heavily relies on oil and gas imports from other countries. Amongst China’s most prominent suppliers are the Gulf monarchies as well as Iraq, Libya and several other OPEC states. According to the International Energy Agency, Beijing imported 8.7 Billion barrels per day in 2017 and, given its enormous demand, will have to keep securing 6.6 Billion barrels daily through 2040. 90% of these supplies get to the Chinese mainland by sea, usually passing across the Indo-Pacific and thus depending on the US Navy’s presence in the region. Through the BRI, China has already built several gas and oil pipelines connecting Central Asia to its mainland as well as undertaken the construction of deep-water ports in Southeast Asia, which will allow Chinese vessels to avoid traditional sea lines presided over by American forces.

Given all the elements illustrated above, at first glance the BRI might seem a mere attempt to facilitate China’s westward economic and political expansion as well as a useful tool in finding new solutions to internal economic needs and challenges. Therefore, as realist scholars would argue, Beijing is doing nothing else than protecting its economy and weakening its neighbors in order to pave the way for the consolidation of its hegemonic claims. However, by following this interpretation of the project a fundamental aspect remains undiscussed: the positive effects on the participating countries. While many experts have discarded the Initiative as a “trap” or a “blunder,” some participating nations are expected to significantly benefit from it. In Central Asia for example, many infrastructure projects financed by Beijing, such as the Kashgar-Tashkent and the Samarkand-Mashhad railroads, will ultimately boost connectivity in the region and induce both economic and demographic growth in cities like Astana and Almaty in Kazakhstan and beyond. Furthermore, various South- and South East Asian countries are also going to draw great benefits from the BRI. According to a World Bank report, Pakistan will experience a 10.5% increase in its national real income value, whereas Thailand’s, Malaysia’s and Cambodia’s rates will go up to respectively 8.2%, 7.7% and 5.0%. Moreover, also based on predictions of the World Bank, the Initiative has the potential of globally lifting 7.6 Million people from extreme poverty; as a consequence, until 2030 poverty rates could drop from 9.5% (2015) to 3.9%.

Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that there already are tangible examples of how a BRI-partner can get major advantages by cooperating with China. In this regard, Greece’s experience constitutes a highly illustrative case. In 2009, right in the midst of the European financial crisis, COSCO (China Ocean Shipping Company) decided to invest, despite the country’s enormous debt and dramatic economic conditions, large sums in Athens’ Piraeus Port. In 2016 COSCO finally bought a 51% share of the Piraeus Port Authority, automatically acquiring far-reaching rights over the port’s administration and management. Despite initial criticism about Greece “selling out” key facilities and the possibility of a “debt-trap” scenario, the Chinese investments were able to create 10.000 new local jobs as well as help Piraeus jump from position 93 (2010) to 32 (2019) in the global ranking of ports with the largest container capacities. Yet Beijing’s ambitions with regard to Piraeus have not stopped. In fact, when Xi Jinping arrived in Athens on a state visit in late fall 2019 and inspected the Port along with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, COSCO announced that it would invest another $600 Million with the goal of turning Athens’ port into Europe’s largest. In addition to the enormous sums allocated by the Chinese company, that same year the European Investment Bank decided to get on board too by emitting a $140 Million loan with a duration of 20 years and secured by CEXIM (China Export-Import Bank).

Notwithstanding the dangerous potential of too-generous loans and unsustainable debt, these numbers show how the BRI can certainly have positive externalities on the countries receiving Chinese investment. Moreover, Greece’s case represents an example worth using as a benchmark for other countries with regard to their cooperation with China. As many analysts point out, Beijing’s increasing influence over crucial infrastructure in Europe and elsewhere could ultimately lead to political interference and sovereignty limitation. Yet if Chinese investments are complemented by the participation of “neutral” institutions, such as the EIB in Europe or development banks on a global scale, that might address concerns about the possibility of Beijing gradually penetrating into the countries’ internal affairs through economic coercion. This modus operandi could indeed prove of great utility both to China and lendee countries. By doing this, Beijing could boost its reputation in the eyes of the West, while the participating countries will have solid guarantees on their cooperation with the Red Dragon. Furthermore, over the past years, China has also demonstrated its financial flexibility toward BRI-countries. Following initial concerns about the elevated cost of a new railroad for example, in 2019 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad managed to negotiate a $10 billion price reduction (1/3 of the original) on the project and was even able to get Beijing to agree to a joint venture between a Chinese firm and a local partner in the initiative’s realization.

Therefore, by considering both each country’s concerns as well as the BRI’s overall impact, it is certainly possible to say that under the right conditions, the cooperation with Beijing could turn out to be of enormous benefit to the participating states. Practically, this requires a dynamic but resolute approach by the West, which will both challenge Beijing when needed but at the same time seek, not dread, opportunities to cooperate with China in a joint effort to globally generate growth and foster development. In other words, from a Western perspective, the smartest policy to pursue toward the BRI would be to “multilateralize” the Initiative by increasing its share in it instead of merely condemning it. This strategy is absolutely feasible since the Chinese leadership has always been highlighting the “openness” of the projects and its multilateral features.

Indeed, several aspects of the Initiative have been characterized by such an approach, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a Beijing-based development bank founded in 2015 as a response to the ineffectiveness of other similar global institutions and a fundamental financing source for several BRI-projects. Although China holds the position of majority partner with 30.7% of the total subscriptions and 26.6% of the overall voting power, other countries, which are not necessarily an integral part of Beijing’s sphere of influence, have a significant say in the Institution as well. This is the case of India and Germany for example. Whereas New Delhi disposes of 7.6% of the votes and contributes with a capital of roughly $8 Million, Germany detains the largest non-Asian subscription with 4.6% of the shares and 4.1% of the voting rights. Noteworthy is also the membership of several other nations traditionally embedded in the US alliance system, such as the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Israel, which have not hesitated to join the AIIB, despite Washington’s repeated warnings about the risks of getting involved in a Chinese-led Institution. Striking was also the United Kingdom’s entry into the Bank in 2015 as the first European founding member. Even in the West, many experts have already recognized the great potential of the AIIB’s consolidation as a truly multilateral and balanced institution. In fact, some have argued that the Bank could not only avoid the mistakes and flaws of the World Bank, but also develop itself holding high the principles of fair representativeness and sustainability. As to Beijing’s status as majority partner and the accusations about the Bank being a tool in the hands of the Chinese state, a look at the structure of other existing development banks around the World would already suffice to become aware of a feature inherent to every such institution. The World Bank for example, without questioning the organization’s integrity, could theoretically be defined as a US-controlled Bank, since Washington detains 16.7% of the shares as well as 15.8% of the overall voting power. The same applies to the ADB (Asian Development Bank), where Japan holds the highest number of shares and votes. Moreover, the idea that Beijing could potentially use its power within the AIIB to individual ends isn’t a novelty either. It might be useful to reminisce how during the Cold War the United States systematically used its influence on multilateral Institutions to direct resources to controversial strongmen in developing countries, which functioned as anti-communist forces and were useful to U.S. foreign policy; one of the most blatant examples was Washington’s support for General Mobutu in the Congo, whom an American diplomat once called “a son of a bitch, but our son a bitch.”

Through this overview, several aspects, both positive and negative, have emerged with regard to the BRI’s implications. On the one hand, Beijing has shown that it certainly is willing to use its economic influence over specific countries to pursue political objectives and gain access to strategic regions and infrastructure. Having said that, there is also enough evidence to underscore the positive potential of the Initiative, especially in terms of connectivity and economic growth. As summed up above, various countries have already benefited from BRI-projects and others are expected to enjoy the positive impact of the Initiative in the future as well. Furthermore, since many Western nations and US allies have already joined either the Initiative or the AIIB, it would be particularly wise if the West would adjust its approach toward Beijing’s initiative. This would by no means imply a capitulation before China’s expansion and ambitions, but a more structured and determined cooperation with the PRC could break the current bottleneck in the relations between China and the West. In fact, by recurring to this strategy, Western countries could not only demonstrate more interest in working with China in matters of development and economic improvement, but also implement Beijing’s plea for broad participation within the BRI and therefore gain more leverage in the Initiative. At the same time, if there still should be underlying doubts about China’s real intentions, broader cooperation with Beijing could result of fundamental importance in assessing how far the PRC intends to go and if the Initiative is really designed to be a multilateral, comprehensive and peaceful project. In other words, the West could follow China’s plea for global cooperation and use this very tool to look into Beijing’s cards. A first step in this direction could be a more far-reaching collaboration within the AIIB, which already has several features that could facilitate such an endeavor, as well as a more active and collegial implementation of the projects tied to the BRI. A sign that this sort of framework has the chance to succeed is the already existing cooperation between the United Nations Development Program and Beijing, sealed through a joint action plan on the BRI signed in 2017.

In view of the various aspects concerning the BRI, it is finally possible to state that the Initiative represents both a threat and an opportunity. However, while the potential menaces of the Belt and Road Initiative could be contained by the greater involvement of Western countries, not considering the major economic benefits of Beijing’s projects would be wasting significant resources merely out of ideological prejudice.

July 6, 2020 1 comment

Globalization Migration Print Article Racism White Nationalism

Young White Nationalism

written by Grayson Peters

This article originally appeared in The Generation Spring 2020 print edition. The theme for this edition is “Youth Voices.” A link to our online version of the print publication can be found here: https://www.flipsnack.com/thegen/the-generation-spring-2020.html

Americans generally assume that racism is dying a generational death, and that its last vestiges can be found in an older, more backwards demographic.¹ The youth, it is generally thought, are more tolerant than their elders and may even be the generation to achieve full racial harmony and equality in the United States. Indeed, recent research indicates that young people in the United States today are quantifiably less likely to hold racially prejudiced attitudes than those surveyed in prior years.²

However, since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, hate crimes targeting racial minorities have become substantially more frequent across the United States. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, the FBI reported a sharp 17% spike in total hate crimes, including a 37% increase in crimes targeting Jews and a 16% increase in crimes targeting African-Amerians.³ This report came only two weeks after the deadly shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, in which 11 congregants were gunned down.

A January 2018 study by University of Alabama economist Griffin Sims Edwards and Loyola University law professor Stephen Rusher found strong empirical evidence that the election of Donald Trump increased the number of subsequent hate crimes motivated by white supremacy, validating what other commenters had referred to as the ‘Trump Effect.’⁴

Based on this information, one might reasonably draw the conclusion that recent perpetrators of ‘Trump Effect’ hate crimes skew older. Robert Bowers, the shooter who killed 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, was solidly middle-aged at 46 years old. (October 2018)

But that’s not the whole story.

Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man who live-streamed on Facebook Live as he murdered 51 and wounded 49 worshipping Muslims during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was only 28 years old.⁵ Tarrant had previously remarked that he viewed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”⁶ (March 2019)

John Timothy Earnest, who shot and killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye in Chabad of Poway on the last day of Passover 2019, was only 19 years old. Earnest was no fan of the Trump administration, calling the president as “Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, [and] traitorous,” echoing Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bower’s disdainful characterization of Trump as a Jewish puppet.⁷ (April 2019)

Patrick Crusius, who drove from 10 hours from Allen, Texas to El Paso in order to specifically target Hispanics and subsequently murdered 22 people in a Walmart, was only 22 years old.⁸ Though a Trump supporter, Crusius explicitly clarified in his manifesto that his prejudices predated Trump’s involvement in politics.⁹ (August 2019)

Stephan B., a 27 year old German, failed to gain entrance to a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and instead shot and killed a nearby woman and a man in a kebab shop.¹⁰ (October 2019)

Clearly, violent white supremacism is not the sole-province of over-30s. In fact, relatively young white men across the Western world seem to be picking up assault rifles and murdering ethnic and religious minorities with relative frequency. Although the shooters’ views on Trump vary wildly, with some portraying him as a savior of embattled American whites and others as a race traitor under the influence of a global Jewish cabal, there is much similarity between their worldviews and methods.

Bowers, Tarrant, Earnest, Crusius, and the as-yet anonymous Stephan B. were all clearly motivated by a virulent identification with whiteness and a belief that violence was necessary and justified to guard against an invasion of non-whites and Muslims orchestrated by Jews. Indeed, many of the later shooters intentionally referenced the manifestos and actions of their predecessors.

Earnest (Poway) cited Bowers (Pittsburgh) and Tarrant (Christchurch) as explicit inspirations for his own shooting. Tarrant (Christchurch) was the first to livestream his shooting to a live audience using Facebook Live, and was later imitated by Stephan B. (Halle) on gaming livestream platform Twitch. Crusius (El Paso) explicitly claimed inspiration from Tarrant’s (Christchurch) actions in a manifesto posted to controversial message board 8Chan.

By reading each manifesto, one can see the gradual evolution of a sort of white nationalist terrorist canon, with increasingly complex self-referential citations and behaviors. The sheer number of shooters, necessitating parentheticals to explain who murdered who and in which city, is incredibly disturbing. Even more concerning is the high likelihood that, eventually, another white man under the age of 30 will soon write a manifesto in which the above names are mentioned, copy certain elements of previous shootings (perhaps a third livestream), and in some way innovate on the established theme.

But if the phenomenon of white supremacist mass shootings is novel, the foundational references that they cite aren’t.

Collectively, the manifestos frequently allude to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, named after the 2011 book by French white nationalist Renaud Camus, which alleges a concerted effort by Jews to force immigration of non-whites into majority-white countries so as to effectuate a gradual “white genocide” by demographic change.¹¹

Camus, in turn has cited as inspiration British MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 “River of Blood” speech criticizing mass immigration and 1973 French dystopian fiction novel Le Camp des Saints [The Camp of the Saints], which depicts an apocalyptic flood of immigrants from the Global South into Europe and happens to be one of Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s favorite and most frequently referenced books.¹² Other allusions to 1930s British, fascist politician Oswald Mosley, Adolf Hitler, lone-wolf Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, and others underline both a pervasive European influence, especially that of Europe’s 20th century far-right, in the ideology of American white supremacism and the deep historical roots of the racial hatreds that post-2016 shooters proclaim.

So, if their ideas are decades old, why are young white nationalists killing now?

A growing network of self-described “identitarian” (read: neo-Nazi) organizations like Patriot Front, American Vanguard, and Identity Evropa, recently rebranded as the American Identity Movement, are actively recruiting young people, especially by distributing propaganda and recruitment information on university campuses.¹³ In fact, college campuses, despite their association with liberal and left-wing politics, have become targets for white nationalist organizations seeking new members. According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 868 documented incidents of white nationalist flyering on American college campuses in 2018, and 672 incidents in the first five months of 2019.¹⁴ White supremacist flyering on campuses increased 77% from the 2016-2017 school year to 2017-2018, and 7% from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019. White supremacists have targeted California campuses including UC Davis¹⁵ and UC San Diego¹⁶ by posting flyers, disrupting lectures, and even threatening faculty.

At least one major white supremacist organization of the 2010s – the Traditionalist Worker’s Party – was born on a university campus: at Towson University in 2013. Initially formed as a “White Student Union”¹⁷ by student Matthew Heimbach, the TWP gained notoriety for its participation in the deadly “Unite the Right” Protest and was arguably a top-ten organization in the United States until Heimbach was arrested and disgraced for assaulting his wife and father-in-law, also his spokesman, after he was confronted for having slept with his mother-in-law.¹⁸

It is also important to not understate the radicalizing effects of YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing website, on young white men across the world.¹⁹ Until very recently, YouTube’s algorithm tended to suggest successive videos of increasing political extremism to continue to hold its viewers’ attention and maximize revenue made by showing them as many advertisements as possible.²⁰

For instance, consider the case of an average American teenage boy who mostly likes to watch Youtube videos of people playing and discussing video games that he enjoys. Suppose that he watches videos on the “Gamergate” controversy in 2014, which was an extremely toxic internet debate about the role of progressive social movements like feminism in the gaming community and attempts made on Youtube to critique popular video games from feminist or racial justice perspectives.²¹ He is told, over and over again, that liberals and feminists are threatening his harmless gaming hobby and, perhaps, American society and culture as a whole.

Very soon, this imagined teenage boy is watching videos made by self-described anti-feminists and laughing at compilations of overemotional ‘social justice warriors’ screaming at smug speakers on college campuses. From there, he is suggested videos by mainstream conservative YouTubers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and then videos by edgier commentators like Steven Crowder and Milo Yiannapolous, and then videos by Stefan Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and Laura Southern, all of whom promote white nationalist ideas.

It is very simple, in other words, for young people to innocently stumble into a “radicalization pipeline” of increasingly fringe and reactionary views just by watching Youtube’s suggested videos. The internet’s pervasive influence on the new generation of white supremacists is undeniable. Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, included in his manifesto ironic references to common internet memes and a call for readers to “subscribe to Pewdiepie,”²² an extremely popular YouTuber named Felix Kjellberg (best known for his video gaming videos), who has been accused of trafficking in racism for comedic purposes.²³

There are no easy solutions to this new epidemic of historically-minded but Internet-savvy millenials committing acts of terrorism in the name of white supremacy. YouTube has begun the process of removing some explicitly white nationalist videos, though a vast majority still remain.²⁴ While this may limit young people’s exposure to the most contemporary of racist media personalities, this will not erase the long history their movement draws from. As any brief visit to the YouTube comments section will demonstrate, there are still thousands of people who idealize Oswald Moseley and his British Union of Fascists, insist that Adolf Hitler was the wronged party in the Second World War, and gleefully celebrate physical violence against leftists, minorities, and women. Any effective effort to confront this newest iteration of a centuries-old tradition of bigotry must first confront misinformation and miseducation about the historical legacy it claims.

E N D N O T E S :

¹Leah Donella. “Will Racism End When Old Bigots Die.” NPR, January 14, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/14/505266448/will-racism-end-when-old-bigots-die.

² Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: I. Long-Term Change and Stability From 2007 to 2016.” Physiological Science, January 3, 2019. Accessed November 2017, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797618813087.

³ Michael Balsamo. “FBI report shows 17 percent spike in hate crimes in 2017.” Associated Press, November 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/E5e7bb22f8474408becd2fcdc67f284e.

⁴ Griffin Sims Edwards and Stephen Rushin. “The Effect of President Trump’s Election on Hate Crimes.” Social Science Research Network, January 18, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102652.

⁵“Police with the latest information on the mosque shootings.” Radio New Zealand, March 17, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/384896/police-with-the-latest-information-on-the-mosque-shootings.

⁶ Kristen Gelineau and John Gambrell. “New Zealand mosque shooter is a white nationalist who hates immigrants, documents and video reveal.” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-mosque-killer-white-supremacy-20190315-story.html.

⁷ Seth J. Frantzman. “Anti-Trump antisemitism: The link between Pittsburgh and Poway.” The Jerusalem Post, April 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/

Israel-News/Anti-Trump-antisemitism-The-link-between-Pittsburgh-and-Poway-588071.

⁸ Vanessa Romo. “El Paso Walmart Shooting Suspect Pleads Not Guilty.” National Public Radio, October 10, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/769013051/El-paso-walmart-shooting-suspect-pleads-not-guilty.

⁹ Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Katie Benner. “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online.” The New York Times, August 3, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/u s/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html.

¹⁰ Thomas Escritt and Stephan Schepers. “Gunman kills two in livestreamed attack at German synagogue.” Reuters, October 9, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-shooting/gunman-kills-two-in-livestreamed-attack-at-german-synagogue-idUSKBN1WO1AT.

¹¹ Lauretta Charltone. “What is the Great Replacement?” The New York Times, August 6, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/us/politics/grand-replacement-explainer.html.

¹² Nina Burleigh. “The Bannon Canon: Books Favored By The Trump Adviser.” Newsweek, March 23, 2017. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-canon-books-trump-adviser-572835.

¹³ Nate Heygi. “White Nationalist Groups Increase Recruiting and Propaganda Across the West.” National Public Radio, March 19, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/19/704586335/white-nationalist-groups-increase-recruiting-and-propaganda-across-the-west.

¹⁴ Kristin Lam. “Recruiting hate: White supremacist propaganda rises for third straight year on college campuses, ADL says.” USA Today, June 27, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/27/white-supremacist-recruiting-rise-college-campuses-report/1590886001/.

¹⁵ Colleen Shalby. “White supremacy group’s fliers plastered across UC Davis campus.” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-25/white-supremacy-group-fliers-uc-davis-campus.

¹⁶ Gabe Schneider. “White Supremacist UCSD Student Disrupts Lecture.” The Triton, January 29, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, http://triton.news/2018/01/white-supremacist-student-disrupts-lecture/.

¹⁷ “White Student Union.” VICE News, December 25, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/znqpye/white-student-union.

¹⁸ Kelly Weill.”Neo-Nazi Group Implodes Over Love Triangle Turned Trailer Brawl.” The Daily Beast, March 14, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl.

¹⁹ Kevin Roose. “The Making Of A Youtube Radical.” The New York Times, June 8, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.

²⁰ EJ Dickson. “Study Shows How ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Is a Gateway to the Far Right.” Rolling Stone, August 28, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-far-right-radicalization-study-877061/.

²¹ Jay Hathaway. “What is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks.” Gawker, October 10, 2014. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080.

²²Aja Romano. “How the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto used memes to spread hate.” Vox, March 16, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie.

²³ Aja Romano. “YouTube’s most popular user amplified anti-Semitic rhetoric. Again.” Vox, December 13, 2018. Accessed November 17, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/Pewdiepie-vs-tseries-links-to-white-supremacist-alt-right-redpill.

²⁴ Elizabeth Dwoskin. “YouTube will remove more white supremacist and hoax videos, a more aggressive stance on hate speech.” The Washington Post, June 5, 2019. Accessed November 17, 2019,https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/05/youtube-will-remove-more-white-supremacist-hoax-videos-greater-hate-speech-effort/.

June 8, 2020 0 comment

Global Health Globalization Immigration Society and Culture UCLA and the World

Pandemic Fascism

written by Grayson Peters

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis. Governments worldwide are struggling to restrain the spread of the novel coronavirus, hoping to “flatten the curve” and avoid a surge of patients needing hospitalization which could overwhelm limited hospital beds and medical supplies. Faced with this challenge, many governments are reaching for greater authority over the movement of their citizens, imposing forced quarantines and border closures, activating emergency powers, and ramping up surveillance. While these measures may be effective as short-term countermeasures against the coronavirus, it is undeniable that, compared to only a few months ago, governments are exerting a far greater degree of control over the everyday lives of people.

Nationalists and xenophobes have taken to blaming the pandemic on foreigners, ethnic and religious minorities, and globalization. These reactionary sentiments have the potential to interact dangerously with governments that are increasingly comfortable with exercising authoritarian emergency powers. If the coronavirus is not successfully managed and millions fall sick and die, it has the potential to traumatize the world, radically reshape global politics, and transform the relationships between citizens and governments.

This worst-case scenario, which I call “pandemic fascism,” is the synthesis of medical authoritarianism, a reactionary fear of the foreign, and the collective trauma of a deadly global pandemic.

Unprecedented Border Closures

Countries across the globe are implementing travel restrictions, limiting the ability of their own citizens to move freely and some cutting off entirely from the outside world. These border closures and internal travel restrictions are on an unprecedented scale.

Canada, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Oman, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand have closed their borders to all foreign nationals.

Hundreds of other countries including the United States have put in place less draconian measures like requiring mandatory quarantine periods for foreign visitors and returning citizens. For example, China, Nepal, Madagascar, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Jamaica, Rwanda, Singapore, South Korea, Uruguay, Chile, and Israel have all mandated that those entering the country from abroad remain in quarantine for 14 days.

Other nations have chosen instead to selectively bar travelers from other countries. Jordan, for instance, barred entry from neighboring Israel, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, before adding France, Germany, and Spain to the list.

Medical Surveillance

Although systems of national security surveillance already exist, states are rapidly expanding their abilities to monitor individuals in every waking moment, log their movements, and archive the most intimate details of their lives.

In China, an already pervasive surveillance system is growing to meet the threat of COVID-19. Police officers are donning ‘smart helmets’ equipped with cameras capable of facial recognition and measuring the body temperature of passers-by within a range of five meters. GPS tracking and ubiquitous facial recognition cameras log the movements of citizens, allowing for those who unwittingly come near confirmed coronavirus carriers to be automatically notified. Access to buildings can be restricted if a security camera observes that an entrant has a fever.

Israel implemented a controversial mass surveillance program operated by the Shin Bet security service to track the cell phone location and personal data of persons suspected to be infected and diagnosed with coronavirus, empowering the Health Ministry to send text messages notifying anybody who came into contact with them to self-quarantine. While both legal and arguably justified in the service of public health, this new system of medical surveillance received criticism from privacy advocates. Avner Pinchuk of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel argued that “the danger of COVID-19 is not only the virus itself, but the fear that as part of the efforts to overcome the danger, we will also lose our basic values as a free and democratic society.”

South Korea has used surveillance camera footage, smartphone location data, and even records of credit card purchases to backtrace the movements of coronavirus patients, determine who they were in contact with, and reconstruct chains of transmission.

People under total lockdown in Lombardy, Italy are under location surveillance by the provincial government to ensure that they obey the stay-at-home order and limit their time outside. Lombardy vice president Fabrizio Sala claimed on March 17th that phone location data provided by cell companies showed that 40% of Lombardians were still moving too much.

Blaming the Foreign

Government officials and private individuals are also taking part in the longstanding tradition of blaming foreigners and immigrants for disease. Instead of taking ownership of their crisis management (or lack thereof) leaders are dodging responsibility for failures of public health policy, advancing nationalist policies by using vulnerable groups as scapegoats.

President Donald Trump has taken to calling the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus” amidst a spate of racist attacks on Asian-Americans, and tweeted that the global spread of the coronavirus would be prevented by the completion of his signature wall on the border with Mexico. Sheriff David Clarke, a frequent guest on Fox News, speaker at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and high-profile Trump surrogate suggested that George Soros, a frequently-employed Jewish boogeyman for the far-right, was behind the spread of the coronavirus. Media and political figures in Turkey have claimed that coronavirus is a Zionist plot orchestrated by the state of Israel. Two spokesmen for the Chinese Foreign Ministry insinuated that the virus was brought to China by the United States military and did not, as scientists have concluded, originate in a wet market for wild animal meat in Wuhan.

In each case, blame for the pandemic is not directed towards the virus itself, insufficient public health policies, or overburdened health care systems, but towards alleged foreign threats and traditionally stigmatized groups.

Pandemic Fascism: America First Bruins

On March 25th this year, a new student organization at UCLA named America First Bruins made its social media debut with a joint resolution signed by the Bruin Republicans and five other College Republicans chapters. Alleging that the “Wuhan Virus” is spread by the “continued importation of refugees, guest workers, and foreign students,” the statement calls for President Trump to suspend refugee resettlement, the issuance of F-1 student visas, and the H-1B visa lottery while completing the southern border wall and deploying military assets to seal the northern border with Canada.

America First Bruins is an openly fascist club. I mean this in the truest sense of the word and without hyperbole. The header on its Twitter profile reads, in stylized vaporwave text, “Communists aren’t people.” The club cites Nicholas Fuentes, a holocaust denier, as inspiration. On the subject of ICE raids during the coronavirus pandemic, the club president tweeted “Can ICE just cough on illegals or something?” On the subject of Harvey Weinsein’s 23 year prison sentence for sex crimes, he tweeted “This is proof that women are literal children and should not have full rights.” Responding to the claim that accusing Ben Shapiro, an American Jew, of “dual loyalty” to Israel is antisemitic, he responded: “Jews have no loyalty to Israel? HAH!”

The fact that America First Bruins debuted and the Bruin Republicans openly embraced fascism for the first time amidst the coronavirus pandemic is not a coincidence. The emergency and the nationalist sentiments it produces are fertile ground for fascist organizing. This unprecedented shift in the political culture of the UCLA campus should be understood as a microcosm of an emerging far-right in the politics of American youth, emboldened by the cultural impact of COVID-19.

Fascism and Public Health

Broadly speaking, fascism is an ultranationalist and totalitarian political philosophy which imagines a mythic national rebirth from a state of degeneration, moral decay, and foreign subversion. In fascist rhetoric of the 20th century, foreigners and minorities were often characterized not just as undesirables or political subversives, but as parasites and vectors of disease infecting the body politic.

The German Nationalist Socialist Party, for example, often described Jews as parasites who both leeched off of German society and physically corrupted the German race through miscengination and moral degradation. In this way, previous fascists frequently conflated public health, the body politic, and an ideal of societal purity.

President Trump, importantly, has also used the rhetoric of public health as a way to attack immigrants and marginalized groups. As a candidate for president in 2015, he accused undocumented Mexican immigrants of bringing “tremendous infectious disease” across the border as justification for a border wall and widespread deportations.

The veneer of public health concerns allows fascists to pursue their policy goals of discrimination, exclusion, and genocide without openly admitting that hatred is their motivation. Border closures, travel bans, and immigration restrictions are far more politically viable if ostensibly justified by medical necessity. As a result, fascists like the America First Bruins capitalize eagerly on legitimate anxieties about disease transmission in order to demonize minority groups and expand the national government’s emergency powers.

Looking Forward

Now that we’ve laid out the theoretical elements of pandemic fascism — xenophobia and authoritarianism in the name of public health — it is necessary to ask whether or not this actually represents a serious threat. I believe it does.

In March, Politico reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had furtively requested that Congress grant it emergency powers, including the ability to petition a judge to detain someone indefinitely during a declared national emergency. More borders are shut, more emergency powers activated, and more people under tighter surveillance by governments than ever before. Historically, periods of crisis have enabled strongmen and demagogues to play on the public’s fears, seize unprecedented authority under the guise of responding to the emergency, and consolidate their power into permanent and oppressive regimes.

While the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates strong government responses, including restrictions on travel, immigration, and some proactive surveillance, these measures must be balanced with respect for privacy and a serious understanding that, once the outbreak is managed, governments will cede their emergency powers and the balance of power between citizen and state will return to relative normalcy. And, most importantly, people must continue to point out and shame those who weaponize fear of a virus into hatred of minoritized people. If fear is allowed to fester into hate, then the danger of pandemic fascism that lasts long after the spread of COVID-19 has ended may become a reality.

March 29, 2020 0 comment

Globalization

No Good Options: Policy Choices in the Pandemic

written by Zachary Durkee

Governments across the world have unleashed sweeping campaigns to promote social distancing, an infection control method designed to slow the spread of the current COVID-19 pandemic. People have hunkered down in their homes while thousands of businesses have shut their doors indefinitely. It has all been instituted in the name of “flattening the curve,” a term used to describe the goal of slowing infection rates to the point where healthcare systems do not become overwhelmed.

To achieve just this, many government leaders presiding over outbreak-stricken populations have resorted to enacting rigorous measures. Across Europe and the United States, officials have forced non-essential businesses to temporarily close and imposed shelter in place orders to discourage the public from congregating outside. The Trump administration has also requested that people do not gather in groups larger than 10 people. In epidemiology, this strategy is known as suppression which essentially requires the complete shutdown of society.

These choices may be necessary in the face of such a threat, but do they possess long-term feasibility? This is a question policy makers must grapple with as the pandemic takes hold. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently stated that such lockdowns and the pursuance of a suppression strategy may be needed for as much as half a year to keep hospitals from being overrun. The only issue with this is that the economic toll would be great.

Layoffs have already begun across various industries. Restaurants, an industry which employs roughly 15 million Americans, have been hit particularly hard due to virus-imposed restrictions. Josh Souder, Director of Operations of “The Drunken Crab” in North Hollywood spoke with CNN, stating that everything has already been a “completely life altering experience from start to finish” and that the financial stress of being forced to shut his doors has made him worry about his physical health. In just one day he had to lay off 75 employees. The State of California received 80,000 unemployment applications on March 17th alone. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has warned that the lack of robust state action could lead to national unemployment rates as high as 20 percent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that global GDP growth may have already contracted for the first quarter of 2020.

The nature of this dilemma boils down to the fact that modern economies require integration to thrive while the response to the virus necessitates sweeping levels of social separation to properly combat it. As the economic costs mount and the pandemic rages on, government leaders will be faced with a tough choice ahead. Confronted with a tumbling economic situation that threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, some leaders may ultimately choose to shift to a mitigation strategy (one much looser and less constraining) in an effort to prevent the current turmoil from diving into an economic depression. Mitigation means focusing more on quarantining individuals and instilling heightened awareness of preventative measures within the general public rather than outright shutting society.

The fundamental problem that going down this path presents is that more people will likely die as a consequence. Were the virus left to spread on a larger scale more quickly, hospitals lacking sufficient supplies and beds could become overwhelmed with severe cases of the infection. Current data points to this gloomy scenario were governments to pull back lockdowns and lift shelter in place orders prematurely.

Quite frankly, the picture is bleak. There is no easy answer. Individuals across the globe in positions to make these difficult decisions are faced with two courses of action that trade lives and values. One must ask themself when confronting this challenge: is the direct human cost and prospective catastrophic impact on healthcare systems too consequential when risking a surge of infections under a mitigation strategy, or will the economic implications of sustained lockdowns under a suppression strategy impact us more profoundly in the long term and ultimately cause higher degrees of suffering on a broader scale? Serious thought, analysis of data, and participation of experts must be utilized in making such a decision. The call is not easy, but it must be made soon, especially when the lives of millions are riding on it. Resolute leadership will be needed to determine the path humanity takes.

March 24, 2020 0 comment

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