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CIAO DATE: 08/07
One Sun in the Sky: Labor Unions in the People’s Republic of China (PDF, 7 pages, 210 KB)
Jehangir S. Pocha
There is an old Chinese proverb that holds there cannot be two suns in the sky, so there can be only one source of power in the land. It is an idea the Chinese Communist Party has embraced fully, leaving it congenitally opposed to any leadership or organization in China other than itself. It is hardly surprising then that the Chinese government is not ready to allow independent trade unions to exist because of their potential for creating political instability.
Labor rights remain the last frontier of change in China, and the Communist Party’s growing resistance to labor reform indicates that conditions for Chinese workers are likely to become worse before they get any better. This is a grim prediction for a country where independent trade unions are already banned and millions of workers go to bed every night in overcrowded dormitory rooms...
Stuck on the Streets: French Labor
Timothy B. Smith
Since the early 1980s, labor leaders in North America and France alike have held up Western European nations as humane, worker-friendly, civilized places. In particular they have presented France as a country that makes time for the finer things in life, a place that treats workers with respect and provides decent wages, iron-clad job security, and long holidays—a cradle-to-grave welfare state. This view is no longer tenable.
As fires raged in suburban housing complexes across France in November 2005, the world watched in disbelief. The nation that gave birth to the ideal of solidarity was revealed to be racially segregated and rife with discrimination—officially opposed to the ideal of multiculturalism, but incapable of living up to its preferred goal of assimilating newcomers. Racked by chronic, long-term unemployment, the French electorate suffers further from disillusionment and polarization […]
Venezuelan Labor Struggles to Find Autonomy
By Ambassador Charles S. Shapiro
The Venezuelan organized labor movement, encompassing an estimated 1.8 million workers, struggles under the rule of President Hugo Chávez to achieve independence. The historically privileged minority of petroleum sector workers has been a drag on developing a robust labor movement broadly across society. Despite President Chávez’s rhetoric in favor of the poor, he has pummeled Venezuela’s labor sector into ineffectiveness by promoting the creation of parallel unions loyal to the government to undercut their traditional counterparts; by creating work cooperatives, whose workers do not enjoy the full range of labor rights; by asserting government oversight of internal union elections as a means of stifling union growth; and by unilaterally granting pay and pension increases while refusing to negotiate with union representatives. The opposition-led Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) greatly eroded its own standing through its direct involvement in the political crises of 2002 to 2003, particularly the two-month national strike which paralyzed formal business activity and galvanized Chávez’s support. Chavez used the pretext to fire 19,000 Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA) workers and assume direct control of the largest petroleum company in Latin America.
The Venezuelan labor movement is now split between the ailing CTV and the pro-Chávez National Workers Union (UNT), which itself is splintered into factions. This dichotomy is not, however, a fight between Chavez supporters and the opposition, as elements of both sides favor a labor movement free of government manipulation. […]
From Eastern Bloc to EU: Organized Labor’s Struggle for Relevance
By Tamas Reti
Genuine democratic labor unions were established in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1988, but their chances to effectively influence social transformation remained weak. Transition to a market economy has been a long process rife with crisis and social unrest and is best understood in three stages prior to accession to the European Union (EU). At the start of this transition, labor unions had strong political rather than social credentials and had difficulty adjusting this image. Meanwhile, political parties and governments often made populist social promises to garner public support. Throughout the 1990s, the relationship between government and labor often resulted in institutional weakness and confusion that has prevented organized labor from gaining a strong foothold in any of the CEE countries.
Accession to the European Union and entry in the eurozone demands the convergence of economic-monetary policy, but it is not a driving force in expanding European social values. Vast reforms are necessary, but unions do not have the strength to call for them. Thus, even with real wages rising, labor productivity increasing, and labor conditions improving, it remains an open question who, if anyone, can stop the degradation of social rights in Central and Eastern Europe.
South-South Partnerships: An African Recipe for Growth (PDF, 8 pages, 150 KB)
By Steve Booysen
Africa must use a consumption-based model and Chinese capital to overcome poverty.
Home-Grown Foreign Aid: Workers’ Remittances as a Form of Development Finance
by Ramkishen E. Rajan
A notable trend in external finance to developing countries is the declining share of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), as the OECD countries have consciously cut back their concessional grants since the early 1990s. Most developed countries have failed to meet the UN’s suggested aid target of 0.7 percent of GNP in 1970. This foreign aid dilemma can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the changes to the global political environment, removal of the political motivation for aid due to the end of the Cold War, the desire on the part of donors to reduce fiscal deficits, and a general perception that aid has been ineffective at encouraging economic growth and reducing poverty.
While there still remains a great deal of aid pessimism, there is also increasing evidence of the effectiveness of foreign aid in many poor countries, where it can be effective at reducing poverty when combined with good domestic economic policy and institutions. Accordingly, it is important to focus on increasing both the magnitude and the effectiveness of ODA. The need to encourage creditor countries in the Asia-Pacific to raise their regional aid commitments is particularly acute given concerns that aid from the United States and other donors may increasingly be influenced by strategic and political considerations—the war on terrorism, financing the reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.—rather than pure development and economic considerations. […]
Gaz Promises: Russian Energy’s Challenge for the West
By Keith C. Smith
Gazprom’s January 2006 cutoff of natural gas to Ukraine was a much-delayed wake-up call for Western Europe. This hostile act by Russia’s state-owned natural gas company revealed Moscow’s willingness to use its energy resources in a coercive fashion for political leverage in the region. Russian coercive energy control is an old problem for central European countries. Unfortunately, attempts by the EU’s new members to raise this issue in Western capitals have until recently been brushed aside. It is time to examine Russia’s recent sharp increases in natural gas prices and its increasing control over Europe’s gas pipeline systems. The long-term political and security significance of the Kremlin’s assertive energy policies warrants much closer study by western Europe, and certainly more cooperation with east central Europe.
In arguing that western Europe needs to move quickly to reassess its relations with Russia regarding energy policy, this paper will look at overarching threats to European energy security as well as specific case studies. The first section will investigate vulnerabilities of western European countries to Russian energy coercion. The German-Russian relationship will be evaluated as a representative case. The next section will inspect the ways in which western, central and eastern Europe are in danger of becoming hostage to Russian energy policies, using the Russia-Ukraine case as a sample. The final section argues that the EU should take the lead in re-balancing the state of Russia-Europe energy relations, offering several recommendations for corrective action.
Six-Party Talks: Time for Change
By Paul F. Chamberlin
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Sun Tzu
North Korea undeniably demonstrated it was the world’s ninth nuclear weapons state by testing a nuclear device on 9 October 2006. Given the measure of U.S. success in containing North Korea’s nuclear program from 1994 to 2001, the test represented a major U.S. foreign policy defeat. This defeat suggests that current U.S. policy planners neither know North Korea and regional dynamics nor are aware of their own capabilities to produce a positive outcome. Not only does the test clarify that other states lack the influence on Pyongyang that Washington had presumed, it also suggests that the U.S. approach to North Korea, including the six-party forum, requires revision.
As this article was going to press, North Korea had just agreed to return to the six-party talks. The next round is envisioned for 31 December 2006. While one hopes for a successful conclusion, this essay explains why undue optimism is not warranted and recommends a new U.S. approach. It begins by reviewing key developments, including North Korea’s motives for becoming a nuclear weapons state. It then summarizes U.S. efforts to achieve its goals, including the six-party forum, and concludes with recommendations.
Countering Terrorist Financing: Lessons from Europe
By Michael Jonsson and Svante Cornell
Until recently, terrorist financing has been an underdeveloped subject of academic inquiry and media reporting. With a few notable exceptions, an overwhelming majority of writing in the field followed the 9/11 attacks and focused primarily on two related questions—how al-Qaeda is financed and what can be done to disrupt their financing. Yet terrorist financing is not a new phenomenon. In Europe, both the United Kingdom and Spain have been fighting it for more than three decades. One European terrorist organization, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), has been “credited” with pioneering the kind of sophisticated financial networks that many of the world’s large and longest-lived terrorist organizations today use to sustain themselves. In spite of this, there has been little comparative research on terrorist financing. Such research is crucial to provide lessons on how best to combat terrorist organizations.
This article aims to review and compare Spanish and British experiences in countering terrorist financing. The first section describes the development of more diverse and sophisticated financing methods by the IRA and ETA. The second section analyzes the interaction between different financing strategies, violent operations, and the popularity of these organizations. Following this, the cost of counter-terrorism measures to Spain and the United Kingdom is contrasted with the economic damage that has been caused to the United States by al-Qaeda. The final section points out successes and limitations of countering terrorist financing. The conclusion discusses the applicability of such methods in devising policies to combat al-Qaeda.
Rehearsing Revolution in Peru by Jill Lane
Augusto Boal, a well-known Brazilian theater director, enjoys telling the story about the relationship between theater and politics in Latin America. In the mid-1960s when the political climate was increasingly hostile to the work of artists, Boal and his theater company set off for rural communities where their left-wing theater might escape the scrutiny of the censors. Avowed “revolutionaries,” the actors drew on the aesthetic and politics of an agitprop theater. Drawn in bold, minimalist strokes, their tale championed exploited farm workers and exhorted them to reclaim their dignity by taking immediate action against their landowners. On one occasion the audience of campesinos (peasants) invited the actors to stay for lunch. Over the meal, the campesinos came to a heated decision: that very day, they decided to take their rifles and machetes and head up to the landowners’ hacienda (estate) to claim their rights. They shared their plan with Boal, asking the actors to bring their weapons and join them in the revolt. While artist-worker solidarity and grassroots mobilization were principal intentions of the play, the actors were dumbfounded. Blanched with fear, Boal explained that they had no weapons since, after all, they were just actors performing a play. Horrified by his own hypocrisy, Boal swore to never again present or advocate anything on stage that he himself could not support offstage. Theater itself was not a space to orchestrate revolution, he decided, but it could be a space in which to rehearse revolution—to imagine and practice possible forms of action that could instigate social change. The goal of his theater was to shift the traditional role of the audience: Viewers would no longer be passive witnesses of a never changing storyline on a distant stage. Rather, in the “Theater of the Oppressed”—as his art has come to be known—the spectators would be encouraged to determine how the plot unfolds, thus becoming actors themselves. […]
From Bread Dolls to Prostitutes: A Cultural Diagnosis of Post-Soviet Russia
By Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover
Postmodernism is a peculiar label. It is not a chronological concept in that “post” does not designate something that comes after a period called “Modernism.” If “post” means anything at all, it signifies the “end of history” or “poste histoire,” which implies the demise of linear thinking about history as progress and human development as proceeding along a continuum. In fact, postmodernism is an umbrella term encompassing the thinking about culture in a post-industrial heterogeneous consumer society, which has been described by the American critic Frederic Jameson as the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”
Though it was not given a name at the time, Russian postmodernism emerged in the 1960s as a challenge to the stagnant and closed nature of Soviet society. It was the first manifestation of genuine cultural criticism since 1934, when socialist realism became the dominant method of cultural production in the Soviet Union, stifling all other approaches to cultural disciplines. In the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost’ in the 1980s, postmodernism became the cultural paradigm of new Russia. Ultimately, postmodernism emerged not only as a cultural critique but also as a source of a new, postcommunist value system […]
Defying Double Discrimination
By Peter Blanck, Meera Adya, and Maria Veronica Reina
Women and girls are reported to be the largest group in the global disability population, and they have been historically subject to multiple types of discrimination. This article examines the 2006 UN Disability Convention aimed at protecting the rights of all people with disabilities, and in particular, its implications and specific provisions addressing the rights of women and girls […]
Although reliable world statistics are unavailable, the World Heath Organization (WHO) estimates that 300 million women and girls worldwide have some kind of disability. Research also demonstrates that women and girls with disabilities (hereinafter referred to as “women”) face double discrimination compared to men, since the prejudice they face is based not only on their disability but also their gender. Women face this disparity in terms of a lack of access to equal education, health care, and employment, to name a few areas. Moreover, women with disabilities are among the world’s poorest.
Unequal Benefits by Jay Drydyk
Development-induced displacement (DID) occurs when people are forced to abandon lands or relocate because of development. The term or its acronym may not yet be common parlance for the global public, yet large dam projects such as Three Gorges and Narmada have vividly drawn the phenomenon to the world’s attention. Dam construction, along with urban development and transportation projects, displaced an estimated 10 million people annually during the 1980s. When the severity of the oustees’ plight came to light, it flatly contradicted the promises and rationale of the development enterprise: rather than alleviating poverty, the effects of displacement and bungled resettlement often exacerbated impoverishment.
The Hard Road Back to Soft Power (PDF, 9 pages, 130 KB)
by Ambassador Pamela Hyde Smith
Public diplomacy must be improved in order to combat historically low foreign public opinion of the United States, which threatens U.S. security.
Africa’s Third-Term Syndrome
by Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo
Presidential succession is one of the most contentious issues in Africa. Although liberal democratic practices defined in the rituals of pluralistic elections have been expanding in Africa, this transition is being challenged by the presidential third-term syndrome. The prospect of a third term is frequently met with suspicion, as it generates intense debates and scrutiny by civil society and the international community. It also raises concerns about the main objectives behind this phenomenon within the context of political pluralism in Africa.
This article focuses on understanding the presidential third-term syndrome in relationship to the claims and values of multiparty democracy. It examines the historical context that gave rise to this phenomenon. Additionally, it analyzes current cultural and political conditions in Africa that continue to support and propagate the third-term syndrome despite some national and international criticism. By doing so, it explores the extent to which the rise of the presidential third-term syndrome reflects a deficit of African multiparty democracy. Finally, it considers the options available to the international community in addressing this phenomenon.
More than Regime Change
by Christopher C. Joyner
Over the last five decades international legal literature has paid little attention to post-conflict situations and the ways in which the intervening power contributes to the restoration of public order and civil society. Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions goes far in filling that lacuna. It is neither a manual nor a primer on the ways and means for fixing broken societies after civil conflicts. Rather, the study provides a sensible, carefully conceived assessment of the problems confronting these war-torn societies and weighs the possible legal, cultural, institutional, and political solutions that could facilitate the transition process, upheld by the rule of law. It does so by examining the post-conflict experiences of countries since 1993, drawing lessons from them for effecting norm creation, civil obedience, and political transformation.
The authors provide valuable insights, not only for international lawyers and scholars, but also for policymakers, diplomats, students, and journalists. In doing so, their analysis cannot help but bring to mind former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s admonition to President Bush in the summer of 2002 regarding the prospects for a U.S. invasion into Iraq: “You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.” Secretary Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.” In its lucid, coherent analysis, this study explains what attitudes, goals, and policies are necessary for the intervening state to fix that broken society.
The Other Casualties
by Wa’el Alzayat
Honey, We Leave in Two Hours. Saturday, 15 July 2006. I greet the cab driver at the entrance of the Cedar Land hotel, our home in Beirut for the past two weeks. He is on time and obviously in a hurry; there is a war going on, after all. I had spoken with Mahmoud earlier that day to ask him whether he would be making the Beirut to Damascus run in the coming days. Due to the escalating violence, he told me that he was making the trip in two hours—for the last time. I asked him to pick us up.
My wife and I had arrived in Beirut expecting to spend the summer working and exploring Lebanon and the neighboring countries. I was conducting research for a local non-governmental organization, the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, on various civil society and political issues ranging from human rights to judicial reform. This was an especially important trip for me both personally and professionally: having been born and raised in Syria, returning to the Middle East after eighteen years of absence was something special. Little did my wife and I know that what had begun as an ordinary two-month internship would turn into a roller-coaster ride through a major war. During our adventure, we would see firsthand the opportunities and disappointments of a region full of contradictions.
Two Decades of Democratization
Interview with Aleksander Kwasniewski
On 2 November 2006, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs met with former President of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski to discuss changes to the world system in the last two decades, particularly democratization, European integration, and economic growth in eastern Europe. Mr. Kwasniewski served as president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. Under his leadership, Poland joined NATO and the EU and developed a new constitution.