Tag: United States
More than fiscal crisis in Palestine
Despite all of the media attention Israel and Palestine usually receive, no one is talking about Palestine’s fiscal crisis. Kate Seelye of the Middle East Institute (MEI) opened a panel hosted by MEI and Johns Hopkins SAIS on “The Political and Economic Implications of the Palestinian Authority’s Fiscal Crisis” by noting the presidential debates made it clear this issue will only receive less attention in the future, regardless of who is elected. The panelists explained that the world cannot afford to put this issue aside. Unless progress is made a two-state solution may become impossible.
Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and the event’s moderator, summarized the fiscal crisis: the failed Palestinian UN bid in September of 2011 caused a crisis in the donor community, which provides one billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority per year. The Palestinian Authority has been unable to pay state employees on time. Oussama Kanaan of the International Monetary Fund pointed to a confusing aspect of this problem: the amount of money that the Palestinian Authority needs to pay all of its employees is relatively small, so why has no donor come forward? There is a $400 million deficit, assuming the United States pays the $200 million it pledged (which is not certain given Palestine’s announcement that it will petition in November to become a nonmember observer). At a recent donor meeting in New York, France came forward, but only with $10 million.
When the risks are so high, why is there resistance to action? Kanaan hypothesized that donors are unwilling to commit until the peace process has been revitalized. This was true during the Palestinian fiscal crisis of 2007 so the donor community, Israel, and Palestine met in December of 2007 in Paris to lay out a transition plan. Israel committed to gradually relax restrictions on the movement of goods and people and Palestine promised to strengthen its institutions. The World Bank and the IMF measured progress based on benchmarks over the period between 2008 and 2010. The results exceeded expectations, but in 2012 after Palestine’s failed UN bid and the expiration of the three year plan, the international community finds itself without a strategy. The advances made between 2008 and 2010 are unraveling.
Kanaan offers two possible solutions: convene another meeting like the Paris one in December 2007 or quit struggling for a transition solution and start work on a permanent plan for peace and stability.
Brookings Institution’s Khaled Elgindy supports the latter solution. “The peace process is dead,” he said. It is time to look for different strategies. The peace process failed because it was unbalanced, disjointed and detached from reality. The different application of the Quartet principles and the Road Map illustrates the imbalance. The former is applied as if it had the strength of a Security Council Resolution, but the UNSC-endorsed Road Map has been ignored and destroyed by Israel with Quartet support, he said.
The peace process was built on contradictions. The Palestinian Authority is a government without a state. It is treated as representing all of Palestine when there is a divide between the West Bank and Gaza. The peace process actually facilitated the occupation of Palestine and its dependence on foreign aid. It is impossible to have a healthy economy under occupation, especially when the state is not in control of 60% of its territory or the movement of people and goods. The failure of the peace process is intimately connected to the failure of legitimacy. Years of failed negotiations, the Palestinian Authority’s inability to represent all of Palestine, and the lack of Palestinian control of Gaza eroded the Palestinian Authority’s leadership.
The failures of the peace process and leadership pushed US/Palestinian relations into the “realm of infantilization,” said Elgindy. Elgindy quoted a State Department official in 2012 saying that what matters to the peace process is that the prime minister and the president remain in power. This remark is troubling at a time when the United States is supporting citizen-led movements to make governments more responsive to the people. Elgindy’s solution is that we let the peace process go and focus on doing no harm, building consensus, and ending the occupation.
Robert Danin of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed with Elgindy and Kanaan on the problematic lack of a working peace process and Israel’s failure to relax restrictions enough. Danin emphasized that there is a lot happening on the ground, though the international political conversation doesn’t reflect this. Though the United States pulled back in 2011, other states have been working to keep a more serious crisis from developing. Usually political progress precedes changes on the ground, but the Palestinian Authority met the Paris benchmarks marking it a stable, functioning government but now has no political process to support it. Israel won’t make concessions without being asked. A Netanyahu aide told Danin that there was no incentive to help if Israel was not going to receive anything for its concessions. Danin argued that the solution is to take action before all faith in a two-state solution dies, but with a new conceptual approach where economics and politics are taken together.
Though Danin believes time might really be running out for a two-state solution, Elgindy argued that the peace process and a two-state solution are not the same. The death of one does not mean there is no hope for the other. Danin reported that in 2001 and 2002 during the intifada the international community thought the peace process was dead, but with effort it was revitalized. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad also said recently that he would accept a deal like the one offered by Prime Minister Olmert in 2008. This goes to show, Danin said, there is a difference in the Middle East between dead, really dead, and so dead there’s no hope. Hopefully the peace process is just “dead.”
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The guests who won’t come calling
Today is turning into a Balkans day. It must have been less than 5 minutes after I posted about the SecState visit to the Balkans with Lady Ashton that I got a note complaining that they weren’t going to Macedonia. I’d of course be perfectly happy if they did go to Macedonia, but I’m not sure the Macedonians would be delighted. When the EU and the U.S. come calling, they do it wanting results.
In Belgrade and Pristina, they will be looking for further progress on the bilateral dialogue, which already had a big moment last week with a meeting between the two prime ministers. A settlement of north Kosovo is presumably in the works, though I doubt it will be full-fledged by the end of the month. I don’t really know what they can hope for in Sarajevo. The political situation there is a shambles. They may be content to give a pep talk.
In Skopje, they would necessarily be looking for progress on the “name” issue, which means they would have to go to Greece as well. I can think of a lot of reasons why they might not want to do that. In addition, Washington and Brussels have come to believe that Macedonia’s Prime Minister Gruevski is a big part of the problem in the decades-long search for a name (other than Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM) that Greece will accept. He seems to think he is better off just leaving things as they are, since everyone except Greeks calls the country Macedonia (even Greek officials don’t object any more).
The big problem for Gruevski and Macedonia is that they have been blocked from entering NATO because of the “name” issue. This is unjust, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said clearly and unequivocally last December. But Athens has convinced Washington not to bulldoze it into accepting FYROM, despite the Interim Accord that obligates Greece to do so.
I imagine that if Gruevski rang up the State Department and told them he is willing to accept a “qualifier” (as in North Macedonia) that he might get a SecState and HiRep visit. He does not want to do that because Greece is insisting that any solution be used for all purposes, including every time the name of the country is mentioned in its constitution. I imagine that is at least as difficult for him to swallow as it would be for other prime ministers.
I am notoriously sympathetic with the Macedonians on this question: I think any country (and people) is entitled to call itself what it wants, as in Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Also “Americans,” which is a term some of my Latin American and Canadian friends think should be available to them as well as citizens of the United States. Fat chance they have of stopping us from using it as we like, or we them.
I don’t for a moment believe that Skopje has designs on Greek territory. Certainly its claims, if it had any, would be no better than those of Mexico on large parts of the United States, and the power relationship between the two countries is similar. Greece needs to get over its fear of Macedonia and unworthy defiance of the ICJ decision.
But none of that is likely to get Skopje a visit from Hillary Clinton and Lady Ashton.
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To concert is a virtue
The weekend allowed me to look at a number of interesting reports on the Balkans. The common thread of the two I cite below is the recognition that the issues still plaguing Albania and Bosnia require concerted regional and international approaches. It is often difficult to take concerted action, but when we do we tend to get results that are worth the effort.
1. Antoinette Primatarova and Johanna Deimel, Bridge Over Troubled Waters? The Role of the Internationals in Albania. Unsparing, they fault the internationals for failing to see the negative implications of 2008 constitutional amendments that ushered in a retrograde period in Albania’s young democracy. But they see hope in the EU commission’s advocacy of 12 key priorities, now embraced by the Albanian government and opposition and supported by the U.S.
2. Kurt Bassuener and Bodo Weber, Croatian and Serbian Policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Help or Hindrance? Equally unsparing of past mistakes that allowed Croatia and Serbia to favor their conationals within Bosnia and thereby undermine the country’s unity, they want to see a more concerted U.S., EU and Turkish effort to turn Zagreb and Belgrade in the direction of supporting the Bosnian state. I’m not seeing this one posted yet on the Democratization Policy Council’s website, but I’ll come back and install a link when it appears there (and someone tells me so).
I haven’t seen a recent report on the international mistakes in Kosovo and the importance of concerted action there to overcome remaining problems between Belgrade and Pristina, but of course one could be written. We saw in September the completion of the internationally imposed agenda for the four and a half year period of Kosovo’s “supervised independence.” Last week, with the meeting between Prime Ministers Thaci and Dacic, we witnessed how effective concerted action by the U.S. and EU can be in pushing the remaining issues to the political level, even if there is good reason to be concerned with the lack of implmentation of earlier “technical” agreements.
Of course none of this figured in this week’s presidential debate, but it is relevant: collaboration with the EU enables the U.S. to help resolve Balkans problems on the cheap, committing little more than the diplomatic and political weight of its oversized missions in Belgrade, Pristina, Sarajevo and Zagreb plus the occasional phone call from Hillary Clinton or one of her minions. The EU provides the bulk of the troops, money and “European perspective” required to rescue countries that 20 years ago were basket cases. Sharing burdens is a lot better than carrying them on our own, especially if our vital interests are not at stake. Which they are not in the Balkans.
After I’d written the text above, the State Department announced yesterday that Lady Ashton, the European Union’s High Representative (foreign minister, more or less) and Hillary Clinton will travel together to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo October 29-November 1. This is very much the right approach. If they can concert their messages as well as their travel plans, there is nothing really important in the Balkans that can’t be solved. That includes the political mess in Bosnia as well as the difficult relations between Belgrade and Pristina.
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From silos to networks
Who are peacebuilders? What do they do? Where do they come from? Do they work together, and if so, how? These are the questions that Peacebuilding 2.0: Mapping the Boundaries of an Expanding Field seeks to answer, according to Melanie Greenburg of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The report, developed by the Alliance with help from the Joan B. Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice and the United States Institute of Peace, will be released this summer. On Friday, representatives of these groups launched the report with a discussion of its highlights.
We have entered a new era of peacebuilding, according to Necla Tschirgi of the Kroc Institute. Over the past decade the world has experienced prolonged conflict and militarization. By some measures, people may be less violent, but tensions have flared over environmental, food and energy issues. The funding for organizations like the United States Institute of Peace is at risk and more and more of the U.S.’s international aid is coming under the Department of Defense’s purview.
The Peacebuilding Mapping Project (PMP) administered two surveys for Peacebuilding 2.0. The first, given to Alliance for Peacebuilding members, received 44 responses and showed that peacebuilders work in 153 different countries in pre-conflict, conflict mediation, and post-conflict. Roughly 90% of the organizations surveyed focus on basic peacebuilding processes, like building trust and social cohesion, and they put these processes to work in a variety of areas, including women’s issues, youth issues, and development. Despite such a wide mandate, 60% of the organizations operate on a budget of less than $500,000 and 25% on a budget of less than $50,000.
The PMP gave the second survey to a wider range of organizations working in many different fields and 75 responded. Fifteen replied that they do not identify directly as peacebuilders, but eleven of these fifteen report that they have peacebuilding projects. Many of the organizations in this survey tend to be older and better endowed. Few have mission statements that include conflict-related language.
There are several important implications of this data. First, there are gaps in our knowledge. There is no clearly identifiable shared body of methodologies or principles. It is not clear how peacebuilding or peacebuilding-related organizations network and work together. Second, changes must be made to improve future peacebuilding efforts. Practitioners, academics, and politicians must recognize the wide range of organizations that are involved in peacebuilding and use a “conflict sensitive lens” for work related to conflict. The field must become more cohesive so that different organizations can easily collaborate.
A panel including Hrach Gregorian of Institute of World Affairs, Joceyln Kelly of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Sharon Morris of Mercy Corps, John Agoglia of IDS International, and Paul Williams of Public International Law and Policy Group discussed the implications of Peacebuilding 2.0 in their own professional contexts. Morris explained that Mercy Corps projects are most successful where peacebuilding and development work are combined, but collaboration is difficult because the two groups of practitioners do not know how to talk to each other. Agoglia explained the need for greater cooperation between the Department of Defense and peacebuilding organizations. Williams agreed that communication is a problem and added that in conflict situations, there are often a number of organizations interested in helping, but officials are not able to coordinate so many players. Kelly concluded that transitioning from “silos” to “networks” is essential in order to address all of the problems people face in conflict zones.
Gregorian said that in the 80’s, people were wondering if peacebuilding was even a field. Today we are discussing the established field’s boundaries. This shows how far peacebuilding has come, but also shows what we need to work on in the future.
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A sad commentary, even if my man won
It’s hard to write more than 140-character tweets about last night’s “foreign policy” debate. Governor Romney lined up behind President Obama on almost all current policy issues. He even liked foreign assistance, gender equality, democracy promotion and diplomatic efforts to end Iran’s progress toward nuclear [weapons?] capability. Not to mention their agreement on drones, sanctions, withdrawal from Afghanistan and support for Israel. And they agreed that America’s strength abroad depends on the health of its economy and educational system at home. We’ve got a bipartisan foreign policy, whether we like it or not.
The real problem is that the Ryan budget, which Romney supports, is not aligned with what the Governor advocated. This is particularly clear on foreign aid, which the Ryan budget guts. I realize this is a wonkish concern, but it is also a real one. Priorities not reflected in budget proposals are not real priorities. We can be sure that a Romney presidency would not do what Romney says, because he would not fund it. He would prefer a massive military buildup, on top of the massive military buildup of the past ten years.
The disagreements last night were almost entirely about past events. Romney wanted to leave many more troops in Iraq than Obama and blames the president for the failure to reach a status of forces agreement. The fact that the Iraqis were not willing to bend on legal jurisdiction over the Americans remaining went unmentioned. By the way: the issue is not “immunity,” as most of the press would have it. American troops remain liable in U.S. courts for criminal acts committed abroad, even if the “receiving country” agrees to waive its jurisdiction. The administration resisted tightening Iran sanctions, until of course it no longer resisted because it thought the timing right.
If you want to check the facts, the Washington Post offers a good rundown. I don’t think there was much advantage or disadvantage in the errors, though it is a bit troubling that Romney does not know that Syria does not border Iran, which has ample routes “to the sea.” I wish Obama had not exaggerated the increase in exports to China. The numbers are pretty good without embellishment.
I agree with Peter Beinart: George W. Bush won this debate. Both Obama and Romney defined American foreign policy purely in military terms. This is a serious misreading of the challenges we face as well as the instruments needed to meet them. While pointing repeatedly to problems like Mali’s Islamist insurgency, Iran’s nuclear program, Pakistan’s failing state and Egypt’s economic deterioration, neither talked about the civilian instruments required to resolve them. Diplomacy, foreign aid, international law enforcement, multilateral financial and other institutions simply don’t register on the presidential level, even with my preferred candidate. That itself is a sad commentary on what we call foreign policy, bipartisan or not.
PS: Here is a Voice of America piece I participated in before the debate:
PPS: And here is the piece KSA2 (an English-language Saudi station) did the night of the election:
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Not a good idea
Governor Romney will no doubt repeat tonight that he will label China a currency manipulator on his first day in office. This is what he won’t say:
1. The Chinese have already revalued their currency a good bit (yuan/dollar), much of it during the Obama administration:
2. The designation of currency manipulator is one provided for in U.S. law, not in international agreements. Labelling China one would only require that the U.S. government negotiate with Beijing about their sin, something it has been doing for years (with the results portrayed above). There is no other legal consequence in domestic legislation. Washington could file a complaint with the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization, but the consequences of doing that are unclear. Neither organization has tried in the past to provide a remedy for currency manipulation.
3. The Brazilians have been accusing the U.S. of manipulating its currency downwards (through the Fed’s “quantitative easing,” which injects dollars into the world economy), in order to compete more effectively. Any success we have in pursuing a remedy against China will pave the way for a Brazilian complaint against the U.S.
4. The most likely immediate Chinese reaction would be to halt the appreciation of the renminbi in preparation for a difficult negotiation with Washington. This would certainly harm U.S. exports. The Chinese could also retaliate in other ways: not buying U.S. bonds or blocking U.S. investment.
Bottom line: we have a lot more to lose than gain from a rhetorically stirring but ineffectual declaration that China is a currency manipulator. Maybe that’s why the Bush and Obama administrations have both passed on the option Romney is pushing?
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