Liberal Realism

Hillaroius comment on the US foreign policy on Pakistan

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NYT Blog: Mark Twain the Palestinian-Israelí conflict

Mark Twain is, I think, the most transcendent American intellectual of its time, and here is one proof, check this post at NYT News Blog, "Netanyahu's Embrace of Mark Twain".

China-Brasil Strategic Partnership??

Translation: Pax China in Brazil. Pax Brasilera in South America. Really interesting. The visit of Lula to China may mean a lot in the near future.

The Chinese Al Jazeera (or CNN, BBC…)

For those who still think the days of nation-states are over, may sound rear to hear that two of the international news networks in the world belong to state governments. Namely BBC and Al Jazeera. And it seems like we have a new guy in town: China Central Television. Check this Foreign Policy article:

These are gloomy days for the global media, but you wouldn't know it from looking at China, where the government has reportedly earmarked RMB45 billion ($6.58 billion) for the international expansion of state broadcasting. As part of this push, China Central Television, or CCTV, and Xinhua news agency will produce content in different languages for both Western and Asian audiences. CCTV, which is preparing to move into a new $700 million headquarters in downtown Beijing, has already opened French and Spanish channels and will soon broadcast in Russian and Arabic. Xinhua will reportedly launch a 24-hour English-language news station modeled on Qatar's Al Jazeera that will broadcast news and features from China and compete with CNN and BBC. It will expand its overseas bureaus from 100 to 186. On the print side, China Daily, the state-owned English newspaper, recently opened a Washington bureau and launched a U.S. edition. In April, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, People's Daily, launched China's second major English daily, Global Times.

If there were ever a time for the Chinese press to make inroads into global journalism, it's now, as the death knell sounds for traditional media around the world and a state-financed newcomer has little competition. The big state media companies have already begun looking for international media assets, and CCTV's English channel has developed an audience in Africa and Asia. Observers suggest Chinese media could follow the same path as Al Jazeera, which was met with skepticism just over a decade ago but is now a global news player. So, will media consumers one day find boxes of Global Times on New York street corners? Will viewers in the United Kingdom flip between BBC, Al Jazeera and China TV? Most importantly, will the PR campaign influence the way we think about China?....

   

  

Daniel Drezner Blog on FP: blogginhead with Joseph Nye on relevance of IR theory

Pax China II: WaPo, Now is Jamaica

China is becoming the new financial source of the third world (See post on the subject). Check this article from the Washington Post, which says:

"With Jamaica's currency in free fall, unemployment soaring and banks heavily exposed to government debt, the Caribbean island's diplomats went into crisis mode earlier this year. They traveled to all corners of the world to seek help.

Jamaica's traditional allies, the United States and Britain, were preoccupied with their own financial problems, but a new friend jumped at the opportunity to come to the rescue: China.

When contracts for loan packages totaling $138 million were signed between the two countries in March, China became Jamaica's biggest financial partner. Headlines in Jamaica's leading newspapers, which only a year ago were filled with concern about China's growing influence in the region, gushed about its generosity.

"The loan couldn't have come more in time and on more preferred terms," E. Courtenay Rattray, Jamaica's ambassador to China, said in an interview. While the island nation continues to value its close relationships with Western powers, he added, in some respects Jamaica has more in common with China. "Those are developed countries. They don't have such an in-depth understanding of the development aspirations of Jamaica as does China," he said.

Overseas aid and loans are just one way China is asserting itself in its new role as a world financial leader. While polishing China's own image, Premier Wen Jiabao and other top leaders have blamed the West for the global economic crisis. Chinese officials increasingly are challenging the primacy of the dollar, warning other countries about the danger of keeping reserves in just one or two currencies, such as dollars and euros. And as the global economic crisis has eroded faith in U.S.-style capitalism, there's growing talk that a new "Beijing Consensus" will replace the long-dominant Washington Consensus on how developing countries should manage their economies […]

In a report last month titled "The Beijing Consensus," South Korea's Ministry of Strategy and Finance sounded an alarm over China's aid and loans. Developing countries that accept Chinese assistance, it warned, may lower their guard and gravitate toward a Chinese-style economic model.

Jamaica's Rattray dismissed those fears as overblown. China's financial assistance to his country came with "no requirement to adopt specific macroeconomic policy approaches," he said, and there is "no debate about the government of Jamaica's commitment to a free-market economic model."

Cheng Enfu, an economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-affiliated think tank, said he defines the Beijing Consensus as promotion of economies in which public ownership remains dominant; gradual reform is preferred to "shock therapy"; the country is open to foreign trade but remains largely self-reliant; and large-scale market reform takes place first, followed later by political and cultural change (It sounds for me like the "Embedded liberalism" consensus in which the postwar order was based).

The global economic crisis, Cheng said, "displays the advantages of the Chinese model" and has already expanded China's influence. "Some mainstream economists are saying that India should learn from China; Latin American countries are trying to learn from China. When foreign countries send delegations to China, they show interest in the Chinese way of developing," Cheng said…"

 

Timothy Garton Ash: We need international news more than ever

"We are getting less foreign news at the very moment we need more

A world in crisis demands nations understand each other. At least the BBC is hoisting the banner of Deng Xiaoping thought

Timothy Garton Ash

The Guardian, Thursday 16 April 2009

One complaint I heard during a recent stay in China is that western media give a distorted picture of what's happening there. I think there's some truth in this, but it's not for the reasons that Chinese Communist party members or nationalist netizens imagine. In fact, this is just one instance of a larger international problem…"

(See comment)

Pax China in South American: The Dragon v. Uncle Sam

China is doing exactly what the US government did during the WWI and afterwards, when European powers were too busy with political and economic struggle to take care of their interest in South America. (The story is really clearly told in Frieden's Global Capitalism). The US investing and lending money in the region, and they ended up fulfilling their long planned goal of being the most politically influent nation in the hemisphere. Is you check history, money is literally power. Pax Americana really begun after WWII, when the US became the financial center of the world and everybody own money to US government and/or bankers. That is why I consider really relevant this article from the NYT, which states that:

• "In recent weeks, China has been negotiating deals to double a development fund in Venezuela to $12 billion, lend Ecuador at least $1 billion to build an hydroelectric plant, provide Argentina with access to more than $10 billion in Chinese currency and lend Brazil's national oil company $10 billion. The deals largely focus on China locking in natural resources like oil for years to come."
• "China's trade with Latin America has grown quickly this decade, making it the region's second largest trading partner after the United States. But the size and scope of these loans point to a deeper engagement with Latin America at a time when the Obama administration is starting to address the erosion of Washington's influence in the hemisphere…."
• "Despite forging ties to Venezuela and extending loans to other nations that have chafed at Washington's clout, Beijing has bolstered its presence without bombast, perhaps out of an awareness that its relationship with the United States is still of paramount importance. But this deference may not last."
• "This is China playing the long game," said Gregory Chin, a political scientist at York University in Toronto. "If this ultimately translates into political influence, then that is how the game is played."

Why is Spain so corrupt?

Check this interesting post at Charlemagno blog, from the Economist. Has raised a debate about the cultural reasons of corruption, bringing back to live the ideas of Max Weber on the role of religion and political behaviour. The post is a comment of a press article from El País.

It says:

THE provocative title of this posting is not my own. It is the headline from a thought-provoking, if not completely convincing, opinion piece published today in Spain's best newspaper, El País. The author, Víctor Lapuente Giné, is a Spanish political scientist transplanted to the chilly, rigorous world of the University of Gothenburg's Quality of Government Institute.

Against a familiar backdrop of multiple scandals in Spain, many of them involving property deals and local government, Dr Lapuente Giné asks why countries like Spain, France, Italy or Portugal "have for years shown levels of corruption and governance closer to those of developing nations with authoritarian governments, than advanced capitalist democracies, which have belonged to the OECD for decades".

The article tries to isolate some factors which distinguish Spain, say, from countries with very low levels of reported corruption, such as Sweden. What caught my eye was that the article, early on, seeks to discount theories based around cultural difference. Dr Lapuente Giné writes that it is no more acceptable to say corruption is just "in our culture" than it was acceptable when people used to say that Catholic or Mediterranean countries were unfit for democracy…

Jagdish Bhagwati on the Doha Round, Susan and the "last mile"

So, every now and then your hear something interesting, here is Bhagwati explaining what really happens on the last Conference of WTO members. This is for those of you who swallowed the lies told by Susan Schwab:

"Essentially, America was making an offer to cap her trade-distorting subsidies at $14.5 billion which, in fact, exceeded its current payout, which is likely to be $9 billion or less. America has 2 million farmers. India, which has nearly two-thirds of its population in the rural sector, has small subsistence farmers. Faced with competition from subsidized, often large farms, India's reaction has been exactly like that in the United States where nothing works up politicians and lobbyists more than the often-imagined, not even real, allegation that foreigners are subsidizing their products "unfairly." So, just as America, fearful of competition from China, introduced an unprecedented product-specific safeguard in its bilateral agreement of November 1999 and a special textile safeguard during the transition to freer trade in textiles, India wanted a Special Safeguard Mechanism. It was, however, excessive and unacceptable to America, which had virtually pioneered the practice.

The central problem therefore arose from the fact that the U.S. offer on trade-distorting subsidies was too low, prompting an unacceptable Indian demand for an over-cautious SSM. Evidently the solution lies in America capping the distorting subsidies at a minimum of the current payouts: nothing prevents it from spending more instead on non-distorting subsidies which do not affect output (and hence trade) but which are given, for instance, for environmental improvements and for raising poultry and cattle in an ethically-acceptable fashion. In return, India could surely agree to a serious downscaling of the SSM.
This solution is not politically impossible. It requires America to move away further from distorting subsidies, and substituting them with non-distorting subsidies, a move that is surely possible even in a presidential-election year since total farm support can be maintained while its composition changes in a pro-trade direction..." Check the complete article at Brooking Institution.