Building BRICS?

Alphen, Netherlands.  27 March. They represent 25.9% of the world’s land mass, 43% of the population and 17% of global trade.  The UN Development Programme states that by “2020, the combined economic output of three leading developing countries alone – Brazil, China and India – will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States”.  Today the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) at their fifth annual summit in Durban will announce a new BRICS Bank, under the catchy 1960s throwback title of “Partnership for Development, Integration and Industrialisation”.  The aim of the Fabulous Five is clear; to counterbalance what they see as a) the western-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank; and b) plug a gap in development financing caused by the West’s financial and economic woes.  Is the BRICS laying the foundation of a new world order?

 

On the strategic face of it the Durban summit would seem a natural extension of Chinese President Xi Jingping’s Kissingeresque Moscow démarche of last week.  Clearly, the vacuum created in strategic leadership by the West’s rapid decline, accentuated and accelerated by the EU/Germany’s incompetent handling of the Cyprus default, will see new actors emerge.  However, for all the clear ambitions of China (and to a markedly lesser extent Russia) the five countries are still divided on many issues.

The most obvious is the strategic provenance of the BRICS.  Whilst China and Russia clearly think in terms of classical Kennanesque Cold War Realism, and thus see the strategic game with the West as ultimately zero sum, Brazil and India come from that rather woolly tradition of non-alignment.  The Non-Aligned Movement emerged in the 1960s as an attempt by India in particular not to be dragged into somebody else’s potentially destructive grand strategy.  For a country that had lost well over a million people fighting Britain’s grand and not-so-grand wars this made sense.

Today, India is emerging in its own right and is as a much regional-strategic competitor of China as partner, particularly given China’s role in nuclearizing New Delhi’s arch-adversary, Islamabad.  To that end, as an example of constructive multilateralism a BRICS that promotes stability and co-operation rather than competition is a good thing. 

Brazil fits into pretty much the same category as India.  At several conferences of late I have attended the Brazilians present clearly identified their strategic interests with those of the West.  Moreover, in my Oxford Handbook of War a leading Franco-Brazilian academic summed up Brazil’s foreign policy as essentially Latin American in focus and by and large aligned with that of the US, so long as Washington worked with Brazil.  The BRICS can thus be seen very much in the light of a Brazil keen to remind America of its burgeoning regional-strategic influence.  

As for South Africa the ANC-led government still sees its roots as having been established in a form of colonial war and as such is instinctively drawn to any form of non-alignment with a vague anti-Western tinge.  And, of course, Pretoria is desperately in need of Chinese capital.

Furthermore, for all the grandiose talk last week of a new strategic partnership between Russia and China, Moscow has no desire to be Athens to China’s Rome, particularly if tensions between the US and China reach a point where Moscow’s commercial and energy relationship with Europe is affected.  That may change over time but Moscow will continue to hedge its strategic bets.

However, if there are divisions between the BRICS based on geography, alignment and allegiance there are also huge gaps.  Indeed, it is the issue of capital that will most probably highlight such gaps.  The choice of ‘partnership’ as the key word for the summit is critical.  If the BRICS become seen too overtly as part of a new Chinasphere it will rapidly fall apart.  However, partnership means equality and the word at the summit is that each member will put some $10bn (€7.8bn) into the BRICS Bank.  This figure represents only 0.1% of Chinese GDP and yet some 2% of South African.

Therefore, for the moment the BRICS will remain far more a non-aligned movement than a counter-balancing mechanism.  However, it is the long-term context that makes the BRICS interesting.  One report suggests that whilst Asia alone accounts today for some 24% of world trade, it will be 42% by 2030 and 48% by 2050.  Whereas thanks to the EU, Europe’s mutual impoverishment pact, whilst Western Europe represented 48% of world trade in 1990, it is 34% today and likely to fall to 19% in 2030 and 15% by 2050. 

If the report is right the BRICS could one day find itself at the very core of a new world order.  This summit is clearly building BRICS for the future.

Julian Lindley-French

Xi's Kissinger Move

Alphen, Netherlands. 25 March.  At the start of his historic visit to Russia last week newly-installed Chinese President Xi Jingping said that the “two countries spoke a common language”.  If America sees itself as the indispensable global pivot China clearly has the ambition to become the other global pivot in a new bipolar order.  Xi’s visit to Moscow last week, just over forty years on from Henry Kissinger’s famous 1971 visit to Beijing, makes it is clear that China is embarked on a grand strategy to balance America on the world stage.  This will be a tumultuous twenty-first century.
 

Kissinger’s 1971 visit to China was set against the backdrop of a Nixon administration desperate to extract itself from a failing Vietnam War.  Henry Kissinger, the grand architect of Cold War Realpolitik, wanted to force the Soviet Union to look both east and west.  Moscow was already at the time embroiled in a full-scale border war with China, its supposedly Communist partner.  In a sense by forcing the Soviet Union to face the prospect of a ‘zweifrontenskrieg’ (two-front war) Kissinger applied lessons from his native Germany’s history to US grand strategy

Cue Xi.  The aim of Chinese grand strategy is certainly not to trigger a war with the Americans.  However, Chinese strategic logic is still embedded in Sun Tzu; force an opponent to confront so many options over such time and distance that to all intents and purposes they render themselves weak by uncertainty.  And, Xi clearly understands Kissinger’s dictum that “no country can act wisely in every part of the globe at every moment of time”.

Xi’s timing is impeccable.  There are of course perfectly legitimate reasons for close Chinese-Russian relations.  They are partners in the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.  China is the world’s biggest energy consumer whilst Russia is the biggest energy provider.  Trade between the two countries is booming and is now worth some $88bn or €68bn per annum. 

However, Xi’s visit and indeed his vision is grand strategic and must be seen as such. China intends to lead the strategic counter-balance to the American not-so-well led West and to that end will forge relationships that exploit American uncertainty and Europe’s precipitous decline. 

Kissinger famously said that “If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere”.  As Xi was speaking to Russian President Putin I was attending a conference in The Hague organised by the excellent Atlantic Commission on the transatlantic partnership.  Set against Xi’s visit to Moscow the extent to which Europe’s political class has completely lost the strategic plot was all too evident.  As Xi talked about a new anti-democracy global balance of power pact with Putin all my fellow Europeans could worry about was Cyprus and trying to blame America and Britain for causing the Eurozone crisis. Not only is that laughably wrong it completely and dangerously misses Xi’s point. 

And there is a link.  The Russian media has been running stories all week about the EU’s attempts to resolve the Cyprus crisis as being anti-Russian.  Given that the deal struck over the weekend will possibly see a levy of up to 20% on depositor’s accounts worth €100,000 and more the deal will indeed have a real impact on Russian depositors.  Now, much of that money is of very dubious provenance and it is clear that Germany in particular wants to stop Cyprus being used as an offshore bank haven within the Euro.  However, the timing could not have been worse and will simply help push Russia towards a new anti-Western strategic partnership with China. 

That dynamic will be made all the more certain by the strategic denial that now afflicts the Euro-world.  For example, the Chinese are clearly building a blue-water navy and Xi’s comments demonstrate clear intent to use the Chinese fleet as a platform for strategic influence.  Do not worry, I was told by a senior NATO official, because the Chinese do not know how to use such a fleet.  Sorry NATO but should you not be thinking about these developments?

Clearly, the West must not fall into the trap of concluding that legitimate Chinese ambitions are a precursor to conflict and somehow a new narrative is needed in the US-Chinese strategic relationship (the only strategic relationship that now matters).  Equally, neither Americans nor Europeans can ignore Chinese intent as stated by Xi in Moscow or its burgeoning capability.  In others words the transatlantic allies need a China strategy. 

Sadly that was not the worst of it in The Hague.  A senior European said that in December the European Union will devote a WHOLE session of the European Council meeting to defence.  Whoopee!

Kissinger said that “power is the great aphrodisiac”.  Perhaps he should now add that weakness is the great sedative.

Xi’s Kissinger move – it will not be his last.

Julian Lindley-French

Oxford Blues

Alphen, Netherlands. 20 March.  Sometimes my alma mater Oxford University needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century (Enlightenment).  The sacking of a librarian and graduate student, the wonderfully-named Calypso Nash, is just another example of a college leadership completely out of touch with the young people it serves.  The 'crime' was that some students performed something called the Harlem Shake in the library of St Hilda's College (always a bit uppity and conservative).  One can almost hear the tut-tutting amongst the fossilised academics in the Senior Common Room who probably think the Harlem Shake is a cocktail and are still wondering how one can dance such a thing. 

 

What is particularly galling is that back in the seventies when I was an undergraduate at University College, Oxford (the oldest and the best) some of the things we got up to in the college library makes a thirty second performance of the latest u-tube craze seem like a papal inauguration.  We even played cricket! 

 

So, Hilda's wake up, smell the coffee and remember that you are an institution dedicated to the education of young people and that within reason a little bit of creative exuberance should be celebrated not crushed.  Above all re-instate Ms Nash because her sacking is unjust and makes you look like an ass.  Clearly, someone called Calypso can hardly be sacked for permitting the occasional library dance!  As some of your young people might say (so I have heard) - der!

 

Julian Lindley-French

Who Will Pay for Cyprus?

Alphen, Netherlands.  19 March.  In “1984” George Orwell wrote, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind, simultaneously, and accepting both of them”.  I was reminded of doublethink (to that add double-speak) watching Europe’s politicians and Eurocrats dance on the head of a political pin to distance themselves from the so-called ‘one-off’ Deposit Tax Levy Confiscation of ordinary Cypriot’s  money.  So, who will pay for Cyprus and will the money be put to good use?

 

The logic is brutal.  With Cyprus representing only 0.2% of the Eurozone economy, the Cypriot banking sector some 330% of Cypriot GDP and with 30% of deposits in Cypriot banks Russian (and much of it of very dubious provenance) Cyprus can only fund its side of the proposed €10 billion ($13 bn) bailout via bank depositors. 

Why this particular deal and why now?  For once the EU is being unfairly blamed for a crisis not of its making (aside from the fact that the Euro is a political project that does not work).  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, supported by her Finnish and Dutch counterparts, wants to demonstrate prior to the September German elections that she is being prudent with German taxpayer’s money.  And, under no circumstances must the bond markets be spooked so that the borrowing costs soar of the bigger Eurozone debtors such as Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain – at least not until after September. 

As of today all involved are either retreating fast from imposing the now infamous ‘haircut’ on the small depositor or blaming the Cypriots themselves for this disaster.  The suggestion is that depositors with over €20,000 ($26k) will now have 6.9% of their savings in Cypriot banks taken from them whilst those over €100,000 ($130k) will have 10% confiscated.  This means dodgy Russians and retired Brits neither of whom are hugely popular with those who run the Eurozone will be hit.

Would the money be put to good use?  Well, this reflects yet another fundamental untruth this crisis has spawned.  Yes, it is true that the northern, western European taxpayer has already paid a lot either funding or under-writing ‘loans’ that will never be repaid.  At the same time Berlin has done all it can to ring-fence its taxpayers and find other people to pay for a crisis that by and large had its origins in the ill-conceived leadership of Berlin, Brussels and Paris when the Euro was set up.  The half-measures under discussion simply prolong the agony and increase the costs which have effectively turned the EU into a mutual impoverishment pact.

Therefore, ‘haircuts’ will fail because they do not address the fundamental problem of the Eurozone; the need for tight and common fiscal discipline and structural reform of southern Eurozone economies.  In other words, the Euro will only ever be stable if there is real fiscal and banking union or if the Eurozone contracts into a customs zone of reasonably similar economies organised around Germany.  However, the former would demand the effective end of national sovereignty and democratic accountability, whilst the latter would see southern European economies cast out into the global economy and forced to compete.  That would make current austerity measures look like benign charity.

There is a more immediate consequence; the future cost of crisis-management will now inevitably grow.  This morning the spokesman of EU Council President Herman van Rompuy tried to play down the Cyprus crisis by suggesting it was a special case.  Special or not a clear message has been sent that future bailouts could well involve EU-inspired raids on the small savings of small people.  This will almost certainly mean that when the next crisis inevitably erupts in Spain, Italy or elsewhere people will rush to withdraw their savings from banks and thus triggering a massive banking run. It is banking runs that kill currencies.  In other words this proposal will make contagion more not less likely. 

So, making small depositors pay for the crisis makes little or no sense other than to stave off the immediate disaster.  Indeed, without federation or fracture the crisis cannot be resolved only temporarily contained.  Critically, the Cypriot fiasco reinforces the toxicity that is the political incompetence that created the Eurozone crisis and which is sustaining it.

Orwell also wrote in “1984”, “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind happiness is better”.  Sadly, as Cyprus reveals the Eurozone is generating neither freedom nor happiness, just fear.

Come September and the German elections these realities will have to be faced and the EU’s current phoney war will come to an end with a bang…if not before. 

Who will pay for Cyprus? All of us sooner or later.

Julian Lindley-French

A Tragic Moment in History

Alphen, Netherlands. 19 March.  Tony Blair suggested yesterday that the West would come to regret not intervening in Syria.  He is of course right.  Tony Blair had to make a terrifying call ten years ago which clearly weighs heavily upon him.   Equally, he must accept it is precisely his ill-conceived and under-planned invasion of Iraq ten years ago tomorrow that makes impossible any attempt to rescue the Syrian people.  Indeed, the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the linkages that could be inferred between that act and any Western intervention in Syria today that will doom the Syrian people to their terrifying fate.  Something more for Mr Blair to ponder.

Julian Lindley-French    

Power, Prejudice and Paranoia

Alphen, Netherlands. 15 March. “The ides of March have come” says Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Standing in the Vatican’s St Peter’s Square Tuesday, watching on a big, incongruous screen the Princes of the Roman Universal Church file into Mass I was struck by the power of this moment when a new Pope is chosen to lead the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.  I am not a Catholic and I happened to be walking past St Peter’s but one could feel the electricity of change in the air.  The sense of occasion was made all the more powerful by the tented media city that had sprung up all around St Peter’s.  It was as though Charlemagne’s army had returned to enforce the Emperor’s fiat.  Something else was apparent; the interaction of the ancient with the utterly modern, of faith, belief and identity and how across much of the world that friction is casting an ancient world in a new light but only so often to highlight old thinking.  There is a almost a presumption of future conflict which sure enough will guarantee it.
 

It is in the domain of power politics that the interaction of old and new with power, prejudice and paranoia is now more intense than at any time since the end of the Cold War.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world’s most important power relationship, that between the US and China.  Naturally, as a Briton and a European my instincts are for and with democratic America.  That said, there is nothing in my soul that is particularly anti-Chinese, although like many westerners I am having to force myself to recognise the consequence of Europe's wilful decline and learn to think anew about this new power world.

Equally, I am no European apologist for China.  There are many aspects of China’s one-party rule that I find disturbing and there are quite a few aspects of China’s increasingly aggressive foreign and security policy that worry me.  Whilst there is no reason to believe conflict is imminent, as China has clearly invested in a system the West invented, danger (the ides of March) lurks. 

The metaphor of future conflict is the developing cyber cold war.  A close friend of mine has just come back from Beijing where he attended a high-level conference on all things cyber.  What struck him was the extent to which American concerns about China’s strategic hacking are mirrored in Chinese concerns that the Americans are embedding software in programmes that will enable Washington to pirate Chinese secrets. 

That the Chinese are carrying out strategic hacking there can be no doubt.  This is all part of the presumption of future conflict generated by then strategic hyper-competition that is emerging between China and the US.   And, for the sake of fairness, I will avoid being dewy-eyed about my American allies.  I am old enough to recall those long lost days back in the 1980s when the US routinely exaggerated Soviet military capability to justify a huge defence budget and control over allies.  The American tendency towards power, prejudice and paranoia is certainly no less pronounced than the Chinese.  Sadly, it is just such power, prejudice and paranoia (not Europe’s wilful weakness) that is today setting the rules of this new/old strategic game.    

Therefore, in his humble way Pope Francis seemed to be saying something new to all of us – Catholic and non-Catholic alike; we still have free-will and the power of choice.  We can decide not to presume future conflict.  We can if we want to change the terms of the engagement with each other and in so doing better understand the perspective of the other.  Even a hard-bitten Realist like me can recognise the dangerous logic of so embracing the past that we instinctively repeat it.

That was what I was trying to do in St Peter’s Square – challenge myself to see the world through the perspective of a faith I was brought up to distrust.  Ironically, so much of my healthy English realism about Brussels and the EU has its roots deep in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century when England stood alone against the Catholic princes of Europe.

Have I undergone some Damascene conversion?  No.  Do I think the world will become less adversarial?  Probably not.  However, I think it wrong to assume that conflict and friction are the natural state and that somehow the period of relative (and I stress relative) strategic calm of the recent past will automatically be replaced by confrontation and friction and ulitmately conflict and war between America and China.  The idea that a new East-West showdown is sooner or later inevitable to establish the world's new strategic pecking order is sadly implicit in far too much that is written these days.

The risk is certainly there.  For as Shakespeare wrote, “The ides of March have come. Ay Caesar, but not gone”.

Julian Lindley-French

Syria: Between Sarajevo and Baghdad

Alphen, Netherlands, 11 March.  Thucydides, the great-great grandfather of unforgiving International Relations once said, “The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”.  British Foreign Secretary Hague’s announcement last week in Parliament that Britain will send armoured vehicles and bullet-proof vests to support the Syrian National Coalition came just at the moment when the UN declared one hundred thousand Syrians refugees.  The level of human suffering in that benighted country is now biblical in its proportions.  In a twist of fate the decision comes almost ten years to the day British troops joined US and other coalition forces in the March 2003 Iraq invasion which rent the international community asunder.  Just how far has humanitarian interventionism come in those ten years?

 

Humanitarian interventionism goes back to the end of the Cold War.  It was a brief moment in history which reached its zenith in 2001 when two contrasting 'evangelical champions’ came together to form an unlikely alliance between an American conservative and a British social democrat – George W. Bush and Tony Blair.  Bush was at war fighting Al Qaeda; Blair believed deeply in Just War.

The Americans wanted to eradicate 'AQ’ which to many on the Washington right would be only achieved by 'modernising' the Middle East after America’s image.  A mission that was in no small way linked to the security of Israel.  Blair was haunted by the tragedies of the 1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda in which millions perished for want of action. 

At America’s brief unipolar moment the judicious use of force made everything seem possible.  In 1995 the US had finally led NATO to end the Bosnian Serb assault on the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and in 1999 Blair successfully persuaded US President Bill Clinton to force the Serb military out of Kosovo.  Finally, in 2000 Blair ordered Britain’s armed forces to intervene in Sierra Leone to prevent a genocidal massacre in its capital Freetown.  The blueprint for humanitarian interventionism was established.

Come 911 American power, Bush’s war and Blair’s creed came together as neo-conservatism met humanitarianism.  First came Afghanistan in November 2001 when the two creeds deployed side-by-side.  The Americans led the robust counter-terrorism whilst Europeans sought hearts and minds.  Then came Iraq.  The 2003 invasion not only split Europe down the middle and diverted effort from Afghanistan but forced Tony Blair and Britain to make a terrible choice between war-fighting America  and peacekeeping Europe. 

In fact there were deep differences between Bush and Blair.  An exchange I had at the time with Richard Perle in the International Herald Tribune reflected the tension.  Perle suggested that Iraq was just the beginning of US efforts to transform the Middle East with Iran the one-day objective.  The UK would be willing to support the US over the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, I countered, but London would never support some wider American ‘crusade’.

With bucket-loads of hindsight what became Blair’s tragedy is now Syria’s.  To bridge the immense political gulf between Bush and Blair London had to find some ‘legal’ justification to make the Iraq invasion ‘just’, – hence the Europe-splitting controversy over UN-mandate.  For Blair only a Saddam that posed a very real and present danger could possibly bridge the ideological divide between Bush, Blair and sceptical European public opinion.

In effect Blair placed the entire future legitimacy of Western interventions on the existence of Iraqi WMD.  The subsequent failure to find any WMD in effect destroyed not only Blair but the very cause of humanitarian interventionism that he had championed and which still has much to commend it.  Worse, the Iraq disaster critically undermined belief that Afghanistan could be stabilised amongst many of America’s closest allies and impressed upon the West’s adversaries a sudden vulnerability.  That vulnerability has now been compounded by economic disaster and a widespread and exaggerated belief that the West is in terminal decline.

 

Yes, small-scale interventions have been tried since in Libya and now Mali, but none of them have anything like the Responsibility to Protect ambition that grew out of the the Balkan and Rwandan tragedies.  They are more strike, hope and withdraw operations and as likely to lead to one set of monsters replacing another than offer any real hope to ravaged peoples.

Ten years on from Iraq the British decision must be seen it that light.  A genuine but half-hearted attempt to offer a little support to a brutalised people that is far too little, far, far too late.  Tragically,  in its half-heartedness such 'intervention' becomes non-intervention.  It also effectively marks the grave of Blair’s humanitarian interventionism. 

So, the strong will do what they always do and the weak will suffer what they always suffer whilst the declining will wring their collective hands and feign strength, as they have always done.

How far has interventionism come?  It has come as far as Syria but is now trapped on the rocky, grave-pitted road between Sarajevo and Baghdad.

Julian Lindley-French

How Much Does EU Solidarity Cost?

Alphen, Netherlands. 25 February.  Italy has gone to the polls and Greece and Spain are facing continuing anti-austerity demonstrations.  Here in the Netherlands EU Council President Herman van Rompuy yesterday appeared on Dutch TV to tell the ever more sceptical Dutch that the Netherlands could not survive without the EU.  Last week I highlighted the concerns of my Dutch neighbours that ‘Brussels’ does nothing for them and they are tired of being lectured by Eurocrats and southern and eastern European politicians about the need for ‘solidarity’.  Since that blog I have been inundated with comments from varying degrees of Europhilia and fanaticism berating my neighbours for their lack of aforesaid ‘solidarity’.   So, how much does EU ‘solidarity’ cost? 
 

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the size of the EU economy (gross domestic product or GDP) in 2012 at €12,629 trillion ($17,578 trillion).  The 8 February agreement by EU heads of state and government set the budget limit at 1% of the EU's GDP for the 2014-2020 EU Budget or €1.26 trillion ($1.76 trillion). According to Open Europe this year the biggest net contributors to the EU Budget will be Germany €14 billion ($18.6 billion), France €9 billion ($12 billion), UK €9 billion ($12 billion), Italy €6 billion ($8 billion) and the Netherlands €5 billion ($6.6 billion). 

Official Dutch figures set the size of the Dutch population in 2011 at 16,696,000.  Therefore, the cost of the EU Budget to each Dutch citizen is roughly €299 ($396) this year.  The cost of the EU Budget per annum to my Dutch neighbour’s family of five is thus around €1500 ($1988) per year IF the Budget is confirmed.  However, if the EU Parliament carries out its threat to veto the Budget then this year’s planned spending will be rolled over at 2% of Europe’s GDP, which will cost my by no means wealthy, ordinary Dutch neighbours about €3000 per annum.  There is a lot they could do with €3000 ($3977) to ease their very real worries.  No wonder EU Parliament leader Martin Schulz wants a secret vote so he can again hide the truth from my Dutch neighbours.  So much for democratic transparency!

However, that is not the true cost of solidarity.  One must also add the cost of the various bail outs to southern European countries and the debasing of the Euro due to the printing of money by the European Central Bank (ECB).  It is hard to get accurate figures for this mainly because governments, the European Commission and the ECB are determined to keep the true cost of the Eurozone crisis from my Dutch neighbours.  However, estimates vary between €10,000 ($13,200) and €15,000 ($20,000) per annum, per head (and possibly as high as €20,000 ($26,500)).

There are also additional hidden costs.  The Dutch Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes said yesterday that as much as 4% of the so-called Cohesion and Structural Fund is lost to national corruption or “silly projects”   She highlighted a new EU-funded (i.e. funded by my Dutch neighbour) Polish highway between Warsaw and Poznan that is sound-proofed even though it passes through empty fields.   Therefore, my Dutch neighbours and their fellows are seeing €13 billion ($17.2 billion) of their money effectively stolen or misappropriated each year.

The madness does not stop there.  Some hailed the EU Budget as a victory because for the first time it was cut.  However, what the Budget also reveals is that far from trying to invest out of the crisis by modernising Europe’s economy most member-states and the European Commission simply want to preserve vested interests.  In other words the EU is investing in the past. 

According to the BBC the snappily-named Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MAFF) or EU Budget is to be spent in 2013 as follows: Cohesion and Structural Funds €325 billion ($450 billion), Competition and Growth €125.6 billion ($166.5 billion), the Common Agricultural Fund €278 billion ($368.6 billion) (even though agriculture represents only 2% of the EU GDP), “EU as a Global Player” (aid) €59 billion ($78.2 billion), Security and Citizenship €15.7 billion ($20.7 billion), Rural Development €95 billion ($126 billion) and the worryingly entitled “off-budget spending” €37 billion ($49 billion). 

In other words only 13% of the EU Budget is being invested on preparing European for the hyper-competitive twenty-first century global economy.  The rest is being spent on propping up failure.  It also means that when Italians, Greeks and Spaniards protest about austerity they are really asking my modest Dutch neighbours to go on indefinitely funding a way of life they cannot afford.   In effect, they want the EU to become a mutual impoverishment pact.

Now, like me my Dutch neighbours are prepared to pay so much for ‘solidarity’ as they genuinely feel for the suffering of their fellow Europeans.  However, what they want to see above all is an end to this crisis.  For them that means modernising southern European economies (and others) in return for their ‘aid’.  However, there seems to be little appetite for that in Athens, Madrid, Rome or Brussels.  And they certainly do not want more ‘government’ by a remote Euro-Aristocracy in Brussels Centre in the name of 'stability' to fix a crisis they in fact caused. 

Therefore, Mr van Rompuy, unless you and your elite colleagues understand my Dutch neighbours and quickly the question for them will not be whether or not the Dutch can survive without the EU, but whether or not the Dutch can survive with the EU. The cost of ‘solidarity’ is fast becoming far too high to bear for the relatively few who have to pay for a crisis that is by no means over.

Julian Lindley-French

"Let Freedom Live!"

Alphen, Netherlands.  22 February.  Seventy years ago today three young German students were led to a guillotine by the Gestapo in Stadelheim Prison and brutally executed.  Siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst faced death with immense courage, something even the Gestapo acknowledged.  As the blade began its death fall Hans Scholl shouted out “Let Freedom Live!”  With that single act of defiance Hans Scholl created modern, democratic Germany.  

  

The White Rose movement offered peaceful resistance against the Nazis at the height of World War Two.  Centred on the students of Munich University the group’s members understood full well that if caught they would face certain torture and death at the bloody hands of the Gestapo.  And yet between June 1942 and February 1943 they bravely distributed six leaflets and scrawled defiant graffiti denouncing the Nazis.  One of my heroes Helmuth James Graf von Moltke managed to smuggle the sixth and final leaflet out of Germany and in July 1943 the Royal Air Force dropped thousands of them over Germany retitled, “The Manifesto of the Students of Munich”.

One of the leaflets was sadly prophetic, “Isn't it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes– crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure– reach the light of day?”  The White Rose movement clearly knew of the Holocaust and the crimes being committed in the name of Germany at Dachau on Munich’s outskirts.

Germany and its people bear a heavy burden of history.  Clearly the crimes of Nazism must never be forgotten.  Last year I visited Auschwitz and Auschwitz II Birkenau and its evil mark will be with me for the rest of my days.  However, there is also much said and written about modern Germany that not only misses the point but is plainly wrong.  Sadly, that is often the case in Britain my own country which still counts the cost of its heroic defiance of the Nazis in the name of Europe’s freedom (something too often other Europeans seem to forget).

Modern Germany is not the heir of Nazi criminals but the heir of Liselotte Bendl, Harold Dohrn, Manfred Eickemeyer, Wilhelm Geyer, Willi Graf, Eugen Grimminger, Falk Harnack, Kurt Huber, Marie-Luis Jahn, Trante Lafranz, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Katharina Schueddekopf,  Helmut and Sophie Scholl, Josef Soehngen, and Jurgen Wittenstein.  They are heroes of Europe one and all.

It is their Germany from which Chancellor Angela Merkel takes her inspiration.  It is an inspiration that the rest of Europe would do well to understand and respect as she grapples with the Eurozone crisis.  Yes, Germany can be heavy-handed from time to time.  That is partly a function of a modern Germany that is simply powerful, although that is not something most modern Germans feel.  It is also a function of Abraham Lincoln’s famous dictum that one can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but one can never please all of the people all of the time.  This is especially so in a place as diverse and complex as modern Europe.

Germany’s war history will always be told and rightly so.  One only has to zap television channels to find some documentary or film telling the story of Nazi atrocities and the eventual victory of the Allies over Nazism.  Indeed, I am intensely proud of my own country’s role in that victory.  However, it is now time to tell the story of Germany’s heroes for they are also OUR heroes and one is far more likely to understand and appreciate modern Germany if one understands their struggle and sacrifice.  

As Scholl uttered his famous cry not only modern Germany was born, but modern Europe.  The American, British and Canadian armies in the vanguard of democracy came to liberate the ideas they stood for.  White Rose Freedom called for “…freedom of speech, freedom of religion and protection of the individual citizen from the arbitrary actions of criminal-dictator states”.  They are the very principles of modern Europe. 

In all seven members of the White Rose group were executed by January 1945 and as a Briton, European and a democrat I honour them all. 

“Let Freedom Live!”

Julian Lindley-French

XBox Dreadnought?

Alphen, Netherlands.  20 February.  HMS Dreadnought at a stroke condemned every other battleship on the planet to the scrapyard.  Launched in 1906 she represented a revolutionary step change in ship design combining big guns and new Parsons steam turbines with heavy armour in such a way that she could out-gun, out-pace and out-protect any battleship afloat.  Is warfare about to encounter another Dreadnought moment – an XBox Dreadnought?

 

Two events in the past few weeks suggest for once that a real revolution in military affairs may be starting; a step change in the relationship between technology, force and effect that will profoundly impact strategy, tactics and doctrine.  Yesterday, American computer security firm Mandiant identified a building in Shanghai as the source of 147 cyber-attacks on the US as Unit 61398 of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.  Recent protests at the Senate confirmation hearings of CIA Director-elect John Brennan demonstrated the growing unease amongst human rights activists and legal scholars about the use of drones by US forces.  Both reports miss the essential point for taken together cyber and drones represent nothing less  than future war.

Drones first.  They offer a cheaper alternative to sending armies into difficult places during unpopular wars.  For hard-pressed political and military leaders exerting influence at low cost is an attractive option.  Ironically, the issue of actual comparative cost is not one that works today when compared to the use of manned aircraft.  It is a difficult comparison to make but several studies, including a 2007 study led your Blogonaut, suggest that drone costs per flight hour are not much cheaper than manned fighters or Apache attack helicopters.  The cost of the electronics is roughly similar and although there are savings in weight and there being no need to provide safety systems to support a pilot drones are not very effective in complex combat scenarios. 

However, whilst the operational flexibility they afford commanders may as yet be limited what matters is the ever growing distance between target and operator to the point where the latter is to all intents and purposes invulnerable.  And this is just the beginning.  Exactly the same can be said for cyber-attacks.  Clearly cyber and drones are here to stay as the market for the capability (both military and commercial) is booming and diversifying.  

Take cyber and drone technology together and the dawn of robot wars is a future that is not too hard to imagine.  This does not for a moment suggest that traditional platforms such as ships, aircraft and armoured vehicles will be rendered obsolete on the battlefield.  Rather, they will need to be seen as increasingly robotic (and upgradeable) platforms that are part of a battlefield so large and so remote that the distinction that Clausewitz made between strategy and tactics could become nigh on irrelevant. 

For the West it could be an opportunity to offset the high cost/low numbers problem all Western militaries face in which manoeuvre is only achieved at the expense of mass.  For Asian and other actors it could offer the chance to offset American technological advantage.  The ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu said that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. 

As yet no strategic concept worthy of the name has been crafted that incorporates concept, command, cyber, drones and platforms into a new way of warfare.  When that idea comes the XBox Dreadnought will be reality. 

The purpose of HMS Dreadnought was to make the cost for Germany of competing with the Royal Navy so high as to render a naval arms race impossible.  On the face of it the gamble failed.  In fact, Germany was never able to match the British given Berlin’s focus on land power.  Indeed, the thing about the Dreadnought was not the fact of new technology, but rather the way it was combined and the impact it had on naval strategy, tactics and doctrine.  This culminated in the May 1916 Battle of Jutland when the British and German battle-fleets clashed in the greatest sea battle in history in a way that would have been unimaginable even a decade prior.  And, whilst the tactical outcome of Jutland is contested the strategic victory it afforded the British is clear.  The naval blockade that did so much to force Germany’s 1918 submission was confirmed by Jutland.

Karl von Clausewitz said the overriding aim of war is to disarm the enemy.  Taken together cyber and drone technology suggest small beginnings for a very big and possibly dangerous future as the gap between action and effect is lengthened.  Given today’s strategic landscape historians may look back on this period as the true beginning of a form of robotic warfare.

One thing is clear – the eye in the sky and the ear in the ether is here to stay.  The race is now on for the XBox Dreadnought.

Julian Lindley-French

What has Brussels Ever Done for Us?

Alphen, Netherlands. 18 February.  In Life of Brian, freedom fighter Reg, leader of the ramshackle People’s Front of Judea, rallies his incompetent followers with a seemingly rhetorical question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”  “The aqueduct”, suggests Xerxes.  “Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true”.  “And the sanitation!” says Stan, “You remember what the city used to be like”.  “All right”, says Reg, “I'll grant you that; the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done...”  “And the roads...” suggests Matthias.  “Well yes obviously the roads... the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads?”  “Irrigation, medicine, education, health”.  “Yes, all right, fair enough” says Reg. “And the wine...that's something we'd really miss if the Romans left, Reg” .  “What about Public baths?  And it's safe to walk the streets at night now”.  “Yes, they certainly know how to keep order.  Let's face it they're the only ones who could in a place like this”.  “All right... all right”, shouts an exasperated Reg, “...apart from better sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, public health, roads, a freshwater system, baths and public order... what have the Romans ever done for us?”  “Brought peace?”  

 

On Saturday night over dinner with neighbours a similar sentiment was expressed; what has Brussels ever done for us?  The news was not good.  A neighbour from across the road has just lost his job because his trucking company had gone into liquidation undercut by competition from Eastern Europe.  A neighbour on the other side fears she will lose her job because of changes in European contract law that means her company must compete with cheaper labour from Eastern Europe.  A climate of fear now extends across the village and with it a growing sense of disenchantment with the EU in what had once been the political heartland of ‘Europe’. 

Today’s Europe is noticeable for a profound divide between those that are being paid for by the people of my village and the people of my village who are being rapidly impoverished by the euro crisis.  Indeed, ‘Europe’ is now seen as something bad that is being done to them, a sentiment one can trace across much of northern, western Europe. 

Thankfully politicians in the Netherlands are slowly beginning to wake up to the deep disenchantment felt in towns and villages like my own.  David Cameron’s seminal speech on Europe seems to have acted like a trigger with mainstream politicians much more willing to speak out against the centralizing ambitions of Brussels Centre.  Yesterday, Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans warned EU pretend President Herman van Rompuy that he was going too fast with his plans for ever closer union.  Moreover, the recent Brussels budget summit suggested the emergence of a new alignment for a Europe that serves its nation-states, not a Europe built on their eventual demise. 

This balance of competences battle is the heart of the battle over the future Europe.  Iain Duncan Smith, the British Secretary for Secretary of State for Work and Pension, warned of the ever-expanding and creeping powers of a European Commission determined to interpret its treaty ‘competences’ in the most aggressive manner possible. He was particularly concerned by Commission efforts to interpret responsibilities to protect the free movement of peoples as a ruse to interfere in national social security legislation.

 

It is no longer clear to my neighbours who or what is responsible for the aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, health, wine and law and order.  European regulation they neither want nor voted for is ever more apparent in their lives.  Moreover, they believe it is that self-same regulation that is making them poor in the name of ‘Europe’.  Clearly, national politicians too often blame Brussels for their own failings but behind the crisis an almighty power struggle is underway between the northern, western European taxpayer and Brussels Centre and its powerful political allies.  Not surprisingly my Dutch neighbours feel powerless and intimidated in the face of such forces and are deeply mistrustful of the political class as a whole.       

Of course, the usual self-aggrandising suspects in Brussels Centre trot out the usual mantra about the need for European solidarity.  However, on hearing this most northern, western Europeans simply reach for their wallet to see if their money is still there.    

The sad truth is that the ordinary people of my village are being asked the impossible in the name of Europe; to bear the cost of an ill-conceived currency and the appallingly irresponsible borrowing it triggered elsewhere, whilst being impoverished by a ‘Europe’ that traps them in a spiral of over-regulation, economic sclerosis and beggar-thy-neighbour politics. 

The European Union will only survive if Brussels Centre can clearly demonstrate benefit to the people on my street.  If ‘benefit’ is only yet more theoretical or political rhetoric in the mind of a dangerously detached elite or the supine academics that afford them succour then political Europe will inevitably fail.

What has Brussels ever done for us?  Brought peace?

Julian Lindley-French

When Will NATO Be Nobel-ed?

Oslo, Norway. 13 February.  The certificate room of the Nobel Institute has the feel of the headmaster’s waiting room of an English school.  This is something your Blogonaut was very familiar with in his youth as he spent much time in such places awaiting punishment for having been creative with school rules.  Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela sits close by Kofi Annan, Aung San Suu Kyi jostles with Al Gore (?????) - the great, the good and a couple of American politicians.

 

The citation that announced the awarding of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union in October last year stated, “The union and its forerunners have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.  Walking through Rome’s Fiumicino Airport last week I espied a big sign emblazoned across a wall celebrating the award and trumpeting the message that the EU had kept the peace in Europe for sixty years. 

This week I attended the opening of the Norwegian Atlantic Council’s Leangkollen Conference in Oslo’s Nobel Institute.  Looking at the certificates awarded to Peace Prize recipients with NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow it struck me just how unfair it is that the Alliance has not been recognised as the true guardian of European peace during the past sixty years plus. 

The 2012 award to the EU was not as preposterous as some have suggested but it does point to the increasing politicisation of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Clearly, the role of ‘Europe’ in helping to institutionalise the post-1945 Franco-German rapprochement at the core of European Reconciliation Phase One was vitally important.  However, speaking to senior Norwegian politicians here it is also evident that the Nobel Peace Prize is indeed becoming politicised which is a shame.  In 2009 the Peace Prize was awarded to the then new President Barack H. Obama for simply not being George W. Bush (where do Americans get all these superfluous initials from?). 

In reality Franco-German reconciliation could not have taken place but for the security guarantee offered by NATO and by extension the taxpayers of America, Britain and Canada who bore much of the cost to keep the Red Army at bay during the deepest freezes of the Cold War.  And yet go to the European Parliament and the Euro-fanatics therein have completely air-brushed NATO out of Europe’s contemporary history.  It is as if the Americans, British and Canadians had nothing whatsoever to do with the European peace.  

NATO set out to achieve a Europe free and whole.  One only has to survey the map of Europe of today to see the incredible achievement of the Atlantic Alliance and its contribution to European peace and stability.  It is a peace and stability without which the European Union simply could not exist.  It is also a continuing mission.  The EU likes to present itself as the saviour of a Europe torn apart by war.  In fact it was the 1941 Atlantic Charter of the then two great democracies America and Britain that paved the way not only for victory in World War Two but eventually victory in the Cold War.  However, the difference between the EU and NATO is that the Alliance has had to take the hard, tough decisions over the use of force upon which sustainable peace in Europe has been built at the cost of both blood and geld.

In the Western Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya and a host of other challenging arenas NATO wrestles with the use of legitimate, proportionate force daily for the Alliance is no less a peace organisation than the EU.  However, NATO simply does not have the luxury of being able to eternally theorise about peace.  Crises happen and any visit to the Justus Lipsius building, home of the European Council and known as ‘Just Lips’, the European Commission or the European Parliament and it quickly becomes clear that the peace-building of the EU has NATO foundations.

In an ideal world/Europe the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize would have been awarded jointly to both the EU and NATO for they both played a crucial role in the European peace and they will both continue to do so.

Given that the Norwegian Nobel Committee needs to go back to first principles and ask itself a fundamental question: is the Nobel Peace Prize only for those who seek peace through non-violent means or is the Prize open to all those who have made a critical contribution to peace?  If it is the former then both Obama and the EU should be excluded.  If it is the latter then NATO must also be recognised.  

So, when is NATO going to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? 2013 would do nicely.

Julian Lindley-French

Extremists Stay Away!

Dear All, I just noticed that amongst my followers a website of dubious standing.  Upon closer inspection I discovered this to be a bigoted and racist Islamophobic website.  Upon realising that I immediately blocked it.  Let me be clear; I am firm in my views about policy and I communicate those views robustly to get through to a political class that is increasingly distant from we the citizens and deaf to our concerns.  However, my firmest held belief is that all people are deserving of equal respect from whatever faith, creed, race or orientation they may hail.  My suspicion is that this unwarranted visit from an extremist may have been prompted by my use of the term 'Islamo-fascists' in a blog on Mali to describe the extremists of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. For the record I was quoting a leading analyst and director of one of London'd top think-tanks during an interview he gave to the BBC TV.  Again, for the record, I have the deepest respect for Islam and Muslims and that should be understood by all.

Extremists stay away! 

Julian Lindley-French