Eritrea - Hope For Africa's Future
Current mood: ardent

Eritrea - Hope for Africa's Future

     The struggle of the Eritrean people against the annexation of Eritrea by Ethiopia more than 30 years ago developed into a liberation movement which defeated the strongest army in Africa, an army which was first supplied by U.S. imperialism and later by the Soviet Union. In May 1991, the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia gave up after 30 years of war. That opened the way for Eritrea, annexed by Ethiopia, to develop into an independent, democratic state. The 14-year Mengistu regime was characterized by brutal terror against any political opposition. The political chief of the 330,000-man army, the strongest in Africa, fled abroad to Zimbabwe in 1991. Although during his rule more than 60f the nation's budget had been spent on the military, the army was unable to achieve any notable victories over the various liberation movements.

     The liberation struggle was a war against a far stronger enemy. The Eritreans not only defeated Africa's most powerful army, they also began to build a new and more just society in their own country.

A Short History of Eritrea

     Eritrea, in its pre-colonial form, was neither an independent state nor part of the Ethiopian empire. Eritrea, the way it is on today's maps, was created at the end of the 19th century as a territorial-administrative unit by Italian colonialists. Its name, given by the Italians, is taken from the Greek description of the Red Sea.

     In past centuries, the peoples of the Eritrea region were subjected to the political power struggles of rival foreign powers. In the 16th century, the Ottoman Turks occupied the coastal regions of Eritrea. At the same time, the Ethiopians tried to push into the area to gain access to the Red Sea. In 1869, Italians bought the coastal region of Assab. This purchase laid the foundations for the later colony of Eritrea. In the following years, the Italians pushed onward into Massawa and from there they tried to take over the central highlands. Here they met resistance from Ethiopian troops. In 1896, Ethiopia was forced to recognize all areas north of the Mareb River as the colony of Eritrea. From 1890-1941, Eritrea was an Italian colony, and from 1941-52 it was a British colony. This was in contrast to Ethiopia, which was only an Italian colony for a short time (1935-1941).

     The decades of colonial-capitalist domination by Italy and later Britain meant that a different social, economic, and political development took place in Eritrea than in Ethiopia. For example, in 1940, one-fifth of Eritrea's population lived in cities. Eritrea, a land with a mild climate, was to be a settlement for unemployed southern Italians. Thus the number of Italian settlers jumped from 5,000 in 1930 to more than 50,000 in 1935. Eritrea not only served as a settlement area for Italian colonists, it also provided raw materials and a launching point for the seizure of Ethiopia.

     The British required the labor forces and industrial potential of Eritrea to supply the Allied forces during World War II. At the end of the war, many factories were closed and moved to other countries. The resulting mass unemployment forced many Eritreans to go to neighboring countries in search of work.

     The future of Eritrea after World War II lay in the hands of four victorious powers (USA, USSR, Great Britain, France). When they couldn't come to agreement as to Eritrea's future, the matter was handed over to the UN General Assembly. In December 1952, the UN decided on a federation of Eritrea and Ethiopia, against the wishes of the majority of Eritreans who wanted an independent state.

     In November 1962, Ethiopia declared an end to the federation and illegally annexed Eritrea as its 14th province. All capital, industries, and plantations were left in Italian hands. Later, capitalist investment was sought from Israel, America, and Japan, from which the pro-Ethiopian feudal classes, who collaborated with the Ethiopian colonialists, profited. There were no international protests against Ethiopia's illegal annexation of Eritrea.

     Until 1974, Emperor Haile Selassie I ruled Ethiopia, and with British and later American aid he built up the largest army in Africa. The emperor system was overthrown in a putsch, in which Mengistu Haile Mariam played a major role. Mengistu became chairman of the 'Derg' (military council) in February 1977, and later he became general secretary of the ruling party, head of the politburo, and President.

     Resistance to Ethiopia's colonial rule over Eritrea increased after the annexation. In 1958, the nationalist clandestine organization Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELM) was formed in the Sudan. In 1960, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) was founded in Cairo, and this group launched its armed struggle against Ethiopia on September 1, 1961.

The "Thirty Year War" (1961-1991)

     The annexation of Eritrea was a clear violation of international law. But this act also sowed the seeds of the Eritrean liberation movement. Ever since the annexation by Ethiopia, Eritrea waged a struggle for national independence. For three decades, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) fought for Eritrea's independence - the longest civil war (1961-1991) in Africa's history.

     One of the characteristics of the Eritrean liberation struggle was organizational splits and political disunity. This was partially due to the ethnic and social heterogeneity of the country (Muslims and Christians, urban dwellers and nomads). Therefore, rival organizations were established and often clashed with one another. In particular, there were armed clashes between the ELF and the EPLF, which had split off in the 1970s. The ELF was mainly comprised of Muslim nomads. In the 1980s, the EPLF emerged as the dominant political and military force in Eritrea. In contrast to the ELF, the EPLF had a social-revolutionary profile. The EPLF saw itself not only as a national liberation movement, but also as a movement for social change. From 1972-74 and from 1980-81, there was heavy fighting between the ELF and the EPLF. In 1981, the ELF was finally defeated and driven to the Sudan.

     From 1974 onwards, the clandestine guerrilla struggle transformed into open people's warfare, reaching a high point in 1977 with the liberation of several cities. But in 1978, with the aid of the Soviet Union, Ethiopia launched a counter-offensive against the liberated cities. In the face of modern weaponry, the EPLF responded with a tactical retreat and prolonged people's war. During Ethiopia's counter-offensive, however, the EPLF was able to confiscate heavy weapons (tanks, artillery). These allowed the EPLF to score great victories in its 1987/88 offensive. In February 1990, after many heavy battles, the EPLF took over the strategic port city of Massawa on the Red Sea. When the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia collapsed in the spring of 1991, the Ethiopian occupation army in Eritrea gave up and left the capital city of Asmara without a fight.

     It was the civilian population of Eritrea which suffered the most during the decades of war, especially from the air bombardments by the Ethiopian air force. Many Eritreans grew up knowing only war. Hundreds of thousands fled to the Sudan. The "Thirty Years War" in Eritrea had hundreds of thousands of victims.

     But the cause of Eritrean liberation enjoyed almost no international support, although no one disputed the fact that Emperor Haile Selassie had illegally annexed the region in 1962. But the strategic importance of Ethiopia was too great to risk a conflict with the Addis Ababa government over the issue of Eritrea. And the Organization for African Unity (OAU) and the UN were worried that allowing the creation of an independent state would unleash questions about borders all across the African continent, leading to bloody conflicts. Israel supported Ethiopia to prevent the creation of an independent Eritrea, and both the USA (1953-1977) and the Soviet Union (after 1977) supplied Ethiopia with modern weaponry to suppress the Eritreans by force.

     Both super powers were concerned about the territorial integrity of Ethiopia and its access to the Red Sea. Control of Eritrea meant control over the entrance to the Suez Canal as well as the Indian Ocean. And near the region as well were the oil fields of Arabia. Only a few Arab and Islamic states gave limited support to the Eritreans, mostly to the ELF, to support the creation of an Islamic state in Eritrea.

     An entire generation of Eritreans grew up during the war, which became their "normal daily life". There was little protection for civilians from the air bombardments. The war brought fear and suffering to the people: repression, abuse of human rights, murder, mass executions, torture, prison, robbery, forced relocation, flight, death...

The Principle of "Self-Reliance"

     The EPLF, right from the very beginning, was not simply interested in national independence from Ethiopia, but also in a social revolution which would lay the political, social, and economic foundations for a sovereign Eritrea. In liberated territories during the war, schools were set up and parts of the destroyed infrastructure were rebuilt. According to one EPLF slogan: "With one hand we fight, and with the other we work."

     In contrast to many other liberation movements during the Cold War, the EPLF had to rely on its own resources. Therefore, it concentrated on work which met the needs of the people in the territories it liberated. The EPLF was not only militarily efficient, it was also competent to carry out social development. Even during the liberation struggle, the EPLF introduced great democratization and instilled a sense of "self- reliance", a trust in your own strength, in the people. In small workshops (often underground to escape air attacks), local raw materials were transformed into a variety of goods, in line with this principle of self-reliance. These helped meet the daily needs of both the fighters and the population, as everything from textiles to medical supplies were produced.

     In addition to their own hospitals, Eritreans also relied on hundreds of "barefoot doctors". The education system introduced by the EPLF, in addition to political instruction, gave formal instruction in the languages of Tigrinya, Arabic, and English. A broad literacy campaign was carried out. The EPLF also worked for the emancipation of women.

Independence

     The political and military destabilization of the Mengistu regime at the end of the 1980s was partly due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc. The Soviet Union cut back and then eliminated military aid to Ethiopia. Economic misery, high defense expenditures, a population exhausted by war, and a demoralized army all combined to bring down the Mengistu regime. After Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe in 1991, a united front comprised of the TPLF (Tigrian People's Liberation Front) and the EPDM (Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement) - the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) – seized power in Ethiopia. Eritrea, no longer under the Addis Ababa government since 1991, gained independence following a referendum in 1993. An overwhelming majority of the population (99.8voted for independence. On May 24, 1993, Eritrea was proclaimed a sovereign state, the 52nd in Africa and the 192nd in the world. There was then a close and cordial relationship with the new transitional government in Ethiopia.

     In the meantime, a new Constitution was drafted to guarantee democracy and freedom of the press, equality between men and women, and an end to ethnic and religious discrimination. The government saw its role as creating a democratically legitimate and socially just political, social, and economic order, and to pursue foreign relations which would allow Eritrea to avoid future hostilities. In terms of economic policy, a "mixed economy" was to be practiced, a combination of free market forces and a planned economy. The EPLF in 1987 abandoned Marxism-Leninism  in its political program and has since adopted a mixture of planned and market systems.

     The EPLF has solid support among the population. The bloody civil war brought the Eritrean people together; there is hardly a family in Eritrea which did not lose a member during the conflict. The political territory of Eritrea, as in Ethiopia, is made up of many national groupings. Some ethnic groups living in Eritrea extend beyond the nation's borders.

     There are nine ethnic groups among Eritrea's ca. 3.5 million people. The largest group are the Tigrinya (ca. 50f the population; many are farmers) who live in the highlands, followed by the Tigre (mostly nomadic), the Afar, the Bilen, the Hadareb, the Kunama, the Nara, the Rashida, and the Saho. In the cities, there are many Indians, Arabs, and Italians. As for religion, about half are Muslim and the other half Christian (95 optic-Orthodox, 5 atholic or Protestant), while about 1 ractice traditional African religions.

     Despite the great variety of groups in the country, the period following the 1961 annexation created a sense of national belonging as the struggle for Eritrean independence developed. During its 1994 Congress, the EPLF transformed itself into the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). Step by step, the party and the government will become separate. President Issayas Afeworki was elected with 99 out of 104 votes during the May 21, 1993 National Assembly. Afeworki is also Chair of the State Council, President of the National Assembly, and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. The one-chamber parliament, the National Assembly, consists of 150 representatives (75 freely elected, 75 from the central council of the PFDJ, the latter including at least 10 women). Independent Eritrea's first elections are planned for 1997.

     Eritrea is divided into 10 provinces. Each is headed by a Governor appointed by the President, and all Governors are members of the State Council.

"The Liberation of Women Is the Foundation of Our Revolution"

     The emancipation of Eritrean women was greatly increased by their participation in the liberation struggle. From the very beginning, the EPLF assigned a central role to the question of women. Now in Eritrea, women can attend normal schools. The acceptance of women by men in the society has grown. Women enjoy the benefits of training and education (whereas before they were expected to stay at home). Women in rural areas have benefited from literacy campaigns and the building of schools. 40f the EPLA (Eritrean People's Liberation Army) were women fighters. Neither the achievements of the EPLF nor the building up of the country nor the military successes of the liberation struggle would have been possible without the active participation of women.

     In free Eritrea, women occupy all possible functions and positions, from Central Committee members to military commanders, from heads of villages to mechanics. In the EPLA, women were found at all levels of the leadership. Women occupy 11f the positions in the Central Committee.

     The liberation of women has also changed the lives of men in Eritrean society. The NUEW (National Union of Eritrean Women) demands that women have free choice of their life partners, access to birth control, and better child care. Women play active roles in all sectors of society. Within the EPLF, a process of emancipation took place which prepared women to take on all functions in the society. This process may take longer within the general population, and it won't be easy. But the consciousness which has been created up until today is a great step forward for women.

Eritrea's Future

     There are good signs that Eritrea could be a "model for Africa". The liberation movement, through its decades of struggle, produced "good cadres", for example in the health sector, who under better conditions could make even more use of their skills. Around 600,000 Eritreans received higher education in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Such qualified experience will be of great benefit when it comes to rebuilding the country.

     The primary goal of the government is to make use of existing industrial traditions, the already existing production sectors, and to expand the already rooted crafts trades. The major difficulty in the reconstruction will be food production and the rehabilitation of the agricultural sector. But there are hopeful signs. Food prices have already come down, and the roads, heavily damaged during the war, can now be traveled safely once again. Education and medical care are free in Eritrea. In order to facilitate land reform, at the present time only the state may own land tracts.

     There are several social and economic problems which remained to be solved. Hundreds of thousands of refugees need to be brought back home and reintegrated into the society. Tens of thousands of war veterans and former guerrilla fighters need to find new types of employment.

     When the Eritreans fought for independence, there were about 2.5 million people in the country. Another 500,000 had fled to fundamentalist Sudan. Hundreds of thousands more were in other African countries and on other continents. At the present time, the Sudan is causing problems for Eritrea. The fundamentalist state is trying to win influence over the Eritrean refugees. Islamic Jihad fighters are recruited from the refugee camps and small armed units are trained for terrorist attacks inside Eritrea. In response, Eritrea has broken off diplomatic ties with the Sudan.

Conclusion

     Many former guerrilla fighters have since become farmers in the new Eritrea. They no longer carry weapons. All men and women are required to give two years of national service, repairing roads and building schools and hospitals. There is no resistance to this plan by the government. "Many of us feel guilty for not having fought in the liberation struggle," say many Eritreans who live abroad.

     Born in 1991, Eritrea is a new hope for Africa, as is the new Ethiopia. Both deserve our full support.

(Translated by Arm The Spirit from 'Kurdistan Report' Nr. 9/10 - 1996)

 http://www.etext.org/Politics/Arm.The.Spirit/Guerrilla/Africa/eritrea

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More Robert Kaplan: Development, not poverty, causes upheaval and terrorism.
Current mood: productive

February 23, 2002

Editor's Note:  We have edited the interview in this transcription for clarity and readability.
The original real audio interview may be heard on our Ask The Expert page.

From Financial Sense Online http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Kaplan.htm

JIM:   Joining me on the program is Robert Kaplan. He is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the best-selling author of seven previous books on travel and foreign affairs that have been translated into many languages, including Balkan Ghosts, The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth  and The Coming Anarchy. We are here to discuss Robert’s new book called Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos. Robert I want to talk about something that President Bush said in his State of the Union Address. He said, “We live in dangerous times.” What can you tell us about the world that we live in today, especially with all your travel? Do you agree?

ROBERT:   What I can tell you is it is development, not poverty, that causes upheaval and terrorism. Poverty is in fact, very stabilizing. But, if you look at the decades in France, before the French Revolution and the decades in Mexico before the Mexican Revolution, you will find there were periods of uncommon economic growth and social change. What happens is that development leads to rising expectations that overwhelm governments and regimes and lead to tumultuous change. It is precisely because we have seen so much dramatic uplifting development with the creation of new middle classes in places as far flung as Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil, etc. We are probably in for about a decade or so of really tumultuous, sometimes violent, political upheaval. Remember that the terrorist of September 11^th and the recent suicide bombers in Israel were not sons of poverty. They were all sons of the new middle class.

JIM:   Now in your previous book, The Coming Anarchy, you talked about how we live in a bifurcated world. Part of the world is healthy and well fed and then there is the other part of the world that is poor, brutal and short. What does this portend for the future for rest of the world?

ROBERT:   Well, it’s not just that the world is separated or bifurcated between rich and poor. Even in poor countries in the poorest parts of Africa, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. You have little communities on the coast of Ghana, where you have wealthy families hooked up to satellite television and private security guards. Then you have all kinds of tribal violence in the north. Again, it is because the world economy grew at such a fast, dramatic rate over the past decade or two, and because capitalism, by its nature, is uncontrollable. The more dynamic the capitalistic expansion, the greater the disparity. It is from the disparity that we are going to get all the political upheaval for the next few years.

JIM:   We have seen great sources of stress in the undeveloped world, which has the greatest population growth. How does this shape up in terms of battle for the earth’s resources? I am thinking of some of the environmental stresses that we have seen, whether it is water or natural resources.

ROBERT:   Well, first, keep in mind that while the world population as a whole is aging, we are going to see what is called “demographic youth bulges.” We will see the explosion of the population of young males between the ages of 15 and 30 in several dozen of the most unstable countries to begin with, over the next few years. If you think about it, it is that age group that causes political upheaval. China is the best example of your question. You now have two-thirds of the Chinese population living in environmentally fragile areas. There are places where human beings never lived in economic concentrations before. Even if you have a continuation of the same weather and seismic patterns, with the same kinds of floods etc., you are going to see a lot of instability because of weather patterns that have continued through history. But never before in history have these areas been populated in such urban concentration.

JIM:   It was readily thought, at least when the Cold War ended, that it was going to usher in this world of great peace. The media has given the illusion of this peace. Most of the major powers have reduced their standing armies, including the United States. Robert, we now live in an entertainment-oriented society. We seem to be almost numb and blind to the various conflicts that we see around the globe.

ROBERT:   This is the most dangerous time in history. Although the U.S. power is greater proportionally than the British Empire or the Roman Empire ever was, the asymmetry is also exaggerated. In other words, because of the technological era that we live in, you could have a group of ten or twelve people who can unleash a chemical agent that could ruin an entire city in the American Mid-West. So, it takes relatively little to really harm us. It is a very dangerous time in history. I can’t think of a more challenging time for leadership. There is this illusion of safety and prosperity, somewhat shattered by September 11^th, but not completely. What happened on September 11^th is at least, theoretically, small stuff compared to what can happen.

JIM:   In your book Warrior Politics, you draw a sharp distinction between what we call realism and idealism in dealing with foreign affairs. Where, in your opinion, is America today?

ROBERT:   Well, first of all, realism has a specific definition in foreign affairs. Here are a few parts of the definition. Realism in foreign affairs assumes that domestic politics operates within the confines of law. Foreign policy, though, operates in a lawless realm. The kind of morality we apply overseas in dealing with our adversaries is a more limited, sadder morality than we apply at home. Realism also means that all moral questions of human rights, democracy, etc. are ultimately questions of power. Realism assumes that sometimes you have to perpetrate a certain amount of evil in order to do a greater amount of good. These are all aspects of realism in foreign affairs. I think the United States, right now, under President Bush, is what I would call a classically realist foreign policy.

JIM:   In your opening chapter, you state something that I thought was fascinating. You talk about the fact that the evils of the 20th century arose from populous movements that were monstrously exploited in the name of Utopian Ideals. They had their power amplified by new technologies, but also, as we go forward into the 21^st century, we see populous movements springing up all over the world.

ROBERT:   Yes! Remember that the Nazis and the Communists were Utopians. They had this idea of the perfect society. They could only implement it through coercion and force. Without the tools of the industrial revolution: trains, tanks, aircraft carriers, railway grids, factories, etc., they never could have done the evils that they did. It was kind of a Utopianism married to the technology of the age that created these horrible regimes.

JIM:   I wonder if you might explain how the role of the Islamic fundamentalism plays in this old world.

ROBERT:   Remember, Islamic fundamentalism is partly an outgrowth of urbanization. For decades, the Muslim societies have experienced a tremendous growth of cities as part of globalization. When people left their age old patterns in the villages, where the religion was traditional, non-ideological, they moved into these vast cities and they needed to keep the family structure together. Religion became more intense, more ideological, more of fear. So while it solved the problem of crime in the cities and kept families together, it also provided a very fertile petri dish for the emergence of diseased germs, like terrorists. So, precisely because we live in an urbanized world, what we have now is a new/old phenomenon of political Islam. I think that ultimately in the first few decades of this century, we are going to see the implosion of political Islam, because there is no Islamic way to fix a car. You either have just the absolute repression of the Taliban or the economic incompetence of the Ayatollahs who have destroyed the Iranian middle class. I think it is interesting that the population of Iran is very pro-American, because they have actually had an experience on the ground with an Islamic revolution and it has been terrible.

JIM:   Your book, Warrior Politics, is not so much a book about what to think, but more importantly, about how to think. You say with foreign policy, that it will become more of an art than a science. Explain that.

ROBERT:   I don’t tell people in this book -- business leaders or government leaders -- what to do in this crisis or what to do in that crisis. I show them how to think by condensing the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, the ancient Chinese and the ancient Romans, and that many of the problems that leaders think that they are confronting for the first time, they shouldn’t be so lonely. These problems have all been confronted in the past, in all their complexity. There is a way to work through them.

JIM:   In your book, you talk about the actions and the thinking of Churchill and Chamberlain. I wonder if you might draw the contrast between the two. How the two approached foreign affairs. How they solved them or dealt with them.

ROBERT:   In Chamberlain's way of dealing with things, he did not have moral priorities, or what I call a hard-headed morality. He was unwilling to overthrow Hitler in the mid-thirties, because Hitler had been democratically elected. Whereas Churchill was willing to commit a smaller evil, like destabilizing a democratically-elected regime in Germany in the 1930’s in order to do a greater amount of good, which was to stop Hitler from taking over Europe. Churchill understood that foreign policy was messy, dirty business. Often, you have to do a certain degree of harm in order to be responsible to the millions of strangers who have elected you.

JIM:   In your forth chapter, which I thought was a very powerful one on history for today’s leaders, you talk about some of the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Thucydides. You had a quote from Clausweitz, that is, “The fog of uncertainty, a wide ranging intellect, is called for to feel out the truth with an instinctive judgment.” Isn’t that what is called for today.

ROBERT:   Yes. Domestic affairs are long drawn out processes, thorough studies of Congress, like Social Security reforms. Foreign policies in crisis events move very fast. They are often complicated and mystified by cultural differences. What is required is a mind, a very well read mind that knows history because he is often acting on instinct. In foreign crisis or in business, you often have to make decisions with only 20% of the evidence in because by the time there is 40% of the evidence, it is too late to affect the outcome. It is the more you know, the more sure you are. But the later you act, the harder it is to change things.

JIM:   I was reading your book on Churchill and I am reminded of another book that I recently read, which was The Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. Churchill was blamed for the failure of the British Army and Navy at the Battle of Gallipoli. Yet had they followed Churchill’s advice, the war, some say, could have ended much earlier. He was willing to act and force an issue based on intelligence he had.

ROBERT:   This was Churchill’s proclivity throughout his career. I don’t think it was something he learned. I think it was instinctive. In my chapter on Churchill, in Warrior Politics, I deal with Churchill as a young man. A 25 year old soldier and journalist, writing about a war in the Sudan in the 1890’s that is very similar to America’s recent war in Afghanistan. One of the things that Churchill writes about is a great power -- if it doesn’t have something to struggle for, it will slide into decadence and partisanship. In the 1890’s Britain was the financial center of the world. It was a place at peace, but it had been humiliated in Sudan because of a fundamentalist rebellion and Churchill was ready to force the issue. He would have gradually built-up forces there, despite all the dangers, in order to overthrow the regime and set Sudan on the path of good government. In fact, that is what happened.

JIM:   When you talk about the world of the Greeks and Thucydides, in many ways, does the Peloponnesian era in history represent what we see today?

ROBERT:   The Peloponnesian War, between a very big complex city/state alliance, lead by Athens verses another very unwieldy alliance of city/state lead by Sparta. It was actually a bi-polar conflict, with more similarities of the Cold War, than the era we are in today. If you look at both Athens and Sparta, each had about 50 city/states on their side. You had alliances within alliances and explaining that is very difficult. Think how difficult it will be explaining the minutia of the Cold War Alliances to someone say, 300 years from now, let alone 2500 years from now.

JIM:   It was amazing. You also wrote about another statesman. In many ways, a political philosopher, Machiavelli, like Thucydides, wrote his best work while he was in exile. Why do you think it is that Machiavellian or that term connotates a negative way of thinking in politics today?

ROBERT:   Well, actually, Machiavelli got a bad wrap during the Counter-Reformation because the Catholics were caught up with coming into power over the Protestants. Machiavelli’s enemy really was the power of the Pope. In fact, The Prince, which was his great work on politics, was not so much a work of amoral criticism as it is an instructional guide for those of us who do not accept fate or fatalism. We know that the forces that rate against us, in politics, in business, can be so strong that all the cunning is required in order to overcome them. The Prince is an instructional guide to that cunning required to overcome fate and that is why it has become a classic.

JIM:   I wonder if we could move on and talk about the importance of Hobbes’ Leviathan. You wrote something about freedom becomes an issue only after order has been restored, or we can restore order. What did you mean by that?

ROBERT:   I think the next twenty years of politics is going to prove just how relevant Thomas Hobbes, a 17^th century English philosopher was. In Hobbes’ view, the most important question is order, not freedom. Just think of it practically for a moment. If you have no order, no police, no court than any man can commit any violence against any other man. Anyone can steal someone else’s family and property and kill them. It is only once you have a certain amount of order that then you can go about the task of making that order un-tyrannical. In other words, freedom has no meaning without the protection that order implies. Throughout the world we see all these decaying, calcified regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, that are going to, in some sense or another, crumble. The real issue is not going to be holding democratic elections. It is going to be the re-establishment of some form of legitimate order in many of these countries.

JIM:   I want to talk about something I found fascinating in your book -- something I follow -- and that is the role that media plays. It is almost like they are in their own country and their own state in terms of shaping public opinion, not only the opinion of public citizens, but also the leadership. We live in an age where reason and intellect have given way to, what I call, emotions. We have the rule of the mob. What problem does this present to statesmen?

ROBERT:   The media now are generally global cosmopolitans. Their friends and colleagues live all over the world. They are less concerned with national self interest than they are with universal morality. An example is, during the 1990’s, they were much more concerned with the United States saving the lives of innocent civilians in Rwanda and Bosnia, and less concerned or felt less important, was the terrorism going on against US Embassies in East Africa, against the bombing of American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, etc.. Statesmen are more limited. They don’t have the luxury the media has with being concerned for universal human rights. Statesmen are accountable to specific populations in a specific geographical space that have elected them. They, of course, have to be more concerned with issues of national self interest than with human rights. That is what leads to the ultimate sort of conflict and tension between a world media and say someone like President Bush, whose first priority is the preservation of American power.

JIM:   Does this not present a problem, the way that public opinion is shaped? I don’t know what term I would use, but I would call it an over-sensationalism of coverage of certain news items, whether it is the death of JFK, Jr. or the death of Princess Diana. They get overly focused on a particular issue. Another example is in Bosnia.

ROBERT:   It is that the more secure we feel, the less serious the media will be. When security is taken for granted, entertainment becomes the principle medium of public discourse. Leadership becomes increasingly lonely. The President has to only concentrate on threats that the media perhaps cannot see or will not take with the same seriousness as the President.

JIM:   You wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly back in 1994, which I guess was the outcome of The Coming Anarchy. Where do you see the world today, in comparison to when you first wrote that article in 1994?

ROBERT:   I think in general the article has been born out. Many of the things I wrote about in Africa have in fact come true in the specific countries. I think that there are greater economic disparities, not only between continents, but within continents and within countries. I think that the next ten years are going to be categorized by a seamless instability in many parts of the world, a mini-chain reaction. Every place influences every other place. There are too few and too feeble global mechanisms to control things.

JIM:   Moving into the future, what form does that Leviathan take, and in particular, what role will the US play?

ROBERT:   I think that the ultimate goal over US foreign policy over the decades, say over 50 or 70 years, is to stay strong enough. We need to maneuver in a wily enough fashion to preserve our power so enough time is given for the strengthening of interlocking global institutions so that ultimately, say in 100 years or whatever, the United States can gradually receive from history. It will sort of be over taken by the global institutions that reflect their own values. The US does not have the luxury to do that now, because the UN is clearly not up to the task and we certainly do not want to give way to a power like China. We have to step up to the plate of being kind of a benevolent, imperial power.

JIM:   A lot of people would call that into question. They would resent great power politics. If we look at history, with the fall of the Roman Empire, what came in afterwards were the Dark Ages. In fact, in your book, Warrior Politics, you end with Tiberius. What was it about the Romans that they ruled for so long?

ROBERT:   They ruled for so long because they had a system. They also had a culture, which whatever its drawbacks were, was so strong and vibrant that it assimilated other cultures. Other people wanted to be like them. They wanted to speak Latin. They wanted to be Roman Citizens. I think there are some similarities between the Romans and the American. The biggest difference though, Rome was highly centralized, whereas America has a relatively weak central government and is very vibrant at the edges, in the various states and communities. This gives the United States flexibility and a dynamism that Rome lacked.

JIM:   Going forward from your years of travel, what would you say is the most important thing you learned?

ROBERT:   I think the most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems. It is impossible for the United States to micromanage solutions and development in many parts of the world.

JIM:   Finally, if you were to give a piece of advice, if you were an advisor to a president, what would you advise them on foreign policy?

ROBERT:   I would say, in terms of the war on terrorism, to keep the rhetoric stark and simple, exactly as he is doing now. Keep the policy behind the scenes extremely subtle and flexible. In other words, talk like Reagan, but operate like Nixon -- not in the Watergate sense of the word -- but I mean Nixon in his finest moments in foreign policy.

JIM:   Alright Robert, we have run out of time. I would recommend your book to any politician taking part in foreign policy, or anyone wanting to think differently about history. The name of the book is called Warrior Politics, it is by Robert Kaplan. Another book written by Robert Kaplan is called The Coming Anarchy. Mr. Kaplan, I want to thank you for joining us on The Financial Sense News Hour. We wish you the best of the day, sir.

Robert D.Kaplan's Expert Page on Financial Sense

1:05 PM - 1 Comments - 1 Kudos - Add Comment

Robert Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy
Current mood: restless

Interview

Robert Kaplan

Fall 1999

ADM's Joe Sottile interviews Robert Kaplan, author of The Coming Anarchy, for Understanding Human Security

From America's Defense Monitor http://www.cdi.org/adm/

From 1987 until 2000, the weekly television series America's Defense Monitor was broadcast on about 65 PBS and cable stations across the United States. In thirteen seasons, the series presented critical information on the military's impact on the political system, the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. Other topics include foreign policy, international affairs, armed intervention, and nuclear and conventional weapons. Individual episodes of America's Defense Monitor have received awards in major film competitions.

CDI: How would you assess the state of the world at the turn of the century? Could you identify a few trends or issues that will shake the next century?

KAPLAN: I think the world is no more stable or unstable than it has been in other times in history. But because there are now six billion of us, rather than just one billion say a hundred years ago or whenever it was, the magnitude of problems is much greater. So that the outbreak of a war has much greater consequences than it had a hundred years ago. And not only are there six billion of us, but more than in any time of history are we urbanized, so we are in big cities, so we are in need of big complex infrastructure, of sewage, of electricity, of potable water that we never had before, because people in rural settings have the ability to live of the earth to a much greater extent than people in cities and are not susceptible to price rises in food for example, because they can grow their own supplies. So where there is many more of us than in any time of history, we require much more than in any time of history. We require more from government, the more a society is the more government has to provide in infrastructure. So the same level of political instability exacts much greater consequences.

CDI: Can you identify a couple of trends, for example ethnic or religious conflicts, which do not fit in tradition notions of security challenges? Perhaps affecting the way foreign policy decision makers approach the next decade or two.

KAPLAN: For the last three hundred years, foreign policy practitioners had thought about security in terms of nation states, one nation state versus the other, one constellation of nation states competing with another constellation of nation states, and that has give rise to the notion of power politics. And that is what sort of has been the organizing principle of foreign policy the last few hundred years. That still works obviously, because there are lots of powerful nation states out there that have conflicting views of lots of things. But increasingly we see the weakening of nation states. The weakening from the top by global corporations, international trading groups, but we also see the weakening at the bottom through wars, refugee migrations, civil conflict. So increasingly we have non-state adversaries who want to kill us, terrorist groups for instance, who are not part of any bureaucratic mechanism of the state. They don't own territory; they do not have an address. So, for instance, when the U.S. government, as it did about a year ago, announced that it had destroyed the infrastructure of Osama Bin Laden terrorist network, some of the hardware and infrastructure, what did that mean? It meant that they had destroyed a bunch of blow-up tents in the dessert of Afghanistan that you and I could put back together in about two hours. So increasingly these people don't have an infrastructure that is destroyable. They only way to get them, is to kill them. So I think the more unconventional the threat, the more assassinations will come back.

CDI: What do you see as the role of military power in this kind of changing situation between traditional state actors and non-state actors?

KAPLAN: The power of the military is going to increase. There is a basic contradiction about time. We live in a age of democratization, but at the same time military and security services are increasingly powerful within governments themselves. Throughout the world we have a kind of facade of weak democratic governments that behind the scenes are being run, manipulated or incredibly influenced by various military people. The best example of that was just a week or two ago going on in Armenia where the man who was assassinated was the man who was really running the country, who controlled the military security apparatus and the elected president had just been a figure head. So throughout the world we see that, even in the United States, the military has an increasingly unacknowledged role in foreign policy decision making. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shelton, is a virtual member of the cabinet on national security decisions. This did not exist a few decades ago. The head of Central Command, General Zinni USMC, is a virtual Pro-consul for the Middle East. Nobody acknowledges this, but everybody knows it is true. And why is this so, here and abroad. Because increasingly foreign policy is technical. It involves relief and rescue operations of one sort or another, dealing with environmental emergencies, earth quakes or whatever. And the military is the only group in Washington that has the technical know-how to know how actually affect such a policy on the ground. So because they are the ones to know how to do it, they will have increasingly a role in shaping the policy itself.

CDI: What do you envision as the role for NGOs? As NGOs tend to address these problems, maybe in competition with military structures, or in competition.
 

KAPLAN: I think the importance of NGOs exists and it is growing, because there are more and more of them and like the military they are the people on the ground who know how to do things on the ground. In many of these, what I call, non-strategic humanitarian emergencies like Rwanda teamwork, etc. But I think the power of NGOs has been blown a bit out of proportion and that is because while militaries have strategic goals, NGOs do not have strategic goals. NGOs just want to save lives, like the UN. The UN is devoted to nothing except crisis prevention. It beliefs in nothing, it has no great strategic goal. All it wants to do it stop whatever fighting that is going on at any time. NGOs are similar. They have humanitarian objectives. They do not have national self-interest objectives. Therefore they are a factor, but they are not a power in their own right. In the sense that they are not competing with us, they are not competing with any other group. And NGOs in each different emergency will have conflicting goals. Have you ever noticed that when you see interviewed an NGO in Bosnia, he will say this is the most important emergency in the world, and an NGO in Rwanda will say this is the most important emergency in the world. Wherever NGOs are, they will think their emergency is the most important thing going on at the planet, but the problem is there are several ongoing emergencies simultaneously. And great powers have to pick and choose where they put their emphasis. So because NGOs do not discriminate, their importance is diminished because they do not have a defined goal.

CDI: How would you define human security (if possible) and is human security a viable framework for US foreign policy?

KAPLAN: From what I have seen around the world - I have traveled in about 80 countries, I just spend a few months traveling through the Caucasus, the former Soviet Union, some of the poorest parts of the ex-Soviet Union (Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, most recently Armenia), I traveled through Sub-Saharan Africa - human security has to do with protecting you and your family and your children. That is where it boils down to. Human beings in all these countries are not intellectuals; they do not think about human security, they do not think about universal values. The only people who think like that are the intellectuals who are interviewed by visiting western journalists and diplomats and others who go, and they like to charm people who are the most educated members of the society, and who think like they do. So there is this elite around the world that thinks about a concept called human security, but what human beings actually think about, ninety percent of them at least, is how do I get the most for me and my family or my extended family. And what I have seen of that, these people will put up with any kind of tyranny if it means a better material stability and quality of life for their immediate relatives.

CDI: What role should foreign aid play in US foreign policy, and I am thinking specifically of how it interacts with the idea of human security? If human security may not a viable framework for conducting foreign policy, what role should foreign aid then play?

KAPLAN: Foreign aid will play the same role as it always had. Foreign aid has never helped much for what it was meant for, but it has been a way that we have projected our own strategic power. Because when we give money to a certain region in the world, we have more influence in that region of the world. Because a certain amount of foreign aid is always stolen, unless patrionist networks develop which we can use in the case of an emergency. If we give no foreign aid, for instance in the area like West Africa and we give no foreign aid for ten years. Let's say there is an emergency - and a number of Americans are held hostage, or diseases are spreading there, or the Iranians are using several West African countries as a trans-shipment point for parts of nuclear weapons, or these countries are used a trans-shipment point for drugs - we will have more influence with local officials there in order to deal with the problem if we have a record of already having given foreign aid year in year out. We will have proven political commitment to the region. So without foreign aid, our ability to influence societies at a time when it is absolutely necessary for our own self-interest will be greatly diminished. I am in favor of foreign aid, but I have no illusions of what foreign aid actually accomplishes.

CDI: How would you describe America's role in globalization?
 

KAPLAN: Globalization is one of these words that become so overused, that we all become embarrassed using it because it becomes sort of a cliché. Let me use globalization in a way in which it maybe has not been used in the past. Globalization is actually a code word for a very weak anomic form of the new American imperialism. Because what is it really? It is an American, western management way of doing things. Countries that are globalized, let me take Hungary as an example. A Hungarian official bragged to me recently, said we have sold all our bags to foreigners. That means we now have to operate on an international standard. We cannot mess up our own economy the way we used to anymore. We are forced to be held to an international standard, because we not even know our own banks anymore. So that is a good thing, it is not a bad thing for Hungarian security. In other words, countries in the world that have been globalized are those places that have bought into, to some degree, of a western capitalist way of doing things. One can broadly interpret that in many ways, and because of that there will be disagreements, and perhaps even violent disagreements, within this great new area of American influence. Globalization means that basically the West won the Cold War, that our model of political development had won out to the extent that are there as yet no other specific competing models, because the area outside of the globalized roam of the world, inside the poorest parts of the ex-Soviet Union, the poorest parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, they are not offering a competing model. They are just too poor or too chaotic, to be part of this new kind of very weak anemic form of American imperialism. But it is so weak, it is so anemic, it does not even go by the name American. It goes by another word: globalization. So is this usable for us, yes it is, because not nearly to the extent that say the imperial holdings of Britain were using it for Britain. We are now at a new journey in world history. We have a new kind of undeclared imperialism, that because it is undeclared it is weak, but it is not without consequences at the same time.

CDI: In your upcoming book, "The Coming Anarchy", you describe a series of situations, states that maybe roughly described as failed states. What do you see as a responsibility of the industrialized world, or post-industrialized nations, in assisting in failed states and restoring civil society?

KAPLAN: I have an upcoming book of essays coming out, called "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War" which will be published by Random House in February. It deals with a number of topics. It deals with the part of the world, that is not part of this new globalized area. It deals with the whole problem of democracy. It deals with the whole problem mass murder. There are different essays that deal with different elements. In the first few essays I kind of describe the problem as a foreign correspondent and in the last I kind of open avenues in how to deal with them. But I think, to bring it down in a nutshell, in order for us to keep a stable world in the future we have to abandon this idea of exporting democracy. Democracy cannot be expanded; it needs natural roots to develop. It cannot be exported. We can talk about human rights, we can talk about the protection of minorities, but there are many societies around the world that are actually more stable and more prosperous without elections than because of elections. That is because these societies have no middle class, they have no working institutions, they are basically societies of world peasants in Sub-Saharan Africa or urbanized peasants as in the ex-Soviet Union. And the real challenge in these places is to start from scratch a real middle class and see it grow. Because it is only with a middle class that you have stability. The problem though it throughout history middle classes have never been started from scratch, except under authoritarian regimes. Once their sizable enough and big enough, then they tend to throw out the very autocrats that created the middle class in the first place and advance up the level of democracy. We have seen that in the southern cone of Latin America and Argentina and Chile, recent year in Uruguay, we have seen it in Taiwan and South Korea. That in societies that are so poor like Singapore, which was as poor as West Africa 35 years ago, initial prosperity can only come from some kind of enlightened despotism. After that initial prosperity, then you want to see increasing democratization, but you cannot jump start it from scratch by holding elections.

CDI: What do you think it means to be the world longed superpower, what kind of security issues or security challenges should the US be focusing on at the turn of the century?
 

KAPLAN: It means nothing more or less than it meant for the British empire at the end of the nineteenth century when there was no challenge on the horizon for the British navy. If you got up at a conference and said the navy will not be the most powerful force in the world in twenty years, you might be laughed at because you would have no proof of your argument, it would all be purely subjective. So that is what it means. It means that at this moment as we speak there is no other nation or region in the world that has information age military capabilities. But precisely because of we are so powerful, we are resented. And if history teaches anything, it is that power is fleeing, there will always be challengers.

CDI: Are there any implied responsibilities being the one superpower at the turn of the century?
 

KAPLAN: Yes, there is, like it or not. We are all stuck with each other in this world. Whatever we do affects the outside world to a much greater degree than what the people of any other nation does. So we have no choice but to be internationalist. The only intelligent argument could be about the degree of internationalism. Isolationism is simply not an option. It is a 1920s word that has no more relevance today.
 

CDI: What are some security threats you see in the future?
 

KAPLAN: In terms of concrete security threats in the future we are going to face, keep this in mind, that the spread of free markets does not necessarily mean the spread of civil society. The drug trade that goes up and down North America is an example of the success of free market capitalism. Organized crime mafias that have taken shape and power in many parts of the ex-communist world is another example of the success of free markets. So it all depends what kinds of free markets you mean. In terms of the threats we are going to face threats of all kinds of criminal groups that take advantage of globalization. They will take advantage of the spread of free markets and technology. They will take much greater advantage of it them democratic parties will around the world. We have weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical, nuclear - that are a greater threat, because they can now be used by non-state actors, meaning terrorist groups, people that do not own a country, who do not own geographical space. The chances of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, that is not a test, is probably greater now than during the Cold War. That is because during the Cold War nuclear weapons were controlled by controlled by two very conservative, stodgy bureaucracies - ours and the Kremlin. Now they are in the hands of people who have no bureaucratic control mechanisms, no real organized decision-making process of how to use them. So there are terrorist groups, there are crime and mafia groups, there are all kinds of lethal weapons, there is kidnapping which is going to be used by crime groups and others to influence the behavior of the wealthy around the world, targeted people. So increasingly, we will be attacked in the places we are most vulnerable. As I said earlier, we will be challenged for power. Somebody will challenge us and they will never challenge us in the areas where we are strong, but in the areas where we are weak.

12:48 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

what is it with penises? (for fuck's sake)
Current mood: aggravated

so. i'm sat here in bed. it's saturday night. i've blown off all my friends. in fact, i'm fired. and all for what? 1:30 am, can't even catch a cab downtown and meet them.

by the way... not my fault. i tried. the person the penis is connected to is, um... sleeping. whoo-hoo. AND i told him the story of the lazy fuck.

i guess the moral, that is to say, the punchline, of the story is that i will keep getting older and they will keep getting lazier.

1:38 AM - 6 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Oh, the trouble I've seen...

Me and national holidays... not so much. What is it, exactly? I thought it was just the biggies-- Christmas, Thanksgiving, both of which I injured my face, thanks very much. Maybe that's it. Holidays = injuring my face. If I had a digital camera, I could have posted the damn picture of my spectacular shiner I gave myself last night because I had a sudden and brief but lustful affair with the pavement.

I'm readingan article about Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I had no idea that he is 81 years old. Hopefully, the bastard will die soon. Fucker. He's a fucker. Zimbabwe used to be one of the better countries in Africa but he has driven it into the ground. Government-backed squatters steal farms and let the fields rot because they can't plow and plant them, causing massive food shortages. Ran the Indian shop managers out of the country. Long live Morgan Tsvangarai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, the only opposition.

What was my point? Oh well...

12:20 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Favorite quotes
Current mood: contemplative

"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone." --Jo Godwin

The first winter rain
And I shall be called
Traveler
--17th-century Japanese poet Basho

"I cannot help but notice that there is no problem between us
that cannot be solved by your departure." --Unknown

Currently listening : Drunken Lullabies By Flogging Molly Release date: 19 March, 2002

1:10 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

IF YOU'RE A GUY IN YOUR MID-30'S, IT'S TOO EARLY FOR A MID-LIFE CRISIS.
Current mood: perplexed

so, what's with all of the guys i know in their 30's fucking 22 year-olds (give or take a year)? I'm talking pretty much ALL of them. Celeste and I were out with a group of about 10 fabulous ladies last night, and pretty much the refrain was the same. "Yeah, he gave me a couple weeks, was really nice, and then inexplicably ditched. Now I find out he's fucking a 23 year old."

These girls are funny, smart, cute, etc. (i'm leaving myself out of that one because my humor is a bit off and i sure ain't cute!). We came to the conculsion that it's the guys doing all the leg work, so to speak.

GUYS. WAIT UNTIL YOU'RE AT LEAST 50 TO FUCK THE BIMBOS AND BUY THE TRANS-AM. OR YOU'LL HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS CYCLE WAY TOO MANY TIMES AND AT THE END OF EACH CYCLE YOU'LL JUST LOOK AND FEEL OLDER.

p.s. in case you think this is you: this is a general statement about our conversation last night about the guys we know IN GENERAL. the male characters in this blog are fictional. any similarities to any real or imagined people is purely coincidental. however, the ladies are all real.

Currently listening : How It Ends By Devotchka Release date: 05 October, 2004

12:33 PM - 4 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment