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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1357 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 10

Transnational Thursdays 10

Happy 10th TT guys, feels like some kind of accomplishment.

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading. Last week’s thread covered forgotten wars, to give a sense of how flexible it is.

Spain

Observers expected Spain’s elections to bring a right wing government into power. However, the ruling socialist PSOE did better than expected (given their recent large losses in municipal and local elections) and the far right Vox did far worse. The center right PP pulled ahead of PSOE, but Vox’s loss of 19 seats prevents the two parties from together forming a majority. PSOE and the farther left Sumar together are smaller still, but probably have better odds of finding a third coalitional partner due to Vox’s toxicity for third parties. This probably means that current PM Sanchez would need to coalition with the Basque or Catalan independence parties, who he has decent relations with but would still likely require playing to some of their demands.

Niger

Niger’s president Mohamed Bazoum yesterday announced the presidential guards had locked him inside the palace in what seems to be an attempted coup. He says the army stands ready to defend him but apparently not so - the military has now taken him prisoner and announced they’ve taken power of the country. Niger is legendary for their coups and no one would pretend Bazoum was a great leader, but coming on a string on military coups across West Africa it’s mostly just depressing.

Ecuador

Violence has been bad in Ecuador for a while now, culminating in the high profile assassination of a mayor last week. President Guillermo Lasso, who a few months ago dismissed Congress and has ruled by decree since, recently declared a state of emergency in two affected provinces suspending freedom of assembly and movement. You may remember also Honduras declaring a state of emergency after a prison riot and giving control of the prison system to the military. Ecuador has now done the same for Ecuador's own prison system following a strangely similar prison riot. Lasso has said that he will not run for reelection but his increasing authoritarianism has kept watchers skeptical.

Guatemala

As of now it looks like Bernardo Arévalo will be legally allowed to participate in the runoff election but the Attorney General has been cracking down however possible, recently issuing a police order to raid his campaign headquarters. Semilla supporters and civil society groups have been protesting in response. The US has now added several related prosecutors to the Engels targeted sanction list along with officials who participated in the politically motivated crackdown against the journalist José Rubén Zamora for criticizing government corruption.

Argentina

Argentina and the IMF are supposedly near to reaching yet another agreement to help pay back the $44 billion they took on under the previous administration. The payments were conditional on Argentina doing some fiscally responsible stuff like shoring up reserves and moderating their deficit, which they definitely didn’t do, but they have now demonstrated some reform willingness by announcing a new preferential exchange rate for export goods and raising some import taxes. This is a five month deal so it would last until a new president takes office in December.

Kenya

President William Ruto, who took office last year as a progressive champion of the poor, recently raised taxes to help Kenya pay back its debts. Coming during a period of prolonged inflation, this spurred waves of protests against the government, led by the opposition coalition Azimio and their leader Raila Odinga. Police brutality has responded in turn and things have spiraled further. The protests have grown increasingly looting-filled, but the allegations about police brutality aren’t a joke either:

More than two dozen rights groups including Amnesty International last week said they had evidence of 27 “extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions” in July alone.

Ruto has formerly offered to have a sitdown meeting with Odinga but the latter has refused. Odinga was the opposition candidate in the last two elections and feels 2017 was stolen from him (it probably was), so is now unwilling to deal with current government.

Burkina Faso

France has withdrawn its troops as well as its ambassador yesterday following the demands of Burkina Faso’s military junta. This is despite the fact that almost half of Burkinabe territory is considered to be dominated by radical groups, whether Taureg secessionists from Mali or Islamist fundamentalist groups. The conflict has been especially bad lately and over a tenth of the population has been displaced, causing the Norweigan Refugee Council to rank Burkina Faso as the world’s most neglected displacement crisis. Still, the new government has made an anti-French stance a central plank of their governance and has alo suspended French owned media channels. Following their departure from Mali, also at the behest of a military junta, France only has about 3000 troops left, mostly in Niger and Chad.

India

You may remember previous coverage of the escalating ethnic violence in the Manipur region. Opposition parties in India are now initiating a vote of no confidence against Modi for his refusal to address the conflict, which has displaced over 60,000 people. The vote is assuredly stillborn against a BJP majority.

Modi has “revealed” his plank for a third term. Unfortunately I can’t really find details but it’s completely oriented around development. India was the tenth largest economy when Modi took office and is now the fifth; Modi has promised to raise it to third place. Obligatory pinging of /u/self_made_human.

Cambodia

Cambodian President Hun Sen, who has ruled essentially since the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, claimed another landslide win a few days ago in a completely farcical election. A tragedy for the good people of Cambodia but a huge W for dedicated Hun watchers hoping for their boy to hold onto his high score:

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, 70, has been in power since 1985 – only the leaders of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, both also authoritarians, have held office longer.

I wonder if when you reach this level you feel like you’re in a competition with the other heavy hitters.

Perhaps not, because shockingly yesterday he announced his formal resignation, ending his tenure as Asia’s preeminent dictator. That said, Hun has said that he will stay on as leader of the communist party and his son - who was literally only just elected as an MP - will now become Prime Minister, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of him yet.

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What is the wider effect of Sahel countries (Niger/Burkina Faso/Mali/etc) moving away from France? Has this kinda stuff happened before?

For Burkina Faso and Mali it meant a realignment away from France and towards Russia. They both forced the French military to withdraw and instead invested more heavily in the Wagner Group. It's highly likely Niger (along with CAR, one of the last countries with meaningful French military presence) will do the same, and France has already been evacuating its citizens.

It's interesting from the perspective of a sort of quiet death of the French overseas Empire though arguably Mali was the only really important country to France because that's where they source a lot of their uranium. And even as their boots-on-the-ground presence reduces, France still exhibits significant economic control over many of these countries by their financial integration via the CFA Franc, holding a bunch of the West African countries' reserves in French banks, etc.

The real largest long term question is how this will impact the fight against ISIS/Al Qaeda/Boko Haram, which is currently the biggest security threat in the region.

Has this kinda stuff happened before?

Coups are super common in West Africa, and in Niger in particular, but I don't know if we've seen exactly this kind of large realignment. The last analogous situation might be the reverse dynamic in the Cold War, when Soviet Union sympathetic leaders like Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso were couped and replaced with pro-French leaders.

Interesting. I wonder how Macron and the French establishment, or the French public, feels about this.

If anything, it speeds up uranium mining projects in europe, like Sweden and so on. And of course there are other sources of uranium.

I have heard Thomas Sankara's name before but did not know who he was. Thanks for the comments.

I honestly don't follow France very closlely so there's probably other users who could comment better on it, but Macron definitely started with a strong Africa focus in his foreign policy, apologized to Algeria and also Rwanda for their role in the genocide, and has been trying to promote French language schools in the former Françafrique, so he's likely disapointed. He has tried to adjust accordingly though. He recently agreed to them replacing the CFA Franc with their proposed regional currency the Eco and has now announced an updated security approach of "a new, balanced relationship," drawing down troops and co-administering bases with host countries.

I really don't know how the French public feels about it. My anecdotal impression from a distance is some people were feeling like they were turning into forever wars but I could be wrong about that being widespread; I think I've seen polls that a majority favor staying in Africa. A French soldier who had been stationed in Mali once told me they had made a deal with the Taureg rebels to not crack down upon them if the rebels left their mines alone, so it sounds like their efforts against the insurgency were pretty mercenary in nature.

Sankara is an interesting guy for sure, probably one of the more successful African socialist leaders in terms of growth and HDI.

My latest Finnish news recap.

CLIMATE CHANGE TOURISM: Finland has experienced a weather pattern reminiscent of some of the past years; hot June, a fairly chilly July and (at least according to forecasts) a hot August. The temperatures for the last few weeks have been around 15–25 °C – a perfectly suitable weather for most of our cold-blooded citizens – though it has also been frequently a bit too rainy for my taste.

Thus, we have been spared the direct effects of the Southern European heatwave ravaging various countries (like Portugal, where Finnish firefighters have been sent to combat forest fires). However, this has not applied to Finnish tourists who, alongside tourists from various other countries, have been vacationing in the South – notably in the island of Rhodes, now suffering from wildfires.

Naturally, the trials of the tourists amidst the destruction have drawn scorn from the more climate-change-conscious sectors of the society. Many of the supposed visitors have now cancelled their trips, and even more scorn has fallen on those taking up cheap flights to do some disaster tourism in the stead of the cancellers. The whole discourse on the tourists instead of everyone else suffering from these effects is fairly myopic, but that’s just par for the course.

Obligatory pinging of /u/self_made_human.

You'll need to use @self_made_human instead, since the u/ thing links to Reddit accounts! Instead of being pinged, I came here the old fashioned way, in search of excellent effort posts haha.

On the topic of a vote of No Confidence in Modi, yeah, not going to happen. The BJP has so utterly consolidated power at the national level that there's no real opposition outside of regional parties. The Congress is still floundering, too obsessed with being the party of Gandhis for Gandhis to give up on Rahul and find a better contender against Modi.

I honestly have no clue how long the BJP will remain in power, Modi's quite popular, so who knows? At least Rahul is out of the running for next year's elections, to give you an idea of what kind of circus Indian politics looks like:

On 23 March 2023, Gandhi was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment by a court in Surat, Gujarat, under charges of defamation related to remarks he had made against Narendra Modi during the 2019 Indian general election campaign.[2][83] The case was filed by the Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Purnesh Modi who alleged he had defamed everyone who held the surname Modi. The judgement passed by the Chief Judicial Magistrate H. H.Verma held Gandhi to be guilty and stated that the entire "Modi community" was defamed when he had asked "Why do all these thieves have the name Modi?" during a speech comparing Narendra Modi with economic offenders such as Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi.[83] Legal experts have questioned the basis of the charge as defamation is only actionable against individuals and not a generic class of people.[2]

Gandhi's lawyers have stated that they would appeal at a higher court and have secured a one-month stay on the sentence.[84] The conviction's coming into force would disqualify him from holding any public office and make him ineligible to contest in the upcoming 2024 Indian general election.[2][85]

On 24 March, a notification was issued from the Lok Sabha Secretariat and affirmed by the speaker Om Birla which disqualified Gandhi as a member of Parliament effective 23 March, amidst differing views among legal experts on whether a stay on sentencing and conviction should lead to immediate disqualification.[86][87]

You'll need to use @self_made_human instead, since the u/ thing links to Reddit accounts!

Truly I cannot excise the Redditor inside :( On the plus side, maybe someone will stumble upon your reddir profile and find some great comments.

Incredible excerpt haha.

Great write up! I’m definitely interested in the details of the Indian development policy.

Thanks!

Modi's big picture economic strategy is clear when you see it in 3 parts across 3 terms.

  1. Govern
  2. Build
  3. Open

Govern
The first term was making India governable. Standardizing a national identity system (Aadhar), reducing corruption and keeping bureaucrats accountable to deadlines (I know 3 people close to me in different branches of the govt. None are Modi fans, but they all attested to this) and making payments fully electronic (social welfare, UPI). Even his failures indicated that direction : demonetization.

Build
This one is fairly obvious. The rates of infrastructure building this term has been insane. This also means making building easier. labor laws have been made more lax, FDI has been relaxed and long-nationalized-sectors are now being privatized/made-lean to be open to competition. Note : the removal of cushy/bulk govt. jobs (agneepath) means that Modi is inducing a lot of unemployment on purpose. It might signal optimism towards new 3rd party investment and job creation.

Open
The goal of term 3 seems to be to open the doors. If India is seen as well governed and has the infrastructure to scale, then making India incredibly business friendly should lead to a huge inflow of investment. The focus in the west is on big Indian tech cities like Gurgaon or Bangalore, but it is the hard engineering factories getting setup in tier 2 cities and previously ungovernable regions (UP) that have the greatest potential.

Ofc, the plan is just 1 piece of the puzzle. Modi cares about development, but only as long as it doesn't interfere with electoral politics. India's socialist tendencies mean that whole system hates any change that involves liberalization. This means passing a lot of unpopular laws such as removal of cushy govt. jots, even more lax labor laws and allowing the destruction of much beloved dinosaur Govt. institutions. Also, not giving in to uncomfortable unemployment by giving away handouts or creating fake jobs means that Modi will have to tolerate a strain of unpopularity & discontent before things pick up. This will be his most challenging term, by far.

I can only speak for the plan. The proof will be in the pudding.

Great details here, and I agree that the plan sounds great on the surface level, but execution is always the difficult part.

I'm impressed that Modi has managed to gain enough power to take away government sinecures and weather the inevitable backlash. Taking away the toys and spoils of the populace is always one of the hardest things to do in a democracy.

His best ideas have seen massive protests and he had to eventually withdraw them.

  • Reduced corporate taxes was reverted
  • Some temporary removal of labor laws stayed temporary. (despite there being no thing as permanent as a temporary govt. policy)
  • The amazing farm bill got slaughtered in left media around the world and lost him a few states in HUGE numbers
  • CAA and NRC saw supposedly the 'biggest protest on planet earth' and were shelved indefinitely.

When Modi is unable to break an issue into Hindu vs Muslim, he struggles to get the whole nation aligned on it. (To be fair to Modi, every leader not name Nehru/Gandhi has has struggled with this. Governing 1+ billion diverse people is hard)

What was the farm bill about? I heard about the protests but never actually understood what the policy issue was.

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