Under the cover of democracy......Joseph Massad

For decades during the Cold War, the rhetoric of US and Western European imperial power was one of promoting democracy around the world. Indeed, as the Soviet model became attractive to many countries in Asia and Africa (not to mention Latin America) ridding themselves of the yoke of West European colonialism, the US system of apartheid, known as Jim Crow Laws or racial segregation, was less than a shining example for people who just liberated themselves from European racial supremacy that was used to justify colonial rule. As is well known, it is this that prompted the United States to begin the road to end its apartheid system, signaled by the famous legal case of "Brown vs the Board of Education" in 1954, which set the stage to desegregate schools in the American South. 

But as US action around the world aimed at eliminating the recently won right to self-determination for the peoples of Asia and Africa under the guise of "Western democracy" fighting "totalitarian communism", which left a trail of millions murdered by the US and its allies (starting with Korea and moving to the Congo, to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and from Guatemala to Brazil to Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Chile, to Southern Africa and the Middle East), the cruel US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade have hardly changed this anti-democratic trend. Yet two important victories are always touted by supporters of US foreign policy on the democratic front: namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing "democratisation" of Eastern Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The US hopes that its policies in both places will guide it to achieve similar ends for those uprisings of the Arab world that it cannot crush.

Profits and impoverishment

The people of the Eastern bloc wanted to maintain all the economic gains of the Communist period while calling for democratisation. The US, however, sold them the illusion of "Western democracy" as a cover for their massive US-imposed impoverishment and the dismantling of the entire structure of social welfare of which they had been beneficiaries for decades. Thus in a few short years, and through what Naomi Klein has dubbed the "Shock Doctrine", Russia went from a country which had less than 2 million people living under the international poverty level to one with 74 million people languishing in poverty. Poland and Bulgaria followed suit. As billionaires increased and the margin of profit for US corporations skyrocketed in the former Eastern bloc, with the help of illustrious imperial organisations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the US, under international pressure, moved steadily to conclude a deal to end political apartheid in South Africa.

If the people of the Eastern bloc had to sacrifice their welfare states and their livelihoods in exchange for the outright pillage of their countries by Mafia-style capitalism, the people of South Africa were sold political "democracy" in exchange for the intensification of economic apartheid and the complete surrender of the country's economic sovereignty. While the business class became infinitesimally more racially diverse (as its US precedent pretended to do since the 1970s), the impoverished classes remained racially uniform. Today's South Africa is so saddled by debt and is signatory to so many economic agreements and protocols, that it can neither redistribute the racialised private property of the country (protected by its constitution), anymore that it can provide wage increases under its obligations to the IMF, which insists on wage "restraint". The massive racialised poverty of the country has only deepened its economic apartheid under the cover of the "end" of political apartheid.

In the Middle East, the Oslo agreements, signed around the same time that US-style democracy was being imposed on Eastern Europe and South Africa, were even worse. The Palestinian Authority moved (under US and Israeli instructions) to demobilise Palestinian civil society, which was enormously strengthened during the first intifada. Western-funded non-governmental organisations appeared on the scene in force. The NGOs co-opted the intelligentsia, the technocracy, and most of all erstwhile activists into the service of a Western agenda that rendered these foreign NGOs the new local "civil society", while Western governments financed the corrupt Palestinian Authority that continued to collabourate with the Israeli occupation. Poverty reigned supreme in much of the West Bank and all of Gaza and continues to destroy the lives of Palestinians there. Iraq, meanwhile, was being also transformed from its reduction to the stone age by US bombs into a US-imposed mafia-style "democracy" while the entire welfare benefits that existed under Saddam were withdrawn. Iraqi oil was handed over to American corporations in the ongoing American pillage and destruction of that country.

Other Arab countries, especially Egypt, were being flooded with Western-funded NGOs as the IMF and the World Bank were ensuring that local wealth is firmly in the hands of international capital and a small, local, subservient business class that supports the local dictatorships. A large number of women and labour activists, human rights and political activists, minority rights and peasants rights activists were no longer to be found defending the poor and the oppressed among whom they lived, but were now found on the payroll of these Western-funded NGOs, masquerading as civil society. While this demobilisation of Arab civil society ultimately failed to forestall popular Egyptian and Tunisian rage against two of the most corrupt regimes of post-independence Asia and Africa (or even Latin America), the US and its Saudi and Qatari allies are devising a new economic package to "support" the recent uprisings, especially Egypt's larger and much more important economy. 

Strengthening the rich

We got wind of US magnanimity early on. Indeed on the first day of the ouster of Mubarak, whom the Obama administration supported till his very last day in office (and beyond), the New York Times reported that "the White House and the State Department were already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties."A few days later, on 17 February, 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared "I'm pleased to announce today that we will be reprogramming $150 million for Egypt to put ourselves in a position to support our transition there and assist with their economic recovery," she told reporters. "These funds will give us flexibility to respond to Egyptian needs moving forward." A month later on March 16, Clinton declared on behalf of the US government that "we also think there are economic reforms that are necessary to help the Egyptian people have good jobs, to find employment, to realise their own dreams. And so on both of those tracks - the political reform and the economic reform - we want to be helpful."

Indeed preparations " to be helpful" were completed by the Obama administration and its European and Saudi-Qatari allies by May 19, the date Obama delivered his speech. He declared:

First, we've asked the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to present a plan at next week's G8 summit for what needs to be done to stabilise and modernise the economies of Tunisia and Egypt. Together, we must help them recover from the disruptions of their democratic upheaval, and support the governments that will be elected later this year. And we are urging other countries to help Egypt and Tunisia meet its near-term financial needs.

If this was not enough, Obama offered a laughable gimmick to ease the $35 billion debts of Mubarak's Egypt on the Egyptian people by "relieving"post-Mubarak Egypt "of up to $1 billion in debt and work with our Egyptian partners to invest these resources to foster growth and entrepreneurship."But relief of $1 billion must be countered with help to indebt Egypt further. So Obama, in the same breath and without irony, declares, "we will help Egypt regain access to markets by guaranteeing $1 billion in borrowing that is needed to finance infrastructure and job creation…we're working with Congress to create Enterprise Funds to invest in Tunisia and Egypt."

As the impoverishment of Eastern Europe created massive wealth for new local elites and their US and Western European corporate masters, Obama asserts that America's financial assistance "will be modeled on funds that supported the transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government finance institution, will soon launch a $2 billion facility to support private investment across the region. And we will work with the allies to refocus the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development so that it provides the same support for democratic transitions and economic modernisation in the Middle East and North Africa as it has in Europe." But this is not all, the United States will also "launch a comprehensive Trade and Investment Partnership Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa." Recognising that Saudi and American avarice was such that all oil profits have found themselves pumping the European and American economies since the 1970s to the detriment of the region itself which languished under IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies (cuts in subsidies and wage decreases for the poor, increase of subsidies for the rich, restricting the rights of the working class, ending protectionism and selling the country off to international capital, raising food prices), causing the ongoing upheavals, Obama now wants a portion of the oil profits to be reinvested within the Arab world. He explained that

We will work with the EU to facilitate more trade within the region, build on existing agreements to promote integration with US and European markets, and open the door for those countries who adopt high standards of reform and trade liberalisation to construct a regional trade arrangement. And just as EU membership served as an incentive for reform in Europe, so should the vision of a modern and prosperous economy create a powerful force for reform in the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama along with France and Britain moved quickly. At the end of May, leaders of the Group of 8 wealthiest industrialised nations pledged to send billions of dollars in aid to Egypt and Tunisia. France's Sarkozy declared that "he hoped the total aid package would eventually reach $40 billion, including $10 billion from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait". Meanwhile, Qatar has been talking to oil-rich Gulf partners about a new plan to create a Middle East Development Bank to support Arab states in transitions to democracy. Its plan has been inspired, according to newspaper reports, by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development "that helped to rebuild the economies and societies of eastern bloc countries at the end of the cold war." The projected Middle Eastern development bank reportedly envisages tens of billions of dollars of yearly lending for political transitions. Qatar is seeking the support of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for the initiative. Indeed the Saudis had already made a $4 billion grant to the Egyptians and the IMF just announced a $3 billion loan to the country. Yet, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, Mubarak's finance minister, who had been lauded by none other than the IMF as a most efficient finance minister, and who was named in 2008 by the IMF itself as chairman of its International Monetary and Financial Committee, has fled the country and was just sentenced to 30 years in prison by an Egyptian court on corruption charges. A week before the fall of Mubarak last February and before his flight from the country, Boutros-Ghali resigned his IMF position. But the IMF is not deterred. Its "help" to Egypt will continue unhindered by such trivial matters. Moreover, as part of the effort to crush the popular demonstrations and the demands for democratisation in Jordan, Saudi Arabiabudget deficit". Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (recently dubbed the Gulf Counter-revolutionary Club) had also extended, a few weeks earlier, an invitation for the only two surviving monarchies outside the Gulf, Jordan and Morocco, to join as members. also granted $400 million "to support Jordan's economy and ease its

Neutralising the poor

But if the US deal in Eastern Europe was to impoverish the majority of people under the cover of democracy so that US businesses can pillage their economies, and if its deal in South Africa was about safeguarding and maintaining the same level of racialised pillage of the country by South Africa's whites and the international business partners also under the cover of democracy, what is the form of political-economic exchange being transacted in the Arab world?

Clearly in countries where the US-Saudi counterrevolutions have triumphed, the aim is to maintain the same level of imperial pillage led by the US while pacifying the mobilised population and strengthening local elites (Bahrain, Oman, and Jordan are the primary examples here) or rescue the retinue of collapsing dictatorships (whether allies of the US or not) to lead regime transition and resume their partnership with the US politically and economically (Libya, Yemen, and even Syria are primary examples). But what about Egypt and Tunisia where a substantial number of the entourage of the overthrown regimes are also targeted by the uprisings for their corruption and complicity in the violence unleashed by the anciens regimes? It is there where the US-Saudi axis wants to focus its efforts.

Business elites who miraculously escaped formal charges in Egypt, and they are legion, have expressed much concern about demonstrations and strikes disrupting the economy (and their profits). Billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who fancies himself a supporter, if not a leader, of the uprising, and whose father and brothers were also transformed into billionaires in a few short years after they partnered with USAID during Sadat's "infitah"or "open door" policy, and especially following the US invasion of the region in 1990/91, along with many other "honest" businessmen and women are ready to carry the torch for the US in "democratic" Egypt as they had done faithfully under Mubarak. Sawiris founded a new political party and now refuses to join the ongoing Friday demonstrations, which, he claims, are weakening the economy. He recently declared that "it was wrong to accuse all of the country's businessmen of wrongdoing,"insisting that "many are honorable people who helped create jobs for Egyptians". The US and Obama have also been celebrating young business executives like the naive Stockholm Syndrome sufferer Wael Ghonim (Stockholm Syndrome is the only acceptable excuse for Ghonim's spending the majority of his famous TV interview crying and defending, rather than condemning, his secret police interrogators). Ghonim was touring the US speaking to international bankers as well as to World Bank economists, as a "leader" of the Egyptian uprising at the behest of the Google corporation itself.

But most Egyptians and Tunisians, unlike East Europeans under Communist rule, are poor already. As the main form of apartheid that rules Egyptians and Tunisians, unlike their South African black and poor counterparts under political Apartheid, is an economic and class apartheid, what then would granting US-style democracy to them be in exchange for?

The answer is simple. There is an increasing understanding among US policy makers that the US should ride the democratic wave in the region in those countries where it cannot crush it, and that in doing so, it should create political conditions that would maintain the continued imperial pillage of their economies at the same rate as before and not threaten them. Saudi money followed by American money and IMF and World Bank plans and funds are all geared to supporting the business elites and the foreign-funded NGOs to bring down the newly mobilised civil society by using the same neoliberal language of structural adjustment pushed by the IMF since the late 1970s. Indeed, Obama and his business associates are now claiming that it is the imposition of more neoliberal economic policies that is the main revolutionary demand of the people in Egypt and Tunisia, if not the entire Arab world, and which the West is lovingly heeding. That it is these same imperial policies, which were imposed on Poland by the IMF (and produced Solidarnosc in 1980), and ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union, as they marched onwards to impoverish the entire globe, with special attention to Africa, the Arab World, and Latin America, is glossed over as socialist whining. In this sense, the US will ensure that the same imperial economic policies imposed by international capital and adopted by Mubarak and Ben Ali will not only be maintained, but will be intensified under the cover of democracy.

Moves to limit economic protests and labour strikes are ongoing in Egypt and Tunisia. Once elections are held to bring about a new class of servants of the new order, we will hear that all economic demands should be considered "counterrevolutionary"and should be prosecuted for attempting to "weaken" if not "destroy" the new "democracy". If, as is becoming more apparent, the US strikes alliances with local Islamist parties, we might even hear that economic protests and opposition to neoliberal imperial economic policies are "against Islam." The US-imposed "democracy" to come, assuming even a semblance of it will be instituted, is precisely engineered to keep the poor down and to delegitimise all their economic demands. The exchange that the US hopes to achieve by imposing some form of liberal political order on Egypt and Tunisia is indeed more, not less, imperial pillage of their economies and of the livelihoods of their poor classes, who are the large majority of the population. The ultimate US aim then is to hijack the successful uprisings against the existing regimes under the cover of democracy for the benefit of the very same local and international business elites in power under Mubarak and Ben Ali. How successful the US and its local allies will be will depend on the Egyptian and Tunisian peoples.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

The great land grab: India's war on farmers.....Vandana Shiva

"The Earth upon which the sea, and the rivers and waters, upon which food and the tribes of man have arisen, upon which this breathing, moving life exists, shall afford us precedence in drinking."
- Prithvi Sukta, Atharva Veda

Land is life. It is the basis of livelihoods for peasants and indigenous people across the Third World and is also becoming the most vital asset in the global economy. As the resource demands of globalisation increase, land has emerged as a key source of conflict. In India, 65 per cent of people are dependent on land. At the same time a global economy, driven by speculative finance and limitless consumerism, wants the land for mining and for industry, for towns, highways, and biofuel plantations. The speculative economy of global finance is hundreds of times larger than the value of real goods and services produced in the world.

Financial capital is hungry for investments and returns on investments. It must commodify everything on the planet - land and water, plants and genes, microbes and mammals. The commodification of land is fuelling the corporate land grab in India, both through the creation of Special Economic Zones and through foreign direct investment in real estate.

Land, for most people in the world, is Terra Madre, Mother Earth, Bhoomi, Dharti Ma. The land is people's identity; it is the ground of culture and economy. The bond with the land is a bond with Bhoomi, our Earth; 75 per cent of the people in the Third World live on the land and are supported by the land. The Earth is the biggest employer on the planet: 75 per cent of the wealth of the people of the global south is in land.

Colonisation was based on the violent takeover of land. And now, globalisation as recolonisation is leading to a massive land grab in India, in Africa, in Latin America. Land is being grabbed for speculative investment, for speculative urban sprawl, for mines and factories, for highways and expressways. Land is being grabbed from farmers after trapping them in debt and pushing them to suicide.

India's land issues

In India, the land grab is facilitated by the toxic mixture of the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the deregulation of investments and commerce through neo-liberal policies -  and with it the emergence of the rule of uncontrolled greed and exploitation. It is facilitated by the creation of a police state and the use of colonial sedition laws which define defence of the public interest and national interest as anti-national.

The World Bank has worked for many years to commodify land. The 1991 World Bank structural adjustment programme reversed land reform, deregulated mining, roads and ports. While the laws of independent India to keep land in the hands of the tiller were reversed, the 1894 Land Acquisition Act was untouched.

Thus the state could forcibly acquire the land from the peasants and tribal peoples and hand it over to private speculators, real estate corporations, mining companies and industry.

Across the length and breadth of India, from Bhatta in Uttar Pradesh (UP) to Jagatsinghpur in Orissa to Jaitapur in Maharashtra, the government has declared war on our farmers, our annadatas, in order to grab their fertile farmland.

Their instrument is the colonial Land Acquisition Act - used by foreign rulers against Indian citizens. The government is behaving as the foreign rulers did when the Act was first enforced in 1894, appropriating land through violence for the profit of corporations - JayPee Infratech in Uttar Pradesh for the Yamuna expressway, POSCO in Orissa and AREVA in Jaitapur - grabbing land for private profit and not, by any stretch of the imagination, for any public purpose. This is rampant in the country today.

These land wars have serious consequences for our nation's democracy, our peace and our ecology, our food security and rural livelihoods. The land wars must stop if India is to survive ecologically and democratically.

While the Orissa government prepares to take the land of people in Jagatsinghpur, people who have been involved in a democratic struggle against land acquisition since 2005, Rahul Gandhi makes it known that he stands against forceful land acquisition in a similar case in Bhatta in Uttar Pradesh. The Minister for the Environment, Mr Jairam Ramesh, admitted that he gave the green signal to pass the POSCO project - reportedly under great pressure. One may ask: "Pressure from whom?" This visible double standard when it comes to the question of land in the country must stop.

Violation of the land

In Bhatta Parsual, Greater Noida (UP), about 6000 acres of land is being acquired by infrastructure company Jaiprakash Associates to build luxury townships and sports facilities - including a Formula 1 racetrack - in the guise of building the Yamuna Expressway. In total, the land of 1225 villages is to be acquired for the 165km Expressway. The farmers have been protesting this unjust land acquisition, and last week, four people died - while many were injured during a clash between protesters and the police on May 7, 2011. If the government continues its land wars in the heart of India's bread basket, there will be no chance for peace.

In any case, money cannot compensate for the alienation of land. As 80-year-old Parshuram, who lost his land to the Yamuna Expressway, said: "You will never understand how it feels to become landless."

While land has been taken from farmers at Rs 300 ($6) per square metre by the government - using the Land Acquistion Act - it is sold by developers at Rs 600,000 ($13,450) per square metre - a 200,000 per cent increase in price - and hence profits. This land grab and the profits contribute to poverty, dispossession and conflict.

Similarly, on April 18, in Jaitapur, Maharashtra, police opened fire on peaceful protesters demonstrating against the Nuclear Power Park proposed for a village adjacent to the small port town. One person died and at least eight were seriously injured. The Jaitapur nuclear plant will be the biggest in the world and is being built by French company AREVA. After the Fukushima disaster, the protest has intensified - as has the government's stubbornness.

Today, a similar situation is brewing in Jagatsinghpur, Orissa, where 20 battalions have been deployed to assist in the anti-constitutional land acquisition to protect the stake of India's largest foreign direct investment - the POSCO Steel project. The government has set the target of destroying 40 betel farms a day to facilitate the land grab. The betel brings the farmers an annual earning of Rs 400,000 ($9,000) an acre. The Anti-POSCO movement, in its five years of peaceful protest, has faced state violence numerous time and is now gearing up for another - perhaps final - non-violent and democratic resistance against a state using violence to facilitate its undemocratic land grab for corporate profits, overlooking due process and the constitutional rights of the people.

The largest democracy of the world is destroying its democratic fabric through its land wars. While the constitution recognises the rights of the people and the panchayats [village councils] to democratically decide the issues of land and development, the government is disregarding these democratic decisions - as is evident from the POSCO project where three panchayats have refused to give up their land.

The use of violence and destruction of livelihoods that the current trend is reflecting is not only dangerous for the future of Indian democracy, but for the survival of the Indian nation state itself. Considering that today India may claim to be a growing or booming economy - but yet is unable feed more than 40 per cent of its children is a matter of national shame.

Land is not about building concrete jungles as proof of growth and development; it is the progenitor of food and water, a basic for human survival. It is thus clear: what India needs today is not a land grab policy through an amended colonial land acquisition act but a land conservation policy, which conserves our vital eco-systems, such as the fertile Gangetic plain and coastal regions, for their ecological functions and contribution to food security.

Handing over fertile land to private corporations, who are becoming the new zamindars [heriditary aristocrats], cannot be defined as having a public purpose. Creating multiple privatised super highways and expressways does not qualify as necessary infrastructure. The real infrastructure India needs is the ecological infrastructure for food security and water security. Burying our fertile food-producing soils under concrete and factories is burying the country's future.

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993.

Is the United States in decline?.......By JOSEPH S. NYE

Is the United States in decline? Many Americans think so, and they are not alone. A recent Pew poll showed that pluralities in 13 of 25 countries believe that China will replace the U.S. as the world's leading superpower. But describing the future of power as inevitable American decline is both misleading and dangerous if it encourages China to engage in adventurous policies or the U.S. to overreact out of fear.

How would we know if the declinists are correct or not? First, one must beware of misleading metaphors of organic decline. Nations are not like humans with predictable life spans.

After Britain lost its American colonies at the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole lamented Britain's reduction to "as insignificant a country as Denmark or Sardinia." He failed to foresee that the industrial revolution would give Britain a second century of even greater ascendancy. Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power.

It is also chastening to remember how wildly exaggerated were American estimates of Soviet power in the 1970s and of Japanese power in the 1980s. Today some confidently predict the 21st century will see China replace the U.S. as the world's leading state, while others equally confidently argue that the 21st century will be the American century. A fair assessment is difficult because there is always a range of possible futures.

On American power relative to China, much will depend on the often underestimated uncertainties of future political change in China. China's size and high rate of economic growth will almost certainly increase its relative strength vis-a-vis the U.S. This will bring it closer to the U.S. in power resources, but doesn't necessarily mean that it will surpass the U.S. as the most powerful country.

Even if China suffers no major domestic political setback, many current projections are based simply on GDP growth. They ignore U.S. military and soft-power advantages, as well as China's geopolitical disadvantages in Asia. America is more likely to enjoy favorable relations with its neighbors, allies like Europe and Japan, as well as India and others.

My best estimate is that, among the range of possible futures, the more likely is one described by Lee Kuan Yew as China giving the U.S. "a run for its money," but not passing it in overall power in the first half of this century.

Looking back at history, the British strategist Lawrence Freedman notes two features that distinguish the U.S. from the dominant great powers of the past: American power is based on alliances rather than colonies, and it is associated with an ideology that is flexible and to which America can return even after it has overextended itself. Looking to the future, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton argues that America's culture of openness and innovation will keep it central in an information age when networks supplement, if not fully replace, hierarchical power.

On the question of absolute rather than relative American decline, the U.S. faces serious problems in areas like debt, secondary education and political gridlock. But solutions exist. Among the possible negative futures are ones in which the U.S. overreacts to terrorist attacks by closing inwards and thus cuts itself off from the strength that it obtains from openness.

But there are answers to major American problems that preoccupy us today, such as long-term debt (see the recommendations of recent deficit commissions) and political gridlock (for example, changes in redistricting procedures to reduce gerrymandering). Such solutions may remain forever out of reach, but it is important to distinguish situations where there are no solutions from those that could in principle be solved.

America is likely to remain more powerful than any single state in the coming decades. At the same time, we will certainly face a rise in the power resources of many others—both states and nonstate actors. We will also face an increasing number of issues to which solutions will require power with others as well as power over others. Our capacity to maintain alliances and create networks will be an important dimension of our hard and soft power.

Rather than succumb to self-fulfilling prophecies of inevitable decline, we need a vision that combines domestic reforms with smart strategies for the international deployment of our power in an information age.

 

Mr. Nye is a professor at Harvard and author of "The Future of Power" (Public Affairs, 2011).

Talk of India as future great power unavoidable......Joseph S. Nye Jr

Last year, the leaders of all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council visited India, accompanied by delegations of business leaders. The Indian economy has been growing at more than 8 percent annually, making it increasingly attractive for trade and investment. When President Barack Obama visited in November, he supported permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council for India. So did British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. But the last to visit, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, said nothing at all about it.

Official pronouncements stress friendly relations between India and China, and some trade analysts argue that the two giant, rapidly growing markets will become an economic "Chindia." When Wen visited several years ago, he signed a comprehensive five-year strategic cooperation pact. As Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put it at the time, "India and China can together reshape the world order."

Such statements reflect a considerable change from the hostility that bedeviled Indian-Chinese relations following the 1962 war over a disputed border in the Himalayas. Nevertheless, strategic anxiety lurks below the surface, particularly in India.

China's GDP is three times that of India's, its growth rate is higher, and its defense budget has been increasing. The border dispute remains unsettled, and both countries vie for influence in neighboring states such as Myanmar. And, in recent years, China has worked behind the scenes to prevent permanent Security Council membership from conveying great-power status on India.

But talk of India as a future great power is unavoidable, and some Indians predict a tripolar world, anchored by the U.S., China, and India, by mid-century. Vijay Joshi of Oxford argues that "if we extrapolate present trends, India will have the world's third largest national income (after the U.S. and China) within 25 years."

After market-oriented reforms in the early 1990s, growth rates soared, with projections of double-digit growth in the future. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times calls India a "premature superpower" -- a country with low living standards but a huge economy. He thinks that the Indian economy will be bigger than Britain's in a decade and bigger than Japan's in two. India has an emerging middle class of several hundred million, and English is an official language, spoken by up to 100 million people. Building on that base, Indian information industries are able to play a major global role.

India has significant hard-power resources as well, with an estimated 60-70 nuclear weapons, intermediate-range missiles, 1.3 million military personnel, and annual military expenditures of nearly $30 billion, or 2 percent of the world total. In terms of soft power, India has an established democracy, and a vibrant popular culture with transnational influence. India has an influential diaspora, and its motion picture industry, "Bollywood," is the largest in the world in terms of the number of films produced yearly, outcompeting Hollywood in parts of Asia and the Mideast.

At the same time, India remains very much an underdeveloped country, with hundreds of millions of illiterate, destitute citizens. Around one-third of Indians live in conditions of acute poverty, and India accounts for roughly one-third of the world's poor. India's GDP is $3.3 trillion compared to China's $5 trillion, and is 20 percent that of the United States. India's per person income of $2,900 (in purchasing-power-parity terms) is one-half of China's and one-fifteenth that of the U.S.

Even more striking, while 91 percent of the Chinese population is literate and 43 percent is urban, the numbers for India are only 61 percent and 29 percent. Each year, India produces about twice as many engineering and computing graduates as America, but The Economist reports that "only 4.2 percent are fit to work in a software product firm, and just 17.8 percent are employable by an IT services company, even with six months training."

A symptom of this is India's poor performance in international comparisons of universities. The 2009 Asian University Rankings, prepared by the higher education consultancy QS, shows the top Indian institution to be the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, at No. 30. Ten universities in China and Hong Kong are ranked higher. High-tech exports are only 5 percent of India's exports, compared to 30 percent for China.

India is thus unlikely to develop the power resources to become an equal to China in the next decade or two.

Indian officials are generally discrete in public about relations with China, but in private their concerns remain intense. Rather than becoming an ally, India is more likely to become one of the Asian countries that will tend to balance China's strategic rise.

 

Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a professor at Harvard University. His new book, "The Future of Power," will be published in February.

The Arab Spring and Europe's turn........Ana Palacio

Until now, and with few exceptions, the West has nurtured two distinct communities of foreign policy specialists: the development community and the democratic community.

More often than not, they have had little or no connection with one another: development specialists dealt comfortably with dictatorships and democracies alike, believing that prosperity can best be created by concentrating exclusively on economic issues and institutions.

The consequences of this approach have a special resonance in the Arab world today. But, as the recent United Nations Security Council debates on the Arab Spring have shown, it is not the major emerging countries that will influence events in the region.

Brazil has barely uttered a word in reaction to the region's tumult, while Russia and China have little taste for sanctions against Libya in light of their own autocratic governments.

All of this adds up to a unique opportunity for the European Union to support its neighbours' transition from revolutionary upheaval to democratic government. At the same time, we need to promote the progress of other regimes in the region toward inclusive democracy. Indeed, the EU is their natural partner in this endeavour.

Since the launch of the Barcelona Process in 1995, EU Mediterranean policy has been criticised for not linking financial aid to democratic reform, and for giving priority to European concerns like immigration, security, and cooperation on counter-terrorism.

At the same time, EU policy has sidelined clear southern priorities, like opening up Europe's agriculture and textile markets. The result is that the vision of the official Euro-Mediterranean Policy (EMP) has lagged far behind its original goals.

Europe should shift its focus from immigration and security back to policies that reflect the original objectives of the Barcelona Declaration. The EMP's central goals were to advance a "comprehensive partnership" and political reform, and to create "a common area of peace and stability", together with a Euro-Mediterranean free-trade area.

Democracy, rule of law, human rights

Moreover, the associated MEDA funding mechanism crucially and specifically included the European Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights. This link between security, democracy, and human development has since been broken and needs to be restored through investment in good governance, regional development, and education.

The EMP evolved in 2004 into the European Neighbourhood Policy framework, and in 2007, the European Neighbourhood Policy Instrument (ENPI) replaced MEDA as the EU's main financing mechanism for Euro-Mediterranean policy.

This put human rights funding into the National Indicative Program (NIP), which encompasses 17 countries: ten in the south and seven in Eastern Europe.

Although good governance and human rights remained among the ENP's proclaimed goals, official communications of the European Commission show that it emphasised security and border control.

When the EMP was "re-launched" in 2008 under the newly established Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) to give it greater political emphasis, the result was an exercise in "realism" that further weakened the original EMP.

And, for all its high-flown language, the UfM is an empty shell. This is partly due to unfortunate timing: the UfM's launch coincided with the outbreak of the Gaza War and became entangled in the complexities of Arab-Israeli relations. But the initiative also failed to gain momentum among political leaders.

To implement the far-reaching vision of the Barcelona Process, the ENP will have to revisit the way it distributes its financial support, rebalance the funding that it provides to the EU's eastern and southern neighbourhoods, and place much greater emphasis on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.

Education remains a key area where the EU should contribute to the development of the southern neighbourhood, if only because young people are a growing majority of the Arab population.

Although many Arab states have been opening new schools and universities, and are allowing more private educational institutions to flourish, the quality of education in the region still leaves much to be desired. Religion remains a compulsory subject throughout university programs, while inquisitiveness, critical thinking, and objective analysis are all widely discouraged.

As the Jordanian intellectual and former foreign minister Marwan al-Muasher has argued, state and religious interpretations of history, science, and political values are hammered into Arab students. Wilfried Martens, President of the European People's Party (EPP) in the European Parliament and former prime minister of Belgium, recently made a similar point:

"The West is not at war with Islam. Christianity is not at war with Islam. And neither is democracy. All three, however, are incompatible with a certain interpretation which claims that the scripture is the basis upon which to build a state."

Of the Arab countries receiving ENP funds, only Egypt has channeled a high proportion - nearly 50 per cent - toward education. In any case, Europe's spending on education in the region is scattered among inter-regional, national, and thematic programs, which makes it difficult to see how these funds' effectiveness might be measured.

Europe now faces key decisions that concern both its values and its interests in the Arab world, and the reconciliation of its short- and long-term objectives.

Infrastructural investment and economic reform are crucial for the Mediterranean region's future development, but they cannot transform the region without a parallel emphasis on democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and education.

To advance both objectives, the EU must link its investment and aid programs to concrete progress on democratisation, and press for much greater accountability and improvement in reforming educational systems throughout the region.

Ana Palacio, a former Spanish foreign minister and a former senior vice president of the World Bank, is a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale University.

The mathematics of the Arab Spring........Larbi Sadiki

Egypt and Tunisia are now officially on the international donor community's radar.

The World Bank and the G8 already are already planning different ways to sponsor the so-called Arab Spring. Many Arabs are speaking out against a possible Euro-US "hijacking" or "containment" of the regional movement through this type of "cheque book diplomacy".

I will argue here that this position is not intellectually robust, and that the Arab Spring demands dialogue, not political and cultural protectionism. There is a moment of confidence across the Arab geography: Arabs can hold their own.

This bodes well for recasting Arab-West relations, as it veers away from a return to hollow views of cultural and socio-political autarchy.

Simply crying "US hands off the Arab Spring" is not the answer.

From Zoelick to Cameron

The British prime minister seems to be right on track for lending support aimed at democratic reconstruction in Egypt and Tunisia.

Cameron has earmarked £110m ($180m) for development over the next four years, echoing the G8 outlook on the Arab uprisings.

How exactly the money will be distributed and whether it will be spent on projects that support the rule of law, freedom of press and pluralism is missing from Cameron's transcript.

This new-found enthusiasm for spending generously on the Arab Spring - whether by Obama, Cameron or the "International Misery' Fund" - echoes the World Bank's April message in support of the Arab Spring.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick set the tone in favour of a participatory citizenry which will develop good governance - shorthand for the rhetoric of accountability, transparency and efficiency in the political economy of developing areas.

The sub-text: Funds for what?

There are opportunities, but also perils, in Western aid aimed at supporting the Arab uprisings. It depends on how you read between the lines - especially when the text articulates that aid donation is a function of realpolitik: the goal of which is to limit immigration and extremism.

The EU has recently been called upon to "humanise" its immigration laws; addressing this as an area of non-monetary aid so that Arabs are able to access opportunities that Europeans may be willing to offer.

As for fighting extremism, no-one is naive enough to believe that democracy alone will stamp out extremism. Likewise, aid aimed at fighting extremism can actually imperil institution-building and risk a return to mukhabarat ["secret police"] regimes that kill, imprison, torture and ignore the rule of law. This is a declarative objective of the Western financial charm offensive; such an attack was recently revealed by the G8 in Normandy.

A confused agenda whose facade is "democracy promotion" - and its substance "fighting terrorism and immigration" - will fail to achieve attention as a recipient or a donor. It will obfuscate, rather than clarify, the role played by Western governments in the "Arab Spring".

The mathematics of Arab democracy

Aside from theBritish support pledged, there are additional billions that have had a Pavlovian effect on the Egyptian and Tunisian prime ministers, respectively, Essam Sharaf and Beji Caid el Sebsi.

The aim is "good governance" without causing basket-case economies. Sharaf is seeking to offset the immense damage to the country's tourism industry caused by the uprising, while el Ssebsi has built a case based on refugee influx.

Both are also scrambling for a cut of the four billion in aid and loans to be contributed by the US.

Freer access to EU markets is another aim of both men. There is no shortage of EU cash, but the question is whether this will be as "charitable" as the aid that was invested into eastern and central Asian democratic transitions via the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

In any case, there is still much to be revealed about the reins attached to these packages when they finally see the light of day.

Zoellick's cheque book is also on offer - and there are hints of billions in World Bank funds for the Arab Spring countries. More to the point, Zoellick's rhetoric hints at creative methods that aim to fund community empowerment which would bypass the state and target the people directly through their communities instead.

Whether the shareholders in the Bretton Woods financial system - US, China, Japan, and the EU - sharpen or blunt Zoellick's creativity remains to be seen. Money, unfortunately, is not given to further only values (note the stress on values by Obama in his speech to the British parliament), but also to further the donors' interests.

Autonomy vs autarchy

Two fundamental principles must be understood in order to grasp the mathematics of the Arab Spring.

One the Arab side, return to autarchy is self-defeating. Pride and greatness have been returned to Arabness, and there is no longer any need to engage in autarchic brands of discourse. Autarchy has been the fundamental currency of dictators keen on secluding the Arab masses from the flow of ideas hostile to their own selfish rule. This has been done in the name of all kinds of ideologies.

This is the moment for spreading cosmopolitanism of good governance, moral protest, anti-authoritarian resistance, and social justice. This is a shared space - in which Arab narratives and struggles engage with like-minded currents transcending geography and time.

"Hands off our Arab Spring"-type narratives ignore the global voices and ethical forces who are joining in this emancipatory moment being ushered in. So to recoil via autarchic propositions goes against the spirit of this movement.

It is as if they are claiming that the Arab Spring has not recharged the batteries of self-confidence enough for Arab nations to engage the outside world with confidence, self-assertion and a greater capacity for self-representation.

Autarchy only reinforces Orientalist narratives that have misrepresented Arabs for so long through images of invisibility, inferiority, and an incapacity to speak back.

Conditionality in reverse

Similarly, no patronage from the Western powers is needed.

Arabs in Tunisia and Egypt have reclaimed - and in Libya, Syria and Yemen are in the process of reclaiming - the right to self-govern.

Hence the current moment demands a transition from the idea of conditionality imposed by the donors to a new conditionality, in reverse, imposed by the recipients of the funds. That is, good governance must be thought of as a two-way street: where there are equal obligations on the donor and the recipient.

The donor community has generally flouted its own rules of good governance by plugging authoritarian rule into the global financial system by way of handouts, grants, and funds. 

These have typically had much to answer for in terms of reproduction of autocracy, corrupt regimes - the likes of which WikiLeaks has revealed Western governments' intimate knowledge of - and the procurement of technology of oppression that prolong dictatorship; Mubarak and Ali are but two examples of this.

The injustice and irony in all of this is that debt incurred by non-representative regimes is still counted as legally binding, which shackles the oppressed citizenry to billions that are owed from morally questionable transactions organised by the very institutions that have preaching "good governance" since the early 1990s.

Democratisation: from mathematics to morality

A return to ethical basics and conditionality is necessary, and can acheived by these means:

• Funds and grants are to be dispensed only to governments "of the people" - which means democratically elected governments, complete with a system of legitimate checks and balances. Right now, this excludes the transitional governments of Egypt and Tunisia. Both have presented cases for billions of dollars from the funds on offer by the West, however, neither is representative of the people.
• Technical aid, materials or training for the military, police or intelligence must be in accordance with the rules of upholding democratic rule and the principles of good governance - meaning that they are subject to transparency, and with full knowledge and approval of elected parliaments and other civic bodies and institutions.
• Aid, including that given to non-governmental organisations, must not limit the choice of recipients when it comes to choosing a developmental path. It must not be subject to the values and interests of the donors whose free market economies, in this instance, are very difficult to replicate in an Arab world - the goals of which include robust sustainable development solutions and distributive mechanisms aimed at equal opportunity, social justice, and poverty eradication.
• The bulk of aid must be geared towards addressing "the two Ds": i) democratic consolidation, with the root problem of youth disaffection, loss and disenfranchisement, and ii) distribution to deal with the acute problems of marginalisation - which is the root problem of youth disenfranchisement.
• Civic-capacity building must be factored into the process of aiding Arab democracy-building. And it must include the re-training of police forces and the dismantling of the apparata of oppression one by one. Police and intelligence forces have traditionally been the enemies of the Arab populace. This must change. 

Through conditionality in reverse, good governance becomes a mutually binding contract. It will ensure that Arab-Western political and economic engagement is underpinned by ethics of shared obligations and responsibility. By doing it this way, external finances will bring relief, goodwill, dialogue and friendship instead of burdening the Arab and Western worlds with fear, distrust and acrimony.

The currency of freedom

It still remains to be seen how, and even if, the masters of world finance put their money where their mouth is. In particular, for now, no dispensing of aid must proceed until elected representatives of the people - and independent civil society groups - are in a position to deliberate and reflect freely on the terms and plans of the aid to be given.

The only given in this discussion is that the organisers of Tahrir Square and Habib Bourguiba Avenue have spoken in favour of dignity and freedom, which is the currency of the Arab Spring. There is no need to fear for these masses and their epic resistance against tyranny.

It is a resource they can, if need be, also direct towards resisting financial hegemony.

What is reassuring about the new-found morality of resistance is that it rejects autarchy. It speaks the lingua franca of freedom - which transcends geography, religion, nationality and ethnicity. It uses Western technological innovations for the purpose of self-empowerment.

On both accounts, the protesters have resisted and continue to refuse living under tyranny or on disconnected islands.

Dr Larbi Sadiki is a Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, and author of Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004).

How to exit Afghanistan without creating wider conflict......By Henry A. Kissinger

The American role in Afghanistan is drawing to a close in a manner paralleling the pattern of three other inconclusive wars since the Allied victory in World War II: a wide consensus in entering them, and growing disillusionment as the war drags on, shading into an intense national search for an exit strategy with the emphasis on exit rather than strategy.

We entered Afghanistan to punish the Taliban for harboring al-Qaeda, which, under Osama bin Laden’s leadership, had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. After a rapid victory, U.S. forces remained to assist the construction of a post-Taliban state. But nation-building ran up against the irony that the Afghan nation comes into being primarily in opposition to occupying forces. When foreign forces are withdrawn, Afghan politics revert to a contest over territory and population by various essentially tribal groups.

In our national debate, the inconclusive effort was blamed on the diversion of resources to Iraq rather than on its inherent implausibility. The new Obama administration coupled withdrawal from Iraq with a surge of troops and material in Afghanistan — an effort I supported in substance if not in every detail. We have now reached its limit.

The stated goal of creating a government and domestic security structure to which responsibility for the defense of Afghanistan can be turned over is widely recognized as unreachable by 2014, the time most NATO nations have set as the outer limit of the common effort. Polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans believe that the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan.

The quest for an alternative has taken the form — it is widely reported — of negotiations under German sponsorship between representatives of Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, and American officials. Most observers will treat this as the beginning of an inexorable withdrawal. The death of bin Laden, while not operationally relevant to current fighting, is a symbolic dividing line. Still, the challenge remains of how to conclude our effort without laying the groundwork for a wider conflict.

For negotiation to turn into a viable exit strategy, four conditions must be met: a cease-fire; withdrawal of all or most American and allied forces; the creation of a coalition government or division of territories among the contending parties (or both); and an enforcement mechanism.

Enforcement is the most crucial element and the most difficult to sustain. After decades of civil war, the parties are unlikely to feel bound by provisions of any agreement. The Taliban especially will try to take over the coalition government or breach the cease-fire. In the absence of a plausible enforcement mechanism, a negotiation with the Taliban, whose forces remain while ours leave, will turn into a mechanism for collapse.

This is particularly the case if negotiations are accompanied by withdrawals amid a public debate over accelerating the process. The more rapid and substantial the immediate withdrawal, the more difficult the negotiating process will be. We must choose our priorities.

An enforcement mechanism can be a residual American force, some international guarantee or presence, or — best — a combination of both. Total withdrawal is likely to be final; there should be no illusion of reintervention.

Although the predominant role of the United States sometimes obscures it, the outcome in Afghanistan is, in essence, an international political problem. The perception that the strongest global power has been defeated would give an impetus to global and regional jihadism. Militant Islam would be encouraged to magnify similar tactics in Kashmir or in India proper, such as the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. The end of such a process is likely to be a proxy war along ethnic fault lines in Afghanistan and elsewhere, especially between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s other neighbors would be at comparable risk if a Taliban-dominated government or region reverted to the Taliban’s original practices. Every neighbor would be threatened: Russia in its partly Muslim south, China in Xinjiang, Shiite Iran by fundamentalist Sunni trends. In turn, Iran would be tempted by the vacuum to arm sectarian militias, a strategy it has honed in Lebanon and Iraq.

The complexities of an exit strategy are compounded because relations with Pakistan and Iran are severely strained. These countries do not have the option of withdrawing from the neighborhood. If their interests in Afghanistan are not related to ours to some extent, Afghanistan will exist under permanent threat. Without a sustainable agreement defining Afghanistan’s regional security role, each major neighbor will support rival factions across ancient ethnic and sectarian lines — and be obliged to respond to inevitable crises under the pressure of events. That is a prescription for wider conflict. Afghanistan could then play the role of the Balkans prior to World War I.

Such an outcome would threaten the security of Afghanistan’s neighbors more than America’s. A partly regional, partly global diplomatic effort is needed to accompany direct negotiation with the Taliban. So long as America bears the primary burden, Afghanistan’s neighbors avoid difficult decisions. To the extent that U.S. postwar withdrawal is made explicit and inexorable, they will be obliged to take another look. The formal deadline established by NATO, the implicit Obama administration deadline and the public mood make it impossible to persist in an open-ended civil war. An immediate withdrawal largely for symbolic reasons would risk falling between all shoals. A multilateral diplomacy that defines a common international security interest proscribing terrorist training centers and terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan should be undertaken urgently. To encourage this process, a deadline should be established for reaching a residual force — say, in 18 months to two years, with the major reductions coming at the end of the process. Should a reliable international enforcement mechanism emerge, the U.S. residual force can be merged into it. A regional conference is the only way a bilateral negotiation with the Taliban can be enforced. If the process proves in­trac­table, Afghanistan’s neighbors will eventually have to face the consequences of their abdication alone.

After America’s withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and the constraint to our strategic reach produced by the revolution in Egypt, a new definition of American leadership and America’s national interest is inescapable. A sustainable regional settlement in Afghanistan would be a worthy start.

Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and is the author, most recently, of “On China.”

Has economic power replaced military might?....Joseph S Nye

At the Cold War's end, some pundits proclaimed that "geo-economics" had replaced geopolitics. Economic power would become the key to success in world politics, a change that many people thought would usher in a world dominated by Japan and Germany.

Today, some interpret the rise in China's share of world output as signifying a fundamental shift in the balance of global power, but without considering military power. They argue that a dominant economic power soon becomes a dominant military power, forgetting that the United States was the world's largest economy for 70 years before it became a military superpower.

Political observers have long debated whether economic or military power is more fundamental. The Marxist tradition casts economics as the underlying structure of power, and political institutions as a mere superstructure, an assumption shared by nineteenth-century liberals who believed that growing interdependence in trade and finance would make war obsolete. But, while Britain and Germany were each other's most significant trading partners in 1914, that did not prevent a conflagration that set back global economic integration for a half-century.

Military power, which some call the ultimate form of power in world politics, requires a thriving economy. But whether economic or military resources produce more power in today's world depends on the context. A carrot is more effective than a stick if you wish to lead a mule to water, but a gun may be more useful if your aim is to deprive an opponent of his mule. Many crucial issues, such as financial stability or climate change, simply are not amenable to military force.

Today, China and the US are highly interdependent economically, but many analysts misunderstand the implications of this for power politics. True, China could bring the US to its knees by threatening to sell its dollar holdings. But doing so would not only reduce the value of its reserves as the dollar weakened; it would also jeopardise US demand for Chinese imports, leading to job losses and instability in China. In other words, bringing the US to it knees might well mean that China would bring itself to its ankles.

Judging whether economic interdependence produces power requires looking at the balance of asymmetries. In this case, it resembles a "balance of financial terror", analogous to the Cold War military interdependence in which the US and the Soviet Union each had the potential to destroy the other in a nuclear exchange. In February 2010, a group of senior Chinese military officers, angered over US arms sales to Taiwan, called for China's government to sell off US government bonds in retaliation. Their suggestion was not heeded.

Economic resources can produce soft-power behaviour as well as hard military power. A successful economic model not only finances the military resources needed for the exercise of hard power, but it can also attract others to emulate its example. The European Union's soft power at the end of the Cold War, and that of China today, owes much to the success of the EU and Chinese economic models.

Economic resources are increasingly important in this century, but it would be a mistake to write off the role of military power. As US President Barack Obama said when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, "We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified."

Even if the probability of the use of force among states, or of threats of its use, is lower now than in earlier eras, the high impact of war leads rational actors to purchase expensive military insurance. If China's hard power frightens its neighbours, they are likely to seek such insurance policies, and the US is likely to be the major provider.

This leads to a larger point about the role of military force. Some analysts argue that military power is of such restricted utility that it is no longer the ultimate measuring rod. But the fact that military power is not always sufficient to decide particular situations does not mean that it has lost all utility. While there are more situations and contexts in which military force is difficult to use, it remains a vital source of power.

Markets and economic power rest upon political frameworks, which in turn depend not only upon norms, institutions, and relationships, but also upon the management of coercive power. A well-ordered modern state is one that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and that allows domestic markets to operate. Internationally, where order is more tenuous, residual concerns about the coercive use of force, even if a low probability, can have important effects - including a stabilising effect.

Indeed, metaphorically, military power provides a degree of security that is to order as oxygen is to breathing: little noticed until it becomes scarce, at which point its absence dominates all else. In the twenty-first century, military power will not have the same utility for states that it had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it will remain a crucial component of power in world politics.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr, a former US assistant secretary of defence, is a professor at Harvard University and the author of The Future of Power.

Can equality exist in the Jewish state?......Kieron Monks

In 2005, following the arrest of several high profile Arab politicians and lobbyists living in Israel, the Shin Bet security agency made a statement justifying their actions: "The security service will thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, even if such activity is sanctioned by the law."

The statement highlighted a fundamental tension between democratic freedom in Israel, and the need to maintain its Jewish character. Thwarting harm to that character has been extrapolated to require controls on Israel's Arab minority in many departments of society, from education to the right of dissent. The need to ensure Jewish demographic and institutional domination has prompted a raft of controversial policies and practises.

The conflict is most revealing at the level of political representation. Israel can point to the presence of 14 Arab Knesset members out of 120 as evidence of its civil rights credentials. Proportionally this is a reasonably fair reflection of a minority that accounts for 18 per cent of Israel's population; given that the Arab community habitually votes in lower numbers.

In practise, the mandate to represent Arab concerns dictates that they work against - rather than with - the rest of parliament. Knesset Member Haneen Zouabi of the Balad party is open about her role being fundamentally oppositional. "I was elected to speak for those who voted for me, not to reinforce the Zionist consensus," she says. "My role is to represent injustice and to make it more visible." Zouabi has long argued against the legitimacy of a Jewish state for allowing "institutionalised discrimination", instead favouring "a bi-national state not based on ethnicity".

She has suffered for her beliefs. After participating in the 2010 Gaza flotilla, aimed at breaking the Israeli siege, a seven to one majority voted to strip her of parliamentary privileges. Likud Knesset Member Danny Danon called for her to be tried for treason, and there were attempts to disqualify her party from elections. The hostility was so great that Zouabi was forced to travel with an armed escort. A year later she remains a pariah in parliament, branded a traitor and a terrorist-sympathiser.

Exiling civil rights

Others have suffered more. Azmi Bishara, also of the Balad party, was the leading voice of the Arab civil rights campaign. Despite attempts to disqualify him, Bishara became the first Arab citizen to run for the office of Prime Minister. Throughout his career Bishara faced numerous investigations from the Shin Bet. He was forced to resign in 2007, and went into exile abroad, in the wake of spurious charges of espionage.

Such attacks on Arab politicians are not exceptional, and some have been more serious than political expulsion. A 2002 report from the Human Rights Association of Nazareth documented nine cases of Arab Knesset Members being assaulted by security services over the preceding two years, seven of whom were hospitalised. In addition, the state had opened 25 criminal investigations against Arab Knesset Members over the same time period. 

In recent years, the Jewish majority in the Knesset have been pushing for a decisive end to the debate over the legitimacy of a Jewish state. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was able to pass a bill last year requiring non-Jewish immigrants to take a loyalty oath to a Jewish state, and is seeking to make the oath mandatory for all Knesset members.

The most significant effect of the oath is to enhance Jewish demographic supremacy. It places a fresh barrier in the path of Palestinian refugees' historic right of return, as enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, effectively terminating their claims to former homes.

By contrast, the Law of Return grants any Jew the right to make their homes in Israel without challenge. The law is supplemented by aggressive marketing campaigns in the US and other nations with large Jewish populations, often through emotive appeals to religious solidarity. Naturalising diaspora Jews has been made a formality and is often granted within 48 hours, even to those with tenuous claims to Jewish ancestry or citizens from hostile nations. Financial incentives are also offered; as of 2007, Iranian Jews making Aliyah, the so-called "return" to Israel, are entitled to a payment of $5000.

Higher education

Jewish nationalism is supplemented by a mandatory three year term in the Israeli Defence Forces. Jewish soldiers who serve are eligible for a number of benefits: a discharge payment, one-off loans of up to $3,500, and scholarships to academic institutions.

Recruitment does not extend to Arabs, who are then placed at a disadvantage in the jobs market. Najwan Beredker, a graduate in political science from the University of Haifa, quickly discovered that her degree counted for little. "I spent months looking for employment," she said. "Even for the basic service positions in shopping malls, most of the shops had a sign outside - 'after military service'. Effectively it meant 'we don't accept Arabs'." In public sector and government positions, 'loyalty' is an accepted criterion for employment. The policy helps to explain the disproportionately low Arab presence in these sectors - two per cent and seven per cent respectively.

Army service has also cemented divisions in higher education. In 2010, it was revealed that Haifa and Tel Aviv University, among others, gave preferential treatment to ex-soldiers seeking accommodation and tuition fees. Although a Haifa court had ruled the practise of favouring soldiers to be discriminatory, a central government amendment overruled the decision.

The Dirasat policy research centre in Nazareth reported the number of courses carrying an age restriction of 21 - the standard age of finishing army service - is increasing. They also report an entrenched practise of segregated accommodation for Jewish and Arab students.

The case of five-year old Tamir Hasnin in 2005 highlighted that segregation is also practised in primary schools. Technically admittance is determined solely by proximity to the institution, but Hasnin's case highlighted that ethnicity is a factor. Rather than registering him with his nearest, predominantly Jewish school, Lod Municipality enrolled him at one several kilometres away that had a higher proportion of Arab students. The Municipality justified their stance by expressing "the preference that Arab children, especially in the lower grades, attend Arab schools, in order to preserve their language and culture".

Ironically, it is one of the most long-standing grievances of Arab civil rights campaigners that they are unable to preserve their culture through control of their children's education. All schools in Israel are bound to a strictly vetted syllabus that gives close attention to material that could be taken as incitement. In 2010, a group of Palestinian and Israeli academics submitted a ground-breaking text, Learning Each Other's Historical Narrative, to the Ministry of Education. The book featured both sides' accounts of historic events on the same page with a blank column for the students own thoughts. It was immediately rejected.

Beredker, the political science graduate, received little education of her own culture growing up in Nazareth, home to Israel's largest Arab community. "In my Nazareth school I learned Jewish history but I never saw the word Palestinian," said Beredker. "Until I was 16 I had no awareness. We were even made to study our language wrong, with many mistakes in the words and grammar."

Nurit Peled, co-founder of Bereaved Parents for Peace and lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, believes that text books are selected to support feelings of Jewish superiority. "We never teach about the state of Israel, we teach the land of Israel, which includes all of Palestine. It is recognition by denial," she said.

Peled's research also revealed common stereotyping of Arabs in text books; "I could not find one picture of an Arab human being," she said. "They are all of types. They are presented as primitive terrorists or farmers who reject modernity."

Democratic rights?

History has been targeted through the signing into law of the Nakba bill this year, forbidding commemoration of the Palestinians' displacement in 1948. In practise, schools were already prevented from mentioning the term, in an attempt to prevent new generations of Arabs from becoming aware of this dark chapter in their history.

The Nakba bill also touches on another thorny conflict between the "Jewish and democratic state". A cornerstone of western democracies has always been the acceptance of dissent. By contrast, Israel's violent suppression of the May 15 marches in Jerusalem, Qalandia and Gaza, highlighted intolerance of even peaceful protest.

That intolerance has been shown consistently through the six years of non-violent Palestinian protests that began in Bil'in, the village which has suffered injury or arrest of over half of its population.

New bills proposing the criminalisation of boycott movements indicates a further step towards the intolerance of dissent, taking Shin Bet's diktat to a new extreme. Human rights groups operating inside Israel have expressed concern at the proposal of a new bill to deny funding to organisations that produce critical reports.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel responded to the new laws with the worrying claim that this Knesset is "the most racist in history". Their latest reports document the link between discriminatory legislation and deepening intolerance within Jewish society in Israel. Certainly, the discreet recent law allowing town councils to selectively admit members has been taken up enthusiastically in areas with high Arab populations. Tolerance of religious leaders calling on landlords not to rent homes to Arabs has exacerbated the trend. In 2010, polls conducted by the Israeli Democracy Institute found 53 per cent of Israeli Jews thought it acceptable to demand that Arabs leave the country, and 46 per cent would not live next to an Arab family.

For decades, Israel has been able to defend the scandals with the justification that quality of life is higher for Arabs living in Israel than it is in the Occupied Territories. Knesset Member Zouabi argues the claim is disingenuous. "We should not be compared with the West Bank after 40 years of Israeli Occupation has destroyed its economy, any more than we should be compared with Britain or the US," she said. "We demand equality with Jews, not to live as second class citizens."

In a recent address Netanyahu took another opportunity to stress the fortune of Arabs living in Israel. "Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel's Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights," he said during his Congress speech. That may be changing: with the wave of revolutions across the Arab world, democratic reforms are being demanded and accepted. Israel seems to be heading in the opposite direction. While ethnicity continues to dominate society, there is little space for other ideals.

Kieron Monks is content manager of This Week in Palestine magazine. His freelance articles have appeared in The Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Tribune, Ma'an News and many others.