As Fidel Stands Down, Others Stand Up

Today, the world's attention turned to Cuba, where Fidel Castro retired and was succeeded by his younger -at seventy-six years of age- brother, Raúl. Castro's enemies have a good reason to rejoice. Or maybe not. After all, Fidel outlasted ten American presidents and the collapse of the regime's main ally, the Soviet Union; survived the longest economic embargo in history, several assassination plots, one invasion attempt, and thirteen days of a nuclear missile crisis; and he is willingly stepping down while making sure that power stays in the family and the ideological contours of his revolution are not blurred.

With time, it is likely that his heirs will toy with the free market in a gradual and centrally-planned manner, à la China or Vietnam. But I suspect that it will continue to be safer to criticize Cuba's appalling lack of political freedom than its economic under-performance. After noting that Cuba is outranked in the UN's Human Development Index by Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, the editors of The Economist wrote, characteristically: "Forget the cigars and the posters: Cubans have had a rotten deal from a miserable regime -and they know it." The statement is incomplete. In the Americas, Cuba is also outranked by the United States, Canada, Barbados, and the Bahamas. And yes, according to the same index, Cuba is better off than the remaining 26 countries in the Americas, including NAFTA's Mexico and Brazil; better off than two EU countries, Romania and Bulgaria; better off than all the other communist, single-party regimes, such as China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, and than every non-EU offshoot of the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine; better off, in sum, than 126 countries listed in this ranking.

On the same day but a different island, another Communist was elected president of his country. In Cyprus, Demetris Christophias made history by becoming the first Communist in the history of the European Union to reach the presidency in one of its states. Christophias is the Secretary-General of AKEL, a Marxist-Leninist party, and was labeled by his opponents as the Castro of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, Soviet-educated (Ph.D. in History at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences), and maintains ties with the Kremlin. The party, AKEL (formerly KKK, or Communist Party of Cyprus), had never before fielded a candidate for presidential elections. No one in Europe seems, however, too worried. Demetris Christophias may do to the 'communist' label what Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done to the 'Islamist' label. If anything, some hope that Christophias will be successful in addressing one of the world's most intractable problems: the division of the island among Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. Christophias' rejection of the UN's 2004 reunification plan was merely tactical, and his party is more inclined to a federal solution to the island's partition. It will be a hard sell and an improbable journey, but so is everything else.

What a surprise...

It is clearly noticeable that some contributors on this blog feel disappointed by what happened in Serbia today. I am honestly surprised by their reactions considering how deeply the Serbian society is divided on fundamental socio-political issues which date back long before Milosevic came to power. This partition on backward nationalists elements on one side and democratic oriented citizens on the other was further magnified during the last 20 years of political turbulence in the Balkans.

I believe such actions were actually secretly celebrated by those parties who recently lost elections in Serbia. Their argument is that aggression against Western companies and embassies will entail a sharp response from abroad which would further alienate the people in Serbia from the West. In addition, Kosovo’s crisis, evocation of the Kosovo's mythology, and calls for national unity are actually going to serve the purpose of diverting attention from more important domestic issues such as war crimes, economic issues, and origins of “dirty money” for a period to come.

On the other hand, there is an obvious responsibility of the West for the situation in Serbia. The ultimate questions that most of the Serbs would ask their counterparts in the West are: "How would you feel if 15% of your territory is forceably taken away from your country by breaking the international law (U.N. resolution 1244)? How would you feel if your country is bombed for three months because of the so-called humanitarian crisis? How would you feel if every nationality except yours has rights to self-determination?"

Additionally, the E.U., represented by the E.U. High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Mr. Javier Solana, actually put pressure on the Democratic Party to accept Mr. Vojislav Kostunica as the prime minister of Serbia even though he got only 13% of votes on the last parliamentary elections held last year in Serbia. This move kept the common and secret police under the control of nationalists. Moreover, due to a strong U.S. pro-Albanian stand, the so-called talks between the Kosovo and the Serbian leaders were condemned even before they started. Not to mention the U.S. claim of Mr. Milosevic as a "factor of stability and the main peacekeeper in the Balkans" in the mid-1990's as well as the role of the former U.S. ambassador in Serbia, Mr. William Montgomery, in defaming the reputation of the former pro-liberal prime minister of Serbia Mr. Zoran Djindjic.

Finally, I would like to address to Americans who found themselves hurt by seeing the pictures of the U.S. embassy on fire. At the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador, said he was “outraged” by the attack on the Embassy and would be seeking a unanimous statement today from the 15-member Security Council condemning it. “The government of Serbia has the responsibility under international law to protect diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies.” Now, I would like to quote my friend’s response, a graduate student of the New School at New York, Mr. Rados Piletich to Mr. Khalilzad’s demand. “Responsibility under international law, huh? Like the kind of responsibility when we invaded Iraq without UN Security Council approval? Or maybe the kind of responsibility we took when we decided not to pay Nicaragua one penny of the $17 billion in reparations that the International Court of Justice ordered it to pay for arming, training, and supporting the Contras, and mining the coast off of Nicaragua to prevent international trade? Or, perhaps the same kind of responsibility exhibited by the country that bombed Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, leading to the deaths of scores of thousands of civilians in that country, and preparing the way for the genocidal Khmer Rouge?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall... eyes wide shut."

The Pitiable Serbs

Such an outrageous display of virulent nationalism as we have seen today makes me ashamed for every time I defended the Serbs going all the way back 1991. While I have been careful to balance my position on Kosovo’s independence over the past week, I can no longer hold my tongue. The Serbs who have attacked the US embassy in Belgrade are manifesting a form of nationalism which I can only describe as pitiable.

This once proud nation has fallen behind the curve of history. Such chest-thumping nationalism in the Europe of Regions smacks of medieval backwardness. Let the Kosovars and their lignite mines go. Serbia has other more precious resources to protect. Why preserve the Field of Kosovo? To remember the loss to the Turk? Again, such backward-looking nationalism not befitting the once and future great power of the Balkans.

Why do the Serbs blame America for their loss of Kosovo? Thousands of cascading decisions led the country to this point—no small number of which were made in Belgrade, Brussels, London, and Berlin. Burning the US embassy will do nothing to reverse that long trend line.

I take back my defense of Serbia as more ready to join the EU than Croatia. I take back my defense of Serbia as the victim of a neo-liberal war of attrition in the 1990s. I take back my defense of Serbia as a misunderstood and wronged nation. Those rioters have made it clear that we in the West have often understood Serbia and sometimes Serbia is simply wrong.

Happiness: Location, location, location

“It is time we admitted that there is more to life than money, and it is time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB, that is, general well-being.” These words came not from a hippie throwback or a leftist intellectual, but from David Cameron, leader of the Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition and of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party. Of all the things David Cameron has said in the last years, no one has met as much public approval as this one. Measuring and explaining the happiness of nations is not anymore just the subject of social science research and journalistic interest. It has entered the realm of policy. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher that argued that the purpose of politics should be about bringing the most happiness to the greatest number of people, would be proud. The United States may be the only country -that I know of- with a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness, but in Bhutan they take it seriously enough for the king to proclaim Gross National Happiness as the prism that should guide rulings and policy.

It may appear to some as epistemologically flawed, if not utterly bogus, but thousands of psychologists, sociologists, economists and political scientists are in the business of finding the happiness quotient of a given country, comparing it, and unbundling it in search of explanations and, possibly, policy prescriptions. The World Database of Happiness lists almost 8,000 names in its Directory of Happiness Investigators. Apart from a database of happiness research, there is a map of global happiness, competing surveys and indexes ranking the happiness of nations, and passionate debate over their findings.

Interestingly, most try to prove the old adage that money does not buy happiness. The World Values Survey made headlines when it established that the countries with the greatest percentage of people satisfied with their lives were Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Although counter-intuitive, this seemed to reinforce conventional wisdom, which long ago accepted that warmer countries are poorer but happier. Scandinavian countries top almost every ranking that matters, uniquely excelling at both creating wealth and distributing it, and finding the balance between efficiency and fairness that big-government advocates long for. But one also associates those societies with alcoholism, wife battery, weather-induced depression, and suicide. Tropical countries, despite poverty and malaria, are often thought of as happy places where people dance and mate on empty stomachs. Other studies point out that the happiness quotient of industrialized countries has not varied much since World War Two, despite a dramatic rise in income. Western nations do not get happier as they get richer. This has important policy implications. If better education, health care, and prosperity do not contribute to the overall level of well-being, why should governments even bother? Why should rich, sad countries help poor, happy countries?

The truth is that most surveys indicate that Swedes, Danes, Swiss, Norwegians, Austrians and Icelanders actually top the overwhelming majority of the happiness rankings. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, despite the bad reputation of its gastronomy and climate, do quite well too. In studies that measure SWB (subjective well-being), the effect of poverty and conflict is immediately apparent. Allowing for exceptions, the map of global happiness correlates very strongly with UN data on health and wealth. Whether one looks at happiness surveys or at the United Nations' Human Development Index -which combines GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, life expectancy at birth, and rates of literacy and enrollment in higher education- you will find almost the same countries at the top of the list, and the same countries at the bottom. Romania, Moldova, and other legendary sad places in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, are only rock bottom when poorer, African countries are left out of the picture. Italy is romanticized by tourists and movies as an ideal place, with ideal weather, food, and people, but Italians, appalled by economic under-performance and third-worldly levels of government corruption and instability, are reportedly very gloomy these days. Suicide is not just something that happens to Japanese or Scandinavians for whom material well-being is not enough. It happens, in much larger numbers, to poor cotton farmers in India unable to pay back loans used to buy pesticide.

The happiness debate is not immune to the geography versus culture dilemma. And one can quibble endlessly over how to define and measure well-being or satisfaction, or how to distinguish correlation from causation, but those Scandinavians, at sub-zero temperatures and taxation above fifty percent of income, are actually very happy people after all. I suspect good governance has something to do with it. It has to be either that or the alcohol.

Superdelegates: Waiting for the Un-Democratic Convention

A modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosing the health of American democracy would probably criticize the outsize influence of special interests and powerful lobbies. He might rant against an apathetic and uninformed public, and scorn the 80 million people of voting age that decided to stay at home in the last presidential election. He would probably write about the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds raised to buy 30-second television ads, and how money has become a better indicator of electoral success than a well-reasoned argument or a good debate. The media, the military-industrial complex, the electoral college, the Florida recount, the butterfly ballot, would all be included along with the usual suspects to be blamed for the bad shape of the world's first modern liberal democracy. And yet the now famous superdelegates, which will supposedly decide the Democratic primary this summer, could become the last straw for many, and the most embarrassing chapter for most.

Superdelegates, which account for one-fifth of the Democratic Party Convention, are members of Congress, governors, former presidents and vice presidents, party insiders, and members of the Democratic National Committee, including city council members and union leaders. These are not chosen by primary voters, nor are obligated to give their vote to the candidate preferred by a majority of the people. Thus, as it is often mentioned these days, one could envision a scenario where Barack Obama ends up winning twice as many state primaries and caucuses as its opponent, obtains more delegates and more votes, and still loses the nomination because party insiders prefer Hillary Clinton. Until now, very few knew those superdelegates even existed. As a matter of fact, most people that volunteered their time, donated their money, spent hours in a caucus somewhere, or simply went to the voting booth, believed they were participating in a beautiful exercise of democracy at its finest.

The party's primaries were a largely undemocratic affair for most of its history, and were dominated by big-city bosses and party machines. After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, in passionate contest for primaries with Eugene McCarthy, the DNC gave the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam war and had not won a single primary. As a reaction to the public outrage -the convention itself was mobbed by protesters who were tear-gassed-, the party revised the primary process to make it more democratic and ensure that the will of the people decided the nominee. However, after the consecutive nomination of mavericks like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter, the party introduced the superdelegates to control the fervor of activists and the momentum of insurgent campaigns and non-establishment candidates. Party insiders and elected officials, or so it was argued, would be better judges of a candidate's potential electoral success. They did not, however, get off to a good start. Superdelegates propelled the nomination of Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Reagan in the 1984 general election. Since then, people forgot about them. Each time, a clear front-runner emerged early in the race, and superdelegates simply crowned him en masse at the convention. Over the last years, the closest thing to a brokered convention took place in a fictional election, in the last season of the American television serial drama The West Wing.

It is not at all clear that Clinton would get a majority of superdelegates, or that Obama will reach the convention with a lead in states, delegates, and votes. It should also be noted that many Obama supporters welcomed the idea of a brokered convention when they thought Clinton would lead in votes and delegates. They knew the rules of the game. But most voters didn't, and many will feel understandably disillusioned, if not enraged. Watching so many of these party insiders relish at their role as king makers and boast about receiving calls from Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and the Obama campaign is unsettling enough. The political system of the United States allows for someone to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college and the presidency, and for thirteen state legislatures in the smallest states representing 4 percent of the population to block any amendment to the constitution, among other notoriously anti-democratic features. But you can chalk these up to the federal structure of the United States. The power of superdelegates in the Democratic party, however, has no other explanation than the desire to control and tame democracy. After getting so many people involved and excited, breaking records of political participation in each contest, the will of the majority should determine the nominee, whether this is Hillary or Barack. Otherwise, they should skip the balloons, the confetti, and all the happy talk about the power of democracy at work.

Obama's Foreign Policy Experience

After twenty wins in coast-to-coast state primaries and caucuses, record-breaking turnout in most contests, and a level of national enthusiasm that threatens to alter the political map of the United States, Barack Obama is still asked in interviews, almost without exception, how can a candidate with such "little foreign-policy experience" be viable or electable in a presidential race. Other candidates receive different treatment. That affirmation, for example, never made it to any question posed to the former front-runner for the Republican nomination, Rudolph Giuliani. Before the collapse of his campaign, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Rudy was favored by national-security conservatives, who imagined that only America's mayor could beat radical Islam worldwide. And yet Joe Biden, who called Giuliani "the most uninformed person on foreign policy now running for president" was correct, if only a bit unfair. He forgot Mike Huckabee, but then again, no one bothered to say anything at all, good or bad, about Mike Huckabee those days. Huckabee and Giuliani never got the "little foreign-policy experience" bit from interviewers or debate moderators. Obama has to deal with that assumption as a given.

Of course, he handily rejects that notion by reminding his audience that no one had more experience than Cheney or Rumsfeld, or that judgment can be more important than experience. Others point to the Kenyan or Indonesian chapters of his life story. And very few elected officials had the foresight and the courage to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, which would become the biggest strategic blunder of US foreign policy in the last decades. Less noticed is the fact that, before he began plugging his second best-selling book, before he was rumored as a presidential candidate and only C-Span junkies paid attention, Obama spent most of his time in the Senate talking about issues related to foreign policy, and doing so with the command and nuance that one associates with more seasoned legislators. Whether on the Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Homeland Security, or Veterans' Affairs, at Darfur rallies, or in conversations about the embargo on Cuba, Obama was at his best when he spoke about foreign policy.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of being naive and inexperienced on foreign policy when he stated that the United States should strike against selected targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan, provided actionable intelligence and Musharraf's inability to take action himself. Yet Clinton did not protest when a CIA airstrike in Pakistan killed one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives earlier this month, or back in 2005 when a CIA drone took a similar action against another leader of the network, also within Pakistani territory. She did not protest when Ethiopia bombed the Islamists out of Mogadishu a year ago, with help from the United States, or when Turkey repeatedly violated Iraq's northern border to stamp out PKK targets in its Kurdish region. Last September, Israel bombed Syria, unprovoked, in another cross-border attack that did not draw Hillary Clinton's opposition or condemnation. Fortunately, some people have begun to catch up and turn the argument on its head. After another flawed attempt at justifying her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion, Wolf Blitzer, in a rare display of inspiration, asked Senator Clinton: "Are you telling us that you were too naive in believing that George Bush would do the right thing?" She laughed, nervously, and replied without countering: "Nice try, Wolf, nice try." Indeed.