Employment and the EU: What Brusels forgets – Pages 12-14
APRIL 2014 N o 1404
Was bringing the Islamists into the political fold a gamble that paid off? Yes for those who maintained that their coming to power would not be irreversible. Yes also for their enemies, who predicted that once they were in power, they would reveal their obsession with identity and religion, and the limitations of their economic and social policy. “With [the Islamists] we are pre-Adam Smith and David Ricardo,” Hamma Hammami, spokesman for the leftwing Popular Front, told me. “The Muslim Brothers’ political economy is a rentbased economy; it’s about parallel trade. It isn’t about production, or wealth creation; it isn’t about agriculture, industry or infrastructure; and it isn’t about reorganising education for strategic aims, whether economic, scientific or technological.” galerÍa marlborough,madird
Juan GenovÉs – ‘Escalada’ (2012)
Tunisia: change, but no change
Tunisia has taken the most hopeful direction after its Arab Spring. But none of the entrants in the forthcoming election seems to have the valid and drastic economic plans that will be needed to fulfil the aspirations of Tunisians
BY SERGE HALIMI
The Arab revolts in Egypt, Syria and Libya have not turned out happily, which leaves Tunisia as the last source of potential optimism in the region. None of the social aspirations that sparked its December 2010 uprising have been fulfilled. But after a long political crisis, and the assassinations of two leftwing members of parliament in six months (1), Tunisia has a new constitution, approved by 200 of its 216 parliamentarians, and a technocratic government of national unity. Tensions have eased and there is relative calm.
OpponentsoftheIslamistEnnahdamovement feared it would become entrenched in the state apparatus, leading back to dictatorship. But Ennahda left office as peacefully as it came, having been politely invited to “withdraw” by the International Monetary Fund, Algeria, western countries (including France), the powerful union confederation, business leaders, the revolutionary left, the centre right, the Human Rights League…
It presumably yielded to pressure in the knowledge that its record was shabby and the international environment unfavourable to the Islamists (ousted militarily from the Egyptian presidency, discredited in Turkey). Article 148 of the constitution stipulates that a fresh election must take place in Tunisia before the end of 2014. Revolution is off the agenda, but the country may again be starting to think that some measure of happiness is achievable in an Arab world where it is in short supply.
Serge Halimi is president of Le Monde diplomatique
Continued on page 4
Inside this issue Ukraine: still the same old players j-a dérens and l geslin Pages 2-3 France’s foreign policy faux pas anne-cécile robert Pages 4-5 All change in Algeria jean-pierre séréni Pages 6-7 Cambodia: the peasants’ revolt philippe revelli Pages 8-9
Price: £3/US$4.99
Ukraine isn’t Armageddon The conventional readings of the Ukraine crisis, and of the Russian response to it under Putin, with the annexation of Crimea, don’t accurately reflect the situation in Ukraine,
Russia or Crimea. And they’re no help for the future
BY OLIVIER ZAJEC
Media treatment of recent events in Ukraine confirms that some in the West see international crises as Armageddons, conflicts between good and evil where the meaning of history is enacted, rather than as signs of differences of interest and perception between parties open to reason. Russia lends itself well to this appealingly simple scenario. Many commentators see it as a barbarian state ruled by Cossacks, a semi-Mongol otherworld defended by the successors of the KGB, hatching plots in the service of neurotic, cynical, egotistic tsars (1). These reclusive autocrats, out of touch with the times, advance pawns on ivory chessboards rather than reading the Economist; they sink a nuclear submarine for the fun of polluting the Barents Sea, or provoke an illegal referendum in a nearby foreign country to reclaim part of the Soviet Union.
The clichés in the western press – not just since the start of the Ukrainian crisis but over the last 15 years – may be all that most readers know of Russia’s current foreign policy. This negative view, verging on caricature, is a wellestablished tradition, based partly on analyses that emphasise the totalitarian and “insincere” compulsions of Russian culture, and partly on the supposed continuity from Stalin to Putin – a favourite theme of French columnists and US neocon thinktanks (2). It goes back to the tales of early European travellers who likened the “barbarous” Russians to the fierce Scythians of antiquity (3).
The analysis of events in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) results from this persistent demonisation. Ukraine, linguistically and culturally divided between East and West, is only able to preserve its present borders by maintaining a balance between Lviv and Donetsk, respectively
Olivier Zajec is a senior researcher at France’s Institut de Stratégie Comparée, Paris
Will India vote for Modi? christophe jaffrelot Page 10 Middle Venezuela takes to the streets alexander main Page 11 A brave new world for Scotland? david graves Page 15 Mexico: art on a grand scale laurent courtens Page 16
representing European Ukraine and Russian Ukraine. To favour either would mean denying the foundation on which the country is built, and triggering a Czechoslovak-style partition from which there would be no going back (4).
Ukraine is like a fiancée who cannot choose between suitors, however costly the rings they proffer. Russia promised $15bn in December 2013, when the European Union pledged $3bn as a sweetener to the political association agreement rejected by the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (on 21 March the core chapters were signed, as the Russian parliament approved the annexation of Crimea). Ukraine has given (revocable) assurances to both suitors: the Kharkov accords of 2010, which extended Russia’s lease on the naval base at Sebastopol until 2042, and the lease of arable land to European agribusiness. Experts who succumb to anti-Russian obsession and reduce this geocultural ménage à trois to a forced marriage with Russia lack analytical skill. They criticise Putin for using power politics, but lack imagination in limiting their own scenarios to the (liberating) absorption of Ukraine into the Euro-Atlantic community.
Contrary to what has been written, Ukraine’s delicate internal balance was not upset on 27 February when armed men seized control of Crimea’s parliament and government buildings – a sensational act taken to be Putin’s response to Yanukovych being forced to flee Ukraine on 22 February. The real tipping point came on 23 February, when Ukraine’s new government voted to repeal the status of Russian as the second official language in eastern regions of the country – a measure that the interim president has so far refused to approve. Putin could not have wished for a better excuse to initiate his Crimean manoeuvres. The revolution that led to the fall of Yanukovych, then to Crimea’s exit from Ukraine, is only the latest twist in the cultural tragedy of this Belgium of the East.
In Donetsk, as in Simferopol, Russianspeaking Ukrainians are generally less sensitive to Russian propaganda than reputed, interpreting it with fatalistic irony. Putin knows that these people have the same hopes for the true rule of law and an end to corruption as their Galician compatriots. But he also knows
Continued on page 2
