Young Diplomats

April 15^th Togo Presidential elections

More than 2 million Togolese participated in the April 25 presidential election that secured incumbent President Faure Gnassingbé’s third term in office. Faure has won with 59 percent of the votes, while his closest challenger, Jean-Pierre Fabre, reached only a 35 percent of the votes.

Togolese elections have raised numerous protests from the public, who aimed to limit the presidency to two terms, thus, not allo
wing the current ruling party to realize a third presidency in 2015. Protests were met with tear gas and a water cannon. In light of the situation, analysts have even questioned whether To
go would follow the example of neighboring Burkina Faso, in which long-ruling Blaise Compaoré was forced to resign from office after protesters called for his departure in October 2014. However, despite multiple efforts by the opposition, no constitutional change occurred before the 2015 election. Instead, Fabre called for Togolese citizens to support political alternation via the ballot box.

To sum up, the 2015 election was mostly a contest between the same candidates as in the 2010 election, though their parties had new names. The vote-share results were similar as well, differing by just a percentage point, although turnout was lower than in previous elections.

 April 13^th Sudan General elections 

Sudan’s presidential and parliamentary elections were Sudan’s first elections since the secession of South Sudan in 2011. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the country’s longtime leader, was re-elected winning 94% of the votes. Being leader of the National Congress Party (NCP), Bashir has been trying to survive once again in government. In such a situation, the top priority of the NCP has been to demonstrate that it is capable of conducting countrywide elections without any major disruption. It also needed to give the impression that it still has secured bases of popular support beyond the loyal military-security apparatus that has kept it in power for so long.

Why is this party so much striving for survivor? The answer rather lies on the leader, an less on the party itself. Al-Bashir seized power in a coup d’état in 1989 and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. In spite of this, the investigation was suspended in December 2014. Now, by obtaining another five years in office, he will have an entire state structure to help protect him from the ICC–including money, bodyguards, a military and a foreign service with international lawyers.

This victory could not have been possible without the NCP ensuring somehow the invisibility of the opposition parties running in the elections. The NCP had restricted the political space for opposition parties using a familiar arsenal of arbitrary measures, including intimidation and harassment. It also tightened its control over an apprehensive civil society, and curtailed the activities of the media. The most vocal opposition parties subsequently pulled out of the elections in advance. They claimed that the rules were written in a way that would ensure an NCP win the elections. This seems a very common game played amongst newly created countries or immature democracies, very much present in the African continent.

Nevertheless, in the case of Sudan, the elections procedures can be looked from a different point of view: in reality the opposition parties in Sudan have already got no chances to achieve a dominant position within the electoral public. In fact, the opposition parties lack strong structures, cohesion and far-sighted leadership, along with a clear strategy on how to mount a serious political and electoral challenge to the NCP. Thus, it should be also noted that even the mainstream opposition parties do not provide the public with a reasonable alternative than the already familiar and experienced ruling party. The apparent technique chosen by these parties has been to boycott every electoral process. This year, the boycott was quite ineffective; the voters were left to choose between the NCP and a multitude of newer, smaller and lesser-known opposition parties, which were unable to campaign effectively because of overwhelming logistical and financial difficulties.

Going even further within the analysis of the political scenario in Sudan, some local sources have even pointed to a possible electoral set of the NCP. It is believed that the big party has created these other smaller parties in purpose, in order to form a proper environment of party competition in Sudan. Why not pretend to have political contest when the victory is assured? At least it appears legitimate in the world’s eyes.

In any case, Western countries have tried to apply pressure on the NCP for it to conduct more inclusive elections. The European Union declined to fund or monitor the 2015 elections, and openly condemned the deterioration of Sudan’s already divided and unstable political landscape ahead of the poll. However, occasional diplomatic warnings and non-funding haven’t been enough measures to change the electoral process. Indeed, Sudan successfully lobbied the African Union, the Arab League and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development to send observer teams. And on the bottom line, Western countries also seem to be comfortable with al-Bashir staying in power, given that the opposition offers no viable alternative.

 March 28^th Nigeria Presidential elections 

Nigeria itself represented one of the most crucial electoral processes within the entire continent. With a population of more than 177 million evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy and most populous country. Thus, the electoral success or failure, as well as the maintenance of a democratic procedure in the country, have been critical aspects for Nigeria,  specifically, and for the entire African continent, in general.

The long lasting tradition of violence brought about during electoral campaigning periods in the country had once again characterized the political panorama and have threatened again the stability of Nigeria. An additional focal point in the elections has always been the interesting competition run between the Christian candidate, Jonathan Goodluck, and his Muslim opponent, Mohammad Buhari. This has been the main historically social cleavage in Nigeria, and this year it most worried the population eager to find an efficient president able to combat the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, which has been steadily gaining strength in northeast Nigeria. Moreover, during the electoral period a search for a solid president capable of dealing with the Nigerian domestic instability was in the loop. This has been a main concern amongst the Nigerians during the last year. The instability in the country has increased as a result of the recent global collapse of oil prices, which are hitting hard the government and political classes. In fact, as of today oil constitutes more than 70 percent of Nigeria’s revenue and provides more than 90 percent of its foreign exchange.

Accounting for all such concerns, this year the distribution of votes has been different than in the past. And as such, the elections have brought a tendency towards violence sparks across the country. Indeed, the growing public perception that Jonathan Goodluck’s administration was weak has fueled support for the APC, the Muslim party. As such, the results of the elections confirmed Buhari’s victory over Goodluck, making him achieve  15.4 million votes, while the Christian side won only 13.3 million.

It is the fourth time that Gen. Buhari, 72, has sought the presidency of Nigeria. He ruled the country from January 1984 until August 1985, taking charge after a military coup in December 1983. Mr Jonathan, on his part, had led Nigeria since the year 2010, initially as acting leader before winning elections in 2011.

To conclude the electoral period in the country, Nigeria’s elections have been crucial because of two aspects: the election of a Muslim candidate, as opposed to the Christian one that had been holding the  government until present. And the violence that has characterized the period, creating a big concern for instability, not only within the country, but for the entire region as well. That is because an unstable Nigeria with internally displaced and refugee populations and a government unable to quell Boko Haram could potentially destabilize various neighboring states, triggering a disastrous experience for the continent.

Introduction – African Elections

Each and every country in Africa has got a completely different and unique political life and record. Each time an African country experiences an elections period, its processes, events and outcomes, are all different and meaningful in their own ways.

The year 2015 has seen an elevated number of electoral processes in various countries in Africa.  This has thus been a critical year for African democracy, with citizens going to the polls in at least a dozen African countries. Already, we have witnessed the peaceful transfers of power in Nigeria and Lesotho, and the status quo in Sudan and Ethiopia. Ballots in Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso will be hotly contested. All of it deserves an in-depth analysis of each country’s elections separately.

January 20^th, Zambia Presidential Elections 

After having had two sick presidents die in office, including the last one (Michael Sata), Zambia has voted for who they expect to be a healthy President to stay in for a complete office term. Unfortunately, according to the Zambian Constitution he will only be able to stay for the remaining period of time that his predecessor could not complete out of his term: 18 months. That is, a very short period to demonstrate his abilities and to accomplish all his campaigning promises. Only then he will be able to run for the next programmed elections by the end of 2016, and acquire a full mandate from its very beginning.

The new elected President Edgar Lungu, head of the Patriotic Front Party, has achieved only a minority mandate this time, less than half of the 5 million registered voters made their marks in the polls. Two main problems are to be dealt with, and a bunch of promises are to be turned into reality.

Corruption is a central problem amongst many African governments including the Zambian. For it, Lungu has avoided making any promise. Another issue that the President will have to solve is the rising trend among civil society groups which demands a new and more democratic national constitution. However, Lungu said he would not make this issue a priority of his presidency in light of the high poverty levels, poor communication and road infrastructure, and low educational standards which have to be taken care of first.

On a more positive note, however, plenty of promises were made by the ambitious new President. Lungu has promised continuing his predecessors’ “vision”, developing a variety of programs, reducing fuel and staple food prices, increasing access to education, expanding social welfare to all rural districts, protecting the freedom of the media, ending tribalism, and improving his engagement with the public.

The public remains impatient to experience all these improvements. Lungu encounters, however, a main obstacle to overcome: to reach that his government ministers follow him on his ambitious plans. The new President has inherited all members of parliament, ministers, senior civil servants and party officials, who had been chosen by his predecessor. A probable consequence for this would be the lack of loyalty of all these government members. Thus, Lungu must find the right way to gain their trust and unconditional support, which will allow him to implement his vision as Zambia’s President.

By Philip Bobbitt

I don’t envy the officials in Washington who are tasked with forming a plan to resolve, or at least mitigate, the crisis in Syria. Like the punch line of the familiar old-timer from Maine’s reply to the perplexed tourist from the city, “well, if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here,” it really doesn’t advance things to say — as I have found myself saying — that the time for action was three years ago.

Syria, whose population is less than 23 million, has more than 7.5 million internally displaced persons. One in every four refugees in the world is a Syrian. The United Nations estimates that more than 200,000 persons have died in the conflict; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that figure is over 320,000.

The first of these options would be a historic embarrassment for the administration whose “red lines” the Syrian government has so studiedly crossed; nevertheless, embarrassment is seldom a justification for prolonging a deadly civil war. Indeed, some critics think this is one of the lessons of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.

The second option would prolong the civil war, perhaps even increasing the mass depopulation of Syria with all its consequences for human suffering. At least thus far, it seems unlikely that opponents of the regime aligned with the United States could effectively hope to hold enough territory to force a negotiated peace. Indeed, the longer the war continues, the more momentum accrues to the most retrograde and anti-Western insurgents. Arming the Kurds would also enrage Ankara and Baghdad.

The third option is at least consistent with what seems to be a long-term bet on Washington’s part of an eventual rapprochement with Tehran. The relative youth of the Iranian population, its level of education compared to those in neighboring states, and a consistent trend in public opinion among the educated and the young that favors closer ties with the United States all seem to encourage this bet. Against such hopefulness, however, we must consider that strategic success by Iran’s military forces and theocratic regime is unlikely to lessen their grip on power.

The last option would plunge the United States once again into an open-ended commitment in which it finds itself arrayed against forces that are currently warring with each other. It is not impossible to imagine the “exit strategy” demanded by commentators; in all likelihood, it would amount to a partitioning of the country and some sort of negotiated cease-fire, the policing of which need not require U.S. ground forces. But at least as likely would be an ignominious withdrawal forced by a disillusioned and frustrated American public, making this option the riskiest of all because of its potential domestic consequences. The possibility of armed clashes with Russia would only add to this risk.

Reframing the Issue

Facing such unpromising choices, the wisest course is often to reconfigure the problem. I remember the popular cartoon strip of my youth, Pogo, drawn by Walt Kelly. Few of my readers will remember those brilliant satires, but something of their narrative structure lived on in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and its ensemble of characters. In Pogo, as in Peanuts, the chief character was an earnest, rather gullible straight arrow whose basic decency was often thwarted by the complexities of a small but diverse world. At Pogo’s side was his friend Albert. (I should add that Pogo was a sober, sensitive possum and Albert was a rather louche alligator, both always depicted standing upright with human accoutrements.) In the strip I wish to recall for you now, the two friends are playing checkers. Albert is wearing a velvet smoking jacket and chewing meditatively on a cigar. Suddenly, in a frenzied triumph, Pogo jumps all of Albert’s checkers, wiping them from the board. The alligator is aghast; the cigar drops from his mouth. But then he recovers his poise. He reaches into his smoking jacket and pulls out a hand of cards. “I got a straight flush! What have you got?”

So I propose that we stop looking at this question as a problem of the Middle East; of course it is that, but it is not just that. More important than any of the United States’ assets in the Middle East is the North Atlantic alliance. A refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, at least in the decades since World War II, is shaking NATO countries to their constitutional foundations. A NATO ally, Turkey, has encountered its own troubles: the Islamic State has attacked it, Russian fighter planes have invaded its airspace, Syria has shelled its villages and its borders have witnessed the worst scenes of war-torn refugees seen since the Yugoslav Wars. In the past two weeks, surface-to-air missile have locked onto Turkish aircraft flying in domestic Turkish airspace. The situation cries out for the United States and its NATO allies to send aid of all kinds to protect a member of the alliance, to relieve the onward pressure of refugee migration to other allies, and to help alleviate the burden on Turkey.

The problem is that Turkey is no longer the repository of our hopes for a progressive democracy among Muslim states. Indeed, the quest for a democracy seems to have destroyed the secular basis of the state. As a result, Turkey’s president has supported the very Islamic State that now attacks his country and appears to be responsible for the Oct. 10 massacre in Ankara. He has broken off negotiations with the Kurds, even though they are the most effective fighters in the region who, like the United States, oppose both the al Assad regime and the Islamic State.

In this situation, the creation of safe zones along the Turkey-Syria border offers a different kind of option. The United States has years of experience enforcing no-fly zones in the region with considerable success. The problem, as we saw at Srebrenica, is that safe zones must be enforced by regular ground troops or they will become killing fields. Air power alone, which can enforce a no-fly zone, cannot protect a safe haven. A NATO force including Turkish, American, British and French troops could effectively establish such a zone for refugees. It’s only a beginning, and that is to say, something as troubling as it is promising.

By Ian Morris

“No-one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise,” Winston Churchill observed in 1947. “Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” And most people tend to agree with Churchill’s sentiment that nothing beats the wisdom of the crowd. In 2007, EU polls found that around the world, regardless of country, continent, age, gender or religion, about 80 percent of respondents believed democracy was the best way to run a society.

And yet, very few people felt this way until very recently. Throughout most of recorded history, democracy has consistently equated to mob rule. Even in November 1787, a mere two months after playing a leading role in drafting the U.S. Constitution, James Madison took it for granted that “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

To me, this raises one of the biggest but least asked questions in global politics: Should we assume that we are cleverer than our predecessors and that we have finally figured out the best way of organizing communities, regardless of their circumstances? Or should we assume that because democracy has a history, it — like everything else in history — will someday pass away?

The Technological Challenge to Democracy

I have been thinking about this question a lot since this spring, when I attended a dinner hosted by Stanford University’s cybersecurity committee on how cybersocial networks might affect democracy. (Serving on committees is generally the worst part of an academic’s life, but some can be rather rewarding by exposing their members to a range of new ideas.) My fellow diners were mostly members of Stanford’s political and computer science departments, and much of the conversation centered on the details of designing better voting machines or networking citizens for online town hall meetings. But some of the talk rose above the minutiae and into grander, more abstract speculation on what supercomputers and our growing ability to crunch large data sets might mean for the voice of the people.

The past decade has seen huge advances in algorithms for aggregating and identifying preferences. We have all become familiar with one of the more obvious consequences of this trend: Personalized ads, tailored to our individual browsing histories, pop up unbidden on our computer screens on a regular basis. But research has moved beyond studying its effects on decisions about consumption and on to decisions about justice and politics. When tested against the 68,000 individual votes that have been cast in the U.S. Supreme Court since 1953, a computer model known as {Marshall}+ correctly predicted the outcomes of 71 percent of cases. Meanwhile, an algorithm designed at University of Warwick predicted the outcome of the 2015 British election with 91 percent accuracy by analyzing political tweets.

Admittedly, there is still a long way to go. {Marshall}+ is good, but it cannot compete with Jacob Berlove, a 30-year-old resident of Queens, N.Y., who has no formal legal or statistical training but is able to predict the Supreme Court’s votes with 80 percent accuracy. And while the Twitter-analyzing algorithm got many things right about the British vote, it was utterly wrong on the one thing that really mattered: the relative tallies of the Labor and Conservative parties.

But as technologists like to say, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Algorithms are still in their infancy, and I would guess that by the time self-driving cars become a common sight on our roads (2020, according to Google; 2025, according to most auto manufacturers), our computers will have a better idea of what we want our politicians to do than we do ourselves. And should that come to pass, we might expect two additional predictions to play out as well.

The first seems uncontroversial: Even fewer people will bother to vote. In the United States’ 2012 presidential election, only 58 percent of citizens took the time to exercise their right to vote. In the 2014 midterm elections, that figure dropped to 36 percent. Other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries aren’t much better: On average, only seven of every 10 voters participate in member states’ elections. In Switzerland’s 2011 legislative elections, only four of every 10 voters participated. How much further should we expect participation to fall when technocrats confirm citizens’ suspicions that their votes don’t really matter?

The second prediction is even more ominous: When our computers know best what we want from politicians, it won’t be a big leap to assume that they will also know better than the politicians what needs to be done. And in those circumstances, flesh-and-blood politicians with all their imperfections may start to seem as dispensable as the elections that we have thus far used to choose them.

Omniscient computers that run the world are a staple of science fiction, but they are not what we are talking about here. As Churchill said, political machines do not need to be perfect or all-wise, just less error-prone, ignorant and/or venal than democracy or any of those other forms of government that have been tried from time to time.

Science fiction stories also often feature people rising up in arms against machines, violently overthrowing their too-clever-by-half computers before they take over mankind’s future. But I suspect that this scenario has no more connection with reality than Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, one of my favorite science fiction renditions of the all-knowing computer that controls human society. After all, we already casually entrust our lives to algorithms. There was a time when people worried about computers controlling traffic lights, but because they did such a good job of it, that fear eventually subsided. Now, some worry about driverless cars in much the same way, but these fears will also fade if the vehicles cut the number of fatalities on the road by 99 percent by 2050, as McKinsey consultants have predicted. In doing so, they would save 30,000 lives and $190 billion in health care costs each year in the United States alone.

My guess is that humanity will almost certainly never face a momentous, once-and-for-all choice between following our instincts or following algorithms. Rather, we will be salami-sliced into a post-democratic order as machines prove themselves to be more competent than us in one area of life after another.

How Democracy Rises and Falls

One reason it is so difficult to forecast where this trend might take us is that there is a shortage of good historical comparisons that would allow us to see how other people have coped with similar issues. There is, in fact, really only one: ancient Greece.

The use of historical analogies is a problem in its own right, because one of the most common blunders in policymaking is drawing simplistic, 1:1 correlations between a current event and a single case in the past. Noting similarities between contemporary problems and some earlier episode (say, between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves in Ukraine and Hitler’s actions in the Sudetenland), strategists regularly — and often erroneously — conclude that because action A led to result B in the past, it will do so again in the present. The flaw in that sort of thinking is that for every similarity that exists between 1938 and 2015, there are also dozens of differences. The only way to know if the lessons we are drawing from history are right is to look at a large number of cases, identifying broad patterns that reveal not only general trends but also the kinds of forces that might undermine them, causing a specific case to turn out much differently than we might expect.

But because democracy has been an extremely rare occurrence, examples of societies abandoning democracy are also extremely rare. Therefore, we have little alternative to comparing our own world with ancient Greece. The analogy, though only able to provide limited insight, is still rather illuminating.

Ancient Greece differed from the modern world in many ways, the most obvious of which were its low levels of technology and its small scale. (Even a relatively huge Greek city-state like fifth-century Athens had only 350,000 residents.) Not surprisingly, its democracy differed too: Rights were restricted to free adult males, who made up about 20 percent of the population, and democratic values regularly coexisted alongside slavery. Greek democracy thus had more in common with 1850s Virginia than with today’s United States.

And yet, ancient and modern democracies have all shared the same basic logic. Since around 3000 B.C. — as far back as our evidence dates — nearly all complex, hierarchical societies have rested on the belief that a few people have privileged access to a supernatural sphere. From Egypt’s first pharaoh to France’s Louis XIV, we find the same claim repeated and largely accepted: Because we kings and our priests know what God or the gods want, it makes perfect sense for the rest of you to do what we say. But for reasons that continue to be debated, many Greeks began rejecting this idea between about 750 B.C. and 500 B.C. Around A.D. 1500-1750, many northwestern Europeans (and their colonists in North America) went down a similar path. Both sets of revolutionaries then had to confront the same pair of questions: If no one really knows what God or the gods want, how can we tell what to do and how to run a good society?

Both groups gradually drifted toward similar answers. Even though no one knows so much that we can leave all the big decisions to him alone, they said, each of us (or us men) knows a little bit. Pooling our wisdom won’t necessarily produce the right or best answers, but it should nevertheless produce the least bad answers possible under the circumstances. Bit by bit, Greek city-states in the sixth century B.C. transferred power from the aristocratic councils to broader assemblies of male citizens. By the fifth century B.C., they had begun calling their new constitution dêmokratia, which literally means “people power.” Similarly, between the late 18th and 20th centuries, European states and their overseas colonists led the way in gradually shifting power from royals and nobles to representatives of the people, eventually going beyond the Greeks by outlawing slavery and enfranchising women.

In both cases, democracy rested on the twin pillars of efficiency and justice. On the one hand, the unavailability of god-given rulers meant that listening to the voice of the people was the most efficient way to figure out what to do; on the other, if everyone knows something but no one knows everything, the only just system is one that gives everyone equal rights.

In Greece, this consensus began breaking down around 400 B.C. under the strain of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. A few military leaders, including the Spartan Adm. Lysander, accumulated so much power that they seemed to surpass ordinary mortals, and philosophers like Plato began to question the wisdom of the crowd. What if, Plato asked, democracy pools not our collective insights but our collective ignorance, leading not to the least bad solutions but to the least good? What if the only way to find truth is to rely on the thinking of a tiny number of truly exceptional beings?

The answer came in the persons of Philip the Great and his son, Alexander. The former conquered the whole of mainland Greece between 359 B.C. and 338 B.C., while the latter did the same to the entire Persian Empire by 324 B.C. Both men aggressively pushed the idea that they were superhuman. In one famous story, set around the border between modern-day India and Pakistan, Alexander summoned a group of Hindu sages to test their wisdom. “How can a man become god?” he asked one of them. The sage responded, “By doing something a man cannot do.” It is hard not to picture Alexander then asking himself who, to his knowledge, had done something a man cannot do. The answer must have been unavoidable: “Me. I, Alexander, just conquered the entire Persian Empire in 10 years. No mere mortal could do that. I must be divine.”

Emboldened, Alexander proclaimed at the Olympic Festival in 324 B.C. that all Greeks should worship him as a god. Initially, the people responded with bemusement; Athenian politician Demosthenes said, “All right, make him the son of Zeus — and of Poseidon too, if that’s what he wants.” But the sheer scale of Alexander’s achievements had genuinely shattered the assumptions of the previous two centuries. A new elite was concentrating such wealth and power into its hands that its members really did seem superhuman. When Demetrius the Besieger, the son of one of Alexander’s generals, seized Athens in 307 B.C., Athenians rushed to offer him divine honors as the “Savior God,” and over the next 100 years, worshipping kings became commonplace. Plenty of city-states — more than ever before, in fact — liked to call themselves dêmokratiai, but small elite circles with good connections to the kings’ courts took control of all important decisions.

Democracy swept Greece after 500 B.C. because it solved the specific problem of how to know what to do and run a good society if no one had privileged access to divine wisdom. It unraveled around 300 B.C. because the achievements of Alexander and his successors seemed to show that some people did in fact have such access. Democracy’s claim to be the most efficient form of government looked like nonsense once large numbers of Greeks began to believe that their leaders were the sons of gods; its claim that justice meant giving every man equal rights looked equally ludicrous when some men, thought to be demigods, so obviously seemed to deserve more rights than others.

Democracy: A Solution to Particular Problems

While it is highly unlikely that the 21st-century world will follow the same path as Greece in the fourth and third centuries B.C., I will close by suggesting that there nevertheless might be an important lesson in this ancient analogy. Democracy is not a timeless, perfect political order; it is a solution to particular problems. When these problems disappear, as they eventually did in ancient Greece, democracy’s claims to superior efficiency and justice can vanish with them.

Democracy has a solid foundation to its claims of being the most efficient and just solution to the particular challenges of the 19th and 20th centuries. But now, we are making machines that have much stronger claims to godlike omniscience than either Philip or Alexander had. Economist Thomas Piketty already worries about the growing gap between rich and poor that “automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based,” but in terms of significance, these pale in comparison to the consequences of creating new forms of intelligence that dwarf anything humanity is capable of. Put simply, the end of democracy may be one of the least shocking changes that the 21st century will bring.

Summary

The Netherlands doesn’t make international headlines very often, but its recent moves to prepare for a radically different European Union have started to garner attention. On Nov. 18, a local newspaper revealed that the Dutch Cabinet has discussed a plan to create a smaller version of the Schengen Agreement that would include fewer countries. Then, on Nov. 24, a group of advisers to the Dutch Cabinet issued a report recommending that the government prepare for a future in which the members of the European Union would take different stances on policy and integrate into the bloc to varying degrees and at different speeds. These moves reveal that the Dutch government wants to be ready if the European Union’s political and economic instability worsen. But perhaps more important, they are a reminder of the intimate link between foreign policy and geography.

Analysis

The Netherlands exemplifies the ways in which geography can determine the behavior of a nation. The country has been shaped by a constant struggle against two formidable enemies: water and foreign powers. The country’s core is located around and north of the delta of three rivers — the Rhine, the Scheldt and the Meuse (or Maas) — and their tributaries, including the Waal, which connects the massive port of Rotterdam to Germany. These rivers have shaped Dutch politics and economics in many ways.

Low-cost transport enabled by the rivers and the Netherlands’ proximity to the North Sea made the country a key center for finance and trade in northern Europe. By the 17th century, the Netherlands had become one of the world’s major seafaring and economic powers. The Dutch established colonies and trading posts all over the world, from the Americas to South Africa to Southeast Asia. In the process, they refined and perfected capitalism, creating the model for modern stock exchanges as well as insurance and retirement funds.

But along with its economic impact, water had great influence on the country’s politics. Roughly a quarter of the Netherlands’ area is below sea level, and the rest is only slightly above it. Floods pose a permanent threat to the Netherlands (which literally means “the Low Countries”), destroying towns and undermining farming. St. Lucia’s flood, for example, is believed to have killed between 50,000 and 80,000 people in the Netherlands and northern Germany in 1287.

The Dutch therefore needed to reclaim land from the sea and build complex canals, dikes, lochs and pumping stations to develop agriculture and protect towns from flooding. To do so, permanent cooperation between government officials, the urban bourgeoisie and farmers was needed. This led to the creation of a decentralized administrative system based on cooperation and constant compromise that survives to this day.

It was this cooperation that made Dutch independence possible. Until the late 1500s, the Low Countries (which included present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) consisted of several small political entities under the rule of the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg. In 1568, some of these entities rebelled against their rulers because of high taxes, the persecution of Protestants and the Habsburgs’ attempts to centralize the government. In 1581, the northern provinces of the Low Countries declared independence from Spanish rule, leading to the creation of the Dutch Republic.

The Confluence of Nature and War

But if the Netherlands’ geographic location made the country immensely rich, it also put it in constant danger. Surrounded by major military powers including Germany, France and the United Kingdom and lacking any significant geographic barriers to protect it, the Netherlands historically has always been vulnerable to invasion or has been under the de facto rule of outside powers. Its fertile polders, low-lying patches of land protected by dikes, produce sizeable amounts of food. And its strategic ports and waterways, key location between France, Germany and the North Sea have long attracted the attention of foreign powers.

As a result, the Dutch fought against the French, the Germans and the British between the 17th and 20th centuries, in some cases at the same time. (1672, the year that England, France, Munster and Cologne declared war against the Dutch Republic, is known by Dutch historians as the “disaster year.”)

One of the Netherlands’ primary defense strategies during an invasion was to open the dikes, washing its enemies away or at least slowing their advance. But because this was not completely effective, the country also had to rely on the next best thing: diplomacy. Small but wealthy, the Netherlands became the middleman in charge of preserving a balance of power in Europe that would keep its enemies at bay. This involved strategies such as holding international peace conferences to settle disputes between states and participating in as many international organizations as possible. It comes as no surprise, then, that institutions such as the U.N. International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are located in The Hague. This is also attributable to the Netherlands’ long maritime tradition, which made the Dutch pioneers in maritime (and thus international) law.

To a large extent, the strategy worked. Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and World War II, the Netherlands did not face any existential threats. The country even managed to remain neutral during World War I, working to remain on stable ground with the British and the Germans. But the limitations of the Netherlands’ balancing act were laid bare in 1940, when the Nazis invaded and occupied the country in only a week.

A Never-Ending Balancing Act

World War II revealed the limits of the Netherlands’ neutrality. After the war, the country redesigned its foreign policy to focus on two pillars: a strong alliance with the United States and a push toward European integration. As a result, the country became a founding member of both NATO and the European Economic Community (the predecessor of the European Union), allowing it to secure access to foreign markets while receiving protection from the United States.

However, the shift in strategy did not end the Netherlands’ permanent balancing act. Quite the opposite: The Dutch remain committed to acting as an honest broker between Germany, the United Kingdom and France, and they share Germany’s view of the European Union as key to preserving peace and free trade in Europe. The Netherlands was one of the founding members of the eurozone in the late 1990s, and a key European treaty (the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union) was named after the Dutch city where it was signed.

While the Dutch are culturally and ideologically close to Germany, they do not necessarily want a Germany-dominated Europe, and they understand the need to preserve the Franco-German alliance. Since the beginning of the crisis, the Dutch government has combined support for German-sponsored economic reforms in the eurozone with criticism of the political consequences of extreme austerity.

While mediating on the Continent, the Dutch also see a growing need to preserve their independence. The country shares the United Kingdom’s concern that the process of Continental integration may be going too far. In 2005, the Netherlands was one of the two countries that voted against the EU Constitution in a referendum; France was the other. Since the beginning of the European crisis, the Dutch government has backed London’s push to revise the European Union’s institutional framework to give national parliaments veto power over certain EU policies. The Netherlands also supports Britain’s push to reduce EU bureaucracy and red tape and shares London’s concern about the economic, political and social impact of unrestricted immigration.

But the Netherlands is also a mid-sized power, which means that the Dutch government often finds it necessary to side with small and medium-sized countries to counter the supremacy of the European Union’s largest economies. The Netherlands has often pushed for strong EU institutions to mitigate the influence of Germany and France. This is why a Dutchman, Frans Timmermans, is one of the European Commission’s vice presidents, while another, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, is the president of the Eurogroup.

Shaping the European Union

In the coming years, the Netherlands will play a significant role in shaping the future of the European Union. To begin with, it will support some of the United Kingdom’s requests to redefine the Continental bloc. The Hague is interested in keeping the United Kingdom in the European Union and will once again use its position as the honest broker between the large powers to secure compromises. The Dutch government will support London’s demand for national parliaments to play a larger role in EU decision-making. It will also defend the United Kingdom’s claim that the European Union should reduce red tape for businesses. The Hague may also support the British government’s call to redefine benefits for immigrants, since the Dutch government has expressed similar concerns about alleged welfare tourism.

The Dutch will seek accommodation with the British, but their support will have limits: The Netherlands wants to avoid a treaty change. As the EU crisis has escalated, the Netherlands has seen a rise in Euroskeptic and anti-immigration forces, and as a result the traditional parties have little desire to refuel a debate about the future of the European Union or call a referendum over a new treaty.

The Netherlands will try to preserve the European Union, but it is not afraid to call for limiting certain aspects of the process of Continental integration to a reduced number of countries in the Continent’s northern economic core. During the height of the Greek crisis in the first half of 2015, the Dutch government was one of several EU governments that asked local experts for a contingency plan, should Greece leave the eurozone. The Dutch also kept a hard line on Athens, demanding tough economic reforms in exchange for a new bailout program.

More recently, the Dutch government has discussed plans to create a group of “like-minded countries” to limit the influx of asylum seekers in northern Europe. According to De Telegraaf, the Dutch Cabinet recently discussed plans to create what it calls a “mini Schengen,” which would include only the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria and Germany. In an interview with international newspapers, Dijsselbloem, the president of the Eurogroup, said countries in northern Europe could be “forced to take measures to close their borders” because of the rise in the number of asylum seekers and the lack of solidarity by countries in the south.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently asked the Advisory Council on International Affairs — a group of academic advisers to the Dutch Cabinet and parliament — for its opinion on the use of the “enhanced cooperation” mechanism in the European Union. This mechanism allows a certain group of countries to deepen integration in some areas without including the entire European Union. The advisers replied that the use of  “differentiated integration” would become increasingly frequent in the future because the European Union has become too complex and has too many members to secure consensus.

In the coming years, the Netherlands will try to keep the European Union alive, even while defending policies to freeze or reverse certain aspects of Continental integration. This is because though the Netherlands wants to preserve the political and trade aspects of an integrated Europe, it is not necessarily interested in promoting a Continental bloc with an ever-growing number of members that extend from Portugal to Cyprus and that integrate at the same pace, as was the bloc’s original intent.

As a mid-sized power in northern Europe, the Netherlands is particularly interested in preserving a political and trade agreement that includes the largest powers around it, as well as those countries with which it has deep historical tries (Belgium and Luxembourg). As the plans for a federal Europe are replaced by mechanisms to ensure different levels of integration at different speeds, the Netherlands’ main goal will be to protect its privileged relationship with the largest powers in northern Europe.

By Jay Ogilvy

A few columns ago, I proposed a different vision of geopolitics based on Manuel Castells’ concept of “the space of flows.” The main idea was fairly simple: We need to supplement the literal proximities between the geopolitical entities we call “states” with another set of relationships — namely, the ties that bind some places to others through dense corridors of communication and commerce.

With the help of well-known American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, I’d like to explore yet another form of closeness and distance that could further supplement a new, less literal, geopolitics: economic and cultural similarities. I’ll start with Fukuyama’s thesis that China and southern Italy are, in a sense, “closer” to one another than are China and Japan or Italy and Israel.

In his book Trust, Fukuyama develops the thesis that low-trust societies — places where people generally have less trust for those who aren’t related to them, like China and southern Italy — put so much importance on family and relationships that they often find it difficult to succeed in industries requiring organizations that are larger than just a few families. Products such as handcrafted leather goods and clothing can be fashioned and sold by small groups of people bearing the same last name. But the automobile and aerospace industries demand larger workforces and consequently require a degree of trust among strangers that runs in short supply in southern Italy and western China.

Revisiting the ‘End of History’

Let’s take these questions in turn. It is tempting to think that Fukuyama is wrong again; wasn’t he the guy who told us that history was over? But this would be a glib conclusion that badly misreads the case Fukuyama was making in The End of History and the Last Man. To those of us steeped in the tradition Fukuyama draws on — George Friedman included — everyone knows that the phrase “the end of history” does not refer to the cessation of politics. What a ridiculous idea, as if one day we might wake up to a world in which journalists no longer had anything to write about! Fukuyama is not deluded, as countless commentators have made him out to be with sentences starting with, “Contrary to Fukuyama’s idea that history is over … ”

Instead, “the end of history” refers to a particular reading of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work by a French scholar named Alexandre Kojeve. In a series of influential lectures in Paris during the 1930s, Kojeve laid out an interpretation of Hegel, according to which Hegel (the thinker) saw himself teaming up with Napoleon (the historical actor) to accomplish a kind of rounding out of history in word and deed. To the extent that Hegel’s words brought to self-consciousness Napoleon’s uniting of Europe, then the disparate and often senseless acts of history that had occurred up to that point could be understood to have achieved a new level of meaning and maturity.

Kojeve certainly wasn’t maintaining that according to Hegel, history was over and nothing would happen anymore. Again, that would be ridiculous. Nor was Fukuyama claiming anything of the kind. Instead he was borrowing this idea, well known to some, to make similar sense of the demise of both communism and fascism in the 20th century. With only democratic capitalism left, the contest between world-dominating ideologies was over. A new maturity, not the shutdown of death, had been achieved. With the violence of adolescence behind us, we could enter into adulthood, with all the headlines and events that “adult” development would engender.

Of course, it is possible to question both Kojeve and Hegel about their reading of Napoleon’s significance, just as it is possible to question Fukuyama’s view that democratic capitalism has triumphed quite as thoroughly as he claims. After all, China still resists democracy, and since 2008 we have reason to look for another chapter in the history of capitalism. But these are sensible debates about real issues, not facile dismissals of a foolish claim that was never intended to be made in the first place.

So Fukuyama is not wrong again, because he was never wrong to begin with. Nor, I think, is he wrong now to call attention to the figurative “closeness” between southern Italy and China. Their economies, and hence their geopolitical power, are still inhibited by low levels of trust between non-kin. Look at Italy’s plight as one of the southern European nations tearing the European Union apart. Look at the near panic induced among many senior Chinese officials who are cowering under the threat of arrest. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is unfolding for a reason: The “radius of trust,” to use Fukuyama’s vivid phrase, is still too often drawn tight around friends and family, even as companies in China get bigger.

Fukuyama on Political Order

Fukuyama’s focus on the importance of trust carried into his later two-volume magnum opus, The Origins of Political Order (2011) andPolitical Order and Political Decay (2014). These magisterial tomes trace the origins and evolution of political organizations from their pre-human roots in primate biology to the present day.

There is no way to adequately summarize more than a thousand pages in less than a thousand words. Still, I want to draw your attention to this work because Fukuyama’s framework sheds light on two areas of great interest today: First, the crises in southern Europe and the Middle East, and second, the prospects for democracy in China.

For Greece and Italy, his lesson is fairly simple: Don’t assume that once modernization has been achieved, liberal democracy will flourish like mushrooms after a rainstorm. After taking the time to review several histories of nation building and state building — the two are not the same, as Fukuyama shows in great detail — he is able to conclude with authority that there are several paths, not just one, toward modernization and development.

Fukuyama then identifies the six major components of a geopolitical model: economic growth, social mobilization, ideas/legitimacy, democracy, rule of law and the state. By reviewing and comparing the histories of state formation in China, Europe, Russia, Latin America, the United Kingdom, North America and Africa — in other words, the history of the entire world — Fukuyama is able to show how different countries’ paths toward modernization have been.

“In Britain and America, economic modernization drove social mobilization which in turn created the conditions for the elimination of patronage and clientelism. In both countries, it was new middle-class groups that sought an end to the patronage system. This might lead some to believe that socioeconomic modernization and the creation of a middle class will by themselves create modern government. But this view is belied by the Greek and Italian cases, societies that are wealthy and modern and yet continue to practice clientelism. There is no automatic mechanism that produces clean, modern government, because a host of other factors is necessary to explain outcomes.”

A similar lesson can be drawn with respect to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever one has to say about the wisdom of driving on to Baghdad in the Iraq War, the bungling of the U.S. occupation showed a callow lack of appreciation for that “host of other factors” involved in institution building.

“Results of state building are very disappointing. The United States is scheduled to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan in 2016 without having created a functional, legitimate centralized state. Iraq seemed to have more of a state, but the latter’s authority in the areas north of Baghdad collapsed in 2014. Repeated interventions and billions of dollars in foreign assistance have yet to create functional governments in either Haiti or Somalia.”

The Recurring Threat of Patrimonialism

One theme that shows up throughout Fukuyama’s work is the unending tension between the need for objective, neutral and fair rule-based institutions on the one hand, and mankind’s age-old tendency to favor family and friends on the other. Even where the rule of law has triumphed after centuries of familial favoritism by tribal leaders, society hasn’t managed to eliminate the perpetual threat of “repatrimonialism” — a big word that plays a big role, by Fukuyama’s measure.

This brings us back to China, for there as nowhere else we see the contest playing out: Can China move beyond “rule by law,” where the legal system is used to level the playing field for everyoneexcept the country’s leaders, to “rule of law,” where the leadership is not, in patrimonial fashion, above the rules governing everyone else?

The jury is still out, but Fukuyama’s framework gives us a helpful lens through which we can read breaking news stories about China. Fukuyama begins his history of statecraft by pointing out that China was the first in the world to transition from warring tribes to a functioning, centralized state under the Qin dynasty in the third century B.C. Much has happened since then, of course, and the paroxysms of the 20th century — from Mao’s Long March, through the Cultural Revolution, to Deng Xiaoping’s dictum “to get rich is glorious” — may have cut the roots to China’s past so thoroughly that no vestige of its long history could last. But in one of his bolder chapters, titled “The Reinvention of the Chinese State,” Fukuyama makes the claim that “whether or not participants in that process were aware of what they were doing,” Chinese leaders have been engaged in a kind of Confucian repatrimonialization since 1978 that is, in many ways, reminiscent of dynasties past. “The reformers were deliberately seeking to establish a Western-style Weberian bureaucracy, but in doing so they inadvertently recovered some of their own traditions.”

So what about the future? Will the growth of the middle class in China generate louder calls for democracy? Or can authoritarian capitalism persist? As of this writing, Fukuyama is on his way home from China, and we will be talking in the coming weeks. I’ll convey the outcome of our conversation in my column next month.

By Ian Morris

Last week, a visit to the London School of Economics gave me the opportunity to participate in some fascinating and important discussions on everything from the origins of agriculture to the future of the U.S.-Iranian relationship. And yet as the week went on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a truly momentous shift was unfolding right in front of me. Each morning as I walked through Soho to get to the school, I passed under a big banner announcing, “London Welcomes President Xi Jinping.” The Chinese leader had been in town just a week earlier on a visit that British Prime Minister David Cameron had called the beginning of “a golden time” in Sino-British relations.

Britain’s leaders have enthusiastically embraced China. Two years ago, Chancellor George Osborne announced that London would become the first Western hub for trading renminbi and that Chinese banks would be allowed to open branches there. Then in June, Britain ignored U.S. objections and signed the Articles of Agreement of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, widely regarded as a Chinese rival to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. During Xi’s most recent visit in October, London announced not only that it would ease visa restrictions on rich Chinese tourists but also that the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group would invest $9 billion in the new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, despite concerns about China gaining access to nuclear secrets. Meanwhile, negotiations with China continue for a $16 billion investment in High Speed 2, a high-speed rail line linking London to northern England.

An Island at the Edge of the World

Since about 6000 B.C., when melting glaciers finally raised sea levels high enough to create the English Channel, two fundamental facts have dominated Britain’s strategic position. First, it is an island at the edge of the European landmass; and second, it projects into the northern Atlantic Ocean.

But insularity has rarely equaled isolation. Both archaeology and DNA show that by 5000 B.C., people, goods and ideas were already moving up and down the “Atlantic facade,” stretching from modern-day Spain to Scotland. Southern England was still tightly linked to northern France through ties of ethnicity, economics and culture when Julius Caesar invaded in 55 B.C. However, Britain was still very much the edge of the known world in antiquity and remained so until the 15th century A.D. While the English Channel and North Sea were narrow enough to function as trading highways, the Atlantic Ocean was simply too big for ancient and medieval ships to master. Its vastness formed a barrier that cut the islands off from the real centers of civilization, which stretched from the Mediterranean to China.

This band of civilization had formed the world’s demographic, economic and military core since farming began around 9500 B.C., and for millennia Britain served as a subordinate satellite at the band’s western end. In the last few centuries B.C., northern France heavily influenced southern England, but in the first few centuries A.D. Rome ruled the whole of England and Wales. Then in the mid-to-late first millennium A.D., Germans and Scandinavians settled and plundered much of Britain, before Norway and Normandy invaded England in 1066. By the start of the second millennium, English monarchs (of partly French descent) began pushing back, and for a few short years after 1422 the infant King Henry VI nominally ruled both France and England. By 1475, though, English King Edward IV had formally renounced all claims to France in exchange for cash.

Technology and, above all, the invention of ocean-going ships eventually transformed Britain’s strategic situation. By the 12th century A.D., Chinese shipwrights were building vessels capable of traveling thousands of miles. Arab skippers in the Indian Ocean picked up some of their key ideas and brought them to the Mediterranean. And by the 15th century A.D., Portuguese caravels were nosing their way down the western coast of Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1490s, bigger, faster Iberian galleons reached the Americas and passed the Cape of Good Hope to enter the Indian Ocean. The new ships converted the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier around Western Europe to a highway linking it to lands of untold wealth.

Becoming the Center of Global Trade

At first, it seemed as if the new technologies had done little to change Britain’s strategic position. Spain and Portugal, which both combined easy access to the Atlantic with strongly centralized monarchies, were better placed than any other country to exploit the maritime highways. The English, along with the French and Dutch, found themselves shut out of the rich pickings in India, South America and the Caribbean and reduced to trading with the parts of North America that the Spaniards did not want. If anything, Britain seemed more vulnerable than ever to domination from the Continent in the 16th century, particularly when Spain tried to invade it in 1588.

In reality, though, the Atlantic economy that ocean-going ships had created had already begun to improve Britain’s fortunes. The North Atlantic had become the Goldilocks ideal: big enough that very different kinds of societies and ecological zones flourished around its shores, but small enough that European ships could move quite easily around it, trading at a profit at every turn. In this brave new world, the relatively weak governments of England and Holland became an advantage, because they were less able than the powerful Spanish monarchs to expropriate traders’ profits.

Throughout the 16th century, Spanish kings treated the New World and their merchant subjects as a kind of ATM that provided the cash needed to fund wars and dominate Western Europe. But by 1600, they were overextended and bankrupt. English kings, by comparison, struggled to plunder their North American colonists and their traders. Generations of conflict ended in 1688 with a compromise, known as the “Glorious Revolution,” that installed a Dutch king and business-friendly institutions in England. Holland, which did not even have kings, went even further in this direction, and the three great wars fought between the English and Dutch from the 1640s to the 1670s had everything to do with intercontinental trade and nothing to do with European empires.

Meanwhile, Britain’s insularity continued to dominate its strategic thinking, but the fact that it projected into the North Atlantic was increasingly coming to be more important than its location near the Continent. Understanding this, a handful of 18th-century Britons undertook one of the most profound strategic reorientations in history. Rather than seeing Britain as the western end of Europe and using overseas trade to fund wars that could improve the country’s position relative to the Continental powers, they began to see Britain as the hub of an intercontinental trade network. From this perspective, the only reason to fight a war in Europe was to prevent any single power from dominating the Continent, since a dominant land power might then be able to challenge Britain at sea.

The story of how they achieved their goals is too well known to need retelling, but by 1815 Britain had managed to establish a balance of power in Europe and an overseas empire on which the sun never set. Bringing together huge concentrations of capital, precocious industrialization, a vast merchant marine, unrivaled financial expertise, a fleet bigger than any other three navies combined, and an Indian army that could act as a strategic military reserve made Britain the first genuinely global power in history. Unlike any previous empire, Britain derived most of its wealth not from plunder or tax but from its dominant position in global trade, and it used its military and economic muscle to protect free trade and open markets. Long before the “golden time” in Sino-British ties dawned, Britain’s relations with China were entirely a product of this muscle. China’s emperor rejected a British trade delegation in 1793, but 50 years later his descendant was unable to resist any longer after British ships sank his fleet, seized Hong Kong and moved to blockade the Grand Canal, threatening Beijing with famine. The “unequal treaties” that followed, giving Britain a monopoly over trading rights along much of China’s coast, remained in force until the 1940s, and China did not recover Hong Kong until 1997.

The story of how Britain’s 19th-century system broke down is even better known. Free trade allowed some of Britain’s commercial partners — most important, the United States and Germany — to industrialize their own economies. On the one hand, their growing wealth allowed them to buy more British goods and to raise British revenues even further, but on the other it made them rivals in international markets and rich enough to challenge Britain militarily.

After about 1870, Britain’s financial and military lead over its rivals steadily shrank, and with it, the country’s ability to police the international order and to deter other great powers from trying to unite Europe. In 1914, Germany’s leaders decided that their own strategic position was so parlous that they had no choice but to risk war with the world’s policeman. Even if they did not initially aim to master Europe, their war goals rapidly evolved in that direction. Britain and its allies defeated this challenge, but only at a ruinous cost, and a second German offensive (much more explicitly aimed at Continental mastery) could only be overcome with the power of the Soviet Union and the United States.

Same Interests, New Tactics

In 1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said, “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.” But that was not entirely true. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary, had been nearer the mark in 1848 when he said, “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual friends … [only] our interests are eternal and perpetual.”

For more than 400 years, Britain’s strategic interest had been to engage vigorously in global trade while preventing the rise of a single dominant power on the European continent. In the 17th century, that required all-out naval conflicts with the Dutch. In the 18th century, it required all-out naval conflicts with France as well as colonial expeditions and occasional Continental land wars. In the 19th century, it mostly meant policing the world’s sea-lanes and trying to conduct the Concert of Europe. Between 1914 and 1945, it meant total air, sea and land wars with Germany and an increasing reliance on the United States; and from 1945 into the 2010s, it meant even deeper dependence on American economic and military strength, combined with a delicate diplomatic dance with what we now call the European Union.

British leaders constantly had to recalibrate the balance between their American and European interests. In the 1950s-1960s, they found themselves leaning too far away from Europe and being shut out of the Franco-German alliance that headed the European Economic Community. In the 1970s, they found themselves leaning too far in the other direction, entering the renamed European Communities on disadvantageous terms in 1973. Since the 1980s, they have leaned away from Europe again, renegotiating their financial contributions in 1984-85, opting out of the euro in 1992, joining the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 against Western Europe’s strong objections, and committing in 2013 to an in-out referendum on the European Union within the next four years.

Seen in this light, the dawning of a “golden time” in Sino-British relations takes on new meaning. British interests remain focused, as they have been for centuries, on balancing between Europe and the wider world, but Britain’s special relationship with the United States is just one vehicle for pursuing that balance. There are no eternal allies.

Since about 2010, British governments have begun wondering whether the American alliance is still the best way to maintain their nation’s position in the world. Their interest in becoming “China’s strongest partner in the West,” as Osborne has put it, need not mean that Britain is drawing further away from Europe, since both U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart insist that they want to see Britain remain within the European Union. Nor does it need to mean that Britain is turning its back on the United States. But it does, nevertheless, represent a significant rebalancing. Britain, with the world’s fifth-biggest economy (in nominal terms) and, by many judgments, its fifth-strongest military, is by any reckoning an important ally of the United States. But the most significant aspect of Britain’s apparent strategic realignment is surely the fact that it is not the only country that is engaging in such activity. Whether we put the blame on the foreign policy vacillations of the Obama administration, the recklessness of the Bush administration, or the steady growth of Chinese economic and military might, even such long-time American allies as Australia, South Korea and Israel are looking for new friends.

The United States has been the world’s greatest power for nearly a century, and for more than a quarter of that time it has dominated the international order more completely than any power in history. But there are growing signs that the ground is shifting under our feet, and few are more revealing than the banners with which London welcomed China’s president in October.

Forecast

• The security architecture of the Caspian Sea will change as states such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan develop their navies independently of Russia, their biggest military benefactor.
• Neither of those navies, immature as they are, will be able to challenge Russia’s anytime soon, but they will be able to defend their hydrocarbons interests.
• The states bordering the Caspian Sea will try to maintain stability as best they can to avoid inviting unwanted external intervention. 

Analysis

The security architecture of the Caspian Sea, the largest enclosed inland body of water in the world, may soon change. Of all the states that border the sea — Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan — Russia has the strongest navy, and military activity in Caspian waters tends to reflect its strength. Indeed, Russia participates in virtually every military drill and operation there, and much of the equipment used is made by Moscow.

But that may no longer be the case. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan appear determined to develop their own naval capabilities, ones that would function independently of Russia. On Nov. 4, they signed a bilateral defense cooperation agreement that will take effect in 2016. The agreement emphasizes joint naval exercises and invites officials in Azerbaijan to attend KADEX, an arms exhibition held in Kazakhstan.

The agreement was signed partly in response to Russia’s growing involvement in Syria, into which Russia is launching cruise missiles from its ships in the Caspian — notably with Iran’s permission. Wary of the risk that kind of cooperation poses, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan will try to extricate themselves from Russia as they jointly defend their shared maritime interests.

Well-Founded Interests

Their interests in the Caspian are well founded: Its waters are rife with hydrocarbons resources. The Caspian Sea Basin holds up to 48 billion barrels of oil and up to 8.2 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It also lies directly on the route of the Trans-Caspian natural gas pipeline, which would supply Europe with natural gas without Russian involvement.

Naturally, these interests bring Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan into conflict with Iran and Russia, which want to limit their neighbors’ access to offshore oil fields and obstruct the construction of the Trans-Caspian pipeline. And they want to do so by manipulating the territorial boundaries in the sea. Currently, Iran controls only 13 percent of the water in the Caspian Sea, a number derived from how much coastline it actually has. Tehran — and only Tehran — wants each country to have a 20 percent share, splitting the territory evenly among all the states that border the sea, regardless of how long their coasts are. The discrepancy has created a disputed zone, into which Iran has deployed naval assets to fend off Azerbaijani hydrocarbon exploration vessels. For its part, Russia will continue to discourage new pipeline routes into Europe, much as it did with the failed Nabucco pipeline.

What No One Wants

It is little wonder, then, that as the interests of Iran and Russia diverge from those of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, so too do their naval strategies. As Russia and Iran enhance interoperability through bilateral exercises, Azerbaijan is courting other countries. In November, it hosted the heads of navies from the United States and Korea to discuss educational and technical cooperation opportunities. Over the past few years it has acquired as much non-Russian military hardware as it can. It has purchased naval assets from Turkey, Israel and the United States, and it has participated in several training programs with the U.S. Coast Guard. (Notably, the 2016 U.S. Navy Foreign Military Sales program has several options for platform and equipment purchases in which Azerbaijan may be interested, but so far no official proposals have been made.) Moreover, Baku hopes to modernize the equipment it already has, and with an expanded military budget for 2016, it may well be able to.

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan is developing its shipbuilding capabilities, having launched its first project in 2012. Like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan wants to avoid purchasing Russian equipment, as evidenced by the poor showing of Russian defense firms at the KADEX expo since 2010. In addition, Astana recently purchased 10 unmanned underwater vehicles from French firm ECA Robotics, which also trained many Kazakh naval officers in their use.

With so many changes in the offing, the Caspian Sea may appear to be the scene of imminent conflict. However, Caspian Sea states will try to maintain stability as best they can because they understand that instability could invite external intervention — something that none of them want.