HOW DID THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MISS THE CRISIS IN MALI

Jim de Wildewww.jimdewilde.netwww.twitter.com/jimdewilde August 2012

DRAFT

As part of a series of essays on foreign policy in a post-superpower world, I have been attempting to frame a global foreign policy, not as an abstraction, but as a way to think about how global rule of law, global sustainable development and global security can be approached. New alliances require new strategies. Students in Angola will have a different perspective on the Cold War than students in Dusseldorf or Denver. The new generation of global China will have a different interpretation of the partition of Arabia than historians looking at it from a London-Washington-Paris Treaty of Versailles worldview. Mauritanian students will look at the Westphalia state system differently than Swiss political scientists.

This is not an argument that the world of global security issues has changed completely or that understanding Chinese naval strategy is no longer essential for foreign policy strategies. It is, however, an argument that ignoring the influence of new players and attitudes will not enhance the values of rule of law and global security.

Nor is this a celebration of U.S. decline as can be found in some circles of English-speaking Asia. Until there is a means for ensuring that the personal security of Kurds or Tuareg or Tamils in Sri Lanka can be guaranteed by some kind of new security regime, the United States, Britain and France will continue to be asked to play the disproportionate role that they did in the protection of Benghazi.

However, the assumptions, which have gone into foreign policy about Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iraq, show that the way we think about the world is dramatically limited.

Building a state system in Afghanistan has shown that traditional foreign policy thinkers have been unable to disentangle the past assumptions and ask questions about a post-colonial post-Cold War view of the issues at stake. The argument that in the 1980s, U.S. foreign policy backed the Islamists against the “secular modernizers” in Afghanistan allowing scarce credibility in the 1990s and 2000s needs to be addressed. It is the first question asked when one has a discussion of Afghanistan with Colombians or Nigerians.

We know that conversations between Ankara, Moscow and Tel Aviv are more relevant to the future of Syria than Security Council resolutions. However, we continue to have political conversations that are predicated on transparently obsolete assumptions. Then pundits pontificate on the “cynicism” of democratic electorates confronted with “insurmountable” global problems.

Canadian foreign policy has always had an opportunity to give a different view. Colonial enterprises like the Boer War almost brought the disintegration of Canada. Quebec has always identified with Algeria more than with France in its self-image and intellectual composition.

Which leads me to four themes I want to pursue this year:

(1) How did “the international system” get Mali so wrong? This is important not only because Mali is important geopolitically and culturally but also because it reveals like an MRI scan on our decision-making process what we are doing so wrong.

(2) How are we ensuring resource wealth doesn’t lead to kleptocratic governments and what kind of regime do we need to ensure global mining is an advanced technology industry distributing productive wealth globally and not a caricature of James Cameron’s Avatar?

(3) What is the global foreign policy of the new “Second World” powers? What is Indian foreign policy towards rule of law in the Maldives and the successor regime to Assad in Syria? The international system is improvising strategies in Mali as it did in Ivory Coast. The thing that is clear is that the UN is not a vehicle for these activities and improvised solutions (Dakar-Abuja on Mali, Istanbul-Moscow-Tel Aviv on Syria) are very unstable elements.

(4) How do we promote the global rule of law at every opportunity to ensure that the international system establishes the preconditions for global wealth-creation? This is not a question of naïve idealism. Even if the “fair” outcome will take a while, it is imperative that the language of “fair outcomes” be part of international politics, more rather than less.

HOW DID WE FAIL THE PEOPLE OF MALI IN WASHINGTON, OTTAWA, LONDON AND PARIS?

In the last few months, Mali has gone from being a place known for historical tourism and a global mining centre to being a place where terrorists and fundamentalists have created chaos and a situation that has real consequences for global security.

The independence of Azawad, the Tuareg homeland of northern Mali has not been recognized by any international agency. The weakened government of Bamako recovering from a coup of soldiers dissatisfied with corruption and lack of support for the obviously failing military effort against northerners is trying to recover its balance.

I am not an expert on Mali. I leave my understanding to first-rate analysis from Afua Hirsch of the Guardian and political scientists like Benjamin Soares at Leiden. Mali is important because it now risks becoming a centre of global terrorism, because cultural heritages are a global trust and because any country that has experienced rule of law that slides into chaos is a moral challenge to the global community in a particular way, which is the Baltic States or the Pinochet coup of our generation.

The issues posed by the failure of the “global security community” and “the coalition for the promotion of the global rule of law” to anticipate what happened in Mali is, however, something that I want to talk about.

Our approach to foreign policy issues is hopelessly out of date. At one level, this is a bromide, generals fighting the last war. We had a paradigm based on the war-by-error of World War I, on the Cold War, or Vietnam, on 9/11. But this seems to be a more serious problem of failed analysis (“conceptual frameworks” or “paradigms” or “memes”) and one with consequences well beyond the wonderful culture and democratic values of Mali.

The sudden collapse of Mali came from three perfect storm producing phenomena:

(1) The tragedy of success, a democratic regime that received too much donor assistance before the capacity to turn capital into productive and transparent investment existed;

(2) The unaddressed issues of colonial boundaries (the curse of the Durand line as I have called it in a previous lecture) which continues to make the world more dangerous as Ogaden, Afghanistan, Iraqi, Syrian boundaries create challenges of global consequences in the modern age;

(3) The inability of our foreign policy theories to understand migration as an international problem, as when thousands of armed militia left Libya to go south and west through the Sahara.

Mali is one of many future crises that come from this outdated approach to international politics. Here are some new assumptions that one might hope became an Obama Doctrine in a second term:

1. Global migration has changed the nature of state security. Thousands of immigrants create a security problem and are a global concern. When there is a displacement of people as predictably took place after the Libyan war. Global migration requires a new approach to the issues of economic migrants, refugees and international politics.

2. The aid trap described by Dambisa Moyo is real. The task of foreign assistance is to ensure that local capital markets allocate capital to productive entrepreneurs. Initiatives like VC4Africa are critical for the next generation of democratic activists so that situations like the one that led to the Malian coup and subsequent regional destabilization are addressed. Resource revenues should be turned into SWFs like Abu Dhabi or into a pension system like Norway. By the end of the decade, all mining and extractive industry payments should be directly to such investment instruments.

3. Most importantly and most difficult, the residual effects of the colonial boundaries drawn on maps in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and London has to be addressed. In Brazil and Canada, we are exploring ways to provide shared jurisdiction over aboriginal lands to ensure that prosperity is managed by the stakeholders. In places like the Tuareg population of Mali, where the Mauritania-Mali border has no economic significance, new institutions have to be designed. As many of these areas (the Ogaden, for example) are rich, new institutions for managing the wealth that comes from extractive industries have to be designed.

This will not happen overnight. But the language of traditional international relations has to change for it to ever happen. There will be endless threats to global security unless the international system creates geographically coherent states where democratic politicians can build social trust. Political innovators will also have to design new mechanisms for cooperation between states that allow us to manage interdependence.