Επαναφέρω μια ανάρτηση που έκανα προ διετίαςμε αναδημοσιεύσεις από report της Transatlantic Academy (το ίδρυμα, υπό την αιγίδα του German Marshall Fund, ολοκλήρωσε τον κύκλο του, έκλεισε, στις αρχές Ιουνίου - εμπεριέχει έναν συμβολισμό και αυτή η εξέλιξη).
Europe and the United States must accept that the international order built by the West and based on its values will not be universalized as their material and ideological hegemony wanes with the rise of China and other emerging powers.
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I
The Future of the International Liberal Order
I
The Future of the International Liberal Order
The world is making a transition from a western-led international order to something new. The current order was designed by the West to serve and promote liberal practices. Over the past 200 years, this order has undergone many changes: the shift away from imperialism, the rise of U.S. hegemony, and the turbulence of the 20th century. Recently, however, a trend of alternative orders has begun to emerge, which could pose the greatest challenge yet to the liberal international order. As a new host of rising powers begin to assert their place on the global stage, the material and ideological dominance of the liberal order may be coming to an end. In researching this theme, Transatlantic Academy fellows are examining the following changes to the international order:
1) Power Shifts. There is currently an ongoing diffusion of power from the industrialized West to the emerging economies. Western democracies’ share of global GDP is steadily decreasing, a trend that is likely to continue. While military balance of power remains with the West, thanks mostly to U.S. military strength, defence budgets in Asia are collectively higher than in Europe, suggesting a longer-term shift in military power.
2) Decline of the Western Model. The economic crisis, gridlocked politics in the United States, and the lingering financial crisis in Europe contribute to a lack of global enthusiasm for the western model. For now, the image of the West is tarnished.
3) The Introverted West. Ongoing economic and political troubles have led the West to an increased focus on internal domestic issues. The EU is spending less time engaging its neighbourhood and more time focused on its internal problems. The United States is losing its credibility as a hegemonic power, and also looking increasingly inward. The more introverted the West becomes, the less the liberal order will be actively maintained and promoted.
4) Global Governance Challenges. As the number of players in the game increases, global governance proves harder to negotiate. Not only are there more participating state and non- state actors, but populism at home has made focusing abroad more difficult. An example of this is President Obama’s October, 2013 canceled trip to Asia to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, due to the U.S. government shutdown.
5) Fundamental Differences. The emerging powers and western democracies often have fundamentally different views of world order. Legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy promotion, justice, and economics are components of order which can be understood and promoted in different ways. Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil and other rising powers bring with them alternate interpretations and perspectives on international order, and their ever strengthened engagement with the world will increasingly create a new international landscape that the West must learn to navigate.
Πηγή: Transatlantic Academy
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II
China’s Increasing Role in the Mediterranean
II
China’s Increasing Role in the Mediterranean
Over the past three years, Mediterranean security has taken on new meaning in light of the Arab Spring and growing role of China to the security scene. The Levant especially has been a flash point for Mediterranean “conflict,” with the protracted Syrian crisis, Israel and the West’s confrontation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the longstanding Arab-Israeli conflict, and energy scramble among states in the Levantine Basin. Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), there is a retrenching of western influence and the U.S. rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific reinforces such a trend after a decade of war in the Middle East.
In midst of such a region-wide scramble, China has entered the Eastern Mediterranean basin and MENA at large by expanding its economic, political, and military footprint. The readjustment of sensitive regional balances in line with the gradual penetration by China, as a unique global actor aiming to be a player along with the EU and the U.S. in the Mediterranean, will have security implications for key regional stakeholders.
In light of perceived waning U.S. influence, already traditional western allies such as Israel and Turkey are readjusting and upgrading ties with China [Δες ενδεικτικά: Israel and the BRICS - National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel "Special Relationship" - Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations - SCO and Mackinder’s prophecyκαι Turkey, China, and the Eurasian Land Bridges].
Turkey Between NATO and SCO
In 2013, NATO member Turkey shocked its allies when it chose a U.S.-sanctioned Chinese firm to co-produce a $4 billion long-range air and missile defense system. Despite NATO’s warnings that such a system would compromise NATO intelligence and therefore not be interoperable with its early warning assets, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chose to make the deal.
Moreover, Erdogan has repeatedly announced his desire for Turkey to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a China-led and Russia supported Eurasian security organization that also includes partners such as Iran and Pakistan as observers. Frustrated with the stalled EU accession process, Turkey is increasingly turning from a westward European orientation to an eastward Eurasian orientation.
Much like the missile defense deal is causing a rift between Turkey and its NATO allies, technology transfers to China are also damaging U.S.-Israeli ties.
Israel, China, and the Middle East Peace Process
In December 2013, the head of Israeli defense exports resigned, after U.S. outrage upon discovery that U.S. military technology used for missiles and in electro-optic equipment had been transferred to China. In pursuing warmer ties with China, Israel had hopes to leverage its skills in high technology, agricultural innovation, and its most lucrative industry, weapons. The push for upgrading Sino-Israeli ties comes in midst of deteriorating relations between Israel and the U.S. and EU.
In November 2013, while the Great Powers were hammering out an interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, former Israeli UN ambassador Dore Gold — who has the ear of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was joined in Beijing by retired Gen. Uzi Dayan, former deputy chief of staff for the Israeli Defense Forces, to explain the need for defensible borders in the West Bank to Chinese military brass. They also presented their case on a nuclear Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians, with materials translated into Chinese.
With EU boycott over Israeli institutions that operate in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and increasing disaffection with the U.S. rapprochement with Iran, Israel is looking to China as a new partner. Likewise, Beijing has also expressed interest to join the Middle East Peace Quartet.
Given China’s unique posture in the Levant — simultaneous good ties with Syria, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and even ties with Hamas and Hezbollah, which the West declines to engage, one wonders if it is a matter of time before the Quartet becomes a Quintet.
Syria as the New Afghanistan
Next door to Israel, Syria is what some Chinese scholars call a new “Afghanistan” — a witch’s brew of international jihadists group exporting terrorism, as well as a battleground for proxy war between great powers.
Syria presents a new threat to China: the internationalization of the Uyghurs’ separatist cause forming in the crucible of the Syrian war. Chinese Uyghurs from Xinjiang as well as those residing in Turkey have crossed over to Syria to join jihadi fighters, with goals of returning to Xinjiang to launch attacks. Beijing further fears that through linking with international jihadist groups, Chinese Uyhgurs and their terrorist cohorts would spawn homegrown radicalization of China’s 20 million Muslims.
Fearing an Islamist regime would replace Bashar al-Assad and export terrorism to China, Beijing thus joined Russia and Iran to help Assad “politically, militarily — and also economically,” in the words of Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Kadri Jamil. In September 2013 when the U.S. threatened to attack Syria and Russia responded by dispatching a naval flotilla, China also deployed warships to the coast of Syria to “observe” the situation. In January 2014, China and Russia further conducted joint naval war games in the Eastern Mediterranean in a “show of flags.”
Quo Vadis?
In the year ahead, China will continue to attract countries in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean with its expanding economic and maritime footprint, and play a more assertive role both in the political and security realm in order to safeguard its interests.
By Christina Lin - Πηγή: Transatlantic Academy
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III
NATO Should Adapt Geographic Division of Labor, Work with China in Mediterranean
III
NATO Should Adapt Geographic Division of Labor, Work with China in Mediterranean
A group of scholars from the United States and Europe argue in a new report that the transatlantic partners should:
• engage China’s military to provide cooperative security in the Mediterranean region via NATO;• be willing to modify the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to regain consensus on the norm among emerging powers post-Libya; and• acknowledge a geographic division of labor within NATO, in which Europe takes greater responsibility for crises in its neighborhood while the United States is more engaged in Asia.
These are among the recommendations of the Transatlantic Academy’s survey Liberal Order in a Post-Western World.
Europe and the United States must accept that the international order built by the West and based on its values will not be universalized as their material and ideological hegemony wanes with the rise of China and other emerging powers, the scholars argue in the report, the product of seven months of collaborative research and analysis. The transatlantic partners must instead respond by solidifying their societies, economies, and alliance as an anchor for liberal values through the completion of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and other measures, while at the same time finding common ground with emerging powers to forge a new rules-based global order.
“Peacefully managing the onset of a polycentric world will require compromise, tolerance, and recognition of political diversity,” Transatlantic Academy Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan writes in the introductory chapter to the survey.
The scholars argue that, “As it confronts an era of geopolitical flux and uncertainty, a strong and resolute West will be needed to guide ongoing change.” Necessary steps for the “strengthening of the liberal anchor” include reinvigorating the transatlantic partnership through:
• a TTIP agreement between the United States and European Union, open for other countries to join provided they meet its standards;• a capable NATO that accepts a geographical division of labor while maintaining full commitment to collective defense;• the construction of a coalition for Internet governance to ensure an Internet “where access and content are open to all”; and• greater U.S.-EU cooperation on development aid.
The report also recommends strategically engaging emerging powers in a number of areas, including:
• working with China to provide security in the Mediterranean, a region where Beijing is increasing its economic and military footprint;• reopening the conversation on prevention of mass atrocities by using Brazil’s “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP) proposal as a starting point to develop greater consensus; and• cooperating with these powers on development aid.
The scholars also argue that the West must reduce its dominance of global economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to encourage emerging powers to provide more global public goods and prevent the marginalization of such institutions.
Individual chapters of the report examine how the international liberal order is viewed by countries such as China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Nigeria; global economic governance; TTIP; the changing world of development aid; Internet governance; China’s emerging role in the Mediterranean; and the use of partnerships to sustain order.
Liberal Order in a Post-Western World was authored by the six Academy fellows: Trine Flockhart of the Danish Institute for International Studies, Charles A. Kupchan of the Council of Foreign Relations and Georgetown University, Christina Lin of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, Bartlomiej E. Nowak of the Vistula University in Warsaw, Patrick W. Quirk of Johns Hopkins University, and Lanxin Xiang of the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Shorter-term fellows and other scholars contributed additional chapters and boxes on topics such as monetary order, the eurozone crisis, and the Middle East.
“The previously Western -devised and- dominated world order is clearly in flux,” the report concludes. “The West need not cede all influence in shaping the rules-based world order to come, however. To the contrary, the United States and Europe can strongly shape it by consolidating their internal strength and allure as a liberal guide for future principles and actively engaging emerging actors to set new rules of the road.”
Πηγή: Transatlantic Academy
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