Promise and Performance: The Trials and Trails of India’s Industrialization

The 1960s and early 1970s in India are vital for understanding patterns of growth and structural tendencies of the national economy at large because in many ways they mark certain fundamental transitions that were, in fact, already observable by then. Agricultural growth rate fell sharply form 3.64 percent in the 50s to a mere 1.68 percent in the 60s and ‘non-foodgrain output growth was uniformly lower than foodgrain growth’. (Mohan Rao 1997: 7) Similarly, despite a fourfold increase in industrial production between 1950-1975, it can be seen that the average level of industrial production fell from 7.7 percent between 1951-65 to a sluggish 3.6 percent per annum during the decade 1965-75. (Nayyar, 1978) - Table 1. There was also a general slowdown in the heavy industry, with growth in metal production falling from a healthy 12.5 per cent per annum in the first period to a mere 2.5 per cent per annum in the second. (McCartney, 2009) Further, there have also been studies which pointed out the increased emergence of unutilized manufacturing capacity and a concomitant decline in the rate of industrial growth, as already noted. (KN Raj, 1976) Therefore, it is illuminating to see what this clear conjecture of declining growth rates in both industry and agriculture during the 60s imply in regards to the sustainability of the economic models of growth and productivity implemented primarily through the influential Second Plan.

Nehru and Mahalanobis (Source)

In this essay, I argue that, although there had been exogenous factors such as poor harvests and loss of foreign demand and aid leading to foreign exchange shortages, the failure of the Mahalanobis strategy as evidenced by the economic slump from the mid-sixties, among other things, was caused by a much more fundamental failure at the heart of the strategy — namely, the incorrigible insistence on capital goods industrialization as being the primary means of national development within an overall context of income maldistribution, and demand deficiency. As India focused on real capital formation as the panacea for problems of employment and growth, the promise of perpetuation and sustainability of this model has been belied by the subsequent crises. In this context, I believe it is inevitable and imperative that one ask what it was that churned the “passions” of policy-makers and politicians to undertake heavy industrialization as the singular pathway to a certain ideal state of living. This is not to deny the diversification of economic structure, establishing of higher irrigation facilities and increased but inequitable potentials of self-sufficiency that this stress of large-scale manufacturing was able to accomplish, but it is to excavate and investigate the underlying ideologies, insecurities, inhibitions and formative powers that structured, sustained and directed the state-machinery and resource-allocative forces to take up this cause. In this essay, however, due to lack of space, I will focus only on aspects of economic promise and performance, nevertheless acknowledging the centrality of the historical question.

Table 1. (Nayyar, 1978)

Firstly, the interrelations between consumer goods, capital goods for producing capital goods, and capital goods for producing consumer goods was seen to be central to evaluating and achieving effective economic growth, as articulated in the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy. (Chakravarty, 1987) The concomitant necessity here was also a need to increase the production of consumer goods using labour-intensive methods, (as opposed to direct capital investment by the government) and a general increase in employment in order to have the consumer demand proportionately expanding. Along with this, the overall success of the plan was also dependent on the inter-sectoral harmony. Any slowdown or insufficient performance in the agricultural sector would also lead to a dampening of the industrial growth. This would be the case if (i) agricultural supplies were limited because in India’s traditional industries such as that of jute, cotton, and sugar, were heavily dependent on agriculture for their raw material; (ii) if the ‘surplus of wage goods and investible resources are not forthcoming’, (Nayyar 1978: 5) then this could lead to slackening of output and inflationary situations, and finally, (iii) a general demand for the industrial goods will fall with rising food costs, severely hindering non-foodgrain consumption expenditure.

It should be noted here that the sources for financing and sustaining the conditions necessary for long-term productive growth was dependent as much on general public investment and the subsequent diversification of capital goods into manufactured goods, as it was on the ability of the government to procure resources for reinvestment by either taxing or incentivizing or directing the growing incomes of private players. The latter is important — for both social and political reasons as well - because a concentrated increase in the consumption of non-essentials and luxury goods at the cost of public investment and inequitable distribution of national income can only lead to an economy that is both unstable and unsustainable. Thus, it was assumed that the government would be able to socialize current income flows by financing investments through savings construed by private entities within an overall context of increased productivity of the public sector and community-held agricultural sector. Therefore, even if certain patterns of public investment can play an important role in Indian agriculture, as Chakravarty (1979) notes, ‘on demand side far more significant effects can be obtained in the long run sense by changes in agrarian relations.’ As a case for illustrating the inequitable demand, we can look at the year 1964-65, where it has been calculated that, in the rural sector, ‘the richest 10 per cent of the population was responsible for 32.2 per cent of the total consumption of industrial goods, whereas the poorest 50 per cent accounted for only 22 per cent of the total. Consumption inequalities were even more pronounced in the urban sector, where the top decile purchased 39.3 per cent of the industrial goods and the bottom five deciles absorbed just'19.9 per cent of the total.’ (Nayyar 1978: 7)

Here, it is pertinent to raise insights from Bagchi (1970) who identifies two critical problems with the strategy; namely, (i) ensuring balanced increase of supplies of different types of goods, and (ii) the inevitable discrepancies that arise between the distribution of demand and planned supplies of consumer goods. While the former may lead to loss of demand for capital goods if ‘capital-goods industries outpaces the planned rate of increase in the output of consumer-goods industries’, the latter can potentially exacerbate the problems of ‘inflation and evolution of the black market both in socialist and mixed economies’. At the core of his analysis is the plausible idea that the limited controlling powers and socio-political inhibitions of mixed economy governments cannot ensure cogency and cooperation with the more dominant economic forces, namely, the expenditure patterns of private sector. Therefore, it is important for us to acknowledge the presence of rural oligarchy in determining the course, feasibility and effectiveness of industrial growth (Mitra, 1977) because (i) it must be pointed out that export-led foreign-capital induced industrial growth cannot be sustainable as far as the domestic consumer demand is low due to unequal income distribution. This is because export-led policies will require alliances between ruling coalitions and urban industrial elite which, often, will have to come at the expense of the rural based rich peasantry. (ii) Consequently, a resolution to turn to external markets to replace the domestic demand bottleneck would entail policies that will ease licensing measures for industries and incentivizing MNCs (multinational corporations), cutting back on indirect taxes on luxury goods (because the majority demand is from urban and rural elite who indulge in such consumption), or cutting the level of income tax levied on the rich in order improve their scope for consumption and savings and so on — all of which would entail severe redirecting of resources and incentives for the welfare of the elite as opposed to more plausibly rural-poor-friendly policies such as fertilizer subsidies, public investment in irrigation and so on.

Given that, the social and political nature of elite demands should also be noted. They had to be concerned about protecting the structural benefits accruable by rigid maintenance of hierarchized divisions of land holdings, proprietary relations, tenurial conditions and caste privilege dynamics. One could claim that, in a supply constrained system, an increased role of public investment led growth could cure the demand deficiencies. But, as Chaudhuri (1998) notes, ‘even when public investment rises, what is crucial is the structure and character of investment’. If public investment is primarily utilised in accordance with political intents of decision-makers and the elite, then the issues will only be exacerbated.

Although, Nehruvian agrarian policies in the Second Plan did theoretically focus on achieving political power to the rural poor peasants while also improving agricultural productivity using labour-intensive methods, none of these ideals were substantiated or realized. Varshney (1998) insightfully shows how intra-Congress party struggles and discrepant realities on the ground, coupled with the increasingly failing overall agrarian productivity and loss of foreign exchange led to the eventual collapse of the institutional strategy employed by the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy. One must note here that, along with the lack of local political support and mileage that was required to mobilize the resources for enabling the policy measures, the strategy made an oversight in at least two ways. Firstly, as Chakravarty (1987) notes, they treated the agrarian sector as a ‘bargain sector’ wherein it was optimistically believed that a slight capital investment and organizational restructuring through co-operatives, panchayats and indirect measures such as rural education would help increase the ever-required food supplies, thus balancing inter-sectoral costs, and cutting import costs. Thus, the government was confident enough to halve the total outlay in investment in agriculture and irrigation in the Second Plan, along with an absolute decline in irrigation expenditures.

But, more importantly, the assumption that industrial growth from well-achieving capital goods sector would rise in tandem with agrarian surplus proved to be a far cry. This was especially untenable given that there was no considerable plan delineating financial distributional mechanisms that must be at play in order to ensure equitable income distribution, even if there was, presumably, a formidable agrarian surplus. In other words, for equitable growth and increased productivity, there has to be implementational strategies concerning not only inter-sectoral relations, (questions dealing with price incentives, surplus labour, technocratic adjustments, movement of raw materials etc.) but also those of intra-agrarian forces (sub-regional variabilities, natural resource differentials, proprietary and holding relations, centre-state relations etc.) must be actively acknowledged. We see that in the Second Plan, the latter was meant to be achieved mostly through social restructuring and political programming as opposed to heavy economic investments. This proved futile in an overall scenario of a mixed economy and intra-party fractions where the government did not simply have the muscle to wrest its policy measures into fruition.

Consequently, it should be mentioned, thereby, that one of the main limitations of the Mahalanobis strategy was that it did not prioritize the ‘income distribution’ problem as it was centred on the issue of industrial productivity. This was so to such an extent that even the growth of consumption was schematized and imagined as being dependent on ‘prior increase in the capacity of the capital goods sector’. (Chakravarty 1987: 28) Thus, it is provocatively and profoundly insightful when Chakravarty compares this model as being a peculiar form of ‘trickle-down’ strategy because ‘it promised an improvement in the consumption level only as the end product of a process of accumulation’, even though it did not favour any high-income group as being necessary for accumulation. However, I think this opens up avenues to consider the three periods of planning as being a form of state-capitalism, as opposed to being strictly socialist. Additionally, it is pertinent we engage with this question about the nature of the state as well, because, as delineated by Byres (1997), theorising the nature of the post-colonial state as being either ‘instrumental/Hegelian’, ‘interventionist’, or ‘multi-class’ and so on has implications on how we approach planning, and in determining our priorities and possible blind-spots.

References:

Bagchi, Amiya. (1970) ‘Long-Term Constraints on India’s Industrial Growth, 1951-1968’ in Robinson, E.A.G. and Kidron, Michael (eds.) Economic Development in South Asia, London: McMillan and Co Ltd. pp. 170-193

Chakravarty, Sukhamoy. (1979) ‘On the Question of Home Market and Prospects of Indian Growth’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 14, No. 30/32. pp 1229-1242

Chakravarty, Sukhamoy. (1987) Development Planning: The Indian Experience, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Mohan Rao, J. (1997) ‘Agricultural Development under State Planning’ in Byres, J. Terence (ed.) The State, Development Planning and Liberalisation in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 127-172

McCartney, Matthew. (2009) India- the Political Economy of Growth, Stagnation and the State, 1951- 2007, London: Routledge

Nayyar, Deepak. (1978) ‘Industrial Development in India: Some Reflections on Growth and Stagnation’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 13, No. 31/33. pp. 1265-1278

Raj, KN. (1976) ‘Growth and Stagnation in Indian Industrial Development’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 11, No. 5/7. pp. 223-236

Varshney, Ashutosh. (1998) Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Nation Negated: Tagore, Periyar and Their Anti-Nationalism

In the June of 1916, under the Press Act of 1910, the government of British India passed orders against the founders and executive members of the Home Rule League and the Theosophist Society: Annie Besant, B.P. Wadia and George Arundale, and their associate newspaper New India. In order to quell their constant attacks against the British bureaucracy and their calls for Indian self-rule, the Act forbade them from participating in politics, whether in the form of writing or in speeches, and confined their movements to six specified locations that were not under the influence or reach of Madras City; their organization’s primary foothold. In the same week as this, Rabindranath Tagore, recently Nobel laureate and amassing global fame, arrived for the first time in the Japanese capital of Tokyo, where ‘some twenty thousand people turned out to receive him at the city’s central railway station’. Under a $12,000 contract with a speaking bureau in New York, Tagore was to deliver a series of lectures in the United States via a brief detour in Japan. It was these series of lectures that form the content matter of a slightly later publication in 1917 titled Nationalism, an important text for consideration in this essay. Finally, and importantly, in this very year of Nationalism’s publication, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker makes an entry into the realm of nationalist politics by joining the Madras Presidency Association (MPA), a non-brahman enclave of the Indian National Congress.

Periyar and Ambedkar (Source)

What, one asks, do these three separate historical instances signify? In this essay, I argue that these seemingly disparate incidents, were, in fact, part of an ongoing ideological conjuncture of contending efforts to formulate differing ideas of the nation. By mainly focusing on the thought and activities of Tagore and Periyar, I will compare and show their critical visions and figurations of the idea of the nation. Broadly speaking, while Tagore represented nationalism mainly as a force of capitalist nation-state machinery, Periyar saw it as being congruent to Brahminical Hinduism. By doing so, they present to us highly critical visions of nationalism and, in turn, provide alternate modes of thinking about forms of belonging and resistance.

I will start off by showing that Tagore’s critical formulations of nationalism was part of post-World War I (post-WWI) forces of pan-Asian political cosmopolitanism and were enabled by his own socio-philosophical ideal of spiritualist humanism. Thus, owing to these Tagorean ideals, it is morally untenable to embolden nationalism, and hence it becomes necessary to negate and resist the idea of ‘nation’. In Periyar’s case, however, intersectional identities and intra-national forces of subordination demand that the idea of ‘nation’ be negated. Thus, a vector of subaltern identities of gender, caste, class, region and language, mobilised through the Self-Respect Movement, serve to defy the hegemonic utopia of nationalism. In the first section, I will also briefly discuss Annie Besant’s Home Rule League because its activities were part of the pan-Asian cosmopolitan moment that Tagore engages with, and they also form a prelude to the entry of Periyar’s Self-Respect movement. In the second section, I will discuss in greater detail Periyarite and Tagorean discourses against nationalism and conclude by discussing the alternatives they presented.

The Decade of 1916-26: Besant, Tagore and Periyar

As scholars such as Gauri Viswanathan, Erez Manela, and Mark Frost, among others have shown, during the end years of the WWI, what Frost calls the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ emerged. This roughly refers to the decade from 1916 to 1926, when, across the British territories, ‘elite expressions of nationalism merged with a new type of political cosmopolitanism’. Religious patriots, revivalists, and literary thinkers in Singapore, Ceylon and India — modernizing Buddhists, Confucian progressives and Theosophists, respectively - imagined and expressed ‘new visions of world order’. This order broadly meant a ‘reconstructed’ British empire, forming an imperial federation of countries, that was to bring about international brotherhood and permanent peace. Owing to the lack of space, and for our local purposes, I will only be focusing on the Indian scene at the moment that was predominantly occupied by the Annie Besant’s Home Rule League.

In early 1914, in the league’s other newspaper Commonweal, Besant wrote that ‘the term Empire has broadened to signify a unification of peoples under a single scheme of government which should allow its co-ordinated parts the widest possible freedom of autonomy’. Under this scheme of Home Rule League, the imperial federation, as presented in Besant’s Commonwealth of India Bill, involved the creation of a system of government that extended from village councils in rural areas and ward councils in municipal towns, to provincial parliaments and a national parliament that elects representatives to an imperial parliament. According to this plan, India’s national parliament would control its own army, navy and communications, though, as Frost notes, Besant later argued that India required the ‘continuance of the ‘imperial connection’ to preserve her from the threat of Russia’. Although, Besant’s ideas predate Wilson’s Fourteen Principles, Viswanathan and Frost, suggest that these ideas were formed under the influence of empire-builders like Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes on the one hand, and Asian millenarians and reformist thinkers such as Anand Coomaraswamy, Dr. Lim Boon Keng, and Ponnambalam Arunachalam, on the other. Although, for the most part Besant received political support in Madras presidency and through adherents such as the “trinity” of Indian leaders Lal, Bal and Pal; her reputation was heavily compromised in 1919 when she took a stance that was interpreted as favouring General Dyers’ role in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and in her opposition to Gandhi’s Satyagraha. Unlike Besant, however, Tagore never invested the British Empire with his cosmopolitan hopes nor entertained the nationalist politics as the way to achieve his ideal of humanist universalism.

In Nationalism, he considers the idea of ‘nation’ as an extraneous category imposed upon Indian history due to its colonial encounter. He distinguishes between nation and society, what he calls samaj, and poses them almost as dialectical forces. The former serving a mechanical purpose, working through forces of commerce and military, deploying power (although, the political side of society does have this aspect, it is only for the sake of self-preservation, unlike the nation, which uses this to attain supremacy and so on). The samaj, however, is through which the attainment of human ideals is made possible and is an end in itself. The samaj, owing to the incursions of the West is under threat of being submitted to the forces of nationalism. The working principle of the former is competition between mechanically organized nations for the purposes of power, whereas the latter works through ideals of social cooperation and harmony, with those principles being an end in themselves.

In the former, self-interest reigns, and thereby breeds perpetually greed and jealousy for wealth and power limitlessly, while in the latter, it is the notion of ‘mutual self-surrender’ which sustains and enables a spirit of reconciliation. In the crucial sentence, he defines the colonial encounter as the ‘moral man, the complete man’ giving way, almost unknowingly, to the ‘political and the commercial man, to the man of limited purpose’. Significantly, Tagore understands 'nation' not as an identarian term, but as a transposable method of mechanical organization of power, an extraneous field of abstraction, that is always imposed (he even calls it an ‘applied science’) and thus as an anti-idealist force.

Thus, when we construe the Tagore’s impulse, the problem of nationalism cannot simply be posited within the field of political sociology because the ‘political’ is not the primary site of contestation in his emancipatory discourse. For Tagore, the ideal of freedom and universalist conviviality was, first and foremost, a preterpolitical task. It was to be attained and articulated through spiritualist humanism, the communal space of samaj, the aesthetic idealism of creative unity, and the ethics of heterological comity, among others. It is owing to this philosophical orientation that Tagore was able to pose the question that was new and, perhaps also, rather baffling or irksome to his contemporaries: what, his writings seem to ask, should the ideal of Indian freedom constitute of when it does not merely mean being untethered to the colonial yoke and establishing a modern nation? Thus, the further question is: what else is required of the ethical task of imagination and of living, when neither anti- colonial nationalism nor internationalist cosmopolitanism can bring upon the transcendent fellowship of humanity?

In this very decade, alongside Tagore, political developments in the Madras Presidency, form the preconditions for the emergence of Periyar. As Barnett and Irschick show, in the early-twentieth century, a nexus between Home Rule League, the Congress and the Brahmin community was felt very strongly by the rural, land-owning non-brahmin jatis. Along with the fact that major players in the League and Congress were mostly Brahmins, their predominance in administrative jobs and university-level education was observed and protested. Thus, in response to the belief that Home Rule merely meant Brahmin rule, Justice Party was established in order to advocate against Home Rule and prioritize social reform and non-Brahmin demands over the Congress-League politics. It was in this context that Periyar joined MPA, and in later stages, even radicalized further, as I will show in the next section.

E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (1879-1973), known to his followers as Thanthai Periyar; the Great Man — a self-conscious dig at his nemesis Gandhi, the Great Soul - was born in the trading town of Erode in Tamil Nadu. His father, Venkatappa Naicker, worked as a stone mason and coolie, and he lived in great poverty for the first half of his life until he earned his way upward through trading. It was in this now-wealthy household, infused by Brahminical religiosity, that Periyar was born into. Periyar recalls the donative thrust of his wealthy mid-caste family where charities to temples, cow-gifting to Brahmins and patronaging of wandering Hindu monks who debated religion in his house was a common feature in his early life. Periyar himself, at the age of twenty-five, left home as an itinerant monk, along with two other Brahmins, travelling to North India. He travelled to Puri, Calcutta, and Benares where he worked in a Hindu ashram, translating religious sermons of his Brahmin compatriots and collecting leaves and materials for conducting the daily puja. After two years of this sadhu lifestyle — during which, he later said, he witnessed firsthand the corrupt practices of the Brahminical fold - he was taken back to Erode by his father.

The Next Decade, 1926-36: Tagore and Self-Respect Movement

The very Periyar, who wandered the stretches of the Indian subcontinent as a wandering sadhu, translating religious sermons; around three decades later would set sail on the French ship, Amboise, from Madras that would take him touring the Soviet Union and other European countries. In this Soviet tour of 1931, however, he was translating into Tamil the Communist Manifesto and was attending the May Day Parade at the Lenin Mausoleum at the Red Square, meeting with atheist-rationalist societies such as League of the Militant Godless and German International Freethinkers’ Association. He was so inspired by the Soviet power —the hydroelectric stations of Dneprostroi and Zaporizhia, Avtomobilnoe Moskovskoe Obshchestvo, the efforts of Profintern offices (Red International of Labor Unions), and its resilience during the era of Great Depression and so on - that he even named the children of a leading Dravidian intellectual ‘Russia’ and ‘Moscow’. Similarly, Tagore, who travelled to the Soviet in the same ship the previous year, also spoke highly of the Soviet spirit for having ‘raised the seat of power for the dispossessed’. He was particularly admiring of the Soviet education system, which he discusses in his fifth and seventh letter that he wrote from Berlin. He was particularly struck by the active participation and visiting of the working-class members and craftsmen in art exhibitions that were previously only the reserve of the upper-class aristocrats and art connoisseurs. In the seventh letter, he even discusses the Soviet use of the museum as a pedagogic site. Although he identifies the repressive dimension of Soviet’s propogandist education, Tagore, however, hoped that this spread of education and the consequent banishment of illiteracy, could serve to further democratize the state in the future. The Soviet experiment was important for Tagore because it served as a model for the Indian nation that was poor, agricultural and mostly illiterate, just like Russia before the Revolution of 1917.

Tagore, however, had his reservations against many Soviet characteristics, one of which is chiefly pertinent for our purposes, namely his stressing of the links between nationalism and violence. In an interview he gave to the newspaper Izvestia, he advised the Soviet government to ‘never create a force of violence which will go on weaving an interminablechain of violence and cruelty’. He mentioned that the ‘[F]reedom of mind is needed for the reception of truth; and terror hopelessly kills it’. However, as it was later made evident in Moscow show trials and the Stalinist purges, this warning seems prescient. The powers and needs of nationalism, by the suppression of the individual and by the coercive hegemonizing of cultures, necessitates the use of violence. According to Tagore, this was an interminable and originary link between nationalism and violence.

This link between nationalism and violence gets articulated in Periyar through his emphasis on the centrality of Brahminism. It was also during the early- to mid-20s that Periyar rejected Gandhian Congress, as he became increasingly convinced that Gandhi’s politics of negotiation and accommodation with Brahmins was not radical and just enough to realize his ideals. Periyar believed that Gandhi sought to “attack” Brahminism while upholding varnashrama dharma — a self-contradictory move - as became clear in Gandhi’s responses to Vaikkom Satyagraha and temple-entry protests. Thereafter, according to Periyar, the ideology and function of the ‘nation’ as a concept was homologous to Brahminical Hinduism both in terms of its networks and ideals. Here, most significantly, we need to note that ‘Brahminical Hinduism’, in Periyar’s usage, was an all-encompassing term that included and referred to Aryan and North Indian subordination, Hindi-Sanskrit hegemony, patriarchal systems of power, upper class domination and even the institute of Congress. Thus, his Self-Respect Movement, which sought to eradicate and oppose Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism, involved issues that cut across all the inferiorized, subaltern identities of caste, gender, class, language and region. There are two main things to note here about this Periyarite conceptualization of Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism.

Firstly, by making ‘nationalism’ and ‘Brahminism’ continuous, homological and transitive entities; Periyar was able to emphasize and attack the very core upon which these power structures are predicated. Namely, their irrational, constructive and classificatory function. The most astounding and “scandalous” aspect of Periyar’s radicalism springs from this very recognition of its core function. To further substantialize this point, we can consider his 1955 declaration, when he advocated for the public burning of the Indian National Flag. Here, he invokes Thiruppur Kumaran, a Gandhian nationalist, who died in January 1932 because of brutal police attacks when he refused to let go of the British-banned Indian National Flag. Periyar said:

“Why shouldn’t we burn [the Indian National] flag? Is it because Thiruppur Kumaran saved it? Is the cloth so soiled that it will not burn? All that is needed is little more kerosene and it will burn. Or is it made of some fire-proof cloth? A lump of clay becomes Vinayaga. Isn’t it the same story when a cubit length of cloth becomes the flag? We have proved that Vinayaga had the same worth as a lump of clay. Similarly, we will prove that your flag has the same value as a cubit length of rag.”

Here, we can observe a series of remarkable reinterpretations being undertaken, all made possible owing to the Periyarite recognition mentioned above. The first thing to note is that Kumaran, in Periyar’s reading, cannot simply be glorified and subsumed within the nationalist discourse as a martyr. In fact, upholding Kumaran as a martyr would amount to condoning the very evil of nationalism. According to Periyarite discourse, Kumaran is more a ‘victim’ of nationalism than he is a heroic martyr. This is because Kumaran, an exemplar of the nationalist public, fails to see the constructive nature of nationalism and its deep linkages with the Brahminic discourse. The passionate euphoria, the sense of belonging, the sacrificial compulsion, and the ethics of self-annihilating reverence inspired by the nationalist symbology all serve to dehumanise and deify the nationalist subject. It is this dehumanisation that Periyar finds to be irrational. This ‘irrationality’ can only be produced and sustained because of the constructive character of these symbols, affects and ideologies. Moreover, Periyar even identifies a congruence between the Brahminic Vinayaka and the National Flag, thus highlighting their homology. In many ways, he is also hinting at the theological foundations predicated in both cases where the ideals of devotion and deification, surrender and sacrifice, reverence and repression are all active. Given these forms and formulations, Periyar’s response is to aver the pragmatic materiality of things. The flag and the idol are merely objects that are instrumentalised and propagated as more worthy than a human life. Thus, if this ‘objective’ element is recognised and the schism between the symbol and substance, the material and the immaterial, the real and the reinforced is identified, one can see things more clearly. Thus, for Periyar, emancipation and democracy can only be achieved through an undertaking of rationalist inquiry. Rationalist public inquiry lays bare things and events providing clarity and truth. More importantly, it emancipates the nationalist-subject from the shackles of Nationalism/Brahminism by way of humanism. Similarly, it is owing to this disenchanted, rationalist framing that he was able to describe the idol in Vaikkom temple in 1924 as ‘a mere piece of stone fit only to wash dirty linen with’. On the same note, he criticized the Hindu public saying that ‘[H]ad it not been for the rationalist urge of the modern days, the milestones on the highways would have been converted into gods. It does not take much time for a Hindu to stand a mortar stone in the house and convert it into a great god by smearing red and yellow powders on it’. Therefore, we see that the religiosity of nationalism and Brahminism was opposed to the virtues of rationality. As M.S.S. Pandian summarily notes, ‘self-willed reason alone could restore the real worth of those enslaved by religion’ and the Self-Respect Movement strived to do the same.

Self-Respect Movement (Source)

Secondly, Periyarite notion of ‘Brahminical Hinduism/Nationalism’ was useful as a political strategy for public mobilization and the ease of ideological communication. By pointing out to the inextricable link between the two conceptual entities, Self-Respect Movement was able to consistently mobilize and address the large subaltern non-brahmin public. Thus, a critique of Nationalism as Brahminical Hinduism enabled Periyar to consider and address issues emerging across a vector of identities, such as gender, caste, class and language. We can start by looking at the language question in Periyarite discourse, and specifically, how it was developed during the Anti-Hindi agitations of the 1930s. The agitations mainly erupted as a response to the C. Rajagopalachari - led Tamil Nadu Congress government’s decision tointroduce Hindi in schools. The anti-Hindi agitations, as commonly misconceived, were not merely a product of jingoistic Tamil chauvinism or a romanticized idea of Tamil purity and its ancientness. In fact, Periyar’s comments on the issue are instructive in this regard. He outlined his position as follows:

“I do not have any attachment to the Tamil language for the reason that it is my mother tongue or the tongue of the nation. I am not attached to it for the reason that it is a separate language, ancient language, language spoken by Shiva or language created by Agastya. I do not have attachment for anything in itself. That will be foolish attachment, foolish adulation. I may have attachment for something for its qualities and the gains such qualities will result in. I do not praise something because it is my language, my nation, my religion . . . If I think my nation is unhelpful for my ideal and could not [also] be made helpful, I will abandon it immediately. Likewise, if I think my language will not benefit my ideals or [will not help] my people to progress [and] live in honour, I will abandon it.”

It was through this logic that the Self-Respect Movement evaluated English, Tamil and Sanskrit. Sanskrit, with its strong links to the Pundits and their cultural superiority, was always rejected by the movement as a language that denied equality and dignity to the subaltern classes that it forcefully excluded. English, on the other hand, as Pandian notes, was regarded ‘as a language of modernity rather than as a language of colonial governance’. Although, the movement recognised that English was central to the Brahminical acquisition of cultural capital and in their usurpation of bureaucratic power, it reinterpreted the role of English. It was understood that English could be used as an alternative space to carry out the critique of the extant power relations, and through it access the global ideas of freedom and liberation. Therefore, Periyar says that ‘it is no exaggeration to say that it is the knowledge of English which has kindled the spirit of freedom in our people who have been cherishing enslaved lives. It is English which gave us the wisdom to reject monarchy and to desire a republic; to reject Sanathana Dharma and desire socialism. It gave us the knowledge that men and women are equal’. In fact, this attitude is highly consonant with Tagore’s reservations against Gandhi’s actions during the Non-Cooperation movement. Gandhi, in a long essay called ‘Evil Wrought by English Medium’ censured figures such as Rammohun Roy and Tilak for using English as their primary means of expression and ideation. He also argued against the ‘superstition’ that English was necessary for ‘imbibing the ideas of liberty and developing accuracy of thought’. Just as Periyar, Tagore also considered this Gandhian attitude to be flawed and dangerous. While Gandhi identifies the imposition of a foreign language as damaging, Tagore and Periyar argue that it was precisely an interaction with these other languages that gave rise to wider comprehensiveness and increased cultural exposure. Thus, Tagore writes that Rammohun Roy, due to his knowledge of other languages, was, in fact, able to have ‘the comprehensiveness of mind to be able to realize the fundamental unity of spirit in the Hindu, Muhammadan and Christian cultures. Therefore, he represented India in the fulness of truth, and this truth is based, not upon rejection, but on perfect comprehension. Rammohun Roy could be perfectly natural in his acceptance of the West, not only because his education had been perfectly Eastern, — he had the full inheritance of the Indian wisdom. He was never a schoolboy of the West, and therefore he had the dignity to be the friend of the West’. This position regarding English highlights a very important and common feature between Tagore and Periyar. Unlike Gandhi and their other contemporaries, Tagore and Periyar did not automatically accept the intrinsic validity of the national space which was required in order to sustain the binaries of Foreign/Domestic, Colonial/Colonised and English/Indian and so on. This was not because they were turning a blind eye to the brutal reality of colonialism. Instead, they identified that these binaried categories cannot be fully essentialised and that each category was internally differentiated. Moreover, they were interested in establishing and enabling the interface between these categories and emphasising their interrelation. Thus, it would be a mistake to read their efforts to collapse this dichotomous view as a form of ambivalent support for the British colonialism.

Given this, the role of Tamil has to be further explored in anti-Hindi agitations within the Self-Respect Movement. Unlike the orthodox Tamil Smarthas, Vaishnavites and Shaivites, Self-Respect Movement discourse did not posit an easy, taken-for-granted opposition between Tamil and Sanskrit. Instead, it was understood that, although it was better than Sanskrit, Tamil also had ingrained many forms of disempowerment and exclusionary vocabulary that had to be refashioned in order to deem it progressive and democratic. The main cultural forms that inhibited Tamil were seen as religion and gender. Therefore, leaders such as Kuthoosi Guruswamy and Periyar criticized the canonisation of ancient Tamil texts such as Thirukurral and Silapathikaram because they were seen as promoting gender inequality and upholding patriarchal structures. On a similar note, they criticized the promotion of Tamil through Puranic and epic Kavya literature alone and thereby sought to ‘de-sacralise’ the language. This was done by campaigning against singing Saivite hymns inconferences, teaching religious texts as part of Tamil language courses, and including invocations of gods in school textbooks. Thus, this auto-critique of Tamil enabled the Self- Respect movement to mobilise and garner support of women and lower-caste groups as well.

In this connection, the question of the relationship between gender and Brahminical nationalism within the Self-Respect Movement has also to be emphasised.

The most important way in which Periyar opposed the patriarchal foundations of Brahminical nationalism was by attacking the institutions of marriage and family. By insisting that marriage was merely a way of enslaving women and turning her into private property, he initially campaigned for complete abolition of marriage itself. However, during the Self-Respect Movement, he advocated a form of marriage that ‘transcended the traditional and socially-accepted norms for women’. In this new form of marriage, all rituals associated with traditional marriage had to be abandoned, including the tying of thali which he regarded as a symbol of male subjugation. These marriages were conducted without the presence of Brahmin priests and were scheduled during times that were traditionally considered as inauspicious, such as during Rahu Kalam or midnight. Apart from these, he opposed arranged marriages and advocated men and women to choose their own partners. And as aforementioned, he also sought to reform the patriarchal heritage of Tamil language itself. For this reason, he introduced such neologisms into Tamil such as vidavan (widower) and vyabicharan (male prostitute), which had not existed before. Along with these measures, the Self-Respect Movement also ensured that a substantial women presence be maintained in public conferences, by creating a separate women’s conference and by ensuring women preside over and fairly participate in general conferences. It was therefore that feminist figures such as R. Annapurani, T.S. Kunchidam and S. Neelavathi, among others were prominent during the movement.

Thus, we see that representatives of identical categories encompassing gender, caste and language were able to articulate and refashion their political will and reason within the Periyarite discourse. The realist and rationalist thrust of Periyarite politics deemed impossible the hegemonic and all-encompassing utopia of nationalism by stressing the existence of factional divisions, and intra-categorical differences. Therefore, nationalism was understood not as an antidote to these various vexing problems, but as an ideological and socio-cultural system that actively sought to erase or underplay these issues. Tagore, on the other hand, criticized the extraneity and violence of nationalist machinery, as that which diminishes humanity’s ability and proclivity to commingle, and establish peace and internationalist fellowship. In doing so, and owing to their critical prescience, courageous eloquence, and unwavering efforts for collective betterment; the antinomies and anxieties of the contemporary moment can be better addressed.

References:

Anandhi S, ‘Women’s question in the Dravidian Movement, 1925-1948’, Social Scientist, 19 (1991), 24-41.

Barnett, Marguerite Ross, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, (New York: Princeton University Press, 1975)

Besant, Annie, ‘On the watchtower’, The Theosophist, 36.2 (1914), 97–103 (p. 99).

Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, ‘Rethinking Tagore on the Antinomies of Nationalism’, in Tagore and Nationalism, edited by K. Tuteja and Kaustab Chakraborty, (Shimla: Springer Publications, 2017)

Bhattacharjee, Manash, “Tagore’s Prophetic Vision in 'Letters from Russia'”, The Wire, September 11, 2020, https://thewire.in/history/rabindranath-tagore-letters-from-russia-soviet- union.

Chidamparanar, Sami, in Leader of Tamils: Biography of Periyar EVR (Madras: Periyar Self- Respect Propaganda Institute, 1983)

Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India, (New York: Princeton University Publication, 2001)

EV Ramaswamy, in Thoughts of Periyar, edited by V. Anaimuthu (Tiruchinapalli: Thinker’s Forum, 1974).

Frost, Mike, ‘Asia’s maritime networks and the colonial public sphere’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 6.2 (2004), 63–94.

----------, ‘Beyond the limits of nation and geography: Rabindranath Tagore and the cosmopolitan moment, 1916-1920’, The SAGE Journal of Cultural Dynamics, 24.2 (2012), 143-158.

Gandhi, Mohandas, and Ramachandra Prabhu, Evil Wrought by English Medium, (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1958)

Guha, Ramchandra, ‘Travelling with Tagore’, Penguin Classics, (2012), 1-51.

Irschick, Eugene F, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: Tamil Separatism and Non- Brahmin Movement, 1916-1929, (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969)

Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, (New York: Oxford University Publications, 2007).

Pandian, MSS, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007)

--------, 'Denationalising' the Past: 'Nation' in E V Ramasamy's Political Discourse’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28.42 (1993), 2282-2287.

---------, ‘Nation Impossible’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44.10 (2009), 65-69. Periyar, Thanthai, Why were women enslaved?, edited by K. Veeramani, (Madras: Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institute, 2020)

Sen, Krishna, ‘1910 and the Evolution of Rabindranath Tagore’s Vernacular Nationalism’, in Tagore and Nationalism, edited by K. Tuteja and Kaustab Chakraborty, (Shimla: Springer Publications, 2017)

Tagore, Rabindranath, in Truth Called Them Differently: Gandhi-Tagore Controversy, edited by Prabhu and Kelekar, (Ahmadabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1961)

-----------, Letters from Russia, (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati Publications, 1960)

-----------, Nationalism, (Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2012)

-----------, Creative Unity, (London: McMillan and Co., 1922)

Venkatachalapathy, AR, “Periyar’s Tryst with Socialism”, The Hindu, September 18, 2017,https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/periyars-tryst-with-socialism/article19704347.ece.

Viswanathan, Gauri, ‘Ireland, India and the poetics of internationalism’, Journal of World History, 15.1 (2004), 7-30.

The Gradual Origins of Indo-Lanka Liberalization Reforms

When dealing with the question of structural reforms in South Asia, there are two interesting issues that arise, especially in the case of India and Sri Lanka. Firstly, we notice that the impact that the reforms have had in India were quite negligible in improving the rates of growth in manufacturing industry, total factor productivity rates, aggregate economic growth, employment rates in the manufacturing sector and of capital formation. Many scholars argue that in fact a much larger shift in the trend of growth rates can be observed during the 80s in India, that is, a decade before the reforms were carried out most forcefully. Conversely, in Sri Lanka, post-1977 reforms led to a burst of short-term economic growth with a jump in GDP rates within four to five years. Secondly, we see that in the case of both Sri Lanka and India, this new economic vision of reforms was as much a product of immediate and internal economic crises as it was a political project to redefine new alliances and state priorities.

Dr. Manmohan Singh, then Finance Minister of India, officially announcing the liberalization reforms in 1991. (Source)

In this essay, I argue that there are, broadly, two factors can be identified that explain the gradual structural transformation of these economies: (i) firstly, the growing dissatisfaction with the state-led planning economy, which which has arisen not only because of the states’ underperformance over the decades, but also because of a general ideological shift in understanding the role and the nature of the state; (ii) secondly, the gradual culmination of internal crises, coincidentally with various exogenous shocks or externally dependent or determining conditionalities. It is also worth noting here that, additionally and perhaps more interestingly — and this is to some extent a partial product of the two factors mentioned above — a peculiar link started to be drawn between socio-ethnic conflicts and the advancement of a liberalized economy, which became an essential part of the discourse of nationalism and sovereignty in general. In other words, the third factor underscores the attempts of these states to produce ‘economistic’ discourses in order to either make sense of or justify concomitant incidences of ethnic violence seen at the time.

Given this, there were generally two camps of thought which actively debated these issues. One, largely critical of the reforms, emphasized that the supposed failures of state-led development were not as acute as neoliberal writers were claiming, and that therefore, it was important to trace the political economy changes, i.e.; the role of bureaucratic-businessmen alliances, or the shifting governmental priorities pushed forth by, and in favour of, elite interests in order to understand the emergence of reforms. Then there were those who actively advocated reforms, pointing out to the stifling measures of state-led planning economy, which was unable to unleash the entrepreneurial spirits of the nation, or improve the overall economic efficiency, and therefore could not integrate into the global market by attracting foreign capital and increasing incentives for domestic private investment. There are, needless to say, considerable variations within each of these camps which I will try to present as well.

The underlying argument here is that a failure of the socialist developmental schemes led to a gradual but partial reversal in the states’ responses to the constraints present at the time of reforms which motivated them to liberalize. Here, I use the word ‘partial’ in a double sense: in lieu of Corbridge (2000), as being partial or favourable to elite interests, and secondly, as ‘incomplete’, in the sense that there was never a complete or absolute withdrawal of the state from the economic apparatus.

Two Models of Divergence

There is an interesting divergence in the development models of India and Sri Lanka before they took on the reforms, which evinces that diversity in approaches to state intervention exists even within development states. While India predominantly focused on heavy industrialization and capital formation as a way to alleviate poverty, by contrast Sri Lanka prioritized public spending on social welfare mechanisms and various subsidizing policies. Over the long-run, while failure to (i) mobilize domestic resources, (ii) direct and sustain savings into productive investment, (iii) to create rural demand and increase agrarian productivity, and (iv) persistent levels of poverty, unemployment and under capacity utilization etc. led to an economic slump in India in the 70s, in the case of Sri Lanka, we see that an overdependence on plantation-led exports revenue could not sustain the pervasive expansion of the public sector in regulation, production and welfare which eventually led to a deteriorating exchange position. (Herring, 1987)

In a sense, these long-term experiences with state-led development that either underperformed (as was the case in 70s India) or pushed the economy to the brink (Sri Lanka in mid-70s) could be seen as feasible economic explanations that led the states’ gradual embrace to a more market-led liberalization economy. In India, a visible shift toward furtherliberalization was already discernible in the 80s before it achieved a state of ‘reforms proper’ in the early 90s. Gandhi’s regime, which returned to power in the 1980 elections banking on the socialist rhetoric of ‘garibi hatao’, could already be seen to be making policies in favour of the indigenous businessmen and industrialists. Also, these tendencies were relatively heightened in the succeeding Rajiv Gandhi regime. A spate of industry deregularization policies were introduced along with the lifting of trade restrictions. In the early 80s, ‘thirty-two groups of industries were delicensed without any investment limit, and this was followed by removal of licensing requirements for all industries except for those on a small negative list, subject to investment and location limitations.’ (Ghosh, 1998) Similarly, in 1985, the coming of Open General License increased the list of exportable items and exporters were now able to access imported inputs at world prices. However, it should be noted that these changes were occurring alongside an increased cutting of subsidies in the public distribution system and dissolution of the Food for Work program in 1982. (Kohli, 2006) Thus, we observe here not only the commencing of these explicit liberalization- friendly policies, but an active emergence of a renewed economic propensity favouring newer priorities. As Kohli (2006) notes, the state was now increasingly seeing itself as a mediator in coalition with big businessmen to achieve economic growth as opposed to the earlier idea of planning economy. Thus, these lucid remarks by Ghosh captures the changing dynamics of the 80s economy:

While the economic expansion that occurred was dominated by the straightforward Keynesian stimulus of large government deficits, the role of planned investments in this process was very limited. Indeed, it was government expenditure that led to economic expansion which was finally reflected in an expenditure-led import-dependent middle class consumption boom. The effective irrelevance of planning meant that growth patterns were determined much more by market processes than by state direction. (Ghosh, 1998, pp. 321)

However, there are, in my view, some certain qualifications that have to be made here. Although, state direction did decrease, as Ghosh points out, this is not to say that India, even in the early 90s, was able to, or willing to, totally ‘withdraw from the economy’, whatever that may entail. Instead, we see that, as in the case of Sri Lanka, undertaking an economic logic of liberalization essentially means a shifting of governmental priorities and a fundamental reshaping of the nature of the state, rather than, what Herring calls, ‘wholesale privatization campaign’. (Herring, 1987)

The Partiality of Reforms

While in India the gradual tilting was discernible through various policies employed in the 80s, in Sri Lanka this shift was most pronounced in the 1971 austerity budget. But, as in the case of India, the role of the state was not completely minimized but only changed. Now, the states would play a lesser role in regulation, commerce, and production. These were discernible by an increased change in composition of overall investment with private investment crossing the levels of public investment in both states and the many deregulation procedures undertaken. However, the state had still to play an active role in developing public infrastructure, which was thought to create the initial conditions necessary to attract and sustain private investment. One subtle irony here was that while the reformist philosophy and the pro-business economy, in practice, emphasized banking on already established private actors, the theoretical rhetoric was that the capital would actually flow into capital-scarce areas and improve labour-intensive growth, thus fuelling employment. But the problem with this was twofold. Firstly, these expectations did not actually materialize as can be construed by the largely unchanging industrial growth rates and employment rates. Secondly, it paved the way for eliminating the existing structures of welfare provisioning mechanisms. Thus, instead of strengthening these measures, which had been instrumental in sustaining formidable rates of human development in these countries, governments took an anti-labour and anti-poor turn.

It should be noted here that these changeshave taken place within an overall context of partiality. Thus, for example, the passing of Essential Public Service Act in 1979 in Sri Lanka gave the state the powers to outlaw trade union activities across the states. Likewise, the Tamil rural poor had to face unfavourable conditions as, for instance, when the imports of agricultural commodities such as grapes, chilis and onions were liberalized in Jaffna, while the paddy and potato crops, which were mostly grown by the Sinhalese farmers, were protected. Even the public investment programs, which were largely funded by external monetary agencies and banks such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as through foreign aid, have led to discriminatory projects. The Mahaweli Development Project was, for instance, seen as a matter of nationalist pride, while the Tamils were protesting against it because the project was deemed to encroach lands that traditionally belonged to them. (Dunham and Jayasuriya, 2001) Similarly, the insistence of the pro-reform Jayawardane government in 1977 on reducing food subsidies was also not a product of economic rationalizing. There was no established evidence or justification to suggest that the closed economy’s trade policies or stunted growth rates was a direct result of public expenditure on food subsidies. (Herring, 1987) In fact, as Dunham and Jayasuriya (2001) pointed out, the annual subsidies on Air Lanka was exceeding domestic expenditure on public transport and sometimes also on food subsidies. Here we can note that the reforms were driven not only by economic considerations, but also by broader socio-ethnic and ideological leanings.

Sri Lanka 1977 riots, the year of liberalization reforms. Source

Just as in Sri Lanka, we can observe a similar bias in Indian reforms. However, it should be noted here that these reforms were not singularly beneficial to the elite classes and favoured majoritarian ethnicities. It is true that there was a short-term growth that was made possible following the 1977 reforms in Sri Lanka and, furthermore, the government was able to deal effectively with the fiscal deficit crisis after the reforms. However, the question of the sustainability and bias of these reforms has to be acknowledged. Thus, the continued failure of the Indian state to invest in education and health infrastructure contributes to the violent inequalities in enabling access to accruing social capital for the lower classes and depressed castes. Additionally, the determining importance of possessing certain initial conditions that favour economic growth (such as availability of infrastructure, presence of formidable human capital, durable climate for investment etc.) stands out in the way post-reform growth pans out. Atul Kohli (2006) discusses this very issue while analysing divergent growth trends in Indian states. Likewise, I believe that it can be assumed that this is true for national economies as well. A further proof of this could be a greater success that East Asian countries have been able to achieve, unlike, for example, India. The fact that South Korea and Taiwan in particular had well-established infrastructure and large state power played a role in ensuring high growth rates through open, export-oriented economies. In contrast, in India, fragmented power structures and differing demands of varied interest-groups have led to slower efforts to rapidly integrate into the global economy. Thus, we can see that the presence of favourable ‘initial conditions’ and a pro-business state are equally important in determining the implementation of these policies.

Thus, one of the cruel ironies was that these programmes of economic stabilization could not necessarily lead to political stabilization, moreover, they led to just the opposite result - increased political instability.

References Cited:

Dunham, David and Jayasuriya, Sirisa. (2001) ‘Liberalisation and Political Decay: Sri Lanka’s Journey from a Welfare State to a Brutalised Economy’. Netherlands: Institute of Social Studies.

Ghosh, Jayati. (1998) ‘Liberalization Debates’ in Terrence J. Byers (ed.) The Indian Economy: Major Debates Since Independence , Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 295-335.

Kohli, Atul. (2006) ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980-2005: Part 1: The 1980s’ , Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 13. pp. 1251-1259

Kohli, Atul. (2006) ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980-2005: Part 1: The 1990s and Beyond’ , Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 14. pp. 1361-1370

Corbridge, Stuart and Harriss, John. (2000) Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press

Herring, Ronald. (1987) ‘Economic Liberalisation Policies in Sri Lanka: International Pressures, Constraints and Supports’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 22, No. 8, pp. 325-333

The Taiwan Question & Sino-American Relations

In May 2021, during a trip to China to promote the new installation in the Fast & Furious movie franchise, famous American actor and professional wrestler John Cena got himself in a heap of trouble when he said, during an interview on Taiwanese TV, that Taiwan would be “the first country to watch Fast & Furious 9”. More precisely, Cena received backlash from China due to his comments, which led to him apologizing to the Middle Empire in a short video during which the former professional wrestler underlined his “love and respect” for China and its population, all in Mandarin. Of course, it did not take very long for this event to cross the entire world, becoming a source of jokes and pleasantries on the internet through various memes. 

Now, why exactly am I talking about this particular news topic? Simply because this event, through all its layers of silliness, perfectly summarizes the difficult case of Taiwan, as well as the current state of Sino-U.S. relations. Indeed, objectively speaking, Taiwan does fulfill the four criteria for statehood under international law defined in the first article of the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) – a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to establish foreign relations with other states. In addition, it has its own flag, its own national emblem, and its own national anthem. However, Taiwan's statehood is also frequently questioned, notably by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which considers Taiwan as a part of its territory in accordance with its “One China Policy”. 

In the past year, the topic of Taiwan regained in importance around the world as the PRC adopted a more aggressive and expansionist approach to its foreign policy and began a military build-up along its borders with Taiwan, raising concerns of a possible Chinese invasion. In the meantime, the United States of America, considered by many to be Taiwan's greatest ally and whose relations with China have been at an all-time low over the past few years, got involved in this situation with the goal of assisting Taipei in the event of an invasion and convincing Beijing to reconsider its plans. In front of such a complex situation, one can wonder, for instance, why and how did this all happen and and whether it could have provoked an armed conflict between the U.S. and China. These questions, and perhaps many more, will be answered in the following article. 

Historical Context

To fully understand the case at hand, it is necessary to go back in time. Over the course of history, the island of Taiwan has changed hands repeatedly – from the Dutch to the Spanish, to the Chinese and finally to the Japanese, who lost it back to China after the Second World War. It is important to note that this was not the same China as today – it was in fact its pre-communist version, the Republic of China (ROC), led by Chiang Kai-shek. At this moment in time, the ROC was torn by a civil war opposing the regime in place with communist insurgents led by a man named Mao Zedong, who eventually won the war. In the face of defeat, Chiang and his troops fled to Taiwan, where they proclaimed the Republic of China in exile while Mao, after coming into power, proclaimed the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Both of them claimed sovereignty on all of China, but if most states and organizations recognized Taiwan as the “real” China at first, the tide eventually turned in the PRC’s favor as a growing number of states began to recognize Beijing’s sovereignty over China, including the United States in the late 1970s. 

The One-China Policy & Taiwanese Independence   

There are essentially two different visions of Taiwan. In one, Taiwan is an independent country, and in the other, Taiwan is a province of China, which is the official policy of the Chinese government regarding the island. To further elaborate, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) considers that Taiwan is a distant Chinese territory that shall be reattached to China one day under what is called the “One-China Policy”. 

XINHUA

The One-China Policy is essentially a belief whose roots are linked to the fact that China, over the course of history, separated and reunited itself multiple times. In fact, the CCP considers that China’s territory still is not complete to this day as some parts of its former land are either part of another state (such as the Kashmir region in India) or autonomous, in the latter case it is Taiwan. Therefore, the main goal behind the One-China Policy is to regain these contested lands to one day make China truly united again.

Interestingly, a major part of the Sino-Taiwan dispute is linked to the fact that Taipei and Beijing have two different and conflicting perceptions of Taiwan. In fact, the tensions between the two actors started evolving to their current state following the election (and subsequent re-election) of Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, known for being a strong advocate for Taiwanese independence – which goes against everything the One-China Policy stands for. Therefore, over the last two years, the RPC has more than doubled its military presence near the island, wishing to deter Taipei from seeking its independence and even going as far as threatening the use of “drastic measures” in the advent of this scenario.

The U.S. Role 

As mentioned earlier, this dispute is not solely between Taiwan and China, as there is another actor involved – the United States of America. Of course, one may wonder why exactly the U.S. is involved, considering that it is after all a dispute between two Asian countries. Simply put, it is because it is in their best interests to do so, and for two reasons. First, as previously mentioned, although the U.S. government does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state (doing so would prevent Washington from having diplomatic relations with the RPC), they still maintain some relations with Taipei, thanks in part to the existence of the Taiwan Relations Act from 1979. Such relations include the provision of military equipment and training to the Taiwanese Armed Forces to safeguard the island. And while the Taiwan Relations Act does not necessarily guarantee an American military intervention in the advent of a Chinese invasion of Taipei, it would not be surprising to see the U.S intervene in this scenario, as they play a major role in Taiwan’s defense.

Second, in addition to Sino-American relations currently being at a historically low point, many political scientists argue that Beijing and Washington’s competition for the ranking of superpower could drive them towards what is commonly known amongst experts as a Thucydides’ Trap. Named after famous Greek historian Thucydides who first observed this phenomenon in his account of the Peloponnesian War, the Thucydides’ Trap typically occurs when a rising power (in this case, China) threatens to remove the dominating power (in this case, the U.S) from its throne as superpower, potentially resulting in a preventive war between the two countries. Many Thucycides’ Traps have been observed throughout history, most notably between the U.S and the USSR during the Cold War, but not all of them have resulted in a conflict. Indeed, as political scientist Brandon K. Yoder pointed out in an article on the matter, a conflict may occur between the two states if the rising power has hostile intentions and therefore “takes overtly non-cooperative, “revisionist” actions”, i.e., actions that go completely against everything the current power stands for. Would Taiwan be the straw that broke the camel’s back in that regard? On paper, it could certainly be the case. However, as it has been proven time and time again, theories do not always work out when applied in the real world. 

Conclusion 

As pointed out in this article, the Taiwan situation is an extremely complex one that greatly affects the already strained relations between Beijing and Washington. However, it is hard to say for the moment if this will necessarily provoke an armed conflict between the two states. Indeed, while it is true that the tensions are extremely high in that regard, the Chinese and U.S. economies are very much codependent, and both countries still cooperate on topics such as the environment. In addition, one could argue that the U.S. seems to be prioritizing a hedging strategy over armed conflict to contain China’s power, as evidenced by the recent return of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) – an association of states whose goal is to contain Beijing’s rise and of which the U.S is a member. However, as it has been proven many times in the past, international politics are extremely unpredictable, and everything can change in a heartbeat.  

Reimagining India's Healthcare Sector Post-Pandemic

In light of the pandemic, India needs to reimagine its healthcare sector. With India ranking 57th in the Global Health Security Index, which measures countries' preparedness and ability to handle the pandemic crisis, it is essential to consider a wider discussion and proposal for a paradigm shift in the infrastructure of healthcare services in India. According to the National Health Profile data, public healthcare services in India, especially in the last decade, have been diminishing, with only 1.29% of the country's GDP in 2019-20 dedicated to public healthcare services. Dismally, India's public expenditure on health is reducing to amounts lower than many countries classified as the 'poorest' globally.

Source

Major Issues Faced During the Pandemic

One of the major healthcare issues that have cropped up during the pandemic is the unavailability of basic infrastructure, where India has 8.5 hospital beds per 10,000 citizens, one doctor for every 1,445 citizens, and 1.7 nurses per 1,000 people, with all of the figures being less than the prescribed limits by World Health Organisation. In addition to the lack of ventilators in hospitals, diagnostic labs' limited availability has led to slow testing rates. There has also been an unequal distribution of workforce practices, with most of the personnel being employed in tier-I or tier-II cities, leading to understaffing problems in rural areas. 

Even 2004's Integrated Disease Surveillance Program, one of the major National Health Programme under National Health Mission, for maintaining a decentralised laboratory-based surveillance system to monitor disease trends and to detect and respond to outbreaks in early rising phase, is grappling with lack of personnel and resources as well as struggling to cooperate with the district health systems across states for data collection. In addition to these problems, private healthcare providers, accounting for almost 70% of healthcare provisioning in India — holding 62% of the total hospital beds and ICU beds and 56% of the ventilators — have been offering their services at a much lesser rate than the public hospitals by reportedly denying treatments to the poor as seen in Bihar, and overcharging patients with rates as high as one lakh rupees per day in cities like Mumbai. Regarding the economic policies adopted for India's healthcare system, there is a misbalance in its expenditure on preventative care with only 7% being spent on it, according to the data of the Financial Year 2017. Even in the field of foreign trade, India imports almost 70% of its Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients from China — ultimately creating huge dependence on other nations rather than being self-sufficient — despite being known as the "pharmacy of the world" and globally having the third-largest pharmaceutical industry in the world by volume.

Source

Long-term Measures for a Reformed Health Sector

In light of these issues, India needs to revisit its health policy, take lessons from the pandemic, and hopefully shift to a preventative healthcare economy to tackle any such future crisis. There is a definite need for increased public spending, for which health budgets need to be revised so that India's spending can inch closer to the global average of 6%. States such as Kerala attest to the efficiency of strong public health systems, which have been able to control the adversities of COVID-19 through outreach-based public health strategies and proactive social engagement. A separate Disaster Management Budget for increasing the number of beds and physicians, medical equipment, medicines, and care packages will contribute to successful prevention and cure in the long run. While foreign investments in medical education may lead to positive outcomes, the heavy dependence on other countries for APIs and drugs should be minimised. It should be used as an opportunity to mitigate India's supply of raw materials through mutually beneficial partnerships.

Increasing public spending along with active involvement of community doctors, Panchayat representatives, social healthcare workers, community volunteers, civil society groups, and women's groups will help in creating a robust mechanism for ensuring not just the implementation of government schemes and programs but also in directing efforts towards awareness campaigns, facilitating entitlements for vulnerable and marginalised groups, ensuring delivery of services, and providing local insights for health planning from below. Community healthcare professionals working in tandem with public health staff need to be strengthened in their capacities through better access to basic medical tools, equipment, resources, funding, research, and training.

Additionally, there needs to be a greater emphasis on preventative care in primary and secondary sectors. It has been noted that Primary Healthcare Centres are handling all measures needed for epidemic control, such as testing or detecting cases. However, currently, there is a downward trend in the proportion of the Union health budget allocated for the National Health Mission, which is focused on supporting primary and secondary health care, reporting a cut from 56% in 2018-19 to 49% in 2020-21. Optimum spending in this direction could mean expanding the network of Health and Wellness Centres within the Ayushmaan Bharat program as centres for spreading awareness, disease prevention, and community level monitoring.

Source

Regarding the private sector, there needs to be a legal framework in place to ensure future cooperation between the government and private players. These definite legal frameworks should be such that they focus on the duties and social obligations over private healthcare providers' commercial interests, especially in times of emergency. While states such as Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh overtook private hospitals for providing COVID-19 care, long term cooperation for providing free services to the poor and implementing public health schemes need legal provisions for avoiding the drawbacks faced during this pandemic.

Way Forward

This marks the appropriate time for bringing in health system reforms in India by focusing on public health services, increased public spending, active social and community engagement, and regulated private sector services, for turning these dreary times into an optimistic opportunity for a vigorous healthcare system. It would also help ensure one's rights to affordable, accessible, and quality healthcare by employing inputs from all key stakeholders and building solidarities across differences to bridge inequalities.

References

https://www.ghsindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2019-Global-Health-Security-Index.pdf

http://www.cbhidghs.nic.in/WriteReadData/l892s/8603321691572511495.pdf

https://thebastion.co.in/covid-19/disease-surveillance-in-india-from-sars-cov-to-covid-19/

https://www.prsindia.org/parliamenttrack/budgets/demand-grants-2020-21-analysis-health-and-family-welfare

https://cddep.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/State-wise-estimates-of-current-beds-and-ventilators_24Apr2020.pdf

Edited by Hiba Arrame

Blame the Government: How State-Sponsored Inequality Made the Sahara-Sahel a Battleground

The Sahara-Sahel is home to some of the lowest-income countries on Earth. Famines are recurrent, food insecurity is widespread, and poverty is the daily bread of many individuals. Nevertheless, what has attracted international attention during the last decade is the growing power of armed groups such as Boko Haram, MNLA, and AQIM. They have managed to put states up against the ropes. They have turned this turbulent region into a conflict zone between the state and armed groups, and these latter against one another. These violent non-state actors pose a threat not only to the country but also to individuals: terrorist attacks and warfare hinder human development. And violent conflict destroys and prevents economic growth in an already impoverished area. At the same time, the Sahara-Sahel has become a vital hub for the international trafficking of drugs, weapons, and human beings. 

MINUSMA Blue Helmets in Mali. Source: French Delegation to the UN

Many factors have been put forward to explain the explosion of violence in the region, from colonial borders to failed governments. However, its roots lie elsewhere. Systemic marginalization and neopatrimonialism in politics are the ones to blame. States in the region have created the perfect conditions for the flourishing of a lucrative criminal economy and armed groups' appearance. This article will analyze the horrible politics of the Sahara-Sahel and the violence and crime they have created. We will then look into the cases of some countries. We will finally explore ways to make individuals in the Sahara-Sahel more secure and freer.

States Rotting from the Inside

The first mishap of the region is the extreme inequality in the distribution of power. Elites controlling the state's apparatus, directly or indirectly, refuse to take into account the demands that would make it possible for others to attain welfare comparable to theirs. African politics are structured to a great extent through neopatrimonialism. A single authority ensures the provision of state resources to support groups through a symbiotic political relationship, which in turn allows and provides the maintenance of the authority's power (Raleigh, 2010). This kind of informal arrangement is especially prevalent in the Sahara-Sahel. Neopatrimonialism creates politically relevant and irrelevant groups, excluding certain ethnicities and peripheral populations, often coinciding with the political process, which affects the quality and duration of the lives of these groups. The relevance or irrelevance of a group depends on its physical capabilities, which determines the capacity to support or threaten an authority. The people most likely to suffer from state marginalization in the Sahel are nomads, small ethnic communities, and populations living in rural arid areas (Ibid). Irrelevant groups are marginalized from the political process and, consequently, from the public provision of goods, such as transportation infrastructure, state companies, education, or healthcare. The exclusion from the economic benefits that the state can provide is especially harmful in a region in which the private economy and private foreign investment are not especially salient. 

Marginalization directly provokes a lack of economic opportunities, stable income sources, and social mobility. Less evidently, it also produces a profound feeling of humiliation, of having been left behind, of rage and resentment. The unequal geographical and ethnic distribution of state expenditure and public goods hampers economic development, freedom, and creates violence.

Survival Economics

The lack of economic and welfare infrastructure is directly linked with the emergence of a criminal economy. Engaging in illicit activities is the only way for many people to survive and acquire a fantasy of social ascension. As Nyaburi Nyadera and Massaoud put it:

"Marginalization of the communities from the formal economy of the states is the primary reason for the growth and subsequent establishment of this informal economy which has continued to draw recruitment from a majority of the young population who join to make ends meet for them and their families,"

— Nyaburi Nyadera and Massaoud, 2019, (p. 277).  

Starting during the last decades of the 20th Century, the trade of illicit goods in the region began with subsidized food and oil from Libya and Algeria. When the subventions ended in the 1990s, these commercial networks shifted to other commodities, primarily narcotics and weapons. Colombian cartels began shipping their cocaine to Europe through the Sahara after losing the North American market to Mexican gangs. Moroccan hashish is nowadays sent through the Sahel into the Middle East to avoid the better controlled Maghrebian borders (Ibid). Weapon trafficking also started in the 1990s, diverting arms from conflicts in Niger or Algeria to emerging battlefields, exploding in recent years thanks to the Libyan Civil War.

Cocaine flows in the region. Source: OECD (2014). An Atlas of the Sahara-Sahel: Geography Economics and Security. OECD Publishing. Paris

The Rage of the Neglected

The loss of recognition that exclusion entails may seem less evident but is equally relevant. Exclusion cannot only be analyzed as a material fact: the meaning that individuals give to it and the particular perspective of those who suffer it must be considered. Non-recognition is humiliation, and societies can crumble if a group feels humiliated. Humiliation suppresses the question of existence. The crushed are torn between the image they have of themselves and the perception others give to them (Balzacq, 2016). It leads to the destruction of confidence in the broader social world and its security. Van Haaften and Van de Vijver, who have studied the psychological effects that marginalization produces in Sahara-Sahelian populations, put it this way:

"At the group level, established patterns of authority, civility, and welfare no longer operate; at the individual level, depression, apathy, hostility, uncertainty, identity confusion, and depression frequently emerge"

(1999, p.377).

This feeling is fertile ground for the emergence of armed actors. Marginalization has allowed groups like Boko Haram or AQIM to present themselves as the oppressed's defenders.

"The resentments and grievances towards the national governments by members of local ethnic groups in the Sahel […] have increased their vulnerability to join some of the armed groups in the region,"

— Nyaburi Byadera and Massoud, 2019 (p. 273).

These actors do more than just canalizing resentment; they also frequently provide the necessary services and welfare infrastructure that the state has not. Madrasas financed by Boko Haram and subsidiary associations have thrived in Northeastern Nigeria; these groups often offer drought relief and food aid in neglected areas. 

Drought and famine in Chad. Source. Al Jazeera 

The link between the criminal economy and armed groups is essential. Armed groups need the funds and weapons that illegal trade provides, and illicit activities need the instability and, often, the protection that non-state violent actors ensure. For example, cocaine shipments across the desert pay a "tax" to bands such as AQIM to pass through. Furthermore, these groups' capability to exert violence is ensured by the constant flow of weapons that illegal trade allows, which has boomed thanks to the ongoing conflict in Libya (Lacher, 2012). Neopatrimonialism divides ethnicities and areas between relevant and irrelevant, and so political and economic exclusion appears, leading to a lack of economic opportunities and a profound sense of humiliation, which provokes the emergence of a criminal economy out of pure need and of armed groups that channel the rage of these communities. The illegal economy and armed groups need and reinforce each other, resulting in increased insecurity in the region.

A Nationalist Uprising, a Jihadist Offensive And a Success Story

Mali scores are high at the Theil Index, a measure of intra-state geographical inequality that computes a score out of HDI (Human Development Index) differences among the regions of a country and at violent events.

The central most recent conflict suffered by the country is the Tuareg rebellion of 2011. The event took place mainly in the regions of Timbuktu, Gao-Kidal, and Mopti, where the Tuareg ethnicity represents the majority. These regions suffer from low HDI levels compared to the rest of the country (but for Gao-Kidal). Their HDI is 22, 1, and 29 percent less, respectively. Compared to the best-performing region, Bamako, these differences jump up to 48, 35, and 53 percent. The political status of Tuareg and Moors has switched between being powerless and junior partners, according to the GrowUp dataset. It is difficult to tell the extent to which the criminal economy is present in the area since its success depends on its invisibility.

Nevertheless, significant firearms seizures took place. The zone seems to be a vital route for the transportation of Moroccan hashish and a convergence point of two cocaine trafficking routes (Gagnol et al., 2014). The rebellion of 2011 aimed to create an independent state by the name of Azawad in this area, probably the most significant sign of dissatisfaction with the Malian state. The groups involved were mainly the MNLA and several Islamist groups. Clashes between nationalists and Islamists soon made the MNLA realign with the Malian government. Nevertheless, the conflict resulted from years of economic and political marginalization caused by the centralist state in Bamako (Nyaburi Nyadera, Massaoud, 2019).  

2011 Azawad War. Source: OECD (2014). An Atlas of the Sahara-Sahel: Geography Economics and Security. OECD Publishing. Paris 

Nigeria is the country with the highest score in the Theil Index in the region. Two areas are most affected: the Niger Delta and the Northeast. Focusing here on the Sahelian part of the country, that is, the Northeastern regions of Borno and Yobe, we can see that they are terrible performers. Their HDI is 31 and 56 percent less than the national average. Compared with the state with the highest value, Lagos, the difference rises to 44 and 64 percent, respectively. These regions have regressed since independence (International Crisis Group, 2015). The primary ethnicity in the zone, the Kanuri, has gone from being discriminated against to powerless, depending on the year, per the GrowUp dataset. The population of this area has suffered both from the economic and political exclusion for the last thirty years. The existence of a criminal economy can be correctly singled out thanks to major arms seizures that have been made and to the area being reported as an essential route for cocaine trafficking (Gagnol et al., 2014). It is precisely here where the group Boko Haram was created in 2002. Since then, the group has carried out thousands of attacks all around the country and has recurrently taken control of vast swathes of territory, expanded to the borderlands of Niger and Chad, and provoked a full-blown international military response. The group was founded as a school complex in Maiduguri, Borno's capital, for the poor children of the zone. They denounced state corruption and police abuses and built tens of madrasas, procuring popular support. In 2009 they started a violent campaign to transform the area into an Islamic State. Although forced to retreat in 2015 by an international coalition, their attacks have recently multiplied.

Soldiers after capturing a Boko Haram (ISIS) flag. Source: Público 

Contrasting with the previous examples, the case of Morocco shows that armed violence does not necessarily exist in the region. A reasonably peaceful country when compared to its neighbors, its levels of HDI inequality are negligible, the difference between the worst-performing area and the average is of only 4 percent. It is true, however, that Sahrawis remain politically discriminated in the country. Nevertheless, the lack of economic exclusion seems to offset the political exclusion effect. Although Morocco suffered from a conflict with the Sahrawi Polisario Front, a violent group, in the late 80s, data shows that there has been a significant reduction of the differential between Western Sahara and the rest of the country, thanks to positive tax discrimination, justifying the absence of new major violent events.

A Way Forward

The traditional response to domestic violence has usually been more policing and expensive military operations, destroying the already precarious economies of the region and producing even more resentment. Another way is possible. To put an end to the illicit economy, states should ensure alternative sources of income, an equal distribution of public goods, and a real commitment to equal opportunities. A legal economy is beneficial to local populations and state authorities since it provokes the emergence of taxable activities and liberates resources from the security forces. The response necessarily goes through the impartial provision of public services and economic investments. Indeed, these neglected areas are often arid and isolated places where the emergence of high value-added activities is difficult, which is why states should consider putting in place favorable discrimination policies and exploiting the strategic location they have for the flourishing of legal regional and world trade.

"Governments can claim that their inability to provide much-needed resources and social welfare in all parts of the country is caused by the weak economy […] however, the point is not about whether there is a strong economy or not but whether national resources are shared in a manner that promotes inclusivity and equity,"

— Nyaburi Nyadera and Massaoud, 2019.

Furthermore, foreign powers should diversify their interventions in the region, providing economic relief and investment projects to the most neglected areas apart from pure military force. Of course, the financial exclusion is not caused by a naiveté of state authorities, but rather from the neopatrimonialism political arrangements from which they profit. Political exclusion is behind most of the cases of subnational economic inequality. Again, European countries and the EU have a role to play here by conditioning military support to create more politically inclusive societies. Foreign powers have to ensure that the response to violence is not only military and that conflicts do not merely end with the state winning but with all parties arriving at satisfactory arrangements. The inclusion of Tuareg rebels into Malian security forces after the 2011 war is an excellent example. Equality, not power, is the way towards a more peaceful and freer region.

References

Balzacq, T. (2016). Théories de la sécurité. Les approches critiques. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Gagnol, L., Bensâad, A., Antil, A., Augé, B., Heinrigs, P., Nwajiaku-Dahou, K., . . . Walther, O. J. (2014). An Atlas of the Sahara Sahel: Geography, Economics and Security OECD Publishing.. 

International Crisis Group. (2015). The Central Sahel: A Perfect Sandstorm. International Crisis Group. Retrieved from http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:policyfile&rft_dat=xri:policyfile:article:00177768

Lacher, W. (2012). Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahara Sahel Region. Washington: The Carnegie Papers.

Nyaburi Nyadera, I., & Massaoud, M. H. (2019). Elusive Peace and the Impact of Ungoverned Space in the Sahel Conflict. Güvenlik Bilimleri Dergisi, 8(2), 271-288.

Raleigh, C. (2010). Political Marginalization, Climate Change, and Conflict in African Sahel States. International Studies Review, 12(1), 69-86. 

Van Haaften, E. H., & Van de Vijver, F. J. R. (1999). Dealing with extreme environmental degradation: Stress and marginalization of Sahel dwellers. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 34(7), 376-382. 

Edited by Hiba Arrame

COVID-19 Undermines Peru’s Economic Stability

In Perú, we’ve been in confinement for more than a month and don’t know exactly when the lockdown will be lifted. The state of emergency was declared (article 137.1 of Peruvian Constitution) and the restriction of some of our rights and liberties (like freedom of displacement, association or the right to work) is accepted because we need to deal with the virus, and everyone seems to be handling the situation well, inclined to a desire to resume our rights, lives and maintain our well-being. Families are staying home in order to avoid being infected with COVID-19, which is characterized by its ability to contaminate rapidly. For this reason, the government has put in practice some measures in order to guarantee people’s basic needs. Most breadwinners can’t go to work, students can’t go to schools. It seems that now we are living in a different era, in which our digital devices are our only contact with the outside. In this article, we’re going to make a recount of the measures the Peruvian government has been putting in action in order to mitigate the economic crisis that can result from the outbreak of this extremely dangerous virus.

Source

So far, more than 45.000 victims of coronavirus have been reported and the cases increase day after day. Being at home, at the same time, helps people avoid being in contact with others and, hence, reinforces our plan of steering clear of the virus. These measures, however, involve some important economic cost. The decisions taken by each country reflect what they value more, in some cases, it can be human life and, in others, economy. Trump’s administration is being criticized because of this and he defends himself arguing that: “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” However, both decisions promise positive and negative consequences, and the latter need to be mitigated. 

Some economic sectors are still working like food industry, which can’t be paralyzed and is guaranteed to operate during this difficult time. Health professionals that work with coronavirus patients will be paid an extra 3.000 soles (885 USD) for their hazardous work on this recent time. On the other hand, tourism, commerce and other important economy sectors, considered non-essential, remain paralyzed. For this reason, Perú has put in practice the plan “Reactiva Perú”, which aims to keep our economy moving and implements other measures to protect people’s primary rights. It is noteworthy, at this point, that Perú is qualified as the best prepared country of the Pacific Alliance to confront the economic repercussions of coronavirus. An analysis of the Peruvian Economy Institute (IPE), shows that our finances are more likely to support the economic impact of COVID-19 than Colombia, Chile or Mexico. In fact, this study expresses that our country is the least indebted of the Pacific Alliance, it just represents 26.9% of our GDP. It also has savings over 15% of the GDP and, according to the analysis country risk, its debtor quality remains stable.

The Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (MTPE) has implemented a new way of work, which is called remote work for people that work in sectors that develop activities considered non-essential. In this case, we have for example teachers who are working from home. This new way of employment is defined in the Urgency Decree N° 026-2020 (article 16, title II) as the provision of subordinate services with the physical presence of the worker in their home or place of isolation, using any means or mechanism that enables to work outside the workplace. However, it’s necessary that the nature of the work allows them to carry on with their duties from home. Those unable to work from home may apply for a license that permits them to maintain their salary, as long as they redeem the number of hours they were paid once the coronavirus situation comes to an end. A license can be obtained to maintain the employee’s salary without the obligation to compensate these hours. This last measure was implemented by Urgency Decree N° 029-2020.

The electronic devices that employees may use can be both provided by the employer or by the worker (article 19, U.D. N°026-2020). While working remotely, employer and employees need to comply the obligations that are detailed in article 18 of the same Urgent Decree. For example, workers need to be available, during labor hours, to coordinate with their employer.

In addition, the Urgency Decree 038-2020 has been put into motion, which approves the implementation of a perfect suspension of employment with conditions, these measures beneficiate workers and employees of micro, medium, small and medium sized enterprises to fulfil their work contracts and receive an income given by the state of 760 soles (224 USD). They also will have a health service guaranteed by the State. It is also necessary to explain what a perfect suspension of employment is and how it differs from an imperfect suspension. This latter operates when workers don’t work but they maintain the validity of their work contract and keep receiving a salary. This operates, for example, with female workers who cannot work during pregnancy and absent for a lapse of time while maintaining their work contract and their salary. Another case of this are the vacations, in which you, after working hard throughout the year, can go relax on a beautiful beach in Miami and still get paid. According to the article 17.2 of the Urgency Decree N°026-2020, this imperfect suspension of labor also occurs if a worker is infected with coronavirus. 

On the other hand, we have the perfect suspension of employment, which is operating in our country due to coronavirus situation. In this case, workers maintain their work contract but don’t receive a salary. Both parts, the worker and the employer, cease, for a lapse of time, to have the responsibility to comply with the obligations that are stipulated in the work contract. This is an exceptional measure and the government is privileging the agreement between workers and employers.  In order to mitigate the negative consequences of this practice, workers that are under this statement, can retire part of their fond of Compensation for Length of Service (CTS) (art. 7 U.D. 038-2020). 

Chapter III of Supreme Decree N° 003-97-TR is the legal normative that rules when to apply suspension. Article 12 of this Decree explains that it can operate if occurs an event that could be catalogued as force majeure or fortuitous case. In this case, we are stepping into a force majeure event because we can’t control the apparition and expansion of coronavirus and we couldn’t event prevent it, it is outside our dominance. The key point here is that this can last only for 90 days. 

While measures have been taken to reduce the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak on workers and employers, another part of society remains in the shadows because of their line of work. Hernando de Soto in his book “The Other Path” (1986) explains that the activity that these workers realize is informal because, in Perú, the cost of emerging to a formal one is too expensive. Actually, they represent 72.5% of our Economically Active Population (EAP) and 18.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The database of the Minister of Labor and Employment (MTPR) doesn’t proportionate a real number of the independent workers that live on their day to day income because most of them are informal workers and that’s a considerable issue in these times. We don’t know for example the exact number of street vendors that operate through the country. For this reason, when social isolation was first ordered, many of this people decided to disobey the mandatory quarantine justifying themselves by arguing that “if we don´t work, we don't eat”. Informal economy has been a big problem with which Peruvian economy had to deal for a long time and now more than ever. 

As we maintain social isolation, there was a crucial debate on the Congress about the Administrators of Pension Funds (AFP). They are, nowadays, in the eye of the storm, and the Congress has decided that workers and employees can retire 25% of the fund that they’ve accumulated during their work years. The amount can’t be less than 4.300 (1.269 USD) and can’t exceed 12.899 soles (3.808 USD).

The International Monetary Fund has said that after coronavirus situation, a global economic recession might be lurking. Considering this, the Minister of Finance and Economy is injecting liquidity in micro, small, medium and big enterprises in order to avoid a stage of massive unemployment. For this reason, the Help Enterprise Fund is giving 300 million of soles (about 88 million USD) to maintain in float small enterprises. Secondly, they have increased the pathway of the program “Crecer”. Although, there are around 80 thousand of fixed term contracts that haven’t been renewed. 

National Superintendence of Tax Administration (SUNAT) has implemented a course of action due to coronavirus situation, putting in practice the following Superintendence Resolution: N° 054-2020/SUNAT, Nº 055-2020/SUNAT and Nº 058-2020/SUNAT. This is a new manner to help alleviating enterprises tax burden. Actually, tax earnings have decreased by 17.9%. This is a measure that has been taken globally. 

Finally, for those who are poor and the extremely poor, a program has been developed by the Minister of Development and Social Inclusion that is called “Yo me quedo en casa”. Its objective is to provide families in need with 380 soles (112 USD) to help them get through the current situation. However, there is still so much to do considering that, almost 7 million of Peruvians, don’t have access to public services like water or electricity. 

In conclusion, as we may have seen, the government is taking a long list of measures in order to mitigate socio-economic impact of coronavirus.  Nonetheless, this implicates a great challenge. Fortunately, we have maintained a stable debtor qualification which allows us now to work with the International Monetary Fund. Our National Savings allowed us to react swiftly to this Global Health Emergency. These are the days in which countries all over the world need to ponder over what they value more, which can be human life or economy cost. Decisions need to be taken in accordance with human rights. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses that we all have the right to the life and it is the government's duty to protect it. Now, during these difficult times, we need to work together, government and society because we both form the State.  

I’d like to quote the definition of State of Victor Garcia Toma, Peruvian constitutional lawyer:

“The State is an autonomic political society organized for structuring the convivence, we are a group of people interrelated because of the necessity to survive and perceive common benefit. This requires a relation based on social force and a hierarchical relation between government and society.”

References:

https://www.cepal.org/es/comunicados/la-unica-opcion-estrategica-mediano-plazo-mitigar-efectos-covid-19-la-region-es-avanzar

Soto, H. . (2009). El otro sendero: Una respuesta económica a la violencia. Lima: Grupo Editorial Norma.

https://www.inei.gob.pe/media/MenuRecursivo/publicaciones_digitales/Est/Lib1589/libro.pdf

 https://www.ipe.org.pe/portal/el-arsenal-economico-ante-la-crisis-alianza-del-pacifico/

https://www.ipe.org.pe/portal/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/INFORME-IPE-IV-Impacto-del-covid19-en-la-econom%C3%ADa-peruana_vf.pdf

https://www.ipe.org.pe/portal/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/INFORME-IPE-V-Impacto-del-covid19-en-la-economia-peruana_vf.pdf

 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 

García, T. V. O. (2014). Teoría del estado y derecho constitucional . 

Political Constitution of Peru (1993)

 Edited by Hiba Arrame

Legal Measures to Prevent COVID-19: The Reality of the Crisis vs. the Mechanism of Prevention. The Moroccan Experience

The spread of the new coronavirus has destabilized the world since it first appeared in the Chinese city Wuhan in the late 2019; it was declared as a global pandemic leaving many victims behind, not to mention thousands of cases of infections around the world.

Moreover, it should be noted that the wide spread of COVID-19 has initiated a crisis with global dimensions, as its remnants have not only reflected on the human element, but have also had extended it to affect many areas, including the economical, political and legal ones.

It has shown the fragility of foreign affairs when among the first consequences of the spread of the virus was to take a defensive stance by all countries of the world through the policy of isolation and border closure because of the fear of worsening the situation and loss of control over the social stability.

Consequently, many countries have resorted to closing their borders and limiting movement within their territory. The French State has approached on March 16, 2020 that the President of the Republic issued his decision to take the necessary preventive measures to reduce interpersonal contact, thus restricting any movements unless absolutely necessary across the French territory, for up to a minimum of 15 days, and allow people to move provided that a written statement is signed to justify it.

However, as Morocco is being strongly involved in the international community, it has been affected by the prevailing situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic and has resorted with the first confirmed case to take many legal measures aimed to prevent the epidemic and to reduce the various potential damages that may result from its rapid spread.

The Kingdom of Morocco hastened to adopt several proactive preventive measures that are necessary to close the maritime, land and air borders. It also put a great emphasis on the order of quarantine, «the stay home» for people who had a direct contact to infected persons or were in risk regions. Morocco rushed to close schools and universities starting «the distance learning» along with the prohibition of mass events.

Source

Furthermore, the Kingdom has opened a bank account called the «National Fund for the Management of the Coronavirus Pandemic» to receive donations and to support the affected groups.

Given that the study on preventive legal measures, taken in order to cope with the new coronavirus, is of global importance, a constant follow-up study on this subject is necessary to give a start to new various national legal measures that Morocco has brought into this context.

Proactive Legal Measures to prevent the Coronavirus Outbreak

                                                                                                                                                                      The rapidly increasing spread of the coronavirus has required the Moroccan State to take several precautionary measures in order to control the epidemic and to reduce the spread. The Kingdom declared a state of health emergency on March 20, 2020 for this reason.

However, the Moroccan government did not issue the law regulating this state of emergency until 23 March, when the Decree No. 2.20.292 was issued declaring a state of health emergency throughout the national territory to cope with the outbreak of the coronavirus. The decree was published in the official newspaper on March 24, 2020.

This decree entitles the competent authorities to adopt different measures to prevent and control infectious diseases. It also included many objective provisions, namely the criminalization of certain acts that weren’t considered criminal before. Additionally it contained a set of procedural provisions, such as the suspension of legal deadlines, which are listed as follows.

 1.    Criminalization of certain acts as a preventive legal measure:

Referring to the Decree No.2.20.292 it is clear that the Moroccan legislator has criminalized many acts that weren’t criminal in the past, which are considered to be a violation of the state of health emergency declared in the country. For instance, the criminalization of non-compliance with the authority's orders as well as the dissemination of false news.

•   Disobeying authority orders to comply with the state of health emergency

The Decree-law No. 2.20.292, issued by declaring a state of health emergency in the Kingdom of Morocco, included injunctive and deterrent requirements for anyone who violated the orders of the public authority and refused to comply with them, which is clearly seen in the Article 4, which states:

«Anyone in one of the areas where a state of health emergency has been declared must abide by the orders and decisions of the public authorities referred to in the Article 3 above.

Violation of the provisions of the previous paragraph shall be punishable by one to three months' imprisonment and a fine of 300 to 1,300 dirhams (30 to 130 dollars) or one of these penalties, without violating the most severe criminal penalty.

The same penalty shall be imposed on anyone who obstructs the implementation of the decisions of the public authorities taken in accordance with this decree by law through violence, threats, fraud or coercion or incites others to violate the resolutions mentioned in this paragraph, by means of speeches, shouting or threats made in public places or meetings, or by posters displayed in public or through various audiovisual or electronic media, and by any means others use an electronic prop for this purpose.»

As can be seen, the Article 4 is the main basis for the principle of unique punishment, as the decree expressly punishes anyone who violates the orders and decisions of the public authorities regarding the state of emergency. All this disregarding the prejudice to the most severe criminal penalty. A case of theft during this period applies to the requirements of the Criminal Code relating to the crime of theft, and not to the violation of the State of Emergency Law decree.

In fact, it may come to mind that the requirements of this decree conflicts with a set of constitutional rights stipulated in the Title II of the Moroccan Constitution, perhaps the most important of which is the right to freedom and mobility. Despite that, it becomes clear soon that the issue is an exceptional circumstance that calls for the protection of the most sacred rights which is the right to life and physical integrity, which has been denounced by various international laws and conventions.

This is in accordance with the spirit of the Moroccan Constitution, with reference to to the Chapter 21 of the Constitution we find out that it provides the right of the individual to his personal safety and relatives, and to protect his property; as stipulated in the second paragraphs that public authorities guarantee the safety of the population and the integrity of the national territory in respect of the rights and freedoms guaranteed for everyone.

Accordingly, when an individual or collective right is curtailed in order to protect the public interest, such as freedom of movement for example, what the executive power will is obliged to do is based on the principle of constitutional legitimacy.

Mohamed Lyoubi, director of the Epidemiology Department in the Ministry of Health (source)

• Spreading and promoting fake news

Given the wide spread of fake news about the coronavirus since its first emergence in Morocco, and due to the psychological nature of the dissemination and promotion of fake news on the social media, especially in this exceptional situation, and because of its negative effects which are manifested in creating terror and fear, whether through the understatement of the efforts of the state and its authorities in preventing the virus, or by denying the existence of the virus and spreading fallacies about it without investigating reliable medical sources.

The Chief Prosecutor is authorized to follow up on anyone who promotes false news about the coronavirus, which has already been carried out through arresting and investigating with a group of individuals if creators were suspected of involvement in the matter, following the circulation of some videos containing false news.

Moreover, the Public Prosecutor's Office has opened 81 judicial investigations in response to false news resulting in the initiation of judicial follow-up against 58 persons while research is ongoing.

2.    The suspension of legal deadlines (judicial reporting and appeals):

It should be noted at the outset that the most likely legal adaption of the coronavirus pandemic is classified as a force majeure, the latter of which the Moroccan legislator defines through Chapter 269 of the Law of Obligations and Contracts as follows:

«It is considered to be a force majeure: everything man can't expect, such as a natural phenomenon, enemy raids, and the act of power, which would make the implementation of the commitment impossible.»

Thus the previous proposal, which classifies the coronavirus as a force majeure, is reinforced by the issuance of a series of communications that announced the suspension of work within the courts of the Kingdom, perhaps the most important of which is the communication issued to suspend all hearings except those related to the decision of urgent cases and related to the judiciary of the investigation.

Therefore, the impact of the coronavirus was not only limited to the objective rules, but it has also extended to the procedural rules, where it significantly affected the normal functioning of the case, in other words it has influenced the Judicial time, especially with regard to reporting and appealing as the most important legal institutions that depend on the element of time for their validity.

A confusion about the fate of the proceedings that did not respect legal deadlines was removed due to the force majeure of the coronavirus pandemic, as the aforementioned state of emergency decree in the Article 6 referred to the suspension of all deadlines stipulated in the ongoing legislative and regulatory texts, especially deadlines associated with appeals, whether administrative or judicial, and all the deadlines associated with reporting. 

Although, the deadlines are considered to be public order and can only be suspended under a law that provides for the suspension of their calculation and the declared decree of the state of  health emergency is legally a position for all legal deadlines to take effect.

The Article 6 of the Decree No. 2.20.292 related to the State of Health emergency / states: 

«All deadlines stipulated in the legislative and regulatory provisions in force during the declared period of health emergency shall be suspended and resumed from the day following the lifting of the state of emergency mentioned. 

The first paragraph above excludes the appeal sought in cases of persons arrested, as well as the duration of the situation under theoretical guard and pretrial detention.»

The Role of the Judiciary in Preventing and Reducing the Manifestations of the Crisis

In the framework of the national mobilization to confront the coronavirus and to enshrine the principles of solidarity, the Moroccan judiciary in turn followed the same approach and played an active role in preventing and reducing the spread of the COVID-19 by initiating the suspension of hearings in various courts across the Kingdom, except for some special cases (criminal and misdemeanour cases involving persons detained in pretrial detention and held in prison institutions, and cases of investigation and juveniles…)

However, it should also be noted that several memos have been issued aimed at preventing the spread of the COVID-19 by reducing the number of frequent offenders and avoiding bringing detainees to the courtroom as well as delaying the criminal files until the end of the quarantine, in order to avoid the potential risks that may affect the judicial assistants and Justice-fairers.

In the same vein, Mr. Mustafa Fares, Managing Director of the Supreme Council of the Judiciary and the First President of the Court of Cassation, submitted a communiqué announcing the solidarity of the various members of the judiciary by donating a half of the monthly salary to the National Fund for the Management of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

It should also be noted that the role played by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which has turned to the adoption of digitization in constantly receiving and handling complaints by fax and e-mail.

In the same context, the office of the Public Prosecutor announced that in the framework of activating the injunction sought by the Decree No.2.20.292 on the enactment of provisions for the state of health emergency the public prosecutions have followed since the decree entered into force on March 24, 2020, a total of 4,835 people violated the state of health emergency, of whom 334 were referred in custody to the court.

The Public Prosecutor's office has followed up 263 people, including 43 people of whom are in custody for violating certain criminal law requirements, since the public authorities declared the quarantine on March 20 and March 23, bringing the total number of followers in this context to 5,098.

In this regard, the Moroccan judiciary has been quick to issue eloquent orders and rulings adopting the preventive measures imposed by the phase, perhaps the most important of which was the ruling of the Administrative Court of Rabat in order 955 of 31/03/2020, which ruled against a Moroccan citizen and his wife requested to enter Morocco from Spain via the Mediterranean port of Tangier by their car, after which they remained stranded on Algeciras after the declaration of the state of health emergency.

They were drawn by defending the Article 24 of the Constitution which guarantees freedom of movement through the national territory.

While the injunction was based on a decree on the enactment of provisions for the state of health emergency and the procedures for declaring it, which aims to reduce the spread of the virus and prevent it. To clarify, the main purpose on which the previous injunction was based is to avoid a potential infection with COVID-19 that may be caused by the spouses if they were only allowed to enter the Moroccan territory.

Given the above, it can be summarized that the efforts made by Morocco have indeed managed to control the rapid spread of the virus, but the question is: will the Moroccan State manage to keep the current stability by controlling the situation as demonstrated in the near future?

Edited by Nataliya Napetova

The Uncertainties of the Green Deal and Their Effect on the European Economy

Since the first weeks of being President of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen launched the European Green Deal. As mentioned in the communication of the EC, the European Green Deal aims “to tackle climate and environmental-related challenges; that is this generation’s defining task”. It is part of the EC ambitions to have a neutral economy by 2050. The scale and the scope of this initiative is too ambitions. Regarding the EC, the EU Green Deal seeks comprehensiveness and deepness at the same time and on the all sectors gathering together.

The European Green Deal (source)

Many concerns are raised by interest groups such as private companies, workers and also public institutions about the impact this deal will have on European economies. The first term of transition it is expected to be the Von Der Leyen mandate of 2019-2024, which seated the Green Deal atop its priorities. Any transition phase that has to deal with the economic effects caused by structural changes.

In order to reach the goal of neutral economy by 2050, EC has set-up a mechanism: Just Transition Mechanism (JTM), which will support the EU economies financially throughout the next three decades. It is one of the financial supporter mechanisms along with European Investment Bank. The total amount of financial support established for JTM is estimated to be around 7,5 billion. 

The transition phase obviously will have a bill to pay in order to be implemented. The costs are estimated to be around 1 trillion euro, which is a huge amount of money compared to the EU annual budget. The economic sectors directly or indirectly attached to the Green Deal will be charged mostly of energy production and agriculture. Through the JTM, EC is aiming to help the private sector to adjust easily in this transition phase and meanwhile to reduce as much as possible eventual economic costs carried out by the shift of  the economic structure. 

Where will the money come from? (source)

Implementation of the Green Deal, mainly in the more dependent coal economies, eventually will influence the structure of markets. In the Eastern economies such as Poland or Romania, but also Greece too, coal production of energy goes up to 70% of the total national production. By saying that, the economic challenges for these countries will bring uncertainty to macroeconomic indicators. It is important to keep in mind that last June (2019), countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Estonia refused to sign the commitment to reach carbon neutrality in the next 30 years, because of their dependency on fossil fuels.

Regardless of the challenges its implementation faces, the European Green Deal obviously tends to make possible a sustainable development of European countries. Through the JTM, EC aims to broaden the scope of investment in order to have a flexible economy. In global economy, it is even more difficult to have a clear economic perspective when in the same time countries like USA, China or India are advancing so fast. The EU Commission draft considers this time as an opportunity for “economic growth and prosperity”.

The EU Green Deal eventually is expected to have consequences also on the economic structure of the countries affected. The shift toward a neutral economy unavoidably will impose companies to change the technology production. Probably not all the companies operating in the market will have the chance to be able to continue working. Even though, in the EU Green Deal draft it is mentioned that the initiative will financially support “projects ranging from creation of new workplace through support to companies, job search and re-skilling assistance for jobseekers”, the criteria and the evaluation mechanism of the financing are still unclear.

Identifying the EU Green Deal as a cornerstone of the 2019-2024 Von Der Leyen Commission on the one hand and the important political moment to push political and economic process towards a sustainable development on the other, would be considered as a significant sign for new investment in the economic sector which is highly related to the economic transition. Transport, for instance, is one of the quarters of pollution section in the EU. A shift towards sustainable sources of energy production will affect the European Trading System (ETS) as well. The aim to include in the EU ETS airline and maritime transport has raised concerns by the companies representators about the added costs.

The pressure of the Green Deal is present also in the agriculture sector. Farmers are one of the main parts of the EU budget and it is still unclear if the Green Deal will affect the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP). According to the EU Commission, the plan is to shift the focus from compliance to performance, and in such a case, measures such as eco-schemes should reward farmers for improved environmental and climate performance”. For the farmers the future is even more unclear about the “new technologies” referred in the Green Deal and sustainable foods system, especially after the EU Court of Justice decision to block currently the New Plant Breeding Technique (NPTs).

The financial support of the JTM, must gain also a political consensus on European Parliament (EP), in order to be implemented. Until now, among the EU member states does not seem to exist a broad consensus on the way how the JTM will be financed and how the money will be spent. There exists some political divergence between the members states whom are interested most on the pushing towards the Green Deal agenda and the other who in short terms may be losers from the initiative. There is still an ongoing debate about the budget, where divergences are mainly political, which seems to be the first difficult challenges of Charles Michael to lead towards an agreement and political consensus.

To conclude, the transition phase will be a test for EC if would be able to deal with challenges ahead and in the same time to keep European social cohesion. The shift towards a neutral economy, beyond the advantages in terms of opportunities for growth, circular economy, needs to take carefully into consideration the eventual effects that could be caused especially in the more fragile sectors such as agriculture, which will be affected. Social and economic cohesion should be taken into consideration and especially in such a difficult political time Europe is having actually. 

Edited by Hiba Arrame

How Lega Nord Became Part of the Italian Political System: A Little Reminder of an Almost Forgotten Piece of History

This article mainly aims to point out the political and social role played by the Northern League during the transition that affected the Italian political system between Prima Repubblica – the journalistic expression indicating the period between 1948 and 1992 – and Seconda Repubblica. It is important to clarify that it was a political transition, not an institutional one - in contrast to the situation of the French case - since the constitutional settlement remained unaltered. 

The first part of the dissertation focuses on the latent tensions, internal to the system that flared up in the early ‘90s, in combination with groundbreaking international developments, which were deeply linked to the representation crisis of traditional parties, in order to reveal the relationship breakdown between people and politics, which is at the basis of Northern League’s success. 

Source

I will start by analyzing the physiognomy and the warning signs of the three most representative parties: “Democrazia Cristiana” (DC), “Partito Comunista Italiano” (PCI) and “Partito Socialista Italiano” (PSI). The Roman Catholic party had founded its legitimacy on an anti-communism attitude from its implant in the country, in the aftermath of the Second World War, along the lines of the international bipolarism of the Cold War.  

In the ‘80s, a mixture of spontaneous social transformations, domestic and international events weakened and overturned the role played up to that time by the DC. 

There are some points to stress: the progression of the European integration process imposed a rationalization of the public spending, which had been rashly used for decades as a sort of leverage of consent, causing a high public debt. The opening of the markets that anticipated the EU’s integration represented a great opportunity for the emerging social groups formed by self-employed workers and small entrepreneurs of Northern Italy, as a result these sections of society felt economically limited by the central government.  

The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which anticipated USSR’s collapse in 1991, marks the peak of the ‘crisis’ of great ideologies, due to a secularization process in the conception of politics: anti-communism, la raison d'être of Democrazia Cristiana, had formally ceased to exist. The image of anti-communism bulwark was also the binding element for the party; in fact, during those years, the DC faced significant scissions, showing its internal divisions. One of the most significant split-ups was the protest pursued by Mario Segni, who promoted a strong referendum campaign against parties. The referendum for the abolition of the multiple preference in political elections was held in 1991, and two years later, the electoral referendum enshrined the reform of the electoral system into a partial majority system. 

For the DC, this majority logic represented another black mark, since it weakened the center of the political axis that the Roman Catholic party had traditionally occupied.

In addition, the major of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, pursued a strong protest against his own party, denouncing collusions between local representatives of the DC and the Mafia, and it did not take long before he formed a new party under the name “La Rete”. 

Several corruption probes exploded in 1992 under the name of “Tangentopoli”, gravely damaging the legitimacy of parties, and especially of those who had covered power and governmental positions for years, such as “Democrazia Cristiana”, but also “Partito Socialista Italiano”, which were covered by shame. Corruption inquires also brought a perverse relationship between politics and economy to surface, which had provoked distorted effects on the functioning of economy and on budgetary problems: a huge national debt and a consequent heavy taxation. 

All these factors had profound impacts on civil society dissent towards the political class. The PSI, led by Bettino Craxi from 1983, tried to give itself a new image – also breaking definitively with the Marxist background - in order to attract the support of the new productive categories, but the following judicial inquiries against its representatives destroyed the party’s credibility. 

The PCI proved its unwillingness and inability to realize and to accept the ongoing social changes: new professional profiles and emerging social classes marked the end of the centrality of the working class, prefiguring the advent of post-industrial values, which disclaimed the Marxist world-view based on the class struggle. The communist party appeared inadequate to interpret the emerging issues and could not reform itself in order to find a successful political strategy against political disaffection. The end of the Warsaw Pact was the final blow for the party, obliging it to rethink deeply its identity and its ideological background. 

Upon these preconditions, the Northern League built its consensus. It is important to specify that it was not originally a unitary political entity: it was molded on several independent movements which already existed in the Northern regions. Thus, the second part analyzes the peculiar and favorable conditions existing in some areas of the North; then comes to focus on the unification process, which led to the emergence of the Northern League; the last one outlines the constitutive characteristics of the new political force. 

1. In the ‘80s, in the foothill areas of the Northeast of Italy, an economic framework constituted by small manufacturing enterprises gained importance in terms of productivity and prosperity. This emerging production model was in contrast with the large company models symbolized in Fiat in Turin and with the “new economy” identified with the city of Milan. The DC governed those peripheral areas of the North, but the Roman Catholic subculture crisis gave a stronger anti-political connotation to the pre-existing autonomy demands. The new middle class, composed by entrepreneurs and self-employed workers, was increasingly dissatisfied with the central government, perceived as corrupted and spendthrift, and demanded efficiency and bureaucratic streamlining. These social sectors were perceived as politically marginal by reference to their ascendant economic role. 

The different leagues, which drew from this growing dissent, had the element of territorial cohesion in common, in opposition to the commercialism and the inefficiency of the central State; they made their territory a symbol of anti-politics. 

2. The two main movements, which brought Northern League into life, were “Liga Veneta” and “Lega Lombarda”. After some initial electoral successes, severe internal division marked the first one; therefore, Lega Lombarda was able to take on the leading role in unifying all the independent regional movements into a unitary political project. 

At the general election in 1987, the Lega Lombarda obtained two parliamentary seats; some months after the following electoral success at the European election in 1989, the first national conference of the new political subject was set up. 

The Northern League was officially formed in 1991; it incorporated the different independent leagues in order to constitute a unified Northern Italian party with a relevant position at national level. At the 1992 elections,  the new party gained its first great success, obtaining the 8.6% of the votes cast, even if the polling data did not fully reflect the disintegration of the party system: the DC still reached 29.7% and the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS, the new name of the former PCI) 13.9%. It is only during the following administrative rounding vote that the dramatic dissolution of all the traditional parties became evident. 

3. The political strategy of the Northern League combined the antagonism against the central state with a territorial aspect: local communities were emphasized as a world full of values and interests, which were more important than what the State represented. The iniquity of the redistributive system was one of the points most stressed, highlighting the contrast between the productiveness of the North and the parasitism of the South. 

The party was structured around the centralized leadership of Umberto Bossi, who made a conspicuous use of a specific and innovative communication modality to strengthen feelings of ‘belonging’ among the electorates. He refused the common political language opting for a simple and more popular type of speech instead. He did not lack in rude rant, but the real goal was to differentiate the Northern League from all the other political forces and to impact on the irrational side of the voters. In this way, the leader was not perceived as a member of the political establishment, but as an interlocutor at the same level of his activists/ militants. Therefore, if for the original lega the use of the local dialect was a form of regional claim, for the Northern League it became a means of political antagonism against the central institutions. Moreover, the style of the speech, aimed at developing an identity based on territorial and ethno-cultural elements, which were progressively adapted in their substance to the political ends. After the conception of the region as a body of common traditions, typical of the original local leagues, Lega Lombarda molded a territorial interpretative scheme based on a view of the region as a community of material interests. During the first congress of the Northern League, the federalist project, by the ideologue Gianfranco Miglio, was submitted to the social basis. Federalism represented the main theoretical reference and it enlarged the spatial reference from localism to the entire North of Italy, enabling the Northern League to expand its legitimacy at national level. 

Source

Federalism was invoked until the negotiations for the formation of the new government after the 1994 elections. In Bossi’s speech, federalism was tabled as the crucial element for choosing alliances, but, in fact, it was instrumental in obtaining the acceptance of the voters for the alliance with Berlusconi... It is not by chance that the relationship breakdown between Bossi and professor Miglio occurred approximately in that period.

The involvement of the Northern League in the new government constitutes the main topic of the third section, which analyzes the role of the incoming force, “Forza Italia”, in the new context and its influence on the Northern League’s identity and strategy. 

In fact, during the governmental cohabitation in the “Polo delle Libertà”, the territorial issue substantially lost centrality in the political debate, and the Northern League watched its strong characterization fade. To regain political identity and visibility, Bossi built up a hardline polemic against the indirect ally (Alleanza Nazionale, AN of Gianfranco Fini, part of a parallel coalition with Forza Italia under the name of “Good government Pole”) and especially towards Berlusconi, branded as a successor of the old regime. The previous targets of Northern League’s invective, such as the roman chambers of power, the commercialism of the parties and the malfunctioning of the state apparatus, were subsequently associated with the non-transparent business of the Lombard entrepreneur Bossi. 

This strategy, based on antagonism, was successful: the polls of the voting intentions showed an increase of the approval rating for the Northern League compared to the descending consensus marked by the announcement of its participation to the governmental coalition. In fact, during the 1994 elections, the Northern League had lost about 0.3% of the votes compared to the 1992 elections. Moreover, data showed a regression in the areas of the latest Northern League’s successes, such as the North-West and the urban poles, in the face of additional growth in the areas where the party had originally taken root.  

This can be explained considering that Forza Italia was a natural adversary for the Northern party: they both were not part of the old political class, and they both broke the conventional canons typical of language politics using an innovative communication approach. And, finally, they both criticized the pervasiveness of the state presence – especially in the economy – supporting the demands from civil society which had been bereft of representation for years.

Although sharing these common aspects, Berlusconi’s rhetoric was very effective also on the moderate electorate, who considered economic recovery, orderliness and normalization of the political framework much more important than the territorial issues. Moreover, Forza Italia did not have a territorial dimension (thus no spatial representation limits); it could rely on a massive use of the media, and the anti-communism rhetoric, used by its leader, proved to be still incisive on Italian society. These elements caused the shift of the more moderate components of the Northern League voters to Berlusconi’s political force. 

The tensions internal to the coalition led, finally, to the withdrawal of the Northern League, with the consequent resignation of the government. At the administrative elections in 1995, the Northern party made alliances with the opposition forces, but during the election campaign for the following general election in 1996, the League newly presented itself alone against all. The insistence on the differentiation from all the other parties and the perpetuation of antagonistic polemic proved once again to be successful, since the Northern League obtained 10% of the votes on a national scale. 

Nevertheless, the party could not play a leading role in the following legislation because the majority system had brought to the aggregation among parties on a bipolar logic, and the Northern League, devoid of coalitional power, could not be determinant in the Parliament.

This point reveals the perpetuation of some typical elements of the Italian political system, which proves the incompleteness of the “transition”. Indeed, the ’94 elections – usually identified with the transition of the political framework – showed how the variation of the electoral system did not alter the systemic high rate of fragmentation and the high temperature of the political conflict. 

In conclusion, the phenomenon of the regional leagues represented one of the most important newness of the post-war political system, since they refused to collocate along the traditional left-right axis, reclaiming instead some deep cleavages of the Italian society, such as the “center-periphery” and the “North-South” relations. The emergence of Northern League can be read as a reflection of the systemic crisis and, at the same time, as one of its determinants, since the political force gave a precise direction to the anti-politics humors and to the latent fears of the society. Indeed, the Northern League did not merely go along with the emerging issues, but it introduced debate modalities and themes, which were destabilizing for the other parties.

Furthermore, the Northern party anticipated some relevant aspects concerning the politics of our time, such as the personalization of leadership and a populist rhetoric, but, at the same time, the political role of the Northern League was narrowed down by the sticky elements of the system’s physiognomy. 

Edited by Hiba Arrame

The Many Challenges of North Africa: Understanding the Algerian Role in Regional Security

On Monday, the 23rd of December 2019, the news agency Algeria Press Service released a press dispatch announcing the sudden death from a heart attack of the de facto leader of Algeria, Ahmed Gaid Salah. Only four days before, the newly elected but highly contested President of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, Adbelmajid Tebboune took office and, as a first measure, decorated Gaid Salah - the Chief of Staff of the People’s National Army - with the top honour of the National Order of Merit. The Lieutenant that ruled over Algeria saw in Mr. Tebboune, ‘the man able to lead Algeria to a better future’. This tragic event illustrates the seemingly new regime that claims to put an end to the military rule over the country. Between wills of change and political dramas, what is the Algerians’ place in regional governance? What are the strategic challenges that the North African power and its new regime will have to face in the pursuit of regional peace and stability?

Algeria and the Many Challenges of North Africa

Strategically located on the Mediterranean coastline, holding the highest Human Development Index of continental Africa and covering the largest national area in both Africa and the Arab World, Algeria has imposed itself as an unavoidable security actor in North Africa. The 2019 mass protests put all eyes back on this keystone country, as a part of the process of maintaining international peace and security in this unstable region. The challenges that the North African power has to face are of various natures, ranging from coping with the Malian and Libyan crises to controlling upcoming migrations from the Sahel region towards Europe, and tackling terrorism. In addition, the democratic challenge that has been gathering millions of Algerian each Friday of the last eight months makes the balance of powers in the region even more unstable.

In order to provide a panoramic understanding of the dynamics of Algeria in regional security, this article will first critically assess the military and political profile of the country before examining the Algerian involvement in matters of conflict-solving and counterterrorism in North Africa, with a special emphasis put on the ongoing Malian crisis. Finally, a brief thought on the possible future scenarios regarding security problems at stake in the region such as migrations in the prism of Algerian politics will be then proposed to the reader. Under no circumstances does this work attempt to achieve anything but to neutrally describe the situation in this country. It does not constitute a position in favor of any cause or point of view.

Wielding the Carrot and the Stick: A Heavily-Armed but Rethinkable Regime

Just like Soviet countries back in the Cold War, Algeria enjoys a heavy military that concentrates all the efforts on the political power at the cost of public investments in public health, education or even energetic transition. Salient is the fact that of all arms imported by African states, 54% account for Algeria alone, well ahead of its Morroccan neighbour and Nigeria. Relying on the most important proven reserves of oil in North Africa, Algeria has chosen to dedicate 5.7% of its annual GDP to military expenditures.

The regime entertains strong and long-term military partnerships with playmakers of the international security scene. Algeria ranks among the top destinations of the Russian Federation’s military exports, third only to India and China. As of March 2019, 66% of all weapons imported in the North African country are fabricated in the Eurasian power, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports. In addition to the privileged Russian partnership that dates back to the Cold War, China, Italy as well as Germany are also important suppliers of the Algerian military.

Many claims among the Algerian population have emerged during recent years and partly explain the 2019 mass protests. Last July, the French-speaking daily newspaper El Watan (meaning ‘the Homeland’ in Arabic) published an article entitled ‘Democracy in Algeria: End of Privileges with a Corrupted Regime’. According to the widely-read newspaper and other analysts, the role of the military is prevalent in the country and should be reduced. To a relative extent, bearing in mind all the frustrations that could be addressed towards the government, one must acknowledge the fact that press independence is more or less preserved in the country, as shows the critical stance of popular newspapers. Regarding the involvement of citizens in politics, many analysts underscore the process of ‘depoliticisation of the citizenry’ (1). It is worth highlighting that during recent years, the government has shown some signs of good will, taking into account popular requests. Examples include the February 2016 long-awaited constitutional recognition of Berber as an official language of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria alongside with Arabic; or the creation, by the executive power, of two commissions dedicated to ensuring a democratic control of elections: National Commission for Election Supervision and the Independent National Commission for the Surveillance of Legislative Elections (2), which effectiveness can be questioned.

Conveyed by social media and direct talks between citizens, the 2019 protests demonstrate a more active role of the population that first of all aims to reshape the democratic system in a more comprehensive and inclusive framework. In other words, Algerians seem to be driven by a will to experiment with a new form of democracy on behalf of representativeness in the two senses of the term: that is, to be both the reflection and the voice of the population.

Protesters in Algiers, unhappy with the political system.  June 14, 2019 (Reuters/Ramzi Boudina (source)

A North African Power Involved in Regional Security and Conflict Resolution: the Malian Example

Following the neoliberal methodology of International Relations, foreign policy making is for a great part driven by domestic politics and norms (3). As such, this section will try to understand through the Malian conflict how the Algerian deciders shape the nature of the policy on regional security and terrorism.

Since 1962, and as a result of the war against colonialism, the Algerian foreign policy has relied on two essential principles: non-interfering in other countries’ domestic politics and using military force only to protect borders while preferring negotiations to solve conflicts (4). One would remind the pivotal role of Algerian diplomacy during the Cold War as shown by the solving of the Tehran hostage crisis with the 1981 Algiers Accords, which Point I was entitled ‘Non-Intervention In Iranian Affairs’ (5). One should also bear in mind the importance of the Cold War in the understanding of the two mantras, to the extent that this period and its global dynamics contributed to building the fundamentals of the Algerian diplomacy. The US-Iranian example illustrates the foreign policy leitmotiv of the country: that is, to act as a mediator and to support non-meddling in domestic affairs of foreign powers while refusing military intervention.

The conflict in Mali has to be analysed in order to understand the contemporary offshoot of this diplomatic tradition. Algeria has been endorsing the role of ‘the Leader of Mediation’ (‘Chef de file de la Médiation’) (6) between the Government of Mali and the Azawad separatist movement. In accordance to the role of mediator that the Berber country likes to endorse, a ceasefire between the two camps has been agreed upon and signed in the Mediterranean capital in 2015 (7), in what is now also known as the Algiers Accords. The agreement called for the respect of national sovereignty and peaceful dialogue in Mali. Moreover, in the matter of dealing with cross borders terrorism, Algeria also opts for bilateral cooperation. That is why a Mali-Algeria summit is held frequently, either in Bamako or Algiers in order to provide a comprehensive framework of cooperation in intelligence and counterterrorism in the Sahara desert. Likewise, the Comité d’Etat-major Opérationnel Conjoint (CEMOC), based in the southern city of Tamanrasset, aimed to secure a deserted area expanding to Mali, Mauritania and Niger. But with the France-led Operation Barkhane, this initiative became somewhat secondary and quite ineffective.

Although idealist, as any accord, the 2015 Algiers Accords as well as multilateral initiatives illustrate the Algerian paradox: even if the country has the military ability to intervene and could have the legitimacy to do so, it elected not to. However, it should be reminded that Algeria enjoys a high-class secret service and counterterrorism section of the military, that have proven since the end of a decade-long fight with the now defeated Islamist insurgency - but also the 9/11 attacks, its effectiveness when operating against terrorism within the national borders (8). As such, in November 2019 in the region of Ghardaia, Algerian Defence Ministry arrested a group of eight Islamist militants planning to join terrorist groups in Mali (9).

Algeria of Today, Algeria of Tomorrow: What’s Next, Except Uncertainty?

The Algerian strategic potential is merely unmatched in the world. Should it be because of its geography - Algeria is a pivotal crossing point for trade and migrations; the richness of its cultural heritage - that is the meeting of every Mediterranean civilisation; the unity of its people; the resources of its subsoil. But years of mismanagement as well as the infamous ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s have jeopardised the growth and openness of this regional power. Among the reasons for the non-take-off of the Algerian economy is the lack of diversification. Indeed, around 95% of Algeria’s exports originate from petroleum, making the national economy vulnerable to low oil prices, and more largely to international context, despite a low level of debt. Algeria has to diversify its economy and exports in order to resist an external shock and establish a stable growth. Economic fields such as tourism and tertiary sectors have to be developed by the political power.

Algeria’s exports are almost only composed by hydrocarbures. The country needs to diversify its economy (source: The Observatory of Economic Complexity) (source)

Regarding regional affairs, some auspicious signs can be observed. Albeit distrustful towards the regime, the Algerian population is still showing support to the military and the diplomatic role of its representatives. The Malian example along with the Libyan crisis, tend to demonstrate that Algeria’s commitment for dialogue remains constant. An unanswered question subsists however. Is Algeria ready to cope with the overwhelming upcoming migrations flows coming from Sahel and Sub Saharan Africa? How will Europe manage to convince Maghreb countries - of which Algeria is the largest - to anticipate the decade to come?

Finally, an Algerian revival cannot ignore the demands of the 2019 protests. The refusal of a fifth presidential mandate of Mr Bouteflika is first of all a call for democracy and transparency. Algerians do not necessarily reject the former Cold-War icon but rather the institutional system as a whole, which is widely considered as sclerotic and corrupted. Despite auspicious signs for democracy, the proposals emanating from the government remain unsatisfying for the population. The regime needs to seriously take into consideration the will for democracy and the right to dignity and act accordingly in order to achieve social peace. If not, who knows if the country is ready to face political division and social partition, so deeply needed in this period? Things might look somewhat gloomy but let us daydream when watching all the population united under the Desert Foxes winning the African Football Cup. As put by a young Algerian supporter in Paris ‘unity is possible in Algeria and nothing is impossible for Algerians.’ Hopefully, the future will prove the optimistic young man right.

The victorious Algerian football squad contributed to maintain a national unity amidst tense political context in 2019. (source)

References:

1. Yahia H. Zoubir & Ahmed Aghrout, Algeria: Reforms Without Change? in Zoubir, Yahia H & White Gregory, eds., North African Politics: Change And Continuity, (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 146.

3. Helen V. Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 

4. Akram Belkaïd, ‘Pourquoi l’Algérie n’intervient-elle pas militairement en Libye et dans le Sahel ?’ in L’Algérie, Un Pays Empêché, (Paris: Tallandier, 2019), p. 298.

8. Kal Ben Khalid, ‘Evolving Approaches in Algerian Security Cooperation’, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2015.

Edited by Hiba Arrame

Les Leçons du Pouvoir Polonais – Insight into Polish Political System

Introduction 

On October 13th, currently ruling party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – Zjednoczona Prawica (Law & Justice – United Right) has won its second straight parliamentary election and retain the right to be in charge of the government. This time, landslide victory didn’t happen as it was back in 2015, when took the Sejm (lower house) and Senat (upper house) by commanding margin and becoming the first single party since 1989 democratisation winning majority in both houses. This time, the opposing Koalicja Obywatelska (Civic Coalition) with independent Senators will rule in the Senat. Upcoming 9th term in the history of Polish parliamentarism after 1989 could be really turbulent, with presidential elections next year that could totally turn the tables. Why are those elections the key? Could the next few years be politically difficult for Poland? The way that Polish political system is built trigger that uncertainty, let’s have a look on it.  

Photo by Tomasz Radzik

Separation of Powers

According to the Constitution, power in Poland is divided into three branches: executive, legislative and judiciary, although we couldn’t call our system parliamentary republic or presidential republic or even semi-presidential republic. Power distribution, electoral process regarding Parliament and President don’t give a clear advantage on either over another. 

Parliament

As it was mentioned before, Polish Parliament is bicameral system, having Sejm (lower house) and Senat (upper house). There are 460 MPs in the Sejm and just 100 Senators, both elected by direct elections, every four year (or earlier, in the result of shortening the term of office, which already happened) in direct elections, however in different electoral systems. Members of upper house are elected in party-list proportional election, seats are allocated using the D’Hondt method, which, by a definition, favours larger parties. The evidence was seen 4 years ago, when victorious Prawo i Sprawiedliwość – Zjednoczona Prawica won getting 37,58% of votes, that gave over 51% of seats leading to majority. Speaking about Senat, since 2011 we have a “winner takes is all” system, so, basically two main parties occupy the seats in upper house. 

Parliament obviously has a right to vote bills, both houses need to agree to become a law (President’s signing makes a law enter into force at the very end), however Sejm has a power to override Senat’s refusal. Apart of that, government or given minister gets a vote of confidence from it, as well as vote of no confidence, as one of the Parliament’s roles is to control the actions of the government. 

A specific constitutional body is the National Assembly, which is basically joint sitting of both Sejm and Senat, which is headed by Marshal of the Sejm (could be replaced by Marshal of the Senat, when absent). National Assembly has special rights, that are regarding to the President – for example, they could remove the President from its office, however in very specific circumstances. 

President

President of Poland is the head of the state of our country. He is elected by popular election, in most cases after two rounds, but when the candidate gets more than 50% of votes in the first round, he could already be elected – it happened only once after 1989 (2000, when Aleksander Kwaśniewski has won). Head of state’s term lasts 5 years and can be renewed once.  

Mr. President has a legislative initiative (even regarding to the change of the Consitution), namely he can bring a bill to the floor of Parliament, like also signs a bill that after the signing is in force. However, the head of state’s competency doesn’t include more than signing bill, he could also use a veto to halt the enactment of law, propose presidential amendments or submit the bill to the Constitutional Tribunal so check his compliance with the Constitution.

One of the most important competencies that Polish President has is the availability to designate the new Prime Minister and ask him to form a new government, like also swear-in the members of the government. According to the law, the President could designate anyone to be a PM, but usually this is the candidate proposed by ruling party/coalition. 

Being officially the First Citizen of Poland, President represents Poland in the international area, but he’s not enforced to lead country’s foreign policy, as it’s the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ competency, so they should cooperate (naturally with the Prime Minister either), same with the military, being is the Supreme Commander. Considering, the foreign policy, President is able to ratify and terminate the international treaty. 

President of Poland Andrzej Duda

Courts

Few words about judiciary power in Poland. Our Constitution guarantees its total independence from other powers, however it’s not entirely like this. In the cases of courts, judges are appointed by the President, but candidates are presented by other judges, so it guarantees the real independence. However, speaking about Tribunals, the judges are elected by Sejm which doesn’t make a constitutional body totally independent from other powers. Speaking about Constitutional Tribunal, candidates could be indicated by a political party and elected by that party.

Is Polish Political System Equal to Ones in the Western Europe? 

The Prime Minister has the greatest availability to rule the country, but as a citizen I don’t have any influence about who would become that one. In opposite to the UK, where the leader of a winning party become a Prime Minister, it’s not that guaranteed in my country. That could lead to the situation when the Prime Minister has to listen to the leader of a party, if isn’t one, if he wants to keep his position. As you can see, Prime Minister’s leadership could be dramatically limited. I remember the 2005 elections, when Prawo i Sprawiedliwość won and everyone expected party’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński to become the Prime Minister. However, the party indicated quite anonymous Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz to create a government. Another example regards to current PM – Mateusz Morawiecki. Four years ago I didn’t know anything about him, back in the day, he was a CEO of a large bank in Poland and after that he became the Minister of Development. 

Let’s have a look at the president. He has the strongest democratic legitimacy, as he is elected in direct popular elections. However, his power is limited, so he couldn’t make a use of his support to the extent which would be possible. During the campaign president could promise basically everything and it’s okay for him, due to the fact, that at the end of the day he could say that Parliament refused and he did whatever he could, since the legislative initiative is the only thing President controls totally. 

Back to my point from the beginning of the article, why are presidential elections so important right now? It’s simple; if opposition’s candidate won, that would lead to vetoing nearly every bill accepted by the Parliament, so government would just do administrative job rather than adopting its policy. Same story from the presidential perspective, every bill proposed by the Head of State due to the legislative initiative would be refused. The coordination of actions regarding foreign policy would become difficult, because of different foreign policy’s vision. 

What’s the conclusion? It’s better to have the legislative and executive powers represented by one political party for moving the country forward. With party-list proportional election that forces MPs to in fact listening to more extent their party’s leader rather than voters, system could be totally blocked for few years. Why so? It might be brutal what I’m about to say right now, but sometimes it’s more worthy for MPs to vote in the Parliament in compliance to leader’s will, even if bill could be harmful for MP’s constituency or against person’s beliefs. Voting against the likes of party would lead to being erased from party’s list by the next election, even if MP is doing good for his region.

Prime Minister of Poland Mateusz Morawiecki

Between Snow and Fire: The 2019 Iranian Fuel Protests

What Is Happening Right Now in Iran?

On the morning of Friday the 15th of November, as Tehran woke up to snowfall that signals the coming of winter, the streets were starting to burn. Millions of Iranian citizens have taken to the streets to protest against the unpopular decision by the Rouhani administration to increase the price of petrol. According to the plan announced by the government the price of petrol, which is heavily subsidized in Iran, will be increased by 50% for the first 60 litres purchased each month with any more purchased above that threshold being increased to 300%. The government has tried to justify this plan by claiming that 60 million Iranians in the most disadvantaged economic conditions (out of a total population of 83 million) will benefit from these increases. What should be considered is that when the price of oil increases, the prices of other goods will follow suit in scenarios such as this one.

During the weekend, over 80,000 people in a hundred cities have taken part in these protests against this government initiative. Government buildings and gas stations have been stormed and set on fire, but most of the protests have proceeded peacefully. Drivers have abandoned their cars on roads and highways to cause traffic jams and have utilized apps such as Waze to inform other participants of where to stop their cars.

The response of the Iranian authorities and security forces has been nothing short of violent. Amnesty international reports that more than 100 people have been killed, people inside the country say there are already over 200 deaths during the manifestations; just in 5 days.

Source

Internet Shutdown

Internet monitoring website NetBlocks has confirmed that Iranian intelligence and security organisations have been jamming and interfering with internet services in an effort to hamper the ability of protestors to communicate and coordinate with each other in and outside of the country. On Sunday night, internet access was almost completely shut down. Such internet blackouts could possibly allow Iranian authorities to employ even more violent tactics against protestors without fear of Iranian citizens and the international community at large being aware of such acts.

Since Friday, hashtags related to the protests have gone viral on Twitter such as #IranProtests, #IslamicRepublicMustGo and #IranRegimeChange.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram have been invaluable to protestors, not only to coordinate and communicate with one another during demonstrations, but to also share their own narrative outside of their borders and alternative to the narrative being put out by the Iranian government. Protestors have shared videos and images of clashes with security forces as well as make appeals to the international community. The videos and images that have come to us from the streets of Iran have been the result of ordinary citizens who have used anti-filter apps such as Tor among other VPN and proxy services. These browsers are illegal in Iran but are easily accessible on the internet and at mobile shops. They are small but significant gestures of rebellion that confirm the potential of social mobilisation in the country. As Radio Farda reports, Iranian authorities have been issuing warnings to citizens through SMS messages ordering them to leave and avoid protest gatherings otherwise they will face serious consequences.

Source

Previous Uprisings

In recent years, international attention on Iran has mainly focused on the nation’s foreign policy. In May of 2018, the United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement, and in the summer of 2019, Iran once again was the centre of world news in regards to their actions in the Strait of Hormuz which involved attacks on foreign oil tankers followed by drone strikes on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. In addition to their involvement in the Syrian Civil War and uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq. In recent days, Iran has been in the spotlight due to announcements of new oil fields and new measures regarding the implementation of nuclear energy. What escapes the Western point of view however, is the voice of Iranian society and the perception of the distance between the Iranian people and their government.

Over the last decade, the Iranian people have repeatedly voiced their dissent, in particular in 2009 when students and the middle class took to protest known as Green Movement, and between 2017 and 2018 when the least wealthy and most conservative members of society took to the streets.

In June of 2009, following the fraudulent outcome of the presidential elections, the largest public demonstrations since the 1979 revolution were held. The protests were severely suppressed by the police. The main leader of the Green Movement, Hossein Mousavi, is still under house arrest. The number of victims of the suppression is still not clearly known.

On the 28th of December 2017, protesters took to the streets of the city of Mashhad to express discontent over the economic crisis, which lead to rising prices of basic food supplies such as eggs and poultry. The protests quickly spread to over 70 cities within the week. According to FreedomHouse, around 4,900 people were arrested during the period of anti-government protests and at least 21 people were killed during clashes with police forces. 90% of those arrested were under 25 years old.

In both cases, even before the army was deployed, the government had cut internet access. This may seem like a minor aspect when compared to the serious human rights violations committed by the government and religious establishment, but it is not. Public debate is extremely limited in Iran, information and entertainment channels are heavily censored by authorities, so protestors mainly rely on social media to coordinate protests and exchange information. Social media does not have a direct impact on authoritarian regimes, but they are important as they allow the citizens living under said regimes to represent themselves even when freedom of expression is scarce. 

The use of such strategies should not be taken for granted because it presupposes a certain degree of awareness that develops over time, not only in Iran, but for the rest of the region as well.

This Is NOT Just a Protest

The escalation of violence during protests is never a good sign. The Iranian security forces have been caught firing on protestors as well as firing tear gas into building courtyards. While some protestors are giving flowers to soldiers of the Iranian Army, others are singing “Death to the Dictator”. 

The religious establishment and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei say that these protests are part of a plot perpetrated by the enemies of Iran. The economy is on its knees and unemployment is rising. This is partly due to the sanctions placed against Iran by the United States. These protests are the manifestation of discontent held by a population that has long sought and demands higher democratic and economic standards. The Iranian people have lost faith in Rouhani, the moderate president who is now seen by the people as nothing more than a mere puppet in the service of stronger powers in the Iranian establishment. In the hope of reducing violence, the next test will be the parliamentary elections due to be held in February 2020, in which the people of Iran will face an important political decision during a time of extreme political fragility.

Source