Agrégateur de flux

Pour la première fois, un président français est en visite à Cuba. Pourquoi aucun dirigeant français ne s’est rendu sur l’île auparavant ?
Pendant la Guerre froide, aller à Cuba aurait compliqué les relations avec les Etats-Unis. Par la suite, la France a néanmoins reçu Fidel Castro en 1995. C’était à la toute fin du second septennat de François Mitterrand. Après la crise d’Irak, Nicolas Sarkozy avait envisagé de se rendre sur l’île mais il a été rattrapé par la guerre en Libye. Ce voyage a donc été repoussé jusqu’à cette année. L’annonce du rapprochement entre Washington et Cuba, après 65 ans d’embargo, a néanmoins accéléré cette visite officielle.

Au delà de l’aspect historique, quelle est la symbolique de ce déplacement ?
Cette visite est certes historique sur le fond mais elle vient surtout confirmer les bonnes relations que la France et Cuba entretiennent. Le voyage officiel de François Hollande vient consacrer cet état de fait et intervient en 2015 au moment où l’île va s’ouvrir aux Etats-Unis. Le président a choisi de s’y rendre pour avoir un effet d’entraînement, les partenaires européens, principalement les pays nordiques, étant fortement réservés sur ce processus de normalisation depuis le 17 décembre dernier.
Le rapprochement historique entre La Havane et Washington sera en toile de fond. Quel message veut faire passer François Hollande ?
Le président français veut faire comprendre aux Cubains que normaliser dans un délai proche leurs relations avec les Etats-Unis est une avancée importante mais qu’ils ne doivent pas oublier que la France les a aidés à survivre pendant l’embargo. Cuba occupe une place centrale dans les Antilles mais sa position stratégique sera encore plus renforcée avec la perspective de la levée de l’embargo américain. Sur le plan purement économique, il s’agit aussi de donner une impulsion et de préserver les acquis français.

La présence française est-elle importante à Cuba ?
La France n’est effectivement pas le premier partenaire économique de Cuba, loin derrière la Chine ou le Venezuela mais elle est déjà bien présente à Cuba et a la possibilité de mieux faire dans le secteur agricole, touristique et de la santé par exemple. Les visées de cette visite seront économiques pour les patrons qui accompagnent François Hollande. Air France et Accor, déjà présentes à Cuba, sont attirées par le développement touristique de l’île où se rendent chaque année quelque 100.000 Français. Le but pour François Hollande est de préserver les entreprises françaises à Cuba qui est un marché de plus de 11 millions d’habitants en devenir. Pour toutes ces entreprises , la concurrence sera rude et agressive, autant se préparer dès maintenant.

“…and on the third day, he rose again.”

Last week was both a triumph and a disappointment for UKIP. On the one hand, they secured almost 4 million votes in the General Election, a performance almost unsurpassed for a third party in the UK. On the other, the inequities of the electoral system meant that those votes only translated into a single seat. More problematically still, that seat was Clacton, and not Thanet South.

Prior to the election, Nigel Farage had been very clear: failure to win Thanet South would mean that he would step down, since he could not credible lead a party with parliamentary representation if he himself did not have a seat. This was repeated several times, enough to confirm that it was not a slip of the tongue, but a definite personal policy. It reflected both his public confidence about the party’s breakthrough in the election and his long-running dislike of running a political party.

Those with longer memories will recall 2010, when Farage stepped down as leader to contest Buckingham, citing an inability to do both jobs at the same time. His failure and that of his replacement, Lord Pearson, brought him quickly back into the fold. But even before that, Farage had long resisted the pressure to take over the leadership, preferring instead the libero role of media terrier and back-stage influencer: his election in 1999 to the European Parliament has long provided him with an alternative power and resource base.

Thus, no one should have been surprised that Farage followed through on May 8th, stepping down almost within the hour of being beaten into second place in Thanet.

More surprising was the jujitsu move of announcing that he would take the summer to rest and relax, before considering whether to stand again in a leadership contest in the autumn. I’ll admit that I kicked myself a bit at this point, for not seeing this as a way around his commitment to resign. It all made sense, in that even if there weren’t the seats, there were the votes and with the unexpected arrival of a Tory single-party government, a referendum on the EU was also now on the cards. In short, the prefect situation for Farage, bar that one small problem of his absence from Parliament.

Through the weekend there has been discussion of who might take over. Suzanne Evans had been proposed as interim leader, and was one of a handful of potential candidates. Perhaps tellingly, none of them made a big push to sell themselves, either to the media or to the party. Douglas Carswell – once again, the only UKIP MP – popped up to remind everyone that he had absolutely no interest in the job. Evans herself talked about the strength in depth of the possible candidates. But nothing comparable to Labour’s exertions, or even the LibDems.

Now, today, the big(ger) twist.

The party’s NEC released a statement saying:

“As promised Nigel Farage tendered his official resignation as leader of UKIP to the NEC. This offer was unanimously rejected by the NEC members who produced overwhelmingly evidence that the UKIP membership did not want Nigel to go.

“The NEC also concluded that UKIP’s general election campaign had been a great success. We have fought a positive campaign with a very good manifesto and despite relentless, negative attacks and anastonishing last minute swing to the Conservatives over fear of the SNP, that in these circumstances, 4 million votes was an extraordinary achievement.

“On that basis Mr Farage withdrew his resignation and will remain leader of UKIP. In addition the NEC recognised that the referendum campaign has already begun this week and we need our best team to fight that campaign led by Nigel. He has therefore been persuaded by the NEC to withdraw his resignation and remains leader of UKIP.”

Typos (and a curiosity about what that ‘evidence’ might be) aside, the statement is very telling about the situation of the party right now.

Firstly, it calls into question the values that UKIP has fought on, of being different to other parties. It looks like a slippery way out of the situation: the NEC refusing his resignation, Farage changing his mind, expediency over principle. It is a gift to political opponents.

Secondly, it highlights the lack of options open to the party. Without Farage, they still lack anyone who is able to replace him. For all the growth in membership and the efforts to build more of a senior team (at least in terms of spokesmen), Farage remains indelibly linked to the party’s image. One might have imagined him taking a more independent role in the referendum campaign, but the party would have struggled enormously without him. The failure to get anyone apart from the one man who has been vociferous about not wanting to lead the party into the Commons means that will only continue.

Thirdly, it exposes the fragility more generally of the party. About a year ago, I wrote a piece wondering whether UKIP could survive 2015: the likely lack of representation, the absence of opportunities for making a mark. I’ve come back to this several times since, but today I find myself closer to sticking with that view than for a long while.

Momentum is a precious thing in politics, as much as it exists at all. The period since 2013 has been incredibly strong for UKIP, but without the bodies in Parliament to show for it, that momentum will be hard to maintain. Farage’s media charms cannot and will not last forever. Even the EU referendum risks pigeonholing the party back into its old form as a single-issue party, something it’s tried hard to combat. If Cameron does draw things out, then matters become even worse, as everyone struggles to interest the public in the details of a renegotiation.

Nothing last forever, and today’s events are only likely to make matters more difficult for both Farage and UKIP.

The post Nigel ‘Jesus’ Farage appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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Javier Corrales spells out the true cause of Venezuela’s economic malaise — and it isn’t the oil.

Wai Moe explains why Kokang rebels are making life hard for the Burmese military and what this means for the country’s relationship with China.

Asma Ghribi reports on a new Tunisian security law that harkens back to the old dictatorship’s repressive methods.

Christian Caryl asks why, despite many years of bitter experience, we still allow genocides to happen.

Alexander Motyl argues that Kiev is better off now that Ukraine’s ruined eastern Donbass region is Russia’s responsibility.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

In a must-read essay, the Economist scrutinizes the state of democracy in the world: what has gone wrong, why, and how to fix it.

The International Crisis Group looks ahead to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 2016 presidential and legislative elections on which the political future of the country depends.

In the Daily Beast, Jamie Kirchik spares no criticism for former Florida representative Bob Wexler, who has heaped praise on Kazakhstan’s recent election (in which President Nazarbayev received 97.5 percent of the vote).

Middle East Briefing warns that the Assad regime may collapse with little warning, and calls for the international community to impose a “dis-entanglement plan” to prevent horrific bloodshed. (In the photo, rebel fighters under the Free Syrian Army take part in a military training near Aleppo.)

Bloomberg’s Kateryna Choursina, Volodymyr Verbyany, and Alex Sazonov take stock of the diminishing fortune of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whose candy company is shedding value along with the rest of Ukraine’s economy. Writing for openDemocracy, Jack Davies reports on a plague of western sex tourists taking advantage of the Ukrainian conflict to prey on vulnerable women.

Sarah Mendelson publishes a new CSIS report examining how governments attack civil society and looking at potential responses.

The Irrawaddy’s Kyaw Hsu Mon details the struggles of Burma’s private newspapers, squeezed by high production costs and competition from the state-run press.

And finally, the Syrian Observer notes that Syria and Russia have signed an agreement to “enhance cooperation in election-related expertise.”

Photo credit: BARAA AL-HALABI/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

For the countries that border the Arctic Ocean—Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (through its territory of Greenland)—an accessible ocean means new opportunities. And for the states that have their sights set on the Lomonosov Ridge—possibly all five Arctic Ocean neighbors but the United States—an open ocean means access to much of the North Pole’s largesse. First, though, they must prove to the United Nations that the access is rightfully theirs. Because that process could take years, if not decades, these  countries could clash in the meantime, especially as they quietly send in soldiers, spies, and scientists to collect information on one of the planet’s most hostile pieces of real estate.

While the world’s attention today is focused largely on the Middle East and other obvious trouble spots, few people seem to be monitoring what’s happening in the Arctic. Over the past few years, in fact, the Arctic Ocean countries have been busy building up their espionage armories with imaging satellites, reconnaissance drones, eavesdropping bases, spy planes, and stealthy subs. Denmark and Canada have described a clear uptick in Arctic spies operating on their territories, with Canada reporting levels comparable to those at the height of the Cold War. As of October, NATO had recorded a threefold jump in 2014 over the previous year in the number of Russian spy aircraft it had intercepted in the region. Meanwhile, the United States is sending satellites over the icy region about every 30 minutes, averaging more than 17,000 passes every year, and is developing a new generation of unmanned intelligence sensors to monitor everything above, on, and below the ice and water.

If Vienna was the crossroads of human espionage during the Cold War, a hub of safe houses where spies for the East and the West debriefed agents and eyed each other in cafes, it’s fair to say that the Arctic has become the crossroads of technical espionage today. According to an old Inuit proverb, “Only when the ice breaks will you truly know who is your friend and who is your enemy.”

thousands of miles from the frigid
north, the actual decision on which country gets what slice of the Arctic will be made in midtown Manhattan by 21 geologists, geophysicists, and hydrographers who compose the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. This treaty is a sort of international constitution establishing the rights and responsibilities for the use of the world’s oceans.

Although approved in 1982, after nearly a decade of meetings and conferences, the convention did not go into force until 1994; since then, it has been what sets limits on offshore mining. The treaty also regulates a country’s exclusive economic zone—how far from its shoreline a nation can legally fish and tap the minerals under the seabed. Thus, beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit of this zone, none of the five Arctic Ocean countries has the right to touch the enormous body of mineral wealth below the ice. The treaty, however, allows any nation to lobby for up to 350 additional nautical miles, and sometimes more, if it can prove that an underwater formation is an extension of its dry landmass.

Today, nearly 170 countries have ratified or acceded to the treaty, but the United States has yet to do so. In fact, out of the five Arctic Ocean nations, the United States is the only outlier. Upon the convention’s inception, President Ronald Reagan’s administration, with its free-enterprise philosophy, could not “as a matter of principle” sign on to something that encouraged a “mixed economic system for the regulation and production of deep seabed minerals,” wrote Leigh Ratiner, one of the U.S. negotiators for the treaty, in a 1982 Foreign Affairs article. One of Reagan’s attorneys general, Edwin Meese, later went so far as to call the treaty “a direct threat to American sovereignty.” Despite its being signed later by President Bill Clinton and having the backing of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama—as well as the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Navy leaders, environmental groups, and the oil and shipping industries—
conservative Republican senators continue to argue that the agreement would somehow subjugate the U.S. military and business interests to U.N. control.

Each Arctic Ocean country, upon ratifying the convention, is allowed 10 years to present scientific proof to the commission that its continental shelf extends beyond its exclusive economic zone. In December 2014, when it became the latest to submit bathymetric, seismic, and geophysical data to the United Nations, Denmark joined Russia and Canada in the fight for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. And though this has been an expensive contest for all involved, costing each country millions of dollars, the tactics at times have been cheap, if not utterly bizarre.

The first to approach the U.N., in 2001, Russia asserted that it had ownership not only of the North Pole, but also of an area amounting to about half the Arctic. To symbolically emphasize this point six years later, a Russian submersible carrying Artur Chilingarov, an avid explorer and then deputy speaker of the Duma, planted a rust-proof titanium Russian flag on the ocean floor 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole. The event triggered an outcry from Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay. “This isn’t the 15th century,” he said. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say, ‘We’re claiming this territory.’” Chilingarov shot back: “If someone doesn’t like this, let them go down themselves … and then try to put something there. Russia must win. Russia has what it takes to win. The Arctic has always been Russian.” Adding to the political theater, soon after the flag-planting ceremony, the Russian air force launched cruise missiles over the Arctic as part of a military exercise.

Not to be upstaged by Moscow’s flag stunt, in December 2013, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen and announced plans to claim ownership of the North Pole. “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic,” Harper had said in a 2007 speech at a naval base outside Victoria, British Columbia. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this government intends to use it.” The idea, according to Harper’s “Northern Strategy,” is to assert Canadian presence in the Arctic by “putting more boots on the Arctic tundra, more ships in the icy water and a better eye-in-the-sky.” But some Canadians think the prime minister has gone too far. “[N]ow Harper has become the Putin of the Arctic,” chided Heather Exner-Pirot, managing editor of Arctic Yearbook, in a 2013 blog post.

To meet its 10-year deadline, Norway filed its arguments to the U.N. in 2006, claiming that its seabed extends into both the Atlantic and the Arctic oceans in three places: the Loop Hole in the Barents Sea, the Western Nansen Basin in the Arctic Ocean, and the Banana Hole in the Norwegian Sea. But depending on the outcomes of various expeditions underway, including Kristoffersen and Tholfsen’s work on the ice floe, the country might return for a piece of the Lomonosov Ridge. It’s banking on some flexibility baked into the treaty: As long as a nation meets its 10-year deadline, it isn’t penalized for follow-up submissions.

When Denmark presented claims to the U.N. that the Lomonosov Ridge is the natural extension of
Greenland—a self-governing Danish territory with the nearest coastline to the North Pole—it also offered the commission evidence that now overlaps with studies presented by Russia and Canada. And this could prove to be drastically more complicated than it first might seem.

Given that the commission generally meets but twice a year, the pace at which it moves is anything but fast. For example, at the 30-year anniversary of the Law of the Sea treaty, the U.N. published a progress report stating that since the commission was formed in 1997, various countries around the globe, including those that border the Arctic, had submitted 61 claims to define new borders in the world’s oceans. However, in that same time, the commission had only managed to issue 18 sets of responses. In recent years, the 2012 report highlighted, the commission’s workload had “increased considerably,” and member countries had indicated plans for 46 future submissions.

This existing backlog does not bode well for settling matters quickly in the Arctic, especially now that those claims are becoming even more complex. Denmark seemingly attempted to reduce some of this wait time by petitioning the commission to recognize only the scientific merits of each of the country’s claims. Once these are established, according to Denmark’s submission, the Arctic nations will determine for themselves where the final boundaries will be drawn—a right allowed under the treaty.

In some ways, this tangled, bureaucratic system has worked out for the polar countries, perhaps even enabled them. Over the past few decades, they have happily assumed something akin to Arctic squatters’ rights, taking special liberties to explore the ocean’s bounty while simultaneously expanding control, both mechanical and human, as the ice continues to shrink. With or without a U.N. decision, the Arctic countries likely aren’t budging anytime soon.

today, woven tightly into the very fabric
of Arctic life is espionage: Technicians eavesdrop on civilian, government, and military communications, radar signals, and missile tests. They also conduct surveillance photography of any military equipment, ports, or bases. In December 2014, during a news conference in Moscow, Col. Gen. Viktor Bondarev, the head of Russia’s air force, noted that there had been a dramatic increase in foreign spy flights, including ones in the Arctic. “In 2014, more than 140 RC-135 flights have taken place, compared to 22 flights in 2013,” he said. But the same goes for the Russians, according to defense officials: NATO intercepted more than 100 Russian aircraft in 2014, three times more than the year before.

Russian President Vladimir Putin views the far north in a vehemently nationalist light. “The Arctic is, unconditionally, an integral part of the Russian Federation that has been under our sovereignty for several centuries,” he said in 2013. To put muscle behind this statement, in March 2015 the Russian military launched a massive five-day show of force in the Arctic involving 38,000 servicemen and special forces troops, more than 50 surface ships and submarines, and 110 aircraft. Two months earlier, the first of about 7,000 Russian troops began arriving at a recently reopened military air base at Alakurtti, north of the Arctic Circle; 3,000 of them will be assigned to an enormous signals intelligence listening post designed to eavesdrop on the West across the frozen ice cap.

More than a dozen additional bases are slated for construction. In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, told the Russian Defense Ministry’s public council that Moscow plans to build 13 airfields, an air-to-ground firing range, and 10 radar posts. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed the council, “In 2015 we will be almost fully prepared to meet unwelcome guests from east and north.”

Eavesdropping on the Russians across the North Pole is a Canadian listening post so high in the Arctic that it’s closer to Moscow than to Ottawa. Known as Alert and located on the northeast tip of Ellesmere Island in the territory of Nunavut, it is just 500 miles from the pole and is the northernmost permanently inhabited location in the world. A welcome sign declares, “Proudly Serving Canada’s ‘Frozen Chosen.’”

There, in some of the harshest weather on Earth, staffers maintain critical antenna networks used to intercept key Russian signals containing Arctic troop movements, aircraft and submarine communications, and critical telemetry from missile tests and space shots. In recent years, as technology advanced and the Russian buildup began, Canada moved hundreds of earphone-clad operators to Leitrim, a listening post near Ottawa; at this base, several satellite dishes eavesdrop on military and commercial communications satellites.

Canada shares its intelligence from Alert and Leitrim with its close partner, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), and the United States reciprocates through its Thule Air Base in western Greenland. More than 700 miles north of the Arctic Circle and more than 60 miles from the nearest Inuit village, Thule is not just one of the world’s most isolated facilities, but also one of the most highly classified. With a trio of bulbous igloo-like radomes on a wind-swept cliff about three miles from the base, personnel in a gray, windowless operations building send operational commands to more than 140 satellites in orbits from 120 miles to 24,800 miles above the planet.

Among the satellites the station controls are those that fly over Russia and its Arctic bases every 90 minutes, taking detailed photographs with cameras capable of spotting objects on Earth only a few inches long. Technicians feed directions to satellites about 20,000 times a year on average, said unit commander Austin Hood in a 2012 article in Airman, a U.S. Air Force publication. In addition, the station sends commands to many of the NSA’s eavesdropping satellites with instructions on which frequencies to monitor, such as those for telephone communications and Internet data.

in 2013, concerned about the possibility
of Russian drones in the Arctic, the Canadian government produced a classified study that explored the possibilities and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Unless “UAVs gain aerial refueling capabilities,” it reported, Russia could not spy in Canadian Arctic territory. And though Canada has orbited Radarsat-2, a synthetic-aperture radar surveillance satellite capable of seeing through clouds, in order to keep track of events and military movements (including in the Arctic), this technology apparently wasn’t stealthy enough for the country: In August 2014, defense employees began carrying out experiments to test the feasibility of developing drones for use in the Arctic.

The response? Three months later, in November, a Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland Alaska. When completed, this base will make Russia the only country to have this technology in the Arctic skies.

Norway is also becoming nervous about Russia. In March 2015, around the same time that Moscow showed off its 38,000 troops, Norway acted similarly, dragging out 5,000 soldiers and 400 vehicles for its own Arctic military exercise. But rather than spying on Russia with satellites, Norway is putting its spies to sea. In December 2014, Prime Minister Erna Solberg christened the $250 million Marjata. Built for the Norwegian Intelligence Service and expected to become operational in 2016, the vessel will be among the world’s most advanced surveillance ships, according to information released by the Norwegian military.

“The new Marjata will be an important piece in the continuation of the Intelligence Service’s assignments in the High North,” Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen, head of the service, said in a statement. He also told a Norwegian newspaper that the Marjata’s task “will be to systematically map all military and some civilian activity in areas close to Norway.” Designed largely for eavesdropping on Russian communications and other signals, according to the Norwegian government-owned news service NRK, it will also identify things like the frequencies of Moscow’s radar systems—information that is critical in order to jam them should hostilities break out.

Beneath the Arctic ice, the United States and Russia remain adversaries, vestiges of the Cold War. Since the USS Nautilus first slid under the North Pole in 1958 and the USS Skate became the first to surface there less than a year later, U.S. submarines have completed more than 120 Arctic exercises.

With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect. According to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, the “alarmingly sophisticated” Russian fleet “will likely dramatically alter the world’s future geopolitical landscape.” The author, veteran submariner Lt. Cmdr. Tom Spahn, said the armament on the Yasen, Russia’s new fast-
attack submarine, includes supercavitating torpedoes that can speed through the water in excess of 200 knots, about the equivalent of 230 miles per hour. This “makes her truly terrifying,” Spahn wrote. The new Russian subs, that is, will be stealthier and far deadlier than any ever known.

one evening in november 2014, u.s. radar operators spotted six Russian aircraft—two Tu-95 “Bear” long-range bombers, two Il-78 refueling tankers, and two MiG-31 fighters—heading toward the Alaskan coast. They had entered a U.S. air defense identification zone, airspace approaching the American border where aircraft must identify themselves, and they were getting closer when two U.S. F-22 fighter jets were dispatched to intercept them. About six hours later, Canada detected two more Russian Bear bombers approaching its Arctic airspace. Like the United States, Canada scrambled two CF-18 fighter jets to divert the bombers within about 40 nautical miles off the Canadian coast.

Although the Bears are designed to drop bombs, they are also used to collect intelligence and eavesdrop on military communications. This was most likely their purpose in flying close to the U.S. and Canadian Arctic coasts. To be clear, Moscow wasn’t doing anything Washington doesn’t do itself: The United States regularly flies its RC-135 aircraft—a variant of a Boeing 707 that sucks signals, from radar beeps to military conversations to civilian email, from the air like a vacuum cleaner—near Russia’s northern territory.

As the planes get closer, spying becomes bolder. And though this strategy might be necessary for Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway as they vie for supremacy in the new Great Game, this isn’t a strategy that is necessarily logical for the United States, a country not party to the Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Even if the Senate were to ratify the treaty, it is likely that, by the time it submits its claim to the commission, much of the icy region will be accounted for. And given the rightward turn in Congress, the odds that the treaty will be ratified during the Obama administration are slimmer than ever. In the words of one U.S. Coast Guard admiral quoted about the Arctic in a 2010 Politics Daily article, “If this were a ball game … the U.S. wouldn’t be on the field or even in the stadium.”

In the next few years, as the Arctic Ocean opens for business, American spies will still be busy feeding directions to satellites that spin over the North Pole, while the United States’ polar neighbors will be busy exploiting the resources beneath it and leading convoys through the ice in new shipping channels above it. With this kind of Arctic strategy, in other words, the United States will remain frozen in another era.

Ce lundi 11 mai 2015, François Hollande est en visite officielle à Cuba. Il est le premier président français depuis l’indépendance de l’île en 1898 à s’y rendre. Comment cela s’explique-t-il ?
Cuba est un petit pays. Indépendamment de son régime politique, Cuba a toujours été très proche des États-Unis, qui historiquement ont interféré dans sa vie intérieure. La France n’a jamais voulu se mêler des affaires cubaines avant que cela ne soit possible, que n’apparaisse une fenêtre d’opportunité. Cette occasion de rapprochement est apparue avec la fin de la division du monde entre l’Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques (URSS) et les États-Unis, qui a permis une réinsertion de Cuba dans son environnement régional et d’une manière générale, dans le monde.
En 1993, peu de temps après la chute du mur de Berlin et la disparition de l’URSS, la France a décidé de voter à l’Assemblée générale des Nations unies en faveur de la résolution qui condamne l’embargo des États-Unis. En 1995, la France, a reçu Fidel Castro. Depuis lors, les relations entre la France et Cuba se sont densifiées et beaucoup de visites ministérielles ont eu lieu. La visite de François Hollande consacre la normalité des relations entre la France et Cuba à un moment où elles pourraient être bousculées par l’irruption, en matière économique et culturelle, des États-Unis. En effet, les deux présidents – cubain et américain – ont décidé le 17 décembre 2014 de normaliser leurs relations, suspendues depuis 1962.

François Hollande et son homologue cubain, Raul Castro, discuteront du développement de liens économiques entre leurs deux pays. Cela se fera-t-il au détriment de la question des droits de l’Homme ? Quelle est la nature actuelle des liens économiques entre les deux pays ? La France peut-elle passer outre la réalité des droits de l’Homme à Cuba ?
Je ne sais pas si la visite du président français se fera « au détriment » de la question des droits de l’Homme. Je n’ai en tous les cas rien lu de tel venant de la part de la présidence de la République française. C’est un commentaire qui a été fait par des associations proches des milieux dissidents, par des associations de droits de l’Homme ou encore des organisations d’opposants au régime cubain. La question des droits et libertés avait gravement perturbé les relations de la France avec la Colombie puis le Mexique, au cours de la mandature de Nicolas Sarkozy. Une nouvelle approche a été mise en application par François Hollande. Elle vise à parler des droits de l’Homme de façon discrète, en tête à tête, et sans tapage médiatique. Cette méthode a permis la libération d’une française incarcérée au Mexique pour un délit de droit commun qui avait provoqué la quasi suspension des relations ministérielles entre ces deux pays. C’est une méthode qui est évidemment beaucoup moins bruyante et médiatique que celle qui été appliquée précédemment. Mais elle a le mérite de ne pas affecter l’ensemble des relations bilatérales. Un chef d’État, doit défendre au mieux la globalité des intérêts nationaux. François Hollande pour préserver les intérêts culturels et économiques de la France à Cuba, comme ailleurs dans le monde, a donc choisi de ne pas faire de déclaration publique spectaculaire sur les droits de l’Homme. Mais il en sera néanmoins question à l’occasion de son dîner de tête avec le président Raúl Castro.
Concernant les relations économiques, la préoccupation française est de préserver les positions acquises par les entreprises françaises à Cuba avant le déferlement prévisible des entreprises nord-américaines. Barack Obama a en effet ouvert le 17 décembre 2014 la voie à une normalisation sans condition avec Cuba. Il a mis entre parenthèses ce qui était exigé jusqu’à aujourd’hui par les États-Unis, le changement de régime, plus de libertés et de démocratie avant de normaliser les relations avec Cuba. Le président américain a considéré que cette politique d’isolement et de sanctions n’avait eu aucun effet et avait eu plutôt comme conséquence d’isoler les États-Unis sur le sous-continent latino-américain. Barack Obama a opté pour une autre stratégie. Elle prendra certainement du temps, compte-tenu des résistances du parlement. Mais le jour où elle arrivera à maturation, il est évident que les entreprises nord-américaines seront très bien placées pour prendre des parts de marché aux entreprises françaises, européennes, chinoises, colombiennes, mexicaines ou encore canadiennes, qui sont pour l’instant présentes à Cuba sans véritable concurrence venue des États-Unis.

Selon vous, ce rapprochement avec Cuba s’inscrit-il dans une stratégie plus large de renforcement de la présence française dans les Caraïbes voire en Amérique Latine ?
Tout le monde a les yeux fixés sur Cuba puisque c’est la première fois qu’un président français y effectue une visite officielle mais aussi en raison du caractère particulier du régime cubain. Pourtant, cette visite de François Hollande s’inscrit dans une stratégie caribéenne, régionale : après Cuba, le président se rendra en Haïti et avant Cuba, il avait réuni les chefs d’États de la région en Martinique, pour une conférence sur le changement climatique et ses incidences dans les grandes et petites Antilles. C’est une stratégie qui est en cohérence avec la diplomatie économique qu’il a mise en place depuis 2012. Elle concerne tous les continents. En Amérique latine, François Hollande a effectué des déplacements au Mexique et au Brésil. Le ministre des Affaires étrangères a visité un grand nombre de pays d’Amérique latine, tout comme le secrétaire d’État au Commerce extérieur ainsi que d’autres ministres. Marisol Touraine, ministre de la Santé, était d’ailleurs à Cuba avant l’arrivée du président Hollande. Ce voyage s’inscrit donc dans une cohérence continentale. Elle vise à assurer une présence économique et culturelle française plus forte, afin de donner à la France des fenêtres extérieures de sortie de crise.
Cuba présente par ailleurs un double intérêt pour la France. L’un est économique, l’autre est d’influence. Nul doute que ces deux considérations sont entrées dans le scénario ayant justifié cette visite.
L’intérêt économique va bien au-delà du modeste marché cubain, qui représente à peine onze millions de consommateurs. L’intérêt économique de Cuba vient de sa situation géographique. L’’île, est une sorte de « porte-avions » entre l’Amérique du Nord, les Amériques du Sud et Centrale, face au Canal de Panama, en phase d’élargissement. Cette position stratégique en fait un lieu privilégié pour développer le commerce maritime et des plateformes d’échanges en matière aérienne pour le tourisme. Un grand port de redistribution de conteneurs est actuellement en construction à Mariel près de La Havane, avec le soutien du Brésil. D’un point de vue économique, c’est dans ces domaines que la France entend se placer sans pour autant négliger quelques grands contrats potentiels.
Concernant l’influence, Cuba symbolise la résistance d’un petit pays face à un géant, les États-Unis. Les frères Castro ont une image positive auprès de leurs homologues latino-américains et caribéens. Il y a quelques mois, Cuba, du fait de cette image a pu présider la Communauté des États d’Amérique latine et de la Caraïbes (Celac). Cuba par ailleurs joue actuellement un rôle dans la recherche de la paix en Colombie. Rendre visite au chef d’État cubain, c’est prendre en compte aussi cette réalité et ce rayonnement.

COPENHAGEN, 11 May 2015 – OSCE Parliamentary Assembly President Ilkka Kanerva (MP, Finland) today called on all political and civil society actors in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to work together to promote security and dialogue following the weekend’s violence and warned that old ethnic divisions must not be allowed to reemerge in this time of political upheaval.

“On behalf of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, I mourn the loss of life in Kumanovo and offer condolences to the families and friends of the victims. There must be an immediate, credible investigation into what occurred. It is crucial that all sectors of society now focus on promoting peace and co-operation and guard against any attempts to reopen the old ethnic divisions that work against their nation’s security and progress,” Kanerva said.

The OSCE PA President further reiterated that the country’s political crisis must be resolved as soon as possible, through its institutions and relying on democratic principles, particularly in order to safeguard security at this critical time.

“The weekend’s incidents must convince politicians that the time is absolutely now to resolve the crisis that is paralyzing the country. They must rely on the country’s institutions, guided by the rule of law, in order to move beyond this impasse. Failure to do so presents a threat to stability and security in the country and the region at large. The country’s neighbors, too, must now act on their special responsibility to promote stability,” Kanerva said.

Kanerva urged political leaders in Skopje to fully enlist the support of the OSCE and the international community at this time.

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Well, that didn’t work out as expected. A voter in Wales drew a penis on his ballot during Britain’s Thursday election and it ended up counting as a vote. The depiction of the male anatomy was penciled in next to the name of a Tory candidate for Parliament, presumably as a protest, and vote counters put the ballot in Glyn Davies’ column.

“One voter decided to draw a detailed representation of a penis instead of a cross in my box on one ballot paper,” Davies told the South Wales Evening Post. “Amazingly, because it was neatly drawn within the confines of the box the returning officer deemed it a valid vote.”

Davies held his Wales seat with 45 percent of the vote.

The Tory MP thanked the anonymous penis artist for the contribution to his victory. “Not sure the artist meant it to count, but I am grateful,” Davies said, according to the Evening Post. “If I knew who it was, I would like to thank him [or her] personally.”

GEOFF CADDICK/AFP/Getty Images

A UK in-out referendum will soon be upon us. How the rest of the EU responds will be crucial to shaping the outcome in the UK and shaping the future of Europe.

The UK’s 2015 general election has been one of the most spectacular in the country’s modern history. Defying the polls, David Cameron managed to increase the number of Conservative MPs to secure a small majority in the House of Commons.

It means the UK and EU will soon face a make or break moment that many in both have quietly dreaded: a UK in-out referendum.

To borrow from US President Lyndon Johnson, the EU now has to decide whether it wants the UK inside the EU tent pissing out, or outside the EU tent pissing in.

European Thinking

For Cameron, the referendum is a commitment he made personally in January 2013 and which carries almost universal support in his Conservative Party. The question is no longer if but when the vote is held.

Whatever date Cameron goes for we can expect a tsunami of analysis and debate about what a Brexit would mean for the UK. This will add to the plethora of existing research on the subject.

But as I’ve argued before, this overlooks the equally big question of what a referendum and/or Brexit could mean for the EU. Understanding the EU’s reaction will also be crucial if we are to understand whether the UK can secure a renegotiation and remain a member.

Like it or not, Europe will soon witness the people of one of its largest states debating whether or not to quit the leading organisation of pan-European cooperation and unity. This is not an insignificant development for the EU, European geopolitics, the states of Europe, or how we study European politics and integration.

That might sound an obvious statement to make. It’s one you’ll find is raised over dinners in Brussels or coffee in Berlin. There has certainly been no shortage of informal chat about what a Brexit could mean for the EU.

But discussion quickly turns to what a Brexit might mean for the UK. The implications for the EU are pushed to the side. There have been only a couple of reports – SWP, DGAP, ECFR, Bertelssmann, Open Europe – analysing what such a big event could mean for the EU. Each ranges in size and focus.

Hopes and Fears

In Britain it is hoped an open debate about Europe can lance the festering political boil Europe has become. It could provide a fresh start for everyone. A successful vote could also break Europe’s fear of referendums. It could show that the citizenry of member states can and should be engaged directly in discussing the future of the EU and their member state’s part in it.

However, a UK referendum could trigger calls for similar referendums elsewhere. Britain is not the only country to have a difficult relationship with the EU. Granted it is the one where an out vote is a distinct possibility. Nevertheless, some fear the UK is about to trigger a domino effect that brings chaos through more referendums. The outcome would be a slow weakening and unravelling of the union.

Forever Awkward

Even if the UK votes to stay in the EU, the issue of Europe in British politics is unlikely to be settled. Rather than cleanse British politics of a poisonous debate, the vote could merely be a placebo. The European question in British politics has long been about more than to be or not to be in Europe. It weaves its way into many of the problems and issues shaping the UK today. They are unlikely to go away whether the decision is to stay or leave.

Whether in or out the UK will therefore remain, as Stephen George once described it, ‘an awkward partner’. The rest of Europe should expect continued sniping and difficult times. So would it not be better then to banish Britain altogether to the outside of the EU tent?

Awkward Questions

The rest of the EU will play a central role in deciding whether Britain stays or goes. Those in the UK who seek a withdrawal would be served by an EU that is instead obstructionist, refusing to countenance much by way of renegotiation. This would be a ‘passive expulsion’, the EU doing little to keep Britain in because the members quietly want it to up and leave of its own accord.

In deciding whether to try to keep or let Britain go the rest of the EU will have to face three issues about a Brexit:

First, what could be the economic costs for the EU of the various possible trading relationships that would follow a Brexit? A UK on the outside would be the EU’s biggest trading partner. Would any special deal be offered to the UK, or would this risk complicating relations with other non-EU states to say nothing of compromising the single market?

Second, how would UK-EU relations on matters of security and defence be managed? Britain might have recently become more withdrawn from the world, but it retains a considerable punch. The UK will not be quitting NATO.

Third, who would benefit from the political changes to the EU brought about by a British exit? Or would there be little benefit? Would the damage hit everyone by triggering a series of changes that weaken the idea and direction of European integration?

Searching for answers

The search is now on to decide what position the EU will take. Central to this will be the position of Germany. Others should not be overlooked. Cameron has often made the mistake of assuming all decisions are made in Berlin. That overplays Germany’s power, if only because any such decisions are made with a view to wider European politics and not simply bilateral relations with the UK.

In September 2014 the DGAP published a report (edited by myself and Almut Möller) made up of 26 views of a Brexit written by people from research institutions and universities from sixteen EU member states, nine non-EU countries, and a view from the EU’s institutions in Brussels.

Its conclusions were clear: while there is sympathy for some of the UK’s frustrations at the EU, there is equally a great deal of frustration at the UK’s attitude towards the EU and other member states. As the Dutch contribution put it, Britain suffers from a sense of ‘narcissistic victimization’ – of believing only it suffers from the EU’s failing and only it knows the way forward.

The report does not make for optimistic reading for a UK government hoping the rest of the EU will offer it much by way of a renegotiation to sell in a referendum. Yet there is some hope because the report shows the rest of the EU has not yet fully grasped where a Brexit may take them. Perhaps then Britain and the rest of the EU still have time to realise that a Brexit is not in the interests of either side.

 

The post Brexit: Europe’s Awkward Questions about its Awkward Partner appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

This report is for the media and the general public.

The SMM monitored the implementation of the “Package of measures for the Implementation of the Minsk agreements”. Its monitoring was restricted by security considerations and in two instances through delayed access to heavy weapons holding areas*. SMM monitors came under machine gun fire from a Ukrainian Armed Forces soldier in the Luhansk region. Heavy fighting was heard by the SMM in and around Shyrokyne on 10 May. Fighting around Donetsk airport continued, though at a reduced level compared with previous days. The SMM observed 9 May commemorations in many cities, some of which included displays of heavy weapons.

Fighting continued to be heard by the SMM in and around Shyrokyne (20km east of Mariupol) on both 9 and 10 May, with over 400 explosions heard on 10 May alone representing a significant deterioration compared with previous days.[1] During the day the SMM heard outgoing mortars and incoming artillery. On 9 May the SMM, from the Joint Centre for Control and Co-ordination (JCCC) observation post at Donetsk railway station (“DPR”-controlled, 8km north-west of Donetsk city-centre), heard 148 explosions and several bursts of small-arms fire. In the SMM’s assessment the majority of the explosions took place around government-controlled Pisky (15km west-north-west of Donetsk) and “Donetsk People’s Republic” (“DPR”)-controlled Spartak (10km north-west of Donetsk). The SMM recorded 89 explosions and several bursts of gunfire on 10 May from the JCCC observation post, occurring in areas between 3-7km south-west, west, north-west and north-east of their position. Both the Ukrainian Armed Forces Major-General and Russian Federation Armed Forces Colonel-General at the JCCC headquarters (HQ) in government-controlled Soledar (77km north of Donetsk) expressed concern that “DPR”-controlled Horlivka (36km north-east of Donetsk) had become a hotspot.

In Donetsk city the SMM monitored a 9 May commemoration. Thousands of people (males and females of all ages) watched about 400-500 men dressed in military-type uniforms – some ceremonial and some in combat fatigues – on parade, many of whom carried rifles.

The acting head doctor of the tuberculosis hospital in “DPR”-controlled Donetsk city told the SMM that despite Presidential Decree 875/2014 and Cabinet of Ministers Resolution 595 (which saw relocation of State institutions to government-controlled territories and ceased funding to health institutions in “DPR”-controlled territories) they still co-operate with hospitals in government-controlled territories over patient transfers. The interlocutor said that the hospital received regular humanitarian aid from the Russian Federation, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and others. According to the acting head, local pharmacies do not stock supplementary medicine they require.

Near government-controlled Nykyforivka (81km north-east of Donetsk) the SMM saw a firing range with evidence of self-propelled artillery systems and tank use in the vicinity. Residents told the SMM that such equipment was being used for training purposes at this location.

On 10 May an SMM patrol came under machine-gun fire in an area three kilometres west of government-controlled Krymske (43km north-west of Luhansk). The SMM team had exited their vehicles to observe nearby shelling. As the team re-entered their vehicles, approximately 3-5 long bursts from a modernized Kalashnikov machinegun (PKM) (7.62x54mm) impacted close by – some within two metres. The SMM suffered no injuries and left the area. The SMM assessed the fire as originating from 200 metres south-east of their location. During a follow-up meeting, the local Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander told the SMM that one of his soldiers accidentally opened fire “because they were not aware of the SMM’s arrival”, that the soldier acted nervously and attempted to fire “warning shots”. The commander apologized and promised full security for the SMM.

The SMM saw 9 May commemorations on both sides of the contact line in Luhansk. Approximately 5,000 people (both males and females, of all ages) attended a 9 May military-style parade by the “LPR” in Luhansk. In both government-controlled Sievierodonetsk (74km north-west of Luhansk) and Popasna (69km west of Luhansk) the SMM observed celebrations on 9 May. About 1,000 people were in attendance at both locations.

On 10 May the SMM observed a training area on the boundary between the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in “LPR”-controlled territory. The SMM spoke with a “DPR” “commander” who informed the SMM that the training involved instruction of “DPR” members on military strategy. The SMM observed 50 “DPR” members undergoing training.

The SMM spoke to two elderly residents (one male, one female) in “LPR”-controlled Vodotok (30km south-east of Luhansk) who told them of the difficulties faced by the village’s 20-30 residents. The interlocutors said that pensions had not been paid since June 2014. They said they had never received any humanitarian aid, had no local medical services and required medication. The primary source of food was local farms. Although they had electricity, there was no gas supply and they drew water from village wells.

The SMM continued to visit heavy weapons holding areas. In government-controlled areas the SMM re-visited seven heavy weapons holding areas and noted that two multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) were missing at one location; four MLRS at another location; four 152mm towed howitzers absent from its previously recorded location; and two 152mm towed howitzers missing from a further location. All other weapons previously recorded at these sites were in situ, and in compliance with Minsk withdrawal lines. The SMM observed that some heavy weapons were recently moved (as evidenced by fresh mud on truck wheels and tracks visible in fields). At one location the SMM had to wait 30 minutes - forty minutes at another - before being given access*. On 9 May the SMM observed an “LPR” heavy weapons convoy returning from the parade held in Luhansk to the site where they were located prior to the parade. On 10 May the SMM observed these weapons being moved to holding areas that are compliant with Minsk withdrawal lines.

Despite claims that the withdrawal of heavy weapons was complete, the SMM observed the following weapons’ movements in areas in violation of Minsk withdrawal lines on 9 and 10 May. In “DPR”-controlled areas the SMM observed six main battle tanks (MBTs) (T72), three towed howitzers (D-30 122mm), three MLRS (BM-21 Grad 122mm), three howitzers (2S1 122mm self-propelled “Gvozdika”122mm), three anti-aircraft systems (Strela-10 120mm), and three towed howitzers (“Msta-B” 152mm)[2]. At another location in “DPR”-controlled areas the SMM saw two self-propelled “Gvozdika” (122mm) howitzers. In “LPR”-controlled areas the SMM saw self-propelled howitzers, towed howitzers, tanks, MLRS and anti-aircraft systems “Strela”[3]. In government-controlled areas the SMM observed two MLRS BM-30 “Smerch” (300mm calibre), one MLRS BM-21 Grad (122mm calibre), four towed guns (possibly 130mm field guns M-46) and one anti-aircraft missile system “OSA-AK”[4]. At other locations the SMM saw three MBTs (T-72), one truck towing a 122mm D-30 howitzer and two stationery trucks with two “Msta-B” 2A65 152mm howitzers attached.

The SMM Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) observed three Ukrainian Armed Forces artillery pieces (likely towed 152mm cannon) near the government-controlled village of Pionerske (13km east of Mariupol) firing eastward. Two hours later the UAV observed a house burning in Shyrokyne (20km east of Mariupol). Near Shyrokyne the UAV detected a “DPR” “base” with four small boats. In nearby “DPR”-controlled Bezimenne (30km east of Mariupol), the UAV observed a previously seen “DPR” facility, with only three infantry fighting vehicles at this location. The three MBTs previously seen at this location (see SMM Daily Report, 7 May, http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/156046) were no longer there.

The SMM monitored a 9 May commemoration at Dnepropetrovsk’s General Pushkin Tank Memorial and the nearby Glory Monument organized by the “Opposition Bloc,” the “Soviet Officers’ Union of Ukraine” and the “Anti-fascist Union.” Approximately 300 people of all ages, including numerous war veterans, were present. Many participants wore the St. George ribbon. At a second gathering in a nearby street, the “Commemoration Ceremony for the Anti-Terrorist Operation Heroes” organized by the “Country Defence Foundation”, 200 participants (mostly young and middle-aged men, some women) took part, many of whom wore the remembrance poppy. While the SMM observed heated individual discussions between participants of the opposing rallies, the overall atmosphere was peaceful. The SMM saw around 100 police officers, some wearing riot gear.

In Kherson the SMM estimated that 10,000-15,000 persons were gathered in the Park of Glory for 9 May commemorations. Representatives of Pravyy Sektor (Right Sector) and the Samooborona group were in attendance, though without flags and banners following an agreement between the governor, political parties, and local community representatives on abstaining from displays of political insignia during the commemorations. The SMM observed some of the estimated 700-800 police present ordering citizens wearing the St. George ribbons to remove them.

On 9 May at Cathedral Square in Chernivtsi, the SMM observed a peaceful commemoration at the war memorial attended by approximately 550 people (mostly men aged over 50 years old). Thirty police were present.

The SMM monitored the laying of wreaths at the Hill of Glory memorial in Lviv on 9 May. Dozens of citizens and war veterans attended. Approximately 200 police officers secured the area, including 30 riot police, together with activists from self-defence groups and the Svoboda party. The SMM observed an isolated incident when Svoboda activists removed a St. George ribbon from an elderly man and burnt it.

Official commemorative events in Kyiv on 8 May were closed to the public. On 9 May tens of thousands of people gathered in Kyiv to commemorate war veterans. Government officials, members of political parties and citizens laid flowers at monuments in Glory Park and at the World War II museum. Large numbers of law enforcement were present, both uniformed and plainclothes police officers, at all public gatherings. At least four separate groups, numbering from 10-40 people (mainly pensioners, most of whom were female) carried flags and posters associated with the Communist Party to Glory Park. The groups were protected by several rings of law enforcement officers. One group was blocked by 3-4 young men near the park. The police kept the two sides apart and the group was able to proceed. Another group carrying two communist flags were confronted by approximately 10 men (aged between 20-35 years of age) in irregular military uniforms who tore the flags out of their hands.

The SMM continued to monitor the situation in Kharkiv, Odessa, and Ivano-Frankivsk.

* Restrictions on SMM access and freedom of movement:

The SMM is restrained in fulfilling its monitoring functions by restrictions imposed by third parties and security considerations including the lack of information on whereabouts of landmines.

The security situation in Donbas is fluid and unpredictable and the cease-fire does not hold everywhere.

• At two government-controlled heavy weapons holding areas the SMM were told to wait 30 minutes and 40 minutes respectively before being given access.

 

[1] For a complete breakdown of the ceasefire violations, please see the annexed table.

[2] These weapons were observed at the 9 May Donetsk city parade.

[3] These weapons were observed at the 9 May Luhansk city parade.

[4] These weapons were observed at the 9 May commemoration in Sievierodonetsk.

Related Stories

• Latest from OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine based on information received as of 19:30 (Kyiv time), 8 May 2015
• Latest from OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (SMM), based on information received as of 19:30 (Kyiv time), 7 May 2015
• The Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine urged all sides to respect ceasefire during the forthcoming commemoration events

Le 7 mai 2015, les armées ont reçu un troisième drone de type Reaper. Il a été directement projeté à Niamey, au Niger, auprès de la force Barkhane.

Le 28 avril 2015, le patrouilleur hauturier (PH) l’Adroit a quitté l’opération européenne de lutte contre la piraterie Atalanta. Une opération menée aux côtés de plusieurs bâtiments et aéronefs des marines allemandes, néerlandaises, italiennes et espagnoles. Le commandement à la mer était assuré par un amiral suédois, à bord du bâtiment amphibie néerlandais Johan de Witt.

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The Arab Spring uprisings failed to meet people’s expectations for bringing democracy to the Middle East because most countries in the region inherited a long history of authoritarianism that inhibited any move toward representative government.

This was the central point of Tarek Masoud’s talk at a May 11th IPI Distinguished Author Series event during which he explained the reasoning behind the new book he co-authored with Jason Brownlee of the University of Texas at Austin and Andrew Reynolds of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform.

The newly released book explains why some of the uprisings that shook the region beginning in 2011 managed to achieve regime change, while others didn’t. But it also goes deeper. Of the countries that overthrew their rulers—Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen—only one, Tunisia, has actually turned into a full democracy.

Mr. Masoud, the Sultan of Oman associate professor of International Relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said the main reason why Tunisia succeeded is that the small country inherited a tradition of pluralism and internal balance of power that was missing from the state apparatus of countries such as Egypt and Libya.

“We could have predicted how the Arab Spring would end even before it began,” Mr. Masoud declared. “The future of the Arab world is going to look a lot like its authoritarian past—except worse,” he added, noting that “at least during the authoritarian past you had some modicum of state authority that protected people from the kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. Today, we don’t even have that.”

Tunisia, he said, is the Arab World’s only liberal democracy and the only success story of the Arab Spring. “The central obsession of this book is to explain why,” he added.

Mr. Masoud acknowledged that many have tried to tackle this question. But they have focused on the wrong answers, he said, such as the role played by the countries’ militaries, the impact of new communication technologies, or the different grievances that existed in those states. While these factors may address part of the question, Mr. Masoud said, they don’t actually answer it.

On grievances, for example, the Harvard professor said that in most cases these had been there for a long time, and so saying they provoked the 2011 uprisings doesn’t really answer the question of why then.

The same goes for the role played by the military, Mr. Masoud said. Revolutions succeed, the argument goes, only when a professional military decides to defect from the ruling regime. “But of course,” he said, “if you know anything about the militaries in those countries, it’s not at all the case.” Yemen, he said, did not have a professional military, but Yemenis still removed Ali Abdullah Saleh from power. And Tunisia, he continued, transitioned to democracy without the involvement of its military.

“Explaining why Tunisia didn’t have a military coup requires us to do more than just look at the army, because all the conditions for a military coup were actually there,” he said.

The answer, Mr. Masoud said, has to do with the kind of state Tunisians and Egyptians inherited, which in turn explains why their first post-revolution elections went in different directions.

“The difference really rests in understanding what happened among the politicians themselves,” he said. “In Tunisia, the politicians were actually able to come to some kind of an agreement, and therefore avoided the mass protests of the magnitude that we saw in Egypt.”

That agreement was the result of a relatively balanced first election in which the Islamist al-Nahda won 40 percent of the votes. In Egypt, however, Islamist parties gained a total of 70 percent of seats in the parliament. “There was a huge imbalance in the political landscape,” Mr. Masoud said, which “is the proximate explanation for why Tunisia goes one way and Egypt goes the other.”

This imbalance ultimately led to Egypt’s 2013 military coup, Mr. Masoud said, reflecting a political science truth that, in states where power is evenly shared, “the government does not feel that it can be arbitrary, and the opposition should not be revolutionary and irreconcilable.”

“I think this even balance of power existed in Tunisia,” Mr. Masoud said. “The liberal opposition saw that they got a majority of the vote in 2011, so they had no need to be revolutionary and irreconcilable.”

“The liberals in contrast in Egypt did not want another election…. They didn’t want that because they knew that compared to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists—both of whom had large ground operations—they would have a hard time mounting political campaigns, even finding candidates to run.”

When it comes to Libya, Mr. Masoud said the importance of inherited state traditions is even more evident. Muammar Qaddafi’s 40-year rule, Mr. Masoud said, was based on a philosophy of state dismantlement, carried out with the goal of eliminating any challenger to his rule.

“The problem,” Mr. Masoud said, “is that when you then overthrow Qaddafi, you as an ascendant democrat, have very little in the way of a state to actually govern the territory.”

The event was moderated by IPI Senior Adviser for External Relations Warren Hoge.

Watch event:

Allgemeines : Um den Europatag zu feiern, öffnete das Europäische Parlament am 2. Mai seine Türen in Straßburg und am 9. Mai in Brüssel und Luxemburg. Die Informationsbüros in den EU-Mitgliedstaaten organisierten Veranstaltungen für alle Altersgruppen. Insgesamt 40.000 Menschen besuchten das Parlament an den drei Standorten.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2015 - EP

Általános : Május 2-án Strasbourgban, május 9-én pedig Brüsszelben és Luxembourgban rendeztek nyílt napot az Európai Parlamentben az Európa nap alkalmából. A három helyszínen összesen mintegy 40 ezren fedezték fel az EP-t.

Forrás : © Európai Unió, 2015 - EP

Allgemeines : Luxleaks, die Beziehungen zwischen der EU und Russland und der Fortschrittsbericht zur Türkei werden diese Woche in den Ausschüssen diskutiert. Die Fraktionen bereiten die Plenarsitzung in Straßburg vom 18.-21. Mai vor und Parlamentspräsident Martin Schulz erhält den Karlspreis.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2015 - EP

Les célébrations de la Saint-Georges se sont déroulées les 22 et 23 avril, au 12e régiment de cuirassiers (12e RC) à Olivet, sous la présidence du commandant de la 2e brigade blindée et gouverneur militaire de Strasbourg, le général Jean-François Lafont Rapnouil.

You missed it? How could you? The second-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) was issued last week with much fanfare, at least at the State Department. As may befit a late second-term document and a department whose budget resources have topped off and are starting to decline, the new QDDR is pretty unambitious. Thin gruel, in fact, for the future of America’s civilian statecraft. And that might explain why it didn’t get a lot of coverage.

Some people want the QDDR to tackle big strategy issues, but it is really about reforming and strengthening the structures and processes that run America’s foreign policy. It might be nice to have a big-picture strategy document, but you can’t pull the strategy cart if you don’t have the horses.

And this QDDR is even less ambitious than the first one. It doesn’t offer the foreign-policy community the fundamental reforms it needs to recover the primacy to direct America’s strategy and deliver the goods: an integrated approach to dealing with the governance challenges around the world, strengthened security institutions subordinated to stronger governance, or even an internal strategy and resource-planning process that would enable the State Department to make the hard choices it must with inevitably constrained budgets.

QDDRs are not like QDRs — the original Quadrennial Defense Review, done at the Department of Defense (DoD) since the mid-1990s. When then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set out to produce the first QDDR, published in 2010, the goal was not to lay out a strategy for U.S. foreign policy, but to improve the capabilities of the State Department to execute that strategy.

I was pretty hard on that QDDR at the time. It did make a decent effort to clarify that the State Department is not the Defense Department, emphasizing the role the State Department should have in conflict prevention and resolution, calling for major improvements in the State Department’s planning and budgeting, and clarifying the department’s relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Although fairly unexciting, these were all good bureaucratic things to do.

But the first QDDR missed a great opportunity for fundamental change — change it might have pulled off with the star power of Clinton, which would have elevated the State Department to real foreign-policy leadership and would have eliminated some serious organizational dysfunction. It did not broaden the mission of the Foreign Service to include dealing with governance issues in other countries. It did not change training of Foreign Service officers fundamentally to provide skills in strategic planning and program development and management, and to make mid-career training and education available. It did not reform a broken architecture for security assistance at the State Department or make an effort to recapture leadership over U.S. security assistance policy from the Defense Department.

It did not end the division of planning and budgeting between a stovepipe over on the “management” side that does personnel, buildings, security, administration, and IT/communications support, and the other stovepipe over in the foreign assistance program office that plans and budgets for U.S. foreign assistance. And it did not even discuss the reality that the United States has far too many foreign assistance programs — an uncoordinated diaspora of offices and agencies scattered around the bureaucratic universe in D.C. from the Justice Department to the DoD to the Commerce Department to the Export-Import Bank to the Treasury Department and beyond, to the bewilderment of anyone the United States does business with overseas.

So I hammered away a little last year in this column after the new QDDR was launched, urging the new team to at least try to address some key institutional problems that make the State Department (and its USAID partner) dysfunctional and unable to lead U.S. foreign policy. I picked three themes: 1) make governance dilemmas in the world a core mission of U.S. foreign policy, and build the programs and training to implement that priority; 2) take civilian control of U.S. security assistance (much of it is now at DoD), and embed that effort in stronger civilian governance overall; and 3) centralize and empower a capacity at the State Department to do integrated strategic and resource planning.

It will not surprise you that this latest QDDR did not go for the gold on any of these three core problems. At best it gets a fairly weak incomplete. Secretary of State John Kerry, like his star-powered predecessor, earned few points; in the end he didn’t actually put his credibility and heft on the line to get fundamental change, a change the department needs if it is going to give reality, not talk, to its claim that it is the lead institution for U.S. foreign policy.

Make Governance a Mission and Build the Tools

Governance actually gets a lot of verbal attention in this QDDR — more rhetoric than it got in the first one, as I was reminded by several people who worked on the report. But some of that rhetoric is misleading, and some of it is even dangerous.

What’s wrong in the rhetoric? Specifically, on p.18, the QDDR says, “the movement toward accountable governance and the expansion of the global middle class are two of the most promising opportunities in recent human history.”

Unfortunately, neither statement is true. Accountable governance is not on the rise; it is being struggled for, and that struggle is failing, most notably in states like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States made a big show of promoting democracy. (And, for the record, the global income gap is widening, threatening the existence of the middle class, even in places like the United States. See Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream? or Joseph Stiglitz’s The Great Divide.)

So if the State Department is going to take the global problem of weak, ineffective, corrupt, unaccountable governance seriously, it has to start with reality, not wishful thinking. That leads me to the dangerous part. What do they mean by “governance”? The language in the QDDR is a bit slippery here, but one word keeps cropping up: “democracy.” On page 28, for example, it reads, “Democracy, accountable governance, and respect for human rights are essential for a secure, prosperous, and just world.… We are at a critical moment for democracy.” What the report is underwriting, once again, is that long, elusive, exceptionalist American project of bringing “democracy” to the world.

Thought we were over that, given, most recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, no, here it is again — the American dream abroad, at least in language terms. After years of worrying this issue, my thinking is that the United States would do pretty well (and that is hard enough) to help other governments become more efficient and effective at providing the services they use their tax money to provide, while becoming a bit less corrupt and certainly more “responsive” to their citizens (the QDDR says “accountable,” which is certainly a more realistic goal than “democratic”).

But to plant the flag in “democracy,” a thing the United States isn’t even doing well itself, sets up the State Department for something that neither it nor anyone else can do abroad — create democracies. Put that one on the shelf.

Plus, the QDDR does little to strengthen the State Department’s tool kit when it comes to governance. There is nothing here as basic as saying the department will revise the standards it uses for training and promoting Foreign Service officers to include knowledge of governance and the ways in which the United States might, at least minimally, focus its assistance agenda in that direction. Oh, there is language about USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. And if the department were really focused on governance, as I said last year, it should certainly start by making USAID fully buy that mission as a necessary precursor to successful “development.” But, there they go again; “democracy” gets the headline, not governance.

And if fragile states are part of the governance target, there is nothing new here about how to deal with that. It’s the same old, same old bureaucratic solutions, including rhetoric about the role of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), created in the last QDDR. The CSO got itself torn in two last year in a conflict, I am told, between people who wanted it to be on the front lines of fragile-state transition, with teams in the field, and people who wanted it to retreat into planning in D.C. for somebody else to act on.

The State Department’s inspector general wrote up this sad story last year. And, apparently, the latter team won, and the QDDR group did not get the memo about how CSO’s nails got clipped this April, when its missions overseas were scrapped. According to an anonymous submission to DiploPundit, one of the best trackers of the inside stories at the State Department, the CSO will be even less relevant than it was:

Yes, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) has a new mission: “CSO advances the Department of State’s understanding of how to anticipate, prevent, and respond to violent conflict through analysis and planning; monitoring, evaluation, and learning; and targeted, in-country efforts that inform U.S. government policymaking.”    Since there’s no longer any mission element about stabilization and stabilization operations, why is that being left in the Bureau’s name?

Security Assistance Is Still a Hot Mess

If I only got a rhetorical half-loaf on governance, what about getting the State Department’s act together on security assistance programs? They weren’t even discussed in 2010’s QDDR. They’re barely discussed in this year’s QDDR, with just a paragraph on security-sector reform and one on security-sector governance. But America’s deepest engagement in the governance of other countries is being driven by the GWOT (George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror), which has become Countering Violent Extremism. When war is the metaphor (and in Syria/Iraq, the reality), armies are the tool, and the United States is deeply engaged with the armies of the world.

America does it through security assistance and what the DoD calls “security cooperation,” or “building partner capacity.” And the country handed a lot of that task over to the Defense Department, despite decades of having budget and policy responsibility in the State Department, spending upwards of $15 billion a year doing it.

There are lots of ways the QDDR could have tackled this mess. Calling for a strategic overview of security assistance policy, for example. There has never been one, and despite the publication of a presidential policy directive in 2013 (PPD 23), there is still no coordinated strategy. Instituting a systematic evaluation of the payoff from spending more than $10 billion a year (including by the DoD) would be a good idea.

Challenging other countries to make sure accountable governance overall is part of what determines their eligibility for U.S. security assistance dollars would be a nice thing.

And frontally dealing with the reality that the Defense Department and the combatant commanders have pretty much taken control of security assistance and cooperation and it is time to return policy and budget responsibility to the civilian foreign-policy agency — well that just seems to be a bridge way too far. The paragraph in the QDDR on security-sector governance simply describes, in vague language, what the United States purports to do now; it offers nothing new. And the report even says the State Department is in charge of security assistance “with the exception of DoD SSA [security sector assistance] appropriations,” which kind of begs the issue.

Last year I wrote, “The State Department rarely takes its statutory responsibility for security assistance seriously as a core mission.” I know, from personal experience, that the people who work this issue at the department, at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (can we change that first word?), do take it seriously. The QDDR did not, and is not, going to help them much in reforming the system.

Strategy, Planning, and Budgeting Take a Hike

And how about that third priority issue for the State Department — making strategic planning a reality and tying in all the planning and budgeting so that the department actually has something we can call a respectable strategic plan?

The QDDR is pretty good about the progress made here over the past six years. There actually is a functioning foreign assistance budget process. It even includes planning at the embassies, which do integrated country strategies and pass them back to Washington, where regional bureaus do joint regional strategies and where functional bureaus (like CSO and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor) do functional strategies. And every year, the embassies and bureaus do a resource request for the next year. Under strong leadership, the State Department’s foreign assistance budget office has made a real contribution to budget planning at the department, more than I have seen in over 20 years following that process.

But, and there is a big but, the pieces are not together to do a real strategic plan at the State Department, and the QDDR does not make any progress on assembling them. For one thing, broader strategic planning, to the degree it is done, is done in that other planning office I mentioned — the management side of Foggy Bottom. This means, of course, that people, IT, communications, buildings, and, above all, personnel policy are not meshed with program planning in the foreign assistance office. Not something the Pentagon’s Programming, Planning, Budgeting, and Execution System would let happen for a nanosecond.

Do people, training, and investments in support have nothing to do with programs? Not plausible, but the new QDDR does not bite the bullet and finally create a full-service planning and budgeting office under the secretary of state. Ducked that one, again.

And while they were not at it, they also ducked the question of making that office a statutory one. Right now, the foreign assistance office just depends on the goodwill of the secretary; the next one could blow it away without any trouble, and might. And there would go all that previous progress.

Wait Until Next Year

This time around, the QDDR took a walk, by and large. It described a lot of what the State Department does now, made some of it look new, took a few small steps ahead, but punted on the big ones. Which leaves the job to the next secretary, and to the next QDDR, if it happens. If past is prologue, the next secretary of state will look at the management and planning side of Foggy Bottom and leave it to someone else while he or she flies around the world doing the “fun” stuff. And the longtime effort to reform and strengthen the State Department will be handed off again, as it has been for decades.

Photo credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In August 2013, just months after being selected to lead the Catholic Church, Pope Francis told an interviewer that the Holy See’s clergy and diplomats should be less fixated on questions of sexual morality and show greater concern for the fate of billions of people abandoned by a modern “throwaway” culture that pays little heed to the world’s poor and persecuted.

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods,” Pope Francis said in the interview, in which he underscored the importance of promoting peace and tackling poverty and wealth inequality. “The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

The comments marked the start of a major rebranding campaign for the Catholic Church, whose image has been tarnished in recent years by the hierarchy’s failure to crack down on sexual abuse by priests and its clergy’s reputation as hard-bitten crusaders more committed to enforcing stringent moral codes than promoting peace and ministering to the world’s neediest.

Two years into his papacy, Pope Francis has also managed to successfully restore the Holy See’s reputation as an important diplomatic player. He has cultivated a personal image as peacemaker and truth-teller, brokered secret diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Cuba, and forced the world to confront uncomfortable truths, from the Armenian genocide to the deadly exodus of thousands of immigrants into Europe. He has also emerged as a powerful voice of compassion for those long living on the fringes of the church, or at least treated as second-class citizens, including the destitute, women, and openly gay Catholics.

But at U.N. headquarters, a central clearinghouse for world diplomacy and the September destination of the first papal visit since 1995, diplomats say the objectives of the Holy See have changed little under Pope Francis, and that the pope’s envoys remains very much entrenched on the front lines of the culture wars the pope himself has suggested he wants to leave behind. In debates on issues from development to poverty, the Holy See’s observer mission continues to serve primarily as a bulwark against efforts by Western governments to expand progressive policies, including sexual and reproductive rights, that have long been anathema to the church.

Archbishop Bernardito Auza, a Filipino priest Pope Francis appointed as the Vatican’s de facto ambassador  to the U.N. last year, frequently uses the U.N. pulpit to promote the church’s conservative values, denouncing abortion and efforts to restrict population growth, and decrying the rise of artificial insemination as beneath the dignity of women and men alike. “Men are human beings, not horses, and any attempt to diminish men basically to purveyors of biological material is unworthy of their dignity,” he said in a March 19 speech at the Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium at U.N. headquarters. “Children must be begotten in love, not manufactured in labs.”

U.N.-based diplomats say that the pope, as well as Auza, have outlined a wide-ranging diplomatic agenda in their public statements. But they say the message hasn’t trickled down to the Holy See’s negotiators in New York. “We have been very happy to hear some of the signals that have come from Pope Francis: He has been more progressive and indicated that he didn’t want the church to be as dogmatic as it has been,” said one Western diplomat who has negotiated with the church’s diplomats at the United Nations. “But when you look at what is happening on the ground here in New York, you don’t really see that change at all.”

A review of a confidential internal negotiating text from a recent conference on the Commission on Population and Development, obtained by Foreign Policy, show the Holy See’s negotiator working to strip out references to “reproductive rights,” which the Vatican sees as a green light for abortion, and “gender equality,” a phrase the Vatican views as an implicit endorsement of transgender rights.

“We are not sure whether [the pope] doesn’t have the influence in the organization you would hope he has, or he didn’t mean it,” the diplomat added.

Indeed, there is little doubt that Francis is already walking a delicate line between conservatives who share his predecessor’s more traditional views of gay marriage and abortion and pragmatists more amenable to softening those stances.

Defenders of the pope also say the Vatican’s diplomatic activity is by no means limited to matters of sex and reproductive rights.

Pope Francis and his U.N. envoy have taken advantage of the Catholic Church’s status as the only religion recognized as an observer state at the U.N. to promote a range of other causes, from the abolition of nuclear weapons and the fight against climate change to the protection of migrants and Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa. His role in opening the door to talks between the U.S. and Cuba stands as one of the more remarkable diplomatic achievements of the past decade.

“The word on the street is that Francis matters,” said John Allen Jr., associate editor at the Boston Globe and its Catholic coverage website Crux, and author of nine books on the Vatican and Catholic affairs. Allen said that “delegates are now constantly approached by their governments for reads on what the pope is up to.”

From Backwater to Diplomatic Hot Spot

Only four years ago, the Vatican was in danger of becoming a diplomatic backwater. Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had previously been the guardian of Catholic doctrine in the Vatican. Benedict had taken an interest in the major challenges of the day, earning the moniker of the “green pope” and playing a role in urging Iran to release 15 British sailors. But he showed less interest in diplomacy than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who has been credited with working with President Ronald Reagan to topple the Soviet Union.

In Rome, diplomats wondered aloud whether diplomatic embassies at the Vatican even made sense, recalled Allen.

In November 2011, Ireland, a major Catholic country, withdrew its ambassador from the Vatican following protests by then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who accused the Holy See of obstructing an investigation into sex abuse. Ireland claimed the decision was designed to save money, but many diplomats suspect it was a result of the sex abuse dispute.

Vatican officials feared it was the start of a diplomatic exodus from the Vatican by governments that felt embassies weren’t worth the expense given the Holy See’s diminished diplomatic profile, according to Allen.

“There was a perception during the Benedict years that the Vatican had become less relevant,” he said, noting that the church’s Vatican diplomacy has under Pope Francis evaporated such notions. “Nobody is talking about that anymore.”

In an April interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama said the United States consults “very closely” with the church about how the U.S. can help protect religious minorities in conflict areas.

Obama will meet with the pope at the White House in September, where he intends to discuss climate change and matters of “war and peace,” including in the Middle East, “where Christians have been viciously attacked,” the president said in the interview.

In a March speech at Durham University in England, Britain’s envoy to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said his “embassy, and the other 80 or so resident embassies to the Holy See from governments around the world, have never been busier, because their is a real interest in and demand for our reporting on the views of Pope Francis and the Holy See on the key issues of the day.”

Other countries have sought to leverage the Pope’s charisma and influence to advance their interests. A spokesman for Israel’s foreign minister, for example, said his government is looking to expand relations with the Vatican to collaborate on countering radical Islam.

“We would like to further upgrade our relations with the Vatican, and start a broader and more significant dialogue on issues of mutual concern such as the fate of Christian minorities in the Middle East and Africa and the rise of radical Islam,” Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman told FP. “As part of this dialogue, we would like to see an official visit of top Vatican officials in Israel.”

The Israeli officials remarks follows a round of high profile Middle East diplomacy by Pope Francis, who traveled to the region early on in his papacy and invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israel’s then President Shimon Peres to Rome to pray together for peace in the Middle East. The symbolic meeting was followed by the launch of Israel’s military incursion into Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge. But it highlighted Pope Francis’ commitment to engaging in even the most controversial political and military crises.

“It’s the Same Hardline”

Pope Francis intends to highlight his diplomatic ambitions in a high-profile trip next September to the United Nations, where he will address the U.N. General Assembly at a Summit on Sustainable Development, which will endorse a new set of 17 development goals, known as the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. He will also back as many as 169 more detailed targets that can be met by 2030, including the eradication of poverty and hunger, increase opportunities for the education of children and women, and the promotion of economic growth that is environmentally sustainable.

The visit aims to underscore the church’s commitment to addressing “poverty and social justice” and drawing attention to the international community’s responsibility to uphold “religious freedom” and defend minorities from persecution, Auza said in an interview with the Deseret News previewing the pope’s visit

“In the Middle East, the United Nations has been in a sense powerless, it has not been able to find a way how to stop bloodshed and persecutions, especially against Christians and minorities,” he said.

Behind the scenes most of the Holy See’s diplomatic influence has been mustered to advance the Vatican’s position in supporting a traditional view of the human family that leaves little room for gays.  During negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, the Holy See has largely devoted its energies to pushing back on efforts by Western government to expanding reproductive rights and the protections afforded women, girls, and gays. “They are focused on very few issues; the only time you hear about them in negotiations is on issues relating to abortion, women’s rights, the family,” said a European diplomat. “I really haven’t encountered them on any other issues in last years.”

A second Western diplomat who has negotiated across the table from the Catholic Church’s diplomats for years said the Vatican’s traditional negotiating positions and policy preferences haven’t changed under Francis.

“The new pope he has a different outlook on the world, which could really launch the [Catholic Church] in a whole different type of dialogue at the U.N.,” the diplomat said. “But they don’t do that. Not much has changed when you get into the negotiating room. It’s the same hardline.”

Last month, the Holy See’s diplomats continued it push to restrict sexual rights in negotiations before the Commission on the Status of Women. “The one thing they tried to do was insert the word “fundamental” before any mention of the human rights of women and girls,” recalled Shannon Kowalski of the International Women’s Health Coalition. “In their minds, this would potentially exclude reproductive rights, sexual rights or other human rights that have not been explicitly agreed in U.N. treaties. They also opposed reference to the role of women’s organizations or feminist organizations in advancing gender equality.”

In a separate debate last year on the Sustainable Development Goals, a centerpiece of the pope’s diplomatic priorities at the United Nations, Francis’s representative expressed concern that the negotiations were heading towards perilous moral waters.

“For a large number of countries, ‘reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights agenda infringes on their national sovereignty in the politically and morally fraught questions of abortion,” Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Holy See’s former nuncio at U.N. headquarters, said last May in a statement on one of the SDG’s goals.

Two months later, the Holy See issued a statement indicating that they could only partially join the consensus on the final document to be endorsed by world leaders because it included references to phrases like “sexual and reproductive health” and “reproductive rights” and “family planning.”

Vatican diplomats also sought to restrict sex education to youngsters, saying the “primary responsibility lies with parents,” a provision that would restrict minor’s access to sex education.  Finally, the Holy See’s delegation pointed out that it understands any reference to the word “gender” in a final document to mean “male or female” only, a move aimed at heading off any language affording rights to gays or transgender people that don’t identify themselves in traditional sexual roles.

They also denounced violence and discrimination against women and girls, forced marriage, and reinforced the church’s commitment to achieve equal access to education and employment opportunity, and address of unpaid care work.

Kowalski, of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said that while Pope Francis has projected a more progressive image, she has seen no evidence in a shift in the Holy See’s policies at the United Nations.

“We have really seen a continuation of business as usual,” said Sharon Kowalski. “We always saw them honing in on language about sexual rights. There have been a lot of proposed goals on poverty eradication and on reducing equality and the Holy See hasn’t said anything. They have been quiet.”

Hanging With Ban Ki-Moon

Many diplomats say it is misleading to judge the pope’s diplomatic outreach on the basis of what his envoys do at the United Nations. Most of the serious diplomatic outreach takes place in the Vatican, they say, not in the corridors of the United Nations.

One western diplomat recalled a recent meeting between an envoy from his government and high-level Vatican diplomats eager to protect Christians. During the meeting, church officials raised a broad range of concerns, from the stalled Middle East peace process to the Iranian nuclear deal to the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa.

“On the protection of Christians they asked us to be open and upfront and to name the issue as a problem,” according to the diplomat. They also urged the governments to be careful not to inadvertently “contribute to the further exodus of Christians” from Iraq and Syria through overly generous immigration policies. “The main message was ‘the Christians need to return. They belong there,'” the diplomat recalled.

The deadly exodus of migrants who leave North Africa and attempt to make it to Europe is a top diplomatic priority for Francis and his diplomats. The Vatican routinely scolds European envoys traveling through Rome about their failure to do more to to address the problem. Rome’s message is a blunt one: “The Mediterranean should not become a cemetery and the Europeans have a common responsibility to do something about it,” said one European diplomat.

Francis’s personal outreach to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has been particularly active. Last month, Francis hosted Ban at the Vatican for a discussion about climate change and the fate of the African and Middle Eastern refugees risking their lives on deadly boat trips in search of a better future in Europe. “They are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war. They were looking for a better life,” Francis told thousands of followers during April 19 prayers in St. Peter’s Square. Next month, the pope plans to issue his first papal encyclical on the impact climate change inflicts on the world’s poorest.

Behind closed doors at the Vatican, the Pope assured Ban of his commitment to fighting climate change. But the discussions soon veered off onto other topics, including the link between migration and human trafficking and the need to tackle the root cause of poverty and inequality. They also touched on nuclear disarmament, the conflict in South Sudan, and the role that sports can play in promoting peace. “It was a really wide ranging discussion; I think there is now wider common ground bet the U.N. agenda and the pope’s agenda,” according to a senior U.N. diplomat. “I think [Pope Francis’s] heart is in the U.N. agenda.”

Francis invited Ban to the Vatican shortly after he was appointed pope, and they have met at least once every year. Last year, the U.N. held its annual meeting of heads of U.N. agencies in Rome, a gathering that brought together more than 40 of the U.N.’s top officials. The pope went around the room to shake each and chat with each of the participants.

Those early meetings led to collaboration between Jeffrey Sachs, a senior adviser to the U.N. chief on sustainable development and the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Religions for Peace.  On April 28, they organized an interfaith conference entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity.”

A statement underscored the role of mankind has played in causing global warming and called on wealthy nations to underwrite the costs of developing countries trying to respond to the devastating impact of climate change. “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity,” it stated.

“If the pope is involved it increases the outreach,” said Janos Pasztor, a senior advisor to the U.N. chief on global warming, noting that Ban and Francis have agreed to join together in raising public awareness of climate change. “The pope is the number one potential mobilizer in the world; he speaks to 1.2 billion Catholics, plus a lot of other people.”

Who Am I to Judge?

Francis has also raised hopes that his papacy that would strike a dramatically different approach to gays than his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who once signed a Vatican letter asserting that homosexuality is “an objective disorder” that reflects a “strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil.”

Francis has spoken compassionately about gays, suggesting the church would be accepting of them. In February, the Vatican for the first time granted VIP seats to the New Ways Ministry, a group of visiting gay and lesbian Catholics, to a weekly audience with the pope at St. Peter’s Square.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?,” he said in an August 2013 interview.” Last October, the Vatican issued a report indicating that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian Church.”

The pope’s remarks were embraced as the dawn of a more compassionate church that would focus on the matters that affect all humanity.  But on the eve of the pope’s upcoming visit to the United Nations, advocates for gays, women and other marginalized groups have been disappointed on that front, saying the Holy See’s diplomats have invested most of their diplomatic resources into leading a cultural war.

In an early test of the Vatican’s tolerance for homosexuality, France selected in January an openly gay diplomat, Laurent Stefanini, to serve as its envoy to the Vatican.  Paris has yet to hear back, though the pope invited Stefanini, a Catholic who had served at the Vatican for four years, to prayer.

“The Vatican’s refusal to acknowledge his credentials was a slap,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of Dignity USA, an organization of gay and lesbian Catholics. Duddy-Burke initially welcomed the Vatican’s stance on gays in the church as an “undeniable breakthrough.” Now, she said, she has situated herself in the “wanting to be hopeful but still skeptical camp” about the Pope’s outreach to gays and others.  “It totally gives lie to the sense that gay people are welcome in the Church.”

The Vatican’s views on homosexuality reveals a deep seated anxiety about the way that U.N. bureaucrats and Western governments have framed international discussion on development and concerns about efforts to control population.

Those concerns were heightened in debates on population and women’s rights in the mid-1990s in Cairo and Beijing, which fueled calls for universal access to reproductive health services and family planning information by 2015.

The Vatican’s principle preoccupation is less about sex than about what it views as the emergence of radical new definition of gender, which see human beings, not simply as men and women, but as individuals who can determine their own sexual identity control their natural reproductive cycle.

For the Church, this represents an affront by liberals and feminists to the natural biological order and the traditional family, headed by a man and woman, and contributes to homosexuality, abortion and the erosion of the family.

Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican launched an inquiry into the largest the Leadership Conference of Women Religious on the ground for promoting “radical feminism” themes incompatible with the Catholic faith. They were cited for straying from church doctrine on issues like birth control and an all-male priesthood and scolded for devoting too much time to tending the on poverty and economic inequality while remaining  silent about abortion and same-sex marriage. Last month, the Vatican reached a settlement with the nuns that effectively ended the stand off.

Pope Francis “hasn’t changed the church’s position on abortion or gay marriage but his attitude is everybody already knows where the church stands on that,” said Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest who serves as a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “We don’t have to beat a dead horse.”

The Pope is Not Waiving the White Flag in the Culture Wars

Other observers say Pope Francis is facing a difficult balancing act, and that some may have had unrealizable expectations on liberal causes, including gay rights and abortion.

“The Catholic Church has always been pro-life and also in favor of peace and justice, and this is true of Pope Francis,” according to Allen. “The fact that he probably speaks more about the poor and migrants and the environment than pro-life matters is not intended to get the Vatican out of the pro-life game.”

The Catholic hierarchy is largely divided into camps: the theologians, who ascribe to a pure reading of church doctrine, and the diplomats, who think the church should be more focused on matters of peace and justice. For now, the diplomats are in ascendance at the Vatican, but the pope has had to assure the theologians that he is not rewriting church doctrine. Last August, Francis visited a so-called cemetery for “abortion victims” outside of Seoul South, Korea, to underscore the church opposition to abortion. Francis has “to convince the pro-life contingent in the church that he is not their enemy,” said Allen. “And he has done stuff to make clear he is not waiving the white flag in the culture wars.”

Photo by Vatican Pool/Getty Images

 

You know all those “salute to the troops” stuff thrown up on football scoreboards? It turns out that the NFL charges for at least some of them. And we’re the chumps footing the bill.

No, this is not from the Duffel Blog or Onion. Christopher Baxter of NJ.com

reports that the Pentagon, which is begging Congress for big bucks, actually paid NFL teams $5.4 million of your hard-earned money.

For example, the Jets were paid nearly $400,000 for several promotions, including, according to the contract, “A videoboard feature – Hometown Hero. For each of their 8 home game [sic], the Jets will recognize 1-2 NJARNG Soldiers as Home Town Heroes. Their picture will be displayed on the videoboard, their name will be announced over the loud speaker, and they will be allowed to watch the game, along with 3 friends or family members, from the Coaches Club.”

This is one of the crassest manipulations of patriotism I have ever seen. As a friend points out, it makes the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk look prescient but way too gentle.

(HT to JH)