I'm normally skeptical of the motivations of Turkish sources critical of France ever since Franco-Turkish relations broke down after France's recognition of the Armenian genocide earlier this decade, but Caglar Dolek's quite readable "From Francafrique to Eurafrique with Sarkozy: Not Much of a Difference?", published in the Journal of Turkish Weekly, does make good points about Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union plan. Dolek argues that, via the European Union, France is trying to move on from the nominally and cronyishpost-colonial web of ecionomic, political and military contacts known as "Francafrique" by bringing in the entire European Union into a much closer relationship the entire African continent, not only the Francophone countries.

After reading Nicholas Shaxson's Poisoned Wells, I'm quite willing to agree with Dolek that French motivations are far from pure and that this would add quite a few negatives, like substantial corruption and seret networks of powerful people, to the broader European political arena.. I also think that the realization of something like this plan is inevitable, if only because of the potential economic synergy between the two shores of the Mediterranean. At least the North African states like Morocco and Tunisia that have a passing chance of joining the European Union have a chance at avoiding the worst of this arrangement.

Continuing the theme of international disparities on growth, come across a recent post by james_nicoll, ("The Benefits of Colonialism") presenting data on economic growth in four Asian countries taken from Angus Maddison's study The World Economy. This study is available through Google Books, and the data below is taken from the tables on page 217.

GDP per capita growth per cent in four Asian countries (1800-2000)

Country	1820-1870	1870-1913	1913-1950	1950-1973	1973-1998
China	-0.25	0.10	-0.62	2.86	5.39
India	0.00	0.54	-0.22	1.40	2.91
Indonesia	0.13	0.75	-0.20	2.57	2.90
Japan	0.19	1.48	0.89	8.05	2.34

With caveats--India was still partly uncolonized in the first half of the 19th century and the First Opium War took place towards the end of the 1800-1850 period--the contrasts in economic growth rates in China, India, and Indonesia during and after their domination by foreigners are striking. In Nicoll's words, "[e]ven taking into account that the US bombed Japan flat during WWII, the Japanese still outperform India under the Raj, Indonesia under the Dutch and China during the unpleasantnesses of the first half of the 20th century."

The year 1981 is usually marked off as the beginning of the world's AIDS epidemic. In that year, American physicians in New York and California realized that certain of thweir clients were manifesting unusual diseases which were symptomatic of immune suppression, like Kaposi's sarcoma or pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. HIV didn't emerge de novo in that year: Enough retrospectively diagnosed cases have been discovered to show this. As a point of fact, HIV-1 and HIV-2, both simian immunodeficiency viruses, are most closely related to viruses dwelling in the bloodstreams of, respectively, chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys. How could the virus possibly get from those primates into the human bloodstream?

Look to the genocidal capitalism inflicted upon the subjects of the Congo Free State and among the French colonial subjects in Central Africa. Most brutally in the Congo Free State, but also in French territories where the Code de l'indigénat allowed subjects to be conscripted as forced labourers, Africans suffered and died in huge numbers in colonial projects like the Congo-Ocean Railway in modern Congo-Brazzaville.

Hochschild likewise notes that "In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape [he apparently means gendercide] was just as brutal. ... The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, as roughly 50 percent. ... In the 1920s, construction of a new railway through French territory bypassing the big Congo River rapids cost the lives of an estimated twenty thousand forced laborers, far more than had died building, and later rebuilding, Leopold's railway nearby." (Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost, p. 280.) The French Governor-General Antonetti, planning construction of a railway to the coast, was "frank about the human cost" of the project. "Either accept the sacrifice of six to eight thousand men, or renounce the railways," he declared, and later: "I need 10,000 dead [men] for my railways."

In the 2000 paper "Origin of HIV Type 1 in Colonial French Equatorial Africa?", Amit Chitnis, Diana Rawls, and Jim Moore suggest that HIV crossed over to human beings through the hunters of bushmeat, people who killed primates and were contaminated with their bodily fluids, becoming infected with their viruses and later transmitting them to others. Moore doesn't think that practiced bushmeat hunters would have been prey to this, if only because the hunting and cooking styles that Moore saw practiced would have limited the hunters' exposure. The authors suggest that the hunters of infected primates were actually inexperienced hunters, perhaps people fleeing their colonial overlords. Regardless of the precise circumstances of the event, it only needed to happen once. After that, the virus had plenty of chances to spread.

There was a massive influx of people into the major cities following WW II, constituting "... movement of previously isolated people into the newly expanding cities" (e.g., the population of Kinshasa increased almost 10-fold from 49,000 in 1940 to 420,000 in 1961). Whatever role this influx may have had in the development of the epidemic, it should be kept in mind that the cities were not "newly" expanding; the population of Kinshasa (and Brazzaville) also increased about 10-fold between 1905 and 1940. This earlier period of urbanization would have created conditions favorable to the initial establishment of the disease.

In addition, the social turmoil associated with forced resettlements and labor undoubtedly disrupted traditional sexual practices and networks. More directly, some of the labor camps (of thousands of men) encouraged the presence of women for "recreational" purposes. Finally, massive vaccination campaigns were carried out with limited resources (e.g., six syringes used to screen and treat nearly 90,000 people for sleeping sickness in 1917-19). An unknown proportion of nearly 100,000 smallpox vaccinations prior to 1914 employed arm-arm direct inoculation with material from pox vesicles (containing a high concentration of lymphocytes, the primary target of HIV-1).

In late colonial central Africa, HIV spread. Similar events may have happened in West Africa, where the less virulent HIV-2 virus spread, most notably in the Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau where the local independence war and Portuguese military medical campaigns may have aggravated the situation. The growing usage of intravenous needles throughout Africa, starting in the 1950s and taking off afterwards, may have worsened the matter significantly, as would blood transfusions. Undetected in the midst of weak if not failing states and their medical systems, HIV began spreading silently throughout Francophone central Africa.

Elsewhere, isolated cases of HIV infection existed outside of Africa from the 1960s on. One infectee, Arvid Noe, was a Norwegian sailor who contracted HIV in the Cameroon port of Douala, later returning to his home country and infecting his wife and youngest daughter with HIV before all three died of AIDS in the mid-1970s. Although Noe later became a truck driver who was sexually active across western Europe, he doesn't seem to have sparked a wider epidemic outside of Europe. That dubious distinction can be assigned by the unknown, unknowing person, perhaps a Haitian who participated in the migration of thousands of Haitian professionals and their families to the former Belgian Congo and--like others--contracted HIV there and brought the then-undetectable virus back to Haiti. There, silently, HIV appears to have spread slowly throughout the Haitian population at a low level from 1966 on. Evidence from transfusions and sexual intercourse seems to suggest that HIV/AIDS had spread to a noticeable level in the 1976-1978 period, but even before then many Haitians who were HIV-infected or AIDS patients in Canada, the United States, and French Guiana hadn't had left Haiti by the mid-1970s. Thereafter, HIV seems to have been reintroduced from the outside world via sex tourism, aggravating an already severe epidemic.

HIV seems to have made the leap to the United States towards the end of the 1970s and silently spreading. There, the first people known to be infected with HIV appear to have been users of IV drugs, the sexual partners, and their children. The first child suffering from AIDS that pediatric AIDS specialist James Oleske met was born in 1974 in New Jersey to a teenage girl with multiple sexual partners who used intravenous drugs. Later on, the first children born in New York City were children born in 1977, suggesting that HIV was present among users of IV drugs and their sexual partners as early as 1976. Shortly thereafter, the disease began spreading into gay/bisexual populations--in 1978, as many as 4.5% of a San Francisco cohort were infected with HIV. The connection of HIV with the socially marginal is reinforced by Michelle Cochrane's analysis of some of the earliest cases of AIDS in San Francisco in When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of the Epidemic makes the point that, far from being the well-off middle- and upper-class gays depicted by Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On, many of the first recorded victims in San Francisco were actually badly off, including several homeless people and more people employed at menial wages.

Why did no one see the big picture before the early 1980s? In badly-afflicted central Africa, as John Iliffe argues, the long latency period of HIV and the fact that AIDS manifested itself in terms of other well-known diseases helped hide the epidemic, even as civil tumult and economic collapse gutted local medical systems. César Nkuku Khonde's "An Oral History of HIV/AIDS in the Congo" does suggest that many Congolese in the mid- to late-1970s were worried by a growing number of unusual deaths, but the paradigm of a new disease processes wasn't picked up until the early 1980s. Many puzzling cases were diagnosed among people with central African connections by Western medical systems: a Belgian-Congolese married couple who left Congo in 1968 and died of AIDS in the late 1980s, a Belgian in Shaba state in the early 1970s who had multiple sexual partners, a Congolese child born in 1974 who a Belgian soldier who served in Zaire between 1976 and 1978 with multiple sexual partners, a Danish surgeon who was exposed to HIV-infected fluids while a surgeon in a hospital in the north of the country, a Canadian survivor of a plane crash outside of Kisangani in 1976 who received a blood transfusion there and died four years later in Edmonton ... Again, no one picked up the AIDS paradigm. By the time that it was, HIV was too entrenched to contain. The lack of the AIDS paradigm played a major role n the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, perhaps aggravated by the concentration of HIV/AIDS in some of these countries' most socially isolated and ignorable populations. Even in contemporary Canada, after all, 60-odd prostitutes could disappear in Vancouver between 1978 and 2002 before local police began a serious investigation.

The net result of this mixture of apathy and incapacity was that by the time that AIDS was first noticed in the United States, perhaps a quarter-million people had been infected with HIV around the world. Gaëtan Dugas, the famous supposed Patient Zero, had nothing to do with the emergence of HIV; he was just one more victim.

If any lesson can be drawn from the story of HIV/AIDS, it is this: Because horrible things were done to millions of people in virtually unknown lands, because only a few of these individuals were monstrously unlucky, and because few people cared to check to see what was happening to some of the most marginal members of the global community, by the time that doctors noticed that a terrible new disease had emerged in 1981 it was far too late to do anything about it. As a result, more than 25 million people have died in the space of a generation and another 33 million people are infected with HIV, with more suffering certain to come.

If only, if only, if only.

Alex Harrowell's review, at A Fistful of Euros, of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, is a must-read review of a must-read book aboiut the vissicitudes of the German economy under Naziism.

Tooze provides abundant evidence for his argument that Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, far from being a uniquely advanced economy full of V-2s and Volkswagens, actually lagged behind its competitors. The vast Fordist demi-continent of the United States was for many Germans, an obvious competitor and model, but so were Britain and France, with their vast empires, their high wages, and their relatively abundant agricultural land. Germany, in Tooze's convincing depiction, was a country with an economy that saw little to no net growth over the two decades that followed the First World War, with an urban working class that could barely afford to sustain itself and a peasantry forced to subsist on overcrowded land and little prospect of this changing. One response to the interwar conundrum--the respone, Tooze notes, that West Germany took after the Second World War--would have been for Germany to try to integrate itself into an integrated world and European economy, but the unsettled and unsettling tone of politics in interwar Europe kept that from being fulfilled. Harrowell points out that the Nazis responded by wanting to "shake the structure until it fell down; the economic history of the 30s in Germany is one of continuous foreign exchange crises, mitigated by a succession of increasingly inconsistent expedients." Indeed, "[b]y 1939, the Reichsbank was reduced to commissioning secret studies to estimate the mark’s exchange rate; the economists who carried them out concluded that the concept was now meaningless in the light of dozens of mutually incompatible side-deals with Germany’s trading partners."

The German economy fared worse in the Second World War. Nazi Germany's economic policy-making, rather than advancing beyond sustained inconsistently, devolved to the point of the wholesale pillage of conquered and satellite states. The sort of willing pan-European collaboration that could have made a difference, Tooze points out, was short-circuited not only by Nazi Germany's inability to treat other polities as its equals but by the economical unsustainability of a Europe deprived of extra-European trade. In the end, it all came crashing down.

Tooze's economic history is gripping, not only because it's an economic history that presents compelling arguments but because of its insights into Nazism. As the debate over at J. Bradford Delong's blog suggests, the long-standing debate as to whether the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were planned by the Nazis in advance (intentionalism) or came about as an epiphenomenon of other Nazi policies (functionalism) seems to have been settled in favour of the intentionalists: An interwar Germany without Nazism might well have gone to war against most of Europe with the aim of securing economic hegemony, but without Nazism's influence on German policy-making (Heather Pringle's The Master Plan, among other books, provides an overview of some of Nazism's inherent irrationality) it seems quite unlikely whether a Nazi-less Germany would ever have come up with such manifestly counterproductive schemes as liquidating the populations of eastern Europe. Too, as Harrowell points out, images of the Americans' settlement of the west of their country and Britain's empire featured prominently as models for Germany's feature imperium, suggesting that Hannah Arendt was quite right to identify intimate links between 19th century European imperialisms and 20th century European wars and genocides. (Mamdami also seems to have been wrong to argue in his When Victims Become Killers that the Nazi Germany did not perceive itself to be a colonizing power in eastern Europe.)

Compelling, well-written, innovative, certainly a classic, The Wages of Destruction must be read by anyone interested in the economics of Nazism and interwar Europe. Tooze deserves a thank-you.

Russian academic and journalist Sergei Markedonov has had a productive day roday, with two articles under his byline appearing in two--"Avoiding the Cubanization of Georgia" over at Russia Profile and "Abkhazia in geopolitical game in the Caucasus" at RIA Novosti. The first article is basically a backhanded compliment to the ability of Georgia post-Rose Revolution government under Mikheil Saakashvili to mobilize international support for his small country through the adroit use of propaganda/public relations, and the second can be seen as a plea to the international and Anglophone community to avoid internationalizing Abkhazia and the question of Georgia's territorial integrity.

On a related note, three predictions about the future of Russia in Georgia and Abkhazia.

1. Russia will not invade Georgia. Granting that the United States didn't invade Cuba in the 1960s after that country nationalized American investments and hosted nuclear missiles, and assuming that Putin and his successors manage a certain amount of realpolitik, Georgia doesn't have to fear an invasion. This is not the Warsaw Pact in 1981, never mind 1956 or 1968.

2. Georgia, while remaining far from EU membership, will edge closer to non-Russian Europe. Fault for this can be blamed on the sorts of sanctions which helped detach Estonia from the Russian sphere of influence in the 1990s, only recently imposed on Georgia, its migrants, and its exports. The European Union and its sphere represents the only other option and, though considerably further from Georgia than Russia, is also considerably larger and wealthier. If it comes down to a non-military competition over influence in Russia's "near abroad," the European Union can only lose if it abandons interest. One might as almost as well expect Mexico to put up serious resistance to the United States sphere of influence in Central America.

3. Abkhazia is going to gain recognition as non-Georgian. Yes, Abkhazia in the 1980s probably had an ethnic Georgian majority population, but those people don't live there in Abkhazia any more and aren't likely to be resettled there in any large number after nearly two decades. It would have been nice if Zviad Gamsakhurdia hadn't mobilized public opinion among ethnic Georgians in such a way as to awaken legitimate fears among the Abkhaz and then accidentally ignited an ethnic civil war that quickly became a Russian proxy war with new state frontiers, but it also would have been nice if Yugoslavia had managed a peaceful transition to multi-party social democratic federalism in the 1980s. Abkhazia exists and, barring an unlikely Georgian conquest, is going to continue to exist.

From Anatole Kaletsky's editorial in The Times, on what seems to be a breakdown in Western-Russian relations, "It’s the West that’s starting this new Cold War":

Casting Russia as the enemy suits everyone at this year’s summit. It distracts attention from President Bush’s contempt for Europeans on climate change and his geopolitical blunders. It helps Angela Merkel and Tony Blair to disguise the failure of their Atlanticist diplomacy while allowing Nicolas Sarkozy to sound tough, without being antiAmerican. It gives all the European leaders at the summit a chance to “show solidarity” with the EU’s newly admitted Eastern members without making any concessions on the discriminatory economic and labour policies that will keep these countries firmly in their place for decades ahead. And best of all, from every nation’s standpoint, the starring role of villain is one that President Putin himself craves.

Mr Putin faces a difficult transition from his present position as a wildly popular czarist-style absolute ruler to some kind of power behind the throne – a kingmaker or political puppeteer possibly modelled on Deng Xiaoping, of China, or Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, but with no real parallel in Russian history. In managing this unprecedented transition, nothing is more useful to Mr Putin than his image as the first national leader since Stalin who could stand up for Russia’s interests against an inherently hostile world. This is why all the EU’s complaints about neo-imperialist bullying of Poland and Estonia, all the lectures from President Bush about democracy and all the admonitions about human rights from Mrs Merkel are water off a duck’s back to President Putin.

[. . .]

While Westerners see Russian resentment about these territorial losses [of most of the western and southern tiers of the ex-USSR] as a throwback to 19th-century imperialist thinking, consider how the process might look when viewed from the Russian side. What Russians see is a powerful and wealthy empire expanding steadily on their Western border and swallowing all the intervening countries, first into the EU’s economic and political arrangements and then into the Nato military structure. Consider from the Russian standpoint the EU’s explicit vocation to keep growing until it embraces every European country with the sole exception of Russia itself, and the almost automatic Nato membership now granted to EU countries. Is it so very unreasonable to view this EU-Nato juggernaut as the world’s last remaining expansionist empire, or even the natural successor to previous German and French expansions that were considerably less benign?blockquote>

Thoughts, if any?

I've been thinking lately of Régis Debray's "Letter from America" (New Left Review 19, January-February 2003), his thesis that Europe--and, I'd argue on the strength of his analogy, Canada--could best remedy its weakness relative to the United States by joining the American federation. Yes, joining the American nation-state is almost certainly a non-starter barring serious state failure; yes, it's surely better to be Switzerland than Austria. Mightn't the American federation be made to transcend its roots?

Readinhg John J. Reilly's blog last week, I came across an interesting note on what he identified as the embrace of Eurasianism by the National Interest. Reilly defines as the "proposition that United States should begin to accommodate itself to a world in which it will take second place to a Eurasian constellation of powers, or at best become a peer in a multipolar world." He goes on to cite three factors weighing against the likelihood of such a substantial American decline.

(1) The demographic decline of China and Europe;
(2) Strategic missile defense
(3) Eurabia.

The last factor is, I feel safe in arguing, a mirage. As I've demonstrated earlier, Muslims in France are not poised for a takeover of France, demographic or otherwise. The influxes of immigrants into Italy and Spain, meanwhile, are easily more Latin American and eastern European than they are Maghrebin, while the only scenarios that would create a much larger Muslim minority in the Netherlands are unlikely indeed (1, 2). Given popular policies hostility towards immigration and Turkish membership in the European Union on top of these demographic realities, the only way that anything approaching Eurabia could possibly exist would require the subordination of the states on the southern and eastern Mediterranean to the European Union, as sources of fuel, other natural resources, and cheap labour (outsourced or imported). Not that it could be otherwise, considering that it's Europe that has the wealthy markets, the advanced technologies, and the abundant capital resources that the Arab world generally lacks. If anything, if it ever happened the peaceful integration of the non-European Mediterranean into the European Union's commercial and otherwise should be celebrated. Better that, surely, than another world war.

The first two factors that Reilly cites, mind, are entirely accurate. Even if the European Union ever managed to transform itself from a network into a coherent state--note the hugeness of this assumption, something I choose to mention in passing for lack of time and space--it still faces more difficult demographic circumstances than the United States, with lower fertility rates and more controversial immigration trends (as the Eurabia fuss demonstrates). Continued growth in some countries (Britain, France, Spain) will be more than counterbalanced by sharp declines in others (Germany, Italy, Poland). With the economic sequelae in this unhappy second class of countries to aging populations and contracting workforces, it would be impractical for Europeans to want to make the European Union as much of a superpower as the United States, never mind to make the Union a competitor. The current good cop/bad cop routine played by the United States and Europeans seems to be the apogee of European aims.

The European Union is the only entity in the world with a population and economy in the same range as that of the United States. If the EU can't do it, how can others seriously challenge the United States? The BRIC combination (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is frequently mentioned, but these countries have their own serious internal problems and are much further behind the United States than even the worst-off major EU member-state. Besides, it won't be long until these countries face demographic problems at least as severe as anything the European Union faces; Russia's already worse off. Much the same can be said of all of the second-tier countries--Mexico and Argentina in Latin America, Iran and Turkey and perhaps Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, Pakistan and Thailand and Indonesia and Vietnam and South Korea in Asia--that could, if things work as these countries might hope, manage to advance significantly relative to the United States.

Even if this progress did take place and, by 2050, half (say) of these countries were as well of relative to the United States as Spain or South Korea are now, what would it change? Spain's prominent on the strength of its ties to Latin America and Europe, and South Korea is a major trading power. Neither state is a military power; neither state is run by people interested in challenging American primacy save on certain local issues; neither is likely to, or capable of doing so. Adding more countries like Spain and South Korea to the world would certainly limit American maneuvering power, but it wouldn't undermine it. Barring some catastrophe, the United States in 2050 would still be uniquely populous, with a population of around 400 million that would compare nicely, in terms of size and age to that of the European Union, and would be substantially wealthier and more internally unified in the bargain. Besides, the United States already has a huge technological advantage over the rest of the world that it's difficult to imagine anyone catching up, or wanting to catch up. The only thing to be hoped of in that regard, if you're expecting the United States to decline sharply, is to imagine that the late adopters might have an advantage in the long run.

Bismarck said that the signal geopolitical reality of his time was the fact that the English language dominated North America. The same could be said of the 20th century; the same will doubtless be said of the 21st. We're stuck with the States, folks, for good and for bad. The United States is just too powerful to ever be dismissed as some people suspect it will be; its relative decline can only go so far.

I can't speak about the first edition, but the second edition of Kenneth Coates and William Morrison's Land of the Midnight Sun illustrates the history of Canada's Yukon Territory clearly and in detail. Before reading this book, I hadn't considered the extent to which the modern Yukon--and, for that matter, the whole of the Canadian North--has been overdetermined by the policies and priorities of the Canadian state, nearly always without reference to the people who lived there. The First Nations were, as usual, transformed from autonomous peoples who engaged with the fur trade on their own terms into paternalized dependents forced to rely on the guidance of the Canadian state; the gold rush lasted only so long and then the territory was left to languish by its colonial overlord in Ottawa, deprived of the investment that it needed to cop the territory was cut off from its connections to its natural metropole of Alaska via the Yukon River and associated with British Columbia; the Alaska Highway did revive the territory's economy, but it did so at the expense of the older and more established centres in the centre and north of the territory like Dawson City and Mayo, encouraging the concentration of the territory's population in the capital of Whitehorse. Coates and Morrison conclude their revised edition of their history of Yukon by hoping that after a century of tumultuous change and increasing marginalization in a Canada that no longer cares about its frontiers, Yukoners will be able to come to terms with themselves and their northern heritage, but even this hopeful conclusion is undermined by the evidence that they themselves have cited about the transitory nature of much of the territory's population and the patterning of Whitehorse on the model of the average (southern) Canadian city. Land of the Midnight Sun might perhaps best be thought of as at once a touching elegy to the Yukon of old and a meticulous reconstruction of how that Yukon evaporated.

Via Islam Online:

There has been serious talk among Iraqi leaders to divide Baghdad into Shiite and Sunni zones in the east and the west to stop sectarian bloodshed and head off a bloody civil war across the country despite appearing in public committed to national unity under the coalition of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, Iraqi officials told Reuters Friday, July 21.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

"The parties have moved to Plan B," he said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shiite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," he said. "We are extremely worried."

One highly placed source even spoke of busying himself on government projects, despite a sense of their futility, only as a way to fight his growing depression over his nation's future.

Sectarian violence has mounted to claim perhaps 100 lives a day and tens of thousands flee their homes.

[. . .]

On the eve of the first meeting of a National Reconciliation Commission and before Maliki meets President George W. Bush in Washington next week, other senior politicians also said they were close to giving up on hopes of preserving the 80-year-old, multi-ethnic, religiously mixed state in its present form.

"The situation is terrifying and black," said Rida Jawad Al -Takki, a senior member of parliament from Maliki's dominant Shiite Alliance bloc, and one of the few officials from all the main factions willing to speak publicly on the issue.

"We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad. The government is incapable of solving the situation," he said.

A senior official from the once dominant Sunni minority concurred: "Everyone knows the situation is very bad," he said. "I'm not optimistic."

Some Western diplomats in Baghdad say there is little sign the new government is capable of halting a slide to civil war.

"Maliki and some others seem to be genuinely trying to make this work," one said. "But it doesn't look like they have real support. The factions are looking out for their own interests."

Pundits told Reuters that broadly speaking Iraq could split in three: a Shiite south, Kurdish north and Sunni Arab west. But there could be fierce fighting between Arabs and Kurds for Mosul and for Kirkuk's oil as well as urban war in Baghdad, resembling Beirut in the 1970s.

An observation: Why is it that global metropolises with names beginning with the letter "b"--Berlin, Beirut, now Baghdad--always get so thoroughly screwed over by foreign-accentuated divisions? I suppose that Indians should be pleased that their country's most populous city is now called Mumbai.

Even as the 139th iteration of Canada's national holiday of Canada Day was celebrated yesterday, Tibetan activists in Canada mourned the participation of Canadian firms in the completion of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, a rail connection that may . David Bruser, in the Toronto Star of the 30th of June, outlined the barest contours of these fears ("Bombardier, Nortel under fire").

In a test run tomorrow, Bombardier Transportation will see its new train cars roll on the 1,956-km Qinghai-Tibet Railway, a project that netted the Montreal-based firm $78 million (U.S.)

But to some Tibetan activists, like Tsering Khangsar of the Canada Tibet Committee, Bombardier, along with Nortel Networks Corp. and other firms involved in the project, have dirtied their hands in an enterprise that will help destroy Tibetan culture.

Khangsar attended the Nortel Networks Corp. annual general meeting yesterday to protest the project, which uses Nortel's wireless communications technology.

She told the crowd at the Toronto Congress Centre on Dixon Rd. that she feels it represents a final stage in Tibetan cultural genocide.

Nortel's CEO Mike Zafirovski quickly countered the suggestion of Nortel's collusion with evil, saying, "We've given this lots of thought. We view this matter finished, and we're moving on," then referred Khangsar to the proxy circular.

"Nortel categorically rejects in the strongest possible terms that we are collaborating with any government to repress the human rights or democratic rights of its citizens," the circular said. "Nortel supplies the same product solutions to China that it provides to many other customers around the world."

Environmentalists have criticized the Qinghai-Tibet railroad, now fully operational, for its impact on the ecologies of the Tibetan Plateau, which dominates both Qinghai province and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Like many other cold high-altitude environments, the Tibetan Plateau hosts unique ecosystems protected by isolation which are, however, rather vulnerable to human intrusion by virtue of the local scarcity of resources. This ecological damage can be taken as inevitable, given how relatively little the Tibetan Plateau has been subjected to industrial technology.

Of more immediate concern to many Tibetan activists is the long-standing fear that Tibet will be overwhelmed by Han Chinese immigrants. This fear is of long-standing, and is product of the fact that there are perhaps two hundred times as many Han Chinese as there are Tibetans, with the Tibet Autonomous Region--the historical core of the Tibetan cultural area--having a population of barely more than two million people. Under Mao, forced population relocations implanted substantial Han Chinese populations in Qinghai and western Sichuan provinces, both territories part of the Tibetan cultural sphere, while the lifting of the most obvious migration controls under Deng Xiaoping produced a certain influx of Han Chinese migrants to the TAR (1, 2). At present, Tibetans form a two-thirds majority of the population in ethnographic Tibet excluding heavily Han Chinese-populated areas in northeast Qinghai, this proportion rising to 95% in the TAR. Even assuming an undercount of Han Chinese, Tibetans still form a comfortable majority of the population in their historic homeland, this majority bolstered by the fact that Tibetan women evidence substantially higher fertility rates than their Han Chinese counterparts in the 1990s (1, 2).

All this could change if, with the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railroad, immigration to Tibetan areas by Han Chinese surges. The example of
Xinjiang to Tibet's north, a region historically dominated by Turkic Muslim Uyghurs that is being Sinicized through immigration comes too readily to mind.

The 2000 census put Xinjiang's total population at about 18.5 million, and official surveys showed growth to 19.05 million by the end of 2002. Among these people, the two most populous ethnic groups are the Uighurs at 45.2 percent and the Han at 40.6 percent, with the Muslim Kazakhs running a poor third at 6.7 percent, according to the 2000 census. Chinese accounts say the total population in 1949 was 4.33 million, of whom 75.9 percent were Uighurs, 10.2 percent Kazakhs and only 6.7 percent Han.

[. . .]

What has really made the difference to the proportions in the population is immigration of Han Chinese from the east. This began in the 1950s when authorities demobilized many of the victorious communist troops into the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and sent numerous other Han from the east to join the corps. They had three main tasks: to maintain border security, to keep the minorities in order, and to boost economic production. This Han immigration reached a height in 1978, then began to decline during the 1980s, but again accelerated in the 1990s. In 2000, the government launched its Great Western Development Strategy, which has involved extensive investment from the east in Xinjiang and Han immigrants to staff development.

The further integration of Tibet clearly poses serious risks for Tibetan culture, but I'm not immediately inclined to think the colonization of Tibet to necessarily be a likely consequence. While Han Chinese do overwhelmingly outnumber Tibetans, this population ratio is perhaps less relevant than the fact that the areas which form ethnographic Tibet--the TAR, Qinghai, Sichuan--are some of the poorest regions in the People's Republic. Xinjiang's economy, marked by such resources as land suitable for agriculture and vast stockpiles of mineral resources and hydrocarbon fuels, offers many more opportunities for many more Han Chinese migrants than the Tibetan areas' overwhelmingly underdeveloped areas. Individual Han Chinese certainly may possess technical and language skills that the mass of Tibetans simply might not have (yet), but the selective migration of professionals to an environmentally hostile and poor region isn't a sort of migration likely to overwhelm native populations. If China reverted to the forced population movements of Mao or if Tibet was found to be as potentially prosperous as Xinjiang, things would change. Both scenarios strike me as unlikely.

Tibetans don't have to worry about being overwhelmed by immigrants. No, the threat posed by the Qinghai-Tibet railroad will be more insidious still. How well will a Tibetan culture already hammered by Communism cope with the opening of the region to mass tourism? That shift is going to transform Tibetan culture radically, as anyone familiar with the effects of mass tourism on once-isolated cultures can attest.

czalex's recent post on how Russophones in Russia continue to define the norms of the Russian language, going so far as to deny regional variants of Russian spoken outside of Russia's boundaries--in Belarus, for instance--recognition as legitimate to the point of regulating the names of the speakers' countries. This reminded of many of the issues that I noted in my March post on la francophonie, particularly on the divide between speakers of French in France and speakers of French outside of France. People don't like it when they're told that the language that they speak is an unacceptable deviation from the standard language that must be corrected, especially when the language difference relates directly to emotionally-charged political relationships.

The French language, at least, is an emergent pluricentric language, one with multiple standards (major standards, as Wikipedia indicates, with Canadian and French variants, minor variants in Belgium and Switzerland and Acadia, emergent variants in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific). The fact that these standards exist has at least as much to do with the political fragmentation of the Francophone world as it does with the fact that that a slim but growing majority of speakers of French live outside of metropolitan France. (Some of) the French might still resist the influence of other Francophone cultures, but theirs is a losing battle.

Insofar as it's possible to make comparisons, the Russian language now is where the French language was in the 1960s. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian language's speakers are still widely distributed across Eurasia; more, unlike French in 1962, Russia in 1992 started out with tens of millions of people living outside the frontiers of the Federation who spoke Russian as a first language. Unlike French in 1962, though, the Russian language was placed in direct competition with other languages already well-established as standards and was indeed often unpopular because of its prior associations, while many of the Russian first-language speakers who found themselves outside of Russia's frontiers have emigrated to Russia. As Russophone populations contract through natural decrease, as Central Asia and the Caucasus become more nationally homogeneous, as the Baltic States continue their effective monolingualism, and--most critically--as Russia's western neighbours promote their languages (Ukrainian, Moldovan/Romanian, perhaps soon Belarusian) ahead of Russian, the influence of the Russian language will inevitably decrease.

The Russian language is now facing a critical period. Russian may well manage to hold its own, experiencing only limited decline, if Russian economic growth continues and the Federation's cultural and political weight grows. Even now, measured on a variety of metrics (population, GDP, land area) Russian is as important a Western language as French or Portuguese. Allowing the growth of regional variants of the Russian language--in the Baltic States, in Ukraine, in Central Asia--will, if anything, make the Russian language more attractive. Harassing non-Russian speakers of Russian to the point of denying them the right to name their own countries is exactly the sort of hegemonic behaviour that will make other languages seem more attractive, relatively easily as second languages and perhaps even as first languages. People don't like to be told what to say.

UPDATE (8:24 AM, 27 June) : HTML corrected.

Dirk Vandewalle's A History of Modern Libya (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) is billed by the publisher on the back cover as "a lucid and comprehensive account of Libya's past [that] corrects some of the misunderstandings about its present," written by "one of only a handful of western scholars to visit the country" during the recent sanctions. So far as I can tell, being a non-expert in this area, the publisher is telling the truth. Vandewalle manages to make a convincing argument that the modern history of Libya has been dominated by different regimes--the lax Ottoman rule, the genocidal Italian colonization, the weak Kingdom of Libya, and Qadhafi's Jamahiriya--which share a common disconnectedness with the lived experiences of Libyans on the ground. Until independence as a unified state, the three regions which make up modern Libya--historically dominant Tripolitania in the west around the future capital of Tripoli, Cyrenaica in the east around the city of Benghazi, and the Fezzan in the Saharan interior--were administered by foreigners with technical and financial resources far superior to those provided for by Libya's subsistence level economy. Libya's oil did give the state vast new wealth, but Vandewalle argues that it also allowed the Libyan state to disconnect itself completely from traditional sources of legitimacy, using money to buy support while lacking any real purchase in Libyan society. Even the Jamahiriya, a regime supposedly characterized by the total mobilization of the Libyan population, was in the end dependent on the ability of Qadhafi's ability to coerce the Libyan population. According to the author, Libya's existence as a tabula rasa as a proper state society has turned out to be the very thing that kept Libya from becoming a proper state.

Vandewalle ends his survey by examining Libya today. The situation, he judges, is mixed: Yes, the sanctions imposed by the United Nations in response to Libyan-sponsored terrorism has been lifted and Libya is enjoying an economic boom driven by foreign investment in Libyan hydrocarbon exports, but inequalities in Libyan society have grown (not least between Libyan citizens and the millions of African immigrants who've recently entered the country) and the Libyan state still has to develop into a much stabler entity. Even so, he still seems to think that Libya's future is going to be more stable than its past, thanks to the past century of shared history and the certainty of high prices for Libyan oil. At least now, Libya has a stable niche for itself in the world of the 21st century.

The rather remarkable interview in The Guardian with the ever-more-controversialist Melanie Phillips, linked to by srk1, goes quite some way towards demonstrating that Eurabia--or Londonistan, for that matter--is the 21st century's version of "Jew York City".

Working in the mid-1980s as a doctor in the Haitian village of Do Kay, Paul Farmer was in a position to witness the village's first three cases of AIDS. His experiences were only a microcosm of Haiti's encounter with HIV/AIDS, driving him to compose his 1990 title AIDS and Accusation. Farmer's initial reactions of shock and concern were certainly shared by Haiti and Haitians, all still reeling from the early association of HIV/AIDS with their nation. Haiti shares with the United States the dubious distinction of being the Western Hemisphere country that suffered the earliest appearance of HIV/AIDS. Americans, as a nationality, were not seen as constituting an at-risk group en bloc. Haitians, because of the early prominence of Haitians and Haitian-Americans in early HIV/AIDS case studies, were, being identified in 1982 by the Centers for Disease Control as making up an at-risk group for HIV/AIDS, with some scientists going so far as to suggest that HIV/AIDS came from HAati. In an era when the disease was only starting to be recognized, the effect of this identification had a devastating effect. Haitians in the diaspora suffered tremendously from being stigmatized as AIDS carriers and suffered from social exclusion in almost every domain of life: education, employment, even the most basic social interactions. Haiti suffered still more directly, not only from the firings of Haitians employed abroad which sharply reduced remittances but from the devastation of the country's nascent tourism industry as observed in 1983 by the The New York Times and that still hasn't recovered. Less obvious but perhaps more profound is the identification of Haiti as a land apart from the wider world, as a territory where savage religious rites and strange sexual practices practiced in a land outside of time allowed horrific plagues to develop and spread to an innocent wider world. Thanks in large part to the HIV/AIDS panic of the 1980s, and with contributions from anti-Haitian and anti-Black bigotries, Haiti's reputation has been destroyed.

AIDS and Accusation is concerned with refuting these accusations and examining the interesting question of why these were made. On the question of the origins of HIV/AIDS, Farmer's initial arguments that Haiti was neither the ultimate nor the proximate source of the American HIV/AIDS epidemic have been confirmed by modern science. We now know, for instance that HIV/AIDS likely originated in central Africa not Haiti, while modern virological studies and sad medical cases like that of a young New Jersey girl born to an IV drug-using mother who died of a straightforward case of pediairic AIDS in 1979 at the age of five that HIV/AIDS was present in the United States at least as early as it was in Haiti. At the very least, HIV was transmitted in both directions between the two nations. Haiti was certainly not responsible.

Why did HIV/AIDS find such firm root in Haiti, so much more so than in the United States? Farmer traces the reasons for this to Haiti's position of extreme dependency. As Farmer demonstrates in his survey of Haitian history, Haitians have very rarely ever been in a position to bargain, whether as slaves brutally oppressed by the ancien régime or as nominal subjects of dictatorships supported by racist Great Powers. The destruction of Haiti's pre-independence sugar industry destroyed Haiti's main sources of foreign exchange, while multiple foreign interventions kept Haiti from developing an alternative source of income and Haitian peasant agriculture collapsed under the strains of population growth and destructive foreign competition. This slow-motion collapse left Haiti in the 1970s with no choice but to use its people as export commodities, whether as cheap labour in the assembly plants of Port-au-Prince or as prostitutes whose services were contracted by foreign tourists. This pervasive desperation precipitated by dependency on a remote American metropole, Farmer argues, is responsible for the rapid diffusion of HIV throughout Haiti. His counterfactual hypothesis that absent Castro's revolution, Cuba might have been an epicentre of what Farmer calls the "West Atlantic" epidemic might be overstated but he does have a point.

What makes AIDS and Accusation more than a competent survey of the Haitian HIV/AIDS pandemic is Farmer's superb integration of his Do Kay experiences into his wider narrative of Haitian dependency. The village that is his subject was founded on infertile highlands by refugees from an Artibonite river valley drowned by the 1956 construction of the Péligre dam. Education was the only way for Do Kay's residents to better themselves, but this cost money that the inhabitants lacked and so many of their number left, travelling to Port-au-Prince or even the United States in the search for something better. Manno, the first man in Do Kay to die of AIDS, was a schoolteacher come from away who was unpopular because of his foreignness and whose death meant little. It was only later when Anita returned to Do Kay, suffering from tuberculosis that was infinitely worsened by her infection with HIV by the only man she had ever slept with, cared by a godmother who wanted to make sure that she at least had a good death, that the people of Do Kay slowly realized that they faced still another new threat to their existence, something else coming from outside.

AIDS and Accusations demonstrates superbly that the Haitians have a long acquaintance indeed with globalization, and that HIV/AIDS--certainly one of Haiti's more pressing problems--is only the latest in a series of catastrophes. Farmer deserves to be praised for his insights, though I'm left wondering why more people didn't pick up on the connections between poverty, globalization, and illness. If more people had paid attention to southern Africa after apartheid and the former Soviet bloc after Communism, so much suffering could have been averted. It certainly should have been.

Not too long ago, Will Baird observed that the Russian Federation is unwilling to recognize the Holodomor, the Stalinist famines of collectivization that killed perhaps ten million Ukrainians in the decade before the Second World War, as a genocide or even as an anti-Ukrainian action.

Ukraine asked the conference to prepare a proposal for the upcoming CIS summit to express its attitude to the 1930-33 famine and genocide in Ukraine (the Holodomor). However, the Russian side orchestrated a procedural move that eliminated the proposal from the agenda. Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan voted with Russia against the proposal. Armenia, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan abstained. Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan voted with Ukraine.

According to Lavrov at the concluding briefing, discussion of the Holodomor would have "politicized" a historical issue. Lavrov argued -- as Russian Ambassador Viktor Chernomyrdin also did in Kyiv -- that Russians and other Soviet citizens suffered equally in Soviet times and it would therefore be inappropriate to single out any people in this regard.

This argument is heard regularly from Moscow about the Baltic states as well: "It was a common pain in the Soviet Union." Such an argument constitutes the ultimate expression of a social culture of collectivism. It also overlooks, first, the fact that Moscow organized the famine and deportations in Ukraine, the Baltic states and elsewhere; and, second, that the Kremlin today is actively discouraging the attempts to come to terms with Soviet Russia's own totalitarian recent history. While refusing to assess the actions of the Soviet regime, Russia at the same time claims prerogatives as the legal successor of the USSR.

As INED noted last May in its report "France-Ukraine: Demographic Twins Separated by History" (PDF format), the Holodomor was the first of two massive demographic shocks that devastated the Ukrainian population. Once, there were as many Ukrainians in Ukraine as there were French in French, and the ratio of Ukrainians to French was improving in the Ukrainians' favour. Stalin's intentional incompetence--whether in state economic planning or in foreign policy--changed this, alas.

Why is the Russian Federation reluctant to recognize the Holodomor? Consider that Ukraine, as it now exists, is relatively strongly Russified, with half of the population speaking Russian and with a national identity still closely linked to that of the Russians. Ukraine is a more unified nation than some give it credit, to be sure, but even so. Imagine that, for whatever reason, the Holodomor didn't happen, that Ukraine was an independent state in the 1930s that was gobbled up by Stalin's Soviet Union under the terms of a somewhat different Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, say, or that the collectivization wasn't quite so horrifically bungled. This would have left another ten million Ukrainians alive. While it's quite possible that this healthier Ukraine would have changed things somewhat, let's say that this somewhat happier Ukraine evolved roughly. Most of the Holodomor dead were ethnically Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking; presumably, when they urbanized they would do so in Ukraine, boosting the fragile Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking majorities in the Russified cities of central and eastern Ukraine. Assuming further that this somewhat strong and more Ukrainian-identifying Ukraine didn't throw Soviet history out of all proportion, then we would have had a Ukraine with a much stronger non-Russian identity than the one that we see. In our history, the Baltic States' nationalism broke up the Soviet Union; in this pleasanter conjectural history, it might well have been the Ukrainians. Instead of a relatively poor and Russified Ukraine of 48 million still oscillating on the margins of the Russian sphere, in other words, we might well have had a mostly Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine of 58 million with a considerably stronger and more popular brand of Ukrainian nationalism.

Genocide denial is convenient, you see. If you deny that anything improper happened to the dissident minority in question, you see, you get to claim that the empire wasn't nearly as bad as some claim. If yours is a fragile nation-state that still wants to lay claim to the problematic legacy of empire, the benefits of denial are wonderfully obvious.

Today's Toronto Star reports that, finally, French condescension towards the non-French members of la Francophonie has finally caused some of them to crack.

Why do you write in French? The question asked this week at the Paris Book Fair to its francophone guest writers seemed innocent enough. After all, this year the fair had chosen to celebrate not one country but a common language shared by francophones from Montreal to Phnom Penh, from Lyon to Brazzaville, from Bucharest to Port-au-Prince. And so this question — why do you write in French — seemed innocent, if not totally justified.

But for Québécois writer Monique Proulx, it was not innocent. It was rude, paternalistic and insulting. Asking me why I write in French is like asking why women have breasts or if it hurts when they grow, she fired off in the Paris daily Libération.

Enough is enough, she went on. Can't you see that the way you relate to la Francophonie, with France on one side and all the other half-breeds and diluted by-products on the other, can't you see I repeat, as I lose my cool thanks to the three litres of maple syrup I shoot up every day while writing in my furry teepee and smoking spruce gum cannabis, can't you see you are perpetuating the same candid condescension that set fire to your cities and suburbs recently. Personally I can't take it any more ...

La Francophonie started in the 1960s not so much as a French initiative as an initiative by la Francophonie's periphery, emerging from efforts by emergent Francophone nations to multilateralize their relationships, to cultivate relationships among Francophones which weren't necessarily dominated by France. The wider Francophone world has responded well to the initiative. France hasn't responded, it seems, by allowing these other Francophone cultures equal status with its own. This is a problem since, as Ethnologue confirms, the French language is a global language. The date is shortly coming when there will be more first-language speakers of French outside of France than inside, the bulk of these in Francophone Africa. Showing some grace to these future generations would be nice, never mind far-sighted.

Over at A Fistful of Euros, Brussels Gonzo makes a counter-argument to Muir's argument against Montenegro.

I tend to agree with the former writer, especially after reading Mark Mardell's rather dispiriting BBC article "Europe diary: Balkan trauma". It seems that a complex of Serbia as a victim, unfairly punished by the outside world, is still popular; it seems that the independence of Kosova and soon Montenegro will be taken by the Serbian population as unfair punishment; it seems that this shock might drive Serbians further into self-imposed isolation.

Tough for them. Weimar Germany was always latently threatening to the entire world. Post-Milosevic Serbia is more pathetic than not. States exist because people want them to exist; forcing people to remain is, besides being bad form, counter-productive. Democracy and empire can't co-exist, I fear.