Yep.
General CE Chat
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
Yep.
Cuban plane crash leaves just 3 alive, and more than a hundred dead...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-44176899
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-44176899
Thanks for sharing. What do you think on the potential for biopharma and pharma merge (if the former isn‘t already that)?
He seems to indicate that this new field has the possibilitiy to get Pharma out of lower ROI. Perhaps (speculating) these things were already on R&D budgets over the past few years which could explain lower ROI when it‘s development cycle is significantly longer (which intuitively appears to make sense since it‘s a new field).
I don't really know anything about that. I suspect that the blog post sounds more alarmist than it should without taking anything away from its claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists
There are 2 more graphs like that (including about liberal values), I'm choosing this next one because I thought it was a really tortured heading: "Centrists are most supportive of authoritarianism (except for far right)" which is hilarious because it seems like the author is trying to avoid saying "the far left is least supportive"...
I think part of this is the centrist backlash to Brexit an Trump, and part of it is something inherent within centrist liberalism/conservatism which is rarely populist (clearly seen in places like r/neoliberal)
Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists
There are 2 more graphs like that (including about liberal values), I'm choosing this next one because I thought it was a really tortured heading: "Centrists are most supportive of authoritarianism (except for far right)" which is hilarious because it seems like the author is trying to avoid saying "the far left is least supportive"...
I think part of this is the centrist backlash to Brexit an Trump, and part of it is something inherent within centrist liberalism/conservatism which is rarely populist (clearly seen in places like r/neoliberal)
Last edited:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists
There are 2 more graphs like that (including about liberal values), I'm choosing this next one because I thought it was a really tortured heading: "Centrists are most supportive of authoritarianism (except for far right)" which is hilarious because it seems like the author is trying to avoid saying "the far left is least supportive"...
I think part of this is the centrist backlash to Brexit an Trump, and part of it is something inherent within centrist liberalism/conservatism which is rarely populist (clearly seen in places like r/neoliberal)
No surprise that the people who go around screaming everyone is ''mental'' and what happened to all the ''sensible politicians'' aren't big fans of democracy. I think it's down to a fundamental distrust and dislike of the working class and poor.
Only showing the "very good" answers can be extremely misleading. The second question about strong leader is a typical example where semantics matter. The answers to the question about civil rights is imo interesting and would be worth following up on.
Uncertain territory. The strange life and curious sustainability of de facto states
The international order has never been tidy or complete, always having lands with contested sovereignty. The breakdown of empires is the most common catalyst for producing new aspirant states. The post-Soviet space is especially rich in these territories, which includes Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria, along with two more recently established shadowy entities in eastern Ukraine.
April 26, 2018 - Thomas de Waal - Hot TopicsIssue 3-4 2018Magazine
Map by Andreï-Bogdan Sterescu
This article first appeared in New Eastern Europe 3-4/2018. Learn how to subscribe here.
We all have a postal address, where a letter or a postcard can be sent. A house number, a street, a town and a country give each of us a personal geography that allows anyone in the world to communicate with us. Except some of us do not. A small category of people in the world do not have an international postal address because their countries do not belong to the world’s postal system – and by extension the common international space. They are global anomalies and their residents are in many ways second-class world citizens. How do we define the status of these de facto states and, more importantly, the people that live there?
Life in a de facto state (or an unrecognised, quasi- or para-state or a number of other definitions discussed below) entails invention and subterfuge. To get back to the first example, of sending and receiving a letter, considerable invention is needed to work with the global postal service. For years, Turkish Cypriots had a mysterious postal address, Mersin 10, referring to a town in Turkey through which mail could be routed to the non-recognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In analogous fashion, a letter to Abkhazia passes through the friendly Russian city of Sochi.
Life in limbo
Some people in separatist parts of Ukraine are now cut off almost completely. International postal deliveries are currently suspended to Crimea and Donetsk and Luhansk. In Transdniestria, which is also often called Transnistria, the two sides in the dispute have found a working interim solution, proving that collaboration can deliver results – and letters. In March I sent my daughter a postcard from the post office in the Transnistrian capital of Tiraspol. The card depicted a view of the Dniester River with a church and a war memorial commemorating the Transnistrians’ sacrifices in the Great Patriotic War. I paid 9.80 Transnistrian roubles for a stamp, but as my card was going to England, the lady behind the counter affixed a Moldovan stamp worth 9.50 lei to it. The card arrived in London five days later, post-marked “Tiraspol, Moldova.”
Postal communication is not such a big issue in the era of email. Other obstacles blocking the interaction of citizens of de facto states with the outside world are more serious. Many find it hard to travel abroad, pursue post-graduate studies or even make simple financial transactions. One Transnistrian businessman described to me how his payments to clients have to be routed via three banks.
These problems are primarily political in nature. Most territories of this kind exist as a result of conflict. When the political conflict that created them is resolved, their status is regularised – sometimes fortunately through negotiations (as in Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia), in other cases by violence (as in Chechnya and Sri Lanka) that may presage more conflict in the future. Things become more interesting however, when the violence is over but the conflict is unresolved, such that the irregular status is long-lasting, the temporary has become permanent. Turkish Cypriots have been living in this irregular condition for almost half a century, Abkhaz and Transnistrians for 25 years.
This prolonged condition of limbo, in which one or two generations have now grown up, raises questions that are almost metaphysical. The issue of how to send and receive letters to and from Abkhazia was the starting point for Letters to Max, the documentary by the French film-maker Eric Baudelaire. We see how Baudelaire posts letters from Paris to the de facto foreign minister of Abkhazia, Maxim Gvindjia and how he takes an interest first in whether the letters arrive at all (they mostly do) and how postal officials have marked them (mostly, writing “Via Georgia” on the envelope).
Baudelaire’s first letter to Gvindjia reads, “Dear Max, Are you there?” Gvindjia laughingly replies, “Yes, I’m here.” The meaning of “here” and “there” is both banal and profound. It takes us beyond the political controversy to a deeper philosophical issue of how certain people insist that they live in a certain kind of “here” and how their claims fit with the rest of the world’s insistence about what deserves to be “there”.
What terms should we use to describe this reality? Or to put it another way, in what jurisdiction does Max Gvindjia live? To call modern-day Abkhazia a “state” is already controversial, but political scientists insist that statehood is a political definition and can exist without recognition. The term “quasi-state” is derogatory and not satisfactory to describe somewhere that has functioned on its own for a quarter of a century. “Self-proclaimed” does not mean much, as most states proclaim themselves as such before others accepted them –think of the United States on July 4th 1776.
Contested sovereignty
Then we come to the thorny issue of recognition. “Unrecognised” is a useful term, but not accurate to describe Abkhazia (recognised by Russia and three other states), northern Cyprus (recognised by Turkey), let alone the special case of Kosovo (not a member of the United Nations but recognised in early 2018 by 116 countries, listed in a special website called “Kosovo Thanks You”). Besides, as James Ker-Lindsay has emphasised in an articlepublished in 2015, recognition is primarily an act of political intention which tells us more about international consensus than international law. Membership of the UN is a commonly accepted definition of statehood, but not an all-encompassing one (ask the people of Kosovo and Taiwan what they think of it).
In the end, the status of a contested territory is mostly defined by negatives. It is a place which is in the awkward category of not belonging to most agreed international structures or organisations. You do not find it in the drop-down box when you fill out an international online form. (In most of the world, that alphabetical list of countries begins with Afghanistan, except in Russia where it begins with Abkhazia).
That is why “de facto state” is probably the best and most neutral term. “De facto” describes a condition in which there is internal self-government and elements of domestic statehood but international rejection of its claims to de jure legitimacy.
The international order has never been tidy or complete, always having lands with contested sovereignty. The breakdown of empires is the most common catalyst for producing new aspirant states, springing up like flowers in the cracks of paving stones after rain. The post-Soviet space is especially rich in these territories. As well as the four enduring de facto states of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria, there are now two more recently established shadowy entities in eastern Ukraine. Only one would-be separatist state, Chechnya of the 1990s, failed.
Compare this to the situation a century ago. A recent map depicts no fewer than 27 “ephemeral states” that proliferated in the ruins of the Russian empire during the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1921. Today only souvenir hunters or a tiny group of nationalist nostalgists remember these statelets, whose names sound as unlikely as the Marx Brothers’ fictional Freedonia. They included the Republic of Uhtua (run by Karelian Finns), the Free Territory (an anarchist state in eastern Ukraine), the Cossack-run Kuban People’s Republic and the Gilan Soviet Republic on the Iranian shore of the Caspian Sea. Each was the project of an ethnic group or political faction in the borderlands between states in crisis. All these “ephemeral states” took on the symbolic trappings of nationhood. They all had flags of course, but also postage stamps, coats of arms and banknotes. All of them crashed and burned relatively quickly, when Bolshevik military might swept them away.
The four post-Soviet breakaway territories share some of the same exotic features as their predecessors from a century ago. They all exhibit the most reliably familiar aspect of small and unrecognised states, over-compensating for lack of real state power with an abundance of state symbolism. All of them have devised elaborate national symbolisms in the form of flags, crests and anthems. Abkhazia has exotic stamps. Transnistria has its own currency, the Transnistrian rouble, giving it control of its own monetary policy. It has even invented plastic coins in different shapes specifically with blind people in mind, which sell for high prices on Ebay. This is the softer side of a harder ideology—all of these territories are in the grip of a big national idea, founded on struggle, military victory and sacrifice in the conflicts of the 1990s and memorialised in sculptures, parades and heroic celebrations.
Patron states
It is important to understand that these places are not scary mafia lands (as Chechnya in the 1990s or current-day Donbas in many ways are). The main impression a visitor to Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh or Transnistria is of normality. Stepanakert, Sukhum(i) and Tiraspol are well-functioning cities with all the trappings of normal life in modern Europe: uniformed traffic police, schools and hospitals, shops and cafés and television stations. Indeed, petty crime rates are generally lower here than in many de jure states.
You have to focus quite hard on your surroundings to work out that things are different here. For me the main clue is that it is so non-commercialised, that the advertising hoardings are always selling local products. You can buy global brands here individually, but there are no international chains, no McDonalds or Starbucks. Sometimes there is an approximation that almost takes you in – for example, Turkish Cyprus has a chain called Burger City which is a sort of imitation of Burger King.
How have these de facto states endured? The post-1945 European consensus that violence and territorial re-conquest in Europe is unacceptable provides one part of the answer. The support of a “patron state” – Russia, Armenia (in the case of Karabakh) or Turkey (Turkish Cyprus) – is a more crucial factor. All of these entities are heavily reliant on their patrons for both economic assistance and security. They range in their levels of dependence. Laurence Broers has compared in impressive detail the three very different types of political economy which enable Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia to benefit from a client-patron relationship.
Yet there are nuances here. The relationship with the patron state is more complex than most outsiders think and the disparaging description of these territories as “puppet states” is wide of the mark. Abkhazia and South Ossetia both survived the 1990s, despite minimal support from Moscow and, in the case of Abkhazia, punitive economic sanctions from Russia. From Sukhumi to Tiraspol, the patron state is accepted as the provider of both security and financing. But within that context the de facto state routinely chooses as its leader the politician who defies Moscow on certain issues. Voters in Abkhazia in 2004 and in Transnistria in 2011 chose Sergei Bagapsh and Yevgeny Shevchuk respectively as their presidents in defiance of Moscow’s favoured candidates, Raul Khajimba and Anatoly Kaminsky. In 2011 even tiny South Ossetia gave Moscow an unpleasant shock by attempting to elect an opposition candidate, Alla Dzhiyoeva, as its leader. In parallel, Turkish Cypriots routinely choose as their leaders politicians who stand up to the government in Ankara.
The interesting story here is how these post-Soviet de facto states have not become rogue states, even though the option was fully available to them. Instead, in cases which deserve more study from political scientists, they appear to have decided to build de facto institutions of statehood and make contracts with their citizens. They do this not with any realistic hope of international legitimacy but as the best method of survival.
It is a partial success story. Although poverty and emigration remain huge problems, all four de facto states have progressed far from being the shadowy territories they were in the 1990s. Yes, there is criminality and contraband here. Transnistria, in particular, is a haven for smugglers. But it keeps that status in large part due to the collusion of its recognised-state neighbours, Moldova and Ukraine. Within certain limits, there is also a kind of democracy here. As Donnacha Ó Beacháin, an associate professor at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, has described, elections in the unrecognised states are circumscribed by certain conditions (certain groups are not allowed to engage in high politics, there is a consensus on issues concerning the conflict) but are also highly competitive. Abkhazia, in particular, has an independent media and strong civil society.
Overall, it is hard to make a strong causal connection between all these attributes of de facto states and their condition of non-recognition. In a challenging PhD thesis, Giorgio Comai makes the case that the four post-Soviet de facto states, economically weak and dependent on a patron state, can be compared to small recognised states, such as Palau and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. “Non-recognition is the symptom, not the cause,” of their problems, Comai argues. Other small states in Africa and Asia, or even the European “micro-states” of Andorra and Liechtenstein, arguably exhibit many of the same features as do Abkhazia or Transnistria.
Waiting for an idea
I recently asked a Transnistrian native what was the biggest problem for him about living in an unrecognised, de facto state. His answer was “instability” and “uncertainty”. “What will happen tomorrow?” he asked rhetorically. “What will Moldova and Ukraine do? Will my kids’ school close, will the border close? It is too unpredictable. I can’t predict three or five years ahead.”
This uncertainty looks set to endure. Transnistria and the other de facto states are weak states reliant on strong patrons but not unique in the world in that condition. In my view, the chief reason for persistent limbo lies in the peculiar dysfunctional relationship between the de facto state and the third corner of the triangle in each case, the “metropolitan “parent” or “base” state, the de jure claimant on each territory in Baku, Chișinău, Nicosia or Tbilisi. Although they hate to admit it, the profile and policies of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus, are all largely defined by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and the Republic of Cyprus. They exist in relation to their missing partner, their shadow, their doppelganger. Separate but connected, each side exerts a – mostly negative – veto on the development of the other.
International engagement with these de facto states is very inconsistent. At one extreme is Turkish Cyprus, where there is international tourism, students from around the world study at its universities and there is trade and traffic across the Green Line into southern Cyprus. At the other extreme is Nagorno-Karabakh, which is deeply isolated from the world, getting very few international visitors and where virtually the only international organisation working there is the International Committee of the Red Cross. Transnistria tends more towards the Cyprus case, having an even more sophisticated trade regime with the European Union than Turkish Cypriots do. South Ossetia is nearer to Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia is somewhere in the middle.
These contrasts have almost nothing to do with an international strategy (something which would be a welcome innovation) and everything to do with the policies set by the governments of metropolitan states (with Tbilisi being a partial exception), which the rest of the world sets as its main criterion for interaction. Karabakh is isolated because Baku wants it so and is prepared to punish internationals who dare to visit and work there. Turkish Cyprus is more open because the government in Nicosia is more relaxed about what happens there.
It is a case of double uncertainty. A Transnistrian, Abkhaz or Turkish Cypriot feels vulnerable in a world where his or her state is unrecognised and at the mercy of much bigger global forces. A Moldovan, Georgian or Greek Cypriot feels the insecurity of seeing a territory under the control of hostile forces. In government-controlled Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Georgia, a displaced person or refugee born in the de facto state and unable to return home there watches as his or her homeland is defined as the national state of others.
As in all conflicts, the dysfunction, mutual punishment and uncertainty are likely to endure as long as the two sides fail to identify a common strategic interest in working together to resolve it. When there is progress, the de facto states will reveal more of their hidden agendas and buried identities, shed some of their more radical posturing, and begin to diverge more strongly from one another. Some of them will surely disappear altogether. That idea could be an integration project – the most likely eventual outcome for Cyprus and Moldova. It could be a civilised divorce, which ends up in a confederation or even managed secession, as in Kosovo, so long as it honours the rights of displaced persons who lost their homes.
Currently, the reality of these places is sustained by an idea that was born in conflict. They continue to produce postage stamps and sculpt war memorials in a protracted response to that violent rupture in the past. Another stronger new idea is needed for that reality to change.
http://neweasterneurope.eu/2018/04/...-life-curious-sustainability-de-facto-states/
The international order has never been tidy or complete, always having lands with contested sovereignty. The breakdown of empires is the most common catalyst for producing new aspirant states. The post-Soviet space is especially rich in these territories, which includes Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria, along with two more recently established shadowy entities in eastern Ukraine.
April 26, 2018 - Thomas de Waal - Hot TopicsIssue 3-4 2018Magazine
Map by Andreï-Bogdan Sterescu
This article first appeared in New Eastern Europe 3-4/2018. Learn how to subscribe here.
We all have a postal address, where a letter or a postcard can be sent. A house number, a street, a town and a country give each of us a personal geography that allows anyone in the world to communicate with us. Except some of us do not. A small category of people in the world do not have an international postal address because their countries do not belong to the world’s postal system – and by extension the common international space. They are global anomalies and their residents are in many ways second-class world citizens. How do we define the status of these de facto states and, more importantly, the people that live there?
Life in a de facto state (or an unrecognised, quasi- or para-state or a number of other definitions discussed below) entails invention and subterfuge. To get back to the first example, of sending and receiving a letter, considerable invention is needed to work with the global postal service. For years, Turkish Cypriots had a mysterious postal address, Mersin 10, referring to a town in Turkey through which mail could be routed to the non-recognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In analogous fashion, a letter to Abkhazia passes through the friendly Russian city of Sochi.
Life in limbo
Some people in separatist parts of Ukraine are now cut off almost completely. International postal deliveries are currently suspended to Crimea and Donetsk and Luhansk. In Transdniestria, which is also often called Transnistria, the two sides in the dispute have found a working interim solution, proving that collaboration can deliver results – and letters. In March I sent my daughter a postcard from the post office in the Transnistrian capital of Tiraspol. The card depicted a view of the Dniester River with a church and a war memorial commemorating the Transnistrians’ sacrifices in the Great Patriotic War. I paid 9.80 Transnistrian roubles for a stamp, but as my card was going to England, the lady behind the counter affixed a Moldovan stamp worth 9.50 lei to it. The card arrived in London five days later, post-marked “Tiraspol, Moldova.”
Postal communication is not such a big issue in the era of email. Other obstacles blocking the interaction of citizens of de facto states with the outside world are more serious. Many find it hard to travel abroad, pursue post-graduate studies or even make simple financial transactions. One Transnistrian businessman described to me how his payments to clients have to be routed via three banks.
These problems are primarily political in nature. Most territories of this kind exist as a result of conflict. When the political conflict that created them is resolved, their status is regularised – sometimes fortunately through negotiations (as in Colombia, the Philippines, Indonesia), in other cases by violence (as in Chechnya and Sri Lanka) that may presage more conflict in the future. Things become more interesting however, when the violence is over but the conflict is unresolved, such that the irregular status is long-lasting, the temporary has become permanent. Turkish Cypriots have been living in this irregular condition for almost half a century, Abkhaz and Transnistrians for 25 years.
This prolonged condition of limbo, in which one or two generations have now grown up, raises questions that are almost metaphysical. The issue of how to send and receive letters to and from Abkhazia was the starting point for Letters to Max, the documentary by the French film-maker Eric Baudelaire. We see how Baudelaire posts letters from Paris to the de facto foreign minister of Abkhazia, Maxim Gvindjia and how he takes an interest first in whether the letters arrive at all (they mostly do) and how postal officials have marked them (mostly, writing “Via Georgia” on the envelope).
Baudelaire’s first letter to Gvindjia reads, “Dear Max, Are you there?” Gvindjia laughingly replies, “Yes, I’m here.” The meaning of “here” and “there” is both banal and profound. It takes us beyond the political controversy to a deeper philosophical issue of how certain people insist that they live in a certain kind of “here” and how their claims fit with the rest of the world’s insistence about what deserves to be “there”.
What terms should we use to describe this reality? Or to put it another way, in what jurisdiction does Max Gvindjia live? To call modern-day Abkhazia a “state” is already controversial, but political scientists insist that statehood is a political definition and can exist without recognition. The term “quasi-state” is derogatory and not satisfactory to describe somewhere that has functioned on its own for a quarter of a century. “Self-proclaimed” does not mean much, as most states proclaim themselves as such before others accepted them –think of the United States on July 4th 1776.
Contested sovereignty
Then we come to the thorny issue of recognition. “Unrecognised” is a useful term, but not accurate to describe Abkhazia (recognised by Russia and three other states), northern Cyprus (recognised by Turkey), let alone the special case of Kosovo (not a member of the United Nations but recognised in early 2018 by 116 countries, listed in a special website called “Kosovo Thanks You”). Besides, as James Ker-Lindsay has emphasised in an articlepublished in 2015, recognition is primarily an act of political intention which tells us more about international consensus than international law. Membership of the UN is a commonly accepted definition of statehood, but not an all-encompassing one (ask the people of Kosovo and Taiwan what they think of it).
In the end, the status of a contested territory is mostly defined by negatives. It is a place which is in the awkward category of not belonging to most agreed international structures or organisations. You do not find it in the drop-down box when you fill out an international online form. (In most of the world, that alphabetical list of countries begins with Afghanistan, except in Russia where it begins with Abkhazia).
That is why “de facto state” is probably the best and most neutral term. “De facto” describes a condition in which there is internal self-government and elements of domestic statehood but international rejection of its claims to de jure legitimacy.
The international order has never been tidy or complete, always having lands with contested sovereignty. The breakdown of empires is the most common catalyst for producing new aspirant states, springing up like flowers in the cracks of paving stones after rain. The post-Soviet space is especially rich in these territories. As well as the four enduring de facto states of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria, there are now two more recently established shadowy entities in eastern Ukraine. Only one would-be separatist state, Chechnya of the 1990s, failed.
Compare this to the situation a century ago. A recent map depicts no fewer than 27 “ephemeral states” that proliferated in the ruins of the Russian empire during the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1921. Today only souvenir hunters or a tiny group of nationalist nostalgists remember these statelets, whose names sound as unlikely as the Marx Brothers’ fictional Freedonia. They included the Republic of Uhtua (run by Karelian Finns), the Free Territory (an anarchist state in eastern Ukraine), the Cossack-run Kuban People’s Republic and the Gilan Soviet Republic on the Iranian shore of the Caspian Sea. Each was the project of an ethnic group or political faction in the borderlands between states in crisis. All these “ephemeral states” took on the symbolic trappings of nationhood. They all had flags of course, but also postage stamps, coats of arms and banknotes. All of them crashed and burned relatively quickly, when Bolshevik military might swept them away.
The four post-Soviet breakaway territories share some of the same exotic features as their predecessors from a century ago. They all exhibit the most reliably familiar aspect of small and unrecognised states, over-compensating for lack of real state power with an abundance of state symbolism. All of them have devised elaborate national symbolisms in the form of flags, crests and anthems. Abkhazia has exotic stamps. Transnistria has its own currency, the Transnistrian rouble, giving it control of its own monetary policy. It has even invented plastic coins in different shapes specifically with blind people in mind, which sell for high prices on Ebay. This is the softer side of a harder ideology—all of these territories are in the grip of a big national idea, founded on struggle, military victory and sacrifice in the conflicts of the 1990s and memorialised in sculptures, parades and heroic celebrations.
Patron states
It is important to understand that these places are not scary mafia lands (as Chechnya in the 1990s or current-day Donbas in many ways are). The main impression a visitor to Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh or Transnistria is of normality. Stepanakert, Sukhum(i) and Tiraspol are well-functioning cities with all the trappings of normal life in modern Europe: uniformed traffic police, schools and hospitals, shops and cafés and television stations. Indeed, petty crime rates are generally lower here than in many de jure states.
You have to focus quite hard on your surroundings to work out that things are different here. For me the main clue is that it is so non-commercialised, that the advertising hoardings are always selling local products. You can buy global brands here individually, but there are no international chains, no McDonalds or Starbucks. Sometimes there is an approximation that almost takes you in – for example, Turkish Cyprus has a chain called Burger City which is a sort of imitation of Burger King.
How have these de facto states endured? The post-1945 European consensus that violence and territorial re-conquest in Europe is unacceptable provides one part of the answer. The support of a “patron state” – Russia, Armenia (in the case of Karabakh) or Turkey (Turkish Cyprus) – is a more crucial factor. All of these entities are heavily reliant on their patrons for both economic assistance and security. They range in their levels of dependence. Laurence Broers has compared in impressive detail the three very different types of political economy which enable Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia to benefit from a client-patron relationship.
Yet there are nuances here. The relationship with the patron state is more complex than most outsiders think and the disparaging description of these territories as “puppet states” is wide of the mark. Abkhazia and South Ossetia both survived the 1990s, despite minimal support from Moscow and, in the case of Abkhazia, punitive economic sanctions from Russia. From Sukhumi to Tiraspol, the patron state is accepted as the provider of both security and financing. But within that context the de facto state routinely chooses as its leader the politician who defies Moscow on certain issues. Voters in Abkhazia in 2004 and in Transnistria in 2011 chose Sergei Bagapsh and Yevgeny Shevchuk respectively as their presidents in defiance of Moscow’s favoured candidates, Raul Khajimba and Anatoly Kaminsky. In 2011 even tiny South Ossetia gave Moscow an unpleasant shock by attempting to elect an opposition candidate, Alla Dzhiyoeva, as its leader. In parallel, Turkish Cypriots routinely choose as their leaders politicians who stand up to the government in Ankara.
The interesting story here is how these post-Soviet de facto states have not become rogue states, even though the option was fully available to them. Instead, in cases which deserve more study from political scientists, they appear to have decided to build de facto institutions of statehood and make contracts with their citizens. They do this not with any realistic hope of international legitimacy but as the best method of survival.
It is a partial success story. Although poverty and emigration remain huge problems, all four de facto states have progressed far from being the shadowy territories they were in the 1990s. Yes, there is criminality and contraband here. Transnistria, in particular, is a haven for smugglers. But it keeps that status in large part due to the collusion of its recognised-state neighbours, Moldova and Ukraine. Within certain limits, there is also a kind of democracy here. As Donnacha Ó Beacháin, an associate professor at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, has described, elections in the unrecognised states are circumscribed by certain conditions (certain groups are not allowed to engage in high politics, there is a consensus on issues concerning the conflict) but are also highly competitive. Abkhazia, in particular, has an independent media and strong civil society.
Overall, it is hard to make a strong causal connection between all these attributes of de facto states and their condition of non-recognition. In a challenging PhD thesis, Giorgio Comai makes the case that the four post-Soviet de facto states, economically weak and dependent on a patron state, can be compared to small recognised states, such as Palau and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. “Non-recognition is the symptom, not the cause,” of their problems, Comai argues. Other small states in Africa and Asia, or even the European “micro-states” of Andorra and Liechtenstein, arguably exhibit many of the same features as do Abkhazia or Transnistria.
Waiting for an idea
I recently asked a Transnistrian native what was the biggest problem for him about living in an unrecognised, de facto state. His answer was “instability” and “uncertainty”. “What will happen tomorrow?” he asked rhetorically. “What will Moldova and Ukraine do? Will my kids’ school close, will the border close? It is too unpredictable. I can’t predict three or five years ahead.”
This uncertainty looks set to endure. Transnistria and the other de facto states are weak states reliant on strong patrons but not unique in the world in that condition. In my view, the chief reason for persistent limbo lies in the peculiar dysfunctional relationship between the de facto state and the third corner of the triangle in each case, the “metropolitan “parent” or “base” state, the de jure claimant on each territory in Baku, Chișinău, Nicosia or Tbilisi. Although they hate to admit it, the profile and policies of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus, are all largely defined by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and the Republic of Cyprus. They exist in relation to their missing partner, their shadow, their doppelganger. Separate but connected, each side exerts a – mostly negative – veto on the development of the other.
International engagement with these de facto states is very inconsistent. At one extreme is Turkish Cyprus, where there is international tourism, students from around the world study at its universities and there is trade and traffic across the Green Line into southern Cyprus. At the other extreme is Nagorno-Karabakh, which is deeply isolated from the world, getting very few international visitors and where virtually the only international organisation working there is the International Committee of the Red Cross. Transnistria tends more towards the Cyprus case, having an even more sophisticated trade regime with the European Union than Turkish Cypriots do. South Ossetia is nearer to Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia is somewhere in the middle.
These contrasts have almost nothing to do with an international strategy (something which would be a welcome innovation) and everything to do with the policies set by the governments of metropolitan states (with Tbilisi being a partial exception), which the rest of the world sets as its main criterion for interaction. Karabakh is isolated because Baku wants it so and is prepared to punish internationals who dare to visit and work there. Turkish Cyprus is more open because the government in Nicosia is more relaxed about what happens there.
It is a case of double uncertainty. A Transnistrian, Abkhaz or Turkish Cypriot feels vulnerable in a world where his or her state is unrecognised and at the mercy of much bigger global forces. A Moldovan, Georgian or Greek Cypriot feels the insecurity of seeing a territory under the control of hostile forces. In government-controlled Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Georgia, a displaced person or refugee born in the de facto state and unable to return home there watches as his or her homeland is defined as the national state of others.
As in all conflicts, the dysfunction, mutual punishment and uncertainty are likely to endure as long as the two sides fail to identify a common strategic interest in working together to resolve it. When there is progress, the de facto states will reveal more of their hidden agendas and buried identities, shed some of their more radical posturing, and begin to diverge more strongly from one another. Some of them will surely disappear altogether. That idea could be an integration project – the most likely eventual outcome for Cyprus and Moldova. It could be a civilised divorce, which ends up in a confederation or even managed secession, as in Kosovo, so long as it honours the rights of displaced persons who lost their homes.
Currently, the reality of these places is sustained by an idea that was born in conflict. They continue to produce postage stamps and sculpt war memorials in a protracted response to that violent rupture in the past. Another stronger new idea is needed for that reality to change.
http://neweasterneurope.eu/2018/04/...-life-curious-sustainability-de-facto-states/
https://www.apnews.com/98f903367b50404cb3c9695bcabefa5a
Security troops on US nuclear missile base took LSD
Security troops on US nuclear missile base took LSD
I agree with Oliver Kamm.
I'm probably the only person in the Western world who thinks Lincoln was a bad President.
There's not an adequate smiley to express my shock... why?I'm probably the only person in the Western world who thinks Lincoln was a bad President.
No. But they're far from being fair and objective. And that bias is shared by the entire media (apart from Fox). Which means that half America don't trust what they read and what they see.
If I'm not mistaken the WSJ and New York Post are also pro Trump and they are two of the biggest newspapers.
I think the Civil War was unnecessary, and Lincoln played a large part in precipitating it.
Because the states had the right to secede...?
No news outlet is truly objective, however there's a difference between framing and selective broadcasting (bias) and outright lying. Fox news does the latter, on a consistent basis.
There's also a big difference between what the right wing media did with Obama, which stemmed purely from racism and was in not based in any sort of facts and what progressive media are doing now. Most of the ridiculous things about Trump they are reporting are based on Tweets by Trump himself. He's the one saying all that dumb shit. You can't fault the media for making stories about that.
If you have to rank sources in terms of integrity it's something like:
New York Times / CNN / wapo
Fox / breitbart / Daily caller
Richard Nixon
Milly Vanilli
Charles Ponzi
Benedict Arnold
Pinnochio
Satan
Trump on twitter
Because the issue of slavery could have continued to be finessed, rather than brought to a head by a self-righteous President. As the rest of the world showed, time was on the side of abolition. It's impossible to envisage America as a slave-holding society in the 20th century.
Why do you even need to talk about the unfair failing fake news media when a simple look on Donalds Twitter on almost any given day is enough to see that he is a deranged person who erodes the US democracy from the top by disrespecting its various institutions? Not to mention decades of diplomacy he seems determined to undo in his quest for US isolation?
Instead of having slavery slowly abolished over time he thought it was worth fighting over to have abolished right away. Especially with the advantage of time you can appreciate that abolishing slavery is worth fighting over?!
The guys obviously on a not so subtle wind up. Or beyond any of your help.... Save your time and energy.
If it's a wum it's been consistent for years.
Fair enough. I can't say I'm that familiar with him. Just going off the fact that he's ticking all the Trumpite boxes as tho he's working his way down a list.
I was just about to say, did @Will Absolute wake up one day this week and decide to tweak the noses of the liberal posters in the Trump thread. I'm not saying that he doesn't believe what he's posting rather that he doesn't care who knows that he believes what he does or what we say to counter his beliefs.
It's absolutely baffeling that someone would think that, i don't know you, so i won't judge you, but the point you just made is as insensitive, disgraceful and stupid as it can be. So it would have been okay to let the slaves of that time leave at least a few decades of that ignominy ? who gives a feck about them right ? they were slaves for so long, i'm pretty sure they wouldn't have cared for a few more decades to finesse the 'issue' of slavery ?
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Oh that’s ok then, they should have just left a couple more generations of African Americans as property, free to be tortured, raped, murdered or worked to death. After all, better not to upset anyone right?
Fixed.
I wish that you would be sold as a slave to some third world country native and you continue to hold your said opinions of slavery continued to be finessed instead of abolished.
Never mind the fact that even after abolishment of slavery, the 'free people' were continually oppressed and it took nearly another 100 odd years to get unsegregated schooling and these 'free people' had Jim Crow laws to contend with enacted just to ensure they are not fully free. But according to Will hunting here, it was already on the wane.
I'm sorry, but this post has me seething. If your agenda is to subtly annoy other posters by posting ridiculous things, you have well and truly succeeded. If you actually believe that white lives were wasted fighting for slavery, you are a monster. feck you regardless
When do you think it would have been abolished? And what makes you think that?
The author of this post is an absolute thundercnut.
You just lost all the possible respect I could have had for you.
Will and Cliven Bundy would be best buds if they ever met at a cross burning. Both i assume disagree with slavery and are not racist racist but the head nodding while talking about abolishment of slavery happened to fast and maybe they would be happier under the care of an owner.