|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME THE BOOK Praise for Excerpts About the publisher About the editor Buy the book THE AUTHOR REVIEWS CALENDAR |
 |
|
Kyodo World Service Economic sanctions are counterproductive foreign policy tools for inducing political change because they only insulate target countries from outside influence and boost their leaders' surveillance power, says political risk analyst Ian Bremmer. The longevity of isolated communist governments, such as Cuba and North Korea, illustrates the failure of the U.S. foreign policies of containment, says Bremmer, who authored in 2001 Wall Street's first global political risk index to assess the stability of emerging markets. "Certain states – North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), Belarus, Zimbabwe – are stable precisely because they are closed," Bremmer writes in his new book, "The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall." The term J curve commonly denotes to the shape of a diagram depicting the temporary worsening of the net trade balance after a depreciation. In his new book, Bremmer applies the model to illustrate a nation's path from authoritarianism to viable democracy. In this J curve, the vertical axis measures a country's stability and the horizontal its political and economic openness. Thus nations to the left of the dip in the J are less open but stable, and nations to the right are open and stable, while states that are somewhat open but unstable, such as postwar Iraq, come at the bottom. Bremmer said one of the first actions North Korea took after a massive explosion at Ryongchon train station in April 2004, which left at least 170 people dead and 1,300 others injured, was to close off all international phone lines, because the leaders wanted no outside information coming into the country. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il also refused an emergency aid offer from South Korea because he ''did not want South Korean trucks to be seen by the North Korean people and the South Korean people to have any exposure to the North Korean people,'' he said. "It is not a preference for North Korea to stay isolated. It is a strategic imperative," he said. "If half the people of North Korea saw 20 minutes of CNN (or of Al-Jazeera for that matter), they would realize how egregiously their government lies to them about life beyond the walls," he writes. But Bremmer says North Korea and other countries on the left side of the J curve have an inevitable vulnerability, because their stability hinges largely on individual leaders rather than institutions whose legitimacy is widely accepted. These institutions represent a state's ability to withstand and absorb a variety of shocks, ranging from a leadership change to major disasters, or even political assassinations, he said. For example, the United States withstood disputes over the result of the 2000 presidential election without any significant impact on its stability, though countries with weaker institutions have been more affected by similar shocks, as in the aftermath of disputed elections in Mexico, Ukraine and Taiwan, he said. Bremmer says a country that is "stable because it's closed" typically goes through a dangerous period of transition to openness, and in this regard Iran is considered more of a risk to the market than North Korea. Among Middle Eastern states, Iran ranks third – after Israel and Lebanon – in terms of openness, measured by factors such as freedom of the press, civil society, NGO operations, and the treatment of women, he said. The Iranian leadership realizes it will be unable to stay in power with a "relatively open Iran," and believes that the only way to stay in power is to close the country and get rid of the reformists, he said. "And how do they accomplish that? By focusing on the nuclear issue," he said. Iran and other countries that are sliding down the left side of the J curve, or moving toward greater openness, need close attention because their leaders will close the country at any time to restore order, Bremmer said. Bremmer says there are no shortcuts in such a transition, but he advocates neither bolstering authoritarianism nor toppling a government militarily due to the enormous costs, as seen in Iraq. Instead, he calls on developed nations to create the "conditions most favorable for a closed regime's safe passage through the least stable segment of the J curve," by, for example, promoting a greater economic engagement and successful integration of disenchanted Muslim immigrants. "Openness enables change. Change is an essential ingredient in growth and prosperity. Only the free exchange of information, values, ideas, and people can build a sustainable global stability that enriches all who take part in it," he writes. — Miwa Murphy
|
 |
|
Print this page