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World//Hong Kong Protests Demand Democracy

Hong Kong has a long and unique history. After the First Opium War (1839-1842), the British Empire and China signed the Treaty of Nanking, ceding dominion of Hong Kong to the British. Roughly fifty years later, Britain and China signed the Second Convention of Peking, effectively leasing the UK the territory for 99 years without fee. Acknowledging Japanese occupation during World War II, the UK retained control for the given amount of time, relinquishing power over Hong Kong back to the Chinese government in 1997. Since then, Hong Kong has experienced much turmoil concerning its political relationship with the Communist Party.

Wynn HortonAs it currently stands, Hong Kong is governed by three branches of government as outlined in their constitution, The Basic Law: a judicial structure — which is not so controversial; a legislative council of 70 members, of whom 40 are directly elected (which has caused much anger); and the controversial executive branch. The lead official in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (as termed by China) is the Chief Executive Officer. Currently, the selection of the Chief Executive is an action performed by an electoral-college-style committee of 1200 members. This committee is, according to critics, an instrument of Beijing, inflicting the will of the Party upon the supposedly separate territory.

In response to a recent wave of criticism calling for democratic elections of all elected officials in the Region, China has responded with a concession – they will allow the direct election of the Chief Executive by all legal adult voters by 2017.  However, they said, a nomination committee made of members from the previous “electoral” committee would handpick the candidates. This small deviation from a more true democratic process, is what has garnered so much rage.

On September 22, 2014, a group of university students flooded the streets declaring a week-long boycott of all classes in response to the decision from Beijing. Six days later, an existing protest movement named Occupy Central With Peace and Love, which had been planning a protest anyway, decided to jump into the wave of momentum with the students, which added significant numbers to the crowds in the streets.

Initially a nonviolent campaign organized as a social protest, Occupy Central With Peace and Love was largely ignored by the city and its officials. Soon after, however, the protest stretched into its second and third weeks, with camps of students and other angry civilians blocking the entrances to major government buildings in certain neighborhoods of Hong Kong.  By October 2, the current Chief Executive had given up, offering his resignation – which the student leaders later accepted. The protesters erected barricades to block traffic and a large number have set up temporary camps in the streets and parks around Hong Kong’s central district. In recent days, police have worked to take down the barriers, work which has only led to significant clashes between the city workforce and the protesters. More than 50 people have already been injured in the alterations between police and workers and the protesting students and citizens.

On Tuesday October 12, 2014, five student leaders, wearing t-shirts that read “freedom now” met with officials from the government. Early reports have said that nothing much was accomplished, terms were offered and denied.  The students have a goal they are unwilling to relinquish. For now they will go on, garnering the support of activists from China (many from Tiananmen Square), Russian, Serbia, and other nations around the world. Committed to meeting with the representatives again, both parties are hopeful but determined to reach a conclusion.

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Opinions Two Views

Two Views: Would Widespread Economic and Political Freedom Create Global Peace?

Though I would agree with Sarah Slater’s point that global peace could never be entirely accomplished due to the presence of scarce resources and competing cultural values, it is hard to negate the evidence that democracies – systems in which political freedom is the foundation – rarely go to war against each other. It is also hard to ignore that economies that practice economic freedom and are increasingly dependent on each other also find it difficult to go to war. For these reasons, it seems fair to conclude that the expansion of political and economic freedoms contributes to domestic and global peace, even if they may not resolve the entire issue.

2view-sarahhThese arguments ultimately rest on cost-benefit analysis. As Immanuel Kant, one of the early writers on global peace, wrote in 1795, wars do not frequently benefit the ordinary people in a country. Often, citizens have to bear the load of war, “having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future.” In a republic or a democracy where citizens are free to exercise political control, it would make sense that they try to refrain from going to war as much as possible. Political freedoms, then, become safety valves that citizens may exercise against their politicians when conflicts begin to get overheated.

Theoretically, Kant’s proposition makes sense, but how does it play out in recent history?

Political freedom – by which we mean the ability of the public to engage in a political process without being coerced or compelled in any way – is a relatively recent phenomenon in history and the phenomenon only took hold in the past 50 or 60 years. According to scholar Michael Mandelbaum, “In the second half of the twentieth century … democracies consistently preferred butter to guns” due to their political choices which reflected their preferences for social welfare programs than to foreign activity and wars. Even the United States, which has acquired the reputation of bellicosity “was subject to the same popular reservations about and objections to war” in the twentieth century that was present in other countries, albeit at a smaller scale.

Increased globalization and the dependency between economies that practice economic freedom also create situations in which the desire for peace outweighs the desire for conflict. Conflict can interrupt trade between nations, the production of goods, and the transactions between consumers and producers which encourages these economies to refrain from war. Again, this argument rests on a cost-benefit analysis between the costs of war and the benefits of peace. As Sarah Slater noted in the previous article, no European state in the European Union has attacked another – a miracle if we examine Europe’s recent history.

We should look at expanding political and economic freedom as a positive force in expanding the capacity of people to behave nonviolently, but we shouldn’t assume that it is a guarantee that people will take the opportunity of these freedoms. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote concerning democracy in Development as Freedom, “Democracy does not serve as an automatic remedy of ailments as quinine works to remedy malaria. The opportunity it opens has to be positively grabbed in order to achieve the desired effect. This is … a basic feature of freedoms in general – much depends on how freedoms are actually exercised.” While political and economic freedom may indeed contribute to global peace, it still depends on what people make of it.

In conclusion, I do not believe that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to the issue of global peace and that if only we could snap our fingers and declare that all countries were politically and economically free, then the world would be immediately at one. This approach ignores cultural and historical conditions and, as we have seen in the Balkans, the transition from an authoritarian government to a system that promotes political and economic freedom can be a violent one. (The current state of affairs in many Middle Eastern countries today would be other examples.) By the same token, however, the evidence exists that, in the long run, these expansions may indeed increase global peace and contribute to the capacity of people to behave nonviolently.

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News Opinions

Iraq 10 Years after the Invasion

It has been controversial since it began.  It divided Americans: some watching as the number of troop deaths mounted, others warning that the costs were worth it if Saddam Hussein’s threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) had any merit.  After over one trillion dollars invested in the country, no WMDs discovered at all, the capture and execution of Saddam Hussein, 4,000 dead American soldiers and over 130,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, many still wonder whether the Iraq war was worth it.

Courtesy of propublica.org
Courtesy of propublica.org

The average current college student was 10 to 11 years old when the invasion began.  I remember staying up with my Dad late that night watching television and waiting for the bombs to fall on Baghdad, Iraq’s capital.  I remember the “Mission Accomplished” banner after the fall of Baghdad just a few short weeks later.  Then the insurgency began, for which nobody was prepared.

Bush’s claim that cutting off the head of the problem would immediately resolve it proved to be wrong as the United States found itself bogged down with al-Qaeda groups and Shi’a extremists using car and suicide bombs in hope of dominating each other through attempting to get their respective populations to hate and kill each other.  It looked as though the United States was about to fail miserably, as critics said it would whenever the country attempts “nation-building”.

But then the surge happened and, after 120,000 U.S. soldiers were sent to Iraq, along with “Awakening Councils” that joined the U.S. troops to drive out al-Qaeda (whose brutal tactics had alienated large swaths of Sunnis), violence began to decline.  As security increased, investments for Iraq’s oil reserves, which some argue are larger than Iran’s, helped to bring more stability to the country.  Even after U.S. troops withdrew in December 2011, violence has remained relatively low.  There are still the occasional bombings, such as the one that killed over 60 Iraqis on the anniversary of the invasion, but, overall, Iraq remains much more stable than it was throughout the insurgency.

However, problems remain.  Iraq is a shaky democracy set up to distribute power equally among the three big ethnic groups: Shi’a, Sunni and Kurd.  But after the attempted arrest of a Sunni vice president for supposedly running death squads, arguments began between the central government and autonomous Kurd regions. These debates were over who has rights to oil reserves. With numerous Arab Spring-style protests against the government of Nuri al-Maliki, a Shi’a that Sunnis accuse of becoming increasingly dictatorial, and suicide bombings continually trying to stir sectarian tensions, Americans may wonder if, in fact, the U.S. should have ever even invaded in the first place.

In the end, nobody can say that the United States made the right choice.  Regardless of the critics that say it only stirred ethnic tensions, Iraq never did slip into a civil war or become a failed state.  At the same time, a democracy was set up, but it remains incredibly fragile, particularly considering that for almost 11 months in 2010 the country could not form a government due to political infighting between Shi’a and Sunni politicians. Nevertheless, economically, the country has been recovering; tourism flourishes as millions of Shi’a pilgrims flock to mosques and shrines throughout the country.  Foreign direct investment in the country’s oil reserves has helped to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure, and in the Kurdish regions cities bustle and commerce thrives, with virtually no violence.  The Sunnis, however, claim to be finding themselves marginalized politically and economically, creating the potential for a new conflict as frustrations rise.

Whether or not you agree that it was a good idea to invade Iraq, never forget that despite the bad, many good things have happened in the country.  This is a milestone for our generation and continues to be pertinent to an American foreign policy that promotes the establishment of liberal democracy around the world, as liberal democracies do not fight each other.  Based on this logic, this war was in America’s national interest.  A good choice?  I am not sure, but it is something that will have a large impact in the Middle East for years to come.

Caleb Johnson is a third-year student with a double-major in international relations and history.