[BRIEF NOTE] Why Shimon Peres Was Wrong About the "New Middle East"

This post carries on from my previous post on the problems with certain sorts of multilateralism. It will also be the first of three planned posts of mine on the Israeli/Palestinian issue, so consider yourself forwarned.

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At least until recently, a critical element in the liberal Israeli belief in how the Middle Eastern situation could be resolved was the idea that Israel could be integrated with its neighbours for the profit of the entire region. This was most famously enunciated by former Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Shimon Peres in his vision of the "New Middle East", a region as integrated as western Europe and like western Europe founded on the reconciliation of the two most prominent antagonists. It's a nice vision, and a hopeful vision.

The problem with this vision is that it has no chance of working.

It isn't just the fact that Israel and its Arab neighbours, unlike France and Germany a half-century ago, are widely disproportionate in size (Israel the smaller) and levels of development (Israel much the most advanced). It isn't just the fact that Israel's strongest relationships with its Arab neighbours tend to be cold peaces profitable only for the lack of mutual violence, and that its existence is still seen as an injustice. It isn't just the fact that almost each and every state on the southern and eastern shroeline of the Mediterranean has a considerably stronger relationship with the entire European Union than with its neighbour, and that an EU-centric hub-and-spokes approach would be better than a Middle Eastern common market.

No, the critical factor is that very few of Israel's neighbours save the very debatable case of Lebanon are pluralistic. This isn't only a matter of them being democratic, though certainly this is a crucial element. It's rather a matter of them failing to be pluralistic societies, to be places where one can be safe and comfortable in one's identity as a member of a minority, whether this minority is defined in relationship to gender, class, or politics. Countries run by regimes so fundamentally insecure that deviation is problematic at best, lethal at worst, are simply unsuitable to be effective partners. Note that the six countries which founded the European Union back in 1956 were all democracies and reasonably pluralistic, at least by contemporary standards; note that membership in the European Union is contingent on, among other things, being democratic and reasonably pluralistic, again by contemporary standards.

The clearest example of this can be found in the Southern Cone before the transition of that part of South America to democracy in the 1980s. Cooperation between the different countries of the region could be enabled through the rather bloody logics of the regnant generals. In Operation Condor, for instance, the military dictatorships

of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the mid-1970s [. . .] , led by dictators such as Videla, Pinochet and Stroessner agreed to cooperate in sending teams into other countries, including France, Portugal and the United States to locate, observe and assassinate political opponents. They also exchanged torture techniques, like near drowning and playing the sound recordings of victims who were being tortured to their family. Many people disappeared and were killed without trial. Their targets were 'leftist guerrilla terrorists' but many are thought to be political opponents, family and other innocent people.

It's also worth noting that at the same time, both Argentina and Brazil maintained active nuclear weapons development programs. In the absence of any plausible Soviet military threat to South America, and given both regimes' contemporary American alliances, it's fairly clear that had these programs ever been completed, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janerio would have been mutual hostages. Fortunately, with democratization South America had the chance to avoid becoming hostage to an Indo-Pakistani-style scenario. It's not a coincidence that MERCOSUR formed just as democracy in the Southern Cone became relatively entrenched in the 1990s, a decade after the shift away from attempts at complete national uniformity.

The Middle East will have to democratize, to undergo some sort of shift towards pluralism. Otherwise, regional collaboration approaching Peres' hoped-for levels will be impossible.

[NNWM] What is it about the Southern Hemisphere's economies?

My most recent post describes the background of Going North is the absolute and relative increase in the standing of the traditional immigrant-receiving countries of the Southern Hemisphere: Argentina, South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Australia, Chile. This is almost the inverse of what happened in the half-century after the Second World War, as Nationmaster statistics from 1950 and 1975 suggest. In 1950, New Zealand was as rich as Switzerland, while Venezuela's per capita GDP compare to Australia and Argentina appeared as developed as France. Much has changed, even for Australia, which has barely managed to hold its own against an economically dynamic southern Europe that once sent immigrants to the Commonwealth by the hundreds of thousands.

Of late, I've begun to think there might be a common pattern of relative decline uniting the immigrant-receiving countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Certainly much has been written about the problems of Argentina and New Zealand in maintaining their relative positions. Less talked about is the way that Australian per-capita GDP slipped from being on par with California's in the mid-19th century to being something comparable to that of western Europe now, much like the trends which ensured that which southern Brazil lost its advantage relative to formerly immigrant-sending areas in southern Europe. Venezuela, for its part, has gained attention mainly for its more recent relative decline over the 1980s and 1990s. South Africa's internal divisions have made it difficult to come to particular conclusions, but living standards once comparable to the highest in the world for whites seem to have fallen significantly to the level of New Zealand, perhaps spurring many of South Africa's emigrants over the 1990s as much as the political situation.

Certainly, internal issues have played a major role in the decline of the Southern Hemisphere immigrant-receiving economies, most notably in South America. Even so, the consistency of the trend appears suggestive to me. Might there be causative factors common to the whole of the Southern Hemisphere? Perhaps this past-century of economic history demonstrates the way in which North Atlantic economic integration disadvantaged areas outside of the North Atlantic, or how the development of cheaper sources of natural resources disadvantaged resource-rich economies in the South.

Thoughts?