![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
May. 25th, 2011
The Economist is correct in noting the unexpectedness of the offer of Gulf Cooperation Council membership to Morocco and Jordan. An expansion to Morocco, in particular, would suggest that the GCC is transitioning from an organization devoted to the integration of the Arab Persian Gulf into something broader and perhaps shallower. What implications would GCC membership have on Morocco's relationship with Europe, I wonder?
Abdullatif al-Zayani, the GCC’s secretary-general, a Bahraini who has been trying to mediate an end to the turmoil in Yemen, disclosed few details of the club’s planned enlargement. But the aims were evident. For one thing, the GCC sees itself as a bulwark against Iran, which all the club’s members, led by its most powerful, Saudi Arabia, view as a rising threat. Jordan’s King Abdullah II was the first Arab leader to speak darkly, in 2004, of a “Shia crescent”; Morocco’s King Muhammad VI cut off diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2009, accusing the Islamic Republic of trying to spread its sect of Islam in his stoutly Sunni kingdom. Aside from Oman, whose sultan follows Islam’s Ibadi school, all GCC members are Sunni-ruled. Jordan and Morocco have also given security support to GCC countries. A Jordanian contingent joined the recent Saudi-led intervention to suppress Shia protesters in Bahrain, and Moroccans have long provided brains and brawn to the UAE’s emirs.
There is an economic angle, too. Morocco and Jordan are relatively poor—and lack oil. The rich Gulf states have backed both with billions in aid. For Moroccans and Jordanians, many of whom work in the Gulf, the open borders and labour markets enjoyed by the GCC’s current sextet, which plans a customs union by 2015, is another lure, though today’s GCC members will not give the newcomers all the same privileges from the start.
Monarchical solidarity is, of course, the ultimate bond, at a time when the republican dynasties of Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia have come unstuck or look shaky. A common joke these days is that the GCC should be renamed the “Gulf Counter-Revolutionary Club”.
If this Bloomberg article is correct and a notably Russophile Yanukovych is still, despite his political leanings, interested in orienting Ukraine economically at least as much towards the European Union as towards Russia, this has profound implications for Ukraine's future. If Russophiles want the EU ...
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said he wants to pursue European Union membership for the former Soviet republic that is also being wooed by a Russian-led customs union with the lure of lower natural-gas prices.
[. . .]
Russia is trying to use fuel prices as a lure to pull Ukraine into a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan even as the former Soviet republic looks to deepen economic and political ties with the EU. Ukraine depends on Russia for more than 50 percent of its natural-gas supply, which its eastern neighbor shut off for two weeks in 2009.
[. . . ]
Yanukovych, from eastern Ukraine, pledged to improve relations by cooperating with gas producer OAO Gazprom and ruled out membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He kept the door open to the EU by taking his first trip as president to Brussels before visiting Moscow.
Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU may be concluded this year, European Commission President Jose Barroso said in Kiev on April 18, adding that the two sides have made progress on agreeing to visa-free travel.
Entering the customs union with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus would end the chances for the agreement, he added. Ukraine four days later said it won’t enter the customs union.
“Russia was, is and will be our strategic partner,” Yanukovych said. “We are now searching for mechanisms of cooperation. We do think we can reach an agreement that will allow us to work with the customs union to the extent which Ukrainian laws and our obligations to world organizations such as the World Trade Organization allow.”
I've long been interested in the ways in which people interpret their societies, especially the lacunae, the things that--to paraphrase Renan--the nation chooses to forget. How does this happen? What sorts of things get forgotten? Does everyone in a given society necessarily know of this? What, in short, are the mechanics by which people imagine their societies' past and present?
As if to satisfy this interest of mine, American Eric Johnson and German Karl-Heinz Reuband are the authors of the 2005 tome What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany.
The main thing that emerges from What We Know, with its interviews of German Jews and Christians alike, is that people operated highly selectively. Individuals had their own individual experiences: different relationships with others, different others to have relationships with, different local environments. Some German Jews experienced numerous kindnesses from their neighbours; others did not. Some German Christians were pleased with Nazi anti-Semitism; others accepted the Nazis on practical grounds, for their apparent solutions to the problems of the German economy and German power in Europe and the wider. And, most notably, some Germans did know about the Holocaust, thanks to the links of individuals with people serving on the Eastern Front or otherwise through rumours which managed to propagate through German society, but many of these people--including Jews--didn't believe that these things were happening. Fear was a major factor: some people seem authentically not to have known what was going on, because the fear of being caught transgressing through rumour-spreading by the Nazi regime was too great. Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in other words, was a terribly fragmented society, where people in all kinds of different positions were simply unable to share experiences in common.
What We Knew is an essential contribution to the sociology and psychology of societies under totalitarian rule. Fragmentation, as Johnson and Reuband make clear, is the rule more often than not. I would have liked consideration as to how these experiences were assembled after totalitarianism's end, but then, that's a different subject indeed.
As if to satisfy this interest of mine, American Eric Johnson and German Karl-Heinz Reuband are the authors of the 2005 tome What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany.
The main thing that emerges from What We Know, with its interviews of German Jews and Christians alike, is that people operated highly selectively. Individuals had their own individual experiences: different relationships with others, different others to have relationships with, different local environments. Some German Jews experienced numerous kindnesses from their neighbours; others did not. Some German Christians were pleased with Nazi anti-Semitism; others accepted the Nazis on practical grounds, for their apparent solutions to the problems of the German economy and German power in Europe and the wider. And, most notably, some Germans did know about the Holocaust, thanks to the links of individuals with people serving on the Eastern Front or otherwise through rumours which managed to propagate through German society, but many of these people--including Jews--didn't believe that these things were happening. Fear was a major factor: some people seem authentically not to have known what was going on, because the fear of being caught transgressing through rumour-spreading by the Nazi regime was too great. Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, in other words, was a terribly fragmented society, where people in all kinds of different positions were simply unable to share experiences in common.
What We Knew is an essential contribution to the sociology and psychology of societies under totalitarian rule. Fragmentation, as Johnson and Reuband make clear, is the rule more often than not. I would have liked consideration as to how these experiences were assembled after totalitarianism's end, but then, that's a different subject indeed.
I've a post up at Demography Matters commenting on the rapid urbanization of Mongolia, concentrated on the capital of Ulan Bator. This urbanization is inevitable and was predicted a decade ago.
Go, read.
Go, read.