Governing without a Majority: Dilemmas for Hung Parliaments in Britain
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Contents:
It found no evidence that Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, had not followed procedure in responding to the incident. Donald Trump made his strongest attack yet on free trade, threatening to withdraw America from NAFTA and impose stiff tariffs on Chinese goods, if he is elected president.
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Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a dentist who now runs Turkmenistan, is nearly as big-headed. He moved the foot-tall, gold-plated statue of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, that rotated to catch the sun, and erected a gold-plated statue of himself, bravely astride a golden horse on a majestic cliff-top pictured. Such absurd extravagances can only happen in a dictatorship—and indeed all five of the once-Soviet Central Asian countries Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan suffer under repressive, cronyist governments.
Today a more complex battle for power and wealth in this fractious region is under way between China, Russia and the West.
For Russia, this is something of a home game. In all five countries Russian remains the lingua franca. Mr Berdymukhammedov inherited his job from one; Mr Rahmon was a party bigwig.
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Only Kyrgyzstan has had multiple leaders and two revolutions, but its current president, Almazbek Atambayev, may be even more pro-Russian than his neighbours. As in Russia, power in all five countries rests with small, now obscenely wealthy, cliques close to the president.
Their leaders all ruthlessly suppress dissent. Though most Central Asians wear their religion lightly or not at all, Islamism appeals to a small but growing number of the young and disaffected. In Aktobe, a mining town in north-western Kazakhstan, 25 people including the assailants were killed in an Islamist attack in early June. The rulers tend to exaggerate it to justify repression.
Many of the fighters had migrated to Russia for work—as millions of Central Asians have—and laboured in grim conditions for low pay, when they were radicalised by Muslim fanatics with Russian citizenship from the Caucasus. The Fergana Valley, which stretches across the eastern tip of Uzbekistan and spills into Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, often seethes with discontent.
Governing without a majority: dilemmas for hung parliaments in Britain. Front Cover. David Butler. Collins, - Political Science - pages. 0 Reviews. Governing without a majority: dilemmas for hung parliaments in Britain. Front Cover. David Butler. Macmillan, - Political Science - pages. 0 Reviews .
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan may have contributed more than 1, IS fighters each. Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group, reckons Uzbekistan has up to 12, political prisoners, many of whom become Islamists in jail. In Tajikistan, whole families have sometimes followed young men to war. Turkmenistan may also be affected. The big worry is what happens when these angry young men come home.
Violent Islamism may have limited appeal, but the more fiercely the non-violent version is repressed, the more appealing extremist jihad seems.
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And if social discontent rises, the Islamists will latch onto it. Against this messy backdrop, talk of a new Great Game has been buzzing for more than a decade. The main players are a militantly nationalist Russia, a mercantile China, an initially hopeful but now bruised America and a warily interested Europe. America and Europe are more cautious. But few American or European companies dare enter a market with such weak legal and banking institutions and rampant corruption.
Four of the five Turkmenistan is the odd man out are members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a regional intergovernmental group promoted by China. The same quartet has joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a Chinese-led international lender, as founding members. Though many ordinary Central Asians feel nervous about Chinese economic inroads, most business leaders and politicians encourage them.
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China has the same idea: in the past decade its trade and investment have left Russia in second place. But Russia remains the pre-eminent influence. Most people watch Russian and Russian-language television channels. With the usual programmes comes relentless anti-Americanism, which many locals seem to swallow, along with conspiracy theories claiming that the West seeks to destabilise Central Asia. Indeed, many poorer locals sound nostalgic for the Soviet Union. The EEU, which Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have joined, may have taken a bit of trade away from China, but it is more a vehicle for Russian influence than a genuine free-trading bloc.
Russia remains determined to keep the former republics as reliant as possible on its road and rail routes and pipelines.
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It also dominates regional security. The Americans and the Chinese have made some token sallies. China has sold some military stuff, including drones and anti-missile systems. Though the five countries share a common history, their post-Soviet paths have diverged, and they are often at loggerheads with each other. Like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan is increasingly closed and inward-looking. Mr Nazarbayev has cannily opened up to the West while staying cosy with Russia yet bolstering economic links with China. He encourages students to learn English. But all is not well. Falling oil prices have hit Kazakhstan hard.
Outside Astana and Almaty, many cities are grim: Aktobe is one of many to suffer mass lay-offs. The banking sector is ropy, the tax system a Byzantine nightmare. All of this deters investment.
In April a series of protests erupted against land-reform proposals. Mr Nazarbayev has ruthlessly restricted political space, exiling, co-opting, banning, harassing or imprisoning opponents. He turns 76 next week and has no apparent successor. A daughter is keen. Yet things are worse elsewhere. Tajikistan may be the least stable. Politically, Kyrgyzstan is the freest, but that does not seem to have made people happier. The president, mindful of the turbulence that overthrew two predecessors, sounds increasingly twitchy. Since March seven politicians have been arrested for allegedly plotting various coups.
The level of popular discontent and the degree to which leaders will go to crush its expression vary. But the prospects for prosperity and stability, let alone genuine democracy and human rights, look far less rosy across Central Asia than they did 25 years ago, when the five countries gained their independence. In the past decade many people have got poorer. For now they seem safe. In none of the five does a coherent, competent opposition look able to stage a revolution, nor does any appear close to boiling point.
But that could change. FEW Brazilians get through a day without eating beans.
Power deals hang in the balance
They gobble up 3. So when prices rise, as they did by a fifth recently after bad weather damaged the domestic harvest, they gripe. Blairo Maggi, the agriculture minister, hopes that Chinese and Mexican farmers will fill the leguminous gap. It may portend a greater opening to trade. Politicians and company bosses are starting to regard trade as a way to boost productivity, and thus growth, in the long run, too.
Of late, the government has tucked into liberalisation as if it were an appetising feijoada bean-and-meat stew. In April Brazil signed an investment treaty with Peru that, if ratified, will allow firms from both countries to compete freely for government contracts. Mr Maggi talks of lifting a presidential decree from that bars foreign ownership of farms, which discourages foreign investors from lending to farmers.
Brazil has been a reluctant globaliser. Ever since the s, when many poor-country governments championed domestic production as a substitute for imports, Brazilian industry has been shielded from foreign competition. From to Brazil was a party to a tenth of all disputes filed at the WTO, usually as the plaintiff.
During that period it erected more trade barriers—from tariffs to subsidies to local-content rules—than most other countries. Attitudes started to shift in as the economy weakened, prompting firms to seek growth abroad. Dilma Rousseff, the PT president, began to liberalise trade after her re-election in The government has enacted two dozen pro-trade measures and just three restrictive ones since the start of , according to the WTO.
Michel Temer, who became acting president in May after Ms Rousseff was forced to step aside while the Senate conducts an impeachment trial against her, is going further. Although his Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement is close to competition-shy industry, he has a liberal streak.