Expansion of the Union

Just today (January 24th, 2012), Croatian voters passed a referendum deciding to become part of the European Union by a margin of two to one, among those who voted.  While officials were somewhat disappointed at the low voter turnout of 44%, this seems like an important step forward for the nation of Croatia.

Membership in the European Union, assuming the current member states agree to permit Croatia's entry, would be enormously beneficial to it in several different ways.  Economically, it would reduce tariffs and promote growth and finance between other member nations of the EU; politically, it would bind Croatia's interests to that of the EU, and vice versa, giving Croatia a much larger voice on the world stage than it might otherwise have.

I should probably give some background history before I say any more about this latest accession.  The European Union was formed after World War II, as a response to the massive economic slowdown Europe had encountered.  While it started with coal, over time it expanded to other products and eventually the entire economies, it functions as a single market-- all the individual countries have the same customs laws, no internal tariffs, etc.  This means that someone in Germany can send goods to France with essentially no governmental interference- similar, in many respects, to shipping many products (for instance, steel) across state lines in the United States.  Many of the member states of the EU have joined a further union called the Schengen Area, which allows citizens of one country within the area to move to any other country within the area without needing a passport. 

This union is critical to Europe in the current economic climate more than ever.  Whereas before World War Two, the European nations dominated world trade and economic activity, none are nearly so powerful shorn of empire.  The British Empire's economy in its heyday was, in my estimation, at least as large a fraction of world GDP as America's is today.  Uniting as a single market gives the European states a much greater degree of influence at the world stage by allowing them to use their total economic might as leverage.

Croatia's joining in would give the EU a relatively small boost to the entire Union; the Union's benefits for Croatia are likely to be much larger.  Nor are these the simple addition of Croatia's GDP to that of the EU; when countries join, they also gain the benefit of free movement of cargo within the Union, which provides enormous economic incentive for countries to invest in each other.  Croatia will actually grow faster within the Union than outside it.

Some of my readers may be asking why this is important.  To them, I say:  look at where Croatia is located.  In the middle of the Balkan mountains, an area of ethnic tensions even today.  While Croatia has high standards of living and a strong economy, the same cannot be said of all the nations nearby.  Hopefully, accession into the EU will lead to more of the countries nearby joining as well.

Politically speaking, it is good to see more states joining the EU as well.  The member nations, though they frequently squabble, are much more harmonious today than they have historically been.  The real question, however, is how Russia will react to more of its former satellites joining the EU.  Russia has historically not been handled particularly well by the West, although it frequently hasn't been the best neighbor, either.  While Croatia was not part of one of the major satellite states, it must be galling for Prime Minister Putin to see nations which were under Russia's shadow-- and all too frequently, its thumb-- during the Soviet era aligning themselves with the EU and occasionally with NATO (Poland, for instance).

As the major power broker in Eastern Europe, Russia's opinion will carry great weight, even in the West (such as when America cancelled its plans for a missile shield in Poland after Russian bad reactions).  A positive reaction could herald an improvement in its often tumultuous relations with the West.  A poor one, on the other hand, could be a harbinger of more of the same.  Whatever the reaction from the Bear, a Union extension down into the Balkan region is likely to bring good tidings to a long troubled area.

Stop Online Prosperity Act

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a bill up for debate in the United States House of Representatives, with a similar bill called the Protect IP Act (PIPA) up for consideration in the United States Senate.  These bills each individually have the power to gut the internet as it currently functions, with disastrous consequences for the global economy, worldwide communications, and world diplomacy.  These consequences unfortunately seem to be either not fully understood or not comprehended by lawmakers, and I strongly urge any readers in the United States to contact your Representatives and Senators and instruct them to vote against their respective bills.

Rep. Lamar Smith, author of SOPA

Economically speaking, the bill is a disaster waiting to happen, at a time when the United States is already doing everything it possibly can to avoid falling back into a recession.  The rest of the world's economy is in a similarly bad state, built as it has been (in large part) for the last thirty years on ever-growing American consumerism.  I'll save greater economic analyses for another time, and keep things relevant here: this bill would greatly strengthen copyright holders' abilities to track down and harm violators, but the bill does so in such a way that many innocent people will similarly be harmed, a thought which I as an American citizen find to be directly in contradiction of everything this nation portends to stand for-- "innocent until proven guilty" is one of the most sacred legal traditions here, and for good reason.

SOPA allows copyright holders and the US Department of Justice to get court orders for any of the following:

1. Force advertising networks, payment facilitators (PayPal, and its ilk), and (as I understand it) credit card companies to stop doing business with sites accused of violating US intellectual property rights laws, financially strangling such companies by blocking the payment methods.

2. Block search engines (like Google) from linking to said pages, further harming the sites by preventing the vast majority of internet users from even knowing it exists.  This is less a problem for major websites, such as Wikipedia, the existence of which is common knowledge, but is a much greater threat to businesses and any non-superpower-sized website

3. Force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block all traffic to the sites.  This is an especially frightening possibility, as it means the site is now cut off from any computer not local to its servers, preventing the rest of the world from accessing it.

The (economic) problem here is that e-commerce is a large (and rapidly growing) part of the world economy, especially in developed countries like the United States.  Amazon.com, an online retailer which is likely to be less affected (though not by any means unaffected) by this bill than many other companies, had an operating revenue of 32 billion (32B) US Dollars last year, an incredible fortune; a smaller website, Netflix, which would almost certainly have to tighten its membership requirements and the fraction of the library available, therefore being likely to be much more affected by the bill, had an operating revenue of 2B USD in its own right. 

Part of the problem is that any site which allows users to upload their own content, which is to say, nearly all of the sites which have created the internet as we now know it, will need to start being absolutely certain their users really do own the copyrights to whatever content they're putting up, likely destroying most of the Netflixes, the DeviantArts, and any other similar sites out there.  And really, can the world afford to lose (potentially) trillions of dollars of e-commerce at a time like the present?

This content-monitoring brings me to the next problem, though:  all it takes is an accusation of wrongdoing for the Justice Department to start turning the wheels, without requiring that any notice be given to the owners of the sites accused.  It is my opinion that this violates the United States Constitution in that it denies the accused the right to face their accuser.  What's worse is that since the Justice Department can (and may be obligated to, I'm not certain) start taking action immediately upon an accusation, this could easily become in practice if not in theory full-blown censorship of sections of the web, violating the United States' sacred First Amendment-- that of freedom of speech and expression.  Imagine, if you will, a Chinese (or British, or Saudi, or whomever you please) company which accuses a competitor of violating intellectual property law on the competitor's website.  The Justice Department could instantly take action, potentially affecting a company anywhere in the world effectively on hearsay.  Even if the competitor eventually got things sorted out, they would likely lose a great deal of time, energy, money, and consumer goodwill (as they received so much bad press) dealing with the investigation, allowing the accusing company to leapfrog them.

The US Governement is not, and should not behave as, a tool for corporations and commerce wars.

Diplomatically speaking, this provides the opportunity even for governments to take actions as outlined above, advancing the interests of nationalized industries (such as, perhaps, Russia's Gazprom) at the expense of competitors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, etc.).  Though I have chosen large companies as examples here, they are actually less likely to be damaged by this act; I chose them for the same reason they'd be relatively protected-- they're well known.  

A number of companies including, although certainly not limited to, Google, Mozilla (makers of Firefox), Twitter, Tumblr, KickStarter, the Wikimedia Foundation (operators of Wikipedia), the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Microsoft have all publicly declared opposition to this bill, with some going so far as to have already started building additional anticensorship infrastructure, such as that used to support the Arab Spring.

While these bills are well intended, hoping to protect the interests of intellectual property owners, they are so ham-fisted about their efforts that they will do immeasurably more harm than good.  It is not unreasonable to think that a sort of intellectual property war is on its way, with the Internet as we know it both the battleground, and the prize.  There is little argument that American copyright law desperately needs revision in the age of the Internet, but few seem to want to acknowledge this fact on Capitol Hill; ultimately, however, it is my opinion that the only way forward which does not directly threaten the rights and liberties of all those on the internet is a revised copyright law.  The alternative, it seems, is a balkanized Internet, where people can no longer speak to those significantly different, or learn from them.  That is, if any Internet remains at all.

Iranian Saber-Rattling

Recently, Iran has threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping in response to the latest threats of sanctions and restrictions on purchasing Iranian oil.  The strait is fairly narrow, and Iran certainly has the capability to close the straits, as they demonstrated in the 1980s.

This threat, though understandable, is ultimately both immature and foolish.  Approximately 20% of the world's oil supply (and more than a third of Iran's oil exports) passes through these straits; Iran's threatening to blockade them is tantamount to a child saying that if he can't play with his favorite toy, nobody can, and then destroying it in a fit of jealousy.  Such petulance on the part of nation-states, though disconcerting, is nevertheless likely perhaps to the point of inevitability in the face of such dramatic pressure both internally and externally.

Within Iran's own borders, President Ahmadinejad faces growing dissent among the youth and the educated, and has fought with the powerful Ayatollah Khamenei, spiritual leader and head of state in Iran, over opening up to the West.  The Arab Spring uprisings of the last year have only served to underscore this conflict.  Cast in this light, the recent show of force seems more like the aggression a wounded animal might display when cornered.  With few other options, it may be that President Ahmadinejad seeks a distraction for his people, and how better to do that than to provoke a confrontation with the United States?  Even if he backs down, people are already talking, and it could make the regime appear stronger than it truly is; after all, if a leader is willing to challenge the United States militarily, he must be incredibly confident, or incredibly foolish, and nobody wants to believe their own (elected) leaders are fools.

Still, with the recent rescue of Iranian fishermen off the coast of Somalia by the USS Kidd, Iran is losing whatever international good will it may have had, and the louder it screams that the straits will be closed if sanctions are leveled, the more its leadership resembles a pack of imprudent children.  If the regime was unaware that the trawler had been taken by pirates (a reasonable question, since the radios were in working order when it was retaken), it is rather sad for them to continue insisting the world take them seriously-- this is not a third-world state with no navy whatsoever to defend itself; this is a well-armed nation with a professional military unable to secure nearby ocean routes against pirates.  If the Iranian leaders were aware the trawler had been taken, yet unwilling to mount a rescue, that raises enormous questions about how much its people truly matter, and indeed exactly what kind of leaders they are.  It is my opinion that any leader who does not care about the people's security is no kind of leader at all, and should be replaced as soon as possible.  

Even allowing that the regime was unaware of the attack on its people, the recent saber-rattling Iran has engaged in serves as a greater indication than ever of the leaderships' lack of real direction.  Shows of force have long been a part of statecraft, but Iran's insistence on continuing its "civilian" nuclear program (the inspection of which they refuse to allow, and which various intelligence services state is absolutely geared towards producing bomb-grade material) is further undermining its regime.  Economic sanctions against Iran have been passed and more are likely, all because it refuses to give up the program or even allow outsiders in to prove peaceful intent.  Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz cannot end well for any involved parties, and Iran is quickly losing the support of Russia and China-- the two UN Security Council members who have been friendliest in the past-- the wisest choice for Iran's leadership would be to back down from the Strait and open channels with the west (preferably to include permitting UN inspection of the nuclear program), while at least ostensibly giving an open ear to the more moderate voices within.  Sadly, such moderation and wisdom seems ever more unlikely; I can only hope for the sake of the Persian people that there is a change to cooler, more sensible heads in Iranian leadership, and soon.