What's Changing? - Politics

 

Please see below selected recent  - mainly geo - political-related change.

 

See also:

• What's New? - Politics
• What's Changing? - Democracy

 

February 2024

• The Economist warned that, if liberals are too squeamish to defend principles such as free speech and individual rights against the excesses of the left, they will fatally undermine their ability to defend them against the right. However, liberalism’s great strength is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements broke apart the idea that some people counted more than others. Socialist arguments about fairness and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about liberty and efficiency led to freer markets and a limit on state power. Liberalism can adapt to national conservatism, too.

 

January 2024

• The FT tracked leaders’ approval ratings in 20 major democracies, using leading pollsters. In the developed world, in 2024 no leader had a rating above 50 per cent. Only one country (Italy) had seen its leader gain approval in the 2020s. Leaders across the developed world are, at least in part, victims of a long-term decay in national morale. Slower economic growth, rising inequality and a growing feeling that the system is rigged against the average person - all these factors are magnified by the polarising impact of social media.

 

July 2023

• The Economist noted that that those who lean to opposite ends of the political spectrum think differently from each other is obvious, that such differences show up in brain scans is intriguing. Brain scanning is a low-resolution approach to studying neural activity, incapable of seeing how the cells which do the actual thinking are connected to each other. Yet, using this fairly crude technique, groups of researchers now claim to be able to distinguish the neural responses of left- and right-wingers.

 

December 2022

• Further reading:
  • Geopolitics is the biggest threat to globalisation - Financial Times
  • How you treat the ‘non-elite’ is key to beating populism - Financial Times
  • The autocratic world will split before the west does - Financial Times
  • The great disruption has only just begun - Financial Times

 

August 2022

• A Danish political party, which used AI to create its policies, said it wanted to run in the country’s general election in 2023. The Synthetic Party used AI to analyse the manifestos of all Danish non-mainstream political parties across the last 50 years to create a manifesto that it hopes will appeal to the 15% of eligible Danes who didn’t vote in the 2019 election. The project is the creation of digital art collective Computer Lars.

 

June 2022

• According to the FT, the story of our species is mostly the story of disorder, not too much order; of anarchy rather than tyranny. Even now, the state, a recent invention, is patchy and provisional in much of the world. Western liberals should adjust their nightmares accordingly. Worrying about strongmen will continue to make sense as long as e.g. Donald Trump ponders a comeback. But the larger trend of events is towards fragmentation and chaos. The FT adds that perhaps it is because there is no face or voice to put to it that such entropy goes under-discussed, under-dramatised and under-feared, even as it accounts for the greater share of human history.
• Further reading:
  • The Chinese companies trying to buy strategic islands - Curio
  • The world-changing meaning of Putin - Financial Times
  • Welcome to the era of the bossy state - The Economist

 

May 2022

• "Malignant Manicheism" has been described as the most crucial characteristic of populist leaders and their propaganda. It is the notion that the political spectrum is divided into the “good” and the “bad,” according to an analysis of recent elections by the LSE.

 

March 2022

• Since the end of the Cold War, policy makers around the world promoted the globalised economy as a force for peace. If great powers were locked together by trade and financial ties, the thinking goes, they were unlikely to go to war with one another: but those ties are now fraying. Pandemic-caused supply chain disruptions led companies to “reshore” business operations. The war in Ukraine sparked a corporate exodus from Russia and Western executives rethought how they do business with China amid rising geopolitical tensions. The world might now be splitting into economic blocs, warned The New York Times, with countries gravitating “to ideological corners with distinct markets and pools of labour, as they did in much of the 20th century.”

 

August 2021

• Research from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge suggested a ‘deep geographical fracture’ is opening across Europe. On one side lie people who live in a city, and on the other those who live in rural areas. Researchers analysed survey data from across the EU 27 plus Norway, Switzerland, and the UK, and found that ‘distrust and disenchantment’ with democracy rises as people move out of metropolitan centres, and peaks among those who live in the countryside. Those out in the country were more likely to view themselves as conservative, and to hold anti-immigration views, noted New World Same Humans.

 

June 2021

• The Pew Research Center released a survey on the impact of the pandemic on political attitudes across 17 advanced economies. The results were stark. A median of 60 percent say that COVID had increased political polarisation in their countries. Just 34 percent said their nation feels more united. In some cases, perceptions of polarisation have jumped by more than 30 percentage points since the pandemic began.

 

May 2021

• The pandemic intensified the global North-South divide. Wealthy western states started moving towards herd immunity whilst poorer countries waited for vaccines. A small number of countries produced their own immunisations, while those without vaccines were increasingly exposed to diplomatic coercion.

 

January 2021

• GZERO Media pointed to the forthcoming "elections that matter" internationally in 2021:
  • For the first time in 16 years, Germans will elect a government that will not be led by Angela Merkel. The German Chancellor is stepping down, and the race to replace her is heating up. Her centre-right CDU party will select a new head to carry the flag into the election, but non-centrist parties such as the far-right AfD or the leftwing Greens will try to continue to erode the dominance of centrist parties.
  • In Iran, hardliners hostile to rapprochement with the West did well in last year's parliamentary elections, and are the front-runners ahead of a presidential vote in June. That could complicate any push to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
  • In November, Russians will vote in tightly controlled legislative elections that are almost certain to give victory to the ruling United Russia party. But Russia's been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis, and Vladimir Putin's approval ratings are near historical lows (for him, at least)

 

October 2020

• Perceptions of China across most of the developed world have been on a steady decline in recent years - and plummeted this year due to China's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and Beijing's aggressive policies in Hong Kong, the South China Sea Sea, and Xinjiang. In a recent Pew survey, a majority of respondents in a group of 14 countries had an unfavourable opinion of China, and their opinion was more negative than a year ago. Australians' disapproval of China jumped 24 points since 2019, while Americans' increased 13 points amid growing US-China political tensions.

 

May 2020

• Maps and timelines of constant forces, like conquest and religion, and also of frailer forces like democracy, encapsulate the complexity of changing political environments.

 

February 2020

• Over 2,000 fighters affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State – groups traditionally at war with each other in the Middle East – have joined forces to take control of vast swaths of territory in West Africa, according to a report by the US military. Fears that increasing instability in the region could become a full-blown "global crisis" come as the Trump administration weighed plans for a US troop drawdown in West Africa.

 

December 2019

• In recent decades, political party systems have fragmented and electoral volatility has increased. The number of parties represented in parliaments across e.g. Europe has grown and the formerly dominant mainstream parties have seen their support base collapse, forcing parties into often uncomfortable and unstable coalitions. Politicians and commentators talk of such scenarios in often apocalyptic terms and associate it with political instability and policy paralysis. Yet Chatham House believes that they shouldn’t. Instead they should focus their energy on making these increasingly competitive political markets work. The Netherlands is frequently held up as a prime example of this process, which is therefore sometimes referred to as ‘Dutchification’. Its highly proportional political system has created the opportunity for new parties and specific interest groups to win parliamentary representation, ranging from an animal rights party and a party catering specifically to the interests of the elderly.

 

June 2019

• In the 2018 Ipsos MORI Veracity Index, only 19% of a representative sample of a 1001 British adults trusts politicians to tell the truth. (The one group who scored lower were advertising executives with 16% while nurses, in contrast scored, 96%.) What is puzzling, noted the Institute for Arts and Ideas, is that politicians, especially those in democratic societies who need to win elections to gain and retain power and who are subject to continual scrutiny by a free press, repeatedly act in ways that they know will erode their likeability, question their moral probity, and diminish our trust in them.

 

May 2019

• A Chatham House debate assessed contemporary power shifts in the international world order, focusing on the extent to which Asia may be rising at the expense of the traditional powers of the West, and asked whether China and the US find a way to peacefully co-exist, or whether we should conclude that today’s world is too complex and interdependent to be seen through the lens of a zero-sum contest. 

 

April 2019

• The Australian Futures Project created The Perfect Candidate: a virtual politician whose views exactly represent the issues Australians care the most about at a local level. The initiative was built around the perspectives of 125,000 Australians, whom a research firm questioned on their top three issues of concern over the course of 30 months. On its website, The Perfect Candidate’s views were compared to what the political parties in Australia actually prioritised. Citizens could quickly see to what degree the real politicians were aligned. The project’s goal was to boost transparency between political groups and their constituents, give Australians insights on their fellow citizens, and increase the focus on long-term solutions.

 

January 2019

• McKinsey's detailed brief on the state of globalisation argued that the centre of gravity is moving South and East; as physical trade retrenches, data flows increase and technology disruption accelerates. 

 

December 2018

• Future Politics examined how the march of technology will continue to transform society and politics, Author Jamie Susskind noted that the digital future need not be as dystopian as George Orwell envisioned. Although Susskind predicts an age of mass unemployment as robots replace human workers, he also believes that automation-led efficiencies will create enough prosperity for governments to expand social safety nets.
• Further reading: 
  • Europe will never be a top-tier geopolitical power - FT
  • The G20 turns ten: what’s past is prologue - Bruegel

 

November 2018

• Few issues in global affairs are as pressing today as the question of whether the world's two largest economies - the US and China - can reconcile what appear to be increasingly divergent national interests. GZEROMedia quoted one seasoned observer not given to hyperbole – their failure to do so would "destroy hope for the world order".

 

October 2018

• One authoritative study claimed that the Arctic shipping route won’t be economically viable for significant ship traffic until 2035. However, GZEROMedia notes that. particularly in the world of long-term investment in transport, that’s not as far off as it sounds. We’re already as close to 2035 as to 2001.
• More broadly, the melting ice cap will make it possible to extract vast quantities of the oil, gas, and minerals thought to lie beneath the Arctic seabed. That will only intensify the competition for territorial claims among Arctic powers - the US, Russia, Canada, and the Scandinavians. Thus far, Russia has made the biggest claim by arguing that its continental shelf extends deep into the Arctic Circle and now, adds GZEROMedia, China will want a piece of the action.
• In Navigating geopolitical risk, Raconteur argued that the correlation between politics and business sentiment shows that the two are intrinsically linked. The rise of pro-business parties, public referendum or rising cross-border tensions can impact bottom lines across the world and must be factored into the decision-making process. But navigating and mitigating geopolitical risk can be a tricky task for leaders to master.

 

September 2018

• As world powers renegotiate economic, military and diplomatic fault lines, and new technologies disrupt established societal and political norms, the rules based international system of governance appears to be in a state of flux, warned Chatham House. Global developments seem increasingly difficult to predict and world leaders can no longer rely on the same. principles, conventions and institutions that have governed international relations for decades.
• Once politics was about left and right, argued the Institute of Art and Ideas, but following Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of other populist anti-immigration leaders in Europe, many argue politics has now become tribal - about open versus closed borders, nowheres versus somewheres, global versus local.
• GZEROMedia sees AsiaPacific as the most important geopolitical region in the world, the Asia Pacific, and sees the Trump administration's strategy as a rebrand befitting a salesman turned president, depending on closer relations between the US and India and India playing a larger role throughout Asia.
• Quartz noted that as China’s sphere of influence reaches west into Africa; the economies of India and southeast Asia continue to grow; and India develops its “look east” policy in the wider "Indo-Pacific", the area touching these two oceans forms “a single strategic system,” a professor at Australian National University and “Indo-Pacific” advocate, argues in The American Interest. 
• Twitter's impact on the way our politics works is profound and disturbing, warned Prospect. Twitter has become a perfect tool for populists and an incubator for aspiring despotsl it is now embedded in Westminster’s political culture, with pernicious consequences that are only just becoming clear, the magazine believes.
• The Venta Maersk ship arrived in St Petersburg after a month at sea. Specially strengthened, it is the first container ship to venture into the Russian Arctic, where shipping lanes have been opened by the melting of the ice-sheets. For Russia, this is particularly important. The Northern Sea Route, the most-trafficked Arctic shipping lane, passes through its waters. Its usage is likely to grow. 
• Further reading: 
  • China is reshaping the international order - FT
  • Uncertain economic and geopolitical futures - Shaping Tomorrow

 

August 2018

• The unprecedented technological transformation taking place today - a period of exponential change labelled the Fourth Industrial Revolution - is not isolated from geopolitical affairs, argued The World Economic Forum (WEF). Indeed, geopolitical competition, especially among the world’s powers, is a major driver of technological disruption; in turn, this disruption is affecting the geopolitical landscape.
• China's “Belt and Road Initiative” involves nearly 70 countries with 65 per cent of the world’s population. The unprecedented development strategy requires up to a US$900 billion investment each year for infrastructure construction, some in areas with high political, economic or environmental risks.

 

July 2018

• In many countries, noted GZEROMedia, historical divisions between right and left have given way to a new distinction between mainstream and populist voters—those who either trust or distrust ruling elites. As voters’ ideologies have shifted, new parties have emerged to channel their interests and discontents, often leading to unexpected election results and unstable governments. 
• Emerging markets are once again in the headlines, noted Chatham House. The IMF has announced a $50 billion Standby Agreement for Argentina, the Turkish lira is precarious and investors are unnerved by forthcoming elections in Brazil and Mexico. Against the backdrop of a strengthening dollar and rising interest rates in the US, the question is whether it is likely that there will be a new round of crises in emerging markets or whether the conditions are fundamentally different today from those in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Few global issues have taken on more current importance than the future of the postwar, rule-based international order, noted Rand, adding that the roots of the order run back to the mid-1940s, when U.S. officials concluded that the United States should work to shape the postwar settlement in more structured, collaborative and rule-bound ways. The resulting global institutions, processes, habits, rules, and norms inspired the rise of regional organisations and became what we now know as the postwar international order. Today, however, warned Rand, that order is under unprecedented strain, both within the societies of its leading members and from revisionist countries determined to change some aspects of how the order functions.

 

June 2018

• Created in the 1970s, the Group of Seven (G7) has become increasingly irrelevant in a world of new emerging powers, claimed Chatham House. An institution that claims to represent the main democratic economies but excludes the likes of Brazil and India cannot possibly claim the legitimacy required to exercise global leadership.
• One of the most significant challenges to the strength of the liberal world order is the increasing influence and power of ambitious nations that reject aspects of the post-Cold War consensus. Notably, Iran, Russia and China have each at times used their clout to push back against Western influence in their regions. Chatham House examined the ways in which these three could potentially shape a new world order in the years to come, and asked: what is the current status of cooperation between these three nations, what opportunities are there in energy, trade and security to bring Iran, Russia and China together and crucially, what obstacles exist to these developing alliances?

 

May 2018

• Geopolitical risks threaten growth, warned the EIU. 2018 will continue to be characterised by tightening monetary policy and credit conditions, increasing risks to global trade, and deeper geopolitical concerns in the Middle East.

 

April 2018

• Nearly 40 percent of Brazilians would now back a military coup in their country to fight crime and corruption, according to a recent study by Vanderbilt University. 
• India’s new military budget of $62 billion, unveiled in February, passes an important milestone - for the first time since gaining independence in 1947, India now spends more on defence than its former colonial power in the UK. Globally only America, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia have higher defence budgets than India today.
• Explaining that no-one now runs the world, a leading geo-strategist claimed that there is a clear trend towards the collapsing power of nation-states, and the rise of network power from NGOs, to corporations, crime rings and terrorists.

Sources: GZEROMedia