A year ago, I was worrying about the implications of the Euro crisis for UN operations:

Despite the financial crisis, the UN’s peacekeeping budget — running at between $7 billion and $8 billion a year — has not yet faced drastic cuts. The Obama Administration has made a point of paying its dues (now 27% of the total) on time, compensating for Bush-era arrears.

However, other big financial contributors — especially members of the European Union, who cover 40% of the costs combined — are looking for cuts as part of broader spending reductions.

In June [2010], Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping was increasingly difficult to manage.”

You can find a longer version of this argument in a paper I wrote for ZIF, the German peacekeeping center, in August 2010.  Fourteen months later, my gloomy predictions are being vindicated.  Colum Lynch published a lengthy piece yesterday  on the FP website headlined “U.S. and Europe fight over cuts in peacekeeping”:

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fended off a push last month by European governments to press to consider cuts next year in U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Liberia, which costs upwards of $525 million a year, more than Liberia’s $459 million annual national budget. Rice has also resisted calls from other European governments, like Britain and France, to consider deeper cuts in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Haiti and in Sudan.

France and Britain are required to pay, respectively, 7.5 percent and 8.16 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping costs.

U.S. officials say that peacekeeping missions must be adequately funded to ensure their success, and that European governments, who each pay a far smaller share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget, are in some instances motivated by a desire to shift funding to their own “pet” missions, not the commitment to fiscal discipline that they claim.

“There is no country that has a greater interest in the economies, effectiveness, and efficiencies of U.N. peacekeeping missions [than the United States]. We pay 27 percent of the bill while the Europeans pay a smaller percentage,” Rice said in an interview with Turtle Bay. “For them to be holier than thou is a bit rich, to say the least.”

I’d like to say “I told you so”, though that’s not super-helpful…

It turns out that my last post on the Security Council and Syria was wrong.

Exceptionally wrong, in fact.

Rather than acquiesce to a resolution condemning the Syrian government for repressing its people, China and Russia used their vetoes.  And rather than support the EU-drafted resolution (as had seemed increasingly likely) Brazil, India and South Africa abstained.

This is a big set-back for the EU and the Americans, who were firmly behind the European initiative.  It’s a big win for Russia, which would have been embarrassed if China had even abstained.  And it’s a grim moment for Brasilia, Delhi and Pretoria, who have missed the chance to carve out a distinctive position in the Council on Syria, and opted to avoid a confrontation.  This was a moment the “IBSA” countries  could have seized to show why they deserved more respect at the UN.  They missed it.

More analysis tomorrow.  For now, congratulations to Gabon and Nigeria for voting for the resolution, refuting the claim that all developing countries are anti-interventionist.

It’s obvious that the Asia-Pacific will dominate American strategic thought for the foreseeable future.  Today an Obama administration official confirmed just that:

The Obama administration is “rebalancing” U.S. foreign policy by enacting a “turn to Asia,” a senior State Department official said Tuesday.  “As the long shadow of 9/11 recedes, we are witnessing the re-emergence of the Asia-Pacific as a key theater of global politics and economics,” Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of State, told a House panel.

What does this mean for America’s NATO allies?  This is a topic I addressed briefly in an op-ed for the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), which has launched an enjoyable online debate about transatlantic cooperation:

Since the Iraq war peaked, US strategic debate has increasingly shifted away from counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations to securing the Asia-Pacific. This has involved diplomatic outreach to India and South-East Asia and a military focus on China’s growing capabilities and its threat to US vessels in the western Pacific.

The European security debate is also evolving, but it is driven by financial concerns. While China’s rise will frame American security policy for years ahead – even in the event of a major terrorist attack – no comparable challenge shapes European worldviews. Russia’s uneven resurgence worries many EU and NATO members, but Moscow’s ambitions centre on energy deals and it does not present a true strategic game-changer. Instead, the need for austerity dominates European thinking.

Do European military forces  have any role to play in Asian-Pacific affairs?  In another contribution to the EUISS debate, Daniel Keohane argues that Europe won’t look far beyond its periphery, and he doesn’t find this surprising:

Put simply, the US is an Asian power, but the Europeans are not. This is not new. During the Cold war, France and Britain carried out a military operation in the Suez Canal, but they did not join the Americans in Vietnam.

Indeed, future historians may conclude that Afghanistan was the exception that proved this post-World War II rule. Most Europeans went to Afghanistan for the sake of their close relationship with the United States, not because it was an existential threat to their security. That unhappy experience makes it very unlikely that Europeans would follow Americans on future military operations beyond Europe’s neighbourhood.

Richard Gowan, therefore, is right about the emerging strategic divergence between Europeans and Americans. But for Europeans the issue is not so much that the Pentagon cares more about Asia; it is that Washington cares much less about Europe.

There are lots of other contributions to the EUISS debate, and they’re all worth a look.  But most of them don’t really address the problem of Europe’s (ir)relevance in the Pacific theater.  Quite a few contributors are still focused on the need for better Euro-American cooperation in the European theater instead, and  all (including Daniel and me) recognize that financial concerns will affect both European and American security policy very deeply.  Nonetheless, I wonder whether the European Security community – and U.S. commentators focused on Europe – have really grappled with the implications of a shift from an Atlantic-centered to a post-Atlantic security order…

Trying to navigate around the special security cordon for the UN General Assembly last week, I got stuck behind a fellow with closely-cropped hair, a massive American flag and a tee-shirt with “THE UN SUCKS” written on it by hand.  That got me thinking, and I have summarized my thoughts in a new op-ed for E!Sharp:

Quite a few U.S. and European officials might have liked to march with the “UN SUCKS” guy. The Palestine debate appeared to confirm that UN diplomacy is weighted against Western interests.

Developing countries backed the Palestinians. The Obama administration stuck with Israel, but was vilified at home for not heading off the issue altogether. The Europeans, failing to declare a single position in advance, looked conciliatory but rather confused.

So is it finally time to give up on the UN?  I don’t think so…

China and Russia – the West’s usual foes in the Security Council – have looked uneasy. Although the two powers have a reputation for defending sovereignty and opposing Western interventionism, both proved ready to compromise on these principles in 2011.

China approved tough measures to deal with the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire and let the U.S., France and Britain have their way over Libya. In the Libyan case in particular, Beijing calculated that grand-standing against the West would do its economic interests harm.

Russia, generally more pugilistic, seemed weak. It tried to defend the defeated Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo from Western pressure, but eventually backed down. It failed to follow through on threats to block any UN action over Libya. When they lack China’s support, the Russians appear to be an increasingly hollow power in the Security Council.

China and Russia have united in defence of the Syrian regime, heading off even the mildest Western resolutions condemning Assad’s crackdown on protestors. Brazil, India and South Africa – all holding temporary seats on the Security Council – followed along.

Yet in August, increasingly concerned for their international image, the Brazilians and Indians fixed a compromise deal to condemn Syria’s behavior. The agreed text was still extraordinarily mild. Yet the appearance of cracks among the non-Western powers holds out the possibility, however uncertain, that the Europeans and U.S. may be able to pull together unexpected coalitions of allies to push for action through the UN in future crises.

The problem, as the op-ed goes on to say, is that both the U.S. and EU have internal problems (looming elections in one case, a lack of political cohesion and the Euro crisis in the other) that may well prevent them from seizing this moment.

Nonetheless, a lot of recent coverage of UN affairs has been simplistic, with pundits applying a simple “with us or against us” test to countries like India, and concluding that they will be in the “against” column forever.  The art of diplomacy is a bit more complicated that, and there are potential openings to reshape the UN (if gradually).

For a more detailed mapping of those openings, check out my latest report with Franziska Brantner on the UN and human rights for ECFR, published last week.

EU President Herman Van Rompuy has managed to pull off a nice little joke by giving Henry Kissinger his phone number.  Get it?

Readers of academic journal Addiction will have become rampant eurosceptics after perusing a recent article by Rebecca Gordon and Peter Anderson entitled “Science and alcohol policy: a case study of the EU Strategy on Alcohol”.   I didn’t know that the EU had a strategy on booze, but the bloc has a habit of launching “strategies” with variable amounts of substance.  In this case, the EU Council asked the European Commission to devise a strategy on reducing alcohol-related harm.  The Commission published a Communication on the subject in 2006.  Is it any good?

Although the Communication acknowledges and supports existing interventions which have high evidence for effectiveness, such as enforcing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits for drivers, it extensively promotes other interventions which have been shown to be ineffective; for example, recommending education and persuasion strategies as a measure across all its five priority areas.

In other words, dear readers, the Commission is boosting policies that don’t work.

Measures to influence price are mentioned only once in relation to sales in drinking venues limiting two-for-one drinks offers. Measures to control physical availability are mentioned infrequently.

It doesn’t really sound like the Commission’s heart was in it…

It also focuses its efforts more on mapping member state actions and coordinating knowledge exchange than on providing concrete recommendations for action or developing Europe-wide policy measures. This may be a compromise between the rights of Member States to develop national policy and legislation and the obligation of the European Union as a collaborative body to protect health.

So this is all about sovereignty and subsidiarity?  Not quite…

Furthermore, it has been suggested that the European Union’s roots as a trading block emphasizes collaboration with industry stakeholders and this influences the ability to prioritize health over trade considerations.

Who might these powerful “industry stakeholders” be?  I have a faint idea, as I once had a brush with them myself.   Late last year, I co-authored a piece in the European Voice with Sushant K. Singh on the EU’s relations with India.  We noted that efforts to sign off on an EU-India free trade agreement had been held up by disputes over liquor tariffs, and expressed surprise that a potentially important strategic relationship was being complicated by the price of booze.  Soon afterwards, a representative of the European Spirits Organisation wrote a sniffy letter to the European Voice arguing that “that spirits are the EU’s most important agri-food export (worth €5.7 billion in 2009).”

I am told that EU-China relations are similarly complicated by the interventions of the, er, liquid lobbyists in Brussels on liquor tariff issues.    I’m all for boosting agri-food exports, of course.  But one would think that the EU could at least set aside “trade considerations” when it comes to stopping its citizens drinking themselves to death.

So, it’s all over in Libya.  Or is it?  I tend to concur with Stephen Walt’s nervous take:

The danger is that we will have another “Mission Accomplished” moment, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, President Obama, and their various pro-intervention advisors give each other a lot of high-fives, utter solemn words about having vindicated the new “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, and then turn to some new set of problems while Libya deteriorates. And as an anonymous “senior American military officer” told the New York Times: “The leaders I’ve talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out.”

What is to be done?  I have published a short post over on the ECFR blog, arguing that it’s not clear that the Libyan rebels can restore stability and normality on their own:

Luckily, outside help is forthcoming.  The next weeks will see international officials (and no doubt a lot of spooks) hurry to Tripoli with offers of assistance. Months ago, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a Special Adviser on Post-Conflict Planning on Libya to prepare for this moment.  The adviser, Ian Martin (who I previously had the privilege of working with on a review of the UN’s political missions) has had time to make detailed preparations. While European governments and EU officials will want to play a part in reconstructing Libya, the UN is best-placed to coordinate the overall international effort.

But the next few weeks may well be chaotic, with regime die-hards and criminal opportunists on the loose, and it will be necessary to ensure that UN and other civilian officials are sufficiently well-protected to do their job properly. It’s unlikely that Libya will turn into another Iraq, but it’s certainly conceivable that someone might try to repeat the attack on the UN’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003 that killed its chief Sergio Viera de Mello.

In this context, the EU could help Libya’s transition to stability by resurrecting a proposal that failed to work out earlier this year. Back in April, the EU Council approved an EU military mission (EUFOR Libya) to help get humanitarian aid into Libya if UN aid officials requested help. As I pointed out in an op-ed in June, the proposal wasn’t very well thought-out, and the mission never got off the ground.

But now the idea’s time may have come. If the EU Council wants to help speed up the Libyan transition, it should declare its willingness to offer one or two of the EU’s Battle Groups to protect and assist UN and other civilian officials for up to three months.  This wouldn’t be full-scale peacekeeping, but a narrower job of guarding compounds and convoys and providing secure communications while Libya moves towards stability.

What happens after that?  It’s worth checking out this new piece by Daniel Serwer on stabilizing Libya and (with apologies for the immoderate self-advertising) a piece that I wrote with Bruce Jones and Jake Sherman on the same topic back in April.  Long-time hawk Max Boot also deserves credit for persistently raising the subject but I find his solution - a big Western operation comparable to that in Kosovo in 1999 - incredible.

Here’s a rather odd bit of UN-bashing from last Friday:

The United Nations Security Council is looking into forming a new environmental peacekeeping force to deal with potential conflicts caused by so-called “global warming.”

Er, really?

The “green police,” as some are calling it, would wear green helmets, rather than the blue ones currently worn by U.N. forces. James Taylor is senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a non-profit group that works to discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to public policy problems. He speculates on how seriously this should be taken.

“Anytime that somebody is talking about raising a standing army, giving it weapons, militarizing the world … in a way that hasn’t been the case before, I don’t find that a laughing matter at all,” he explains. “And given the extremism of the environmental activists here in the United States and around the globe, that gives me great cause for concern, considering that the enemy that they say is destroying the planet is Western civilization and, more specifically, free-market nations such as the United States.”

Where is all this coming from?  It’s true that the Security Council recently held a contentious debate on climate change, but I can say with 100% confidence that there was no talk of a standing army.  But the Heartlanders aren’t just dreaming this up.  Instead, their website points us to this story from the Guardian:

A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.  Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.

There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources. [Emphasis added.]

Hm, so this is a lefty fantasy as well as a right-wing one.  What is the Guardian’s source for the claim?  Answer: an op-ed over at the Huffington Post by Germany’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Peter Wittig.  After offering a rather effective overview of the the security challenges deriving from climate change, Amb. Wittig notes that “there are governments that — in allusion to the ‘blue-helmet’ UN peacekeepers — are already calling for ‘green-helmets to close down coal-mines.’”

As far-fetched as the idea of “green-helmets” might sound, consider the tasks that the United Nations peacekeepers already perform today — e.g. emergency aid, development and recovery, state — and peacebuilding. Repainting blue helmets into green might be a strong signal — but would dealing with the consequences of climate change — say in precarious regions — be really very different from the tasks the blue helmets already perform today?

I’ve made a brief effort to track down the origin of the “green-helmets to close down coal-mines” quotation, but failed.  Perhaps a better-informed reader can enlighten me.  However, a close reading of Amb. Wittig’s op-ed reveals that he patently does not want to (i) forcibly shut any mines; (ii) create a green-helmeted environmental peace army; or (iii) destroy the free market or indeed the West.  In fact, he specifically writes that “it is too early to seriously think about Council action on climate change.”

The Guardian story took the Ambassador’s allusion and converted it into an easy and misleading headline.  The Heartland Institute simply swooped on the Guardian’s tale and spiced it up a little.  And so a new anti-UN myth has been born.

It’s clearly the season to be thinking about whether our current levels of aid spending are politically sustainable.  As Alex highlights in his excellent post below, new polling figures from Chatham House suggest that two-thirds of the British public think the UK shells out too much in  aid (although I concur with Alex’s assumption that few people track the real level of spending).  And as I note in a new commentary piece over on the ECFR site, this fits in with other signs of a looming attack on aid in Europe:

Some European governments, notably the UK, and the European Commission have done their best to uphold their aid pledges since the financial crisis struck. But last year the new coalition government in the Netherlands announced its intention to cut development spending by €400 million in 2011, with more reductions to follow. Opinion polls suggested that voters approved. Research for ECFR’s European Foreign Policy Scorecard found that France had cut its donations to UN humanitarian agencies by around 20% in 2009 and 2010. This week, the human impact of such economising was brought home as Oxfam and other NGOs revealed that European donors including France and Germany had pledged miniscule sums of aid to address the drought in East Africa.

These are, aid experts worry, the initial signs of a deeper shift in Europe’s commitments to helping the poor and vulnerable beyond its borders. Over the last decade, it has become a standard defence of the EU to note that whatever the bloc’s military and diplomatic weaknesses, it is at least the world’s biggest source of international aid. But it hardly requires a mystical ability to see the future to predict that as EU members grapple with debt and domestic priorities, foreign aid budgets will be under recurrent pressure.

Like it or not, I think that it is pretty inevitable that we will see a period of continued retrenchment by European donors in the years ahead (check out the full ECFR piece to find out why). The question is whether this will be smart retrenchment – with governments, NGOs and international organizations actually working out how to introduce sensible reductions, evaluate what works, etc. – or a poorly-coordinated set of budget cuts justified by vague appeals to “the need for austerity”.

There are lots of reasons to expect the latter.  It’s hard to instigate serious discussions about retrenchment because (i) aid’s opponents have lots of easy populist arguments about how “aid never works”; and (ii) aid’s defenders naturally adopt maximalist positions when faced with these attacks.  If you back down from the (now sadly hard-to-sustain) stance that the developed economies should continue to aim to spend 0.7% of GNI on development aid, it’s hard to know where the retreat will end…

Yesterday’s El País carried what to me was an extraordinary story about repossessions of Spanish homes. The recession has seen the number of repossessions in Spain rising to 100,000 per year, but far from suffering for making dumb loans, the country’s mortgage laws allow banks to profit from their clients’ failure to pay.

Repossession policy dictates that if a propert has to be handed over to a bank because its owner cannot keep up with mortgage payments, the bank must endeavour to sell it at auction, and use the proceeds to reduce the amount owed. In the current, stagnant environment, however, nobody is buying, even at repossession auctions, and much of what is on offer goes unsold. Such an eventuality does not perturb the banks, however – indeed, they are probably delighted not to sell – for in the event that a property fails to attract a buyer at auction, the bank gets to keep it for 50% of what it is adjudged to be worth.

Let us say, therefore, that someone has taken out a €100,000 mortgage on a house which at the time the bank judged to be worth €100,000 (many banks, of course, made 100% loans during the boom), and that after paying, say, €10,000 plus interest of that loan the debtor loses his job – not uncommon in a country with 23% unemployment – and can no longer make his monthly payments. The debtor now owes €90,000. The bank tries to sell the house at auction, with a reserve of €75,000 (the Bank of Spain says official house prices have fallen 17%, and the bank knocks off a bit extra to make it look like it is keen to sell). Nobody is interested. The house goes unsold. The bank acquires the house for €41,500 (50% of the official value of €83,000), and the debtor, who is now homeless and jobless, still owes it €48,500, plus interest.

It won’t have escaped your notice that this is a remarkably good deal for the bank. First, it received €10,000 plus plenty of interest – let’s estimate a further €10,000 – from the hapless debtor before he lost his job. Second, it is still owed nearly €50,000 plus interest. And third, it has acquired a house worth perhaps €60,000 (if we ignore the overoptimistic official figures) for just over $40,000. Even if the debtor now does the sensible thing and tells the bank where it can put the rest of the debt, therefore, the bank will have lost just 20% of the loan. Most debtors, however, will not be so bold, and will attempt to pay back the rest of the loan for fear of losing their hard-won creditworthiness. In the latter cases, the bank will have made a profit on the original €100,000 loan of €20,000 plus several additional tens of thousands in interest, so unless significantly more than half of debtors tell the bank where to go it cannot lose on these deals.

Of course, the above example is theoretical and the actual figures are likely to vary somewhat – the bank might sell the house for €70,000, adding another ten grand to its haul, and there are costs of selling to account for too. But unless I have miscalculated it does not seem too far-fetched. Under the current policy, banks benefit by making bad loans. Since most people will try to pay back the loan even though they no longer own their property, banks can easily withstand a few bad debtors, and it is not surprising in an industry where profit rules that their vetting policy is less than rigorous. A couple of commentators in the El País article recommend raising the 50% of the value at which the bank acquires the property to 70% – this would seem a bare minimum to avoid the moral hazard created by the current law. The protesters in the 15-M movement rightly blame the banks for causing the housing crisis, but where policy puts them in a no-lose situation it is inevitable that many will take advantage.

And this week’s prize for healthy democratic debate goes to… Kazakhstan!

A Kazakh weekly newspaper is facing calls for its closure over a crossword clue critics say was insulting to the Kazakh nation, RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service reports.

The row is over a crossword in the May 26 issue of the Russian-language “Stepnoi Mayak” (Steppe Lighthouse) newspaper in the northern city of Kokshetau.

The offending clue asked, “Name the house of a Kazakh street bum.” The answer was given as “yurt,” the traditional home of the nomadic peoples of Eurasia, including Kazakhs.

The crossword sparked a series of protests in Kokshetau and other Kazakh cities.

The chairman of the Bolashaq (Future) movement, Dauren Babamurat, told RFE/RL that the newspaper should be closed as it compared Kazakhs with street bums. Babamurat added that such a harsh punishment would be a lesson for other newspapers in Russian in Kazakhstan.

Gideon Rachman’s FT column today is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the outlook for the Eurozone.

Right now, the conventional wisdom is that Eurozone policymakers face a choice: either the Eurozone will gradually fall apart, or they need to get their act together and pool more sovereignty. It was always illusory to suppose that you could have a currency union in which monetary policy was centralised but fiscal policy was not, so the argument goes – so if policymakers want to avert disintegration, then they need to go further and deeper on unifying Europe, through even greater institutional centralisation.

But Rachman’s having none of it:

Those who argue that “political union” is the solution to the current crisis seem to believe that Europe’s problem is institutional … This is a profound misdiagnosis of the crisis. The real problem is political and cultural. There is not a strong enough common political identity in Europe to support the single currency. That is why German, Dutch and Finnish voters are revolting against the idea of bailing out Greece again – while Greeks riot against what they see as a new colonialism imposed from Brussels and Frankfurt.

To argue that even deeper political integration is the solution to this mess, is like recommending that a man with alcohol poisoning should treat himself with a more powerful brand of vodka.

And while he observes that Joschka Fischer was unrepentant at a recent seminar about policy elites having driven the European project (“it’s called leadership”), he notes that

Such leadership is all very well, if it is vindicated by events. However, if elite decisions go wrong, they create a backlash – which is exactly what is happening in Europe now. German voters were told repeatedly that the euro would be a stable currency and that they would not have to bail out southern Europe. They now feel betrayed and angry. Greek, Irish, Spanish and Portuguese voters were told repeatedly that the euro was the route to wealth on a par with that of northern Europe. They now associate the single currency with lost jobs, falling wages and slashed pensions. They too feel betrayed and angry.

And so, he concludes, “a single currency that was meant to bring Europeans together is instead driving them apart”. Fiscal redistribution is hard enough even within long-established nation states, he observes (think of northern and southern Italy) – for a quasi-state that isn’t a nation, forget it. So what happens now? One of two things, he reckons. Eurozone leaders might manage to patch things up (and I struggle to see how, without the institutional integration that he opposes). Or weaker members of the Eurozone could start to leave. That’s what Martin Wolf reckoned at INET, too.

The versatility of modern diplomats never ceases to amaze…

Following a reported global rise in interest in black metal, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry has begun providing diplomats on foreign service missions with an introduction to the genre – specifically ‘True Norwegian Black Metal’, to give it its official term.

Louder Than War reports that Kjersti Sommerset, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Centre Of Excellence, told newspaper Dagens Næringsliv: “We now have 106 foreign service missions and they get many enquiries from people who want information about Norwegian black metal as a phenomenon. In the training program, we have a large cultural programme in order to give the trainees a good understanding of Norwegian culture and the cultural industry. Black metal is clearly a part of this ‘global awakening’”.

I am not sure if the gentleman pictured above, from a series of pictures of Norwegian black metal artistes, has considered a career in diplomacy. But if the screaming and Satanism wears thin, his Mum will be glad to know he’s got a Plan B.

A Tea Party group is running a summer camp that will use ‘fun, hands-on activities’ to teach kids what the United States is really about. Here’s one of the sessions:

Starting in an austere room where they are made to sit quietly, symbolizing Europe, the children will pass through an obstacle course to arrive at a brightly decorated party room (the New World).

Red-white-and-blue confetti will be thrown. But afterward the kids will have to clean up the confetti, learning that with freedom comes responsibility.

This is not from the Onion.

Poor old Europe. Once upon a time it led the global charge on climate change – but these days, it looks rather isolated, what with its public humiliation at Copenhagen (it wasn’t even in the room for the top-level bargaining between Obama and emerging economy leaders) and the fact that it’s pretty much the only developed economy that still wants to see Kyoto extended for another 5 year commitment period.

So how should it play the Durban climate summit at the end of this year? That’s the subject of a new E3G briefing published yesterday, which is worth a read. As Nick Mabey observes in it, the outlook for the summit isn’t altogether encouraging: there’s no political space for a comprehensive, binding deal to limit warming to 2° Celsius; most major emitters will see leadership transitions next year, so no serious debate on raising ambition can start before 2013; and “Europe is characteristically dithering over the choices involved, and is therefore failing to shape the global political and policy environment”.

Europe’s central decision, Nick argues, is whether or not to sign up for Kyoto 2.0 despite the fact that it would be ploughing a lonely furrow in doing so. He makes a persuasive case for it to bite the bullet and do so, arguing that:

- Doing so wouldn’t require Europe to make any additional emissions reductions to those it’s already committed to with its domestic 2020 target (and in any case high global oil prices do a lot of the heavy lifting on emissions reductions even before policymakers lift a finger);

- If Europe did drop Kyoto, it would be seen as the “final climate betrayal” by the developing world; would mean that the EU had wasted €40bn buying international carbon credits; and would leave OPEC and US climate sceptics “sitting in quiet satisfaction at the irony of seeing Europe take the blame for destroying the only legally binding set of global climate rules”; and above all, because

Europe needs Kyoto because it defines the type of climate regime that can actually deliver European security. Europe needs Kyoto because it provides the core around which we can build a coalition of countries to support an effective 2°C climate regime. Europe needs Kyoto because otherwise it walks naked into the negotiating chamber, having thrown away its best levers to bring the US and China into line

Kyoto contains the critical architecture needed to for an effective global climate regime. Kyoto contains all the necessary elements for monitoring, compliance, finance, technical cooperation and economic efficiency. There is no magic institutional structure waiting to be discovered that isn’t already contained inside – or is compatible with – a reformed version of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto architecture took years to negotiate, refine and ratify. There is no time left to start from scratch again. Whatever the often shrill rhetoric from across the Atlantic, the problem many countries have with Kyoto is not because it is flawed, but because it holds them to account in delivering real greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

The only way to constrain global temperatures to around 2°C is through the type of “top down“ structure agreed at Kyoto, where governments negotiate against an overall ambition of emissions reductions and apportion effort to meet a global goal. 

I think Nick is a hundred per cent right in this analysis (even though he and I differ about what should happen beyond Kyoto). A top-down approach is essential on climate policy - Nick also notes that “even an optimistic reading of the Copenhagen pledges gives an even chance of exceeding 3.5-4° C by the middle of the century” - and it would be catastrophic if the EU backed away from it now.

The only part of Nick’s argument I’m hesitant about is his suggestion that,

Europe must make its recommitment to Kyoto conditional on participation by key developed countries such as Australia. Major developing countries must signal that they are committed to an evolving regime that eventually binds everyone. If Europe cannot get all of this at Durban it should make its participation in a second commitment period conditional, for example, on a parallel comprehensive agreement being in place by 2015.

In order for that conditionality to be credible, though, other countries must really believe that Europe will be willing to walk if its conditions aren’t met. I wonder whether other countries will judge that Europe has the balls to do that, though: it has never shown such a steely edge in the past, on climate or any other foreign policy issue. And as Nick argues so persuasively in the first part of his paper, Europe needs Kyoto. That’s a point that won’t be lost on other major emitters looking to free ride.

As ever, though, I think it’s shocks – climate impacts, oil and food spikes and others besides – that will change the game and open up political space (see this post on five theories of change on global climate politics). In that sense, it’s essential that at least one major emitter is ready to make use of those shocks when they arise, and say: if the world is now serious about climate change, then this is what it will take to solve it. So even if Europe’s conditionality threat isn’t altogether credible, Nick’s argument is still the right one.