Europe’s Economies Move Sideways In June

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The eurozone economies moved sideways in June, with the flash reading on the composite purchasing managers index (which covers both industry and services) for the 16 nation euro area rising to 44.4, fractionally above the 44 registered in May. So we are just where we were before, contracting more slowly than in Q1, but still contracting, and the fiscal bullet is now almost spent.

Not without importance was that the reading came in significantly weaker than the consensus expectation for a sharp increase to 45.3. So the market *has* been getting ahead of itself.

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Is something stirring in Belarus?

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It’s probably getting lost with so much other news but it’s been an interesting few weeks for Belarus.  For a country that always seemed just a WMD allegation from being another axis of evil country under George Bush, perhaps the experience of more constructive interrnational relations is a bit disorienting.  Yet here we have the IMF actually praising the country’s economic management and specifically its move to a more flexible exchange rate regime (hint hint Baltics?), a friendly reception for an EU delegation, and growing signs that Belarus is moving to a more contentious Ukraine style relationship with Russia, at least as far as Gazprom is concerned.  Although the Belarus row with Russia over gas can be settled for a lot less cash than Ukraine will need to do the same.   Now of course it could just be President Alexander Lukashenko’s realisation that the strategy of being a Moscow-allied strongman has run out of steam.  But for a country that even a year ago looked stuck in a geopolitical rut, it’s evidence that things can change.

I’d rather be wrong, so wrong

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about Iran.

via Andrew Sullivan — who, for his work this past week, shall be forgiven much — comes Daniel Larison, fretting about regime collapse and separatist movements in Iran. Those strike me as deeply improbable. Iran is not a failed or even a particularly weak state; if the current incumbents are forced out of power, others will step in. And most of Iran’s minorities are, if not exactly content, uninterested in separatism.

Note that unlike most of its neighbors — Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey — Iran has never had a serious separatist threat. The largest minority, the Azeris, is very well integrated by regional standards; they fought and died in the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War at the same rate as ethnic Persians, and Supreme leader Khameini is half Azeri. The Bush administration spent several years fishing in the waters of ethnic separatism, without much effect that anyone has been able to see.

But I think it’s going to be moot, because I don’t think Iran’s regime is going down.

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Iran: Double down

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Yesterday the Supreme Leader of Iran doubled down, declaring his support for President Ahmedinejad and telling the protestors it would be their own damn fault if anything happened. Today saw riots and more bloodshed.

Well: three days ago I said President Ahmedinejad would not lose. Today I’ll go a step further and add a couple more predictions.

1) The men with guns will stay loyal. This gets complicated, because there are a lot of different men with guns. There are the Teheran cops; the basiji, who are street thugs employed by the government; the Revolutionary Guards; the army.

But at the end of the day, only those last two matter. If the basiji break and run and the cops switch sides, but the army and the Guards stay obedient, the government still wins. It wins ugly, but it wins.

Note that Ahmedinejad is a veteran of the Republican Guards, while Khameini is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Note further that both have broad popular support — maybe not majority, but broad. Millions of Iranians think that Ahmadinejad is the white knight of the people, while millions more (not necessarily the same people, mind) think that Khameini has a special relationship with God. Note finally that while Ahmadinejad may be obnoxious, he’s nobody’s fool. The Supreme Leader’s speech would not have happened if either man was nervous about the armed forces.

2) There won’t be a civil war. (Or at least, there won’t be because of these protests.) A lot of people may get hurt and killed, and some protestors may take up weapons. But it won’t lead to anything but bloodshed and repression. You can’t have a civil war when one side has all the guns.

— I’m going out on a limb to say what won’t happen. But I’m not brave enough to even guess at what will happen. Who the hell knows? Iran is a very opaque country. In my last post I used various popular protests in other countries for comparison. But there really isn’t a good comparandum for this. The closest would be the protests of late-period Communism: East Germany, Romania, Tienanmen Square. But in East Germany, conflict was avoided because the Politburo deposed Honecker; here it’s as if the Politburo had confirmed him in office, while at least a third of the country still believed fervently in Communism. (That’s a thing to keep in mind in Iran: both sides have a big chunk of the general population firmly behind them.) In Romania, Ceausescu had drifted far out of touch with the nation, and his regime was violently loathed by almost everyone; neither of those things is true of Iran.

The closest comparison seems to be China. But even that’s not very close. The Tienanmen protestors lacked leadership and were relatively mild compared to the Iranians. And while they had plenty of support in Beijing, they didn’t have much in the rest of the country. So while the suppression of Tienanmen was brutal, it was also over quickly; once the government cracked down, it was all over in a couple of days. That might not be the case in Iran.

But, really, who the hell knows. I guess we’ll see.

Iranian elections, with SCIENCE

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Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count – an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad doesn’t correlate with anything – as if the uniform national swing beloved of psephologists was real, or for that matter, as if someone had simply shifted the numbers across the board. For comparison, he ran the same exercise for the 2005 German elections, which shows a wide scatter of points with a concentration of big CDU leads in the south.

Then, however, comes the genuinely scientific bit. What would Benford’s law, the principle that in most data sets there is a large excess of numbers that begin with low digits, and that therefore fake data can be identified by its divergence from this, make of it? (The data, by the way, is available here.) Well…it turns out that the results pass the Benford test, which may mean that they are honest or possibly that the Iranian Ministry of the Interior reads blogs, too.

Why Ahmadinejad will win

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We’ve seen a number of regimes fall because of popular protests: Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, yadda yadda. We’ve also seen several that have not fallen: Burma, Armenia, Greece. Which one does Iran more resemble? Or, to put it another way, what are the common factors?

Here’s a first attempt at classification. Political scientists and (especially) people who know more about Iran are encouraged to chime in.

Factors that make a regime vulnerable

In ascending order:

1) The regime is widely hated. Surprisingly, this seems not to be a highly correlated variable. Some of the survivor regimes were almost universally loathed by their people (Burma) while some governments that still enjoyed some popular support managed to collapse anyway (Ukraine).

Relevance to Iran: Low. Many people dislike the current government, but not many actually hate it.
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Not Exactly a United Opposition

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The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more fronts, one reason why they, collectively, do not appear quite ready for prime time.

Here’s one theme, what role foreign embassies to Georgia should play in the confrontation between the opposition and the ruling party:

Nino Burjanadze, leader of Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, called on foreign diplomats accredited in Tbilisi to react and condemn “illegal actions” taken by the authorities… (Civil.ge, May 21)

Levan Gachechiladze, an opposition politician, called on the western diplomats to give up “indifferent stance” and make “concrete statements” about the crisis in Georgia, instead of only repeating “one word – ‘dialogue’.” (Civil.ge, May 29)

…Opposition leaders said foreign diplomats should not involve themselves in internal politics.

“This is considered as interference in domestic political processes, which they are not entitled to do,” said Salome Zurabishvili, Georgia’s former foreign minister and the leader of the Georgia’s Way Party, according to the Interfax news agency. (New York Times, June 15)

Maybe this is why Napoleon preferred to be opposed by coalitions?

Meanwhile in New York and Georgia

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The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.

Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements and other aspects of security in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With local tendencies toward explosions and pot-shots (see here, here, and the end of the page here), precisely the kinds of things that preceded last summer’s war, monitoring by a reasonably neutral group gives cooler heads a chance to prevail. Their current mandate expired last night at midnight, and the resolution would have kept this function going. The Security Council vote was 10 in favor, four abstaining (including China) and Russia exercising its veto.

“We need to get rid of this apparition [of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia],” Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council after casting the veto. “Our partners, however, prefer poison to medicine.”

Apparently that’s diplomatic language in Putin’s Medvedev’s Russia.

[Churkin] had offered to extend the mission’s mandate for one month on condition that the Security Council agree to delete all the “offensive references” in the resolution to names and sovereignty

Because Abkhazia and South Ossetia are regarded as independent by Russia and the overwhelming majority of the international community that consists of Nicaragua.

Russia has also forced the end of the OSCE observation mission in Georgia.

The only governmental monitors left are those from the European Union. EU monitors, however, do not have a mandate that gives them access across the administrative boundaries. They can peer into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but cannot go and see for themselves.

One fewer support for stability. It’s almost as if one major player isn’t interested in stability.

From Yerevan to Tehran?

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Via The Monkey Cage, an interesting article on the lessons hardline regimes may have learned from the Orange Revolution. Here are his four lessons:

1) If you are going to fix the results of an election, give yourself a big margin of victory. Otherwise, a little electoral fraud can credibly be argued to have swung the outcome of the election (as was the case in the Serbian and Ukrainian presidential election)….

2) If you are really going to rig the results of elections, don’t mess around with pretenses of transparency that could end up leaving hard evidence of electoral fraud….

3) Don’t leave any doubt about the willingness of security forces to defend the regime. […]

4) Technology–especially social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, but also more basic technology such as text messaging–is a friend of opposition forces attempting to combat electoral fraud, so do what you can to minimize its impact.

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