The Spanish EU Presidency - towards closer ties with Latin America?

After years of arguments, reforms and failed referendums the Treaty of Lisbon, originally planned to be a constitutional treaty, finally came into force on the first of December 2009. On the first of January 2010 Spain entered the new decade as the first EU-Member State to preside the European Council in the post-Lisbon era. For a country in deep economic crisis this important role of Spain in the first half-year of 2010 is a source of pride and confidence. After traditionally eating the 12 grapes to the tune of the chimes of the clocktower of the Casa de Correos at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Spaniards in front of the TV screens  across the nation witnessed how the facade of the Casa de Correos became the screen for their hopes connected to the EU-Presidency. In an impressive light show the flags and well-known monuments of all 27 Member States were consecutively projected onto the old building, culminating in the publication of the beginning of Spain's Presidency. 

While Spain's youth spent the night on the streets to celebrate the new year until the early morning hours, the accurately prepared clockwork of Spanish initiatives for the EU policy in the first half of 2010 slowly kicked into gear. Apart from hackers replacing President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's welcome video on the official homepage of the Presidency (http://www.eu2010.es/) with a speech by Mr. Bean for a couple of minutes, things are so far running pretty smoothly.

On the foreign policy side, Miguel Ángel Moratinos is the first Foreign Minister that will have to share his role during the Presidency with the newly appointed High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, Baroness Catherine Ashton. While the public and the press reacted with incomprehension when Baroness Ashton was appointed to represent the EU's common foreign policy, perceiving the nomination as a sign of lacking commitment to strengthen the common foreign policy through nominating a globally known and respected politician, the tandem is so far working rather well. From the perspective of European - Latin American relations we can still expect to see a lot of movement stirred by those two in the months to come.

One of the first foreign policy initiatives of Spain during it's Presidency is the furthering of rapprochement between the EU and Cuba. Even though these efforts sustained a small setback through the repulse of a Spanish parliamentarian at the airport of Havana by Cuba, things are developing in the right direction. Forging closer ties to Cuba would reflect that the EU is aware of the changes and the complex political realities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Interdependence and integration is steadily advancing on the continent, even though the process is constantly being complicated by tensions between different groups of states in Latin America. Dividing the continent into relished partners (Brazil, Chile, Argentina) and somewhat shady states to be kept at bay (Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras) does not reflect the realities on the ground. Even though the Plan Colombia and the aggressive rhetorics of ALBA states highlight the political faults of the region, bridges are being built at the same time. The UNASUR process, including Brazil and Venezuela, is suffering frequent setbacks but is still slowly advancing. Colombia and Ecuador are slowly reestablishing diplomatic ties after the rupture resulting from a Colombian air strike on Ecuadorian territory and Latin America at least tried to forge a consensus vis-à-vis the coup in Honduras last year. Thus the foreign policy of the EU should try to address the region as a whole and refrain from singling out inconvenient states.

After this first step in the right direction Spain is aiming at dissolving the blockade of the negotiations of the treaties of association between the EU and Mercosur and the Andean Community. Zapatero declared that relations to Latin America are at the top of his list in foreign policy, stating that "If there is a Presidency that is looking towards Latin America, it has to be ours. We have to seize the opportunity." Lets hope that the Spanish Presidency will live up to it's words.

Man of the year 2009

First of all a happy new year to everyone! 2009 was certainly an interesting year. Barack Obama was elected as the first President of color of the United States of America, the G8 was practically replaced by the G20 as the most important forum for global decision-making, and China, India and Brasil have definitely stepped up as future powers on the global stage. But the decade ended nearly as bad as it had started on 9/11/2001. We saw the crisis peak (hopefully) in the summer months of 2009, followed by the UNFCCC failure of Copenhagen which diminished the hopes that humanity will be able to unite in order to face a serious threat to it's future and we saw another attempt at a terrorist attack on US soil on Christmas.

Apart from annual reviews that reflect these major events of each year on TV, the radio, the web and in the newspapers, the compilation of rankings is one of our favorite pastimes at the end of each year. Some of the most popular and influential ones of them present the person of the year. While most of us would probably have guessed that  Barack Obama will become the man of the year if somebody had asked us at the beginning of 2009, his first year in the White House has shown that many people (especially his European admirers) had completely unrealistic expectations. I remember people applauding every sentence that came out of Obama's mouth when I saw him during his Berlin speech at the 'Siegessäule' in Berlin. The enthusiasm did not even diminish when Obama indirectly demanded a stronger German commitment for Afghanistan, a mission hugely unpopular in Germany. Obama is a realist politician whose biggest advantage and worst problem is that people have chosen him as a projection screen for their idealism and hopes. The reactions to him being awarded the Nobel Peace Price show, how strong this discrepancy has become.

So, with Obama out, the person of the year lists get at least a bit more interesting and 'competitive'.  While TIME magazine, for example, opted for United States Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Shalom Bernanke, for his role in keeping the financial crisis in check, the French newspaper le Monde named Bazil's President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Apart from the fact that rankings of persons are a deeply subjective undertaking and that one can well doubt if there is any real sense in composing them, le Monde's result is interesting. A European newspaper voting Lula as man of the year 2009 is a signal for Brazil (and with it Latin America) being recognized as a global player in Europe.

One of the reasons of Lula being chosen as the man of the year 2009 by le Monde is surely his huge popularity in Brazil, where he still enjoys a 70% popularity near the end of his second presidency. This popularity has slowly carried over first to Latin America and then beyond. Like the biographies of Barack Obama and Bolivia's Evo Morales, Lula's humble beginnings as a steel-worker inspire people. The extreme divisions between poor and rich in Brazil further accentuate the importance of a worker holding the office of the President. But if le Monde had chosen Lula for popularity alone we could as well forget the list and switch to talking about the movie or the book of the year.

But Lula's top position in le Monde's list reflects a very important development in 2009. Brazil has established itself as a regional power in Latin America in the last few years. Its style of influencing intraregional relations in Latin America focuses on the forging of consensus and on the furthering of integration. And it was an integral part of Lula's Presidency to try to use Brazil's regional importance in Latin America as a stepping stone for its ascension to more influence on the global level. In 2009 this policy bared fruits when the G20, in which Brazil plays an important role, was upgraded in it's importance in the wake of the global financial crisis. Additionally Brazil has been able to position itself as a spokesperson of developing countries and was the only rising power and newly industrializing country that played a constructive role in Copenhagen. Brazil is well on it's way to becoming a respected global power.

Last but not least, Lula sets an example by bucking the trend of Latin American Presidents like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Alvaro Uribe, Daniel Ortega and Manuel Zelaya who aim (or aimed) at a second or third term of presidency despite constitutional barriers. It seems like he did not let his huge popularity go to his head, even though he is trying to use it in order to mobilize the electorate in favor of his designated successor Dilma Rousseff.

Lula has definitely helped to put Brazil, and Latin America as a whole, on the map in Europe.

Civil society participation in Copenhagen

COP 15 in Copenhagen has ended this Saturday in the early morning with practically no real results. Not only were decisive measures to mitigate climate change postponed, there was not even a clear signal regarding COP 16 in Mexico. If the world's leaders were not able to produce a post-Kyoto treaty, it would have at least been their duty to set the foundations for further (meaningful!) negotiations at the next talks. But not even this absolute minimum was achieved.

Nevertheless Copenhagen also delivered some positive signals. I was impressed with the 'Klimaforum', the 'alternative summit' of the civil society and NGOs active in climate change which was organized right next to Copenhagen's main train station. There were a lot of presentations from different NGOs and scientists working on climate change everyday. At most times there were at least four different seminars and talks to choose from, each focusing on very different issues of climate change. And most importantly climate change got a real face at the 'Klimaforum'. There were representatives from the landless movements from Latin America, Bangladeshis explaining the dire situation of their country to other visitors and photo exhibitions on the effects of climate change from the Maldives, Sri Lanka and many different places. The pictures of vanishing beaches and dying coral reefs on the Maldives underline that we are not only talking about abstract figures but about the lives and homes of people.

The Klimaforum had everything the Bella Center was missing: the talks were close to the realities on the ground, victims of climate change were directly included, there was a spirit of change uniting participants from all continents and most importantly there were hope and determination. This strong, multinational civil society movement is still at its starting point. It will grow with each UNFCCC meeting and will ensure that the pressure on the world's leaders to act will rise.

The professionalism some NGOs are already displaying in steering media attention and pressure is reassuring. On Wednesday for example, a group consisting of Canadian citizens, the red clothed 'Climate Debt Agents' and the Yes Men managed to make Canada's obstructive climate change policy look completely foolish in the global media. The group had sent out e-mails from a fake Canadian government e-mail account called press@enviro-canada.ca in which Canada promised a 40% cut of emissions and considerable sums of money to pay back their 'climate debts' to developing countries. Of course Canada could have reacted somehow at this point to avoid a public loss of face, but the NGOs were too cunning to let this happen. They published a video from a fake press conference of an Ugandan delegate that they had recorded in a reconstruction of Bella Centers main press room. The supposed Ugandan delegate as well as the 'media representatives' in the video were all climate change activists. In the press video the Ugandan delegate lauded Canada's recent commitments and talked about a break through at COP 15. In another e-mail form a fake government mail account the group then faked a Canadian reaction, stating the following: 

- We at Environment Canada wish to thank the international press community for their measured and understanding response to the hoax that struck our agency earlier this afternoon, while expressing our condolences to the Ugandan delegation who were swept up in the excitement of this false future "vision."Environment Canada wishes to stress that the Ugandan delegation's impassioned response to the announcement is a dramatic tragedy for those who stand to suffer the most. 
"It is the height of cruelty, hypocrisy, and immorality to infuse with false hopes the spirit of people who are already, and will additionally, bear the brunt of climate change's terrible human effects," said Jim Prentice, Canada's Minister for the Environment. -

At this point a small group of climate change activists had exposed Canada's climate policy and shut all loopholes the Canadian government would have had to escape this public relations disaster unscathed. Sophisticated actions like this heighten the pressure on governments that are not willing to make concessions regarding climate change. If we see more activities like this in the future, obstructive policies in climate change negotiations will become more and more costly for governments. And eventually we will reach a point at which the parties just cannot afford another failure like the one in Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen 'Roundup'

So I arrived home today after my two-days short trip to Copenhagen to visit the UNFCCC talks. Even though I have only stayed there for two days it was an incredibly rich experience. There was really everything in Copenhagen, from multinational NGO events communicating a real 'one world feeling' to massive, green-washing PR-campaigns of large multinational companies. I will write a short series on my experiences in Copenhagen over the next few days, trying to reflect the diversity of what is going on in Copenhagen these days. De facto the Climate Change Talks are split up in three, more or less separate, parts: the official talks in Copenhagen's Bella Center, where only accredited government representatives and civil society organizations may enter, the Klimaforum, an alternative civil society summit with NGO representatives from all over the world, and an exhibition area in the town center that is mainly (but not exclusively) used by companies and businesses to present their would-be green image.

When I arrived on Monday morning in Copenhagen after a ten hour trip in the night train from Frankfurt, I went directly to Bella Center for registration. The travel was stopped short at Orestad, one metro station south of Bella Center. We had to go on walking since the metro could only be used by people who had already registered. When we approached Bella Center by foot we soon saw that things would not be as easy as anticipated: there was already a queue of roughly half a mile of diplomats, NGO representatives and delegates waiting to register at Bella Center. In the beginning things were still interesting. We met a lot of people from different NGOs and from different backgrounds in the queue and time was going by quickly. Later people from the Asian web-tv "supreme master tv" started to distribute "vegan starter packages", calling attention to the masses of CO2 that are produced by cattle breeding (even though they were exaggerating the figures grotesquely, claiming that 90% of global emissions stem from cattle breeding). Some activists were disguised as chickens or elks, my personal favorite was the shrimp girl in a pink full-body shrimp suit, complete with antennae and red cheeks.

After three hours waiting in the cold I started to put on extra layers of clothes. Progress was VERY slow, but the queue was moving. I didn't have any  feeling in my toes anymore, but I really wanted to get inside, so I stayed. After three and a half hours there was absolutely no movement in the queue anymore, but I could finally see the entrance. Some people were slowly getting angry, chanting 'let us in' and 'shame on you'. But there was still a big screen TV on which I could watch the 'climate change report' from India or the 'Fossil of the Day' award for the hundredth time, so somehow we carried on.

During all this time there was absolutely no information from part of the UNFCCC secretariat or the Danish hosts. All the people standing in the line for hours had received a preliminary accreditation and were encouraged by the UNFCCC secretariat to start planning their travels to Copenhagen. Some people were standing around in mini-skirts for hours at temperatures below 0°C, others had traditional African or Arabian clothes, clearly not prepared for the long wait in the freezing cold.

After waiting five hours in the cold there was an announcement that the organizers did not know how long registration for the waiting people would take, but that registration would close at 6 pm as planned. At that time it was 4 pm, the queue was still nearly half a mile long, some of the people waiting since 11 am (like me). Some minutes later people passed around a single sheet from the UNFCCC secretariat, stating that apart from Tuesday even less people would be let in. Additionally a system of limited 'secondary badges' was due to be introduced to limit the number of people accessing the conference grounds. On Friday, the most important day, only 90 NGO representatives will be allowed to enter.

To make the long story short: like thousands of other NGO representatives we have not seen Bella Center from the inside. We stayed the rest of our time at the civil society summit "Klimaforum". I was disappointed, but after all we had not put in as much work, time, money, effort and HOPE into our trip to Copenhagen as many NGOs and their representatives from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some of these people have traveled for  thousands of miles and have paid a lot of money to make their voices and the voices of the principal victims of climate change heard. And the UNFCCC secretariat, the Danish hosts and the government parties are actively excluding these people. Their voices matter most, yet they will not be heard. Additionally many NGOs from poorer countries do not even have the money to stay for one or two weeks in Copenhagen. These NGOs are coming on the last days, because they were hoping for a maximum impact of their participation at the peak of the negotiations. These people will never gain access to the Bella Center. The 90 NGO representatives allowed in on Friday will probably be hand-picked and the secondary badges necessary to enter will have run out long ago.

This is the background of the demonstrations and the attempts to storm the Bella Center that we see on the news tonight. I went to Copenhagen because I was interested in gathering first hand experiences, because I was curious and because I wanted to witness international negotiations from up close. Today I am angry, frustrated and deeply disappointed of how the issue of climate change is handled at the expense of the poor and excluding the persons most concerned. 

And of course other people, who feel the impact of climate change in their everyday life, are even more angry and frustrated because they see that our leaders do nothing. They only debate meaningless figures of percentile emission reductions, referring to different base years, while the atmosphere does not care about base years and output reductions. What really matters is the total amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, percentile output reductions only buy time but do not solve the problem. Even if climate change is a phenomenon too complex for anyone to grasp in its entirety, people see that this game of numbers our leaders are playing is meaningless. And additionally our leaders exclude the people on the ground, the ones who really suffer from climate change. The heads of states in Bella Center are sure lucky that the majority of the victims of climate change is too poor to come to Copenhagen. The message to the heads of state is clear: step up to your responsibility and lead, or step aside and let people really willing to make a change do the job!

The run-up to Copenhagen 2

Tomorrow is the starting day of the biggest and most decisive intergovernmental conference in 2009, the UNFCCC in Copenhagen. So far the year has been dominated by conferences and meetings on the global financial and economic crisis which have tied a lot of attention resources that probably would have been better invested in discussing the issue of the single most historical importance of our generation: global climate change.

Only in the last months have the efforts of climate change mitigation been able to reconquer some room in the global political agenda that they had lost to the efforts of coping with the fallout of the global recession. But this process has been gaining momentum recently. Newspapers are full of series, articles, essays and opinion pieces on climate change and the Copenhagen talks. And seemingly the trend is even strong enough to counter tendencies to postpone the decision-making in climate change mitigation to future conferences. Some of the most important powers on an international scale, including China and the USA, had already denied the possibility to implement decisive measures in Copenhagen at the APEC summit some weeks ago. Now US-President Barack Obama felt obliged to change his Copenhagen schedule due to rising public pressure: he will attend the decisive final stages of the talks instead of only visiting the conference along the way to pick up his Nobel Peace Price. Taking into consideration that he personally attended the IOC meeting deciding on the scene of the Summer Olympics 2016, it would have been grotesque to absent himself from the final stages of the Copenhagen talks.

From the perspective of an observer organization attending the talks, the mounting flurry of activities connected to the Copenhagen summit is even more obvious. In the final days leading to the start of the talks more and more e-Mails concerning the conference have arrived at the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations (FRFG). They reflect the plurality of organizations attending the talks and the range of interests that will be voiced in the process. Event managers are promoting berths on cruise liners for representatives of observer organizations. Other organizations are trying to sell excess rooms that had been booked in advance or are looking for funding of their travel and accommodation costs. A 'spiritual on-line TV station' contacted us to ask if we had a booth at the venue of the conference and if they could cover our activities in Copenhagen in the scope of their program. Many organizations contacted us in order to arrange for meetings during the talks to discuss future possibilities of cooperation. Other organizations have been passing around petitions to include everything from water shortage to livestock breeding in the talks. Companies from Brazil are advertising their know-how in ethanol fuels and are pushing for funding of their technology. Other organizations are informing fellow participants ("There is some good news you should know about so as not to be surprised when you get to Copenhagen.") of a "new green, low-cost sustainable fuel" that "can be stored at any location" and that will be "the solution to global warming". It can even be used as a fertilizer!

It becomes clear that organizations, companies and people from very different backgrounds with very different agendas and interests will participate in the summit. The conference will be a very diverse event and the venue will surely be bustling with interesting, dedicated and eccentric people. Lets hope that the observer organizations will be able to put some pressure on the government representatives deciding about the fate of future generations despite their very different interests and approaches. There is no time to bury one's head in the sand/snow.

The run-up to Copenhagen

Contrary to the usual topic of the blog this article will be the starting point of a small cycle of posts dealing with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen from the 7th to the 18th of December 2009 which I will attend as part of the delegation of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations. I hope to share some first-hand impressions here that are both fun and informative. The first short posting will deal with the climate change agenda of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations.

There are only seven days left until the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen starts. The conference itself was prepared for months and months through preliminary meetings within and without the UN framework. All this preparation will culminate in a 12-day conference of tremendous symbolical importance in mid-December, but that's also about it. Barely anyone is still counting on an ambitious post-Kyoto agreement in Copenhagen. US-President Barack Obama will be at the conference in it's early days, stopping by on his way to pick up the Nobel Peace Price in Norway. No other head of state will be there during the same period, and some newspapers already joke that President Obama is combining the Copenhagen and Norway trips in order to save kerosene, as Americas contribution to cutting CO2 emissions.

I will attend the COP15 talks as observer in the delegation of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations on the 14th and 15th of December. A high workload in December and a very limited travel budget unfortunately make a longer stay impossible. Nevertheless we are determined to make the best out of the stay, meeting with other NGO delegations and getting a first hand impression of the process. Chances to really influence the talks are close to zero anyway. 

The Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations is advocating a more concerted and ambitious approach to climate change mitigation. The principle of Intergenerational Justice is only observed when future generations have at least the same chances to satisfy their needs as previous generations. In terms of climate change this would mean that we have to pass our climate system and the environment down to our ancestors in a shape that allows them to sustain an equal level of wellbeing that we are enjoying in our lifetime. In practice this is of course nearly impossible. After all we have already brought the absorption capacities of earth's atmosphere close to collapse which makes the maintenance of today's lifestyle impossible - at least on a fossil energy basis - if we do not want to destroy our planet. But, since future generations will bear the brunt of negative climate change consequences it is at least our duty, as the generations living today, to minimize the damages for future generations. The growing tendency of some scientists to enforce adaptation over mitigation as the "cheaper" alternative is directly violating these duties.

In a nutshell, adaptation says that we should adapt to the consequences of climate change by building higher and better dams against rising sea-levels and ultimately leave areas that become uninhabitable due to climate change. There are two catches though: first, only rich countries have the resources at hand to adapt to climate change and secondly, we will eventually reach a threshold of climate change, at which adaptation becomes impossible. At this point, future generations will pay the bill for our negligence. This means that environments that have been home to humans for centuries will become uninhabitable and people living there for generations will be turned to homeless refugees. We argue that the loss of the place one calls home cannot be calculated economically like any other commodity. This is why the advocates of an adaptation approach are wrong when they want to make us believe that it is the cheaper alternative. We see adaptation as a short sighted strategy, disadvantageous both for the poorest people living today as well as for future generations. Therefore the FRFG is advocating a strategy to combat consequences of climate change that focuses on mitigation over adaptation.

Why intercultural exchange needs to go beyond culture

Currently there is something like a 'hype' about Latin American and Spanish culture in Europe. This process has been accelerating for months and years and has only gained further momentum in recent times. Examples to support this claim are manifold.

In Germany the number of pupils choosing Spanish as a third language is growing faster than the schools can manage. In every German region there is a lack of qualified Spanish teachers for schools. Three German regions, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia are offering an exchange programme for teachers from Spain and Latin America who want to teach Spanish in Germany in order to be able to meet the demand. Some schools are even starting to offer Spanish as a first or second language.

Additionally Latin America is becoming more and more popular as a tourism destination. According to the most recent tourism report of the European Commission, Latin America still plays a marginal role in the overall statistics for the tourist destinations of Europeans, but the growth rates for tourism in Latin America show the increasing appeal of the destination. Naturally tourism figures have dropped in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis, but tourism in Latin America is still doing significantly better than in any other region.The same goes for exchange programmes of all different types. More and more university students are heading to Latin America for exhanges or internships of one year and many young people leaving school after A-levels spend a year backpacking through Latin America.

Last but not least Spanish and Latin American popular culture is reaching more and more people in Europe. Apart from Flamenco, Salsa, Tango and other dances that were always hugely popular and well known, Spanish music is also becoming popular in Europe beyond the peninsula. Almost everybody nowadays knows Spanish singing artists like Shakira, Juanez and Alejandro Sanz. Furthermore Latin American literature has inspired an entire generation of European authors. Daniel Kehlmann, the young German author of the bestseller 'Measuring the World', told the audience at a literature event in Frankfurt´s Instituto Cervantes that reading the books of authors like Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Juan Carlos Onnetti completely changed his approach to literature.

Even though this rising interest in Latin American (popular) culture can be a good starting ground for deeper intercultural exchange, it is necessarily only a first step. Dancing Salsa to Shakira songs and learning Spanish does not already create a deeper understanding for Latin American cultures. Quite the contrary, there is even the danger of seeing Latin America as a continent of dancing, celebrating people that are fun but not to be taken too seriously. A cliché sadly prevalent in parts of Europe from my experience.

This is why an interest for the culture of a country/region can only be a first step. Civil society initiatives and cultural institutions like Instituto Cervantes need to take it over from here and facilitate a broader and more general understanding of Latin America, it´s different countries, cultures and social and political problems. Culture can be a powerful door-opener for intercultural exchange, but the experience the ´Latin America meets Europe´group had at an exhibiton organized by the Peruvian embassy at the Instituto Cervantes in Berlin shows what happens, if exchange is limited to culture.

The Peruvian embassy had organized a small, multilingual exhibition on Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. With a conquistador father and an Inca princess as his mother he was supposedly one of the first mestizos (person of Spanish/Indigenous origin) and the first Peruvian author of 'mixed' descent. The exhibition focused on the life and the works of de la Vega and pictured him as one of the origins of modern Peru. Thus the mixed heritage of Latin America and Peru with all it´s history and conflicts was implicitly mentioned. Nevertheless the exhibition did not elaborate on this in any way. Some critical remarks by forum participants from Latin America soon led to a discussion of these issues that was rather embarassing for the Cultural Attache of the Peruvian Embassy. An average visitor to the exhibition perhaps would not even have realized that one of the core questions of Latin American identitity was broached in this exhibition without being discussed.

The lesson for people trying to further real intercultural exchange between Europe and Latin America is clear: If exchange is reduced to general cultural topics beyond dispute, everybody is feeling good. But a real in depth look and a real exchange can only be reached if the deep-rooted social, historical and political context of culture is also discussed.