Federico Bordonaro

Article by Bruce Pannier for RFERL with bits of my interview on the subject:

It’s been an up-and-down year for the Nabucco natural gas pipeline.

Just as work on the long-stalled project seems set to finally begin, some shift — usually at the hand of Russian energy giant Gazprom — alters the commercial landscape and Nabucco’s chances appear to recede.

But the pipeline’s supporters have just selected a big name in European politics to help push the project toward realization — Joschka Fischer, the former head of Germany’s Green Party and the country’s foreign minister from 1998-2005.

Fischer faces some serious obstacles in jump-starting Nabucco — the would-be cornerstone in Europe’s drive to kick its Russian energy habit, which has failed to attract commitments from suppliers and consumers alike.

Not least among them is the fact that Nabucco’s rival pipeline projects have a powerful lobbyist all their own — Fischer’s former boss, ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who has spent four years on the payroll of Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Bruce Pannier writes on Gazprom for RFERL — the analysis contains bits of my interview for the Radio:

It’s been a tough year for Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant.

Just a year ago, Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom was the third-most valuable company in the world, worth some $350 billion. Now, it has shrunk by two-thirds to about $120 billion, declining to the world’s 40th-largest company, according to “The Moscow Times” on May 27.

And the company appears set to fall another notch or two, thanks to a ruling by Russian antimonopoly authorities on June 2 that Gazprom must share its export pipelines with independent gas producers.

An interview for RFERL on the evolution of European-Central Asian diplomatic and commercial ties.

Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine an official from Turkmenistan visiting Brussels to discuss exporting natural gas directly to the EU.

But when Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov meets with European Union officials in Brussels, discussing his country’s participation in projects to bring natural gas to Europe will be high on his agenda.

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have traditionally been the most resistant of the Central Asian states to Western influence, but both are increasingly showing an interest in breaking that mold.

RFERL’s “Power Vertical” delivered an interesting comment on Stratfor’s geopolitical analysis of the global recession.

The report begins with statistics showing how the global recession is affecting various countries and then moves on to an interesting, geography-based explanation of why the recession is, so far, more than four times worse in Russia (change in GDP of negative 9.5 percent over the last 12 months) than it is in the United States (a decline of 2.6 percent).

Stratfor’s analysis of the United States – how its geography, including the world’s largest mass of arable land and a generous inland waterway system that promotes open and cheap domestic trade, produced a resilient and flexible political and economic system – is intriguing reading.

Geography may not be “destiny”, but it certainly has an influential say about it…

As Peter Zeihan wrote in the Stratfor’s report:

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intracoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.

This reminds me about Spykman’s lesson: Size per se is not strength, but potential strength. Size, topography, and location, if taken together and analysed in their mutual relations, allow an observer to “get the really big things right enough”, as Colin S. Gray said about Mackinder’s geopolitical works.

“The number of people who consider French membership of the EU a good thing has fallen from a peak of 74 per cent in 1987 to 47 per cent last year”, Ben Hall reports in today’s Financial Times. “The reluctance of the parties to debate during the campaign reflects how French enthusiasm for Europe has soured into cynicism and indifference in the past decade”.
Such a process, however, is unfolding since some years. In 2005, after French voters rejected the proposed E.U. Constitution, this author wrote that political Europe was experiencing a paradox, in which “sovereignism” was gaining influence - particularly in France:

The historical context in which pro-sovereignty movements are gaining strength is a fairly paradoxical one. For instance, it is incorrect to say that “Europe does not exist” due to the result of the recent referenda, an argument that many in this movement are making. On the contrary, the European main states such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the “core” of the integration process — obtained, at least formally, the strategic goals they had set in the early nineties. The E.U. now has a common currency, functioning political institutions like the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, in addition to security and defense assets such as the Political Committee for Security, the European Headquarters, a secretary general for foreign policy, and even a Rapid Reaction Force.

At the same time, this complex political, economic and military framework does not work in the way some Europeanists dreamt it would, and the E.U. simply has not become what French visionary personalities such as former French President François Mitterrand wanted. In particular, today’s European Union is neither the source of a distinctly European vision of world politics, nor the political tool necessary to project French power in the age of globalization. If the international system is shifting from unipolarity to a proto-multipolar structure, it is because of China’s rise as a great power, and not because of the European Union. The E.U.’s dramatic division in front of the Iraqi crisis of 2002-2003 was the crucial proof of its weakness as a real global player.

The European paradox is exactly this: the E.U.’s official goals have been reached, but the outcome is quite different from what its main supporters expected 15 years ago.

Moreover, French citizens perceived that an enlarged Europe was not a multiplier of power and prosperity, but a huge market that exacerbated competition, wiping out the welfare state, i.e., the core of the so-called “European social model”.

Since then, the E.U. and the most pro-European parties in France have been unable to reverse the process. Enthusiasm for European integration has remained weak. However, no real alternative to the current path of integrationist policies has been effectively proposed. If the supranational model is in a crisis, so is the “Europe of nation states” advocated by the sovereignists. As a consequence, European elections are perceived as a not-so-crucial event by French (and European) citizens.

E’ uscito il mio saggio su La Russia e l’Estero Vicino: da Eltsin a Putin, per la rivista “Ricerche Storiche”, edita da Polistampa.
Uno stralcio dal paragrafo introduttivo:

L’idea dell’esistenza di un “estero vicino russo” nasce in concomitanza con la fine dell’Unione Sovietica. È direttamente connessa al problema di quali rapporti politico-diplomatici, strategico-militari ed economici instaurare fra la Federazione Russa e gli altri stati ex sovietici.
L’espressione ближнее зарубежье (Blizhneye Zarubezh’e) è composta dall’aggettivo blizhneye (vicino) e dal sostantivo zarubezh’e che significa letteralmente “oltre confine”. In altri termini, designa “i paesi oltre confine ma prossimi”, in contrapposizione all’estero “lontano”. In un articolo del 15 gennaio del 1992 sul quotidiano Izvestiya si menzionava non a caso un “estero a portata di mano” .
L’allora ministro degli esteri russo, Andrei Kozyrev, nell’agosto del 1992 si espresse in modo critico verso ogni tentazione di Mosca di “minacciare” i paesi ex sovietici nel “cosiddetto estero vicino” , in particolare in Ucraina, al fine di mantenerli strettamente legati alla Federazione Russa.
Da parte sua, un osservatore statunitense della nascita del concetto di “Estero Vicino”, Paul Goble del Carnegie Endowment, affermò nel gennaio del 1992 che l’espressione rivestiva “un significato politico ben più che geografico o demografico” e indicava soprattutto “la difficoltà” dei politici russi a considerare i paesi ex sovietici come nazioni “realmente indipendenti”. Ancor più importante, secondo Goble e altri analisti americani, era il fatto che le repubbliche ex sovietiche appena nate fossero l’oggetto della “pretesa russa” di alcuni speciali diritti in campo politico ed economico. In altri termini, il concetto di Estero Vicino designava la volontà di Mosca di delimitare una vera e propria “sfera d’influenza” russa post-sovietica.
Al contempo, cominciava però ad affacciarsi anche un secondo significato di Estero Vicino, più geografico e demografico, ma anch’esso strettamente legato a quello politico: l’espressione avrebbe indicato le repubbliche ex sovietiche dove vivevano ancora circa 25 milioni di russi , che Mosca avrebbe dovuto “difendere” dalla pressione dei nuovi nazionalismi.
Emergevano quindi, già nel 1992, tutti gli elementi che avrebbero reso il concetto di Estero Vicino un perno della nuova politica estera russa: quelli politici, connessi sia alla questione dello status di grande potenza russa, sia al problema della sicurezza strategica del nuovo stato; quelli economici, con la definizione di nuovi rapporti commerciali ed energetici; e quelli legati all’identità russa e al rapporto fra Mosca e le comunità russe oltre confine.

Article written for ExploringGeopolitics.

Spykman’s in-depth analysis of geography’s political-strategic significance constitutes an excellent introduction to the methodology of geopolitics.
. . . Probably, the most interesting part of Spykman’s theoretical geopolitics is the one devoted to the significance of location for a state’s power potential. “The location of a state may be described from the point of view of world-location, that is, with reference to the land masses and oceans of the world as a whole, or from the point of view of regional location, that is, with reference to the territory of other states and immediate surroundings. The former description will be in terms of latitude, longitude, altitude, and distance from the sea; the latter will be in terms of relations to surroundings areas, distances, lines of communication, and the nature of border territory . . . “A complete description of the geographic location of a state will include […] an analysis of the meaning” of the facts of location, since while the latter “do not change, the significance of such facts changes with every shift in the means of communication, in routes of communication, in the technique of war, and in the centers of world power, and the full meaning of a given location can be obtained only by considering the specific area in relation to two systems of reference: a geographic system of reference from which we derive the facts of location, and a historical system of reference by which we evaluate those facts”.

Analysis by Bruce Pannier for RFERLwith bits of an interview of mine.

Duncan Wood for Treasury and Risk:

Political risk can be devastating. Ask the mining companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that have been forced over the past two years to renegotiate their contracts. Ask HSBC, whose headquarters in Istanbul was wrecked by a terrorist attack in 2003. Ask the hedge funds that bet Brazilian stocks would tank after firebrand left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003, then suffered heavy losses when the exact opposite happened.

Companies have always faced these kinds of risks: terrorism, civil unrest, regulatory change, the seizure of assets. But the exposure has never been as great as it is today, argues Christa Davies, CFO of Aon Corp., the global risk-management consultancy and insurance brokerage based in Chicago: “People are doing business in more countries—and a more diverse range of countries—than ever before. They might have operations on the ground, or they could be exposed through their supply chains, by sourcing product components or services in certain locations, or simply through the customer base. It absolutely has to be a core consideration in the way people run their business.”

… “while companies have a formal, rigorous approach to the management of other exposures, like currency risk or business continuity, they usually tackle political risk on an ad hoc basis.”

Simply said, political risk refers to political decisions unduly affecting businesses. However, in many occasions political decisions are caused by geopolitics, that is, by the country’s position both in the global and in the regional political system, and/or by its internal ethnic, religious, and territorial configuration.
Therefore, a thorough understanding of political risk must encompass geopolitics.

Robert M. Cutler on Asia Times reports that

The European Union (EU) and Turkey have resolved two major differences that were preventing agreement on the terms for the Nabucco natural gas pipeline, and the Turkish President Abdullah Gul is reported to have promised that a signing ceremony will take place on June 25 in Ankara.

[…] The Nabucco project would in the first instance take gas from the further development of Azerbaijan’s offshore Shah-Deniz project, which has so far been delayed even though it is piping some gas through the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzerum line (BTE, also called the South Caucasus Pipeline, or SCP). In Prague for the first time, EU officials spoke to the press about the possibility of an undersea pipeline from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan […]

Slowly, the prospects for the ambitious projects are improving. Countless analysts in the last couple of years had claimed that Nabucco was irrealistic and doomed to fail. But they failed to notice that Russia’s alternative project (South Stream) had also troubles, and that slowly, the Turkmen political context was changing. The situation remains a complex one, and nothing is certain. However, the next two months may see a breakthrough. Stay tuned.

Intervista per Radio Radicale sul vertice di Praga e la questione del “Corridoio Sud”.

I wrote in 2005 that Pakistan’s geopolitical importance was on the rise. I considered mainly Pakistan’s position (a strategic link between the Middle East’s Arabian Sea region, South Asia, and Central Asia) and its value for China and the US from a security point of view, especially in terms of maritime power and strategic route. Especially the US cannot afford to see Pakistan disintegrate, because such a development would likely trigger a shift in the region geopolitical orientation (from a pro-Western to an unknown but probably anti-Western alignment).
I also considered the Pakistan-India problem to be a key issue: Pakistan’s destabilization may add to Indo-Pakistani tensions and could potentially trigger a new conflict, which, because of the two states’s nuclear capabilities, is among the most dangerous ones in today’s international relations.

Now, four years later, it is clear that the possibility of a progressive disintegration of Pakistan is to be taken seriously.
In the early 2000s, US geopolitical analyst and geographer Saul B. Cohen launched the hypothesis of a “Pashtunistan” taking shape as a result of US destruction of the Taliban regime and serious instability in Pakistan’s remote regions. This would have triggered a major geopolitical change in Central-South Asia, with Afghanistan and Pakistan de facto disintegrating.
The hypothesis might have seemed too bold, but some of the world’s most important newspapers now utilize the concept.

The situation is confused and it’s not at all clear if it is possible to speak about a “talibanization” of the country. What is sure is that Balochistan, Waziristan, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are caught in a struggle, in which both ethno-religious and territorial aspects are concerned.

Pepe Escobar wrote on May 9 for Asia Times that

Balochistan is totally under the radar of Western corporate media. But not the Pentagon’s. An immense desert comprising almost 48% of Pakistan’s area, rich in uranium and copper, potentially very rich in oil, and producing more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, it accounts for less than 4% of Pakistan’s 173 million citizens. Balochs are the majority, followed by Pashtuns. Quetta, the provincial capital, is considered Taliban Central by the Pentagon […].

For the US, the Afghan operation has become the “AfPak” issue. Max Hastings, in today’s Financial Times, explains the problem clearly:

It is frustrating for the US government to be making strategy for a battlefield while knowing that the strategic outcome will be decided on another one. The current redeployments in Afghanistan are taking place in the knowledge that Pakistan matters much more. The most important change in the thinking of Washington and its allies over the past year derives from recognition they are fighting the wrong war, or at least running a sideshow.

The purpose of the 2001 US invasion was to deny sanctuary to terrorists based in Afghanistan. Yet al-Qaeda today plays only a marginal role in that country, while being deeply rooted in Pakistan. Western forces find themselves engaged in an ill-defined campaign to stabilise Afghan tribal society, while being unable to use troops across the border, where most Pakistanis are bitterly hostile to the US. […]

The most obvious feature of the Afghan war in the months ahead is that it will become, in the phrase of indiscreet US soldiers, “re-Americanised”. The Americans perceive Nato as lacking both means and will to grip the situation. The most important priority for Washington is to determine exactly what its soldiers hope to accomplish, rather than making it up as they go along.

The result is that Pakistan is even more a geopolitical crux today than it was four years ago. It has incresingly attracted US military energies from the Afghan theatre. It has also forced India to re-focus its attention on the Pakistani militants issue after the Mumbay attacks. And it will take a long time before the situation becomes clearer. Expect the AfPak problem to dominate the US foreign policy agenda for the rest of this year and to impact the debate on NATO’s future.

LABORATORIO DI CARTOGRAFIA PER L’ANALISI GEOPOLITICA

Docente: Nieves López Izquierdo

Cartografa di Le Monde diplomatique

L’analisi geopolitica ha come suo principale strumento l’utilizzo di mappe cartografiche, carte tematiche, fisiche e politiche. La collocazione nello spazio geografico di fenomeni di carattere economico, politico, sociale o informazioni dettagliate ed utili alla comprensione del complesso scenario geopolitico costituisce un elaborato stumento di analisi che unisce al contempo elevata capacità di raccolta dei dati, analisi e strumenti di rappresentazioni utili alla comprensione dei fenomeni.

Il corso/laboratorio che Equilibri propone consiste nel fornire gli strumenti pratici affinché chi voglia operare nel campo dell’analisi geopolitica possa usufruire di strumenti cartografici avanzati e la possibilità di realizzarli secondo i propri scopi di analisi. Il laboratorio di cartografia completa un percorso di analisi già perseguito attraverso i corsi ARI aggiungendo un ulteriore tassello metodologico e pratico ad un complesso percorso di formazione.

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As predicted, Turkmenistan is signaling that it aims at diversifying its gas exports, a news that sounds good to European ears:

On April 23-24, Turkmenistan hosted an international energy security conference. The conference gave the Turkmen authorities an opportunity to emphasise their interest in diversifying gas export routes, particularly as falling demand for Russian gas is starting to affect Ashgabat. A recent explosion and disputes over pricing have worsened the relationship between Turkmenistan and Gazprom and intensified Ashgabat’s drive to find new transit routes and markets.

However, Turkey’s ruling élite has apparently chosen to use its possible support for the Southern Corridor project as political leverage in its complex relationship with Europe. This appears to complicate once again the path of the now famous Nabucco gas pipeline:

The AKP government, however, continues to obstruct the project, causing it to lose momentum again as it nears the landmark signing dates. Clearly, the AKP government does not share the EU’s goal of moving forward with Nabucco by signing the IGA and clearing the way for the PSA’s. Instead, the AKP government has developed a vested interest in dragging out the project, using it as leverage on the EU in the even longer-dragging EU-Turkey accession negotiations and even on extraneous issues, such as the Cyprus conflict.

The Turks are now emboldened by the renewed US courtship, and they feel they can raise the stakes in the Eurasian energy game. Europe must take this variable into serious consideration if it is to end the Southern Corridor’s gridlock.

Interview for RFERL.

The European Union repeatedly emphasized unity in the wake of vows at a major meeting late last year to pursue a new energy policy.

Pledges of solidarity to develop a unified energy grid and an end to dependence on Russian gas were renewed again in January, when member states found themselves frantically meeting again when a Russia-Ukraine dispute disrupted natural-gas supplies to a freezing Central and Southeastern Europe.

There has been broad agreement on the need for a diversification of suppliers and new import routes. But divisions quickly emerge when the topic turns to specific projects, and critics suggest national and private interests threaten to eclipse the exigencies of the EU as a whole.

The fate of the Nabucco gas-pipeline project is arguably a case in point.