As things accompanying the epidemic are developing, we can note a few interesting phenomena:

[1] borders are useful after all whereas the mass movement of people may be deleterious;

[2] virtue signalling has long gone beyond being ridiculous;

[3] the international solidarity is wishful thinking;

[4] Beijing and Moscow are far closer to Italy – a European Union member-state in need – than Brussels, Paris, Berlin or for that matter Washington.

[1] Borders are useful. Up to now the principle of the free movement of people (to be precise: labour and customers) has been enshrined in all Western states and regarded as unassailable. Whoever had second thoughts about it was ridiculed mercilessly and touted as inhumane, backward and what not. Nowadays all European governments have decided to isolate their countries from the outside world, including their EU member-state neighbours, and they did not need approval from Brussels. Fear of the DNA double helix soaring here and there made conceited politicians and self-assured citizens bow their knees to reality. They have all at the long last recognized that reality is something that refuses to satisfy our wishes.

[2] The other value enshrined in the Western world was its ethics of being race blind. Lo and behold fear of death has shown that people are race conscious, xenophobic and tend to cherish in-group loyalty rather than the global fraternity of all human beings. In Italy and the United States people naturally have begun to behave in a way suggestive of their conscious avoidance of the Chinese co-citizens or visitors. A quite natural behaviour when you consider that the epidemic started in and spread from China. This, however, was like the gauntlet thrown down to the politicians and social activists who have made a point of virtue signalling. Coronavirus prompts ‘hysterical, shameful’ Sinophobia in Italy (Al Jazeera); As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism (The Atlantic); Coronavirus: Spike in reports of ‘racist’ abuse of Chinese people in Italy (The Local). These are but a few titles. For them it is not the epidemic that poses a problem, it is racisms that is rearing its ugly head. Only when it comes to acid tests can we see reality – something that refuses to bow to our wishes – of inter-human relations. People are in-group oriented (why shouldn’t they be, after all?) and xenophobic. They are hard-wired for that. Naturally, they are concerned first and foremost about their families and then about their extended families (even though they may not admit it consciously or in an attempt to avoid official ostracism) and not about the whole world, about nations in neighbouring countries, let alone about communities located in the other parts of the globe. This provides fertile ground for the few who want to tout themselves as friends of humanity and feel they are operating on moral high ground, which is a shot of dopamine as good as any other: Italian Mayor Urges Citizens to ‘Hug a Chinese’ to Fight Racism; Italian virologist says political correctness doomed his country’s coronavirus response; and On February 1st Florence, Italy, Celebrated “Hug a Chinese” Day.

You still don’t know why the death toll in Italy has surpassed that in Wuhan?

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Recently we have been witnessing a number of events that have captured our attention. These are: the trade conflict between Saudi Arabia and Russia over the price of oil, the changes to the Russian constitution that are under way, the impact that the coronavirus has on the Western world and the resultant ban that the American president issued on European visitors to the United States. Let us have a closer look at them.

All of a sudden the Saudi authorities came up with the initiative to push down the price of oil worldwide. The OPEC countries were easy to deal with but to make oil cheaper globally, Riyadh needed the consent of one of the biggest oil producers outside OPEC: Russia. Moscow declined the proposal. The question arises: why does Riyadh want to have a smaller income generated by oil exports? After all oil makes up the lion’s share in the country’s finances.

The situation reminds one of the year 1985. In April of that year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with his revolutionary ideas of reforming the Soviet system. A few months later Saudi Arabia announced its intention to bring down the price of oil and so it did. Now it is known that the move was done in league with Washington. At that time the Soviet Union – just as the Russian Federation today – had a large income from oil. Less money meant trouble for the Kremlin, especially at the time of the reforms that had been announced. The result was the collapse of the Soviet state within a couple of years.

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At times, almost every decade can bring about a global change. Consider China: this weak colossus, roughly a hundred years ago torn by colonial powers, eventually became the world’s most populated communist country. As such, it naturally aligned itself with its Soviet elder brother, and this ideological alliance transpired as a huge threat to the West. Next, came Nixon’s ingenious political sleight of hand and China was turned into the Soviet Union’s rival, much to Washington’s delight. And then, when the capitalist economy adopted by the Middle Kingdom seemed to be pushing Beijing into the West’s embrace and anchoring it firmly within the global financial system, China has gradually emerged as a superpower on the rise, a challenger, to be reckoned with. At present, swerving more towards Moscow than Washington, Beijing is pursuing an ambitious policy of its own.

Much the same can be said about Turkey. A sick man of Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, on the verge of disintegration in the early twenties of the previous century, it slowly recuperated and rebuilt some of its former greatness. Anchored in the Western military defence system, it was a reliable foothold of the free world in the Middle East and a bridgehead for possible operations against the West’s archenemy: the Soviet Union. This was not to last long, though. With the fall of the “first country of workers and farmers” and the political earthquake that took place in the following decade or so, Turkey seems to be parting ways with its pro-Western and secular policies and reviving among its population the great ambitions of the long defunct Ottoman Empire. Nor is Ankara’s allegiance to NATO a given. With the purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence system done in open defiance of Washington’s wishes, Turkey exercises its sovereignty like barely any other American ally.

Are we facing a realignment of alliances in the making in the Middle and Far East? The February Gefira issue tries to shed some light on it.

 

Money is the be-all and end-all of any country’s economy. There are renowned professors of economics who maintain that anybody who says he understands money is a liar. There is something to it. History is fraught with economic and financial theories and although they operate on numbers and mathematical formulas, political parties that are at loggerheads with one another employ experts who sometimes cannot agree on the most basic issues, who advance solutions that are very much discrepant. Those who lived in Eastern Europe and are old enough to remember will have recalled that in the universities in socialist countries two incompatible types of economy were taught: capitalist and socialist. One wonders whether economy –  despite its numbers and formulas – is something more of an ideological  persuasion rather than a science.

 

Gefira-Bulletin #40 delves into the problem of the global financial system and its effect on countries and nations. Our analysts present the bare financial mechanism and its origin. In a world where economic and political interests of the many players are often on a collision course, in a world rife with political-cum-financial institutions, accords, compacts, agreements and banks, it is not an easy task to see through this deliberately(?) designed thicket pecuniary problems and get to the core of the matter. We do not pretend to have found the Grail, but we hope to have made the problem more translucent to our readers.

 

“Ring out the old, ring in the new,” a poet wrote. The year 2019 like a head of state whose term is coming to an end is outgoing and in its place 2020 is incoming. The new year will take up where the old year will leave off. Of the many concerns that we have had to deal with for the last twelve months and are going to face in the next twelve months is the question of national or individual security. Whether we like it or not, the world is driven by conflict: particular people, social, racial, economic, confessional, ideological and national groups have of necessity divergent and contradictory interests and willy-nilly or with ill-intent they position themselves on a collision course with their competitors at different levels of human activity.

The December issue of Gefira focuses on state or national security because if this can be guaranteed, if governments have a strong grip on societies and political, religious, ideological, economic entities operating within and outside the many states, if governments can settle the differences dividing countries in a diplomatic way, then the chances are relatively big that huge upheavals caused by smaller players can be stopped in their tracks.

Security is the reverse of the same coin where conflict is its obverse. Since the side that is viewed as unfavourable cannot be done away with, the only thing that one can do is strike a balance between the two. Our authors have pondered over current many-faceted threats to security which governments will need to brace themselves for in 2020.