Ø The Trans-Pacific Partnership pact reached this week between the United States and
11 Pacific Rim nations including Canada and Japan, has raised both hopes and
concerns. The commercial value of the deal, when it is approved, is immense,
tying together as it does almost 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. It seeks to
eliminate or reduce about 18,000 tariff and non-tariff barriers. Its
supporters, including President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, say the pact would boost growth in the U.S. as well as the Asian
economies. But it faces opposition inside and outside the U.S. Several members
of Mr. Obama’s Democratic Party oppose the deal, saying it would only help
American companies send jobs abroad. Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders calls
it a “trade disaster”. Critics in other countries say it would benefit large
corporations, particularly American big pharma, with the common people at the
receiving end. Health advocacy groups say it would reduce access to generic
medicines in developing countries; Internet freedom campaigners see it as a big
threat. Mr. Obama has made the TPP the centrepiece of his trade and foreign
policies, and seems determined to push it in Congress and persuade other
governments to accept it. The strategic potential of the deal is clear. The
U.S. started pushing for a Pacific free trade agreement at a time China was
emerging as an economic super power in the region. Defending the accord, Mr. Obama said: “We can’t let
countries like China write the rules of the global economy. We should write
those rules, opening new markets to American products”. The strategic ambitions
of the U.S. are clear. Traditionally, the U.S. has tried to isolate its enemies
and integrate allies with its own worldview. With Beijing it couldn’t do
either. China is now the world’s second largest economy, which has invested
trillions of dollars in U.S. treasury bonds; “isolating” such an economy is
next to impossible. Though the U.S. reversed its hostile China policy in 1972
in order to exploit internal rivalries in the communist bloc, China never
became a U.S. ally. And the chasm only widened after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Now, with China emerging as an economic powerhouse with new institutions
such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in place, the U.S. is trying
to form a grand alliance that would shore up its influence in Asia. But will
this strategic push be at the expense of its own workers, and the poor in the
developing world? If it is, as economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have pointed
out, the TPP would hardly meet either its declared commercial goals or its
undeclared strategic ambitions, and could turn counterproductive.
Ø coalition of labour unions, businesses, lawyers and human rights
activists won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for its decisive contribution to
the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine
Revolution of 2011.” The prize to the coalition, known as the National
Dialogue Quartet, comes nearly five years after an unemployed street vendor set
himself on fire, touching off a political earthquake that toppled Tunisia’s
long-time authoritarian president and proceeded to reverberate throughout West
Asia and North Africa. Among the disappointments of what has become
known as the Arab Spring — collapsed states in Libya, Syria and Yemen; the
return of rule by a military strongman in Egypt; and the rise of the Islamic
State in the sectarian cauldron of Syria and Iraq — the relative success of
Tunisia’s transition to democracy has been a wisp of hope. The quartet
comprises four organisations: the Tunisian General Labour Union; the Tunisian
Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts; the Tunisian Human Rights
League; and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee
emphasized that the prize “is awarded to this quartet, not to the four
individual organizations as such.” The quartet joins 103 individuals and
22 organisations honoured by the prize. Kaci Kullmann Five, chairwoman of the
Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the prize was above all intended as “an
encouragement to the Tunisian people.”
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