 |
|
 |
 |
| |
 |
| IN BOX:
LITTLE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW |
 |
|
|
March/April 2009 |
 |
| A Melting Pot It’s Not |
| By Evgeny Morozov |
How the Internet is giving nationalism a boost.
 Illustration by Elizabeth Glassanos for FP What do Jennifer Aniston, Nikola Tesla, and soy milk all have in common? All three were subjects of protracted editing wars on Wikipedia, fueled by the competing claims of people in several nations (Greeks, Brits, and Americans tussled over Aniston; Serbs, Austrians, and Croatians battled for Tesla the inventor; and Koreans and Chinese fought over soy milk). Such seemingly trivial debates over national celebrities and products usually have a conclusive ending, unlike the heated, intractable online disputes over geographic areas—be it the Sea of Japan or Macedonia (Wikipedia administrators had to develop a special policy to deal with that one). In 1995, Nicholas Negroponte famously proclaimed in Being Digital, “[Thanks to the Internet] there will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox.” But today, the Web is far from the cosmopolitan nirvana that an early generation of Internet theorists envisioned. Indeed, the explosion of user-generated content online seems to be having an effect similar to the printing revolution. When the budding European entrepreneurs of the 16th and 17th centuries began to print books and pamphlets written in the vernacular rather than Latin, they inadvertently forged national print languages—and cultures. Blogs and social networks have proved to be splendid platforms for mythmaking, spitting out visceral imagery and edgy slogans that quickly embed themselves in the national consciousness. Take the arguments between Pakistani and Indian bloggers over Kashmir or the Korean accusations over Japan’s history of imperialism. (Once, some Japanese hackers got so fed up with Korean Web sites that they installed special explanatory pop-ups to correct what they saw as historical inaccuracies.) Of course, e-nationalism isn’t always a bad thing. Consider the plight of Assyrians—a predominantly Christian group whose ancient homeland is now divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Forging a common Assyrian identity in the pre-Internet age was nearly impossible, as Assyrians are scattered around the globe and many of their new homelands don’t provide the right conditions for preserving their culture. Today, regardless of where they are based, Assyrians passionately follow the ups and downs of Assyriska Föreningen, a football club from Sweden that is the closest Assyrians have ever gotten to a national football team. They get regular news updates from sites including Assyrian Voice, their closest equivalent to a national newspaper. The rich tradition of Assyrian music is well represented on YouTube. Assyrian politicians running in local Swedish elections enjoy support of Assyrians in California. As Assyrians and other ethnicities are poised to discover, rebuilding their nation in cyberspace might not be impossible after all.
|
| |
|
| Double Booked |
| By Elizabeth Dickinson |
The number of countries allowing dual citizenship is on the rise.
 iStockPhoto.com For some of the nearly 200 million people living outside their birth countries, passport lines might be getting easier to manage. That’s because the number of countries allowing dual citizenship is on the rise, jumping 75 percent over the past 10 years. Today, the number of nations allowing their citizens to hold two passports stands at 56, including Australia, India, the Philippines, and Russia. And that means the number of people pledging allegiance to more than one country is at an all-time high as well. The phenomenon has grown so rapidly that researchers are only now beginning to examine its consequences. “We know a lot about the legal stuff, but the stats don’t exist,” explains Rainer Bauböck, editor of the journal Migration and Citizenship. Countries most often loosen their restrictions on dual citizenship to reestablish political and economic ties among those who have emigrated, according to Tanja Brondsted Sejersen, author of a recent study in International Migration Review. Italy’s 1992 dual-citizenship law, for example, allows anyone with Italian grandparents to apply for an Italian passport—an attempt to forge business and cultural ties with the millions of ethnic Italians living abroad. “There are tangible financial benefits [to having Italian citizenship] for U.S.-Italian dual citizens,” says James De Santis, executive director of the National Italian American Foundation. “They can own property, attend school, or open a bank account [in Italy].” In 2006, more than 35,000 people became Italian citizens without losing their old passports, about three times the 2003 figure. Countries that depend on remittances, such as El Salvador, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, are also increasingly adopting dual citizenship as a way to keep bonds with expats strong—and the money flowing home. Other countries, such as Sweden, are changing their passport rules to integrate a growing number of immigrants. When Sweden legalized dual citizenship in 2001, the number of people acquiring Swedish passports increased more than 40 percent during the next five years. This kind of integration has obvious economic benefits for new migrants, such as eligibility for jobs. Francesca Mazzolari of the University of California, Irvine, found that immigrants from Latin America who obtained U.S. citizenship but also retained their passports from home earn 2.5 percent more in the U.S. job market than non-naturalized foreigners. Doubling your passports may also mean increasing your chance of success.
|
| |
|
| Who’s More Obama than Obama? |
|
Politicians around the world would love a piece of Barack Obama’s popularity. So, a few are campaigning on their proximity to the U.S. president—both real and imagined.
Nicholas Rajula
Country: Kenya
Obama factor: Claims to be the president’s cousin.
Yes, he can? The 47-year-old textbook distributor ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in December 2007 based entirely on the claim that he shares a bloodline with Barack. The Obama campaign denied the connection. Rajula did, however, attend the U.S. presidential inauguration with seven members of the extended Obama clan in tow.
Claudio Henrique dos Anjos
Country: Brazil
Obama factor: Ran for office under the name Claudio Henrique-Barack Obama.
Yes, he can? Thanks to quirky election laws, candidates in Brazil can run under any name they wish. Hoping to become the first black mayor of Belford Roxo, a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro, dos Anjos picked a name he thought people could believe in. In October, supporters campaigned in a pickup truck blaring the slogan, “Vote for Barack Obama!” Unfortunately, dos Anjos lost.
David Lammy
Country: Britain
Obama factor: A young, black, left-leaning politician who was educated at Harvard and raised by a single mother. Sound familiar? (Plus, they’re friends.)
Yes, he can? The youngest member of the House of Commons when he was elected in 2000, Lammy displays a picture of his pal Barack on his Web site. And he’s none too thrilled about other Brits claiming the “British Obama” mantle. He wrote an editorial attacking Conservative leader David Cameron for adopting Obama-esque rhetoric.
|
| |
|
| Answering the Call |
| By Elizabeth Dickinson |
How Colombian land-mine victims became call-center operators.
 RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP/Getty Images At the height of Colombia’s civil war in 2002, Mario Escobar, then a 23-year-old economics student in Bogotá, noticed a disturbing trend. The Colombian rebel group FARC had started planting land mines—it called them “weapons of the poor”—throughout the countryside. Casualties from the mines began mounting; between 2001 and 2006, deaths tripled to more than 1,100 a year. Thousands more rural farmers and peasants were injured, and many of those maimed were forced to move to cities and beg to survive. Eager to assist these land-mine victims, Escobar and several friends came up with a unique strategy: train them to work in call centers. Such work requires little physical movement. Eccos Contacto Colombia, the project they founded, hosts nine-month call-center training courses for disabled victims of conflict. And though call centers often suffer from high turnover rates—the jobs are generally filled by young professionals who consider the job a starting point on the employment ladder—disabled workers, who suffer from an 80 to 90 percent unemployment rate throughout the region, can be less inclined to leave a job that suits their capabilities. That means investments to train them truly pay off. “We transformed being handicapped into a competitive advantage,” Escobar explains. Today, Eccos’s graduates are working at the heart of Colombia’s booming call-center industry, which is growing 40 percent a year. Thanks to the clear Colombian accent and amenable time zone, the country’s call centers serve companies around the region, including those in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Nearly 40,000 agents were added in the past five years, bringing the number of Colombians working the phones to more than 53,000. The government expects five new call-center companies to launch this year, and it plans to reintegrate former fighters throughout the country using Eccos’s model. Ring up Colombia, and you’ll find it is working.
|
| |
|
| Epiphanies: Shirin Ebadi |
|
"Thirty years have passed and we have yet to arrive at freedom."
 ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images I WAS SITTING IN THE COURTHOUSE [after the Islamic Revolution] when an agent from the justice department came and gave me a letter [saying] I was no longer to be a judge. The women of Iran had lost yet another one of their own. WE CAN BE MUSLIM and practice democracy. It is only undemocratic regimes that believe that Islam and democracy are mutually exclusive and [use it to] rationalize their oppression [of others]. I’VE TAKEN ON MANY CASES in my career. I was a lawyer in the case of a chain of assassinations ordered by the Ministry of Intelligence against opponents of the government. I was a lawyer on behalf of a reporter who was killed in prison. I was the lawyer for a student who was killed in a police raid on the Tehran University dormitories. Each of these, in their own way, represents a violation of human rights. A POLITICAL LEADER SHOWS people the way, moving in front of the people and showing them a path. A human rights advocate—and I am a human rights advocate—instead walks behind the people, and, if anyone is left behind, takes their hand and helps them. I WON’T TELL ANYONE WHAT TO DO, whether to vote or not. But, as a citizen and in protest of the law [forbidding candidates not approved by the Guardian Council], I will not vote in any election. THE SLOGAN OF THE [ISLAMIC] REVOLUTION was “independence, freedom.” And we were told that we would arrive at these two principles. Thirty years have passed and we have yet to arrive at freedom. NOW THAT THE WHOLE WORLD is recommending that we suspend enrichment, the government of Iran should accept suspension and prevent further pressure against Iran. I DON’T BELIEVE in emulating people. I tell my daughters that they should not use me as a model. Our times and the circumstances of our lives are different, and they must find their own paths. Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s first female judge and a pioneering defender of human rights, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
|
| |
|
| Attack of the Digg Clones |
| By Joshua Keating |
How the Internet's most powerful click factory went global.
Any blogger worth his salt knows that in addition to Google and blogosphere buzz, the fastest way to Internet stardom is through user-generated content aggregators such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, and most especially Digg. For the uninitiated, Digg uses a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach to filtering the Web. Anyone can post a link to a story, video, or image (usually, the more salacious or juvenile, the better). Others then vote, or “Digg,” their favorites. Earn enough Diggs and you might make it to the site’s coveted front page, which can drive enough visitors to overwhelm even the sturdiest of servers. In the past few years, specialized Digg clones have sprung up in dozens of languages and on subjects ranging from financial news to international soccer to pornography. One of the largest and most influential Digg clones is Menéame, a Spanish site launched in 2005. Menéame released a free version of its software that easily allows programmers to create sites copying Digg’s rating system. Digg clones have proliferated like rabbits ever since. Check out India’s HotKlix, for instance, for the latest news on the Mumbai terrorism investigation or, if you prefer, scandalous photos of Bollywood starlets. Israel’s Hadash-Hot gets nearly 40,000 visitors a day posting on technology and political news. CKA is the one to visit if you’re a Canadian nationalist. Whatever you’re into, or wherever you’re from, there’s probably a Digg clone out there for you, too.
|
| |
|
| The Difference Is in the Details |
| By Joshua Keating |
According new research by a top economist at the World Bank, how we measure inequality is all wrong.
 TED ALJIBE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES More can be less: A growing Chinese economy means lower inequality, according to a new measurement. Many politicians and economists consider it an unfortunate truth: Economic growth leads to greater economic inequality. But what if this long-held notion is the result of a flawed measurement? According to Branko Milanovic, a lead economist at the World Bank, timeworn calculations of economic inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, miss key indicators, such as how much wealth a country has to divide. That means that countries deemed to have a large gap between rich and poor may be far more equal than many believe. A new method of measuring inequality, the inequality extraction ratio, developed by Milanovic, Harvard University’s Jeffrey Williamson, and Peter Lindert of the University of California, Davis, incorporates a critical statistic: the size of a country’s economy. Why is that important? “When you have a growing economy, the maximum possible inequality goes up,” says Milanovic, because there’s more wealth to go around. That surplus is what makes true inequality possible. “Say that 99.9 percent of the people [in a country] live at a subsistence level, and one guy takes the entire surplus,” he says. “Although that guy is very rich compared to everyone else, the [traditionally measured] level of inequality is not going to be very high.” Using their new measurement, Milanovic and his partners find some countries to be far more unequal than economists traditionally believe. Using the Gini coefficient, for example, an impoverished country such as Ethiopia appears to have only slightly more inequality than the United States. Using the new measurement, however, which takes into account that the two economies differ greatly in size, Ethiopia has more than double the level of U.S. inequality. They also find that developing economies such as China and Russia, for example, have actually become more equal—not less—as they have transitioned to free market capitalism during the past two decades. When it comes to inequality, size apparently does matter.
|
| |
|
| The FP Quiz |
|
Are you a globalization junkie? Test your knowledge of global trends, economics, and politics with 8 questions about how the world works.
FP Quiz Answers
1) C, 19 percent. About 1 in 5 Iraqis, some 5.2 million people, are displaced from their homes. About 2.4 million live as refugees outside Iraq, mainly in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Syria. According to the International Organization for Migration, another 2.8 million are internally displaced within Iraq itself. Many return to find their homes destroyed or occupied by others, or they discover they’ve been priced out of their old neighborhoods.
2) C, 24. Of the two dozen countries that are shrinking in population, nine, including Moldova and Russia, are former Soviet states. Most others are Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Slovenia. Developed countries Germany and Japan also make the list, as do AIDS-afflicted Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The fastest-growing countries? The Maldives (5.6 percent per year) and the United Arab Emirates (3.8 percent).
3) C, Singapore. The Gaza Strip has frequently been described as one of the most densely populated places on Earth. With 10,800 people per square mile, it is indeed crowded; by comparison, Bangladesh has 2,800 per square mile, and the United States just 80. But there are places far more crowded than Gaza. Singapore squeezes in 17,200 people per square mile, and Hong Kong fits 16,600.
4) B, 25 percent. The European Union gets a quarter of its natural gas from Russia, with 80 percent passing through Ukraine. That’s why Europe gets the shivers whenever Russia has a pricing dispute with Ukraine and shuts off the gas. Fears of being left in the cold have led to proposals for pipelines from Russia that bypass Ukraine, or pipelines that skirt Russia altogether, extending from Central Asian countries to Europe via Turkey.
5) A, Luxembourg. Tiny, wealthy Luxembourg is a country packed with cars—647 per 1,000 people—according to the International Road Federation. The No. 2 and No. 3 countries for car ownership are Iceland and New Zealand, respectively, both of which are wealthy and have sizable rural communities in remote areas. The United States may be the country of Henry Ford, but it actually has fewer cars relative to its population (about 461 per 1,000) than its neighbor to the north, Canada (about 561 per 1,000).
6) C, 95 percent. Nearly all music downloads are illegal and unpaid, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the global recording industry. That amounts to more than 40 billion files illegally downloaded and shared in 2008. In China, one of the world’s leading sources for illegal downloads, the online piracy rate is estimated to be more than 99 percent.
7) B, Rwanda. Last September, Rwanda became the first country ever to have a female-majority parliament, when 45 out of 80 seats became held by women. The historic vote—in a country that was 70 percent female after its 1994 genocide and is 55 percent female now—occurred in part because of a quota: Thirty percent of seats are constitutionally required to go to women. The No. 2 and No. 3 countries for female representation are Sweden (47 percent) and Cuba (43 percent). In the U.S. House of Representatives, women hold just 18 percent of the seats.
8) C, 800 gallons. To grow the food the average person eats each day, plus the crops that are fed to animals that wind up on the dinner table, an astonishing 800 gallons are needed per person, per day, according to the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture. Fortunately, technological advances in irrigation have the potential to decrease water waste in agriculture by as much as 70 percent.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
 |
