1. HOW DID THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY MISS THE CRISIS IN MALI
Jim de Wilde
www.jimdewilde.net
www.twitter.com/jimdewilde
August 2012
DRAFT
As part of a series of essays on foreign policy in a post-superpower world, I have
been attempting to frame a global foreign policy, not as an abstraction, but as a
way to think about how global rule of law, global sustainable development and
global security can be approached. New alliances require new strategies.
Students in Angola will have a different perspective on the Cold War than
students in Dusseldorf or Denver. The new generation of global China will have
a different interpretation of the partition of Arabia than historians looking at it from
a London-Washington-Paris Treaty of Versailles worldview. Mauritanian
students will look at the Westphalia state system differently than Swiss political
scientists.
This is not an argument that the world of global security issues has changed
completely or that understanding Chinese naval strategy is no longer essential
for foreign policy strategies. It is, however, an argument that ignoring the
influence of new players and attitudes will not enhance the values of rule of law
and global security.
Nor is this a celebration of U.S. decline as can be found in some circles of
English-speaking Asia. Until there is a means for ensuring that the personal
security of Kurds or Tuareg or Tamils in Sri Lanka can be guaranteed by some
kind of new security regime, the United States, Britain and France will continue to
be asked to play the disproportionate role that they did in the protection of
Benghazi.
However, the assumptions, which have gone into foreign policy about
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iraq, show that the way we think about the world is
dramatically limited.
Building a state system in Afghanistan has shown that traditional foreign policy
thinkers have been unable to disentangle the past assumptions and ask
questions about a post-colonial post-Cold War view of the issues at stake. The
argument that in the 1980s, U.S. foreign policy backed the Islamists against the
“secular modernizers” in Afghanistan allowing scarce credibility in the 1990s and
2000s needs to be addressed. It is the first question asked when one has a
discussion of Afghanistan with Colombians or Nigerians.

2. We know that conversations between Ankara, Moscow and Tel Aviv are more
relevant to the future of Syria than Security Council resolutions. However, we
continue to have political conversations that are predicated on transparently
obsolete assumptions. Then pundits pontificate on the “cynicism” of democratic
electorates confronted with “insurmountable” global problems.
Canadian foreign policy has always had an opportunity to give a different view.
Colonial enterprises like the Boer War almost brought the disintegration of
Canada. Quebec has always identified with Algeria more than with France in its
self-image and intellectual composition.
Which leads me to four themes I want to pursue this year:
(1) How did “the international system” get Mali so wrong? This is important not
only because Mali is important geopolitically and culturally but also because it
reveals like an MRI scan on our decision-making process what we are doing so
wrong.
(2) How are we ensuring resource wealth doesn’t lead to kleptocratic
governments and what kind of regime do we need to ensure global mining is an
advanced technology industry distributing productive wealth globally and not a
caricature of James Cameron’s Avatar?
(3) What is the global foreign policy of the new “Second World” powers? What is
Indian foreign policy towards rule of law in the Maldives and the successor
regime to Assad in Syria? The international system is improvising strategies in
Mali as it did in Ivory Coast. The thing that is clear is that the UN is not a vehicle
for these activities and improvised solutions (Dakar-Abuja on Mali, Istanbul-
Moscow-Tel Aviv on Syria) are very unstable elements.
(4) How do we promote the global rule of law at every opportunity to ensure that
the international system establishes the preconditions for global wealth-creation?
This is not a question of naïve idealism. Even if the “fair” outcome will take a
while, it is imperative that the language of “fair outcomes” be part of international
politics, more rather than less.
HOW DID WE FAIL THE PEOPLE OF MALI IN WASHINGTON, OTTAWA,
LONDON AND PARIS?
In the last few months, Mali has gone from being a place known for historical
tourism and a global mining centre to being a place where terrorists and
fundamentalists have created chaos and a situation that has real consequences
for global security.

3. The independence of Azawad, the Tuareg homeland of northern Mali has not
been recognized by any international agency. The weakened government of
Bamako recovering from a coup of soldiers dissatisfied with corruption and lack
of support for the obviously failing military effort against northerners is trying to
recover its balance.
I am not an expert on Mali. I leave my understanding to first-rate analysis from
Afua Hirsch of the Guardian and political scientists like Benjamin Soares at
Leiden. Mali is important because it now risks becoming a centre of global
terrorism, because cultural heritages are a global trust and because any country
that has experienced rule of law that slides into chaos is a moral challenge to the
global community in a particular way, which is the Baltic States or the Pinochet
coup of our generation.
The issues posed by the failure of the “global security community” and “the
coalition for the promotion of the global rule of law” to anticipate what happened
in Mali is, however, something that I want to talk about.
Our approach to foreign policy issues is hopelessly out of date. At one level, this
is a bromide, generals fighting the last war. We had a paradigm based on the
war-by-error of World War I, on the ColdWar, or Vietnam, on 9/11. But
thisseems to be a more serious problem of failed analysis (“conceptual
frameworks” or “paradigms” or “memes”) and one with consequences well
beyond the wonderful culture and democratic values of Mali.
The sudden collapse of Mali came from three perfect storm producing
phenomena:
(1) The tragedy of success, a democratic regimethat received too much donor
assistance before the capacity to turn capital into productive and transparent
investment existed;
(2) The unaddressed issues of colonial boundaries (the curse of the Durand line
as I have called it in a previous lecture) which continues to make the world more
dangerous as Ogaden, Afghanistan, Iraqi, Syrian boundaries create challenges
of global consequences in the modern age;
(3) The inability of our foreign policy theories to understand migration as an
international problem, as when thousands of armed militia left Libya to go south
and west through the Sahara.
Mali is one of many future crises that come from this outdated approach to
international politics. Here are some new assumptions that one might hope
became an Obama Doctrine in a second term:

4. 1. Global migration has changed the nature of state security. Thousands of
immigrants create a security problem and are a global concern. When
there is a displacement of people as predictably took place after the
Libyan war. Global migration requires a new approach to the issues of
economic migrants, refugees and international politics.
2. The aid trap described by Dambisa Moyo is real. The task of foreign
assistance is to ensure that local capital markets allocate capital to
productive entrepreneurs. Initiatives like VC4Africa are critical for the
next generation of democratic activists so that situations like the one that
led to the Malian coup and subsequent regional destabilization are
addressed. Resource revenues should be turned into SWFs like Abu
Dhabi or into a pension system like Norway. By the end of the decade,
all mining and extractive industry payments should be directly to such
investment instruments.
3. Most importantly and most difficult, the residual effects of the colonial
boundaries drawn on maps in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and London has
to be addressed. In Brazil and Canada, we are exploring ways to
provide shared jurisdiction over aboriginal lands to ensure that prosperity
is managed by the stakeholders. In places like the Tuareg population of
Mali, where the Mauritania-Mali border has no economic significance, new
institutions have to be designed. As many of these areas (the Ogaden,
for example) are rich, new institutions for managing the wealth that comes
from extractive industries have to be designed.
This will not happen overnight. But the language of traditional international
relations has to change for it to ever happen. There will be endless threats to
global security unless the international system creates geographically coherent
states where democratic politicians can build social trust. Political innovators will
also have to design new mechanisms for cooperation between states that allow
us to manage interdependence.