Results for “syria serbia” 3 found
The Middle East and Syria right now
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Some historical events are relatively easy to model with game theory: the Cuban Missile crisis, many of the Cold War proxy wars, the crisis over North Korean nuclear weapons. In those conflicts, the number of relevant parties is small and each typically has some degree of internal cohesion.
To find a situation comparable to the Middle East today, with so many involved countries, and so many interrelationships between internal and external political issues, one has to go back to the First World War, not an entirely comforting thought.
The situation right before that war had many distinct yet related moving parts, including the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the imperialist scramble for colonies, the prior Balkan Wars, a rising Germany seeking parity or superiority with Great Britain, an unstable alliance system, an unworkable Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the complex internal politics of Russia, which eventually led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
What do we learn from the history of that time? Well, even if the chance of war was high by early 1914, it was far from obvious that the Central Powers attack on France, Belgium and Russia would be set off by a political assassination in the Balkans.
Nonetheless, in sufficiently complex situations, chain reactions can cause small events to cascade into big changes. In World War I, one goal behind the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was to break off parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a new Yugoslavia. The empire responded by making some demands on Serbia, which were not heeded, a declaration of war followed, and the alliance system activated broader conflicts across Europe.
If you don’t quite follow how a single assassination, which was not even seen as so important the day it occurred, triggered the death of so many millions, and the destruction of so much of Europe, that is exactly the point. When there is no clear way for observers to model the situation, a single bad event can take on a very large significance and for reasons that are not entirely explicable.
Do read the whole thing.
Is Schengen dead? Or just pining for the fjords?
They are solving for the equilibrium, so to speak:
Germany is reinstating controls at its borders with Austria as Europe’s top economy struggles to cope with a record influx of refugees, according to media reports.
Passport checks had been abolished for countries within Europe’s Schengen zone, but the decision to bring back controls is expected to be announced by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere at a press conference on Sunday evening.
Bild newspaper cited security sources as saying that the state government in Bavaria had asked the federal police to help deal with the task. The newspaper said the federal police would send 2,100 officers to Bavaria to help it secure its borders.
Here is the technological shock. Here is my earlier post on Germany and the backlash. Here is my earlier post on the moral regression of Syria. Put those all together and mix…
Immigration sentences to ponder
“I would never have been able to arrive at my destination without my smartphone,” he added. “I get stressed out when the battery even starts to get low.”
That is from Osama Aljasem, a 32-year-old music teacher from Deir al-Zour in Syria, who took a boat to Greece, walked to Belgrade, and hopes to continue to parts further north and west:
In this modern migration, smartphone maps, global positioning apps, social media and WhatsApp have become essential tools.
Recommended. And yes, disintermediation is kicking in:
“Right now the traffickers are losing business because people are going alone, thanks to Facebook,” said Mohamed Haj Ali, 38, who works with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital — a major stopover for migrants.
Facebook groups are used to pass along GPS coordinates and the prices charged by the traffickers have fallen in half.