The Politics of the Bottom Up Goes Global

Nico's latest liveblogging has mounting evidence that the vote was rigged. 

All of this presents an interesting challenge for how other nations will now interact with the current government.   As Roger Cohen wrote in the NY Times this morning, the current regime's legitimacy is more than in question now.

What a sea change for Iran, and for the region.  Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and now Iran all having meaningful elections.  Afghanistan has just begun its new round of elections.  Even Palestine's recent election was consequential.  While too much can be read it into it, nonethless, this simple idea - that the people must have their say - is making a powerful apperance now in the Middle East where political freedom has been a rare thing indeed.

I have to say that I have been incredibly inspired by the courage of the people of Iran over the past week, and have been deeply moved by their valiant efforts to bring their story to the people of the world.   These images and stories are being seen by all of us throughout the world, but perhaps no more so than its youth, who are the majority of the people of the world today.  Fully 53% of the world's population is under thirty today, and this uprising is becoming an important milestone in the political education of those will come to power in the years ahead.

As I wrote the other day one of the most consequential stories of the early 21st century will be the struggle of the rising nations of the world with modernity and all that it entails - free markets, the global information revolution and of course the other part of what of what the West has been exporting - political freedom, rule of law and democracy. 

As the "world watches" what is happening in Iran, I've been wondering how these extraordinary images are going over in Caracas, Riyadh, Beijing, Moscow and the corridors of power of other less than democratic governments.   The events of the past week have raised the issues of political freedom and liberty in ways that are not always easy for the West to do.   My sense is that whatever the outcome in Iran - and we have to hope for the best each day - these events, coupled with the rise of Barack Obama in the US, are putting some issues on the global table that may be uncomfortable indeed for many important nations in the world today. 

Much has been written about the how events unfolding in Iran are crossing some kind of internal Iranian Rubicon.  Fareed Zakaria has a new essay to this effect.  But there is a strong argument to be made that the world is crossing that Rubicon right along with the Iranians, and that we wiill all be in a new place together after these extraordinary set of events.   I won't argue that we will begin to see street demonstrations in other parts of the world now, but there can be no doubt that the inconvenient and of course critically important issue of political freedom has been introduced into the great global conversation in a way it has not been for a long, long time.  And where that takes us is still to early to tell, but we do know that this new place almost has to be better than where we've been.

From Nick Kristof's NYTimes column today:

The unrest unfolding in Iran is the quintessential 21st-century conflict. On one side are government thugs firing bullets. On the other side are young protesters firing “tweets.”

The protesters’ arsenal, such as those tweets on Twitter.com, depends on the Internet or other communications channels. So the Iranian government is blocking certain Web sites and evicting foreign reporters or keeping them away from the action.

The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.

Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.

“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”

Mr. Zhou said that usage of the consortium’s software has tripled in the last week. It set a record on Wednesday of more than 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people.

If President Obama wants to support democratic movements on a shoestring, he should support an “Internet freedom initiative” pending in Congress. This would include $50 million in the appropriations bill for these censorship-evasion technologies. The 21st-century equivalent of the Berlin wall is a cyberbarrier, and we can help puncture it.

I had more on this yesterday.

There is much to celebrate in the President's new Cuba policy this morning.  NDN was among the first organizations in the nation to argue that the right first step towards a new day with our Cuban neighbors would be to relax the Bush era travel and remittance policy, which had done so much to tear Cuban and their American relatives apart in recent years.   So we are pleased with this announcement, and believe deeply that these first steps will initiate a process over the next five to ten years - or perhaps longer - which helps Cuba modernize, and transition to a more open and democratic society. 

But the announcement also contained provisions about telecommunications which deserve a little more consideration this morning.  Note this exchange between Dan Restrepo and a reporter at yesterday's announcement: 

Q If you guys could just explain a little bit more about the part of today's announcement that deals with telecommunications firms being allowed to - I mean, what

MR. RESTREPO: Certainly. We want to increase the flow of information among Cubans, and between Cubans and the outside world. And one of the ways we can do that under U.S. -- existing United States law, back to the Cuban Democracy Act, is to allow U.S. telecommunications companies to seek to provide services on the island. The licensing process has never -- never really went forward. We're allowing that process -- the President is directing that that licensing process go forward, and directing that the regulations system be put into place to allow U.S. persons to pay for cell coverage that already exists on the island -- again, so Cubans can talk to Cubans, and Cubans can talk to the outside world without having to go through the filter that is the Cuban government.

Q So just cell phones is what this is talking about?

MR. RESTREPO: This is cell phones, satellite television, satellite radio. This is forms of -- modern forms of telecommunication to increase the flow of information to the Cuban people so that if anyone is standing in the way of the Cuban people getting information it is the Cuban government, and it is not some outside technical problem that can be pointed to.

Taking away those excuses and putting -- and trying to create the conditions where greater information flows among the Cuban people, and to and from the Cuban people.

Q To follow up on that, if I may. So if this happens as it's intended to happen, is the idea that a U.S. company would be providing sort of U.S. television programming on -- beaming it in -- onto the island, is that the idea?

MR. RESTREPO: The idea is to increase the flow of information, be it what we see here in the United States -- the global marketplace of television and radio, to make that a possibility for the Cuban people and to ensure that the United States government is not standing in the way of that; to make clear that more -- we stand on the side of having more information rather than less information reach the Cuban people, and for them to be able to communicate among themselves.

This is an early articulation of what could become an important part of any future Obama Doctrine - the idea that connectivity and access to modern media and technology tools have become indespensible elements of free and open societies in the 21st century.   This idea has also been a central part of NDN's arguments these past few years, whether it has been in the reporting and papers we've produced in our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, or in our more traditional policy work.  From a paper I co-authored in 2007 with Alec Ross, A Laptop in Every Backpack: 

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications,media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world.

We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success. There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

And we took an ever deeper look at how mobile devices are becoming core to development work across the world in this recent paper by Tom Kalil, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution.

This new high-tech foreign policy is a logical extension of the deep understanding of the power of these tools the President took away from his own wildly successful Presidential campaign, and is one more example of how the politics of the bottom up is going increasingly global.  Very exciting indeed. 

Congratulations to the President and his whole team for taking these smart and important first steps towards a new day for our relations with our Cuban neighbors.