A Bit More Detail

Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig reports on news that Japan is apparently altering its policy on the Kurils, hoping that a partition of the Kurils between Japan and Russia on north-south lines, giving Japan the islands nearest Hokkaido–Shikotan and the Habomai islet groups–and letting Russia keep the northern islands. This is an attempt at compromise, true, but I don’t think it’ll work out for the reasons Pereltsvaig highlights. Me, as I noted in 2010, Japan is the only defeated Second World War country still claiming territory lost in 1945; there’s something off about that. IMHO.

The idea to negotiate the return of Shikotan and the Habomai group as a first step in the resolution of this long-standing diplomatic impasse belongs to the then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who proposed it to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2001. However, negotiating the return of two rather than all four islands at once met with resistance in Japan, because of fears that such an arrangement would result in Moscow retaining control of Etorofu and Kunashiri indefinitely. Such concerns prompted Mori’s successor Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to seek a comprehensive resolution to the dispute before the two sides conclude a peace treaty, but Putin ultimately dismissed the suggestion. The revival of the idea to negotiate over just two islands coincides with Putin’s return to the presidency yesterday, as the president-elect expressed a certain degree of willingness to resolve the issue in an interview with foreign media outlets in March of this year. However, other Russian media outlets, such as Fontanka.ru, claim that “no Russian president will ever relinquish the Kurils to Japan” and cite sources in the Kremlin as saying that “Japan missed its historical chance to solve this territorial problem already in 1996 when President Boris Yeltsin met with the Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto in Krasnoyarsk”.

• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster raises the possibility of bringing an asteroid into lunar orbit, for scientific and space-settlement purposes both.
• Daniel Drezner is pleasantly surprised that the situation of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng hasn’t led to anything like a breakdown of Sino-American relations.
• Eastern Approaches notes the Polish holiday of “Flag Day” on the 2nd of May, commemorating the substantial Polish participation in the conquest of Berlin in 1945.
• Far Outliers’ Joel discusses the Canary Islands and the role they played in the emerging imperium, both vis-a-vis Portugal and the later imperial strategies of unified Spain.
• Geocurrents describes the Sino-Soviet border disputes in eastern Siberia in 1969 that killed hundreds of people, nearly led to a Sino-Soviet war, and played a critical role in deciding the future of the world.
• Language Hat starts a discussion about the depressing plight of non-Russian languages inside Russia that quickly expands to include discussions of Turkish immigrants in Russia, the situation of Gaelic in Ireland, and Canada’s own language situation.
• Laywers, Guns and Money reviews a book describing how environmentalism in the Colorado ski resort of Aspen helps to legitimate anti-immigrant sentiment.
• At NewAPPSBlog, Mohan Matthen makes the contrarian argument–compelling, but I think ultimately incorrect–that a “Oui” outcome in the 1995 Québec referendum would have been good for Québec and rump Canada both.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell discusses the consequences of Bo Xilai’s wiretapping of other officials in China, in the context of ubiquitous state surveillance generally.

I’ve a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at the latest developments on emigration from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, in the Caucasus.

Emigration is not diminishing with 23% of the population having emigrated, despite the difficulties faced by Georgians in travelling internationally and the relative insecurity of these migrants (the largest community is in an anti-Georgian Russia, while the largest Georgian immigrant community in the European Union is in Greece). Rather, emigration is a necessity.

Go, read.

• Dan Hirschman at A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book distinguishes between the economic measurements GDP and GDP.
• James Bow mourns the death, via cutbacks and falling passengers, of Ontario’s Northlands railway.
• Centauri Dreams considers the question, inspired by evidence that Alpha Centauri is significantly older than Sol, and speculation that habitable planets are likely to be considerably older than Earth, of where the aliens are.
• Daniel Drezner is somewhat surprised that he is optimistic about the spread of liberal-democratic ideals worldwide, at least relative to others in a recent issue of The National Interest.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig considers the similar Russian-based contact pidgins in Siberia and along Russia’s Arctic coast as the product not of contact with a single language area but rather as consequence of a mindset of how to talk to non-Russians.
• Marginal Revolution notes a New York Times article noting the culture shock experienced by trained professionals migrating to Germany from southern Europe.
• Registan notes that the International Labour Organization’s demand to inspect Uzbekistan’s cotton plantations to verify that forced and child labour is not used there, likely to be rejected because (among other things) Uzbekistan does use forced and child labour, is likely to lead to worsened relations with the United States.
• I’m late on this one, but Slap Upside the Head notes the retraction of the only credible study on ex-gays by the paper’s author.
• Towleroad notes the hysterical anger of Islamic clerics and the usual in Iran at the rumour–not the reality–of a gay pride parade in neighbouring Azerbaijan.

• Anders Sandberg at Andart approves of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s desire to use space travel to create offworld backups for our biosphere.
• Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell believes that the close links between Brazil and Boston–driven by migration, at first strictly economic but then driven by interest in Massachusetts’ education institutes–could serve Boston quite well.
• Two links from Centauri Dreams today, one describing the planetary system of HD 10180, a Sun-like star that supports nine planets to our eight, and the other describing hypothetical laser-based defenses for starships against interstellar dust.
• At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo describes the difficulties tourism planners in destination cities have with getting people to visit sites that aren’t the most heavily trafficked.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig deflates the myth that Chinese men (lacking spouses owing to a male-biased sex ratio at birth) will flood into Russia (especially Siberia) looking for Russian women (lacking spouses owing to a high male death rate). Among other things, there actually isn’t much of a shortage of theoretically marriageable men in Siberia.
• The Global Sociology Blog discusses what happens when celebrity culture and social networking sites like Twitter insect. The answer? It’s easier to get social capital than ever before.
• At GNXP, Razib Khan notes that Argentina–unlike English-speaking countries also products of mass European immigration–still evidences the genetic trace of indigenous populations.
• Open the Future’s Jamais Cascio points out that, at long last, global climate change is kicking off (as expected as early as 1981).
• Registan features a guest post from Uzbekistan commentator Azamat Seitov, who discusses the possibility that the Eurasian Economic Community–a Russia-centered bloc also including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan–will take off. He’s skeptical.

As part of an ongoing series of blog posts at Geocurrents regarding Siberia, Asya Pereltsvaig has been making some interesting posts about language shift in Siberia (defined by Geocurrents as all of Russia’s Asian territory, eastward from the Urals to the Pacific coast). Siberia, she notes, has shifted overwhelmingly to the Russian language, a consequence of (among other factors, including immigration) Soviet-era education policies which prioritized Russian above the languages of the Union (and the indigenous languages of Siberia).

Pereltsvaig’s post “How to save the Itelmen language” reminded me of my link yesterday to an article expressing pessismism about the future of the Chamorro language in American Micronesia. The Itelmens are an indigenous people of the Kamchatka peninsula, on the northeastern coast of Siberia near Alaska, that has experienced a pronounced shift away from their nearly-extinct language to Russian. Why? It doesn’t have anything to do with the complexity of the language, she convincingly argues, but rather with state policies that were directed (intentionally and otherwise) towards triggering a language shift away from Itelmen to Russian, including the non-recognition of the minority in the Soviet era. She explains in detail.

First, the lack of writing by no means dooms a language. Written language is a relatively modern invention going back perhaps 5,000 years old, as opposed to the 100,000-year or so history of spoken language. Until quite recently, moreover, writing was limited to a select few people in certain parts of the world. All over the globe, languages continued to be transmitted perfectly well without any written grammars or dictionaries. Moreover, having a written form is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for one language to replace another. Essentially illiterate Russians managed to acculturate the so-called “lost middle Finns” – Merya, Meschera, and Murom – in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but the cultured, literate Romans never managed to impose Latin on the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles (though they did in Gaul and elsewhere in their widespread empire). Having a written form is irrelevant to language shift because children learn their native language not from grammars and dictionaries but from hearing the language spoken around them. And as long as children are able to acquire a language from those around them and speak it natively, the language remains a living one.

Second, being “too grammatically complex,” has no bearing on inter-generational language transmission. As noted by John McWhorter What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be), languages that are transmitted in an unbroken chain from one generation to the next tend to get more and more “ingrown” and “disheveled”, meaning they develop complex grammatical patterns with numerous exceptions, as McWhorter illustrates with Ket, another Siberian indigenous language. It is true that many peoples who have spoken Ket and similarly ingrown languages have switched to less disheveled languages over the course of history, but they have not done so because those languages are “easier” or in any way superior to their native tongues. The process actually works in the opposite direction: when people switch en masse to a new language, they often make it “easier” by shifting to it.

[. . .]

Finally, the argument based on adaptability fails too, as all languages, including Itelmen are malleable. Languages create new words and new forms of expressions either by borrowing from other languages or by using language-internal means. Itelmen too proved its adaptability by coining a large number of new words and by borrowing many others. Recent loanwords are mostly derived from Russian, whereas older borrowings are from Koryak, Chukchi, the Eskimo-Aleut languages, and possibly even Ainu.

Implicit in all of these arguments is the assumption that a choice must be made by the community between Itelmen and Russian. However, bilingualism is a very common phenomenon worldwide. Studies conducted in the last fifty years confirm that bringing up a child with more than one language does not result in confusion. Quite the opposite may be true as some psycholinguistic studies indicate that individual bilingualism may promote a child’s cognitive development, improve creative thinking, hone language learning skills, and even promote the maturation of those areas of the brain responsible for inhibition and control. Continuing societal bilingualism does not hold the community back either, as the Swiss illustrate so well.

The bottom line is that speakers of one language switch to another language in a short period of time not due to some inadequacies of their own language. In the case of the Itelmen, the massive switch of the majority to Russian has to do with forcible assimilation on the part of the Russians, perceived ease of entering the social mainstream (getting education, jobs, etc.), and also the destruction of the traditional ways of life. These social, political, and economic reasons account for the sad state that the Itelmen language finds itself in today: only a small number of elderly people still speak the language. It is taught sporadically in kindergartens and elementary schools, but all language programs suffer from a chronic shortage of trained teachers, materials, and funding. The Itelmen community is not monolithic: though many people want to see the language revived, others do not. Some have invested enormous efforts into language preservation programs, but others have resisted them. Local Russian authorities consider the Itelmen fully assimilated rather than forming a separate ethnic group, and thus refuse to grant the Itelmen the privileges guaranteed to native peoples by law. This also helps to explain why revitalization measures have met only with limited success so far: they address the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of the problem.

Great post, great series.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason writes about how the CBC’s innovative programming let him learn and enjoy things he’d otherwise not have. The cutbacks will not do good things for the national broadcaster.
• Jeff Jedras at A BCer in Toronto pins the blame for the massive cost overruns in Canada’s share of the vastly overexpensive F-35 fighter program squarely on the Conservative Party and its ministers.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster shares the good news that the United States will resume producing the radioactive isotope plutonium-238 so as to provide the necessary fuel for outer-system space probes.
• Crasstalk’s Mean Ol’ Liberal reflects on the meaning of the bulls of Wall Street, not only the statue but the speculators.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that if China’s leadership really does see global geopolitics as a zero-sum phenomenon, China’s relationship with the United States may face substantially more risks than previously thought.
• At Geocurrents, Martin Lewis notes that the northern half of Mali claimed by Tuareg rebels for their national homeland actually has very large non-Tuareg populations.
• The Global Sociology Blog notes the incentives to sociopathy in the global economy.
• Noel Maurer, at The Power and the Money, notes that the Mexican city of Monterrey has a rather high population density by American standards, and a high density of police, too. Thus, its crime rate has little if anything to do with the city’s sprawl.
• Registan notes the ongoing solidification and intensification of ethnic divisions between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in southern Kyrgyzstan in the years after the deadly Osh riots.
• Torontoist’s Todd Aalgard notes that plans to immediately rebuild a platground in Toronto’s High Park are stymied by the need to meet city safety and building codes.

Eurasianet reports on the latest developments facing the Aral Sea, an inland sea formerly located on the Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan border that has almost disappear thanks to the diversion of the rivers that fed it to cotton plantations. Kazakhstan’s portion of the Aral Sea, separated off from the rest of the sea bed and carefully tended with dedicated inflows of water and ecological managements, is recovering. Uzbekistan’s, now, despite all the rhetoric is almost gone, and Uzbekistan’s government might actually be pleased with this.

The saga of the Aral Sea is now a tale of two bodies of water. One holds the promise of a happy ending, the other remains enmeshed in tragedy.

Political geography is a major factor in separating positive and negative. Residents of Kazakhstani settlements along the Aral’s northern shore, including Aralsk, are guardedly optimistic these days. For a couple of generations they watched the Aral steadily shrink and the local economy wither. But recent government rescue measures have stabilized sea levels, helping local fishing communities slowly start to rebound.

In Muynak, another former fishing town, residents are looking for any opportunity to leave. They say they are suffering health problems from dust storms. They also complain that their government is doing nothing to reverse the disaster.

[. . .]

The project appears to be paying off. As the water levels slowly rise, salinity in the Kazakhstani portion of the sea has decreased by five times and fauna have returned. A few hopeful former residents are now returning to Aralsk and other villages along the shore. Though critics assert that Kazakhstan has effectively jettisoned large swaths of the former sea to save a small portion, Central Asia-based environmentalists commend the steps and say it is time for Tashkent to make a similar effort.

If one believes Uzbek state-controlled media outlets, the Aral Sea crisis receives ample government attention in Tashkent. A January TV broadcast reported that over the past decade, the Uzbek government has spent close to $1 billion on saving the Aral and improving living conditions for the region’s residents.

A Tashkent-based environmentalist scoffed at the figure. “Apart from running some public awareness campaigns on the necessity of preserving water, the government is doing nothing substantial,” the environmentalist said.

Some are increasingly concerned that officials in Tashkent welcomes the desertification of the area around the Aral. In recent years, the state-controlled gas concern, Uzbekneftegaz, has been prospecting for oil and gas deposits in the Aral Sea bed with Russian and Asian partners.

• Andrew Barton at Acts of Minor Treason despairs on the occasion of Earth Hour. Broader recognition of the critical problems facing the environment of Earth is so badly needed.
• Bruce Sterling quotes at length from Michel de Montaigne, pioneering essayist and critical futurist.
• At Crasstalk, LaZiguezon describes, in pictures and words, five haunting abandoned places: a mine in California’s Death Valley, Cyprus’ abandoned international airport, and more.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog’s Janis Prince Inniss comments on the way that the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida is polarizing people into two audiences, once seeing his shooter as an inveterate racist and the other blaming the victim. Intermediate situations are possible: class might be more of a factor than race, for instance.
• Eastern approaches notes that after having been stripped of his doctorate for plagiarism, Hungarian president Pál Schmitt has resigned.
• Geocurrents notes South Korea’s significant presence in post-Communist Central Asia.
• The Language Log’s Victor Mair calls for the use of more pinyin in Chinese classes to help boost education.
• At the Naked Anthropology, Laura Agustín comments on the recent ruling on prostitution in Ontario, noting that the ban on public solicitation hits relatively disadvantaged prostitutes worse than their more advantaged peers who can better take advantage of the new liberalization.
• Registan is unimpressed by Mitt Romney’s identification of Russia as the United States’ main enemy.
• Yorkshire ranter Alex Harrowell notes that great efforts are being made to keep new Chinese soldiers depoliticized.

Facebook’s Edward Lucas linked to the report about the most notable spy scandal to hit Canada in recent years.

It will be interesting to see how much press attention this case gets. So far, the allegations against Delisle haven’t been widely publicized since the news broke.

The Wall Street Journal reported that sources close to the case said the leak, allegedly conducted by Sub Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, created serious fallout between Canada and the U.S., which was downplayed by Canadian officials. The Wall Street Journal also said another source claimed the volume linked to the breach was on the same level as the data loss the U.S. experienced through WikiLeaks.

Although the nature of the suspected intelligence leak has not been of publicly revealed, sources close to the matter told the Wall Street Journal that it was electronic communications between allied militaries that was leaked to Russia. The destination of the leaked information also has not been officially confirmed.

A spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay told Postmedia News Tuesday night that allied nations have no doubts regarding Canadian intelligence and defence.

“I can’t speculate on hearsay,” Jay Paxton said in an email to Postmedia News. “The minister has been clear that our allies remain fully confident of Canadian defence activities. That point was reiterated by the visit of Minister MacKay’s American and Mexican counterparts (Tuesday).”

The Wall Street Journal reported, again citing sources familiar with the matter, that the breach centred around a specific alliance between the militaries of Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Delisle, 40, was arrested in Halifax in January and became the first person charged under the Security of Information Act, which replaced the former Official Secrets Act in 2001.

He’s facing charges of breach of trust, communication of safeguarded information and attempting to communicate safeguarded information. The alleged crimes are suspected to have taken place over a five-year period beginning in 2007.

After some delay, Delisle’s bail hearing is now scheduled for April 13.

If convicted, the junior naval intelligence officer faces life in prison.

Delisle was employed at HMCS Trinity, an intelligence facility at the naval dockyard in Halifax that tracks vessels entering and exiting Canadian waters via satellites, drones and underwater devices.

The base is believed to specialize in sub-sea surveillance and regularly feeds its findings to the U.S. Navy and NATO. In addition to having access to communications codes, an employee of the facility might have been able to tell a foreign power the locations of ocean sensors used in monitoring ship movements.