Putting his first boot forward: Russian troops move

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The African Union marks its 20th birthday this year. In its first decade, it mostly managed to work as intended, integrating economies and keeping the peace. A look around the continent today suggests its second decade hasn't been so successful. And skim through the hottest songs on Spotify and you might notice a slow, steady change, less and less English in the lyrics. Our data correspondent takes a deep dive, finding where in the world pop music's dominant language is slipping fastest. But first, Europe has moved a big step closer to war. Last night, after an unusual televised meeting of his National Security Council, Russia's president Vladimir Putin delivered a long and fiery speech.

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He essentially denied Ukraine's very existence. He called it a fiction. He accused NATO of using the country as a base to threaten Russia. After that bit of revisionism, Mr. Putin said the two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, should officially be recognized as independent. Then he said Russian troops would march into them. He called them peacekeepers. Hours later, they did. Those two regions or oblasts have not known peace for some time. Together, they're known as the Donbass. They're packed with Russian speakers. And since 2014, when their Eastern flanks fell under the control of Russia backed separatists. Some 14,000 people have died so far. The international response to Mr. Putin's new offensive has been limited to strong words and tentative sanctions. Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised a barrage of them this morning. And later today, America is expected to announce more. Most significantly, Germany has moved to stop the certification of the vast gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2. Mr. Putin's moves are not yet the full scale invasion that much of the world has been fearing. But 190,000 troops are still crowded all around Ukraine's borders. And with soldiers moving into Donetsk and Luhansk, the circle is tightening.

Well, yesterday was an extremely dramatic day.

Christopher Lockwood is our Europe editor.

It began with a long televised National Security Council meeting. Vladimir Putin sat on a big white chair with all of his minions laid out in front of him and one by one called them up to ask what he ought to do and whether they supported the idea of recognizing these two British. And all of them, I have to say, very hesitantly in some cases, said they did support that move. He shortly after that gave a very long, more than an hour rambling broadcast of the Nation in which he laid out the whole history of the conflict with Ukraine, claim that Ukraine was sort of invented by Bolshevik Russia. Historically, it's complete nonsense, utter nonsense, and at the end of it announced that he was indeed recognizing the two republics and was signing a treaty of friendship and cooperation with them. So all this was carefully choreographed and really very dramatic and unsettling. And perhaps the oddest thing about it really was just watching this hour long rant by Putin because frankly, to many observers he seemed a little bit unhinged.

And so how did we get here? Why is this the point of conflict?

Well, this all goes back to 2014 where very shortly after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, he also sent troops, and these were disguised troops, never acknowledged the so called little green men into two southeastern oblasts, or it's a Russian word for provinces, essentially Donetsk and Luhansk, claiming that the Russian speaking people there needed protection from the Ukrainians. And that was the beginning of the second phase of the great Ukrainian conflict. Now a peacekeeping agreement was signed by all parties. It's called the Minsk Accords. And that set down a bunch of parameters for what an eventual full scale peace might look like, including the reintegration of those two people's republics back into Ukraine itself in return for a high level of autonomy. And that was the basis from which all diplomatic efforts and all military resolutions has been proceeding ever since now, effectively what Vladimir Putin has just done is sweep all of that aside because he has recognized the oblasts as being independent statelets and therefore saying there is no traction anymore in trying to reintegrate them back into Ukraine because they're now independent.

And so in that view, then Russia must simply spill into these oblasts and keep the peace. I mean, how is this not another annexation, an annexation by proxy?

Well, of course, many people do regard it as a form of annexation. I wouldn't use the word annexation exactly, but it looks very like it. The two governments in Donetsk and Luhansk of these so called people's republics are essentially clients, puppets of Putin's. They're only there because he wants them to be there and he backs them. He's given them aid and military support, and now, of course, he's giving them peacekeepers too.

What has the international response been to what Mr. Putin has done?

Well, the international response has been extremely negative. And the reason for that is it's completely torpedoed any pretence that there was a diplomatic solution still available to the problem of what to do about these eastern regions. And it is an attempt to redraw international boundaries. Plainly you can't just carve out states willy nilly, but that's effectively what he's done. So condemnation has come, of course, from President Zelensky of Ukraine. You would expect that, but very strongly from the British, from the Secretary General of the United nations, from the Secretary General of NATO, from the Americans.

He calls them peacekeepers.

This is nonsense.

We know what they really are.

One of the strongest statements came from the American Ambassador to the un, Linda Thomas Greenfield, who said that it was complete nonsense to suggest that the Russian troops that are being put into the two breakaway republics are peacekeepers. She says we know what they really are. Clear implication that they're some form of fighting force.

And as that troop buildup has gone on, there has been a lot of discussion about what sanctions may come, many big threats about sanctions. What do you see happening with those now? That there has been real movement, but not a full scale invasion.

So overnight America announced that they are implementing some quite limited sanctions. And those are sanctions directed specifically at the two breakaway statelets and people that operate in them, businessmen from their companies that deal with them and have businesses.

There in Russia itself, targeting Russian economic interests as hard as we can. And I'll be sending out a bit later on in the House of Commons what we are going to do.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson is already talking about really a quite Tough package of sanctions. This is not the big package of sanctions that the west has been working on for months now. Those are being held in reserve for an actual invasion. I think it's important to understand that nothing Russia has done up till now, in my view, amounts to an actual war. They've simply put formally troops into regions where there were already undeclared troops. It's what they do next.

So how to think about what comes next? What will you be watching out for?

Well, this situation can go in a number of different ways. One thing clearly to look for is any push across the line of contact between the Ukrainian parts of Donbas and the breakaway parts of Donbas. That could happen very, very quickly now, and that would be the first sign that a fairly limited war was underway. But equally, we could see something much bigger and more dramatic, a push from the troops that are lined up to the north of Ukraine in Belarus, fact, only a very short distance away from Kyiv, the capital. Perhaps they will mount an attack on Kyiv. Perhaps there will be cyber attacks, perhaps there will be terrorist outrages. It's possible that special forces that are believed to already have infiltrated the capital might stage something. So there are many possible different outcomes and we just don't know which of them Putin is going to choose. The fact is he's got an enormous number of troops there at a very high level of readiness. We have reports of soldiers sleeping by their tanks right up close to the border. Now, that's not something that you can expect soldiers to do for very long, especially at this time of year. It's not sustainable. So he will either have to move them out or send them back to not barracks, but at least to holding stations a bit further back. But I don't think this situation can last as it is for very long at all.

Krish, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

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This year marks two decades since a momentous rebranding was unveiled at a conference in South Africa. In the presence of leaders such as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, the Organization of African Unity became the African Union. But South Africa's then deputy president, Jacob Zuma, made clear that there was more to it.

It is not just the name change. It is the change of the attitude of the material conditions and the commitment for the new African leadership really to ensure that Africa operates differently, does things in a new way.

The vision was an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa. So 20 years on, has the AU done what the OAU hadn't?

The OAU had been more or less discredited. It had come to be seen as something of a talking shop, a sort of club for dictators.

Tom Gardner is the Economist's Addis Ababa correspondent.

It effectively turned a blind eye to abuses, to crimes against humanity that were happening on its watch. That was one of the things which the au, the African Union, was introduced with a goal of addressing.

So on paper, what were the responsibilities, the priorities for the new au, broadly speaking.

And it has quite a lot of official aims, but chiefly to stop the continent's wars, to ease the flow of trade between countries, and to allow Africa to speak with a united voice on the world stage. Most radically, it came with this mandate, this authority to intervene militarily if necessary, without the consent of a host government to stop bloodshed, war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, things like that.

And so how has its record been.

On that two decades on? Its record is mixed. There are certainly accomplishments. The African Continental Free Trade Area, which took effect last year, is a genuine, if incomplete achievement. Almost every single country on the continent has signed up, bar one Eritrea. And there are successes in the peace and security file as well. If you look at the early peacekeeping efforts, within two years of his establishment, they stepped in to stop a genocide in Darfur. In 2004, they sent in African peacekeepers. A few years later, they started a peacekeeping mission in Somalia to combat a jihadist insurgency there. And then in terms of upholding democratic norms, there were successes as well. For almost two decades, coups on the Continent became much rarer, thanks in part to the AU's strong, strict prohibition of unconstitutional changes of government.

It sounds like the accomplishments you list are all fairly far back in history. What's the picture now?

Yeah, some people, if you speak to them, they'll say the first decade was one of achievement and the second decade was one of regression. If you look at conflict, for example, the AU's ambition was to eradicate it from the continent by 2020. That's the goal of silencing the guns. That's now been pushed back to 2030. So you have this war in Ethiopia, civil war in Ethiopia, where I am next door in Somalia, you have jihadist still running amok in large parts of it and across much of the Sahel as well. Down further south in Mozambique, there's a bloody insurgency in its impoverished north, in Congo, the region crawls with rebel militias. And then, most strikingly, it's coups, which are making a comeback after all that progress in the first decade. In the past year, the AU has suspended four countries, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Sudan, because of putsches.

So why all that regression then? Why hasn't the AU been able to do what it set out to do?

I think when you look at peace and security, in particular the AU's Peace and Security Council, that's the 15 member panel modeled on the UN Security Council, that's lost some of its energy and zeal. More recently, I think the AU Commission in particular and the Peace and Security Council have struggled to stand up against the interests of some of the continent's stronger members and become basically more beholden to the interests of individual member states. To some extent, that's a sign of the times across much of the world. Multilateralism that the AU espouses has become a harder sell in parts of the continent. But I think also member states have learned to push back and rebuff AU responses. They've learned to game the system to an extent.

Gaming the system how? What do you mean?

So Ethiopia is a prime example of this. As their diplomats have acquired more knowledge and skill about how the Commission and the Peace and Security Council work, they've learned how to stand up to it. So Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, gave a speech at the au summit on February 5, marking the 20th anniversary of the African Union.

Our Union has committed to undertake ambitious plans designed to transform our continent and create the Africa we want. We want a prosperous Africa based on sustainable and equitable development. We want a politically united continent that aspires to fulfill the ideals of Pan Africanism and the vision of an African renaissance.

So that's quite typical in its kind of invocations of Pan African solidarity and also standing up to outside powers. What he didn't mention, though, was the civil war and the African Union's doorstep, because the African Union is its seat is in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. So only a few hundred kilometers away, Ethiopia's civil war is raging. And part of the reason why that's able to happen is the African Union has done very little to grasp this crisis by the neck and try to resolve it.

So is there a way for the AU to get back to that first decade, the successful decade, and get the strength that it had then?

It's a matter of will. The AU has some sticks and carrots to enforce its decisions, but it's typically unwilling to use many of them. It expels member states if there's a coup, but it rarely sanctions or imposes stronger sanctions than that, which means that countries big or small can basically thumb their nose at it. The most obvious example was in 2015 when the AU actually voted to intervene militarily in Burundi to quell violence there. And the Burundians basically said no. So what you really need is a commission that is more autonomous, more independent of the member states with the will and the capacity to enforce its decision. The task of building a union greater than the sum of its parts remains unfinished and a lot of work needs to be done.

Thanks very much for joining us, Tom.

Thank you, Jason.

Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican rapper taking the Spanish speaking world by storm. Tracks such as Dakiti mix upbeat reggaeton with slick, socially conscious rapping and have made the musician a household name in much of the world. So much so that Bad Bunny was the most played artist on Spotify in both 2020 and 2021. And his surge in popularity is just one sign of a change in the industry.

English has long been the dominant language in pop music, but in the new digital era, thanks to changes in technology, streaming, its availability, and the music industry, English has more competition all the time.

Dolly Seton is a data journalist for the Economist.

We trawl through the top hundred tracks in the 70 countries that Spotify is in right now. And we were trying to focus on the popularity of both English language music and non English language music.

How do you do that though? How do you isolate the relative popularity of English in all that music?

We built a model that was comparing top artists, genres, languages and tracks. We did this clustering analysis that showed how countries grouped in terms of similarity on those features. And there were three broad clusters that emerged. For example, there was a contingent grouping of countries in which English was dominant that would include the sort of obvious suspects, Britain and America and Australia, but also places like Cyprus and Latvia. And there was a Spanish language grouping, an ecosystem where Spanish songs were very popular. That was a very homogeneous group, you know, most of south and Latin America. And then there was a third group that mostly enjoys local songs in various tongues, places like Brazil, France, Italy.

How do you even navigate across all those data, all those countries, all those songs?

We built an interactive, we focus in that in the number one song on Spotify in 70 countries every week from December 2016 to the first week of 2022. And you can listen to snippets of all of these songs so you can hear what people are listening to all over the world.

Yep, I saw the interactive and I gotta say, it is a lot of fun. But you mentioned that hidden away in there in the data is this decline of English, where you see that happening most.

The biggest drop was in the Spanish cluster, from 25% of hits to 14%. In the local language cluster, the English declined even more dramatically from 52% of hit songs to just 30% of songs. So that's the cluster where you have countries with really strong indigenous music cultures. Now you can also engineer crossover hits from one cluster to another. For example, there was a Spanish language track called Desposito that was a huge hit in the Spanish cluster for Louis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee. Then a remix was made featuring Justin Bieber, and that became the most streamed song in most countries across all the clusters in mid-2017. South Korea is another interesting example. They have a strong music scene and that puts them in the local language cluster. But they create these worldwide hits partly by mixing in English words, which are sometimes in the lyrics, often in the titles. For example, BTS had this huge hit called Boy with Love, very popular both in the local language groups and in the English language groups.

But don't you think that rather than an absolute decline of English in some way, this is a function perhaps of the globalization of music, the fact that everyone now has access to every song everywhere?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that local artists are very much in touch with their audiences on social media that increases their playtime. And so I think social media is part of the story, you know. Nevertheless, English is still the predominant language. So even though the popularity of English songs in the English cluster did drop, it was really quite small. From 92% of the top songs to 90%. And of the 50 most streamed tracks on Spotify over the past five years, 47 were English. One example of English's dominance, where you really see it is in Christmas music. So wham's Last Christmas and especially Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is you. Those are huge international hits in English. Mariah takes the top spot in 24 countries in the English language group and manages incursions into the local language group, for example in Germany and Iceland.

You know, we've talked a few times on the show about music and the music industry and streaming and charts and Mariah just keeps making an appearance.

Yes, she's inescapable.

Thanks very much for joining us, Dolly.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

All I want for Christmas. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.