{"id":4593,"date":"2017-08-24T07:49:53","date_gmt":"2017-08-24T14:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/?p=4593"},"modified":"2017-08-24T08:21:43","modified_gmt":"2017-08-24T15:21:43","slug":"presence-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/2017\/presence-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"Mongolian Presence in Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Julian Dierkes<\/em><\/p>\n

I spent the past year on a research leave from the University of British Columbia in Berlin, Germany, at the Free University’s Graduate School of East Asian Studies.<\/p>\n

I found Mongolia to be much more visible in Berlin than in Vancouver.<\/p>\n

Scale and History<\/h2>\n

Obviously, some of that is simply a matter of scale. 3.5 vs. 2mio inhabitants and a Mongolian community of over 1,000 in Berlin vs. perhaps 400 in Vancouver tell some of that difference. Partly, this is a question of history as well. Modern Mongolia has had significant links with Germany since the 1920s when the new state-socialist government connected with the union movement in Germany. Relations were quite close during the state-socialist era, of course, also involving significant flows of people between Mongolia and the German Democratic Republic. I would not be surprised that if we tallied all the visits by the President and members of the Mongolian cabinet to Germany in the past 5-10 years, this number would rival the number of visits to China, for example, and may even rival visits to Russia. [If you’re interested in\/willing to construct such a tally, please get in touch, that would be an interesting metric on foreign relations\/interactions.]<\/p>\n

Canada-Mongolia relations<\/a> are generally much more recent. These relations are developing perhaps most rapidly around two “hubs” that are apprpriate to Canadian interests and expertise, namely military cooperation around peacekeeping, and, clearly most significantly, Mongolia’s status as an emerging mining economy. As examples of these “hubs” note the recent signing of a Canada-Mongolia Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement<\/a> (FIPA, Sept 8), or<\/p>\n

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A 10-day Public Affairs Workshop supported by Canadian Department of National Defence\/CAF kicks off today #CAF<\/a> #MAF<\/a> #MTCP<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/UT02nS3W3e<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Canada in Mongolia (@CanadaMongolia) October 24, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n