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Weber in Somalia
Just finished this piece in last week’s New Yorker (grading has me behind in my reading) on Somalia (subscription required). It gives a good sense of what “failed state” might mean. This paragraph in particular stood out for me:
“When you lead people, you need power,” Sharif [the president of the country] said. “Power has different meanings. Ideas are power, and so is money and force. The state must have a combination of all those to effect change. You need to serve your people, to protect your people, and to show them the way. And you are not only dealing with ordinary Somali people but with people who are quite destructive. “ Somalia, he said, “is not comparable to the rest of the world. The state does not have a monopoly on the use of violence – and the primary duty of government is to bring security to its people. There are people who need to be dealt with before this can happen.”
That pretty much sums up my course, PSCI 204, Introduction to Comparative Politics. It raises questions about the nature of power and its variations, and the definition of the state. It has a Hobbesian resonance as well: the primary duty of providing “security,” escaping the “state of nature.” I tend to be rather more optimistic about poltiical possibities in general, I’m not as fearful of disorder as Hobbes. But, then again, I do not face the kinds of challenges that confront Sharif on a daily basis….
President Obama, read Mencius!
Cross -posted at The Useless Tree:
The Afghanistan decision is disappointing. I agree with my friend Marc Lynch that it is hard to see how continued US occupation and assault will bring about a good outcome there. What is needed in Afghanistan is state-building, and that cannot be accomplished by an external power wielding military might, it must be constructed from within. Afghanistan is not Germany or Japan after WWII; it is closer to Iraq now, the obvious differences notwithstanding, where our efforts at state-building have yet to succeed and will most likely produce a reignition of civil war. More war in Afghanistan will most likely produce just that: more war in Afghanistan:
So the war launched as a prequel to Iraq now becomes its sequel, with little of substance learned in the interim. To double down in Afghanistan is to ignore the unmistakable lesson of Bush’s thoroughly discredited “global war on terror”: Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.
Mencius describes a situation that I have often related to Iraq. He is talking with the emperor of Ch’i, who has just invaded a neighboring country, Yen, but is now facing a possible counterattack by other countries. Mencius says to him:
Now the emperor of Yen tyrannized his people, so you attacked him. The people thought they were being rescued from fire and flood, so they welcomed you with baskets of food and jars of wine. How can you justify killing elders and taking young people captive, tearing down temples and stealing sacred vessels? The power of Ch’i was already feared throughout all beneath Heaven, and now you’ve doubled your territory without making your government Humane. No wonder all beneath Heaven is up in arms.
Hurry! Send out orders to release the old and young, to leave the sacred vessels where they are. Consult the people of Yen, appoint a new ruler, and then leave. There’s still time to prevent this invasion. (2.11; 1B.11)
“Killing elders and taking young people captive,” can be understood, in the current moment, as the civilian casualties and black jails the US is responsible for in Afghanistan. “Tearing down temples and stealing sacred vessels” can be understood as the cultural destruction that comes of occupation. These kinds of practices have facilitated inhumane government, which breeds its own destruction. Thus, Mencius offers clear advice: stop killing civilians, close the black jails, quit the cultural destruction, consult the people of Afghanistan, appoint a new ruler and leave….
Obama in China: what did you expect?
I’ve been reading some of the commentary about Obama’s trip to China and I am struck by the negative tone of much of what I’ve seen. This piece in the NYT pretty well sums it up:
And then, Mr. Obama departed for China, where the authorities stage-managed and restricted access to his town hall meeting in Shanghai. He did offer a nuanced, oblique critique of China’s rigid controls and restrictions of the Internet and free speech without mentioning, let alone condemning, China’s government.
Mr. Obama and President Hu Jintao presented their two days of talks as substantive, even though they did not appear to make much progress on issues like Iran, China’s currency or human rights. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, took the unusual step of sending a statement to reporters — something he did not do for either stop in Japan or Singapore — saying the China trip went well.
The town hall meeting has come in for criticism from Obama supporters who feel he soft-peddled his critique of censorship. Adam Minter, over at Shanghai Scrap, was not happy:
It pains me to write this (I’m an Obama voter and donor), but Obama’s performance this afternoon reminded me of nothing so much as an overly coached American businessman on his first trip to China, so concerned about what he should or should not say that he forgets what he wanted to say in the first place, and ends up going home with nothing but a hotel bill and empty promises.
He was especially disturbed by this line of Obama’s: “I’m a big supporter of non-censorship“ On its own that is a rather awkward formulation, suggesting that censorship is the baseline from which we work toward non-censorship. It seems ilke conditional support for freedom of information. But just before that, Obama said: “…I’ve always been a strong supporter of open Internet use.” And a bit later he said: “So I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter. The more open we are, the more we can communicate. And it also helps to draw the world together.“ These are more direct, clearer defenses of open exchange of information and ideas without censorship. I suspect the “non-censorship” line was not a calculated expression. He did not sit down with his aides ahead of time and say: “let’s use the term ‘non-censorship’ because that will be less challenging to the CCP.’ More likely, it was extemporaneous. He was just riffing on the idea he had already established when he said:
….I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.
That is why the CCP limited access to the live video feed of the town hall (the trascript is available, however): they do not want to highlight this idea and the contrast that is obviously drawn here with the US.
I would not go so far as my friend David Shambaugh, who, according to Xinhua, was very positive on Obama’s visit:
“The joint statement released on Nov. 17 is an extremely positive document — filled with countless examples of tangible Sino-American cooperation on a large range of bilateral, regional, and global issues,” David Shambaugh, a George Washington University professor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a written interview with Xinhua.
…
“In the document and the two presidents’ joint press statements, there was a very positive emphasis placed on the overall goal of creating a positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship,” Shambaugh said.
He is referring to the long “U.S. – China Joint Statement” that outlined various and sundry issues, ranging from security to economics to environment. It is a careful document. It does not call unequivocally for improvement in human rights or for revaluation of the RMB or for sanctions on Iran. Rather, it lays out an assortment of large and small matters that the two countries are working on together. Neither state, it seems to me, comes away in an unambiguously superior position. Each is tied to the other in many ways. It is a description of interdependence.
And that is my main point here. Those who see Obama’s performance in China as weak – i.e not pressing the PRC on any of a number of sensitive issues – are missing the larger structural reality. The US is not so powerful that it can simply make demands of China without regard to its own vulnerabilities or weaknesses. Take the currency issue, for example. Has the US bees so responsible in managing its deficits and “imbalances” that it can easily and credibly demand that China take care of its surpluses and “imbalances”? No. The US has been flaunting its economic power for decades, avoiding painful adjustments and relying on China and other countries to finance our consumption and debt. We’re really in no position to be dictating on this front, especially since the US needs the PRC more than ever to aid in global and American economic recovery.
Chris Nelson, of the Nelson Report (a DC political email letter) has a reaction to the negative commentary similar to my own:
We take issue with the tone and content of this sort of China coverage for the basic reason that no one outside the Central Committee denies there are real problems with the PRC on human rights, currency, Taiwan, Tibet, industrial policy, clean energy, climate change, espionage way beyond the norm, transparency on PLA expansion, et al.
And really troubling “new” issues such as China’s attempt to corner the world market on “rare earth minerals” (without which the computer age would come to a crashing halt) are surely right up there in the international “stakeholder” world with Iran and N. Korean nukes.
(See the US-China Economic & Security Review Commission annual report discussion, coming Thursday…)
So the real question and dilemma facing Obama is…does he want to try and get China to address all these problems constructively? (Answer: hell, yes!)
OK, then, how do you deal with this long list of concerns and grievances?
Apparently the media expectation/demand is temper tantrums, public feel-good posturing, bellicose speeches about what China “must” do, and dancing the hula with the Dalai Lama.
Get a grip!
Obama said, going in, and has consistently demonstrated for the past week, that he’s trying a new style of communication and body language, if you will (see the much-discussed “bow” to Emperor Akihito) designed to facilitate serious discussion, with serious people, about serious issues.
Obama went to China. In Shanghai he said that freedom of information is a good thing that makes a country strong, thus implying that the PRC should open up more. In Beijing, with President Hu Jintao standing by his side, he said that human rights matter. He said that the PRC should talk with the Dalai Lama. He mentioned the Taiwan Relations Act. He did not posture like a cowboy. He did not hector. He began a serious engagement with serious people about serious issues.
The Internet in China
For those interested in how the internet operates in the PRC, its social effects and political implications, this speech by Kaiser Kuo (an interesting guy: started out a a metal band guitarist and now works for a PR firm in Beijing) is quite good. It’s long (over a hour – takes a long time to buffer) but worth the time. A description of the talk can be found here.
Election News and Analysis
The big election news in Northern Berkshire county is this: John Barrett, who had served as North Adams mayor for 26 years, was voted out of office by a wide margin. Barrett himself viewed it as a generational change:
“All good things must come to an end,” an emotional Barrett said during his concession speech. “I had a bad feeling this afternoon, when I saw people going to the polls. I saw a different voter going to the polls — a younger voter. I used to joke at the conferences I speak at that the people I’ve brought here — with all the changes we’ve made — were going to be the ones to vote me out. That day has come. This was just one election I couldn’t grasp. We got our message out there, but they just didn’t want to listen.”
Congratulations to the new mayor, Richard Alcombright.
For analysis of other races, The Monkey Cage has a few posts. I liked this one, by Marc Hetherington:
The race in New York’s 23rd congressional district exemplifies the disconnect between polarized political elites and much of the American public, which like moderate alternatives when they are available. Movement conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh attacked the moderation of Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee, ultimately driving her from the race and causing her to endorse Bill Owens, her Democratic counterpart. This opened the door for the first Democratic victory in the district in more than 100 years. It seems very likely that, others things being equal, a candidate like Scozzafava would have been the choice over Owens in a two person race. The district choked on the type of candidate that Palin and Limbaugh favored.
The guys at FiveThirtyEight are good with the numbers.
“Too late” on climate change?
I was enjoying my lunch in Paresky this afternoon — chicken salad on a kaiser roll while sitting on a stool facing Baxter Hall — when a strategically placed flier caught my eye. I’ll quote it at length:
Some numbers are just too much . . .
350ppm is the number that leading scientists say is the safe, stable upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
We’re past it, and rising. However, with swift action it’s not too late to reduce our collective emissions levels.
The rest of the text invites students to attend a jumping-into-a-pile-of-leaves celebration of International Day of Climate Action on Saturday the 24th, the goal being to “call on world leaders to pass climate policies grounded in the latest science and strong enough to get us back to 350.”
There is no doubt that global climate change is among the most important social issues of our day. There is also no doubt that optimism is much to be preferred over pessimism. These things being said, a dose of realism is always necessary, and realism begs the question “is it truly not too late?”
The UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2007/08 is organized around the theme “Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world”. Relying on climate models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – THE “leading scientists” on the issue – the UNDP presents six possible scenarios for global temperature and CO2 levels projected to the year 2100. The most pessimistic scenario, given the catchy title ‘A1FI’, assumes “rapid economic and population growth combined with reliance on fossil fuels”. If this is our collective future, the IPCC says that by the end of the century its best estimate is a CO2 level of a whopping 1550ppm with a global average temperature change of +4.5°C (relative to the preindustrial era) and possibly as high as +6.9°C. With +2°C defined as the threshold for “dangerous climate change,” this is a pretty scary scenario.
Quite frankly, however, the IPCC doesn’t offer us any non-scary scenarios. The most optimistic, titled ‘B1’ (“some mitigation of emissions through increased resource efficiency and technology improvement” in the absence of “rapid economic and population growth”) projects CO2 stabilization at century’s end at 600ppm, with a best estimate global average temperature change of +2.3°C over preindustrial levels.
Because future greenhouse gas stocks are determined by past greenhouse gas emissions, even stabilizing emission levels this very moment will still result in a significant rise in future CO2 levels: +200ppm by 2100 even if we stabilized at year 2000 emission levels. To make a +2°C temperature change “unlikely,” the world’s CO2 ceiling is 350 ppm — the goal of the folks behind the International Day of Climate Action and, as the flier admits, a level we’ve already breached. To make a +2°C change of “medium likelihood,” the world must limit itself to 400 ppm. If our goal is even more limited — simply to stay away from a “very likely” +2°C — we still are allowed just 450ppm. At 650ppm, +2°C is virtually guaranteed.
The 2007/08 Human Development Report lays out an ambitious CO2 reduction strategy: a 500ppm peak and stabilization at 450ppm by 2100. This is some ways above the 350ppm goal mentioned above, but even this UNDP plan is extremely ambitious. To achieve the 450ppm goal, the UNDP prescribes CO2 emission cuts for the developed countries from a base year 1990 of [1] 30% by the year 2030 and [2] of 80% by 2050. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, as of 2007 the US was +20.2% from our 1990 levels. That means that using 2007 as our baseline, the US will have to cut CO2 emissions a whopping 42% by the time Williams students are my age, and this just to dwell in the “medium likelihood” territory for dangerous climate change.
The world’s only examples of greenhouse gas emission reductions of such an incredible and rapid scale involve catastrophic economic collapse, such as in Ukraine since the fall of communism where emissions fell (-55% from 1990 to 2004) alongside absolute declines in population, life expectancy and real GDP per capita. I’m assuming this is not quite what the organizers of the International Day of Climate Action have in mind. Yet a realistic 350ppm scenario which does not involve a serious and lasting global depression exists only in the pages of a Tom Friedman book.
It’s good to be optimistic, and it’s good to take up a challenge in the face of long odds. At the same time, it is very important for everyone concerned about climate change to put at least as much effort into preparing to alleviate the suffering which will result from inevitable catastrophes as into struggling heroically to prevent them.
Political Satire
I hadn’t heard of the Yes Men until they popped up last week with a punk of the US Chamber of Commerce. Apparently, they have been around for years (I guess I need to get out more!). I just hope their movie gets to Williamstown, or Pittsfield….
I thought this one was brilliant:
A Thought on Democracy
Getting ready for my Chinese politics class (PSCI 247), I was rereading the work for today, chapter 2 from Adam Przeworski’s Democracy and the Market (1991), and came across one of my favorite thought-provoking paragraphs (p.95)
Democracy is the realm of the indeterminate; the future is not written. Conflicts of values and of interests are inherent in all societies. Democracy is needed precisely because we cannot agree. Democracy is only a system for processing conflicts without killing one another; it is a system in which there are differences, conflicts, winners and losers. Conflicts are absent only in authoritarian systems. No country in which a party wins 60 percent of the vote twice in a row is a democracy.
Is he right? Is he wrong? How?
Inviting Confucius to celebrate 30 years of the PRC
An op-ed in the NYT last week, by Zhang Weiwei, links China’s successes of the past 30 years to various strands of tradition, Confucianism included.
On the face of it, this is yet another example of how the PRC is redeveloping (reinventing) traditional legitimation. As Max Weber says: “Authority will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers.” Of course, tradition is not the only basis of PRC legitimacy. As Zhang Weiwei notes, a kind of “performance legitimacy” is in play – essentially a matter of delivering the economic goods. If people feel that their, and their children’s, material lives are improving, then they will accept authoritarian government. I would add that, in keeping with the Weberian analysis, legal-rational legitimation is also part of the picture. What has changed is the move away from what we might call revolutionary legitimacy (if some political action can be shown to be consistent with the general notion of “revolution,” then it is good) and the return of traditional legitimacy.
What is most notable about Zhang’s piece, however, is the absence of Mao. He is mentioned once, when Zhang notes Deng Xiaoping’s rejection of the “Maoist utopia.”
This made me think of Mikhail Gorbachev and the late Soviet Union. Then, in trying to find a way to reform the declining state socialist system, Gorbachev said the country should “return to Lenin.” This was a means of getting out from under the dead weight of Stalinism. A “return to Lenin” would allow for a critique of all that had gone wrong in the Soviet Union, conveniently blamed on Stalin, while preserving the legitimacy of the initial revolution, and thus the legitimacy of the then still extant Soviet Communist Party.
The PRC has a harder time with all of this because instead of two people – Lenin and Stalin – there is only one: Mao. Back in 1981, the CCP issued its “Resolution on CPC History,” in which it established the good Mao/bad Mao distinction. Everything up until the Great Leap Forward was basically good, while what came after was contaminated with “left errors.” This became the basis for the formula: Mao was 70% good and 30% bad.
What Zhang’s article does, in essence, is to have Confucius play the part that Lenin played for Gorbachev. The Sage, and the tradition for which he stands, is now the target of return, and in that return the “bad Mao” can be elided. Tradition is the thing that now legitimates the post-Mao era of the PRC. Mao, especially the bad Mao, in the meantime, is shunted off to a historical siding alongside comrade Stalin.
The October 1 ceremonies
thus did not really celebrate 60 years of the PRC. They celebrated 30 years. The
1949-1979 period is to be ignored and the glories of the ancient empire
resurrected to facilitate that forgetting.
The danger here is that PRC citizens might start asking: if tradition is now a fundamental basis of regime legitimacy, why did there have to be a revolution in 1949? The KMT has already made something of a come back on the mainland. Could this go further? Could Lung Ying-tai’s new book, Big River, Big Sea gain traction among PRC readers and stoke the question: was all the violence of the revolution really worth it, if the ultimate goal was a return to tradition?
But this may not be too likely an outcome. Legitimation everywhere, in any country, is a mish-mash of tradition and legal-rationality and particularism. The PRC’s odd concoction of a Mao-forgetting return to tradition is no more cognitively dissonent than the historical amnesias of Americans and others.
Cross posted on The Useless Tree.
Haiti and the Metaphysics of Disorder
The unfolding catastrophe in the Republic of Haiti in the wake of the January 12, 2010 earthquakes is an event that most of the world still has not comprehended the full extent of. The primary 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding environs is the worst regional quake in over two hundred years. Moreover, as I write, there have been thirty-two aftershock quakes, many of which on their own could debilitate a city in an advanced industrialized nation. Such a phenomenon is one social scientists study, and yet the empirical branch of social scientific fields can generate routinely data on results, often at the expense of causation. On the other side of these fields’ spectrums, there are those philosophically and theoretically inclined who may wish to advance a metaphysical conception of the cause of Haiti’s plight, much in the manner of the Myth of Sisyphus. Neither aforementioned method is correct.
What has happened in Haiti—and is continuingly occurring now—is a combination of factors located directly in the aftermath of the 1804 Haitian Revolution, the external international community’s tragic isolationist response to that Republic, the rise of factions internal to the polity after US occupation that created what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the early twentieth-century separation between the freedom-loving Haitian people and the authoritarian Haitian state, and the ensuing breakdown of the environment after World War II that has, in effect, exacerbated Haiti’s inability to handle natural disasters. While the refashioning of Haitian democracy has been positively underway in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries despite Haiti’s condition of poverty and unresolved controversy over the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the valence of the environment is one that is extremely arduous. The physical terrain of Haiti simply cannot withstand this level of devastation, which compounds the existent contemporary trends of deforestation and building infrastructural decay.
The second philosophical explanation for Haiti’s plight mentioned earlier (and the one to which a wide discourse of belief exists, whether uttered in the public sphere or whispered around the coffee tables of families living in G-8 countries) is a perspective that suggests that post-revolutionary Haiti and its people are damned to misery. This is what has been referred to as the metaphysics of disorder: the belief that certain groups or individuals are predestined to live in a state of anarchy and disarray. South African thinkers Jean and John Comaroff describe the metaphysics of disorder with regards to post-apartheid South Africa and the obsession in late modern South African literature, film, and policing with the idea of a criminal-minded populous and the need for discipline and punishing of that populous to suppress their purported inherent criminal nature. In Haiti’s case, the metaphysics of disorder is the perennial “poorest country in the Western world” declarations, the regular problems with maintaining a leader in power, the notion that it is only a matter of time before the next disaster hits to remind Haitians of their lot in life, pre-ordained by God or a being higher than humankind.
This latter view must be rejected outright. Politics can never be brushed aside, but what must happen now is the pooling of aid, assistance, and hope beyond audacious rhetorical platitudes. In 1999, I interviewed for a magazine Sir George A.O. Alleyne, then Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and soon-to-be final candidate for the directorship of the World Health Organization (WHO). The interview was in part about a recent Hurricane that devastated areas of the Caribbean and Central America, and I asked Alleyne—a physician born and raised in Barbados—what both regional agents and the world community could do to prepare for natural disasters on the order of a hurricane. Alleyne responded that disasters should not be confined to a theodicy and an affirmation of a willed Act of God. Acts of Nature require immediate, organized responses. They also require what theorists including Iris Marion Young refer to as transnational political responsibility. What is occurring in Haiti is our collective problem. The choice for involvement in Haiti’s unfolding catastrophe is yours.
Neil Roberts is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science at Williams College. He may be reached at Neil.Roberts {at} williams(.)edu.