Stent vs. Mearsheimer

Caught them on the radio last night. Although the conversation made it sound as if they disagreed about almost everything, I'm not sure they actually did. To the extent they did disagree, I think Stent had a somewhat more nuanced perspective on what's going on in Ukraine. (Which may be what happens when you put a regional expert up against an IR theorist, especially one who, like Mearsheimer, doesn't often "do" nuance; he could if he wanted, but my impression is he usually doesn't.)

A.M. linkage

-- S. Radchenko on understanding Putin in light of history (here).

-- S. Vucetic has an 'autobiographical take' on the causes of WW1.

-- There are now one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (via). 

Self-determination and "the clash of norms"

Putting aside the specific circumstances surrounding the Crimea referendum -- circumstances that make it impossible to say that the vote was conducted under fair conditions -- the fact remains that it seems reasonably clear that most Crimeans want to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Thus this is a case, and not the first by any means, in which the principle of self-determination comes into conflict with that of preserving the territorial integrity of extant, recognized sovereign states.

In this case the U.S. and EU have plumped for territorial integrity over self-determination, and the particular circumstances, i.e. the Russian invasion that preceded the referendum, have allowed them to claim the legal and moral high ground in doing so. But in the past the U.S. and many of its allies have occasionally made the opposite choice, recognizing states that have resulted from the breakup of existing ones (e.g., Eritrea, Bosnia, Kosovo), and while it is possible to paint some of this as simple acquiescence to faits accomplis it would be difficult to maintain that a wholly consistent, high-minded, and principled stance has guided all such past decisions.

Indeed, it would be surprising to find complete consistency in anything having to do with state behavior, since it is a truism that the world is complicated and that states navigate it by a messy mixture of interest, calculation, and principle, a mixture that is unlikely to yield completely consistent results. Scholars may try to discern a consistent thread that determines, for example, when the U.S. recognizes secessionist movements and when it does not (see, e.g., Jonathan Paquin, A Stability-Seeking Power, 2010; link), but without casting aspersions on the particular book just mentioned I think it would be wise to retain some skepticism about whether these often tangled situations can be tamed by a nice theory.

The problem is not only that states are guided by a mixture of considerations but that principles themselves, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, come into conflict. In an article published almost twenty years ago ("The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism," Foreign Policy, Spring 1995; link to pdf), Stanley Hoffmann put the point this way:

It is precisely in the realm of chaos I described above -- the realm of disintegrating states -- that the clash of norms is the most evident and paralyzing: Sovereignty (as a principle of order and, still, a barrier against aggressive or imperial designs), self-government or democracy, national self-determination (with all its ambiguities and flaws), and human rights (which are not devoid of ambiguities of their own...) are four norms in conflict.... Human rights...often cannot be protected without infringing upon another state's sovereignty, or without circumscribing the potential for a "tyranny of the majority" entailed by national self-determination and by Jacobin versions of democracy. The trouble-making potential of self-determination, both for interstate order and for human rights, is not so obvious that many liberals want to curb it or even get rid of it, yet the demand for it simply cannot be ignored, and denying its legitimacy would rarely be a recipe for order or democracy. Inconsistency is the result of this confusion: the international "community" has recognized Croatia, Bosnia, and Eritrea, but not Biafra, Chechnya, or the right of the Kurds and Tibetans to states of their own.

Scholars emerging from graduate school with PhDs in political science or international relations are unlikely, I would guess, to find jobs these days if their work prominently features words like "inconsistency" and "confusion." The field tends to value work that purports to bring theoretical order out of apparent chaos. But confusion and inconsistency are often pervasive in the real world of international relations, and although "it's confusing" will not cut it if one is writing a dissertation, for those whose priority is understanding the real world "it's confusing" is not a bad place to start -- and, sometimes, it's also not a bad place to end up.

More on Crimea

From a post at a new blog (found courtesy of Reddit):

Much like in 2008, Putin has fashioned the narrative underlying his expansionist maneuver into Crimea on the basis of ethnicity, rather than territory. The reason why China objected to South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence then, and is objecting to Crimean independence now, is...  because it sets the wrong kind of precedent. Rather than paving the way for a Chinese incursion into Taiwan, a territory to which China argues to have a historical claim, it underlines and legitimates the political cleavages between ethnicities. This runs directly counter to the CCP’s domestic policy, which has historically been to nip all claims to independence made by ethnic minorities (of which over 55 exist in China) firmly in the bud....

And speaking of Putin's claim to be protecting ethnic Russians from discrimination/oppression, Charles King's March 1 op-ed in the NYT ended with this:

...Mr. Putin’s reserving the right to protect the “Russian-speaking population” of Ukraine is an affront to the basis of international order. Not even the alleged ultranationalists who Mr. Putin claims now control the Ukrainian government have tried to export their uprising to Ukrainian speakers in Poland, Moldova, or Romania, or indeed Russia itself. It is Mr. Putin who has made ethnic nationalism a defining element of foreign policy.

Russia was in fact a pioneer of the idea that, in the jargon of international affairs, is now called R2P: the responsibility to protect. Under Czar Nicholas I, Russia asserted its right to guarantee the lives and fortunes of Orthodox Christians inside the territory of its chief strategic rival, the Ottoman Empire. In 1853 Russia launched a preemptive attack on the Ottomans, sending its fleet out of Sevastopol harbor to sink Ottoman ships across the Black Sea. Britain, France and other allies stepped in to respond to the unprovoked attack. The result was called the Crimean War, a conflict that, as every Russian schoolchild knows, Russia lost.

The future of Ukraine is now no longer about Kiev’s Independence Square, democracy in Ukraine or European integration. It is about how to preserve a vision of Europe — and, indeed, of the world — where countries give up the idea that people who speak a language we understand are the only ones worth protecting.

King's statement that Russia "pioneered" R2P by "guaranteeing the lives of Orthodox Christians" in the Ottoman Empire is extremely misleading. Whatever one thinks of R2P, one of its basic features is that it is not limited to the protection of those who share ethnicity, religion or language with the intervenors.

Putin, Mueller, and Thucydides; or, You haven't shown nothin'

Imagine a hypothetical opponent of a view I have occasionally supported here. This skeptic might say:

A major European power has invaded a neighboring country. You aggression-is-passé, major-power-war-is-obsolete people are full of it. It's now clear that you're nothing more than industrious tailors to a naked emperor.* In plainer language, your high-falutin theories are rubbish!

Um, not so fast. First, this kind of thing doesn't happen very often (which supports us, not the skeptic). Second, the chances of this leading to a major-power war are extremely low (if not zero, then very close to it). 

TV pictures of Putin watching military exercises outside St. Petersburg, which I just saw as shown on yesterday's PBS NewsHour (viewed via Youtube), are worth pausing over. Here we have a quasi-authoritarian leader of a country with a sizable military watching, with binoculars, his army's helicopters, tanks, etc. engage in maneuvers. One might almost be forgiven for thinking this was a newsreel from decades ago and that the army was about to roll across some (other) frontier. Binoculars and tanks, however, derive their significance from things one can't see. TV is great at visuals, but even good reporting doesn't always supply the context that visuals require.

In short, you nothing-has-changed-since-Thucydides folks have no reason to crow, because this event doesn't 'prove' anything. To adapt the title of the Stevie Wonder song: you haven't shown nothin'.

ETA: Just saw Dan Nexon's piece on the 'failure' of the 'reset' at Monkey Cage. More on it, perhaps, in due course. 
----
*This phrase is borrowed from the title of Oran Young's 1969 review of a book by Bruce Russett, in World Politics, v. 21, no. 3.

Further note on Ukraine

Dan Nexon writes:

With Russian military forces in place to “protect Russian citizens,” Crimea can declare independence, federate with Russia, or do whatever it wants. Meanwhile, it will be very hard for the EU and the US to make any argument against Crimean self-determination that doesn’t reek of hypocrisy. While I don’t find the Kosovo analogy compelling, it provides Russia with a pretty big rhetorical stick. And as Obama put it in his statement yesterday:

Now, throughout this crisis, we have been very clear about one fundamental principle: the Ukrainian people deserve the opportunity to determine their own future.

Moscow might aim to turn Crimea into a permanent lever over Kiev, support its independence and de facto annexation, or for formal federation via future plebiscite. All three might easily reflect the fundamental principle that “the Crimean people deserve the opportunity to determine their own future.”
 

I can see the logic here, in terms of rhetoric at least, which is the focus of DN's remark. But there is of course a difference; while I'm not saying here how much weight it should carry (that would be too long a discussion for the moment), the difference is that Ukraine is a recognized state, Crimea isn't. How does that bear on the asserted right to self-determination, and does it weaken the "rhetorical stick"? A topic for another time, perhaps.

Art. 2(4) and the Ukraine situation

I've been following, though not intensely, the developments re Russia/Crimea; this report has what seems to be the latest. For reasons of time (and lack of expertise on the region), I'll limit myself to one point. The news reports have been referring to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, under which Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nukes and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. That's fine and all, but Russia is already required to do that under Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter. So the Budapest Memorandum seems to me, though I'm not an international lawyer, redundant on that point.

Also, one commenter at the WaPo said something like "why is the U.S. concerned about international law, given drones, Guantanamo, etc etc.?" That the G.W. Bush admin violated international law, and that the Obama admin may also be doing so in certain respects, is no reason to refrain from expressing concern/alarm when a country of some consequence appears to be violating one of the most basic norms of international society and one of the most basic provisions of the UN Charter. I'm aware there are all sorts of complications here, but the essential points, in terms of international law, seem reasonably clear. That's not to say anything about the policy questions, which I'm not going to do, not in this post at any rate.

Quote of the day (2)

"Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine together inherited more than 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. As a result of negotiated agreements among Russia, the United States, and each of these states, all of these weapons were returned to Russia for dismantlement. Ukraine's 1,640 strategic nuclear warheads were dismantled, and the highly-enriched uranium was blended down to produce low-enriched uranium, which was sold to the United States to fuel its nuclear power plants. Few Americans are aware that, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts program, half of all the electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the United States over the past decade has been fueled by enriched uranium blended down from the cores of nuclear warheads originally designed to destroy American cities."

-- Graham Allison, "Nuclear Disorder," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2010, pp.82-83

Daniel Benjamin on U.S./Russia/Georgia

A pretty good column, on target in its criticisms of Bush's policy of trying to rush through NATO membership action plans (MAPs) for Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest summit. My only criticism is that he is too lenient on Clinton re NATO expansion (but then, he did serve on the Clinton Natl. Security Council).