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A recent issue of Perspectives on Politics (vol. 8, no. 1, March 2010) carries a symposium on Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), by Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NW&W).
The first review in the symposium is by Jack Snyder, who writes that NW&W "aim at nothing less than explaining democracy, economic development, and domestic social peace, which, they say, tend to go together for reasons that have heretofore eluded explanation by social science. The 'omitted factor' that they say causes these good outcomes is the 'open access' pattern of social relationships, based on impersonal rules that provide universal access to the benefits of political and economic organizations (p.13)."
Snyder hastens to assure us that this is more than "an all-too-familiar paean to the benign efficiency of democratic and market institutions, which," he notes with considerable understatement, "might be off-putting to some readers in the wake of the global financial meltdown." Rather, NW&W's distinction between open-access societies and limited-access societies (which they call "natural states") has, according to Snyder, "profound implications for efforts to engineer democratic and economic development."
"Like recent research on red wine and dark chocolate, everything you thought was bad for you turns out to be good, and vice versa. Orderly corruption and electoral manipulation turn out to be good in natural states, because they preserve social peace and allow the gradual development of rule-governed relations among elites [except, one might think, in places where civil wars are already ongoing, but never mind that--LFC]. Natural states advance toward impersonal social relations by partial steps as they mature. Instead of making an unsustainable leap to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen,' they create semi-impersonal categories that treat all individuals of a given status -- nobles, clerics, whites, party members -- as juridical equals. Once rule of law and impersonal forms of organization are established among elites in this way, such practices can be extended to the entire population, if an elite faction sees an advantage in it."
Snyder observes that this supports "the view that successful democratic transitions need to be carried out in a sequence," starting with the construction of administrative and legal institutions and only then moving to "unfettered mass electoral politics."
Fair enough, I suppose -- but it seems to me that the stuff about natural states advancing gradually rather than "leap[ing] to create encompassing impersonal categories like 'citizen'" fails to capture certain important events in "recorded human history" -- such as, say, the French Revolution. Since I've only read the review, not the book itself, I hesitate to be too critical. Still, it does give one pause.
The question Should the U.S. bring back the draft? has been hovering around the edges of political discourse in this country for a while, notwithstanding that the chances of its happening are minimal to zero. The reason the question continues to hover, I think, is that it taps into an ongoing uneasiness about the distribution of sacrifice at a time when the U.S. is involved in two active wars (albeit one of which, Iraq, appears to be in a gradual end-phase as far as U.S. military involvement is concerned).
The point of this post is not to offer a yes or no answer to the question, but simply to raise the issue, which I've not done here before (to the best of my recollection). Given the approach of Memorial Day, this seems like an appropriate time to do it.
I'll start with a quotation, something Michael Sandel wrote five years ago:
"Notwithstanding the outpouring of patriotism in the immediate aftermath of September 11, and the sacrifices being made by the soldiers in Iraq, American politics lacks an animating vision...of the shared obligations of citizenship. A few weeks after the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush...was asked why he had not called for any sacrifices from the American people as a whole. He replied that the American people were sacrificing by enduring longer lines at airports. In a 2004 interview in Normandy, France, on the anniversary of D-Day, NBC's Tom Brokaw asked the President why he was not asking the American people to sacrifice more.... Bush seemed mystified, replying, 'What does that mean, "sacrifice more"?' Brokaw offered the example of World War II rationing and restated his question: 'There's a great sense, I think, that there's a disconnect between what the American military people are doing overseas and what Americans are doing at home.' Bush replied: 'America has been sacrificing. Our economy hasn't [been] as strong as it should be, and there's -- people haven't been working. Fortunately, our economy's now strong, and it's getting stronger.'
"That Democrats did not seize the theme of sacrifice, and that Bush scarcely understood the question, testifies to the dulled civic sensibilities of American politics in the early years of the twenty-first century. Without a compelling account of the public purpose, the electorate [in the presidential election of 2004--LFC] settled, in a time of terror, for the security and moral certitude they associated with the incumbent President." [1]
Sandel's approving reference to Brokaw's mention of World War II is one of many indications that, as the historian David A. Bell wrote a couple of years ago, "in the United States, our equivalent of the [French] legend of [the mass levy of] 1793 is the legend of World War II. Particularly today..., the years 1941-45 have come to be regarded as a veritable American Golden Age.... instead of treating the war [WWII] as a truly exceptional moment in American history -- a combined moment of industrialized mass warfare and real national peril -- we treat it as a paradigmatic one. It has become the standard against which we measure ourselves and, not surprisingly, find ourselves wanting." [2]
Bell went on to argue that the civic reason for reinstating the draft -- to even the distribution of sacrifice and "provide the population as a whole with a common civic experience" -- receives little support from "the overall history of modern Western democracies":
"At the height of the French Revolution, during a legislative debate on the war, a deputy to the Legislative Assembly grandly declared that 'if we are not yet Spartans or Athenians, we will become them.' But in fact, we are not Spartans or Athenians, and will never become them. Which is to say, we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger. To do otherwise is simply not in our civic nature." [3]
I'm not certain that experts in the history of systems of military service (of which I'm not one) would agree that "we will never accept the infringement on individual liberty represented by conscription other than as a direct response to extreme danger." The last time the U.S. had a draft was during the height of the Vietnam War, and in that case publicly articulated opposition to the draft was couched, for the most part, in terms of opposition to that particular war. It was not primarily framed in terms of "we are not Spartans or Athenians" and therefore conscription, except in highly unusual circumstances, is alien to our "civic nature." How much doubt this casts on Bell's argument is, I suppose, debatable -- opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft was, to use the jargon of social science, overdetermined -- but it does perhaps suggest that the question is a bit more complicated than Bell allows.
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1. Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (2005), p.3.
2. David A. Bell, "When the Levee Breaks: Dissenting from the Draft," World Affairs (Winter 2008), p.66.
3. Ibid., p.67.
Wearing the full veil has become a hot-button issue in France, but the reasons may not be immediately obvious to many of those who don't live there. If countries can be said to have ideas of themselves, then assimilationism, the notion that Frenchness is a matter primarily of culture rather than birth, is an element of France's idea of itself. And "culture" here implies acceptance of certain substantive principles. Note, in the BBC article linked above, the French immigration minister's reference to "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," acceptance of which is considered, at least in this official view, part of what it means to be French.
I recently had a conversation with the sociologist Rogers Brubaker (ah, the pleasures of name-dropping), and afterward I took a quick re-look at his book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992), which I had read a long time ago. The book brings out, among other things, what Brubaker calls "the weakness of the ethnic moment and the correlative strength of the assimilationist moment in French self-understanding" and the way in which Frenchness has been defined "in social and political rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being" (p.112). For his bio and more recent books, click here.
P.s. Two relevant blog posts: here (from last July) and here.
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