The campaign finance case (Citizens United v. FEC)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is an example of judging divorced from reality. To mention at the outset something that has occasionally gotten lost, this case was not about direct contributions to candidates by corporations: such contributions remain illegal, although corporations’ PACs (political action committees) may contribute to candidates. Rather, Citizens United had to do with advertising by corporations that endorses or advocates the election of a particular candidate, either directly (vote for X) or by criticizing a candidate’s opponent (Y is no good; therefore [implied message]: vote for X). The decision basically says that it is unconstitutional to prohibit corporations from financing such ads with money in their general treasuries. The main reason? According to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, corporations are speakers and money is speech, and the statutory provisions in question violate the First Amendment by "banning" political speech. As the dissent argues, "ban" is a misnomer since the law at issue deals with one method of financing speech; corporations have been and still are free to form PACs, solicit contributions to them from shareholders, employees and their family members, and use that money to fund their electoral communications. The majority pooh-poohed this point.

In overturning a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which held that the government has a compelling interest in checking the "corrosive and distorting effects" of unlimited corporate spending in election campaigns, the Citizens United majority purports to regard ‘the marketplace of ideas’ as incorruptible and inherently self-correcting. In the majority’s view, speakers -- defined to include corporations -- speak; the electorate then separates the wheat from the chaff, the true from the false, irrespective of how much one side’s voice is amplified by the money at its disposal. That the electoral process almost certainly does not and almost certainly will not work in this way in a polity and society where corporations have a privileged position -- and where their organizational attributes allow them to amplify their influence on the electoral process -- is reasonably obvious, or so one would have thought, to anyone who has not been living under a rock.

(Note: At the oral re-argument of the case last September, which I heard broadcast on C-Span radio the day the decision came down, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, arguing for the government, declined to offer a strong defense of the "antidistortion rationale" of Austin, though she did of course urge the Court not to overrule the case. The government, it’s now clear, was going to lose regardless of who said what at oral argument, but Chief Justice Roberts in his concurrence made a point of quoting Kagan’s statement that Austin was not the clearest opinion (she either said "not the most pellucid" [which is how I had heard it on the taped broadcast] or "not the most lucid" [which is how Roberts quotes her from the transcript].)

As Justice Stevens’s dissent points out, the Citizens United decision will greatly advantage corporations vis-à-vis political parties, since parties are prohibited from raising and spending "soft money." As the dissent also points out, the majority failed to understand that the regulations at issue did not pit certain interests having nothing to do with the First Amendment against the claims of free speech. Rather, the questions raised by limits on corporate money in elections bring one kind of First Amendment interest into tension or conflict with another kind. Since I can't say this better than Stevens did in his dissent, I will quote him:

"All of the majority’s theoretical arguments turn on a proposition with undeniable surface appeal but little grounding in evidence or experience, 'that there is no such thing as too much speech,' Austin, 494 U. S., at 695 (Scalia, J., dissenting) [footnote omitted--LFC]. If individuals in our society had infinite free time to listen to and contemplate every last bit of speech uttered by anyone, anywhere; and if broadcast advertisements had no special ability to influence elections apart from the merits of their arguments (to the extent they make any); and if legislators always operated with nothing less than perfect virtue; then I suppose the majority’s premise would be sound. In the real world, we have seen, corporate domination of the airwaves prior to an election may decrease the average listener’s exposure to relevant viewpoints, and it may diminish citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in the democratic process.

"None of this is to suggest that corporations can or should be denied an opportunity to participate in election campaigns…or to deny that some corporate speech may contribute significantly to public debate. What it shows, however, is that Austin’s 'concern about corporate domination of the political process,' 494 U. S., at 659, reflects more than a concern to protect governmental interests outside of the First Amendment. It also reflects a concern to facilitate First Amendment values by preserving some breathing room around the electoral 'marketplace' of ideas….

The majority seems oblivious to the simple truth that laws such as §203 do not merely pit the anticorruption interest against the First Amendment, but also pit competing First Amendment values against each other. There are, to be sure, serious concerns with any effort to balance the First Amendment rights of speakers against the First Amendment rights of listeners. But when the speakers in question are not real people and when the appeal to 'First Amendment principles' depends almost entirely on the listeners’ perspective [this is a reference to the majority’s argument that the regulations deprive listeners of valuable information--LFC] it becomes necessary to consider how listeners will actually be affected."

I also urge those interested to read the powerful concluding section of the dissent.

A mess indeed

Wash Post headline re the snow storm: "A Historic Mess." That about sums it up.
I hope people in the area are managing to stay warm. I'm not writing this at home, which has no power. Still, nothing compared to an earthquake.

Angkor Wat exists

Two notes:

1) I will have a post up on Citizens United v. FEC; aiming for next week.

2) I can't resist saying this somewhere, and while perhaps it more properly belongs on the comment thread attached to this recent Duck of Minerva post, I'm going to put it here instead. ProfPTJ, in the course of explaining his philosophy-of-science position of "ontological monism," distinguishes it from a rejection of "common-sense realism" and writes: "One need not make profound ontological investments in order to assent to the proposition that Angkor Wat exists, even if one is very unlikely to ever go there and see it in person."
Well (how can I say this without sounding smug and insufferable?) I have actually been to Angkor Wat, albeit a very long time ago as a young child (seven-ish I'd say, maybe six) with my parents and brother. (We were living in E. Pakistan, as it then was, at the time, and we were either going on home leave or coming back from it.) This was obviously before the U.S. pulled Cambodia into the Indochina conflict and Angkor Wat became a dangerous place. I think I have no direct first-hand recollections, but there are photos somewhere, and for present purposes I admit them into evidence as equivalent to first-hand recollection. One of our fellow tourists was an Oxford don, no longer alive, whose books I read years later in college. Anyway, I don't have to make any ontological investment, profound or otherwise, to assent to the proposition that Angkor Wat exists.
And on that insufferable note, I wish you a nice weekend.

One reason why the proposed 2011 budget is $3.8 trillion

Some things, discretionary but judged to be necessary, cost a lot of money. For instance, the proposed budget allocates $7 billion to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and complex. As J. Lewis points out, the administration sees this as linked to its efforts "to find votes in the Senate for ratification of the START Follow-on Treaty and, at a later date, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."

France and the veil

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.

Counterintuitive findings on Islamist militancy in Pakistan

The current issue of International Security carries an article by Jacob N. Shapiro and Christine Fair, "Understanding Support for Islamist Militancy in Pakistan," which is based on a survey of urban Pakistanis. According to the abstract, they find that poverty, personal religiosity, and support for sharia law, among other things, are poor predictors of support for militant groups, as is faith in the country's democratic process. The last line of the abstract ventures to suggest, on the basis of the findings, that economic development, democratization and the like "may be irrelevant at best and might even be counterproductive" in the effort to reduce support for militancy.

The absence of a link in the urban setting between poverty and militancy is not, I think, too surprising, but the statement that those "who support core democratic principles...are not less supportive of militancy" sounds so counterintuitive that one suspects the abstract has been consciously written as a tease, to entice people to read the whole article. It will be interesting to see if people do read it and if it stirs debate.

Yes we can -- well, maybe

"Let's end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas." Pres. Obama said this numerous times during the '08 campaign. The line reappeared in his State of the Union speech, which shows how politically difficult it is to change this part of the tax code. Actually, right now it's politically difficult to do much of anything, at least in terms of legislation. The Founders, we are continually told, wanted a constrained, self-checking government, but this is ridiculous.

On foreign policy and trade policy, the State of the Union speech broke little new ground: the U.S. needs to export more - no surprise; trade should be on a level field - no surprise; we are in danger of being overtaken in technological innovation by other countries - no surprise. It was nice, however, to hear Obama reaffirm his commitment to a nuclear-free world. He also mentioned repealing the don't-ask-don't-tell policy (a line noticeably not applauded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

As for the rest of the speech, I thought Obama struck a number of reasonably good notes. The focus on unemployment was both substantively and politically necessary, as was the emphasis on measures to help small businesses borrow and to encourage them to hire. The spending freeze (not to take effect until 2011, since "that's the way budgeting works") was also something he probably did not have much choice, at least politically speaking, but to propose.

Moreover, it was entirely appropriate, despite what some have said, for Obama to criticize the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the campaign finance case that came down last month. I've read parts of the opinions, which taken together total more than 180 pages, and I had thought about putting up a separate post about the case, but I probably won't. I'm guessing readers of this blog are not that interested in the fine points of First Amendment law. Suffice it to say that the decision is pretty awful. Justice Alito's reaction to Obama's remarks during the speech, and the comment the reaction has occasioned, is a tempest in a teapot.

Obama's appeal to rise above partisanship and divisiveness was both eloquent and expected, though whether it will fall on receptive ears remains doubtful. "The politician looks to the next election, the statesman to the next generation": I seem to recall this line from an essay -- I don't remember which one -- by John Rawls, who was presumably repeating a distinction that had been drawn before. How many of the politicians in Congress are statesmen or stateswomen in this sense? Hmm...

Blog mini-roundup on Canada (specifically the proroguing of Parliament and related issues)

Here, here and here.

See you in Feb.

OK, that really is it for January here.

Incidentally, this site has had a number of first-time visitors in the last several days, and to them in particular I want to say that feedback of any kind (barring libel or obscenity) is welcome. I don't stand on ceremony, and when a commenter tells me to shut up, as one did here, my inclination is to try to respond civilly rather than delete the comment or start an exchange of insults. I will never be able to write about everything I would like to write about here, because I have other things to do besides blogging. (And in addition to the limits of time, there are limits imposed by the range of things that I feel competent and, more to the point, not competent to address.)

See you all next month.

Blattman on Brooks

I denounced the Brooks column as nonsense, but Chris Blattman -- who, unlike me, is a work-in-the-field and crunch-numbers social scientist (heck, let's just say that, unlike me, he is a real social scientist) -- took a more measured approach, contenting himself with the observation that Brooks's air of certitude made him "uncomfortable." Blattman says he's undertaking a randomized control trial, involving a project with street youth in Monrovia, Liberia, to test Brooks's notion of "intrusive paternalism."

Why do poor countries offer aid when natural disasters strike?

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, governments from around the world offered aid to the U.S. One of those offering aid was the government of Bangladesh. I don't recall the exact amount but it was more than token and not insubstantial for a poor country.

Now the Democratic Republic of Congo (considerably poorer than Bangladesh, I'm quite sure, though I haven't checked the figures) is offering aid to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. A Congolese political scientist is quoted by the BBC as saying: "It's a contradiction to see a country which is facing serious financial problems giving away $2.5 [million] but at the same time, it's a purely diplomatic reaction, the Congolese government wants to appear like any other government." (emphasis added)

I think that is exactly right. Offering aid in disasters has become something that sovereign governments -- or governments that want to appear as fully sovereign as any others -- do. It has become a norm of modern sovereign statehood, virtually in the same category as having a national airline and opening embassies in other countries.

The Congolese government's offer of aid is a way of telling the world that it has its problems under control (even though it almost certainly doesn't) and that it deserves as much respect as any other member state of the U.N.

(And I bet you thought that having studied IR theory was a completely impractical waste of time, didn't you? Hmm, I think I'd better not go further with this...)

Pakistan's public schools: condition critical

Griff Witte has an interesting if depressing Wash Post article on the grim state of Pakistan's public education system and the obstacles to reform. USAID will spend $200 million in Kerry-Lugar funds on education in Pakistan this year; the money will not be channeled through NGOs but will be given directly to the government, Witte observes. (This, if I'm not mistaken, might have been a condition for Pakistan's acceptance of the Kerry-Lugar package.) Lack of adequate monitoring of how the money is spent risks that much of it "will go to waste," the article notes.

The vast majority of Pakistani children who are in school attend the public schools, not madrassas. But the public school system is in terrible shape, according to this article; government spending on it is paltry, the curriculum is skewed toward reinforcing half-truths and outright untruths that constitute what one interviewee calls the security establishment's ideology, and "about a third of students drop out by the fifth grade." Read the whole thing, as they say.

Brooks's nonsense about Haiti and poverty

I hadn't intended to post again this month, but this passage from David Brooks's NYT column today (hat tip: HC) is beyond the pale in trotting out stale, dubious clichés about the alleged cultural roots of poverty:

"As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book 'The Central Liberal Truth,' Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10."

The notion that these things are why Haiti is poor is arrant nonsense. In fact I've just read the whole column and virtually the whole thing is nonsense. It starts at the very beginning of the piece, where Brooks confuses GDP growth with poverty alleviation. The two are related but they are not the same. You can have a lot of GDP growth without much poverty alleviation, and vice-versa. This has been obvious for decades. Then there's all this stuff about culture and poverty. It's a convenient device to obscure the way in which global institutional and economic structures (in which we're all complicit) create conditions that facilitate the continuation of poverty and maldistribution. To be sure, there are local differences. The Dominican Republic is much better off than Haiti. But is that because they have different cultures, because the Dominican Republic has "a culture of achievement" and Haiti doesn't? I don't think so. In all likelihood it's a result of complicated histories (including U.S. occupation) and the different ways they are positioned in the regional and global economies, among other things.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know much about Haiti, except what I see and read in the media. But David Brooks knows nothing about global poverty and its causes and possible solutions. An intelligent seventh-grader could have written a better column than this piece of garbage.

Campos on 'terrorball'

Via C. Carpenter.

Those revolutionary Brillo boxes

I happened to pick up a copy of Arthur Danto's new book on Andy Warhol (called, surprisingly enough, Andy Warhol) in my local public library. Although it's a short book, I didn't and don't have the time or inclination to read it from cover to cover. I did dip into it, however.

For those who don't know, Danto is a philosopher and art critic who has written about the philosophy of art, among other things (see Louis Menand's piece in the current New Yorker). In a nutshell, Danto thinks Warhol was a revolutionary artist because he threw into question the definition of art more sharply than previous artists (such as Duchamp) had. If Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which consists of stacks of Brillo boxes, is art, the definition of art must involve something extra-visual or non-visual, since there is no significant difference between Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Brillo boxes that could have been found on any grocery store shelf. "What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye" (Danto, Andy Warhol, p.65).

Similarly, Warhol's 1964 movie Empire, consisting of "an uninterrupted view" of the Empire State Building and running for "just over eight hours" (p.77), throws into question the definition of a movie. Empire "showed...that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move" (p.79).

Danto's book also contains some humor. This R-rated passage (pp.76-77) is an example:

"In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It [i.e., the film] was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University...in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of 'He shall never come.' ... Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started."

Pedagogy of the not-so-oppressed

I just ran across, more or less by accident, this piece by Henry Giroux on Paulo Freire, best known as the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While reading quickly through some of the piece, I was struck by this passage:

"Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a 'dead zone,' where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate [sic; this should read migrates -- LFC] to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards. Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live."

The last sentence of this passage (the italics are mine) led me to wonder what Giroux would think of Michael Sandel's "Justice" course (which I've had occasion to refer to before, albeit briefly). After watching an hour or two of "Justice" online a while ago, it seems to me difficult to deny that Sandel's aim -- and probably, to some extent, his effect -- is precisely to help students become more informed, reflective citizens. But Sandel's politics are not radical, while Giroux's are, and I somehow doubt that Sandel is practicing the pedagogy of the oppressed as Giroux might construe it -- although Giroux does point out that Freire refused to identify his outlook with a particular method. I don't follow debates about education much, so I don't know what if anything Giroux has written about Sandel's course (yes, I could have done a search but I didn't). It does strike me as an interesting question, however.

Soufan on Al Qaeda in Yemen

Ali Soufan, FBI case agent for the USS Cole investigation from 2000 to 2005, writes about al Qaeda in Yemen and observes that those who were jailed for their roles in the Cole bombing have been released. While recognizing the problems Yemeni officials are dealing with, he urges the U.S. to hold them more accountable in return for the U.S. aid Yemen gets.

What to expect here in 2010

For various reasons, I anticipate that I will be posting less frequently in 2010 than I did in '09. When I do post, the substantive foci (focuses? whatever) probably will remain more or less what they have been, though I may go off on tangents now and again.

Best wishes for the new year.

Update on the attack in Khost

The murkiness of the situation on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has only been underscored by the claims of responsibility and involvement by both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in the recent attack on the CIA base. The attack, as Christine Fair said on the NewsHour tonight, appears to have been aimed at decreasing the CIA's ability to carry out drone strikes in North Waziristan, the home of the Haqqani network. Thomas Johnson, on the same NewsHour segment, suggested that the Haqqani network might have "outsourced" the attack to (elements of) the Pakistani Taliban. Johnson also said that the degree of insurgent infiltration of the Afghan police and army, and of interpreters, has been underestimated. Fair had interesting things to say about Hakimullah Mehsud, current head of the Pakistani Taliban. They were both speaking rather quickly and my TV was misbehaving, so I later went to the NewsHour website and listened to the segment again. (Easier to follow that way.)
Further update: See the front-page articles in Wash Post of Jan.10.

Afghanistan: tragic ending to a bad year

In a perfect world of perfectly detached observers, each death in a war zone would be marked equally -- but then, in a perfect world there would be no wars to begin with. In the real world things are otherwise. Deaths on one's own side loom larger. The recent events in Afghanistan -- the killing of seven CIA employees and the killing of four Canadian soldiers and a journalist -- ensure that this will be recalled as a very bad end to a bad year.

Is the Obama administration wise or foolish to retreat from 'democracy promotion' in the Arab world?

"Democracy promotion" was a mainstay, at least rhetorically, of the Bill Clinton foreign policy and of G.W. Bush's. As a practical matter, however, it never achieved all that much, at least not in the Middle East. The U.S.'s major Arab allies in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have not become democracies of any recognizable sort. Kuwait and a couple of other countries have taken some steps toward opening their political systems to greater participation by women and other previously excluded groups, but there has been no general transformation of the Middle East in a democratic direction. Iraq has the forms of democracy, but whether it will turn out in the long run to be a well-functioning system (or even functioning at all) remains at this point an open question.

In a recent article on U.S. grand strategy in Int'l Studies Perspectives (November 2009), David C. Ellis writes: "From a grand strategic position, long-term victory in the GWOT [global war on terror] is hardly feasible without a demonstration of democratic governance in the Middle East.... The overriding dilemma...is that any attempt at reforming the United States' Middle Eastern allies will ultimately require entrenched elites to absolve themselves of their power and position." (Note: Although the GWOT label officially has been abandoned by the U.S. government, analysts continue to use it.)

The dilemma to which Ellis refers is so intractable that the Obama administration has decided to downgrade democracy promotion as an objective, at least according to an op-ed piece by Jackson Diehl published last month ("The deflated Arab hopes for Obama," Wash. Post, Nov. 30, 2009). Diehl notes that Sec. of State Clinton did not mention the word "democracy" in a speech she gave in Morocco in November, nor did she refer to "the Arabs who are fighting to create independent newspapers, political parties or human rights organizations."

The Egyptian sociologist and reform advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who (along with others) met with Clinton after her speech, told Diehl that he urged on Clinton the importance of the next two years "for determining the political direction of the Middle East." Egypt in particular has parliamentary elections scheduled and then a presidential election in 2011. According to Diehl:

"Clinton, said Ibrahim, replied that democracy promotion had always been a centerpiece of U.S. diplomacy and that the Obama administration would not give it up -- 'but that they have a lot of other things on their plate.' For Arab liberals, the translation is easy, if painful: Regardless of what the president may have said in Cairo, Obama's vision for the Middle East doesn't include 'a new beginning' in the old political order."

Assuming Diehl's analysis is correct, is this development as lamentable as he suggests? Maybe. But there are at least two sides to most foreign policy questions, and the other side here would argue that the metaphor of a crowded plate is accurate: the Obama administration has too many other pressing priorities now to devote much energy to a project that has proved frustratingly difficult in the past. On the other hand, if Ellis and Diehl are right, downplaying support for Middle Eastern democratic reformers may not be wise long-term policy. It is worth remembering that incarceration and torture in an Egyptian jail is mainly what turned Ayman al-Zawahiri from an Islamist opponent of the regime into a bitter, remorseless killer and ideologist of global jihad. How many more Zawahiris are being created in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world today?

Rusty master-key

Kal at TMND critically examines Ross Douthat's views about Islam, as expressed in Douthat's writing on Muslims in Europe, the Swiss referendum on minarets, and so on. The post calls the clash-of-civilizations thesis, to which Douthat subscribes, "a master-key for the intellectually lazy." Nice phrase.

Exactly the wrong kind of new year's gift: a "modernization" of the U.S. nuclear arsenal

Republican senators are advocating construction of a new generation of U.S. nukes, saying it's a condition of their support for a new START treaty with Russia. This is lunacy: unnecessary, wasteful, and counterproductive. Sounds like a fair amount of what Senate Republicans have been doing lately.

Eritrean ambassador to UK: "We have never, never, never" aided Somali Islamists

In response to UN Security Council sanctions against Eritrea, the first SC sanctions according to this report since the 2006 sanctions against Iran, the Eritrean ambassador to Britain is quoted as saying: "Now we are 100% sure that we have never, never, never supplied military equipment or otherwise to the extremists in Somalia."

Perhaps there is an inverse relation between the heatedness of a denial and the breadth of consensus that an allegation is true.

Gates memo suggests joint State-Defense funds for 'nation-building'

A recent unclassified memo from Sec. of Defense Gates to Sec. of State Clinton has been obtained by the Wash Post and is reported on today (Mary Beth Sheridan and Greg Jaffe, "Gates proposes 3 funds to aid unstable countries," WP, 12/24, p.A2 link). The memo suggests creation of "three long-term funds...dedicated to training security forces, preventing conflicts and stabilizing violence-torn societies around the world."

The State Dept and AID, as the Post story notes, have traditionally "taken the lead" in this kind of work, but in recent years the military has become increasingly active in it, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Gates memo makes specific reference to "complaints about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy," according to the Post report, stemming from the "huge increase in funding for stabilization efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan" (but, as just noted, the Pentagon's involvement in traditionally civilian work goes well beyond those two countries). Obstacles to joint funds of the sort proposed include the existing structure of congressional oversight; the memo suggests the creation of "special standing committees in the House and Senate" to avoid having to report to eight different congressional committees. The State Dept has not yet responded formally to the proposal, but a spokesman is quoted as saying the memo "contains some creative ideas on moving forward."

McChrystal in Ottawa

I happened to catch on the radio this evening about twenty minutes of a recent q-and-a on Afghanistan conducted by Gen. McChrystal with an informed Canadian audience. Some of his answers were fine I thought, but the response to a question about cooperation with Pakistan and border issues struck me as weak. McChrystal said, basically, that he meets frequently with Gen. Kiyani (head of the Pakistani army) and sometimes in tripartite fashion with the Afghanistan army head, that matters are improving but not perfect, plus one or two other generalities, and that was it. Not only was there no mention of the drone program, which is understandable I suppose since it is officially unacknowledged, but there was very little beyond platitudes on this particular question. Perhaps this is because things are going on that he cannot talk about in public. (Let's hope so.)

Also see: Noah Schachtman on Can U.S. troops run McChrystal's soft power playbook?

Some notable IR books of the past decade

At Crooked Timber they're having a discussion of "top" political philosophy books of the last decade. I don't know what the "top" IR books of the decade (meaning, here, 2000 and forward) are, but I thought I'd throw out the names of some possible candidates. The list is biased by what happens to be on my bookshelf or in my head at the moment and by my own particular interests. In a few cases, to be noted, I haven't read a word of the books in question, so those instances represent just hunches that the book is worth reading. The list is arranged by date of publication (earliest first).

Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant (2000). Aims to integrate the "political theory of human conduct" (identified by the author with Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Berlin) and the international society tradition, especially its more conservative, pluralist side. A vigorous normative defense of the traditional principles of non-intervention and state sovereignty.

Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (2001). Argues that societies throughout history have molded men to be warriors and slotted women primarily into supporting rather than combat roles, even though some women are as physically capable of being soldiers as men (or in some cases, more capable). In other words, while there are average physical differences between the sexes, culture is more constraining than biology or anatomy. The book is a sweeping multidisciplinary synthesis. (For critical comment, see the review symposium in Perspectives on Politics; I'm too lazy to get the citation right now.) [Disclosure alert: I know the author.]

John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001). I disagree with this book's argument and perspective, but it's a major statement by a noted scholar. And he writes well.

Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (2002). In contrast for example to Jackson's The Global Covenant, Pogge argues that some basic institutional aspects of the global order are unjust and that "the citizens and governments of the wealthy societies, by imposing the present global economic order, significantly contribute to the persistence of severe poverty and thus share institutional moral responsibility for it." He makes some specific proposals, e.g. for "a global resources dividend."

Peter Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (2005). Bought it but have not read it.

Stephen Walt, Taming American Power (2005). Insightful analysis of "the global response to U.S. primacy" (to quote the subtitle).

Patrick T. Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (2006). Have not read it but am familiar with some of the author's articles (and also [disclosure alert] know the author).

Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006). Bought it but have read only a tiny bit of it. I suspect, however, that Sassen is stronger on the "global" than the "medieval" part of her subject.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006). The only book on this list by a journalist rather than an academic, but it's researched with scholarly thoroughness. Very good on the background of bin Laden and Zawahiri; the portrait of the latter is especially revealing.

Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War (2008). After dipping into parts of this book, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the argument; however, it's a thoughtful and well-researched approach to the topic.

George Gavrilis, The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries (2008). Have not read it, but anyone with a serious interest in this subject will want to.

Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (2009). My bookmark is stuck at p.126 and may remain there permanently. Contains interesting ideas, but the exposition in the theoretical chapters could have been tightened and shortened.

George Quester, Preemption, Prevention and Proliferation: The Threat and Use of Weapons in History (2009). A short book by a well-known scholar. I have only dipped into it.

There are other titles I could mention but I'll stop here, at least for now. Comments, suggestions, criticisms? Chime in.

International Relations and American political science: revisiting some disciplinary history

The disciplinary history of International Relations (IR) has been a scholarly growth industry in recent years. Articles and books have re-evaluated major writers and traditions and questioned the once-standard presentation of the field’s evolution as a series of stylized "great debates."

One result of this work is that more attention is being paid to the history of IR’s connection with political science. At least in the U.S. and in much of Europe, IR has ended up, for the most part, as a subfield of political science. To be sure, there are many scholars and analysts who "do" IR and are not political scientists, and there are many programs in international studies whose faculty and courses are drawn from a range of fields, but it remains the case that the majority of those studying IR in the academy are political scientists. However, the relationship between IR and political science, particularly American political science, has hardly been an uncomplicated romance.
 
"The growth of the discipline [of International Relations] cannot be separated from the American role in world affairs after 1945," Stanley Hoffmann observed in his 1977 essay "An American Social Science: International Relations."* He pointed to “a remarkable chronological convergence” between U.S. policy-makers’ concerns and scholars’ output:

"What [American] leaders looked for, once the cold war started, was some intellectual compass which would serve multiple functions: exorcise isolationism, and justify a permanent and global involvement in world affairs; rationalize the accumulation of power, the techniques of intervention, and the methods of containment apparently required by the cold war;...and reassure a nation eager for ultimate accommodation, about the possibility of both avoiding war and achieving its ideals."

Such an "intellectual compass" was exactly what many IR scholars furnished. And yet, Hoffmann went on to observe, a peculiarly American "quest for certainty" tried to purge from the discipline the inexactness that inheres in its subject matter, producing a drive for precision "that turns out false or misleading."**

This complaint echoed debates of two decades earlier, debates which are the subject of an article published last year. In "The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory," International Political Sociology 2:4 (December 2008): 281-304, Nicolas Guilhot looks at the period in the late 1940s and 1950s when behavioralism, with its positivist-empiricist and ahistorical style of inquiry, was becoming the dominant force in American political science. Guilhot describes a contrary tendency, a move to (in the words of the article’s abstract) "insulate the study of international politics from the behavioral revolution that was transforming the practice of political science in postwar America."

Two of the key figures in this countermovement were Hans Morgenthau and his former student Kenneth Thompson, who was at the Rockefeller Foundation from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s (and who later became director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia). Trained in international law (as were a number of other émigré IR scholars of the same generation, e.g. Arnold Wolfers and John Herz), Morgenthau was, as Hoffmann puts it, "steeped in a scholarly tradition that stressed the difference between social sciences and natural sciences." As an heir to that tradition and author of a book called Scientific Man versus Power Politics, Morgenthau was, not surprisingly, averse to behaviorialism, a type of social science that, to quote Hoffmann again, "suffered from ‘hyperfactualism’ and conformity."*** Nonetheless, as Guilhot points out, Morgenthau spoke of the importance of "general laws," which Guilhot interprets as mainly a strategic move on Morgenthau's part to gain a hearing and as "a tactical weapon against liberal historians and legal scholars" (p.296). (Other interpretations are possible: there are more sides to Morgenthau than this article suggests.)

In the often told and sometimes oversimplified story of IR’s so-called "first debate," Morgenthau and his fellow realists took on the illusions supposedly fostered by the liberal internationalists of the interwar period (Alfred Zimmern, James Shotwell, Nicholas Murray Butler, et al.).**** However, as Guilhot writes (p.296), Morgenthau, Thompson, and their allies believed that "the critique of interwar liberal internationalism…could not be complete without a simultaneous critique of the behavioral sciences, which were seen as responsible for the further depoliticization of social [science] and IR typical of liberalism." This stance led to an effort to set IR apart, to distinguish it from the direction in which "mainstream political science" was traveling in the postwar period. (p.283) At a paper prepared for a May 1954 conference, Morgenthau insisted – in words Guilhot italicizes – that: " 'A theory of international relations, to be theoretically valid, must build into its theoretical structure, as it were, those very qualifications which limit its theoretical validity and practical usefulness.' " (p.297) These "qualifications" amounted to the view that, as Morgenthau put it, "in reality you can only rely on a series of informed hunches." (quoted, p.297)

Guilhot’s article, based partly on research in the Rockefeller Foundation archives and also on a reading of academic publications from the period, throws light on the intellectual quarrels of the era. He sets the IR debates of the 1940s and 1950s in a wider context, emphasizing that they were "part of a discipline-wide conversation involving all the branches of political science" that centered on "the legitimacy of political science as a scientific project" (p.285) in the wake of the upheavals and catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s which social science had done little or nothing to help avert. He also notes a kind of dilemma of certain postwar realists, who were caught between their need to distinguish themselves from so-called idealists, sometimes by using the language of "science," and their simultaneous desire to "protect" IR from behavioralism, a desire that, in terms of the rhetoric of "science," pulled them the other way. There is, in short, a lot of rich material in this article, much of which cannot be summarized here.

That said, the article also has a couple of weaknesses. First, Guilhot equates a strand of postwar American realism with "IR theory," period. Guilhot maintains that "the ‘theorization’ of IR was essentially meant to…make it immune to the cues of behaviorialism" (p.282) and that "the theory of IR was developed by [the Morgenthau-Thompson] group as a way to secure a space for its alternative vision of politics and scholarship" (p.282, emphasis in original). However, this use of the phrase "the theory of IR" implies, dubiously, that only this group was producing theory and thus, perhaps, tends to confuse more than it clarifies. Guilhot himself notes that "the postwar triumph of the 'realist' approach to international politics concealed deep discords within the ranks of the realists themselves" (p.301), disagreements that had to do with their attitudes about the utility of social-science methods and, more broadly, the degree of their skepticism about the possibilities of taming or moderating power politics.

More importantly, Guilhot’s judgment that the 1950s "realist gambit" was ultimately a failure (p. 300) exaggerates the current prevalence of behavioralist and rational-choice approaches. It is true, of course, that IR did not become separate from political science and in this sense the "gambit" did not succeed. Contrary to what Guilhot implies in his conclusion, however, "psychological, anthropological, or normative elements" (p.300) have not been banished from the tool kits or discourses of IR scholars. On the contrary, the field today is a cacophony of different approaches and orientations. If it were otherwise, scholars would not bother to publish exercises in "field-mapping."***** Admittedly, newly minted scholars who do a particular kind of work, involving for example the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods in the same study, may have an advantage in the current academic job market, at least in the United States. Hiring committees often seem to like candidates who can do quantitative work and are technically proficient. In this sense, self-consciously social-scientific norms prevail in the discipline. However, people continue to produce other kinds of work (some of it of equal or greater value), as a glance at the journals indicates. Indeed, the discipline of political science in the U.S. was engulfed in a much-noticed contest over these issues in recent years, as the "perestroika" movement charged that the field had tilted too far in a positivist, "scientific" direction. Today the large majority of IR scholars identify themselves as social scientists, but what counts as social science (or "good" or "real" social science) remains a matter of dispute, as it has for a long time. The debates of the 1950s discussed in Guilhot’s "The Realist Gambit" thus continue to reverberate, even if in a somewhat different key.

Notes

* Hoffmann’s essay first appeared in Daedalus 106 (3) (Summer 1977). It has been reprinted several times, e.g. in J. Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (1995), pp.212-241, and in Hoffmann’s Janus and Minerva (1987), ch.1.

** Hoffmann, "An American Social Science," in Der Derian, pp.222-23, 237.

*** Ibid., p.217.

**** See David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (1995).

***** For a recent example, see P.T. Jackson and D.H. Nexon, "Paradigmatic Faults in International-Relations Theory," International Studies Quarterly 53 (4) (December 2009): 907-930.

Further reading (a few suggestions)

R.M.A. Crawford and D.S.L. Jarvis (eds.), International Relations -- Still an American Social Science? (2000)

Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (2001)

K.J. Holsti, "Scholarship in an Era of Anxiety: The Study of International Politics during the Cold War," in T. Dunne et al. (eds.), The Eighty Years' Crisis: International Relations 1919-1999 (1998)

Miles Kahler, "Inventing International Relations: IR Theory After 1945," in M. Doyle & J. Ikenberry (eds.), New Thinking in International Relations Theory (1997)

D. Long and P. Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis (1995)

Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, "The Construction of an Edifice: The Story of a First Great Debate," Review of International Studies 31:1 (2005)

William Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (2009)

Brian C. Schmidt, "The History of International Studies," in International Studies Encyclopedia Online, ed. R. Denemark (2010)

Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (1986)

India and the NPT

I'm embarrassed (again) to have missed this development when it happened, but I just learned this afternoon, from David Fidler and Sumit Ganguly's Newsweek column ("India's Bombshell," Dec. 14) about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement on November 29 that India is willing to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear weapons state. India, of course, has never signed the NPT (neither have Pakistan or Israel).

Singh's move comes as a considerable surprise, and as Fidler and Ganguly note, it puts the current NPT nuclear weapon states, especially the U.S. and China, in something of a quandary:

"To admit India as a nuclear-weapons state, NPT members would have to amend the treaty -- specifically, the provision that defines nuclear-weapons states as those that detonated a weapon before 1967. Opponents will argue that bringing India inside the nuclear club could set a dangerous precedent, dangling the possibility of legitimacy in front of other would-be nuclear states. But, given India's responsible behavior as a nuclear-weapons democracy, it would also strengthen the NPT at a moment when the treaty is under attack for its apparent ineffectiveness in curtailing nuclear violations in North Korea and Iran.... [T]he U.S. and China will have particularly hard choices to make. For Washington, opposing the NPT amendment would hurt its relationship with India.... And opposing Indian membership would make Beijing look selfish, more concerned with its own narrow interests than with non-proliferation."

I haven't figured out yet exactly what I think about this, but I have one gloss on this passage: India is effectively already a member of the nuclear club. Even though it's not in the NPT, India was the beneficiary of a deal with the U.S. on civilian nuclear power entered into last year. And it's not as if one hears much of an outcry from any of the current NPT nuclear weapon states about India's nuclear status. Moreover, how would India's joining the NPT affect its none-too-satisfactory relations with Pakistan? Might it not heighten resentment in Islamabad about perceived international favoritism toward India? And, in the long run, would that be good for India? All in all, I'm not sure I entirely agree with Fidler and Ganguly that joining the NPT "would confer enormous benefits on India." It will be interesting, in any case, to see what happens with this.

George Will eats applesauce

Glancing at George Will's WashPost column today, I see he accuses Pres. Obama of serving "intellectual applesauce" with the line in the Oslo speech that affirmed that the human condition can be "perfected" despite an "imperfect" human nature. Will writes: "If the human condition can be perfected, then human nature cannot be significantly imperfect."

I noticed the same line in the speech, but I read it more charitably: in saying the human condition can be "perfected," Obama meant, I think, to say that it can be vastly improved. Was the sentence inartfully worded? Perhaps. Is it "intellectual applesauce"? No.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this...

...because of what it might reveal about my reading habits, but I just now learned of Paul Samuelson's death, and from a blog, not a newspaper.

I don't generally note deaths here, even of notable people (though in recent months I did make exceptions for Kennedy and McNamara, in both cases because there was something I thought I wanted to say, even if not at much length). Not being an economist, I have nothing really to say about Samuelson except the most trivial, solipsistic thing: sitting on my bookcase -- actually now it's on my desk as I'm typing this -- is the tenth edition of Samuelson's Economics (copyright 1976), and suffice to say that it was brand new when I bought it. I don't do the confessional mode much, but I suddenly feel older than I did ten minutes ago (of course I am ten minutes older, but you know what I mean). It was not my favorite book, but I duly read it (well, parts of it), and I managed to pass the course (no, you may not ask what my grade was). I suppose I might even have managed to learn some basic "mainstream" economics, circa 1976.

Contrary to some advice for students going around these days -- there is so much more advice available now -- I did not "tech up" in college: no economics beyond the intro course, no statistics; but then I was never that way inclined. Nowadays, if I really put my mind to it, I can (more or less) understand quantitative articles in my field, or at least get the gist (unless they're only about methodology, in which case maybe not). But that's about it. Oh well.

Forbidden fruit

Nah, sorry, not that kind...

El Jefe Maximo writes about the significance of Dec. 11, 1941, the day Hitler declared war on the U.S. in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, asking what might have happened had Germany: (1) not declared war on the U.S. (i.e., stayed officially neutral in the war between the U.S. and Japan) or (2) actually declared war on Japan (much less plausible a scenario, IMO). His post reminded me that R.N. Lebow's book on counterfactuals is forthcoming from Princeton Univ. Press under the somewhat odd title Forbidden Fruit. (I think the title may be explained in the opening chapter, available online, which I skimmed through at fairly high speed the other day; something about, you know, Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, whatever...oh yeah, and the tree of knowledge, how could I forget that?!? Duh.)

The Emersonian Obama

There is much that might be said (and no doubt much that has already been said) about Obama's Nobel acceptance speech. After a reading of the text that admittedly has not squeezed out every nuance, I highlight three points that seem especially noteworthy:

(1) In dealing with repressive and so-called rogue regimes, the speech called for balancing sticks and carrots, sanctions that "exact a real price" and diplomacy. Although "engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation," he said, sanctions standing alone are not enough. "No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door." The recently announced U.S. policy on Sudan in fact followed this carrots-and-sticks approach.

(2) He insisted that justice and "a just peace" require the amelioration of poverty, in addition to the standard emphasis on civil and political rights. Economic and environmental security (including action on climate change) are linked here to traditional security. Indeed, this part of the speech could have been lifted from a textbook on "human security."

(3) Obama attempted, particularly in the closing passages, to reconcile a "clear-eyed" view of human imperfection with the possibility of progress. This might have recalled for some listeners parts of King's "I have a dream" speech, and indeed Obama quoted King on rejecting "despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history." And in a line that suggested at least one of his speechwriters might recently have been reading Thoreau or Emerson, Obama declared: "Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls."

While there were perhaps some tensions in the speech between the "clear-eyed" and the more visionary elements, I don't think, contra the view of one of the commenters on the NewsHour this evening, that the speech was "philosophically incoherent." No American president at this juncture in history could possibly give a full-throated, unambiguously Wilsonian speech, but neither was it an option, particularly in view of the occasion and the context, to end on anything other than a note of solidarism, hope, and uplift. If anything, the speech erred too far in the direction of a quasi-Sisyphean view of the world. But Obama is no longer campaigning, he is governing and making difficult decisions, so it is only natural to expect that his speeches will strike more ambiguous chords than they did during the campaign.

Obama's Oslo speech

Just downloaded the text; haven't read it yet. May have some comment later.
Michael Bérubé has some fun with the protocol breaches.

A little thought experiment

The Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who was hanged by Nasser's regime in 1966 and whose fundamentalist version of Islam contributed to the ideological formation of al-Qaeda, spent some time in the U.S. at the end of the 1940s. As a student in Colorado, Qutb had a variety of experiences that, shall we say, rubbed him very much the wrong way and helped persuade him of the moral bankruptcy of American culture.

In the opening chapter of his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright described Qutb's reaction to a church dance in 1949 (Qutb at the time was a student at the Colorado State College of Education, now the Univ. of Northern Colorado):

"On Sundays the college did not serve food, and students had to fend for themselves. Many of the international students, including Muslims like Qutb, would visit one of the more than fifty churches in Greeley [Co.] on Sunday evening, where, after services, there were potluck dinners and sometimes a dance. 'The dancing hall was decorated with yellow, red, and blue lights,' Qutb recalled on one occasion. 'The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love.' The minister gazed upon this sight approvingly, and even dimmed the lights to enhance the romantic atmosphere. Then he put on a song titled 'Baby, It's Cold Outside,' a sly ballad from an Esther Williams movie that summer, Neptune's Daughter. 'The minister paused to watch his young charges swaying to the rhythms of this seductive song, then he left them to enjoy this pleasant, innocent night,' Qutb concluded sarcastically."

Imagine what Qutb would make of certain aspects of American culture if he were still alive and happened to plop down on either the East or West coasts today (or any other part of the country, probably, but let's stick to the coasts for this thought experiment). For example, on a December weekend in Miami Beach he would see young women in scanty bikinis posing for fashion-shoots at hotel pools and in hotel lobbies. Everywhere he would see youth, physicality, and sex being used to sell every imaginable product. He would turn on a re-run of a TV program like 90210 and see actors in their 20s who look like they have stepped out of the pages of fashion magazines pretending -- badly and unconvincingly -- to be high-school students and operating on the premise that their school is simply the venue in which their complicated "romantic" (read, sex) lives unfold. He would be pursued by "seductive rhythms" or merely insistently obtrusive "music" in virtually every public space, rendering sequential thought a challenge and reflection even more difficult. Given his reaction to a church dance in Colorado in 1949, what would be Qutb's reaction to these and similar aspects of American culture today? The mind boggles.

No instant analysis

In keeping with my announcement of a break (see previous post), there will be no immediate commentary here on the West Point speech.
Those hungry for instant comment can, for starters, head over to Wash Post and read Meyerson (ambivalent) and, if you can stomach it, Kristol (typically obnoxious).

Note to readers

That's it for this month. I'll be taking a break and will resume posting sometime in December.

The City of the Jugglers

Although I don't do it very often, it can pay to glance at journals that have nothing to do with one's field: you never know what interesting things you might turn up. The other day in the library I happened to look at the Spring 2009 issue of The Victorian Newsletter, which is devoted to William North (1825-1854), whose 1850 novel The City of the Jugglers is described by Patrick Scott as "the least known but most relevant novel of the 19th century" and "perhaps the only English novel fully to take up the challenge of 1848 and the revolutions elsewhere in Europe."* It's available as a print-on-demand paperback from the University of South Carolina Press and also available in a digital version. (Incidentally, North was also, among other things, the author of Anti-Coningsby, a satire of Disraeli and the Young England movement.)
-----------------
*Patrick Scott, "Introducing a 'Lost' Victorian Novel: The Elusive William North and The City of the Jugglers (1850)," The Victorian Newsletter #115 (Spring 2009): 7-15.

Presidents, resentment, and the news

John Sides blogs about research (by C. Karpowitz) suggesting that Nixon's consumption of news via prepared summaries fueled his resentments and that first-hand news consumption may be necessary for "healthy presidential leadership." Maybe, but LBJ, I believe, managed to stoke his resentments without relying solely (or at all?) on summaries; in his case, reading the newspapers and watching the TV news proved very adequate for that purpose.

Caspar Weinberger's books

As some may recall, Caspar Weinberger (1917-2006) presided over the Reagan administration's military build-up as Reagan's Secretary of Defense from January 1981 until November 1987. (Weinberger began his political career in California and then served as Nixon's director of OMB and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.) Weinberger was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra affair on the eve of the November 1992 presidential election, but just before leaving office Pres. George H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger before he could stand trial (Bush also pardoned five other former Reagan administration officials at the same time). In denouncing the pardons, the independent counsel (i.e. investigating prosecutor) Lawrence Walsh sharply criticized Weinberger for having withheld his contemporaneous notes on Iran-Contra, which, according to Walsh, contained evidence of a conspiracy by "the highest-ranking" Reagan administration officials to lie to Congress and the public.

Why rake this up now? Not long ago I happened to be in a used bookstore which was selling part of Weinberger's library. From conversation with a store employee, I learned that the more "valuable" (and possibly more interesting) part of the library, mainly books with Weinberger's signature, was in another branch of the store. A number of the books I saw here were review copies that publishers had sent to Weinberger; some of these dealt with international politics (e.g., Hugh Thomas's 1966 book on the Suez crisis). Other books clearly had been acquired by Weinberger himself, either during his student days or after. These included some on British history, especially biographies of politicians and statesmen; memoirs of American public officials (e.g., Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation, Henry Stimson's On Active Service in Peace and War [written with McGeorge Bundy]); and some books on U.S. politics (I particularly remember an anti-New Deal polemic published in 1937 warning against "the collectivist state"). There was also a complete set of Churchill's The Second World War. And there were one or two items reflecting Weinberger's Harvard connections (he was an alumnus of both the college and the law school), e.g., William Bentinck-Smith (ed.), The Harvard Book. In short, this part of the collection was not all that revealing; perhaps the part in the other branch of the store would have been more so. Or perhaps not.

All these books, virtually all of which were hardcovers, had the same price ($15). As I was leaving I asked the employee about this pricing policy; he replied that they didn't have time to "psychoanalyze each book."

Should KSM and the four others be tried in federal court?

I have two brief things to say on this:

1) While the decision can legitimately be questioned, Republican senators' criticisms today (to the extent I heard them) -- e.g., Lindsay Graham saying something like 'this makes horrible history' or sets a horrible precedent -- were overblown.

2) If it was going to be a federal court, better to do it in the Southern District of New York than in the Eastern District of Virginia which, as I understand it, was the other federal venue considered. Some years ago I observed part of a trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. Based on that and some other things, I think Manhattan is the better choice.

Brazil on the move

At the beginning of October, just after Rio was awarded the 2016 summer Olympics, T. Greer collected a bunch of headlines showing Brazil's assertiveness in regional and world affairs. His verdict: "For the first time in modern history Brazil has banished enough of its inner demons to become a true force in international politics, and [has] a president who is ready to play the role of Statesman-in-chief."

Round and round

Those who are tired of reading about Afghanistan (and if you are I don't blame you) should skip what follows.

Stephen Walt is having none of the various possible "middle courses" on Afghanistan that have been in the air. "Trying to split the difference on this issue is not leadership; in fact, it is a recipe for failure," Walt writes. (He favors getting out.) This may be right but, as Walt knows, the all-or-nothing approach is not consistent with what seems to be Obama's general style. If they read Walt's blog in the White House -- and who knows, someone may -- this is likely to go, so to speak, in one ear and out the other. The recent moves to put more public pressure on Karzai re corruption, and Karzai's apparent efforts to respond, suggest that quick withdrawal is not going to be the decision. But Gordon Brown, for one, does seem to be thinking ahead to an eventual NATO exit.

Gallenberger's John Rabe

Last night I saw Florian Gallenberger's film about John Rabe, the German businessman who was instrumental in saving the lives of more than 200,000 Chinese during the Japanese occupation of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1937 (a/k/a the Nanking Massacre). The movie premiered last February at the Berlin Film Festival (hat tip, Wikipedia) and has won German film awards. I almost didn't go but I'm glad I did, because it was absorbing, instructive, well-acted, and at times moving. Recommended, but not for those who are squeamish about graphic depictions of brutality.

Obama's record

One perspective.

A little F. Scott Fitzgerald

John Quiggin's post on Armistice Day led one commenter to quote Tender Is the Night, providing a reminder of how well Fitzgerald could write. It's #33 in the comment thread.

African Union Convention on Displaced Persons

The African Union recently adopted a Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Displaced Persons, the first legal instrument to define states' obligations toward their own displaced citizens. There are roughly 12 million internally displaced people in Africa. The convention needs to be ratified by a minimum of 15 countries before coming into force. More details here and/or by googling "convention on displaced persons."

You might ask whether conventions like this have any practical effect. The safe, albeit perhaps unsatisfying, answer is that it varies: some have more impact than others. But at a minimum they can help focus attention on a problem, and that in itself can be useful.

Quotes for the day: Paul Kennedy; Eric Hobsbawm

Today being the ninety-first anniversary of the end of World War One (Nov. 11 being marked as Veterans Day in the U.S., Remembrance Day in Canada, and Armistice Day in Europe), two quotations for the occasion:

1.

"...what that struggle meant and did changed the course of history more than any other in modern times.... It brought the end of the Romanovs, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the emergence of a Communist system that blighted so much of humanity for the rest of the century. The war also made possible the growth of Fascism.... [The war] shattered a Eurocentric world order, shifted the financial center of gravity to New York, nurtured Japanese expansion in East Asia, and, at the same time, stimulated anticolonial movements from West Africa to Indonesia.

The aerial bomber, the U-boat, and poison gas brought mechanization to...killing.... Industrialized labor, trade unions, and socialist parties gained in power, while the landed interest declined. The social and political position of women was transformed in various aspects.... The war produced a cultural crisis, in the arts, ideas, religion, literature, and life styles. It also exacerbated ethnic and religious hatreds, in Ireland, the Balkans, and Armenia, that scar the European landscape today. The Great War is therefore not some distant problem about dead white males on and off the battlefield. Its origins, course, and consequences are central to an understanding of the twentieth century. Any high school, college, or university that does not accord importance to teaching its meanings is shortchanging the present generation of students and discrediting itself."

-- Paul Kennedy, "In the Shadow of the Great War," New York Review of Books, August 12, 1999

2.

"On the 28 June 1992 President Mitterand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost many thousands of lives during the remainder of the year. His object was to remind world opinion of the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Indeed, the presence of a distinguished, elderly and visibly frail statesman under artillery and small-arms fire was much remarked on and admired. However, one aspect of M. Mitterand's visit passed virtually without comment, even though it was plainly central to it: the date. Why had the President of France chosen to go to Sarajevo on that particular day? Because the 28 June was the anniversary of the assassination, in Sarajevo, in 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which led, within a matter of weeks, to the outbreak of the First World War. For any educated European of Mitterand's age, the connection between date, place, and the reminder of a historic catastrophe...leaped to the eye. How better to dramatize the potential implications of the Bosnian crisis than by choosing so symbolic a date? But hardly anyone caught the allusion except a few professional historians and very senior citizens. The historical memory was no longer alive."

-- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994), pp.2-3

Fall of the Berlin Wall: 20-year anniversary

The other 9-11, and in the long-run scheme of things the more earthshaking one: 9 November 1989.
See also here.
And here.

New blog on Pakistan; F. Kagan analysis of Waziristan campaign

Via Charli Carpenter: the Pakistan Conflict Monitor.

Also, a couple of weeks ago the Wash Post's Walter Pincus summarized an analysis of the Waziristan campaign produced by Frederick Kagan and others connected with Am. Enterprise Institute. The paper emphasizes the Pakistani army's successful pre-campaign efforts to negotiate deals with tribal leaders and groups who might otherwise have actively opposed the current campaign against the Mehsud group in South Waziristan. (Despite my general dislike of AEI, this analysis, judging from the Post article, seems well-informed.)

Effects of partisanship

Interesting (if you're interested in this sort of thing).

The Afghan government and corruption: is there any hope?

Gerard Russell, writing at FP, thinks the answer is 'yes' (or at least 'maybe'), urging Karzai to set up a body modeled on the Electoral Complaints Commission -- i.e., composed largely of non-Afghans -- to investigate government corruption. On the other hand, Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's former challenger, sounded quite pessimistic earlier this evening in an interview with Margaret Warner on the NewsHour.

Tracking a phrase: "Speak truth to power"

A commenter on this post at The Monkey Cage discusses the phrase "speak truth to power," which, according to the commenter, stems from "a Quaker assertion of the eighteenth century" which was echoed in an American Friends Service Committee publication from the 1950s. The commenter also notes that the phrase was used by political scientist Aaron Wildavsky in the title of a 1979 book.

Another use of the phrase, one that predates Wildavsky, was in Hans J. Morgenthau's collection Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960-70 (Praeger, 1970). Morgenthau dedicated the book to one of his mentors: "to Hans Kelsen, who has taught us through his example how to speak Truth to Power." And in the prologue Morgenthau wrote:

"In the long run..., the voice of truth, so vulnerable to power, has proved more resilient than power. It has built empires of the mind and the spirit that have outlasted, and put their mark upon, the empires of power. On January 22, 1967, about thirty people demonstrated in Pushkin Square in Moscow against the arrest of four persons who had transcribed the court records in the trial against Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel. One of the organizers of the protest, Khaustov, who was sentenced to three years at hard labor, admitted at his trial that he had read Kant and Hegel and that his reading of Kant 'made me see a lot of things in a new light.' The experience of the 1960's has dispelled the illusion that truth can show power the way in direct confrontation. But historical experience reassures us that truth can indeed make people 'see a lot of things in a new light.' And when people see things in a new light, they might act in a new way."

Not exactly the side of Hans Morgenthau that most students get in their introductory international relations classes, is it?

Horatio Alger re-exploded

How much socioeconomic mobility is there in the U.S.? Not as much as many Americans believe. From a piece in Wash Post today by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins:

"...recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults [middle class being defined here as an income of $50,000 a year for a family of three]; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults."

Sawhill and Haskins go on to qualify this picture by noting that the U.S. "is exceptional" in the opportunities it offers to immigrants, relative to other 'developed' countries. But the basic data on mobility should not come as a big surprise. It is, of course, possible, as the 35 percent figure given in the quotation suggests, to rise from a poor or working-class family into the ranks of the middle-class or the affluent, but it's not likely. It probably requires a combination of individual talent, work, and luck (with "luck" construed to include the traits that one is born with and the quality of parenting one receives, among other things).

Anyone who doubts that the reproduction of social class takes place in the U.S., and who wants to consult something livelier and more anecdotal than the abundant academic literature on the topic, can browse through, say, a 30th anniversary Class Report from an elite college or university and note where the alumni's children are going to college. Anecdotal? Sure. Probative of anything in a strict social-scientific sense? No. But nonetheless quite revealing.

P.s. Last year I noted a piece by William Deresiewicz which bears on this last point.