Jonathan Schell remembered

Jim Sleeper writes about the late Jonathan Schell, proponent of nuclear disarmament, student of non-violence, author of, among other books, The Village of Ben Suc, The Fate of the Earth, and The Unconquerable World.

Note: light posting

Posting is going to be light (or absent) here for a while.

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.

Nation-building and modernization as persistent themes in U.S. foreign policy

'Nation building,' as the phrase is used in U.S. foreign policy circles, has long been closely tied to the notion of modernization.  Michael E. Latham traces this connection from the Truman to the G.W. Bush administrations in The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Cornell Univ. Press, 2011; link).          

Aspects of modernization theory had antecedents in classical social theory, notably Weber and Marx, even if the debt to the latter, at least, was not one that U.S. modernization theorists of the 1950s and '60s were generally eager to acknowledge.  As it took shape in the Cold War-era academy, modernization theory assumed, as Latham notes, that all societies passed through essentially the same gate from tradition to modernity and further assumed that the correct policies, properly implemented, could speed up the passage.  The premise was that the U.S. could simultaneously contain Communism and spark a transformation of the 'developing' world, rapidly improving living standards and propelling it into the twentieth century by means that would avoid the brutal coercion that marked, for instance, Mao's efforts to transform China. 

Modernization theorists saw the supposedly universal transition from tradition to modernity as stressful and, thus, unsettling to individual psyches.  The MIT political scientist Lucian Pye's 1956 book Guerrilla Communism in Malaya argued that Communism's appeal was not primarily ideological but psychological; Pye contended that Communism appealed in particular to young men from the countryside trying to escape from the anxiety and "personal uncertainty generated by the jarring social transition from tradition to modernity" (Latham, p.48).  The emphasis on psychology reflected the influence of Harold Lasswell, who had taught both Pye and Gabriel Almond (47).      

If the problem was the psychological strain of the transition to modernity, then the prescription, especially for poor societies in which revolutionaries mounted armed challenges to the government, was "a pattern of nation building that would replace the institutions of the insurgency with those of the state and give the peasant caught in the 'transition'...a renewed sense of the potential for personal advance" (138).  As applied in Vietnam in the early '60s, part of this prescription involved trying to expand the central government's reach into the countryside.  Somewhat like the king's agents in the medieval France of Philip Augustus, Ngo Dinh Diem's provincial and district chiefs would travel around their domains and supposedly "bridge the gap between the central government and the rural masses" (134). 

Another aspect of attempted nation-building in South Vietnam involved relocation of the rural population.  This was the strategic hamlet program, designed to move about 15 million people into fortified villages where the NLF (Viet Cong) would be unable, so the thinking went, to get at them.  As Robert Packenham writes, the program "reflected a curious mix of forced-labor and liberal-constitutionalist tactics," although "[t]he first element...seems to have been implemented more consistently than the second" (Liberal America and the Third World, pb. ed. 1976, p.83).

In America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill & Wang, 2008; link), David Milne describes the strategic hamlet program as follows (p.105):

The director of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, Roger Hilsman, presented the program's blueprint -- "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam" -- to [President] Kennedy on February 2, 1962.... Hilsman correctly identified that South Vietnam's villages provided sustenance, recruits, and a safe haven for the NLF. To prevent the insurgents from requisitioning these vital commodities -- often through coercion -- he...proposed that a series of fortified hamlets be established with bamboo-spiked ditches dug around the exterior and barbed wire attached to the hamlet itself. South Vietnam's villagers would then be removed from their traditional homes and relocated to these fortified oases of non-communist security.

The program was not a success; by "the spring of 1963, only 1,500 of the 8,500 strategic hamlets remained viable" (107).  Milne observes that the "implementation of the strategic hamlet program was like watching an infant attempt to hammer a square plastic block through a triangle-shaped hole" (109).  The U.S. escalation decisions of 1965 changed the character of the Vietnam war, and by "January 1968 the intensified war in the countryside created approximately four million refugees" (Latham, 142).  By 1970 rural 'pacification' programs had been dropped entirely.  

As Latham observes, modernization theory and nation-building waned in the late '60s and '70s but made a comeback, albeit in altered form, in the late '80s and even more after the end of the Cold War. After the U.S. invaded Panama in Dec. 1989 and removed Noriega, whom it had previously supported, the first Bush administration embarked on nation-building via "Operation Blind Logic, the appropriately named plan for the reconstruction of Panama," which "was extremely ambitious and deeply flawed" (195). The Clinton administration's plans for Somalia were equally ambitious, with UN Ambassador (as she then was) Madeleine Albright stating that "we will embark on an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country as a proud, functioning, and viable member of the community of nations" (quoted, 197).  After the Somalia mission led to 'Black Hawk Down,' the Clinton administration retreated from this sort of rhetoric.  (Also, as Martha Finnemore notes [in The Purpose of Intervention, p.83], the Somalia intervention was partly prompted by defensiveness over charges by then-UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali "that powerful states were attending to disasters in white, European Bosnia at the expense of non-white, African Somalia....")

George W. Bush opposed nation-building as a presidential candidate in 2000, but that changed with 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.  Bush declared in a Nov. 2003 speech that "[t]he establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution" (quoted in Latham, 204).  Of course the Pentagon basically ignored planning for the reconstruction of Iraq and cut the State Dept. and other agencies, which had conducted such planning, out of the loop. (Where nation-building or postwar reconstruction has proved more successful, it is likely to have been the result of UN or other multilateral peacekeeping missions with broad mandates.  Latham says that such peacekeeping missions have "rarely met expectations" [199], but I think that statement's too sweeping; some haven't but some have.)

What about the present?  Latham sees "the ghosts of  modernization" hovering around the activities of the U.S. and its allies in both Iraq (at least up until U.S. forces withdrew) and Afghanistan.  Clearly the U.S. and NATO/ISAF have defined their Afghanistan mission not just in military but also in socio-political ('development') terms.  The context (corruption, the effect of decades of war, etc.) ensured that Afghan development was going to be extremely hard and, as Latham observes, the effort has not been funded at the levels of post-war reconstruction in e.g. the ex-Yugoslavia or E. Timor (if one takes population sizes into account).  Moreover, too much emphasis was put on 'the market' as opposed to building a strong central government, in line with prevailing neoliberal doctrine.  While there have been some successes (e.g., in opening up more opportunities for women), the overall picture seems not very encouraging (e.g., a recent WaPo headline mentioned roads built in Afghanistan with U.S. funds that are now crumbling for lack of maintenance).  Today the U.S. and its allies probably would settle for an Afghanistan in which the level of violence is kept under control; the Taliban, if brought into the government, is kept to a subordinate role; and the government is able to control key cities and transport routes.  Whether even this outcome will be achieved is an open question.

On the broader issue of approaches to development, Latham is right to emphasize the wisdom contained in some of the late-1970s emphasis on 'basic needs' and distributional issues, which challenged the then "dominant narrative" (215) that the rising tide of growth would lift all boats.  Even in China, where millions in recent years have left rural poverty for  factory employment, a more egalitarian growth path would have reduced poverty more.  The 1970s critics of modernization were also right to raise questions about the environmental implications of growth, even if some of the specific predictive claims might have missed the mark.  It's hard to disagree with Latham's view that development should focus on "locally centered" (216) efforts directed at "the problems of poverty, inequality, and environment, and combining them with a renewed focus on an expanded conception of human rights and social justice" (215), tempered by the acknowledgment that it will not be easy.

Added later: Jennifer Clapp (Univ. of Waterloo) reviewed Latham's book, along with Nick Cullather's The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (2010), in Perspectives on Politics 11:2 (June 2013).

Added 8/24/17: For a roundtable on Latham's book co-sponsored by H-Diplo and the Int'l Security Studies Forum, see here. 

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.

Secession and 'norm-skepticism'

Prof. Steve Saideman's post on how countries react to secessionist movements elsewhere cites some scholarship, including his own work and Jonathan Paquin's 2010 book on U.S. policy toward secessionist movements, but the post doesn't offer much in the way of a substantiated argument on a couple of points, or so it seems to me. Saideman asserts that a key factor is ethnic ties (as argued in his book The Ties That Divide), and he also says that when ethnic ties are absent, strategic interests will matter. But he pooh-poohs precedent and norms, declaring himself to be a "precedent-skeptic" and a "norm-skeptic."

Maybe the reason for this skepticism is made clear in his book and articles, but it doesn't really appear in the post. It seems reasonable to me to suggest that the territorial-integrity norm (which I believe is a real thing, continuing disagreement from some readers notwithstanding) would imply a baseline of opposition to most secessionist movements most of the time. And I would guess that if one surveyed all the secessionist/separatist movements active in the world today, one would find relatively few of them enjoying much support from states/governments. Certainly I'm not denying that ethnic ties matter in this context (not having read The Ties That Divide, it would be extremely rash of me to do that), but it does seem to me that a flat statement that one is a "norm-skeptic," with the subtext "if you want to find out why, you'll have to read my book," is not all that helpful. But maybe the evidence Saideman has in mind does not lend itself to summary in a sentence or two, in which case the flat statement is somewhat more defensible, I suppose.

ETA: This forthcoming book also takes an approach to secession that appears, according to the publisher's summary, to be 'norm-skeptical.' 

Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting. 

Quote of the day

The Victorian Protestant British scorned Hinduism’s polytheism, erotic sculptures, spirited mockery of its own gods and earthy mythology as filthy paganism. They also preferred the texts created and perpetuated by a small, upper-caste male elite, and regarded as beneath contempt the vast oral and vernacular literatures enriched and animated by the voices of women and lower castes. It is this latter, “alternative” Hinduism that my book celebrates throughout Indian history.

-- Wendy Doniger, in the NYT [link]

What caused the decline in interstate war?

In a recent post, Eric Posner (prof. at Univ. of Chicago Law School) writes that he sees little evidence that the UN Charter, which dates from 1945, has caused the decline in interstate war. Although I don't share what I take to be Posner's general view of international law, this particular point seems right, inasmuch as Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter is best seen as having codified an already-developed consensus rather than having instituted a 'new' rule. And it wasn't really new anyway: "The League of Nations Covenant specified that the highest purpose of the organization was to protect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of its members. The Stimson Doctrine (1931) declared that the United States would not recognize as legal any territorial changes brought about through the use of armed force. The League of Nations subsequently adopted this position as a new rule of international relations." (K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns, 2004, p.134)

As I've mentioned before, I lean to John Mueller's argument that the seeds of the decline in interstate war, or at least in major-power war, were sown in 1914-1918. I'm not saying this is the whole story re the decline, but I think it's part of it. 

Here's a passage from Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (1989), pp.55-56:

That World War I was a watershed event in attitudes toward war in the developed world is clear. Exactly why is less clear.... The impact on war attitudes of the Great War's physical devastation and of its horrifying weaponry should not be discounted.... But the bone-deep revulsion it so widely inspired and and the very substantial blow it administered to the war spirit so prevalent just a few years earlier should be credited at least in part to the insidious [I might have chosen a different word] propagandistic efforts of the prewar peace movement. The war proved to be a colossal confirmation of its gadfly arguments about the repulsiveness, immorality, and futility of war and of its uncivilized nature. Of course, the war also shattered the peace movement's airy optimism, and it certainly undercut its proposition that Europe was becoming progressively more civilized; but that was nothing compared to what it did to the notion that war was progressive -- as well as glorious, manly, and beneficial.... Since the peacemakers of 1918 were substantially convinced that the institution of war must be controlled or eradicated, they tried to apply some of the devices and approaches the peace movement had long been advocating.

He continues:

For reasons that seem in reflection to have been special, it didn't work out so well. In Germany a leader arose who almost single-handedly brought major war to Europe, while Japan, a country that had not substantially participated in World War I nor learned its lessons, set itself on a collision course in Asia that was to lead to national cataclysm.

If one accepts this narrative and explanation, the UN Charter formalized a change in attitudes that had been well underway for more than two decades, which could partly explain why the trend line of decline in interstate war does not track neatly with the UN Charter's adoption.

ETA: If Mueller is right, an underlying normative evolution is mainly responsible for the decline of major war in the 'developed' world, rather than the use-of-force rules themselves. Whether the argument can be extended to cover the decline of interstate war in general is something one could debate.

Note: Edited after posting to fix a grammatically challenged sentence. 

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.

Insular v. continental states, and their 'near abroads'

...one can distinguish between insular and continental states. An insular state is the only great power on a large body of land that is surrounded on all sides by water.... The United Kingdom and Japan are obvious examples of insular states, since each occupies a large island by itself. The United States is also an insular power, because it is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere. A continental state, on the other hand, is a great power located on a large body of land that is also occupied by one or more other great powers. France, Germany, and Russia are obvious examples of continental states.

-- J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.126

Recalling (for some reason) the above -- and putting aside for the time being the point that BraziI might not agree that the U.S. is the only great power in the Western Hemisphere -- I made this comment at Crooked Timber (slightly edited here):

It’s bad luck in a way for Russia, I suppose, that it’s a continental state, so when it acts improperly/illegally/thuggishly (pick your word) in its neighborhood the repercussions are felt by many countries and to some extent across Europe. Whereas, e.g., when the U.S. went into Panama in ’89 and toppled Noriega, the repercussions were not felt as widely, partly because of the U.S.’s insular location (and Panama's location). It may not be ‘fair,’ but geography matters — not to the (moral/legal) equities but in practical terms.

ETA: Before someone mentions e.g. Japan and the '30s, I should say I probably should have given this post a narrower title: "Russia and the U.S., and their 'near abroads'."

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.

Inferiority complexes and indigenous inventions

Hobsbawm writes (The Age of Extremes, p.462):

Chinese communism [he uses a small "c"; I'd use a capital C] cannot be regarded simply as a subvariety of Soviet communism.... For one thing, it triumphed in a country with a far larger population than the U.S.S.R.... Moreover, China was not only nationally far more homogeneous than most other countries -- about 94 percent of its population were Han Chinese -- but had formed a single, though intermittently disrupted, political unit probably for a minimum of two thousand years. Even more to the point, for most of these two millennia the Chinese Empire, and probably most of its inhabitants who had a view on these matters, had considered China to be the centre and model of world civilization. With minor exceptions all other countries in which communist regimes triumphed, from the U.S.S.R. on, were and saw themselves as culturally backward and marginal, relative to some more advanced and paradigmatic centre of civilization. The very stridency with which the U.S.S.R. insisted, in the Stalin years, on its lack of intellectual and technological dependence on the West, and on the indigenous source of all the leading inventions from telephones to aircraft, was a telling symptom of this sense of inferiority.

Well, I can think offhand of one Soviet-era invention that really was indigenous and that ended up being exported to much of the world: the AK-47.

The debate about boundaries

John Quiggin recently touched off a long discussion at Crooked Timber with the assertion, contained in a re-cycled post on "the traditionality of modernity," that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time, not less."

I won't repeat my comments in that discussion here, but want to follow up with a couple of reflections (one or two of which will be set out here, others perhaps in a subsequent post).

In questioning the assertion that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time," several CT commenters argued that not enough time has passed since the end of decolonization, or even since the end of WW2, to draw inferences about a trend.

For example, Peter T writes in a comment at the end of the thread:

John Quiggin would, I imagine, be fairly hard on those who repeat the “19 years of flat temperatures proves global warming is a myth” idiocy. But there’s a similar issue here. We should not expect national boundaries or state break-up/formation to proceed at a steady pace. They are affairs of decades at the least. Definite national boundaries, as opposed to zones of influence (sometimes broad, sometimes quite sharply defined), are a fairly recent thing over much of the earth anyway. The last wave – the decolonisation movement – only subsided around 40 years ago. There have been a number of minor shifts since then, plus the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. So it hasn’t really been all that stable, and it may be simply too early to go looking for explanations. If we get through another 30 or so years without major changes in state boundaries, then I’ll be impressed (if I live that long).

There are several issues here. One is that a strong argument can be made that decolonization itself, as it played out, contributed to boundary stability rather than the reverse (I dealt with that at CT, so won't elaborate here). Another is that Peter T (like others who made a similar point) assumes that the statement "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" contains an implicit prediction that stability noticed at time T will persist until some future time T + X, or will persist indefinitely. Although the context of JQ's post might have encouraged this interpretation, the statement that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" need not be read as anything other than a descriptive statement of what has been happening in recent years: the words "are becoming" do not necessarily mean "will continue to become" or "will continue to become, indefinitely." If someone looks in the mirror and says "my hair is becoming grayer," that does not necessarily mean "my hair will continue to become grayer." All it means is that the person has noticed that his or her hair is grayer now than it was two weeks ago, or two years ago. There is no guarantee that the process of graying will continue: the color of the hair could simply remain as it is, or it is even possible (if not perhaps likely) that the process of graying could reverse itself (without the application of hair dye or anything like that). 

The point, and sorry for the repetition, is that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" does not necessarily have to mean "national boundaries will continue to become ever more stable" or that "stability will persist indefinitely." It can simply mean that in a given span of time -- the last half-century, say -- national boundaries have become more stable. The notion that this, even if empirically accurate, is a meaningless observation because it probably just represents another phase in an endless up-and-down cycle, and the related notion that 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years is too short a time span from which to infer anything of consequence, both suffer from the same weakness.

The weakness is that these dismissals ignore the normative context of international politics, the normative environment in which, in this case, fluctuations in boundaries do or don't occur. Actors have ideas and these ideas influence how they behave, at least to some extent. One idea that the corporate actors known as states now firmly have in their heads is that national (i.e., state) boundaries should be messed with as little as possible and as seldom as possible. We know this because they say it in authoritative contexts. Of course actions do not always match words. The question is how often actions diverge from words. Krasner in his book on sovereignty argued that states' actions diverge from their words quite often; he called this, borrowing from other writers, 'organized hypocrisy,' i.e., a situation "in which institutional norms are enduring but frequently ignored." Is the current norm about boundaries -- i.e., 'don't mess with them' in my colloquial rendering -- "frequently ignored"? Are we dealing here with organized hypocrisy? It depends partly on what one means by "frequently," but my sense is -- and some research, to which I referred at CT, backs up this intuition -- that the boundary norm (or 'the territorial integrity norm' as it has been called) is observed much or most of the time. Not all the time, but enough of the time so that one can say that the match between words and deeds in this particular context is reasonably (not perfectly, but reasonably) good. The norm could change, and/or the degree of conformity to it could change, but to write comments on this subject as if the norm did not exist is peculiar, to say the least. 

Commenters who made points like the one quoted above don't even ask the question about the match between words and deeds because they implicitly assume that words don't matter. It's as if the stability/instability of boundaries, for them, is a question in Newtonian physics, completely divorced from what humans in their collective capacity think or say. But that's not how politics, or almost any other aspect of human life for that matter, works.

Note (added 3/3): Peter T has replied in the comment thread attached to this post; those interested may read the ensuing conversation there. 

ETA: Another example of the same sort of thing, this time from a CT commenter who annoys me a lot more than Peter T ever has, namely bob mcmanus. Here's mcmanus (from another CT thread):

Just finished Daniel Alpert’s Age of Oversupply. It’s a readable middle-brow summation ... with affinities to DeLong and Krugman, with the usual laundry list of Keynesian technocratic prescriptions that are politically implausible.  I think the resource or supply constraints are still a long ways off. What we have is a typical glut, overcapacity, overproduction, oversupply crisis, a typical Marxist (too much capital) crisis of astronomical proportions. Combined with an equally terrifying failure of distribution and global and local imbalances of power and resources. Combined with perhaps social technological advances (US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats) that prevent the old mechanisms of creative destruction and rebalancing, war/revolution and/or depression/capitals destruction => reterritorialization and reconstruction.

I've added the italics, because that's the part I want to focus on. What is preventing a global war, which mcmanus seems to think might in some way be beneficial, at least to the powers that be? Why, it's "social technological" factors: "US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats." God forbid it should ever enter his mind that what statespeople say and believe actually makes a difference in how they conduct themselves. Or that the experiences of their predecessors might influence them. No, that's all superstructural rubbish.

A 'living document'

Two pieces on Syria in yesterday's hard-copy WaPo (p.A10). One, under Karen DeYoung's byline, reports an agreement among "the U.S. and its principal European and Arab allies" on a list of Syrian rebel groups, classified according to whether they should receive arms: yes, no (because of "clear extremist ties"), or maybe. An "Arab official" is quoted as calling the list a "living document," subject to revision as rebel alliances shift. It had better be, though still sounds as if it might be hard to implement.

The second piece, by Loveday Morris, is about the Assad regime's arranging of cease-fires with rebel groups in suburbs of Damascus that it has subjected to starvation and bombardment. The article quotes a range of opinion about these agreements and also notes there is a question about how long they will last.

Kristof's column is worse than I thought it would be

I liked Corey Robin's riposte to Kristof and Charli Carpenter's open letter to him, but until just now I hadn't read the full column itself. It's worse than I thought it would be. Nothing more to say on it right now but perhaps I will weigh in at more length later on. (Then again, maybe not.)

One thing, though: Kristof should spend more time actually reading what academics write. Sure, some of it is turgid and ill-written, but some of it is quite well written, and that even goes for political scientists, Kristof's particular target in this column. I don't want to start listing examples but they aren't that hard to come by.

Mon. linkage

First-hand report from the Central African Republic.

The abstract and the passive voice

Here (via) is an interesting abstract from an article in the American Economic Review of last April:

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not a comparative advantage. Our analysis is able to rule out decreased trade costs, changing political ideology, and an increase in US loans and grants as alternative explanations. We provide evidence that the increased imports arose through direct purchases of American products by foreign governments.

An abstract can't do everything, but this one seems especially designed to frustrate a reader (or tempt him/her to read the article). First, what exactly is "increased political influence" via a "CIA intervention"? Presumably something like the overthrow of Mossadegh, Arbenz or Allende, but the wording also suggests something short of that. Second, although the abstract strongly suggests that the outcome (increased purchases from U.S. companies) was intended, its use of the passive voice drains the scenario of agency (yes, an overworked word): "increased political influence...was used to create a larger...market...."  Why not say: "We provide evidence that during the Cold War, the U.S. used CIA covert actions to benefit American companies by creating political conditions that led to more purchases of American products by foreign governments"? Maybe that doesn't say exactly the same thing and it's a bit long-winded, but it does indicate that someone was actively doing something, as opposed to "increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions...was used...."

WSJ: Saudi Arabia to increase its arming of Syrian opposition

A low-tech (and somewhat inefficient) way to keep up with the news: drive five minutes to the local convenience store and take a look, while there, at the front page of the hard-copy Wall St. Journal (without, needless to say, buying it. One has already bought something else, so that's cool).

Anyway, the center-page story reports that Saudi Arabia has promised to give the Syrian opposition -- I didn't see particular groups specified -- more sophisticated weaponry, including Chinese-made "man-portable air defense systems" (which apparently means, in plainer language, shoulder-fired missiles that can bring down planes).

The art (?) of forgetting

Something I read recently put me in mind of a line from Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art."  Though I didn't remember the poem's title (and wasn't entirely sure about the author either), I did remember the key line -- except for one crucial word. What I remembered was "the art of ... isn't hard to master."  I had to look up the poem for the missing word. The line is, of course, "the art of losing isn't hard to master."