From economic growth to a 'steady state' economy

I don't write a lot here about environmental and resource issues, mostly because I feel I lack the required expertise to say something valuable. But I recently looked at this piece by an Australian philosopher named Rowan (E. Loomis linked to this which in turn linked to it), and it raises some questions that need to be discussed more widely. As Rowan points out, even the most resource-efficient, 'clean' versions of economic growth are not sustainable propositions in the long term: eventually the world will run out of physical space (for the "stuff" that people are using plus the non-bio-degradable "stuff" they have thrown out), and well before that happens raw materials will have been depleted. The way to avoid this is to transition over time to a non-growth, steady-state global economy, while ensuring, or so one would hope, that it is also marked by considerably less poverty and more material equality than the present system. Sounds like a tall order, but the alternatives if it doesn't occur will be very unpleasant. Such a transition might (probably will, I suspect) require the wealthy and the upper-middle-classes in the 'developed' world to give up some of the "stuff" that they currently view as either necessary or desirable props of their existence. 

The alternative to thinking about these issues and doing something about them will be an eventual (note "eventual" not "imminent") collapse of civilization. If it does happen, it will occur, I would guess, several hundred years after I am no longer around. But that isn't too much consolation. Humans, probably uniquely among animals, have the capacity to think about the long-term future, and that really is something more of us should do more often.

Robert Kagan's realist irrealism

From Kagan's piece (h/t S. Lemieux) in New Republic (which I've bookmarked for actual reading, as opposed to skimming, later):

In fact, the world “as it is” is a dangerous and often brutal place. There has been no transformation in human behavior or in international relations. In the twenty-first century, no less than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, force remains the ultima ratio. The question, today as in the past, is not whether nations are willing to resort to force but whether they believe they can get away with it when they do. If there has been less aggression, less ethnic cleansing, less territorial conquest over the past 70 years, it is because the United States and its allies have both punished and deterred aggression, have intervened, sometimes, to prevent ethnic cleansing, and have gone to war to reverse territorial conquest. The restraint showed by other nations has not been a sign of human progress, the strengthening of international institutions, or the triumph of the rule of law. It has been a response to a global configuration of power that, until recently, has made restraint seem the safer course.

The first sentence is obviously correct: the world is indeed an often brutal place. The second sentence, particularly the second part of it, is  more questionable. And the portion in which the "U.S. and its allies" are credited with the decline of territorial conquest is very, very incomplete (to put it charitably), and w/r/t the GW Bush admin, downright weird. Territorial conquest (of the 19th/20th-cent-and-before sort) has declined because most states (I said "most" not "all") are no longer interested in conquering territory. It's not something their leaders think about and plan for. They know (they have learned) that invading other countries does not, as a rule, tend to solve their problems. That's a main reason why territorial conquest has declined since WW2, imho, though there are also other reasons, which I've written about here before.     

Obama's foreign policy week

A speech at West Point is to be followed by one in Poland: see here. Meanwhile, WaPo ran a one-year retrospective on the National Defense Univ. speech; I haven't read the piece yet but will be posting something on it in the beginning of June. [ETA: Well, maybe. June is shaping up to be rather busy.]

Two little words

Via this apparently conservative-of-some-sort site:

Columbia University has received nearly $6 million in taxpayer funds that are being used, in part, to create climate change games that include fake voicemails that portray a dire future, including warnings that "neo-luddites" will be murdering global warming advocates by 2035 (emphasis added).

Without reading further, I suspect the two words I've italicized are doing a lot of work here. Why "neo-luddites" would have it in for "global warming advocates" is a question I don't even want to waste time thinking about.

Mem. Day weekend French lesson

I didn't have the patience this evening to read this post on Nigeria, but skipping to its end I saw a note that fighting in Mali has resumed, with a link to an interview (in French) with an historian and W. Africa specialist. Continuing in skim mode, I glanced at the opening bits of the interview, then followed a link to another interview on the military coup in Thailand. The intro to that reads as follows (boldface added):

Entretien avec David Camroux, spécialiste de l’Asie du Sud-Est et maître de conférences à Sciences Po Paris.
Deux jours après l’imposition de la loi martiale par l’armée thaïlandaise, et après plus de six mois d’instabilité politique, le chef de l’armée, le général Prayut Chan-O-Cha, a annoncé jeudi 22 mai à la télévision un coup d’État. David Camroux, spécialiste de l’Asie du Sud-Est, revient sur les tenants et aboutissants de cet événement qui n’est pas si exceptionnel en Thaïlande.

Les tenants et aboutissants -- I had not much idea what that meant. My paperback French dictionary wasn't helpful, but my somewhat bigger hardcover dictionary was. Les tenants et aboutissants de l'affaire = the ins and outs of the case. (Harrap's Concise, rev. ed. 1989, q.v. tenant)

ETA: I see now that I could have just clicked for the English version, but sometimes it's more fun to look things up. (The site is French, and the English trans. appears, from the opening, to be a bit shaky, but "ins and outs" is there.)

Abstract of the day: biased IMF lending policies, 1980-2000

Sometimes an article's value lies in providing evidence for something one might have assumed but couldn't be sure about in the absence of evidence. As in this:

International organizations (IOs) suffuse world politics, but the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stands out as an unusually important IO. My research suggests that IMF lending is systematically biased. Preferential treatment is largely driven by the degree of similarity between beliefs held by IMF officials and key economic policy-makers in the borrowing country. This article describes the IMF's ideational culture as “neoliberal,” and assumes it to be stable during the observation window (1980–2000). The beliefs of top economic policy-makers in borrowing countries, however, vary in terms of their distance from IMF officials' beliefs. When fellow neoliberals control the top economic policy posts the distance between the means of the policy team's beliefs and the IMF narrows; consequently, IMF loans become less onerous, more generous, and less rigorously enforced. I gathered data on the number of conditions and the relative size of loans for 486 programs in the years between 1980 and 2000. I collected data on waivers, which allow countries that have missed binding conditions to continue to access funds, as an indicator for enforcement. I rely on indirect indicators, gleaned from a new data set that contains biographical details of more than 2,000 policy-makers in ninety developing countries, to construct a measure of the proportion of the top policy officials that are fellow neoliberals. The evidence from a battery of statistical tests reveals that as the proportion of neoliberals in the borrowing government increases, IMF deals get comparatively sweeter.

--abstract from Stephen C. Nelson, "Playing Favorites: How Shared Beliefs Shape the IMF's Lending Decisions," Intl. Org. 68:2 (May 2014)

Was it a BJP landslide?

Yes and no. Yes in terms of total seats won (282 of 545; more than that if you count the BJP's alliance partners); no in terms of total vote percentage, which was 31% (at least that's the figure I heard on the NewsHour). The disjunction is explained by the single-member-district system and the fact that relatively few of the BJP's votes were wasted -- i.e., in districts where it lost, it often lost by large margins whereas in districts where it won, it often won by smallish margins. Or so one gathers from an analysis at the Monkey Cage, quoted at the end of this post by P.A. Foster, who includes links to the coverage in various places.

ETA: The map reproduced at the linked post shows the Congress Party, trounced on the whole, did very well in a few places, including the extreme east, which showing may have been a result of fairly harsh recent govt crackdowns -- if I'm not mistaken -- on the long-running armed insurgencies there. Btw, Harvard history professor Sugata Bose ran for a seat as a Congress candidate in W. Bengal; I don't know whether he won and am not taking the time to look it up right now. 

Photos from Central African Republic

By a young French photojournalist recently killed there. See here.
P.s. They may not all have been taken in CAR, but I think most of them were.

Is Partition to blame for all the subcontinent's woes?

Isaac Chotiner's review of John Keay's Midnight's Descendants puts, it seems to me, too much blame on Partition for everything that is today less-than-optimal in the subcontinent.  P. O'Neill corrects a specific sentence in Chotiner's review, here.

Imperial visions

In "The Sociology of Imperialisms" (1919), Joseph Schumpeter defined imperialism as a drive for expansion for its own sake:

...whenever the word imperialism is used, there is always the implication...of an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued; of an aggressiveness that is only kindled anew by each success; of an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as "hegemony," "world dominion," and so forth. And history, in truth, shows us nations and classes -- most nations furnish an example at some time or other -- that seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. (Schumpeter, Imperialism/Social Classes [pb. ed. 1974], p.5)   

He continued:

Expansion for its own sake always requires, among other things, concrete objects if it is to reach the action stage and maintain itself, but this does not constitute its meaning. Such expansion is in a sense its own "object," and the truth is that it has no adequate object beyond itself. Let us therefore, in the absence of a better term, call it "objectless".... This, then, is our definition: imperialism is the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion. (Ibid., p.6)  

Schumpeter went on to note, among other things, that an "inner necessity to engage in a policy of conquest" could be translated into action only when a "war machine stood ready at hand" (p.61). Schumpeter, as Michael Doyle notes in Ways of War and Peace (1997), exonerates capitalism of any responsibility for imperialism more or less by definitional fiat, and then proceeds to argue that "democratic capitalism leads to peace" (Doyle, p.245).   

***

The idea of a Schumpeterian 'objectless' expansion may seem odd, but in The Reactionary Mind (ch.8, "Remembrance of Empires Past") Corey Robin portrays American neoconservatives as, in effect, proponents of such a thing (though he doesn't put it quite that way).  

Robin describes the distaste, even disgust, with which the neocons viewed the Clinton years. These writers (the Kagans, Kristols, and Robert Kaplan, for instance) saw Clinton's foreign policy, with its emphasis on free trade agreements and globalized markets, as "proof of the oozing decadence taking over the United States" (p.172) after the Soviet Union's dissolution.

Robin summarizes the neocons' perspective as follows (p.174; emphasis in original):

What these conservatives longed for was an America that was genuinely imperial -- not just because they believed it would make the United States safer or richer, and not just because they thought it would make the world better, but because they literally wanted to see the United States make the world.

The neoconservatives were indeed repelled by what they viewed as Clinton's lack of virtú (cf. p.173) and 'vision' (not that George H.W. Bush or Reagan had an especially coherent vision either, but that's another story).  However, the casual reader (and probably even the non-casual one) could come away from this essay (and one or two others in The Reactionary Mind) with the impression that only conservatives have been strongly attracted to an imperial and/or militarily assertive role for the U.S.  Robin is aware, of course, that this is not accurate, but his argument that conservatives' attraction to war and imperialism is qualitatively different from that of non-conservatives can result in glossing over the fact that support for an imperial or expansionist or, at minimum, 'pro-active' U.S. foreign policy has not been the sole preserve of the Right. 

Most obviously, Cold War liberals supported and/or designed many of the interventions of the 1950s and 1960s, including but not limited to the Vietnam War; and the aura of macho toughness cultivated by some members of JFK's inner circle is well known. 

To go back further, one finds, for instance, at the turn of the twentieth century that support for an expansionary U.S. foreign policy crossed the ideological and partisan lines of domestic politics. (There was also, of course, an anti-imperialist movement at the time, though it wielded, on the whole, less influence.)

As Walter McDougall observes:

Historians stress the dynamic crosscurrents in turn-of-the-[twentieth]-century American society. Foster Rhea Dulles thought the era "marked by many contradictions." Richard Hofstadter identified "two different moods," one tending toward protest and reform, the other toward national expansion.... But the contradictions are only a product of our wish to cleanse the Progressive movement of its taint of imperialism abroad. For at bottom, the belief that American power, guided by a secular and religious spirit of service, could remake foreign societies came as easily to Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking, and drugs. Leading imperialists like [Theodore] Roosevelt, [Albert] Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives; leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert LaFollette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions. Even academic historians of the time applauded the war and colonies (except, in some cases, the Philippines), and elected A.T. Mahan [author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History] president of the American Historical Association. (McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (1997), p.120)

Mahan was far from the only intellectual supporter of expansionism, but his book on the influence of sea power, published in 1890 (it was followed by a sequel), had a wide impact. Fareed Zakaria notes:

In the first chapter, which was the most widely read part of the book, Mahan clearly stated his central thesis: as a great productive nation, the United States needed to turn its attention to the acquisition of a large merchant marine, a great navy, and, finally, colonies and spheres of international influence and control. Not only was this necessary, Mahan asserted, it was inevitable, an inexorable step in the march of history. Mahan had expounded on these themes in his lectures at the Naval War College in the late 1880s, and he continued to propagate them through articles, books, and speeches throughout the 1890s. (Zakaria, From Wealth to Power (1998), p.134)

It was not only in the U.S. that Mahan was influential. His book became, in Michael Howard's words, "the Bible of European navies at the turn of the century," from which they took his teaching that the "task of naval power [in war] was to gain 'Command of the Sea,' which made it possible to use the oceans as a highway for one's own trade and a barrier to that of the enemy; and that command was the perquisite of the strongest capital fleet." (Howard, War in European History (1976), p.125)  [For more on Mahan, see, e.g., Philip A. Crowl, "Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian," in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. P. Paret (1986); J.T. Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command (1997).]
 
***
 
Is there, as some of the preceding might suggest, a close connection between attachment to a big navy and support for a far-flung, 'forward-deployed', quasi-imperial global role? This is perhaps a less obvious question than one might think. A big navy, for an 'insular' power like the U.S., is probably a prerequisite (necessary but not sufficient) for the maintenance of a global network of military bases such as the U.S. now has. But one might favor a big navy and advocate limiting its use to helping keep sea lanes open and assuring 'command of the commons,' while opposing the network of hundreds of bases (as well as the present and/or future military operations they might facilitate). Another position, of course, would simply be not to support a big navy, or at least not one of the current size. But this opens up a bigger subject, a question for another occasion.

North Korea's official racism

Here.

Book note

The opening paragraph of this NYT ArtsBeat blog post mentions Adam Tooze's The Deluge, to be published in November. 

Quote of the day

From Richard Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915 (1974; Paladin Bks. ed., 1976), ch.4, "Liberal Initiatives: Gladstone's Ministry 1868-74":

In many ways the various reforms of the British military system during Gladstone's first ministry exemplify as well as anything the interconnectedness for Liberals of principles of morality, efficiency and economy.... The basic aim of the Liberal military policy was to shift Britain from what may be termed a 'Wellingtonian' posture to a posture characterizable as being on unmistakably Liberal principles.... Of the influences at work the most important were the 'objective' considerations: on the immediate level, a chronic shortfall of recruitment, aggravated by the depopulating effects of the famine in Ireland, traditionally a rich source of enlistment in the British service; and, on a larger view, recognition that the fundamental lesson of the Crimean War was not so much its misconduct as that it registered the end of Wellingtonian or Peninsular assumptions that Britain could be a military power on a par with the continental Great Powers.... The Liberal aim, in essence, was to leave the Indian situation more or less where it was as far as strength was concerned (there was no real alternative) but to bring home the bulk of the rest of the army, reduce it in numbers and expense and make it an efficient expeditionary army which could be dispatched where it was needed instead of being a dispersed aggregation of strategic garrisons.... Thus from being a colonial garrison army with a European interventionist frame of intention, it would become a home army with a colonial or expeditionary frame of intention. (pp.82-84)

Bad day in Afghanistan

The killing by an Afghan policeman of three Americans at a hospital in Afghanistan, including a pediatrician, Jerry Umanos, who had been there nine years, seems perhaps especially outrageous, though every death there in these sorts of circumstances is outrageous. But the deaths of Westerners who are in the country in the capacity of, say, doctor, journalist, or teacher -- I think for instance of the young American scholar Alexandros Petersen, killed last January in a restaurant bombing in Kabul; he had just gone to teach at the American Univ. in Kabul -- will, as they should, garner attention. It's hard to give equal attention to all the pointless deaths, but at this juncture they all seem pointless.

Housekeeping note

I've just turned off (at least I think I have) the word/number/captcha/whatever-you-call-it feature of the commenting function, so commenting should be marginally easier now. (If spam results, I may have to consider turning it back on.)  Posting will be light here for the remainder of April, but a couple of semi-meaty posts are in the works for sometime in May.

Quote of the day

I was skimming the other day a two-year-old article by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "How India Stumbled" (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2012), and these bits might be worth quoting in light of the current Indian election:

Most Indian political parties, the Congress included, have archaic decision-making structures that are controlled by small groups of elites.... There are no transparent processes by which decisions are made or party platforms are shaped, which means that there are no real checks on party leaders.... The silver lining for the Congress is that the BJP is struggling with succession and organizational issues of its own.... The next major face-off between the Congress party and the BJP will be the general elections of 2014.... The side that understands that India is fundamentally changing and that old modes of governance no longer work will have the best chance of winning.

Once more with the Asian pivot

A WaPo piece by David Nakamura -- quick reading because so much of it is what might be called 'mainstream-media foreign-policy boilerplate' -- concludes that the Obama admin's Asian pivot is falling short of expectations. The, by implication, obstructionist Dems are blocking the TransPacific Partnership 'free trade' pact (did it ever occur to the WaPo that maybe the TPP has problems?); the State Dept, according to a recent Senate report, is not focusing much of its resources on Asia; and as a result (gasp, what a surprise) the pivot has come to be seen in the region as militarily-focused, the piece informs us.

Also (how shocking), the Chinese believe the aim of the pivot is containment, the Obama administration's protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Of course the piece does mention, in quick passing, the placement of a rotating contingent of U.S. Marines in Australia that was announced shortly after the pivot was launched. What if China placed a rotating contingent of its soldiers in, say, Cuba or, less plausibly, Jamaica? Wouldn't the U.S. admin think China's aim was containment of the U.S.? The distinction between containment and hedging, mentioned in the article, seems not worth wasting all that much time on: China likely will view the redeployment of U.S. military assets to the region as containment, regardless of what the U.S.'s  preferred label is.

There is however at least one success story, or semi-success story, from the pivot, and that is Burma. Hillary Clinton made two trips there as Sec. of State, the second time accompanied by Pres. Obama, and Burma is on what seems to be a gradual path to political liberalization, with emphasis on "gradual." (Jeffrey Brown on the NewsHour had a report from Burma/Myanmar the other day, which I heard on the radio but haven't watched yet.)

Quote of the day

A post-disability world is closer than we think. When soccer’s World Cup begins in Brazil in June, a paralyzed teenager will rise from a wheelchair on the field to make the ceremonial first kick. The teen will be wired into an exoskeleton, with electrodes in his brain that will make the machine respond to his desires, and move the immovable.

Via.

C. Rice speech controversy

See here.

Book note

They don't make paperbacks like they did in the good old days (TM). I recently chanced upon (and bought for practically nothing) a beautifully manufactured paperback copy of Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), a book I'd seen cited many times but had never looked at. It remains to be seen how much I'll read of it.