Wilson and Mexico

In the previous post I mentioned Woodrow Wilson's 1914 intervention in Mexico. There is a somewhat different perspective on this episode in John Judis's 2004 book The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Judis writes that after sending troops to occupy Veracruz, which turned out to be a "disaster" which incited "riots and demonstrations all over the country" (pp.91-2), Wilson "learned his lesson" and switched to a non-interventionist stance. When his Secretary of War urged Wilson to send U.S. soldiers to Mexico City, he replied: "We shall have no right at any time to intervene in Mexico to determine the way in which the Mexicans are to settle their own affairs...." (p.92) Judis says that "in his policy toward Mexico, Wilson also broke with a century-old view of the Mexicans as Indians who were incapable of self-government." (p.93)

I know virtually nothing about this episode and perhaps other interpretations of it exist. Just passing this on FWIW.

P.s. H.W. Brands, in his Woodrow Wilson (The American Presidents Series, 2003), p.50, notes that "the lessons Wilson learned in Mexico didn't prevent him from sending troops to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1915 and 1916 respectively, when trouble in those countries threatened American interests and Caribbean stability" -- or, at any rate, what Wilson considered to be American interests and Caribbean stability.

Haiti, Pakistan, and education

Now here's a bit of a twist: reading a piece of online writing in a hard-copy newspaper. In the Wash. Post for April 1, which happens to be in front of me at the moment, there's an excerpt on the op-ed page from Lee Hockstader's entry for that day on Post Partisan, the paper's opinion blog. He writes about last month's UN conference on Haiti called to receive pledges of support and to discuss reconstruction. $5.3 billion was pledged for the initial two-year recovery program.

Hockstader notes among other things that Haitian president Préval's speech at the conference called for help for Haiti's educational system, "which even before the earthquake had produced an illiteracy rate of almost 40 percent for adults and a quarter of all children with no experience of school whatsoever." In January I had written a brief note about a W.Post article on Pakistan's public schools; the article referred to half of all adults in the country not being able to sign their name. Since it's too late to look up the exact figure, I'll interpret this as meaning that Pakistan's illiteracy rate is (roughly) 50 percent, higher than Haiti's. Pakistan is of course less poor than Haiti, so this is further evidence if any were needed that you can't infer facts about 'human development' just from GDP per person.

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...)

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.