Before civilization

"The philosophy of M. Rousseau of Geneva is almost the reverse of Hobbes's," wrote the authors of the Encyclopédie (as quoted by Michael Doyle in Ways of War and Peace, p.137). 

Although Doyle says that the Encyclopédie exaggerated, judging from Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, which I've been reading, the encyclopedists' view is unsurprising. Rousseau criticizes Hobbes by name in the Discourse, and in contrast to Hobbes's famous description of the state of nature as unremittingly violent, Rousseau supposes a state of nature in which humans are, by and large, peaceful: "...wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without shelter, without war, and without ties, with no need of his fellow men, nor any desire to harm them, perhaps without ever even recognizing anyone individually, savage man, self-sufficient and subject to few passions, had only the sentiments and knowledge appropriate to that state...."[1] 

The evidence that exists about 'primitive' humans suggests that the reality lay somewhere in between Hobbes's war-of-all-against-all and Rousseau's peaceful 'savage'. Referencing Lawrence Keeley's War before Civilization (1996), Joshua Goldstein writes in War and Gender (2001), p.26, that the evidence, while "very spotty," is "consistent with (but not proof of) the presence of warfare at least sporadically throughout all periods of prehistory.... A new and growing...body of tangible evidence -- ranging from discernible fortifications around settlements to remnants of weapons and the residue of injuries on bodies -- suggests the presence of war before agriculture."  
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1. Rousseau's Political Writings, ed. A. Ritter and J.C. Bondanella, trans. Bondanella (Norton Critical Edition, 1988), pp.31-32.
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Added later: "To a number of readers, it has seemed that Rousseau wrote the Second Discourse for no other purpose than to refute, point by point, the Leviathan's argument regarding the human condition in the state of nature (Melzer 1990; Plattner 1979)." -- D.N. Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995), p.174.

Book notes

I am constantly, it seems, running across books that I will probably never have time to do more than dip into, at most. Herewith a few titles that have recently crossed the radar screen:

Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (Yale U.P., 2013)

David Caute, Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (Yale U.P., 2013)

Catherine Lutz (ed.),The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts (NYU Press, 2009)

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The first two of these seem to be partly intellectual history, partly cultural/political history, partly biography. ("Isaac" and "Isaiah" are Isaac Deutscher and Isaiah Berlin.)  

Misc. notes

-- Kirkpatrick on Egypt: David Kirkpatrick (of the NYT) interviewed by Terri Gross.

-- Saw the movie Before Midnight last night. The poignant opening scene, whose background would take too long to describe but which has the Ethan Hawke character putting his 14-year-old son on a plane to return home, gets the film off to a strong start. It's not exactly downhill all the way from there, and Hawke and Julie Delpy do turn in good performances, but the screenplay lurches from the near-brilliant to the pedestrian and back again -- a problem in a film which is mostly conversation of one kind or another. Still, several cuts above most summer movies. Also recently saw M. von Trotta's very good Hannah Arendt.  

Maraniss on Obama on Martin

Here.

Eugene Robinson on Zimmerman/Martin

Here.

The justification for poverty reduction is...poverty reduction

The Monkey Cage links to this post on aid and conflict in Asia, which contains this passage:

...issues of inequality, discrimination and identity rather than poverty are often the drivers of sectarian violence and conflict. ...Yet it is often business as usual for aid donors, who continue to focus on traditional projects for poverty reduction and access to services. Many projects are justified on the basis of 'contributing to peace' but evidence suggests that, at best, development alone does not guarantee peace. At worst, aid risks doing harm by exacerbating existing drivers of conflict or by reinforcing local power dynamics and discriminatory practices.

Which is why poverty reduction should not be justified as "contributing to peace," but rather on the basis that poverty reduction is a good thing in itself. The justification for poverty reduction is poverty reduction.

Art note

On a recent trip to New York I spent an hour or so in the (very crowded) Guggenheim museum and was especially taken with one painting in the exhibit on abstraction in the '20s and '30s, namely Jean Hélion's Composition (April-May 1934). I just glanced at the Wikipedia article on him, which I found interesting because I knew nothing about him. A main point is that he began as an abstract painter but didn't remain one. I'm not familiar with his work beyond the one painting I just mentioned.

Global inequalities and the democratic peace

The observation that "mature" or "consolidated" democracies virtually never fight each other, a/k/a 'the democratic peace', has been linked by some researchers to (among other things) patterns of trade among democracies. However, the democratic peace is not usually connected to the changing global division of labor and global North-South inequalities. Nicholas Lees's article in the June issue of Millennium -- "Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace: A Neo-Ricardian Analysis of International Order" [abstract here] -- explores "the causal connections between global inequality, class formation and the democratic peace" through the lens of the neo-Ricardian idea of quasi-rents (p.492). I won't try to summarize all the details of the article; rather, this post will cover some of the piece's key points while offering some related thoughts.

To begin, it will be helpful to rehearse a bit of recent history. Starting in the early or mid-1970s, 'the Keynesian accommodation' and the Fordist economic model, which together produced several decades of strong economic growth and economically secure working classes in the developed capitalist countries, broke down. In tandem with, among other things, the end of fixed exchange rates, increased capital mobility, and the relocation of manufacturing to parts of the global South, the breakdown of Fordism marked the end of capitalism's 'golden age' (the phrase is from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, who in turn borrowed it from a 1990 book, The Golden Age of Capitalism, edited by Marglin and Schor). The result was increased inequality, wage stagnation, the weakening of organized labor, and a decline, to use the language of Lees's article, in workers' ability to bargain for a share of quasi-rents [for the short definition of quasi-rents, see the note at the end of this post]. As Lees writes: "The defeat of organised labour in much of the advanced industrialised world, combined with the dispersion of productive capacity to the new semi-peripheries, seems to have eroded the quasi-rents of workers in tradeable sectors in the North" (506). 

The end of capitalism's post-1945 golden age was noteworthy, however, not only for what it entailed but for what it did not. First, it did not wipe out the structural advantages enjoyed by the economies and firms of the developed world. A large amount of manufacturing relocated to the semi-periphery (or the 'newly industrializing countries'), but more "sophisticated" activities, involving the interplay of innovative technologies and highly skilled workers, remained concentrated in the North. The global trade regime, as administered by the World Trade Organization, generally continued to favor the richer countries, notably though not exclusively in the area of intellectual property. Moreover, as Lees notes (summarizing Raphael Kaplinsky), buyer-dominated global supply chains allow "large buyers located in the North...to bargain down producers of generic manufactures," such as textiles and furniture (500). Thus, while "within-nation inequality has increased almost worldwide" over the past thirty years, "population-weighted between-nation inequality of purchasing power-adjusted incomes has decreased," but only decreased "slightly -- largely as a result of moderate increases in per capita incomes in China and India" (502; emphasis added).  

Secondly, the end of capitalism's golden age was not accompanied by a collapse in the framework of international politics and specifically not by the outbreak of a major war involving the great powers. On the contrary: in the late 1980s and early '90s the Cold War came to a (relatively) peaceful end, while the phenomenon of interstate war went into decline, as did, albeit more unevenly, armed conflict in general. This conjunction might seem surprising: some might have expected a period of considerable economic turmoil in the 'core' states of the system to have led to a breakdown of order in international politics, or at least to have engendered more violent conflict rather than less. But perhaps the decline in armed conflict, of which the democratic peace is the most theorized aspect, is only temporary; perhaps the democratic peace rests on or presupposes a degree of economic security in the 'advanced' countries rooted in the now-vanished political economy of Fordism, which, among other things, afforded workers access to quasi-rents through strong labor organizations. If so, the end of Fordism, and the concomitant decline or disappearance of the relatively widely shared prosperity in the 'advanced' countries that Fordism underwrote, could be expected eventually to erode the democratic peace.

That, at any rate, is a possible implication of Michael Mousseau's argument about (to quote the title of one of his articles) "the social market roots of democratic peace."  In brief, Mousseau's argument, as Lees presents it, is that economic development in 'contract-intensive societies' (i.e. those based mainly on impersonal market exchange rather than patron-client arrangements) produces non-belligerent values that undergird such societies' lack of hostility toward each other (509-510). By contrast, patron-client networks promote "strong in-group identification and hostility to out-groups -- values which Mousseau argues are externalised in the foreign policy of states" organized on clientalist, neo-patrimonial lines (511). 
 
"In the contemporary world, contract-intensive societies have tended to be social market democracies in which the benefits of economic development are distributed fairly widely" (510). However, as these benefits become less widely distributed in developed capitalist economies (see above), the logic of Mousseau's argument suggests that the values supporting the democratic peace could be undermined (512). 'Advanced' democracies have not hesitated to depart from their professed liberal values when such a departure has been deemed necessary "to maintain the global political and economic status quo," and "[i]f the socio-economic foundations of this status quo were to come under more serious strain, actors within the core might actively reject these liberal values" (513). Lees wisely avoids any predictions about a resumption of interstate conflict in the North, however, observing that several factors may work in the opposite direction (513).

Lees makes a strong case that a combination of Mousseau's approach with structuralist theories of class formation and the North-South divide sheds light on the deep foundations of the democratic peace. But if the democratic peace is seen as merely one aspect of the broader decline in armed conflict, Mousseau's perspective may be less helpful. Mousseau's 'social market explanation' of the democratic peace, which roots both democracy and peace in a particular kind of social and economic development, conceivably could be extended to cover the decline of armed conflict in general. But here it might run into problems: perhaps one could show a connection between 'contract-intensive' economic development and the overall decline in armed conflict, but such a connection is not immediately obvious. 

John Mueller's obsolescence-of-major-war argument (see, e.g., here) and/or Douglas Gibler's 'territorial peace' argument (see, e.g., here) might well be better explanations of the overall decline in war. Mueller, in contrast to Mousseau, takes a more constructivist and elite-oriented view, arguing that great-power war has become so normatively unacceptable that it is no longer part of the set of options that decision-makers have in their heads. In Mueller's view, peace among 'developed' countries rests less on the material circumstances of their populations than on most leaders' and publics' conviction that war has none of the positive features that were once attributed to it, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (i.e. pre-1914). In their different ways, Mueller and Gibler view the democratic peace as one part of a larger trend, one that may be strongest in but is not limited to the rich countries of the North, and Mueller does not draw the tight connections Mousseau does between material conditions, liberal values, and peace. (Gibler may not do so either, but I'm less familiar with the details of his work.)  

In the opening of The Age of Empire, published in 1987, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that "the question of the origins of the First World War...has remained alive, because the problem of the origins of world wars has unfortunately refused to go away since 1914" (p.6). Although the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 has occasioned a renewed flurry of interest in its origins, one wonders whether, from the standpoint of 2013, the origins of world wars is an issue of anything more than purely historical concern. It has been argued that with each further year of great-power peace it becomes more likely (not certain, but more likely) that the two world wars of the twentieth century represent a phenomenon -- i.e., 'hegemonic' or great-power war -- which has now ceased to exist. If that turns out to be correct, future historians looking back probably will see the end of hegemonic war as the main development, beside which the democratic peace may figure as little more than a footnote. 

This leads to the speculation that the research program on the democratic peace may have run its course. Scholars of international security will continue to find things to write about, and one can expect an ongoing stream of publications on civil war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, enduring rivalries, R2P, and other matters. Increasingly, though, it appears that the most serious threats to planetary survival will not come directly from these war-and-peace issues, important as they are, but from the environmental and economic problems and crises that the capitalist world economy continues to generate. Admittedly, whether those economic forces will result in a resumption of great-power conflict, or whether the decline of interstate war is a phenomenon basically independent of trends in the global political economy, remains an open question. In any case, Lees's article deserves attention for, among other things, the thoughtful way in which it links issues and literatures that are not usually considered together.
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Note: Rent "refers to an economic return on a resource greater than the opportunity cost of the use of that resource," and quasi-rents "are temporary rents which arise where the supply of a resource [such as technology] is fixed over the short term but not over the long term" (495).

Peter Hall on the Eurozone's woes

A quite good analysis.

Pop sociology and other stuff

I said "unlikely" to be any posting until after July 4th but not "impossible." (Always leave an out.)

Anyway, a few things. A WaPo piece on "middle-class" protests in various parts of the world was ok until the authors decided to go all pop sociology, declaring:

If the 1960s were about breaking cultural norms and protesting foreign wars, and the 1990s about railing against globalization, then the 2010s are about a clamor for responsive government, as well as social and economic freedom.

Great, glad that's all cleared up and squared away.

Second thing: the excerpt in the current Foreign Affairs from Rick Atkinson's new book (the excerpt is about the run-up to D-Day). I haven't read Atkinson's work, but with several vols. on WW2 under his belt, he is clearly in his element here. Seems to be gated, unfortunately. Btw, DeLong has a book review in the same issue. That might be ungated; haven't checked.

Finally, the U.S. has revoked tariff preferences for Bangladesh across a range of items as a consequence of the garment factory collapses and fires; but I just heard a brief item on this a couple of days ago and haven't sought out the details.

Note to readers

Life has been interfering with blogging, and there is unlikely to be any posting here until sometime after the July 4th weekend.

'Uses' of the past

Some interesting discussion of this theme going on at the USIH blog. I left a couple of comments on this post but the other posts in the same general discussion are worth a look too.

Moral action in the real world

An ongoing exchange at Duck of Minerva between PTJ (here) and Phil Arena (here) raises some interesting questions about rational choice theory and moral action (among other things).

PTJ argues that "moral action strictly speaking" does not take any account of an individual's preferences or desires and that choice-theoretic models therefore rule out moral action by definition.

I don't want to get deeply into the argument about rational choice theory for several reasons (one of them being that I don't care that much about it one way or another), but I do want to raise another issue -- albeit not that systematically or even coherently, given the hour.

The issue is this: does anyone engage in "moral action strictly speaking" in the real world? That is, does anyone act without taking into account his or her own desires, at some level? To some extent this is a semantic question: one can always say that because X did Y, X wanted to do Y. Mother Theresa must have wanted to minister to the poor of Calcutta (Kolkata), otherwise she wouldn't have done it. But the use of "want" in this way begs the question. More pointedly, one can suggest that of course Mother Theresa acted out of moral and religious conviction but presumably it must also have given her satisfaction, in some sense that can be separated from acting purely out of a sense of moral duty. At least, it's not absurd to think that might have been the case. (And if you don't like the Mother Theresa example, substitute one of your own choosing.)

There are at least a few philosophers who think, as Iris Murdoch remarked, that "every second has a moral tinge," that we are constantly faced with moral decisions. This, I think, is an overstatement: there are large swaths of mundane daily life that do not have a moral tinge. But even if only ten percent of one's existence involves moral questions, that's still a lot. And I think ten percent might be on the low side.

The point I'm trying to get to, though, is that real-world decisions usually involve a mix of considerations, in which one balances what one thinks or knows is the right thing to do, abstractly speaking, against the inconvenience or cost to oneself which doing that thing might entail. After all, if Christians followed Christ's example literally, they would live in poverty and give all their wealth and possessions to the less fortunate. Ditto for Jews and Muslims who followed the relevant scriptural injunctions for them. Of course monks and saints might do that, and the WaPo recently ran an article about some young people in well-paying jobs who give most of their income to charity (having been influenced by, inter alia, the writings of Peter Singer), but most people balance the imperatives of their moral and/or religious beliefs against the practical costs of operationalizing those beliefs. I give a small amount of money each month to an organization that works against global poverty. Could I give more? Yes. Why don't I? Because there are other, mostly less selfless (or more selfish, if you prefer to put it that way) calls on a finite amount of resources.

So, to come back to rational choice theory, even if it does rule out "moral action strictly speaking" by definition, if few people engage in such action in the real world, I don't know that the exclusion-by-definition greatly matters -- especially if you assume that ultimately the point of even highly stylized models is to advance understanding of the real world.

Loomis on Debs

In a post from yesterday, E. Loomis reminds us of the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, his June 16, 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, and its consequences.

Brooks needs a history lesson or two (right-to-privacy edition)

I make it a point to read David Brooks only very irregularly (i.e., as seldom as possible). But Corey Robin's interesting piece "David Brooks: The Last Stalinist" reminded me of something -- or rather, a  comment attached to Robin's post was the reminder.

Brooks thinks Snowden is a result of an 'atomized' society and that someone with firmer social ties to community, family, etc., would not have acted as Snowden did. But there's a different way of looking at it: Snowden sees himself, I'm sure, as acting to protect, among other things, the right to privacy, and that right -- and here's the point I'm getting to -- has its origins, as far as U.S. law is concerned, in the late nineteenth century, before the 'atomization' Brooks so deplores had become a major trend. It goes back to Warren and Brandeis's famous 1890 law review article in which they said that privacy is the right to be let alone. One can quibble, I suppose, about whether or how deeply the NSA surveillance programs invade that right, but I still think Brooks should devote a column to Warren and Brandeis. If nothing else, it would be a welcome break from the stale Tocqueville, warmed-over Robert Nisbet, and whatever else Brooks usually serves up.

"Flashes of anger"

Until now I'd avoided all the articles about Edward Snowden's biography and personal life etc., but the Post has a kind of round-up of it all that I just read.

There's this paragraph at the very end:

Snowden now presents himself as a reasoned protester, a conscientious objector of sorts, but he has also shown flashes of anger and even contempt for some aspects of American society. “Go back to your meaningless consumerist life,” he wrote four years ago in a comment on a YouTube video that poked fun at the ritual of high school reunions.

I know reporters are overworked, stressed-out, and under deadlines, but really. Isn't it possible to be both "reasoned" and show "flashes of anger" at "some aspects of American society"? Anyone who doesn't show occasional flashes of anger at some aspects of American society is probably catatonic.

On the other hand, in some of his online comments quoted in the piece Snowden sounds like an egotistical jerk. But some of those quoted remarks are from his early- or mid-twenties, when a lot of people sound like egotistical jerks.

The interesting biographical question is what the article refers to as his leap from security guard to security clearance, a transition whose details apparently remain murky.    

Wise comment of the weekend

In a thread about Iraq and Syria at Crooked Timber, a commenter observes: "An assassin started WW I."

The relevance vel non (as the lawyers say) of this remark to the debate about Syria is something I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Bad optics

Spotted a wire service item in today's WaPo about protests in Greece over the government's shuttering of the country's public broadcasting corp., ostensibly as a cost-cutting measure. As the PR folks say (or maybe they don't say it, who knows?), the optics are bad.

Added later: Which is not, of course, to minimize or make light of what Greece has been going through.

Mitzen on Pinker

Although I've probably mentioned Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature here before, I haven't previously discussed it at any length, for the excellent reason that I haven't read it. However, Jennifer Mitzen's review of the book in the current Perspectives on Politics is worth a post [the link is to a gated version; I haven't searched for an ungated version but there probably isn't one].

As many will know (including those who haven't read the 800-page book), Pinker argues that all forms of violence have declined since the Middle Ages and have declined especially sharply in contemporary times, with 'the West' being the center of this trend. Mitzen basically grants this, but argues that Pinker's approach induces a sense of complacency about the violence that remains, even though that is not his intent. In her words, while "absolv[ing] modernity and moderns" of responsibility for the violence of the past, Pinker "dull[s] our sense that it is important to care about, much less feel a sense of responsibility toward, the distant others still mired in violence."

It is tricky, of course, to argue about a book's (or any text's) effect on readers' sensibilities and feelings since, in these respects, no two readers will be affected in exactly the same way. Shaw's Heartbreak House, to take one example that comes to mind, might have caused some readers (or viewers) of the play to crusade against the pre-1914 arms race in Europe while at the same time inducing others to consider the prospect of starting their own munitions company. Good art is ambiguous (even when it appears to be preachy, as Shaw often does), and scholarship is also often ambiguous, at least in terms of its effects on the sensibilities of its consumers.

With that said: how, in Mitzen's view, does Pinker's approach induce complacency and a dulling of the sense that "it is important to care about...distant others...."?

Pinker's account of liberalism and modernity is, she writes, "airbrushed and uncomplicated." Thus, according to him, the French Revolution took a wrong turn not because of any tensions or contradictions in the Enlightenment but because, in Pinker's words, "many of the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their inspiration were intellectual lightweights" (hmm).

Mitzen criticizes Pinker's accounts of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which he depicts as having nothing to do with modernity, reason or science. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on that particular question. I do tend to think, however, that the legacy of the Enlightenment, although mostly positive, is, to use Mitzen's word, "mixed."

Her key point is that "[t]he mechanisms of Pinker's causal argument suggest that there is not a whole lot we as individual agents can or ought to do about the violence that remains, especially violence outside of the liberal West." Societies, in Pinker's view, will adopt 'reason' and reduce violence when they "are ready" (Mitzen's words) and until then we basically just have to wait. 

This makes Mitzen uncomfortable, and I understand why. On the other hand, I don't think she would be more comfortable with an approach that attempts to spread 'reason' by force. What we are left with is a sort of middle ground, in which societies are mostly left to chart their own paths but with 'the West' offering financial and/or other support to 'liberal,' 'modern' voices within them, while at the same time trying to temper global economic forces that may hinder political liberalization. As a general matter, I suspect that Pinker and Mitzen would both endorse that approach.

IEA report on CO2 emissions

Emissions rose 1.4 % in 2012, putting the world on track for a 9 degrees Fahreinheit temp rise. Emissions fell in the U.S. and Europe, but rose in China (although at a slower rate than in the past) and in Japan, as the latter "imported and burned large amounts of liquefied natural gas and coal to compensate for the loss of electricity production from nuclear plants that have been idle" since the tsunami.

What caused Japan to surrender in 1945?

It wasn't the atomic bomb, Ward Wilson argues.

"They don't make contributors' lists like that any more"

That (i.e., the title of this post) was my comment when someone I know showed me the reprint edition of the first issue of the New York Rev. of Books, which the journal is offering for sale as part of its 50th anniv. celebration: see here. Also, there is a free two-day conference in Oxford later this month in connection with the anniv.: see here.

For a number of years, for most of the '80s and into the early '90s as I recall, I subscribed to the NYRB. Though I eventually stopped subscribing, I think it's clear that the journal has had a good run.

Bernanke on beauty

Via Krugman (via Leiter), I glanced through Bernanke's speech at Princeton. Toward the end of the speech, there is this line (quoted by Krugman at the top of his post): "physical beauty is evolution’s way of assuring us that the other person doesn’t have too many intestinal parasites."

It's nice to know that Bernanke believes in evolution, but this line strikes me -- a complete non-scientist, admittedly -- as sort of dumb. First, physical beauty has a subjective component. Second, to the extent that physical beauty is not subjective but 'objective', wouldn't evolutionary pressures of the sort implied by Bernanke result in lots of physically beautiful people? But there aren't lots of physically beautiful people. On the contrary, they're rare. Maybe Bernanke should stick to economics.    

NSA dragnet on Verizon records

Via Greenwald (via Wonkblog).

I wonder what NSA has been doing with these millions of records. Feeding all the numbers into some humongous computer and seeing if certain "suspicious" matches appear? As they say (supposedly) in the Valley: riilly. 

Obama nat'l security team changes

S. Rice to nat'l security adviser, S. Power to UN ambassador (link to WaPo story). I haven't read Power's A Problem from Hell and it's not on my already over-long summer reading list.

End-of-month linkage

(better-late-than-never edition: most of this is from last month)

Climate change and divestment: here (scroll down to Act Three).

Extreme poverty: interview with World Bank pres. Jim Yong Kim (PBS NewsHour, April 18); the comments left on the transcript appear to be, um, interesting.

Jane Austen, game theorist: here.

Afghan Nat'l Army: WaPo's Kevin Sieff reports (from April 7) on Afghan Nat'l Army (ANA) battalions as they moved, on their own, into a Taliban stronghold, removed a lot of mines and explosives, conducted some firefights, and left; the ANA, at least in this case, has neither the money nor the men, he notes, to set up permanent outposts as the U.S./ISAF forces often did in insurgent areas they had 'cleared'.

Abstract of the day

Peter Haldèn, "Republican Continuities in the Vienna Order and the German Confederation (1815-66)," Eur. Journal of Intl. Relations, June 2013:

This article argues that the German Confederation — deutscher Bund — (1815–66) was a form of rule built on early modern republican political theory. It was a ‘Compound Republic’ form of rule constructed to prevent the emergence of a system of sovereign German states as well as a single sovereign German state. Its purpose was maintaining peace and stability in Europe and safeguarding the autonomy of its member polities. Contemporary statesmen, intellectuals and scholars saw these purposes as complementary. A non-sovereign, polycentric and republican organization of the German lands was regarded as a natural and necessary component in a stable Europe free from war and revolutions. This article analyses the origins, institutions and policies of the German Confederation, with particular regard to how the means of organized violence were organized. It thereby demonstrates the implementation of republican ideas and purposes in the Bund. The article situates the Bund in 19th-century thinking about European stability and sovereignty, further demonstrating the prevalence of republican ideas on international order. Republican political theories and institutions differed sharply from modern theories and models of international relations. Consequently, the history of international politics, the European system of states and state-formation must be re-conceptualized more in line with historical realities.

Gilbert on Kennan

In a blog post, Prof. Alan Gilbert of the Univ. of Denver praises Obama's recent speech on counter-terrorism policy, drones, and Guantanamo as a "turning point," while noting (among other things) that it should have come earlier and contending that presidents never do anything decent without mass pressure from below.

Toward the beginning of his remarks Gilbert, referencing his 1999 book Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy?, comments briefly and in passing on George Kennan:

In most foreign policy discussion and international relations as an academic field, realist theories - both official ones used in making/apologizing for American foreign policy and more sophisticated versions employed in the critical study of American errors and crimes, even systematic ones - abstain from the outset from looking at the consequences [of U.S. foreign policy] for democracy at home....

For instance, the leading post-World War II realist, George Kennan in American Diplomacy, pits sober, professional diplomacy against democratic crusades like Woodrow Wilson's in World War I.... But in the 1984 edition, responding to the disastrous American aggression in Vietnam, Kennan noticed the war complex, "our military-industrial addiction." He shifted to a more democratic, common-good oriented view without naming the shift.

Kennan opposed the Vietnam War from the start mainly on pragmatic grounds (he testified against it in congressional hearings in 1966), and Vietnam probably did influence his thinking.  There are tensions in Kennan's views deriving partly from the way in which moral considerations are often kept unacknowledged or beneath the surface, with the biggest exception to this being his increasingly passionate writings, starting in the 1980s, about nuclear weapons. But I think Kennan remained ambivalent, at best, about democracy until the end of his life. These tensions (or contradictions) run through much of his career, complicating the idea of an un-named shift "to a more democratic, common-good oriented view." Still, it is interesting that some of the language in American Diplomacy, originally published in 1951, changed in the 1984 edition.

P.s. A minor point: "One of the leading post-WWII realists" would have been better than "the leading," since Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Kennan are usually given roughly equal billing as the key figures of post-1945 American Realism, with Arnold Wolfers, John Herz, and some others not far behind. (Generationally speaking, Waltz and Kissinger come after this group.)

Added later: It's possible to put a somewhat more uncomfortable (for lack of a better word) gloss on Kennan's position on Vietnam, which would note that, in addition to his (correct) judgment that Vietnam was not a vital U.S. interest, he just didn't care much about the Third World (as it was then called) and didn't think non-Europeans (or non-descendants of Europeans) had much capacity for self-government. But going into that would require another post.

[To find previous mentions of Kennan on this blog, type "Kennan" into the search box in the upper-left corner.]

Rome exhibit on The Prince

S. Poggioli reports. (It was written in 1513, hence the 500th anniversary exhibition, but was not published until 1532.)

Noted

From an article about an Air Force Sgt. who lost his legs and an arm in Afghanistan:

Deslauriers, 34, has come to Bellingham [Ma.] with his wife and 17-month-old son from Bethesda, where he’s still receiving medical treatment for his 2011 injuries. After the Memorial Day parade, he is hoping to talk to Boston Marathon bombing survivors about life as a triple amputee. He wants to tell them how hard it is to get used to strangers who fix their eyes on his missing legs or look away in disgust. On his worst days he wants to slap these people.

People are probably not looking away in disgust; more likely it's embarrassment, shyness, or not knowing exactly what to say. (One can always thank veterans for serving but that sounds trite; it's probably better than saying nothing but it's not necessarily easy to produce even a few words even when you know you should.) 

Vending machines, people-to-people diplomacy, and Queen Victoria as "figure head"

An advertising gimmick by Coke produced a Max Fisher post (h/t FP's AfPak Daily Brief [which, for those who like corporate charts, is also WaPo, since WaPo owns FP]) that is a mash-up of "the famous [sic] McDonald's theory of conflict resolution" (cough) and dem. peace theory.

The comment thread to the Fisher post is amusing. One "grantpaten," responding to another commenter's assertion that the American Revolution and the War of 1812 'disprove' dem. peace theory, writes:

England was not a democracy [i.e. at the time of the Am. Rev.] It was a monarchy with a weak parliament. That changed under Queen Victoria, which [sic] made the monarchy a figure head [sic].

Yup, Grant. Nailed it.

Cannes note

No, I'm not there, more's the pity; but here's Ann Hornaday on Redford:

Another of the festival’s strongest offerings — J.C. Chandor’s astonishing “All Is Lost” — addresses time’s passing more obliquely, with 76-year-old Robert Redford delivering a bravura performance as a man alone at sea on a sinking sailboat. A magnificent if harrowing example of cinema at its purest, “All Is Lost” contains almost no dialogue; instead, Redford communicates his character through action as he methodically battles the elements. The movie might be about one man against a world he can’t control but, as Chandor noted at a press conference, it’s also about a cinematic icon embodying his own generation’s turbulent passage into a treacherous next phase. “All Is Lost” is an exceptional achievement in every emotional, artistic and technical sense, and it represents a career-redefining moment for Redford. For some reason, it was passed over for competition in favor of far less impressive fare.

Probably good that Redford is doing this now as opposed to playing characters who are twenty years younger, which is what he did in his film The Company You Keep. (He pulled it off, for the most part, and so did Julie Christie, but maybe not entirely.) 

A rebuke to the misguided doctrine of endless war

I don't have a lot of time right now, so will confine myself to saying that a quick perusal of Pres. Obama's National Defense University speech reveals some important statements that he should have made in this way some time ago -- but mieux vaux tard que jamais.

Especially important, I think, is the paragraph where Obama says (I'm not quoting here, but giving the gist) that he will work to create  the conditions in which the AUMF (the Congressional 2001 authorization of military force against those who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks or harbored them) can eventually be repealed -- because it will no longer be needed. The speech is a firm rebuke to the misguided notion of endless war, a notion that was reinforced by G.W. Bush's pronouncement that 9/11 required the U.S. to be at war with "all terrorist groups of global reach," whether they had had anything to do with 9/11 or not.

Obama's NDU speech is really the antithesis of the Bush Doctrine, which was an overweening, foolish, Manichaean conception of an endless global struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. It was a simplistic, ahistorical quasi-fantasy: foreign policy for people who think the world is a (bad) movie. One may not agree with all aspects of the NDU speech, but at least you can tell that most of it was written by grown-ups.

Critique, critique -- that is Moses and the prophets

[with apologies to Karl Marx] 

Roger Mac Ginty (h/t):

Where is the law (and it is followed so religiously that I’m beginning to think it is a law) that says we have to cite Nye, Morgenthau, Kaplan, Keohane etc. I’m sure they are/were extraordinarily nice people and excellent teachers and mentors. But I just find...this followership creepy.

There is no such law. If they're useful to you, cite them. If they're not, don't.

Are we doing enough in this ‘discipline’ to encourage independent thinking, critique, innovation, the breaking of traditions and boundaries? Of course not. Because that would threaten the fiction that there is such a thing as International Relations.

I'm not exactly sure who "we" are, but there is quite a lot of "critique" in "the discipline." Go back to the Ashley/Walker "speaking the language of exile" issue of ISQ (or whatever journal it was). How long ago? As a first-year grad student (somewhat older than my fellow students) in the mid-'90s, I had to read, among other things, Der Derian and Shapiro's edited volume International/Intertextual Relations. Why? Presumably because it aimed to disturb, to destabilize, to criticize 'the discipline'.

Der Derian's opening essay quoted Roland Barthes: "at a certain moment, therefore, it is necessary to turn against Method, or at least to treat it without any founding privilege as one of the voices of plurality -- as a view, a spectacle mounted in the text, the text which all in all is the only 'true' result of any research."

Oh yeah. Bring on The Text.

A dubious-sounding thesis

I'm not sure what's up with this, but it sounds somewhat disturbing (h/t). I'm familiar with the names of the committee members who approved Richwine's dissertation, but the only one a bit of whose work I've read -- many years ago -- is Christopher Jencks. (I'm not sure how Jencks's perspective and views have changed, or indeed if they have, in the last few decades so I'm not even going to try to get substantive here.) I would note as a cautionary matter, however, that committee members don't have to agree with a dissertation's argument in order to approve it; they just have to determine that the thesis passes a certain bar of acceptable scholarship.

Dialogue of the day

From Alan Bennett, The History Boys (pb. ed.), pp.46-47:

Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

Scripps: No, it isn't. What about when it's celebration? Joy?

Dakin: But it's written when the joy is over. Finished. So even when it's joy, it's grief. It's consolation. 


...


Dakin: Actually it isn't wholly my idea.

Scripps: No?

Dakin: I've been reading this book by Kneeshaw.

Scripps: Who?

Dakin (shows him book): Kneeshaw. He's a philosopher. Frederick Kneeshaw.

Scripps: I think that's pronounced Nietszche.

Dakin: Shit. Shit. Shit.

Scripps: What's the matter?

Dakin: I talked to Irwin about it. He didn't correct me. He let me call him Kneeshaw. He'll think I'm a right fool. Shit.

QOTD: Gates on eradicating polio

Excerpted from an interview with E. Klein:

Ezra Klein: How do you ensure you hit every tiny village in a mountainous, rural, poor country?

Bill Gates: We began using satellite maps and we’re finding particularly in Nigeria we were missing a lot of settlements, a lot of nomadic people. The thing we were missing the most was a village would be on a border, and one government would say, “Oh, that’s on their side,” and the other guy would say, “No, that’s on their side.” So your chance of getting polio was super elevated if you happened to live on the border between these local government administrative boundaries.

Then in terms of the teams doing their job, we now put a phone with a GPS sensor in it, every three minutes it says where this team is. It’s in the box with the vaccine so when they come in at the end of the day we plug that in and see if they really went where they were supposed to go.

Our biggest problems now are violence, which causes campaigns to be canceled, or people just not ... willing to go into various neighborhoods, and refusals having to do with bad rumors about the vaccine campaign. And these are both serious issues in both Pakistan and Nigeria.

Cheney's latest ironic absurdity

Tom Ricks, whose blog I should look at more often than once every six months, links to this about Cheney (from J. Klein).

What is Hezb-i-Islami?

In a piece from yesterday, Pamela Constable describes the tangled situation of the group that claimed responsibility for the latest suicide bombing in Kabul.

Quote of the day

Agatha Christie, in one of her witty books, The Moving Finger, introduces a girl fresh from school and lets her run on about what she thinks of it. "Such a lot of things seem to me such rot. History, for instance. Why, it's quite different out of different books!" To this her sensible elderly confidant replies: "That is its real interest."

--Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians, p.9

Waltz and his legacy: a few reflections

I feel I should add my two cents to the torrent of IR-blogospheric comment on the late Kenneth Waltz, if only to justify my existence as a blogger. I never met Waltz[*] but like virtually every student of international relations I have read his two key books (not the third one). This post is basically a spur-of-the-moment thing, not the product of sustained thought, and it should be read with that in mind.

Man, the State and War (1959), hereafter MSW, and Theory of International Politics (1979), hereafter TIP, are rather different kinds of books, even if they both endorse a "structural" view of international politics. MSW is an analysis of what Great Thinkers in the (mostly) Western tradition have said about the causes of war. The book famously sorts these writers into three camps: those who locate the causes of war in human nature ("the first image"), in the characteristics of individual states ("the second image"), or in the 'anarchical' (meaning, essentially, no-world-government) structure of the international system ("the third image"). Waltz concludes that the third-image view is the most convincing, famously declaring that (to paraphrase him) wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them.

MSW is a very perceptive book that treats a subject of intrinsic interest, and for that reason it will continue to be read. But apart from the fact that (some) students are still required to read it, I doubt it exercises all that much influence over the field today. Few Ph.D. candidates in political science who "do" International Relations will write a dissertation these days about what this or that Great Thinker has said about the causes of war. Such dissertations are still written but I think they are rare, especially in the United States. Someone who is interested in both political/social theory and international relations is more likely nowadays to do what might be called critical disciplinary history (which is, for example, what Daniel Levine's book Recovering International Relations is, or so I gather from hearing him speak about it on one occasion before it was published). Disciplinary history is, obviously, about the development of the discipline or the field of International Relations; it is rather inward-focused. Waltz's MSW is not disciplinary history in this sense. That is not at all to criticize MSW, merely to note the difference.

The other aspect of MSW perhaps worth mentioning is that the phenomenon with which it was concerned, namely traditional interstate war, is now increasingly rare. When MSW was published in 1959, the Korean War had ended only six years before, World War II only fourteen years before. The Cold War was in full swing and there was no guarantee that it would not become hot. Today, although wars are, unfortunately, still with us, traditional interstate wars have become unusual events (the last really big one was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), and wars directly between two or more great powers are unheard of. Uncovering the causes of interstate war had an urgency in the 1950s which, at least arguably, it no longer has. The 'hot topic' now is civil war, as will be apparent to anyone who glances through the list of political science dissertations completed in 2012 (in the U.S.) that was recently published in PS. I am not saying MSW is passé or no longer relevant; it will always be 'relevant' because its subject is of intrinsic interest, meaning it has inherent interest regardless of what is going on in the world, just as the study of history has intrinsic interest regardless of what is going on in the world. I'm simply observing that the focus of attention in the field seems to have shifted to other things.

Turning now to Theory of International Politics. The reverberations of TIP are still being felt in the field in a much more direct way than those of MSW. The emphasis in TIP on the "shaping" influence of structure -- meaning, in essence, the distribution of capabilities (power) among states under anarchy -- is still a starting point for many, though by no means all, scholars of international politics. However, TIP has come under several different kinds of criticism since it was published -- in fact, too many to catalog exhaustively here. A sampling: Ruggie charged that Waltz in TIP ignored questions of historical change and transition between different kinds of state system, something the English School had always been more attuned to, while Wendt criticized Waltz for not seeing that 'power' and 'interest' are mostly made up of ideas and that the effects of power accordingly depend on the distribution of ideas in the system. Other writers threw doubt on the notion of 'anarchy' and the states-under-anarchy model. And finally (for the non-exhaustive purposes of this post), many have criticized what is perhaps the central substantive proposition of TIP, namely the argument that balances of power recurrently form and that, in Waltz's words, "if there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it." The other major aspect of TIP was Waltz's views on what 'theory' is; his epistemological-methodological position continues to be both influential and controversial, but I will pass over it here.

Despite all the criticisms, TIP will remain required reading for students, if only so that they can follow the flood of critiques it unleashed. The  appearance as recently as 2011 of a collection of essays about Waltz's work, Realism and World Politics (ed. Ken Booth), suggests that Waltz's writings will continue to generate interest and discussion for quite some time to come and will continue to be seen as canonical works in the field.

(Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

Added later: Waltz's 1988 APSA presidential address, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," as published in the Sept. 1990 issue of APSR, is available here (pdf).
----
*I did hear him speak on one occasion but that doesn't amount to 'meeting'. 

Waltz: r.i.p.

See here, here, and here.
And here.

A bad first sentence

Jerry Bowyer writing at the Forbes site (h/t):

If you pay attention to economic debates you know by now that a celebrity historian named Niall Ferguson made some off-hand comments at a financial conference in which he linked John Maynard Keynes’ homosexuality to some flaws in his economics. (italics added)

That is not what Ferguson did. What Ferguson did was to attempt to link Keynes's sexuality to a mistaken interpretation of Keynes's famous "in the long run we're all dead" line [italicized words added per TBA's comment]. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that line, when taken in context, was being used by Keynes to make a point against those economists who argued that a depressed economy, if left alone, would eventually recover on its own through the magic of the business cycle.

Thanks to a comment on my previous post, I now know that in 2004 two UCLA economists published an article in which they argued that if only certain New Deal policies, in particular the National Industrial Recovery Act, had not mucked things up by 'artifically' raising prices and wages, the Depression would have ended much sooner than it did. Live and learn, as they say.

A side note/question on the Ferguson uproar

This post does not address the main issues involved in l'affaire Ferguson (latest edition) because I think those issues are adequately dealt with elsewhere in parts of the blogosphere (CT, LGM, DeLong, etc. etc.) that have far, far larger audiences than this blog does.

I would like to raise one side point, however. To wit: when I was growing up, I was taught (or imbibed through osmosis, or both) that the clearest lesson of the Great Depression was that  governments' failure to spend in response to the crisis was the height of folly. The economic orthodoxy of the time opposed deficit spending, but that orthodoxy was proved wrong; pump-priming in a depression was obviously the correct policy. That's what I gathered from everything I read, in school and out of school, about the period, and I assumed, until fairly recently, that it was pretty much universally acknowledged to be true. Even as late as the 1990s, it was -- or such was my impression -- fairly unusual to find an academic economist (let alone historian) contending that governments were actually right and sensible in their failure to spend more vigorously at the onset of the Great Depression.

In recent years, however, this consensus -- or what I took to be a consensus -- has fallen apart to such an extent that Ferguson, in his 'open letter' in The Harvard Crimson, can write this:

Throughout my career as a historian, I have regularly written and spoken about Keynes, who had one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. That, of course, is the most important thing about him. You may disagree with his argument that, in a depressed economy, the government should borrow and spend money to stimulate aggregate demand. But you cannot ignore it. (emphasis added)

I take "you may disagree" to mean, in effect, "it is reasonable to disagree."  In other words, Ferguson is saying that reasonable people disagree about whether governments should seek to stimulate aggregate demand in a depression by spending. Would any historian or economist of any reputation, including conservative ones I mean, have written this passage 25 or 30 years ago? If the answer is no, then this is a small sign of how much the prevailing intellectual and political winds have shifted in recent years. Of course, the entire debate about 'austerity' and the policies adopted by various European governments are a much louder signal of the same thing, but I nonetheless find this passage worth remarking.
---
Added later: Just in time for the WW1 discussion: A review of The Sleepwalkers (Clark) and July 1914 (McMeekin) in the current NYTBkRev. (Haven't read the review yet.)

Natural gas and political turmoil

Erik Voeten links to Charles Mann's article which is about, in Voeten's words, "the potential deleterious consequences of finding large quantities of natural gas (methane hydrate) underneath the seafloor." Voeten's post and Mann's article suggest that among these consequences could be increased political instability, as regimes now propped up by oil become weaker and -- this point is the one Voeten stresses -- as countries become less dependent on oil imports. Dependence on oil imports makes the dependent countries co-operative and leads them to behave like good international citizens, lest turmoil interfere with the international flow of petroleum on which they rely: so say Voeten and Michael Ross in a paper on SSRN to which Voeten links.

Having only skimmed Mann's article, my off-the-cuff reaction is that the more serious potential deleterious effect of methane hydrate discoveries is that they will slow down the shift to renewable energy sources (solar and wind). Mann mentions this at the end of his piece. That seems like a fairly certain consequence of new natural gas discoveries, whereas the argument about political consequences seems somewhat more speculative to me. For instance, I doubt that its current oil-dependence has all that much of a constraining effect on U.S. foreign policy. YMMV.

'Cold' boundaries and 'hot' boundaries

Journalistic discussions of issues involving land boundaries between countries (or between states, to use the rough synonym) sometimes fail to distinguish between two possible kinds of disagreement: disagreement over a boundary's location and disagreement over a boundary's status.

There are no longer many disagreements of consequence over state boundaries' location. Most boundaries are settled, or 'cold' -- to use a term one occasionally sees (or used to). Among the unsettled or 'hot' boundaries there is Israel/Palestine, of course, which is something of a special case. There is the disputed India-China boundary, which has just recently flared up again (see also here). And there are, no doubt, a few others, e.g. the disputed India-Pakistan boundary in the Siachen glacier. (There are also, notably, disputes about islands but those necessarily involve maritime boundaries and are therefore in a different category.)

More common, I think, than disputes about location are disputes about a boundary's status. These disputes don't have to do with where the boundary is drawn but rather about the status of the territory it marks out. Take the cases of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, mentioned here. Supporters of Abkhazian independence presumably don't want a different location for the boundary marking out Abkhazia; rather, they want a change in the boundary's status, from a provincial to an international boundary. When an article about secessionist or independence movements refers to "the rigidity of boundaries," this distinction can get lost, because the reader may infer that a secessionist movement wants to change a boundary's location when it doesn't. The Balochistan independence movement, for example, would presumably be happy with the current location of the boundary marking out Balochistan as a province of Pakistan, but it wants the status of that boundary changed to an international boundary. (Note however that some cases, such as that of an independent Kurdistan were it to be achieved, might involve changes in boundaries' locations.)

Then there can be tensions and disagreements that involve boundaries in some way but are not about either the boundary's location or its status. Two states that share a boundary can disagree, for instance, over how to manage the movement of people and/or goods across it. There can also be violence along a boundary that doesn't, strictly speaking, have much to do with the boundary itself but is an expression of hostility between the countries involved that happens to erupt along the boundary for various reasons.

For instance, the recent clashes between Afghan and Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan-Pakistan border may not have much to do with the border itself. According to a May 2 NYT story (h/t FP's AfPak Daily Brief):

Afghan forces claimed on Thursday that they had overrun and destroyed a Pakistani-held border crossing in a remote area, an event that provoked a spontaneous outpouring of nationalist sentiment here, sending thousands of students into the streets to demonstrate and setting off lively debate on social networking sites. A funeral for Qasim Khan, an Afghan border policeman who was the only confirmed victim of the clash, turned into a patriotic rally.

The NYT piece goes on to note that the outcry over the death of one Afghan soldier at the hands of Pakistani soldiers contrasts with the relative silence about the deaths of "eight Afghan Local Police officers [who] were killed on Thursday morning by a [Taliban] roadside bomb that blew up as their truck passed by in the village of Pashtunabad in Logar Province."

That young Afghans pour into the streets when an Afghan soldier is killed by Pakistani soldiers, but do not react similarly when eight American-trained Afghan local policemen are killed by the Taliban, is worth noting. One could draw several possible conclusions. But the  clashes between Afghan and Pakistani soldiers along the border may, to repeat, have little to do with the border itself, despite the NYT piece's mention of the Durand Line; in this sense it is different from the India-China border dispute. (I realize this is a debatable proposition, so reasoned disagreement is welcome.)

Reading notes, with movie postscript

Having embarrassed myself the other day on Crooked Timber (if indeed it's even possible to embarrass oneself in the blogosphere) by revealing that I'd never read The Social Contract, I've now picked up a used copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Rousseau's Political Writings. As an undergraduate I never took the standard course in the history of political thought because (1) I was stupid and (2) the course wasn't required by the program I was in, though it should have been. Consequently there are several canonical works of Western political theory I've never read.

Before I can get to Social Contract, however, I have to finish Iain Banks's Matter which, despite some witty moments and lovely descriptive passages, has turned into something of a chore. Which may explain, I suppose, why I don't read much science fiction.

Movie postscript: I see from the front page of WaPo online that a version of The Great Gatsby, with Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming this summer. It can't possibly turn out to be worse than the early 1970s version with Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow, which is on my worst-movies-ever-seen list.

Update: Have now ordered the recent Penguin ed. of Social Contract, trans. Q. Hoare, ed. C. Bertram. 

May Day link

Since it's May Day, I'm linking this Boston Review forum on global labor standards (h/t), even though I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

Does the process of state recognition need to be 'normalized'?

The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States sets out the minimum requirements for statehood in international law: "a permanent population; a defined territory; government; and capacity to enter into relations with the other States." A prominent international lawyer has written that several of these criteria boil down to "the existence of effective government...." (Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 4th ed., p.73).

Not surprisingly, the rather vague criteria of the Montevideo Convention have not always been applied consistently. In a 2002 article, "Sovereign Rights in International Relations: A Futile Search for Regulated or Regular State Behavior" (Review of International Studies, 28:4), Ersun Kurtulus pointed out that, for example, Chechnya in the 1990s had most of the empirical attributes of statehood but lacked the legal status of sovereignty, whereas Bosnia-Herzegovina was widely recognized as a sovereign state while (arguably) lacking the empirical attributes of statehood. Bosnia was hardly alone in that respect, of course. There is a well-known distinction in the Int'l Relations literature, introduced by Robert Jackson, between "juridical" and "empirical" sovereignty. To take an example: Somalia has juridical but not empirical sovereignty, whereas Somaliland, one could argue, has empirical but not juridical sovereignty. (On Somaliland, see, e.g., Peter Roethke, "The Right to Secede Under International Law: The Case of Somaliland," Journal of International Service, 20:2, Fall 2011.)

The above remarks are prompted by reading Courtney Brooks's article, "Making a State a State," in the current issue of World Policy Journal. Brooks, the UN correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, argues that there is a "need for a mechanism to normalize the process of international recognition of a state."  UN membership, which requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, is perhaps the closest thing to an official stamp of recognition of statehood, but it isn't quite that, and moreover any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council can veto a membership application. 

Brooks contends that no one country should be able to veto a UN membership bid and that a way should be found to bypass the veto power, perhaps by reviving a 1950 SC resolution that was used to break a deadlock over the Korean War by giving "the General Assembly the power to overrule the Security Council in some instances...." The likelihood of this occurring, I would say, is minimal, but it's an interesting proposal.  
 
However, in terms of the way it's organized, the problem with Brooks's generally good article is that it begins with a discussion of Abkhazia, a region in the west of Georgia (see map here) that declared itself independent in 1999 but is recognized as an independent state only by Russia and four other countries. (The four are Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru and Tuvalu, the latter two being tiny island states in the Pacific.) 

Abkhazia is thus not a case of an entity that would benefit from a 'normalization' of the recognition procedure or a bypassing of the Security Council veto, since virtually no country wants to recognize it except Russia. Brooks quotes a Russian spokesman as saying "we encourage everybody to accept the new geopolitical reality in the South Caucasus. Two independent states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, exist there alongside Georgia." This is Moscow's position and (with respect to Abkhazia at least) Venezuela's and Nicaragua's position, and Nauru's and Tuvalu's, all of whose positions have, as one might delicately put it, been influenced by Russian financial largesse. But the other 180-plus sovereign states in the world aren't buying this "new geopolitical reality."    

Accordingly, Brooks tacks on a coda proposing that residents of "disputed territories" like Abkhazia should have their rights to travel freely, for example, guaranteed by some mechanism, perhaps a revival of something like the UN Trusteeship Council. Again, I don't know whether this particular mechanism is the right one, but the basic idea of enhancing the rights of Abkhazians and others similarly situated seems reasonable.

Two other quibbles with the piece: it uses "state" and "nation" interchangeably, which I think should be avoided if possible, and it refers at one point to the "rigidity" of territorial boundaries in negative terms. In fact the rigidity of boundaries has some significant benefits as well as some costs; for further discussion, see, e.g., here.

P.s. Be sure to catch the very short poem quoted at the very end of Brooks's article.

Further reading: Mikulas Fabry, Recognizing States (Oxford U.P., 2010).

The apparent mystery of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

If one glances through some of the reportage of the last week on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as I just did, one finds him described by people who knew him as, among other things, "laid back," "nice," "quite studious" and "a pot head." Among people his own age who knew him and among former teachers, there appears to be uniform astonishment and incredulity at his involvement in the Boston bombings. Is this the case of a "normal" 19-year-old who was "corrupted" by his older brother? Or of someone who concealed his views -- and an aspect of his personality -- from people who knew him? Or some of both? There are enough as-yet-unanswered questions here that one can anticipate a small crowd of journalists already gearing up to produce their very-long-articles-based-on-hundreds-of-interviews-shortly-thereafter-to-become-books. (I assume the genre is a familiar one to readers.)   

Serbia-Kosovo agreement

Here (down toward bottom of the transcript).

Chechnya/Dagestan primer

By M. Fisher: here.

See also here; includes this:

In July [2012], Russian security officials announced that for the first six months of the year, through all of the North Caucasus, 194 militants had been killed, along with 104 police officers and 32 civilians. They expressed satisfaction that this represented a decline from the year before.

Fisher notes that the Russian approach to these regions has been repression rather than an effort to address underlying grievances. I don't know enough about the Caucasus to comment much; but he might have mentioned what proportion of the population in Dagestan is involved in (or passively supports) violent separatist and/or jihadist activity.

Are these the streets of a U.S. city?

Except for the words "Boston Police" on the vehicle, the image -- see here (there's a 14-second ad first) -- looks more like something from the streets of a war zone (think Baghdad, Belfast, or Sarajevo during the relevant times). Hard to believe the quarry is one 19-year-old, no matter how armed, dangerous, and apparently depraved.

Hunger strike at Guantanamo continues

Amidst all the other news, some may have missed that a hunger strike by Guantanamo Bay prisoners, some of whom have been held for years without being charged and see no prospect of release, is ongoing. Some of the prisoners are being force-fed. (See this AP story here.) The topic has been covered extensively at this blog. One letter-writer to the blog I just linked suggests that only Amy Goodman (of Democracy Now) is discussing the hunger-strike story. That's not the case; the 'mainstream' press is covering it. Still, the story should be getting more attention than it has been getting.

The world's greatest deliberative body

The U.S. Senate has defeated the gun background checks legislation (Manchin-Toomey). Sigh.

Maggie and Augusto

Via.

"Syria Behind the Lines"

Jeffrey Brown interviews Olly Lambert, director of the documentary Syria Behind the Lines. Among other things, Lambert describes seeing a government plane dropping a bomb on a village, and the aftermath. (There are also excerpts from the film.)

Afghanistan roundtable

Heard this a.m., on C-Span radio, parts of a discussion from yesterday (at the Cato Institute) on the Afghanistan war(s). Participants: Rajiv Chandresekaran, James Dobbins, Gian Gentile. Worth a listen if you're interested. (Google around for a link -- I'm too busy to put one in, sorry.)

P.s. Two costly Taliban attacks today (the casualties including a U.S. foreign service officer).

Note to readers

I will not be doing much posting in April -- have some other things on the plate.