Henry

Two interesting articles in the _Chronicle_.

Peter Monaghan on film and the difficulties of dealing with Heidegger’s legacy.

and John B. Thompson on the problems of academic publishing, considered from a sociological perspective.

Two interesting articles in the new issue of the Boston Review. Joe Carens makes a political-theoretical argument that we have an obligation to grant citizenship to most immigrants and their children. Jennifer Gordon argues on practical grounds that those who want strong trade unions should be in favour of granting citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants. She writes about how these workers are exploited in sweatshop situations, and how the threat of alerting immigration authorities is used to enforce compliance and to squash union membership drives. On the one hand, this means that the workers who are most vulnerable to exploitation and most in need of union representation are extremely hard for unions to reach. While new forms of protection – worker centers – have sprung up, they’re structurally disadvantaged and only cover a small number of undocumented immigrants. On the other, the existence of a large working population which has no choice but to accept the conditions that they are offered weakens the bargaining power of organized labour more generally. As Gordon writes:

bq. A serious attack on the very worst work in this country will require immigration reform to allow undocumented workers to legalize their status, removing the greatest source of their vulnerability to exploitation; a genuine commitment to enforcing the worker-protection laws that currently languish on the books; and a significant investment in new forms of organizing—including worker centers.

Robert Lemieux has an interesting analysis of the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law forbidding the sale or purchase of private health insurance. I’m not sure if the _Lochner_ analogy isn’t a little strong, but this does seem to be a worrying precedent, whatever the substantive merits of the decision.

bq. Every day, though, I see in the faces of men around me the longing that led me to the reservoir that night, and every day I shudder at the thought that one of them could have been sent to further my indoctrination. I turn away from their stares, I do not return their kind words, and I petition people in power to recognize the grotesque threat among us.

Matthew Cheney stakes a strong claim for the office of Elder Tentacled Abomination in the Order of the Shrill.

I was on the Odyssey show on Chicago NPR yesterday, debating blogs with Eugene Volokh, and got a question that floored me in the opening minutes of the discussion (audio link here). I was asked by the radio host what we knew about bloggers – and responded that there were a lot of them, and that while we didn’t know much about the profile of bloggers in general, we did know that the “big” political bloggers tend to be overwhelmingly male, white and well educated. She then asked me how I knew that these bloggers were white, and I floundered for some seconds before saying that many had pictures up on the WWW. This wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, as many don’t have pictures, and even those that do might in theory be putting fake pictures up for the hell of it. Probably the more accurate answer is that I infer it from the way that Technorati 100 bloggers overwhelmingly tend to discuss the kinds of things that white well educated guys with mildly-to-very geeky interests in technology, pop culture and science fiction like to talk about. At a later point in the interview, we were both asked whether this was a problem. Eugene thought not so much – there’s a lot of political diversity among well educated males. I disagreed – there are some real issues with, say, the way that politics is defined. Certain issues get discussed to death; others are systematically overlooked. If a different crew of people had been there at the outset of the blogosphere, and able to take advantage of the massive network effects/path dependence, the blogosphere could have been a very different place indeed. On the one hand, the blogosphere does seem to me to have made a real contribution to diversity in the media as a whole. Some voices that tend systematically to get shut out, say, from the op-ed pages of the major dailies, play a real role. The left is a lot stronger and diverse in the blogosphere than it is in the mainstream media. But that doesn’t mean that we should think that the blogosphere itself is a level playing field for all forms of opinion; it isn’t.

My floundering aside, I should note that Gretchen Helfrich who hosts Odyssey, did far better at asking interesting and searching questions about the blogosphere than anyone else who has interviewed me on the topic before (or who I’ve heard interviewing other people). That’s in part a function of the hour long format, which allows for more expansive discussion, but only in part.

I’ve just spotted via Fistful of Euros‘ blogroll that Richard Corbett, a Member of the European Parliament, has a blog. While this will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of CT readers, Corbett is one of the most interesting figures in EU politics. Over the last twenty years, the Parliament has been extraordinarily successful in grabbing new competences – often in the teeth of opposition from the Council (which represents the interests of the member states in day-to-day law making). Corbett has been one of the key figures in the Parliament’s ascent to power – he’s got an extraordinarily keen sense for how dull-sounding procedures can be manipulated to produce substantive political gains. His blog, unsurprisingly, is vigorously in favour of more European integration – but he makes points that nicely undermine some of the common wisdom on the EU in the English speaking world. For one nice example, see his post arguing (correctly) that France has never been as pro-European as it’s to be; by and large, it’s only been in favour of those bits of the EU that directly benefit French interests. For another, see this one, which links to a report from the frothing right-wingers in the Adam Smith Institute arguing in favour of dumping UK business regulation in favour of a reliance on EU Regulations (which they also propose to reform to make more business friendly). There’s a widely spread belief in the US and UK that the EU is a vast, all-devouring Socialist Moloch. In fact, its primary goal over the last twenty years has been to build a single marketplace and dismantle national regulation (often, in so doing, weakening the ability of member states to maintain traditional forms of social-democratic control of the market). If you’re interested in EU politics, this is definitely going to be a very useful blog.

I’ve updated the academic blogroll, for the first time in a couple of months – there are many additions. My apologies to all those who have been waiting to be added – a combination of other responsibilities, and the fact that changing the blogroll is a little more painful in our new WordPress incarnation than in MT have led to me keeping on putting off the evil day of updating it. That, and the fact that it’s increasingly becoming impossible for one person to keep up with every new academic blog out there. If I’ve inadvertently left someone out, or if there’s someone else I ought to add, please let me know in comments or by email.

I spent a fair chunk of time over the last few months working as chair for one of the divisions of the annual American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, which is being held this year in Washington DC. It was an eye-opener – I’d never understood how the decision-making process worked before; i.e. how decisions are made over which paper proposals are accepted or rejected. It was also somewhat startling to see how many good papers don’t end up being accepted through no fault of their own. If I had had the slots, I would have accepted twice as many papers for my division as I was able to – there were a number of very good paper proposals that ended up not being accepted due to reasons of space or fit. But there is also a political economy to the process of decision-making; if you understand it properly (I didn’t, prior to participating in the process), you can maximize your chances of getting a good proposal accepted. Mediocre or bad papers are of course still likely to end up on the cutting room floor. Some lessons are posted below the fold. NB that these only apply to the APSA meeting – the processes of choice (and hence the best means to maximizing your likelihood of paper acceptance) will vary dramatically from conference to conference. Those with expert knowledge of other conferences and other disciplines are invited to share tips and experiences in comments.
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A few weeks ago, Michael Bérubé wrote a snarky post responding to a Joseph Epstein review of Elaine Showalter’s Faculty Towers, a brief history of the academic novel. As Michael says, the essay “honestly isn’t very good,” but I can understand why a little better after reading Showalter’s book. _Faculty Towers_ isn’t very good either, and it isn’t very good in the same ways as Epstein’s essay.
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Mark Schmitt and Matt Yglesias have an interesting debate on whether the term “information age” is a metaphor, synechdoche or a description of a more-or-less tangible empirical phenomenon. I’ll have more to say about this soonish when I finish reading Bruce Abramson’s Digital Phoenix ; but in the meantime want to recommend those interested in this question to Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy (which we ran a seminar on in 2004).

Update: And Ed Kilgore jumps in too, arguing, as best as I can tell, that skepticism about the information age is rooted in nostalgia for a 1950’s version of social democracy, that only ever applied to the “aristocracy of labor” in the North.

Have just found out that the better part of the argument that I made in this post, and which I imagined in a rather self-satisfied way to be quite original, was made (apparently some weeks ago) by Mark Leonard in this online piece for _Foreign Policy_ (online). Oh well. Great minds and all that … (or perhaps, as has just been revealed in my case, not so great).

Reading some of the responses to Chris's and my posts on Turkey and the future evolution of the European Union, reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s aside a couple of weeks ago, that:

bq. The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of, and/or to rule out foreigners from the relevant moral universe.

The latter bit is the relevant one here, of course, and it’s a tough question for European leftwingers. Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially increases the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club). My answer is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness, egalitarianism etc. Of course, this is a somewhat broader variant of the more general theoretical questions surrounding the relationship between nationality and cosmopolitanism. So far, I haven’t seen any very convincing counter-arguments that suggest that lefties should privilege fellow-Europeans or fellow nationals over those from elsewhere. Below the fold, I set out some of the arguments that I’ve seen or can think of, but that don’t seem to me to be convincing. Others may disagree – or have other, better arguments that I haven’t thought of.

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Welcome to the blogosphere to Duck of Minerva, a new group blog featuring two international relations professors (Dan Nexon and Patrick Jackson) and a grad student (Bill Petti). The IR-academic corner of the blogosphere has been relatively underpopulated up until very recently. With this new blog, and the forthcoming contribution from John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie Slaughter (an international lawyer, but we can stretch a point) and friends, it’s experiencing a bit of a population boom. Nice to see.

A few thoughts in response to the (not exactly unexpected) outcome in France.

(1) The old way of pushing European integration – agreements among political elites, followed by the odd referendum here and there – is dead. My best-guess prediction – a lot more emphasis in the future on ‘informal’ integration processes such as the Lisbon agenda. I also predict that some of the key issues _will_ be revisited in a future quasi-constitutional text, which will attempt to lay down the law for once and for all. There are a number of dry-as-dust issues regarding the balance between different institutions, between member states on the Council etc which aren’t attracting much attention outside the specialist community now, but which are likely to provoke interesting political crises down the line. Hence, I think there will be another effort to push through Treaty change a few years from now – but unlike previous efforts, it will be proceeded by a widespread and vociferous public debate. The last Constitutional Convention tried very hard to create political buzz and debate, and failed miserably. Their successors won’t have much difficulty in getting attention, for better or for worse.

(2) The Turkish accession process is likely to be a lot more robust than people are giving it credit for being at the moment. The major political decision was taken last year, to open up negotiations with Turkey. The next major political decision comes at least a decade from now, when the member states and Parliament decide whether or not to accept Turkey as a member state. In the meantime, the political running will be made by the European Commission, which is the only body involved in direct negotiations. It’s going to be hard for grumpy member states to disrupt this, even if they want to. Frank Schimmelfennig had a great article in _International Organization_ a few years ago, talking about how the states of Central and Eastern Europe became members of the EU – despite the unwavering opposition of key member states such as France. The processes that he identifies aren’t as powerful in the Turkish case as in the East European one – but they will make it harder to reverse negotiations than one might imagine. The only situation in which I can see Turkey’s accession being seriously endangered is if renewed opposition from the Christian Democratic right (and parts of the left) coincide with reluctance on Turkey’s part to make the necessary concessions in terms of human rights, the role of the military etc etc.

(3) The above said, I do suspect that we are going to see more overt opposition within the European Union to Turkey, e.g. the election of a significant number of candidates on an anti-Turkey platform in the next round of elections to the European Parliament. More generally, depending on how the Christian Democrats finesse this, the extreme right may be able to make hay with this. Contrary to the usual implications in the blogosphere, West European neo-Nazis rely less on anti-Semitism than on ‘Little Green Footballs’ style xenophobia to drum up popular appeal; Turkey is potentially a winning issue for them.

(4) Finally, I suspect that there are tough decisions ahead for the European left. While the Glyn Morgan piece that Chris links to is correct in arguing that some leftists are reaching for the security blanket of nationalism, they clearly will find it far more awkward to make that grab than do their competitors on the right. Herbert Kitschelt (link to Google Scholar page) made an argument a decade ago that still holds. European social democrats are in a sticky position, in that they need to appeal to two, very different electorates in order to win elections. On the one hand, their traditional base is in the working class (which is economically left-wing but often socially conservative). On the other, they’ve often succeeded in appealing to a new set of ‘postmaterialist’ voters, who are usually more centrist on economic issues, but a lot more left wing on cultural ones). If they want to win, they need both – but the two adhere to very different ideas of what the left is (one is on the economic left, the other is on the cultural left). It seems to me that European social democrats can move in one of two directions. Either they can rework the economic cleavage so as to attract middle class voters as well as the working class, by stressing how the middle class too is subject to economic instability and insecurity. Or they can try to remake the cultural cleavage, by seeking to persuade voters that stronger border controls, opposition to Turkish membership etc aren’t xenophobic, and that Islam is ‘different,’ fundamentally anti-liberal etc etc. My hope is that they go for the former rather than the latter, but I’d hesitate to lay any bets on whether this hope is likely to be confirmed by reality.