Henry

Over at Eugene’s lair, Ilya Somin opines on Mario Puzo’s original novel of _The Godfather_, and the sociology of the Italian and American mafias.

Puzo recognized, as sociologist Diego Gambetta explained more systematically, that the Sicilian Mafia flourished because it provided better “protection” against crime and violations of property and contract rights than did the official authorities, who generally protected only the politically powerful elite.

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Several days late and dollars short, my response to Jonathan Chait’s essay on the Netroots. It’s taken me a while to write something, because his underlying thesis is expressed a little circuitously, and I’ve wanted to be sure that I understood exactly what he was saying. Short version – there’s a serious argument in there. But it’s wrong, or at the least badly exaggerated. [click to continue…]

Like a few other CTers, I’m swamped with end of semester duties at the moment, but wanted to point to this very useful FT article on the background to the Turkey crisis, and make a few short arguments in lieu of a proper post. As Brad DeLong often says, the FT is the best newspaper in the world (albeit not entirely without flaws); certainly, I haven’t seen any detailed English language analysis anywhere of the lead-up that competes with this piece.

the story of the past few weeks is a tale of misunderstandings, sexism, snobbery, bruised egos and mutinous soldiers, from which nobody emerges with much credit. … Mr Erdogan seemed to be racked with indecision over whether to run for the presidency himself … But he knew that his would be a divisive candidacy … he and his closest advisers settled on two possible candidates from his party who would be acceptable to the army. … Getting the generals on side had proved unexpectedly easy. … The man he had to convince most of all was Bulent Arinc, the speaker of parliament. … Mr Arinc also wanted to be president. But his candidacy would have been even more divisive than Mr Erdogan’s. … After much deliberation, the three agreed that the candidate would have to be Mr Gul. …at general staff headquarters, … there was a sense of shock. What had happened to the two agreed candidates?

The immediate roots of the crisis are in internal divisions in Turkish society and personality politics. But it’s interesting how outside actors have influenced these domestic battles over the last several years, and have responded to what’s happened in the last few days. The European Union, over the longer term, has exacerbated internal tensions in Turkey badly over the last few years, or in the very kindest interpretation has done nothing to help relieve them. The prospect of EU membership helped stabilize relations between Islamists and the army, promising Islamists a greater degree of religious freedom and human rights, while reassuring the army that Turkey wouldn’t become an Iran-lite style Islamist republic. The underlying tensions that have now exploded can be traced back in part to the ever more explicit reluctance of powerful EU member states to countenance Turkey joining, even in the long run. Even so, during the current impasse, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn has played a positive role by making it clear that a military coup, or anything like it, will stymie Turkey’s chances of membership more or less indefinitely. He’s also publicly warned member state governments that are skeptical of Turkish membership of the EU not to play politics. In contrast, the US, which should be held much less to blame over the longer term, has hinted that it isn’t entirely averse to the generals’ actions, saying that it considers the battle taking place to be an internal matter.

The current events in Turkey highlight starkly the contradictions in US policy. While the US has publicly committed to the spread of democracy etc, it hasn’t wanted to acknowledge that this spread is liable to go along with Islamists of one sort or another coming to power in regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even the relatively mild variety of political Islam in Turkey (which seems likely, under the right conditions, to turn into a Muslim version of Christian Democracy) seems to make US policy makers break out in hives. If the US doesn’t take a more forthright stance on the implicit threat of the Turkish generals to overthrow the regime if they don’t get their way, it says rather a lot about their actual, as opposed to their nominal, commitment to the spread of democracy (but then, its mostly supine attitude to the Egyptian ‘constitutional referendum’ in March has said quite a lot about that already).

In honour of International Pixel-stained Technopeasant Day, Charlie Stross is giving away his novella(??? I – never figured out the difference between novellas, novelettes etc myself) Missile Gap for thems that wants to download it. I’ve put it on my iRex Iliad (which I promise to write a proper review of after the end of semester crunch) for consumption on an upcoming plane trip. Other good stuff is available for free on the technopeasant page from Jo Walton (the main instigator), Sarah Monette etc.

Bits and pieces from elsewhere on the WWW in lieu of a proper post.

Via Tyler, I see that Dani Rodrik now has a blog. And has just won the first Albert Hirschman prize, which sounds to be an excellent institution, honoring “scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication. Hirschman is notoriously a prophet without honour in his own discipline; he’s far more widely read by sociologists (see Kieran’s article with Marion Fourcade for further discussion) and political scientists than by economists.

Cory Doctorow is turning out, in the best of all possible ways, to be an uncomfortable guest at the University of Southern California. There’s a lot more background in this interview he did with the _Chronicle_ a few weeks back, which I meant to link to at the time, and never quite got around to. More on this later today or tomorrow.

This bit at Chris Hayes’ blog (which you should all be reading) is thought provoking:

My friend Nick Reville once said something about public libraries that has always stuck with me. “If libraries didn’t already exist, there’d be no way they could ever come into existence now. Can you imagine telling the publishing industry that the government was going to pay to set up buildings where they gave away their product for free?” That’s as good a summary of our current political-economy as any.

I’ve mentioned before on CT that I’m a fan of Richard Stark’s (aka Donald Westlake) Parker novels, but I didn’t know that John Banville shared my admiration until I read his blurb on Stark’s most recent, Ask the Parrot

[One] of the greatest writers of the twentieth century … Richard Stark, real name Donald Westlake … His Parker books form a genre all their own

This surprised me; Banville is a wonderful writer (perhaps my favourite living novelist), but not the _kind_ of wonderful writer whom I would have thought likely to be an admirer of the Parker books. Banville’s best books ( _The Book of Evidence_; _The Untouchable_) are extended monologues delivered by shifty narrators who don’t themselves understand what’s driving them. In contrast, the Parker novels are all plot, taut and brutal. Few of the characters have complicated motivations, and when they do, it’s a problem for Parker and his colleagues, who are ruthless and clear-thinking professional criminals. Rich interior lives make for loose cannons.

I haven’t been able to track down the source of this quote using either Google or Lexis-Nexis. I have found a couple of articles where Banville describes his admiration for Stark/Westlake, including this Sunday Telegraph article where he compares Stark to Beckett and Simenon. He mentions that he names the main character in his most recent novel, _Christina Falls_ by his surname alone in homage to Parker. I haven’t read this yet, but am very interested to see what Banville makes of the noir genre (maybe Donald Westlake will in turn be inspired to do a rewrite, say, of _The Sea_ a la style Starkaise).

Another bloggingheads.tv with Will Wilkinson is up; among other things we talk about bad culturalist arguments and my sad yet inexorable decline into Goldberg Derangement Syndrome. I suggest that overly determinist cultural arguments aren’t very convincing, especially when they try to explain gross differences between societies. Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change. Coincidentally, I was involved in discussion today over an interesting-sounding new piece from Steve Pfaff, an University of Washington sociologist, forthcoming in Jeff Kopstein and Sven Steinmo’s new volume on divergence between the EU and US. It’s notorious that far fewer Europeans report going to church than Americans – this is often presented, especially in the pop-lit, as evidence of profound and lasting cultural divergence between the two. There’s good sociological reason to suggest that it is nothing of the sort – a key causal factor is the degree of marketplace competition.

In many European countries, churches are established and have official state support, so that they don’t have enormous need to tout for churchgoers. They’re monopolists, and as Albert Hirschman suggests, monopolists tend to be lazy. In the US, in contrast, the legal institution of church-state separation means that churches have to tout actively for business, often through means that appear crassly commercial to Europeans (megachurches and the like). Because they’ll disappear if they don’t attract adherents, they have good incentive to succeed rather better than their European counterparts in putting bums on seats. Apparently, there is a striking negative correlation between church establishment and church attendance across West European countries. Now this presumably isn’t the only causal factor – but it is an important one – and one which suggests that an apparently gross cultural divergence between the US and Europe is to a large extent rooted in the quite particular institutions governing church-state relations (you could perhaps claim that these institutions are themselves manifestations of broad cultural differences, but this would be to miss out on the quite specific historical reasons why they came into being).

Via Ezra Klein, I see that Jonah Goldberg has lapsed into what Ezra describes as a “weird revery over how the rugged individualism of Americans makes them totally unsuitable for social welfare programs.” In Goldberg’s own words:

I find interesting about the liberal defense of European welfare states (They really work! No Really!) is how they leave culture out of the equation almost entirely. … liberals are uncomfortable discussing the reality and constraints of culture for a host of reasons, from multiculturalism to vestigial hangups about seeing the world through prisms of class. … Maybe, just maybe, France and Denmark can handle the systems they have because they have long traditions of sucking-up to the state and throne? Marty Lipset wrote stacks of books on how Canadians and Americans have different forms of government because the Royalist, throne-kissing, swine left America for Canada during the Revolutionary War and that’s why they don’t mind big government, switched to the metric system when ordered and will wait on line like good little subjects…. If government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one, then how come it’s so damn hard bringing third world countries into the first world?

Now it’s a bit rich for a _National Review_ hack to be talking smack about “long traditions of sucking-up to to the state and throne.” But even if we were to pretend for a moment that Goldberg’s argument is serious, it’s terrible. First of all, it gets Lipset’s thesis badly wrong. While Lipset was keen on enduring American values, he didn’t pretend for a moment that they were the only force shaping US politics. Indeed, he explicitly documented how American values became more ‘European’ as a result of the institutional innovations of the New Deal (funnily enough, Goldberg seems to have missed that bit in his doubtless extensive reading on the topic). But more generally, sweeping claims about the all-determining-power of fixed national cultures have a godawful reputation in the social sciences these days. Values change, and sometimes change dramatically. Individuals are more than the passive bearers of cultural traits; they, like, make choices, and sometimes change their minds about things. The institutions that surround them change, and when these institutions change, so too, very often, do political beliefs, values etc.

There are respectable and serious scholars out there, who make more limited and specific contentions about how culture matters to politics (I tend not to agree with many of their arguments, but I obviously don’t have a monopoly on the truth). However, sweeping, half-assed claims that Culture is Destiny simply don’t feature in serious argument any more. Instead, they enjoy a sort of zombie-like half-life in some corners of the rightwing punditocracy, where their explanatory deficiencies are outweighed by their political usefulness in providing a higher justification for selfishness. Which is what seems to me to be happening here.

Over at his other digs, Scott responds to Ann Althouse’s YouTube video of herself watching American Idol, by Youtubing a video of himself watching Ann Althouse watching American Idol. Ladies and gentlemen; place your bets on how close we can get to infinite regress before it’s all over …

Update: Tim Lambert and his dog respond.

A new bloggingheads between Dan Drezner and meself is up, in which, as the blurb puts it, “Dan and Henry analyze Bh.tv’s new business model and then defy it by failing to yell at each other.” One of the topics we discuss is the economic future of the EU, and Andy Moravcsik’s recent article on it. As a slightly belated EU 50th birthday post, and an addendum to my previous disagreement with Andy, I’d like to point to this brand new paper (pdf) by Martin Höpner and Armin Schäfer at the Max-Planck Institut in Cologne. The take home point is that the EU’s market integration processes aren’t neutral and technical, as they are often described as being, but are instead highly political, and have adverse consequences for coordinated market economies. This feeds into the EU’s legitimation problems.

Deregulating the economy is a genuinely political decision that cannot be left to independent agents. … Whether the member states need a ‘neo-liberal’ corrective is not for the observer to choose but must be the result of public deliberation and parliamentary decisions – otherwise, the price to pay is a serious democratic deficit. However, instead of a strengthening of input-oriented legitimacy, we witness ongoing – yet increasingly unsuccessful – attempts to de-politicize EU politics. European-level actors transform essentially political matters into apparently technical ones. An extensive interpretation of the ‘four freedoms’ of the European Treaty allows Commission and Court to enforce
liberalization measures juridically. The law shields these attempts from political resistance especially in organized economies.

Which leads me to wonder, after having read Dani Rodrik’s critique of the cheerleaders of globalization in the _FT_ yesterday whether the EU isn’t being badly misinterpreted by outside observers, especially in the US. The usual claim that one reads is that the EU’s problems are the problems of creaking economies refusing to modernize, rejecting sensible proposals such as the original, tougher form of the Services Directive etc. But can’t this be interpreted from the other direction? Couldn’t one reasonably argue that the near-stalling of the EU’s market integration process demonstrates how over-strident efforts to deregulate are liable to result in political stalemate and backlash from an increasingly truculent public? In short, can’t the EU’s political problems be interpreted not as a failure of the European social state, but as a demonstration of the political limits of attempts to introduce global deregulation, free trade in services _und so weiter_ without real public discussion?

Scott has a new article over at _Inside Higher Ed_ talking about Borders, and reviewing the Indies Under Fire movie that I mentioned a few weeks ago. It sounds like a more complex and interesting movie than I expected from watching the trailer. Which reminds me – Jim Johnson suggested a while back that I should do a post on good bookshops, and consider linking to them in addition to/instead of Powells and Amazon when I review books. I have mixed feelings about linking to Amazon, which is a vociferously non-union operation, but get the impression that many or most CT users buy stuff there. So what good, alternative bookstores are out there? I’ll start by singing the praises of Prairie Lights in Iowa City which I visited this weekend, and which was teh awesome. Fabulous selection of small press books, and a book buyer who, after a brief conversation about Rick Perlstein’s forthcoming, came over to snoop shamelessly through the pile of novels that I was buying at the cash register (the kind of customer profiling I can live with happily). Other recommendations?

I blogged a while back about Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania,” which was the first in a series of four fantasy novels. I recently finished the third in the series, The White Tyger (Powells, Amazon) which is just as wonderful. The novels are profoundly character driven in a way that few genre novels are; they deliberately and specifically refuse to conform to a conventional quest narrative. No-one knows exactly what they’re supposed to do; they’re making it up as they go along. All of the main protagonists (and some of the minor ones) are in some sense or another _doubled_; their selves are split in two so that they have difficulty in explaining their motivations to themselves. The book is less a conventional fantasy story in which the story is external to the characters, determining who they are and what they do, than a working through of the ways that individuals make up their own fantasies, spinning out _ex post_ narratives to explain their actions to themselves and others. The main protagonists don’t know themselves.

This is most obvious in the character of Baroness Ceaucescu, who sees herself as the heroine of an opera, smoothing away the grubby and selfish motivations for her actions and reconfiguring them as the essential elements of a grand and inexorable tragedy, where she has no personal responsibility for what she does. She steals every scene that she’s in. The three novels are vertiginous, and a little jarring. They don’t have the feeling of safeness and stability that most fantasy novels do. All that is solid melts into air. Yet nor are they self-consciously or coyly reflexive (their contingency doesn’t seem playful to me; rather it appears like a very serious attempt to talk about how the world is). I don’t want to say more about _The White Tyger_ for fear of ruining surprises; I do want to recommend it (and I can’t wait to see what the fourth and final novel does).

Patrick Jackson and Stuart Kaufman have an interesting short piece (summary here, pdf here) in the new Perspectives on Politics on the Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy letter that they co-organized to express the opposition of IR professors to the Iraq war. They describe the letter as having had “remarkable success” in building a consensus among IR scholars, but having been a “miserable failure” in terms of its impact on public debate. The letter appears to have been self-consciously intended as an exercise in ‘Weberian activism.’ Max Weber draws a strong distinction between the vocation of the scholar and the vocation of the politician. Roughly speaking, the responsibility of the first in the public arena is to strive for understanding and education; the responsibility of the second is to persuade others to adopt the politician’s viewpoint. For the politician, words are weapons; for the scholar, ideal-typically, they aren’t. Thus, Jackson and Kaufman argue that Weber’s ideas provide a “guideline for how we social scientists should think about intervening in the political realm in a way that does not compromise the detachment and the nonpartisan character of our enterprise.” This didn’t work in the case of the SSFP letter, because the media aren’t equipped to deal with scientifically detached analyses, but academics should persist in seeking to be Weberian activists; that is, they should participate in the public space on issues of their expertise, without getting sucked into partisan debate. [click to continue…]

From what I’m hearing, it sounds probable that John Edwards is going to pull out of the race for Democratic candidate today, because of his wife’s health. I’m very sorry if this is so; Edwards is the candidate whom I would have voted for, if I had a vote. He’s as close to being a Social Democrat as can reasonably be expected of anyone in the mainstream of US politics, and seems as a person and candidate to be deeply smart, serious, and committed to making hard choices in order to right some of the economic inequalities that have become pervasive in this country. I’m even sorrier because of the circumstances. From all accounts, Elizabeth Edwards is an extraordinary force in her own right, combining a tough intelligence with a fundamental sense of decency. I wish them well.

Update: Elizabeth Edwards has had a recurrence of her cancer, but it appears to be treatable, albeit not curable; Edwards says he isn’t dropping out.

Update 2: See Jane Hamsher (and Elizabeth Edwards in comments).