International Politics

“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/facebook-and-freedom/ describes this “Malcolm Gladwell piece”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/facebook-and-freedom/ as a ‘smart’ take on ‘how the kind of “weak ties” promoted by online social media can’t do the kind of work of the kind of “hard ties” that the leaders of the civil rights movement used to knock down an authoritarian system.’ I did a “bloggingheads with Julian Sanchez”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/31257?in=52:12&out=60:32 yesterday where we discussed this piece – and, to put it mildly, we didn’t find it smart (Julian describes it as his ‘most recent excretion’). Not because it was necessarily _wrong,_ but because it did the usual Gladwell trick of taking a vaguely counter-conventional-wisdom argument (in this case, a rehashing of what Yevgeny Morozov has been saying for the last couple of years), adding some quasi-digested social science and a couple of illustrative anecdotes, and then spinning out a _New Yorker_ article. He’s a good writer (for pre-masticated values of ‘good writing’) but a quite mediocre thinker.

I’ll confess to being _particularly annoyed_ by the Gladwell piece because it seems like the purest possible distillation of the intellectual-debate-through-duelling-anecdotes that has plagued discussion over the Internet and authoritarian regimes over the last few years. As this “new report”:http://www.usip.org/files/resources/pw65.pdf (PDF) for the US Institute of Peace (co-authored by Sean Aday, me, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly and Ethan Zuckerman) discusses at some length, we more or less have _no idea_ of whether Internet based media hurt authoritarianism, lead to group polarization or anything else.

bq. The sobering answer is that, fundamentally, no one knows. To this point, little research has sought to estimate the causal effects of new media in a methodologically rigorous fashion, or to gather the rich data needed to establish causal influence. Without rigorous research designs or rich data, partisans of all viewpoints turn to anecdotal evidence and intuition.

The report provides a kind of toy investigation of the Iran protests using network analysis and basic data on informational diffusion to discipline the anecdotes, but is primarily focused on pushing for _actual research_ (which would take substantial investments in developing tools and gathering data) that might try to answer the relevant questions. Without such research, we’ll be left relying on Malcolm Gladwell articles to guide our thinking. And that is not a particularly good place to be.

“Martin Wolf in the FT today”:http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2010/07/25/the-political-genius-of-supply-side-economics/

bq. Whatever the rhetoric, I have long considered the US the advanced world’s most Keynesian nation – the one in which government (including the Federal Reserve) is most expected to generate healthy demand at all times, largely because jobs are, in the US, the only safety net for those of working age.

I’m not sure I agree (or more precisely: your level of agreement with this statement will depend on exactly how you want to define Keynesianism) – but it’s worth pointing out that this is at the least quite consonant with Tyler Cowen’s “arguments about Germany”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/business/18view.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=tyler%20cowen&st=cse. On the one hand, this intellectual convergence could be taken as suggesting that Tyler’s case suggests that German-style social democracy works better than US style Keynesianism (an argument which I _think_ Tyler agrees with, at least with respect to Germans). On the other, it could be taken as suggesting that despite Wolf’s frequent minatory statements about the external consequences of the German model, he believes that it works better in relative terms than US-style Keynesianism in providing _internal_ economic security and political stability. Certainly, he is quite skeptical about the prospects of the US economic system given Republicans’ role as a blocking minority and perhaps majority in the near future (his most provocative suggestion is that Republicans are a perverted species of Keynesians).

The “juxtaposition”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15cd24ee-73c4-11df-bc73-00144feabdc0.html of two quotes in an article on Turkey in today’s _FT_ is pretty interesting.

bq. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, attacked the “very unfortunate choices” by Turkey and Brazil, the other country to oppose the measures. “They are now the outliers,” she said of the two traditional US allies. “They are standing outside of the rest of the Security Council, outside of the body of the international community.” Russia and China, long doubtful about sanctions, voted in favour after a dogged US campaign for support.

and

bq. On Wednesday, Robert Gates, defence secretary, suggested European Union reluctance to admit Turkey as a member could be pushing it away from the west and expressed concern about the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli ties. “If there’s anything to the notion that Turkey is moving eastwards, it is in no small part because it was pushed, and it was pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the west that Turkey sought,” he said while visiting London.

American notions of ‘international community’ are pretty weird if you look at them at all closely. On the one one hand, Rice’s quote suggests that the ‘international community’ more or less reduces down to ‘states that are prepared to agree, however reluctantly, with the US belief that Iran needs to be punished.’ Turkey and Brazil are members of the UN in good standing – and on various counts (democracy etc), they have a lot more legitimacy than e.g. Russia and China. On the other, Gates’ view (entirely apart from its rather dishonest failure to acknowledge that US support for Israel may have done a wee little bit to alienate Turkey) suggests that membership of the European Union isn’t very much more than a generic recognition of Turkey as part of the ‘west’ (whatever the ‘west is construed to be). I’m very strongly in favor of Turkey becoming a member of the EU – but like everyone who has looked at this at all closely, I recognize that this would involve big changes to both Turkey and the EU, and that the EU is not a standard international organization. So on the one hand the US sees the international community as nothing more or less than the states which are prepared to go along with its priorities, and on the other hand, when the US encounters _actual_ communities in the international sphere, it thinks that they should hand out membership of this community without any debate because it would serve the US’s geostrategic interests. As I say, weird.

Update: see also “Charlemagne”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/06/turkey_and_eu.

When I read the _Financial Times_ review of Joris Luyendijk’s _People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East_ last year, I knew it was a book I wanted and needed to read (Australian title is _Fit to Print_). So I placed an order on amazon.uk that very morning. But it never came and I only just got my hands on a second-hand copy. Amazon (US and UK) are both listing it as out-of-print. Which is a pity, because you need to read it too. Some of it will be familiar to intelligent and well-informed people: of course we _know_ things work like that. But it is hard to keep the knowledge one has of the news process in view, when watching TV, reading the papers, listening to the radio over breakfast. Luyendijk will, at the very least, do the necessary job of keeping us sensitized.
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Via Kevin Jon Heller and Una Vera, I just came across Jeremy Scahill’s Nation piece about Blackwater’s operations in Pakistan. Nasty stuff, not the least of which is the allegation that Blackwater operatives are masquerading as aid workers. The predictable consequence will be that aid workers (and not just in Pakistan) will be targeted for assassination, kidnap and torture to a greater degree than at present. Hard to exaggerate just how bad this is.

Two photos today. My partner, Pauline Powell and I visited East Germany and West Berlin in 1984. The first picture is a shot of the Berlin Wall from the western side, and seems appropriate as tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of its fall. The second shot, taken inside the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, announces one of the prayers for peace meetings that helped to build the popular movement that would eventually contribute to the fall of the regime. (Some details of this are on the St. Nikolai Church website.)Both pictures are Pauline’s, not mine (all rights reserved etc). We believe the swords into ploughshares picture is unique on the web, though perhaps others exist as prints. As such, it is something of a historic document.

Being the second part of my reply to “Eric Posner”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/26/bloggingheads-cont%E2%80%99d/ …

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Eric Posner has “two”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/27/reply-to-henry-farrell-part-ii/ “responses”:http://volokh.com/2009/10/26/bloggingheads-cont%E2%80%99d/ to my earlier post on international law. I’ll be writing two responses to the responses – the first (on Eric’s second rebutting post) beneath the fold [click to continue…]

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2009/10/the-goldstone-report-and-international-law/

I thought the FT leader on the Goldstone report got it about right. The report on Israel’s assault on Gaza is a serious bit of work and it’s fairly desperate to try to discredit it by calling its author a “self-hating Jew”. The bigger problem lies with the UN Human Rights Council … And lying behind that, is a still bigger problem with the very idea of impartial international law. … I asked whether international law really deserved the same status as domestic law? After all, the very basis of justice in a nation-state is equality before the law – anybody who commits a murder should be arrested and prosecuted, no matter how powerful they are. But this basic principle does not apply in the international arena. Almost all the people hauled before the ICC have been African leaders; and the UN special tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (where Goldstone was chief prosecutor) only got to prosecute the likes of Milosevic because Serbia was defeated in a war. … The trouble is that … the system of international law that we currently have is as much about power in the international system, as about human rights or the law.

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Wow, that was fast! President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I am sure many Americans (and others) will be thinking “It’s too soon. He hasn’t done anything yet!” Or even “Dude can’t even pass health care already, but he’s been elevated to international sainthood?”.

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.

There’s more to it than just the Bush presidency being a total downer for everyone in the world who cares about multi-lateralism or just wants to do business with the US. The tidal wave of bad faith Bush’s presidency created washed away any chance of progress in so many international initiatives.

Obama’s not a game changer per se, but he’s changed how people feel about playing the game, or whether they even want to.

Or, as the Nobel committee says;

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play”.

Of course that’s not the view of everyone outside of America. I’m at an informal meeting of donors, government reps and NGOs to talk about independent media and economic development. It’s a pretty international crowd, and opinions are about evenly split on whether Obama’s peace prize is sublime or ridiculous. [click to continue…]

I was kind of surprised to see that the wonderful Tom Russell has a long essay on some new blog called The Rumpus, all about Juarez, El Paso, drug wars, borderlands, corruption, et cetera. I love his music, and I like his writing too, so I’m always pleased to see some more of it. The content, though, the content is shocking.

bq. I turned that page in section B where there was a short item about two El Pasoans slain yesterday in a Juarez bar shooting. Back page stuff. Hidden near the end of the story was the astounding body count: _nearly 2900 people, including more than 160 this month alone, have been killed in Juarez since a war between drug traffickers erupted January 2008_ . John Wesley Hardin wouldn’t stand a chance.

Jesus. You’re probably safer in Kandahar.

Maureen Corrigan reviewed sometime CT commenter George Scialabba’s new book What Are Intellectuals Good For? on Fresh Air last night. I’m only about half way through it myself, and am reading in the chaotic way that I tend to read collections (moving randomly between chapters at whim — though to be honest I read just about everything other than detective stories the same way), but I agree with her very positive review so far, especially enjoying the several invocations and discussions of Matthew Arnold whom Scialabba admires greatly. She says:

What Are Intellectuals Good For?, has been published in a beautiful paperback edition by the tiny Pressed Wafer. No one could expect it to be a stealth best-seller. But if you’re at all interested in 20th century thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Dwight Macdonald, William F. Buckley, Ellen Willis and Christopher Lasch to name a few, and in the larger question of whether the world would be poorer if they’d never written a word, then you’ll find Scialabba’s ruminations here invigorating. In fact, just reading Scialabba’s collection will make you feel smarter — even if it’s not clear if that kind of smarts has any direct social utility.

In fact I’d take issue with a little bit of that. It makes me feel stupider, not smarter, but I like books that do that. And I don’t, really, see why it shouldn’t become a stealth best seller. The in-progress CT book event will, no doubt, transform it at least into a stealth pretty-good-seller. (In fact, at time of posting it is #112 at amazon, no doubt somewhat helped by her review).

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I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. [click to continue…]

Back when I was the director of the humanities program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we had our conferences and our lecture series and such things.  For obvious reasons, it is much more difficult to host such things than to be a guest at them, and the experience taught me not only what it’s like to have Host Anxiety Dreams but also — I hope! — how to be a Good Guest.  What’s it like to deal with the Guest From Hell?  Well, one year, at the urging of a colleague, I booked a speaker who wound up changing his flight arrangements at the last moment, at a stunning cost of $1000, and then cancelled on us anyway.  When he eventually arrived, the next semester, he gave a mildly interesting if off-the-cuff talk, went home, and then sent me an outraged email when his honorarium arrived, for, although it was in the amount we’d stipulated, it was not in the amount to which he had (quite quickly!) become accustomed.  When I pointed this out to him, things quickly escalated to the point at which he threatened to tell my dean on me, to which I replied,  please do, by all means, and I will be happy to copy your department chair and dean on all our correspondence, going back to your initial change of travel plans and subsequent cancellation.  That ended <i>that</i> little exchange, and I don’t believe we’ve kept in touch since.

Anyway, having encountered a few Guests From Hell, I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to host an entire Speakers’ Series From Hell.  And now I know!

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