World Politics

The seemingly imminent downfall of Muammar Gaddafi may not represent “the end of history”, but, for the moment at least, it’s pretty close to being the end of tyranny, in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election. Bonapartism (if you exclude its more specialised use to refer to supporters of the Bonaparte family claim to rule France) , is probably the closest modern equivalent. Forty-odd years ago, this kind of government was the rule rather than the exception in most regions of the world (notably including South America and the Communist bloc), and was represented even in Western Europe by Franco and Salazar.

Now, there’s Mugabe clinging to a share of power in Zimbabwe, along a bunch of less prominent, but still nasty, African dictators in the classic post-colonial mode (in the original post, I underestimated the number of these who are still around, but they are clearly a dying breed). Add in a handful of shaky-looking strongmen in the periphery of the former Soviet Union, and that’s about it for tyrants in the classical sense.

Normally classed as tyrants but not meeting the classical definition, Kim jr, Assad jr and Castro minor (and some others mentioned in comments), the first two of whom are certainly tyrannical in the ordinary modern sense, but all of whom inherited their positions, as of course, did the remaining absolute monarchs. The historical evidence, starting with Cromwell jr, and running through Baby Doc Duvalier and others is that regimes like this hardly ever make it to the third generation. They combine the low average ability inherent in hereditary systems with a lack of either royal or revolutionary, let alone democratic, legitimacy.

More interesting cases are those of Museveni in Uganda and Kagame in Rwanda, illustrations of the point that tyrants in the classic sense need not be bad, at least relative to the alternative they displaced. But these seem to be isolated examples, owing much of their appeal to the horrors that preceded them and the fear that those horrors might return.

More surprising to me are the number of cases where classic tyrants, having established one-party states, have been succeeded by self-selecting oligarchies – China is the most striking example, but Singapore also fits. Looking at the evidence of the past, I would have predicted that such oligarchies would either collapse in short order or see the emergence of a new tyrant, but there is no sign of that for the moment.

I don’t have a good theory to explain the rise of so many tyrants in the modern period, beginning with Bonaparte (or maybe Cromwell), or the sharp decline of this form of government from around the mid-1960s. But it seems that it’s a development worth noting.

fn1. Putin is often presented as being a near-dictator. But he doesn’t need to repress his opponents – it’s pretty clear he would easily win elections in Russia with or without doing so. Conversely, there’s no real evidence to suggest that he could or would hold on for long if public opinion turned sharply against him.

In March, I wrote about ICANN’s current leadership, and how it is costing the organization its key people and international reputation. I publicly addressed ICANN’s Board of Directors with my concerns during its San Francisco meeting, and was astonished by the level of support for my view. My aim was to make very public an issue that was deeply damaging to the organization behind closed doors and help make it impossible for the Board to continue to publicly ignore.

ICANN’s Board has now decided not to renew Rod Beckstrom’s contract as CEO when the deal expires in 2012.* There had been calls for Beckstrom to resign or be fired before the end of his contract, but I’m glad the Board is ensuring that the search for a new CEO is not rushed unnecessarily. Hasten slowly, as my grandmother used to say.

As many know, the Board’s new Chair, Dr. Steve Crocker, has spent considerable time over the past year or so on regular phone calls to Rod Beckstrom, not so much in coaching mode as providing a sounding board and voice of experience. That solid working relationship is a credit to both and will help to ease the transition to new leadership.

The Board has given itself time to think hard about a new CEO and make sure the decision is the right one. Presumably they will set up a search committee. I hope that committee can include or consult members of the Internet community. Here are some points the search committee might consider.

‘Multi-stakeholder’ is not a slogan. It’s ICANN’s DNA.

Rod’s most obvious legacy is a largely new, mostly American executive team with shallow ties to the global Internet naming and numbering community. They will need to work hard with the community to show they understand that ‘multi-stakeholder’ is more than a slogan, and that transparency and accountability are not optional. [click to continue…]

This is just a short post seeking, for the purposes of mutual clarification, to highlight where I think the real differences lie between someone like me and “left neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias. I think that something like Yglesias’s general stance would be justifiable if you believed in two things: (1) prioritarianism in the Parfit sense and (2) that real (that is, inflation adjusted) income levels reliably indicate real levels of well-being, at least roughly. For those who don’t know, prioritarianism is a kind of weighted consequentialism, such that an improvement in real well-being counts for more, morally speaking, if it goes to someone at a lower rather than a higher level of well-being. So prioritarism is a bit like a utilitarianism that takes a sophisticated and expansive view of utility and weights gains to the worse-off more highly. This view assigns no instrinsic importance to inequality as such. If the best way to improve the real well-being of the worst off is to incentize the talented (thereby increasining inequality) then that’s the right thing to do.
[click to continue…]

I’ve been thinking about what, if anything, to write about the events in Norway. Obviously one’s first thoughts are with the victims of what was an especially horrible crime. I was in Oslo in April, and it really is hard for me to imagine an event such as this taking place there. Really dreadful and heartbreaking, especially since so many of the victims were young, committed, people who looked likely to make an important contribution to the life of their country.

I’m going to limit myself to a few thoughts on its wider significance. Obviously the killer is in some sense crazy, though whether that is technically true is a matter for the professionals. He was imbued with some version of an ideology which is widespread on the internet and to some extent in Western societies: nativism, extreme anxiety about Islam, hatred for liberal multiculturalist “enablers” of this, and so on. Ideas to be found on thousands of blogs, in the writings of wingnut columnists and neocons, in the shared beliefs of Tea Partiers and birthers, among the rabble of the English Defence League, and among the further fringes of extreme supporters of Israel. Is this fascist? I don’t think arguments about definitions are particularly useful. Some of this current predates 9/11, but in its current form it is a product of the US and global reaction to the attacks on the Word Trade Center. Plain and simple racist movements existed before 9/11, but this focus on a particular religion and its adherents coupled with the adoption of extreme pro-Zionism by the formerly anti-semitic right is something new. (This isn’t a single movement though, it is a spectrum, and elements of it have even been given cover, credibility and respectability by people who think of themselves as being on the left but who backed the Iraq war, strongly supported Israel over Lebanon and Gaza and who disseminate propaganda attacking those who take a different line to them on the Middle East as antisemitic racists.)

Following the Norway massacre many of the elite scribblers of this spectrum — many of whom have played the guilt-by-association game to the max over the last decade — are disclaiming all responsibility. Well, of course, they didn’t pull the trigger, but they helped to build an epistemic environment in which someone did. We may be, now, in the world that Cass Sunstein worried about, a world where people select themselves into groups which ramp up their more-or-less internally coherent belief systems into increasingly extreme forms by confirming to one another their perceived “truths” (about Islam, or Obama’s birth certificate, or whatever) and shutting out falsifying information. Put an unstable person or a person with a serious personality disorder into an environment like that and you have a formula for something very nasty happening somewhere, sooner or later. Horribly, that somewhere was Norway last Friday.

Will Hutton had a piece in the Observer a week ago about immigration policy in the course of which he made the following remark:

bq. the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.

I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold:
[click to continue…]

In my post on bin Laden’s death, I noted the spin in a New York Times story suggesting that torture had helped to extract the clues leading to bin Laden’s location, even though the facts reported suggested the opposite. This analysis, also in the NYT, confirms both the spinning and the fact that the evidence produced under brutal torture was deliberately misleading. Given the failure of the Bush Administration to get anywhere near bin Laden, it seems likely that they were in fact misled, deluded by the ancient belief that evidence extracted under torture is the most reliable kind.

It’s noteworthy that the URL for the story is “torture”, but the article itself doesn’t adopt that description and doesn’t even use the word until well after the lede.

The death of Osama bin Laden has inevitably produced a gigantic volume of instant reactions, to which I’m going to add. Doubtless I’m repeating what others have said somewhere, but it seems to me that most of the commentary has understated the likely impact, particularly as regard US politics. That impact is by no means all favorable – while the Republicans are the big losers, Obama will also be strengthened as against his critics on the left, among whom I’d include myself (admittedly as a citizen of a client state rather than the US proper).

[click to continue…]

“It sure seems like Obama’s job as secret Muslim operative imposing Sharia law on the US just got a whole lot harder.”

We probably should have an open thread on Bin Laden’s death. Consider this that thread.

Here’s some commentary on the Canadian general election from CT’s good friend up north, Tom Slee.

From Boring to Bizarre: Canada Votes 2011

For the second election in a row, Canada’s trip to the polls has, to use a technical term, gone weird. The big story this time round is the rise of the perennial third- or fourth-place New Democratic Party, making NDP leader Jack Layton the probable leader of the opposition and possibly even Prime Minister – something no one (and I mean NO ONE) would have believed possible three weeks ago. I was reluctant to accept Henry’s invitation to comment here because there are many people who know more about Canadian electoral politics than I do, but as NO ONE else had a clue this was going to happen either, it might as well be me to open the comment thread.

For any of you not completely up to date, here’s what’s been happening (note to self – switch to present tense here for that sports-commentator-like sense of immediacy):

• March 25: Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government loses a no-confidence vote that found the government in contempt of parliament. (CBC report)
• March 27: The six-week campaign officially opens. The Conservatives attack Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff relentlessly for being too little Canadian (“He didn’t come back for you”) and too much academic (Harvard for God’s sake), but no issue catches fire with the public.
• April 12 and 13: The mid-campaign TV debates are held, one in English and then one in French. The French debate was moved forward a day so as not to clash with a hockey game. There is no big moment, no immediate announcement of a winner.
• Over the next few days, the NDP starts to pick up support from the Bloc Quebecois, despite never having a significant showing in that province.
• Around Easter, the Liberal vote starts to bleed to the NDP and support for the Grits falls from high 20s to low 20s, and all of a sudden the NDP has almost doubled its share from 17% up to about 30%, clearly in second place (see Andrew Heard’s page at Simon Frasier University, or ThreeHundredEight.com). The Google Trends results for the party leaders summarize the campaign as well as anything.

Which all raises two questions. What caused these dramatic shifts? And what happens next?

Causes first. The leaders are all known quantities; the policy platforms are basically the same as in the 2008 and 2006 elections; the Canadian economy was insulated from the worst of the financial collapse by a combination of oil and good fortune in its banking history; no political or economic issue has taken hold during the campaign. What gives?

It may be worth remembering that it’s the second time in a row that a Canadian election has gone from boring to bizarre. Back in 2008 the Liberals called an election and, then as now, everyone knew that the election would conclude with everything looking the same as before. The Bloc Quebecois would hold on to 50 or so seats in Quebec. The Tories, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Alberta-based Reform Party, were too socially conservative and too doctrinaire to make a breakthrough in seat-rich Ontario and would be limited to about 100 seats from the western provinces, the Liberals would get pretty much all of Ontario’s 100 seats plus some from the maritimes, and the NDP would stay at 20 or so seats. But Liberal leader Paul Martin stumbled and was labelled as “Mister Dithers”, the label stuck and the Tories took 40 seats in Ontario, enough to form a minority government. Once the Liberals started losing support, everything just went from bad to worse for them.

All I can see is that the self-referential nature of recent campaigns, in which poll results themselves have become the major daily news item, lends itself to wild and unpredictable fluctuations as voters’ opinions are shaped by their perceptions of the trends around the country. The patterns remind me of the Salganik, Dodds, and Watts studies of artifical cultural markets from a few years ago (PDF): social decision making leads to cascade-driven inequalities in outcomes, but the outcome is only obvious once you know the answer.

Despite talk of this being Canada’s first social media campaign, I think it’s uncontroversial to say that social media has had little impact. There has been publicity for student “vote mobs” and some questions about the legality of tweeting on election night (before the polls close in the west), but basically the campaign has been mass-media driven.

And as for what happens next? Well who the hell knows. The big questions are whether the NDP polling results will hold up and, in a country with strong regional distinctions, how the nationwide trends will be reflected at the level of individual ridings. It could be that the NDP surge leads to a majority conservative government, or it could be that an NDP-led coalition of the non-right will end up taking power, or it could be… well what? I look to commenters to tell us.

As for me, for the last few elections I have been actively involved in the local NDP campaign, and in 2008 that ended with the Conservatives winning over the Liberals by 17 votes; the closest race in the country. I have never previously considered tactical voting, but this time I have signed up at Pair Vote as my choice is strongly Anyone But Harper. I’d like to think it’s the right thing to do, but with this campaign, who knows?

The news from Yemen is grimly familiar – more protestors shot by President Saleh’s security forces and plainclothes thugs. But now the US government has shifted position, letting it be known in various ways that it’s time for Saleh to go. Their hope now is that a replacement will allow the operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to continue as before. A few thoughts about this.

[click to continue…]

So, the conservative government in Canada has been defeated in a vote of no-confidence. But how, in a Parliament where (what look like to me to be) left-of-centre parties have had a majority since the last election can this have taken it so long? And how can there be a prospect that this situation will be reproduced after the next election?

The answer apparently is a Canadian aversion to coalition governments. In a system where there have long been more than two parties, this makes no sense to me, but my knowledge of the political background is virtually non-existent. Can anyone explain this, or point to some useful resources?

Dramatic events in Libya have overshadowed the murder, by government snipers, of unarmed demonstrators in Yemen on Friday. This crime is as bad as any of those for which Gaddafi has been condemned, but has so far not produced a comparable response from the US and other Western governments. To be fair, there was a similarly cautious response to the initial reports of government repression in Libya and Egypt, so it’s a bit early to be convicting Obama and others of hypocrisy on this.

However, with government ministers resigning or being sacked, and a state of emergency announced, the familiar script seems to be playing out a bit faster. The Saleh regime clearly can’t survive without at least tacit support from the US, so it’s time for Obama to announce the withdrawal of that support, and tell Saleh to leave in the same terms as with Gaddafi.

On the face of it, there should be no problem for the US Administration here. Saleh has been a useful ally, but far less important than Mubarak, whom they dumped without too much concern. The big problem is that after Yemen comes Bahrain. With the Saudis having sent troops to suppress the revolt there, a democratic revolution in Bahrain will threaten their regime as well.

Update 22 March Leading army commanders have resigned, and the collapse of the regime appears inevitable. I’ve seen some off the record comments attributed to senior Administration officials confirming this, but so far nothing on the record beyond calls for restraint and progress towards democracy. I’d say Obama has probably missed the bus on this one, which makes it more likely that he will stick with the regime in Bahrain, where it will be much harder to avoid taking sides. End update

Since I’m not a political party and don’t have a vote at the United Nations, my opinions on the Libyan conflict and no-fly zone happily matter to no-one (except perhaps some enraged bloggers). I certainly won’t be demonstrating against the no-fly zone and, as soon as it gets implemented (as opposed to voted on) I hope it works. But I’d rather not be here. The problem is, as I see it, that the involvement of France, the UK, and the “international community”, and the framing of the issue in terms of civilian protection, fundamentally changes the nature of what’s going on. A series of popular demonstrations, met with armed force, was rapidly transformed into an armed popular uprising, with the possibility of the Libyan people taking control for themselves. And armed popular uprisings, aimed at overthrowing the state do not admit of the neat categorizations of persons presupposed by just war theory, humanitarian intervention, and so forth. The people armed is just that: the people armed. I don’t know if the uprising could have succeeded. The news was contradictory — with frequent reports by Gaddafi that he’d taken cities proving to be false — but, on the whole, it was not encouraging. I’d certainly rather have a no-fly zone (if it works, which is a big if) than the uprising defeated and mass killings by the Gaddafi family in revenge. But a successful popular uprising is no longer a possibility either. Most of the Libyan people have now been cast into the role of passive victims rather than active agents of their own liberation. Some Libyans may rally to the Gaddafi regime out of a sense of wounded national pride at outside interference. And even if Gaddafi falls (which I hope he will) the successor regime will lack the legitimacy it might have had, and will no doubt be resented and undermined by nationalist Gaddafi loyalists biding their time and representing it as the creature of the West. So not good, though I confess to lacking the information to know whether it could have been better.

The surprisingly successful counterattack by the Gaddafi forces in Libya has produced an even more surprising response. Whereas a day or so ago it seemed unlikely that the US, let alone the UNSC, would support a no-fly zone, the UNSC has now passed (10-0 with China among the abstentions) a resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians from Gaddafi’s forces. At least according to the NYTimes, that includes airstrikes directed at ground forces.

The only question now is who will supply the necessary force, and this is primarily a diplomatic issue – the military requirements are well within the capacity of France, the US, the UK, the Arab League and probably quite a few others. But whoever supplies the planes, it seems clear that Gaddafi’s regime is doomed. It is striking that, having been regarded as a member in good standing of the international community only a couple of months ago, he is now unable to secure a single vote in the UNSC.

The vote has big implications for the UN and also for the remaining Middle Eastern dictatorships/monarchies, most notably Bahrein and “Saudi” Arabia

[click to continue…]