Neo-Cognoscenti: Global Affairs and Culture

The End of the Party

2009-01-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

This week, hundreds of people lined up at Midtown Comics in New York to purchase the first edition of Marvel's new Spiderman issue, featuring Barack Obama. Some were skipping work, and some had even flown in that morning from out of town for the occasion. All of them stood outside for hours bracing sub-zero temperatures, and by 9 am the comic book was sold out. Obama's image -on t-shirts, buttons, commemorative coins, periodical magazines, coffee mugs, stamps, plates, bobblehead dolls, posters, comic books, and regular books- is the only thing that sells in these recessionary days. Why else would Doris Kearns Goodwin's one-thousand-page-long book about Lincoln rise up to the top of best-seller lists more than two years after publication? You can call it Obama's first stimulus package.

Similar crowds are flocking to train stations in the Northeast to catch a glimpse of the Amtrak cars taking Obama to Washington for the inauguration, replicating the last leg of Lincoln's journey in 1861. And millions are expected in the nation's capital on Tuesday for the great finale of a two-year love affair of Hollywoodesque proportions. I hear Bill Clinton prefers the moniker "greatest fairy tale ever."

I have partaken in this collective fever as much as anyone, but I cannot help detecting a hint of desperation (or is it hope?) in these quasi-religious manifestations of faith and devotion. It showcases -slightly altering a quote from Bill Maher- the genius of our marketing and the gullibility of our people. It follows the script of any typical American movie: the crisis is systemic and only an exceptional individual can redeem us and guide us through the valley of darkness. Americans chant Yes We Can, but what they mean is I Hope He Can.

And it's not just Americans. People all over the world welcomed Obama's election enthusiastically (with special intensity in Kenya and, for less sentimental reasons, in Obama, Japan). However, this should not be misconstrued as an expression of the world's hunger for American leadership. With few exceptions (Georgia, Taiwan and other East Asian countries, the littoral Arab statelets that surround Saudi Arabia, Darfur), most people want less America, not more. What they cheer is the end of American hegemony and unipolarity; what they hope for is a less intrusive and arrogant Uncle Sam. Be nice to the countries that lend you money, says the overseer of China's two-trillion dollars' worth of US bonds. Stay off the Middle East. Let Latin America follow its preferred course. Draw down the globe-spanning stretch of the US military. Spare other countries the lectures about democracy or capitalism. At a time when the United States' image in the world is associated with preventive war and torture, and Israel's actions are deemed monstrous by most people outside the United States, Western criticism of Russia's intervention in Georgia, or China's heavy-handed treatment of Tibetan dissidents only provokes laughter.

And that is why I am also apprehensive about the end of the honeymoon and the inevitable disappointment. I dread the day that a US bomb kills five children with Obama as commander-in-chief. I contemplate the possibility that the new president will not significantly cut down military spending, which doubled in the last eight years. I fear waking up to another victim of the tragedy of American diplomacy -William Appleman Williams' prescient opus on US foreign policy-, which suggests that Americans believe that other people cannot solve their problems unless they follow America's formula. Most of these nightmarish scenarios, in case you were wondering, feature Rahm Emanuel at one point or another.

If you read books about foreign policy, you have probably noticed that all of a sudden everyone is talking about a post-American world, a non-American world, and the end of American exceptionalism. The most prescient ones -Michael Mann, Emmanuel Todd, Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson, and Yale Ferguson, among others- had been saying the same since 2003, dismissing as humbug all the hype about America's empire. The party is over in Wall Street, in the real estate market, and in consumption indexes, and US foreign policy should reflect this. One suspects that the United States will be better served by an Administration trying to transition smoothly into the new reality, rather than one that makes a last-ditch effort to stay on top and police the world. My careful reading of Obama's words gives me reasons to be optimistic, but I also know that effective politicians can be many things to many people, and new politicians are like blank pages onto which we project our own aspirations. Besides, that presidential bubble can be very hard to puncture. Even if they let him keep his BlackBerry.

Like stuck in traffic

2008-12-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

The Oscar-winner "Crash" begins with this quote from Don Cheadle's character, setting up the tone and message of this metaphor-movie about racism, prejudice, and solipsism in crowded places: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

I find metaphors about cars and traffic particularly illustrative of American society. As we all know, Americans love their cars, and road rage, wasted fuel, rising insurance costs, expensive gas, maddening traffic, melting ice caps, and billions of dollars in bailouts will not change that. Invariably, the Americans I meet have sharper and more coherent opinions about the 14-billion-dollar rescue package to keep Detroit afloat than about the more than one trillion dollars haphazardly dispensed to save the banking and mortgage industry. We might not know our ABCs, but we know our cars.

I have always found that driving a car and trying to navigate traffic brings the worst in us. It's a very antisocial behavior. Behind the wheel, we are always the good guy, and everyone else is a suspect, a faulty driver, and you can only rely on yourself. Driving would be a pleasant activity if it wasn't for all those terrible drivers out there (which I have yet to meet - I have met self-defined "aggressive" drivers, but never self-defined "bad" drivers). We all consider ourselves relatively good, play-by-the-rules drivers, and when we cut someone off or merge too late, we consider it an exception that we can allow ourselves for all those times that we were the victim of such infraction. And, protected by all the metal and glass, we can yell, and feel aggravated, and say all the impolite things that we don't say in the subway when we're standing shoulder-to-shoulder with annoying strangers.

Too many of us see the world as if we were always driving a car, always behind the wheel. As if we were always virtuous and good citizens, and a few maladjusted, misbehaving party-poopers were ruining it for everyone. Around us, people morph easily into welfare queens, cheaters, and system-abusers. It is hard to conceptualize the intricacies of capitalism, or the hydraulics of our imperfect government, or the lobbying tentacles of Big Pharma, but it is easy to remember that person in front of you at an overcrowded emergency room. Mike Huckabee, a presidential contender in this past cycle and a likely candidate in 2012, just published a new book, "Do The Right Thing," in which he essentially concludes that in order to get government off our backs we just need to be better people. We don't have a health care crisis in America, he would say. We have a health crisis. No need to fight over single-payer universal health care or the other patchy, piecemeal approaches in the menu if we just start eating right, and taking care of ourselves, and exercising daily. I hear this often in my classes, and I call it the New Year's resolution approach to government. Frankly, I think James Madison put it much more eloquently when he said "if men were angels..."

Most people remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech by his "there's not a red America, and a blue America, there's the United States of America" line, but my personal favorite is when he laid out the basic creed of progressivism: "If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." And although he often appeals to our sense of personal responsibility -especially in front of African-American audiences, to Reverend Jackson's chagrin- his most important trait to me is his fine sense of empathy, and the belief that we have a crisis of empathy in America.

It feels strange to speak ill of American individualism and selfishness only a few weeks after record-breaking Americans elected this man to the highest office, but I fear that he convinced lots of people less empathetic than he is into voting for him, and very soon we will have to have our seventh national conversation about universal health care since World War One. Maybe it is true that 2008 is not 1993, but Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt, America's leading expert on health-care economics, is not so optimistic. Why? There is no social solidarity in America. Maybe it's just one of those days, but I happen to agree.

Transatlanticism: Swinging to the right, swinging to the left

2008-09-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt, possibly one of the best political historians of our time, likes to remind us that Austria never exorcized its Nazi past. As Hitler's first 'victim,' it never intoned the kind of national mea culpa that Germany, grudgingly and painfully, let out over time. But Austria was not only Adolf Hitler's birthplace; it provided a disproportionate amount of SS agents, concentration camp administrators, and Nazi sympathizers, on a higher per capita basis than Germany itself. In the absence of accountability and collective soul-searching, the echoes of Austria's post-war deafening silence reverberate today.

Austria's 2008 general elections have just yielded the strongest electoral result of the far-right in Europe since the end of World War II. Surpassing Jörg Haider in 1999 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the new poster boy of xenophobic, anti-Brussels Europe, Heinz-Christian Strache is the rising star in a country that embodies European civilization and is one of the highest contributors to the EU coffers. The young Strache and his former mentor, Haider, combined for one-third of the vote, holding a key to the success of any governing coalition emerging from the elections. A former dentist (am I the only one who finds that extremely appropriate?), Strache has been filmed in military fatigues training alongside known neo-nazis; wants to repeal a ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbols but prohibit the construction of minarets; enjoys calling headscarved women "female ninjas" and seems distressed that many Austrians prefer falafels, kebabs, and couscous over Wiener schnitzels and sausages; and his rhetoric and programs are unashamedly anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and, perhaps most importantly, anti-EU. All of the above brings him close and tight with extreme right-wingers in France, Flanders, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere.

And it is not just Austria. A former fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, is part of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, is growing more outspoken every day. While her cohorts harass Gypsies and immigrants, Berlusconi wants to make illegal immigration a punishable criminal offense and fingerprint the Roma minority. Similar anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Poland.

More mainstream conservatism is also on the rise. The Labour Party is crumbling in the United Kingdom, Sarkozy is winning his battle against the unions in France, and at least one of the Polish twins keeps quarrelling with Brussels over the death penalty. Not even Sweden is a social-democratic paradise anymore.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country whose political center is supposed to be markedly to the right from Europe, is in the midst of the biggest government intervention in its economy since the New Deal. American leaders are embracing words like 'bailout' and 'nationalization,' and railing against 'the unfettered free market' and 'deregulation' -although one could equally argue that "socialism for the rich," the only acceptable socialism in America according to John Kenneth Galbraith, has always been part of the conservative agenda. While stocks plunge in Wall Street, the political capital of atheism, universal health care, same-sex marriage, and taxes for the rich is steadily increasing. And unless something dramatic happens, Americans are about to elect a young, black, progressive man from the South Side of Chicago called Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land.

It's almost as if a law of opposites informs the variable distance between the political centers of America and Europe, or as if the pendular swing of politics moves too fast to give all those books that came out at the beginning of the decade any respectable shelf life. Robert Kagan, who famously declared that Americans hail from Mars and Europeans hail from Venus, should look for new planets to explain the transatlantic gap. Jeremy Rifkin and others should wake up from their European Dream. Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his hardline anti-immigration positions, is about to retire from his seat in the House of Representatives after failing to get Americans to embrace massive deportation. Well, maybe he should just move to Europe!

What is Holding Turkey Back?

2008-05-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

To understand Modern Turkey, one must examine the mentality of the country’s founder and first strongman, Kemal Ataturk, and his legacy in Turkey today. Under his leadership, the remains of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Asia Minor were forged into Modern Turkey. The Turkish transformation from the dismantled Ottoman state to the Turkish Republic was made in the image of this man, whose last name translated means “father of the Turks.”

Quite the contrary to what Turkish citizens believe, and have marketed to the rest of the world, the Kemalist ideology is exactly what is preventing the country from moving forward. As has been noted by Marcus A. Templar in his recent study Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability argues that:

The reality that haunts the Turkish Republic from its inception is dangerously revealing itself. Kemal's dream was to Europeanize Turkey, but the foundations he forcibly set have remained stagnant while Europe keeps developing. Government institutions in Turkey look back to Kemalism fearing that deviation from Kemalist ideals could bring the end of their state. Turkey has been built on the principles of Pan-Turkism that are no longer acceptable in Europe and, as she is not an ethnically and racially homogenous country, this alone is the cornerstone of its instability.1

The Kemalist ideology also appears to be the main reason why Turkey cannot be relied on to abide by treaties, thereby hindering the normalization of relations between itself on the one hand, and Greece, Cyprus and the European Union on the other.

[1] Marcus A. Templar, "Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability" in Journal of Global Change and Governance Volume I, Number 2 (2008).

Bonfire of the Vanities

2008-04-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

One of the best lessons of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the fratricidal viciousness of the left's internal squabbles, seemingly more passionate about fighting each other than about fighting General Franco. An unforgettable vignette from Monty Python's Life of Brian parodies a similar dysfunction, with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, and -with only one member- the Popular Front of Judea all too busy in petty internal disagreements to have any effectiveness against mighty Rome. Highbrow or lowbrow, a common thread is inescapable: allowing for exceptions and varying degrees, the political left tends to divide itself and amplify internal differences, while its opponents on the right do exactly the opposite.

To the disbelief of most observers, Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy for the third time a couple of weeks ago, commanding a coalition that stretched from the political center to the secessionist and xenophobic Lega Nord. The anti-Berlusconi camp, appalled that the wealthiest man in Italy, routinely indicted and prosecuted for corruption, and owner of more than half of all media outlets, was too divided to prevent Berlusconi's resounding success.

This pattern can manifest itself not only in multi-party, parliamentary democracies, but also in bipartisan, presidential ones like the United States. American progressives usually blame the corporate media, or, more abstractly, the "system" for their electoral under-performance, but sometimes, and not only when Ralph Nader shows himself, they should blame themselves. The Democratic primary is still ongoing, despite being almost mathematically clinched since the Wisconsin primary two months ago. Barack Obama, now running out the clock, would prefer to use this time to pool some of Clinton's advisers and money, campaign in Florida and Michigan, win over skeptics in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and peel off McCain's support among independents instead of courting white, working-class Democrats. Both candidates are getting scratched up and battered, more by the insufferable and exhausting length of the race than by a gaffes-obsessed media. The Democrats, who are right about the issues but are quite clumsy about process, are readying themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose another unlosable election.

If ignorance is the cardinal sin of the right, vanity is the cardinal sin of the left. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, spent the weekend on a vanity tour that could only damage the electoral prospects of the member of his church. But it is not just Wright that is vain or narcissistic. Since Obama won eleven contests in a row and emerged as the front-runner, the senator has received as much venom from allegedly liberal journalists as from conservative ones. Tavis Smiley, for example, is less than enthusiastic about Obama, partly because his views don't go far enough for his political taste, partly because Obama did not show up at his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans. In response, Bill Maher summed up the feeling of many viewers when he said: "I know, he won't do my show either, but if that's what he has to do, and it's working for him, maybe we should accept it and get over ourselves." Paul Krugman, who many expected to support the anti-war candidate, has spent most of his columns this year attacking Obama over disagreements with details of his health care reform plan. Markos Moulitsas, a strong Obama supporter, spoke in the harshest terms against Obama's decision to be interviewed by Chris Wallace in FoxNews. Obama may be the first liberal Democrat to be elected in a long, long time, but all of us have left-leaning friends that refuse to join the bandwagon because of disagreements over the candidate's policy on Israel, or a specific trade deal, to name only a few.

On a New York Times' article commenting Reverend Wright's exercise of narcissism, Alessandra Stanley closed with a quote from Chuck Todd (and a Carly Simon song): "You're so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you." But that's all of us. It's who we are, and it's why we lose. We are so vain, we think this campaign is about us. And not "us" as in community, or country, or even the progressive movement, but "us" as individuals.

Digital/Medieval Finance: Speed and Chaos as Architecture

2008-04-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

I am presenting next Friday at the DGA Conference and wanted to try out some of the ideas from my presentation here with you. The following is a brief snippet. Any comments/suggestions are always welcomed.

---

One of the most significant enablers of a distinctively new configuration of global finance is the recent application of digital information technologies in financial transactions. These technologies have facilitated the nearly instantaneous transaction of more complex financial instruments by a wider array of investors at lower costs.

Digital financial transactions have reconfigured these global, fast-paced conduits into new hierarchical formations where governmental institutions do not necessarily occupy the top layers. For example, the application of digital technologies in finance has allowed for an interconnected and distributed network of a larger number of investors and instruments to end up as a kind of concentrated power not previously observed.

It is not impossible to imagine a large-scale financial crisis occurring before the wide-spread use of digital technologies; the Great Depression of the 1930s is the most well-known example of such. However, it is perhaps difficult to imagine millions of decisions from a multitude of dispersed investors coalescing around a handful of countries to severely affect their national markets in a matter of a few weeks, such as what occurred during the 1997 Asian crisis.

The speed of action of this concentrated power, and not only its scale, becomes a major transformative feature in our current architecture of global finance.

It is largely through the interplay between money and digital technologies, complex financial instruments, private knowledge networks, and other phenomena that I believe global financial markets have been able to overgrow the centripetal pull of governmental frameworks, whether national or international.

As with other social structures becoming transfixed by globalization, the emerging architecture of global finance lets us peer into a medieval-like future of overlapping authority, competing allegiances, and a diffuse patchwork of social dynamics.

Transatlanticism: Politics and Sexual Scandals

2008-03-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

Alan Dershowitz, arguably one of the most famous faculty members of Harvard Law School, must enjoy being unpopular. In 2002, he began advocating in favor of legalizing torture. In 2006, he defied international outcry in a series of articles that argued that Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli bombs were fair game, and compared Lebanon's collective culpability to Austria under the Nazis. In the face of mounting criticism against the Israel lobby and its outsize influence in Washington, he accused former President Carter and professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of bigotry and anti-semitism. These days, he is one of the few people defending New York's Governor, Eliot Spitzer, recently linked to a prostitution ring and likely to experience one of the most vertiginous political downfalls in memory.

Professor Dershowitz contends that the politicians' minor sexual peccadilloes are private matters that should not be exploited for political purposes, and that this would never happen in Europe. According to him, sexual scandals get bumped to the lifestyle section of the newspaper and then fade away. This is just another manifestation of the transatlantic gap, and most Europeans would proudly agree. François Mitterrand had numerous extramarital affairs but went on to become the longest serving President of France. The pornstar Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, was elected in 1987 to a seat in the Italian Parliament, representing the Lazio district of Rome. Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration and anti-Islam Dutch politician murdered by an animal rights activist, was believed to have had sex with Moroccan teenagers. Europeans carry these anecdotes like badges of honor, and never miss an opportunity to mock American puritanism.

However, the transatlantic divide is not as wide as Dershowitz suggests. A quick review of sexual scandals involving politicians offers a mixed bag: on both sides of the Atlantic, some political careers survived, while others were doomed. In the United States, President Clinton held very high approval ratings in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal. "Gropegate" did not damage Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became Governor of California. Representative Mark Foley resigned, but senators Larry Craig and David Vitter kept their seats. Barack Obama's first adversary in his senatorial race, Jack Ryan, dropped out after his wife filed for divorce and aired her husband's uncommon sexual habits. So did Senator Gary Hart when he ran for President in 1988. But JFK remains one of America's most popular presidents, and he was hardly a boy-scout. In Europe, sexual scandals have dogged the careers of many politicians. Angela Merkel feared for the stability of her coalition cabinet because Günter Verheugen, the Vice President of the European Commission, was having an affair with his chief of staff. The Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan is still battling one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids. The pretender to the Italian crown, the prince Vittorio Emmanuele, spent time in jail in 2006 due to his connection to a prostitution ring. And many believe that the Profumo Affair in 1963, involving John Profumo and a prostitute, helped topple the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan. Even the French (!) are slightly bothered by President Sarkozy's choice of the supermodel Carla Bruni as his new wife.

Nevertheless, we are mixing apples and oranges. Spitzer is likely to be charged with a federal crime, after making a name for himself busting prostitution rings. It is a story that writes itself, regardless of cultural idiosyncrasies. It is patently untrue that a case similar to Eliot Spitzer would not make it to the front page of European newspapers. In fact, Spitzer's case itself did make it to the cover of many European newspapers that had never even mentioned him before. Imagine that Judge Garzón had been found to spend a small fortune in cocaine for his private use after devoting a lifetime sending cocaine smugglers to prison; if Beppe Grillo had been accused of corruption after decades of unmasking the corruption of others; or if Eliot Ness had been buying for himself some of Al Capone's alcohol during Prohibition. Those would be fairer comparisons to Spitzer's case than Mitterrand's double life. Europeans may be more tolerant than Americans towards nudity, but are equally uneasy with corruption, hypocrisy, and wrongdoing.

Italy might be an exception. With twenty-four convicted legislators and fifty-seven appealing guilty verdicts, Italy is in a category of its own. Perhaps if Professor Dershowitz used Italy as a frame of reference, he could aptly argue that Spitzer's expensive philandering is just a drop in the bucket. That way he could continue to antagonize public opinion and common sense.

Update your IR textbooks: Chronicle of a non-crisis

2008-03-11T05:16:00.000-07:00

After deploying his troops to the border with Colombia, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa said on television that Latin America would turn into a new Middle East, and that regional war was a possibility. The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez sent ten tank battalions and the air force to his side of the line, and threatened to use his newly acquired toys, the Russian warplanes Sukhois. He accused Colombia of state terrorism and called President Uribe a criminal. Uribe replied that they had evidence that both Chávez and Correa had ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that he planned to send this evidence to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The President of Nicaragua, the Sandinista Daniel Ortega, jumped into the fray. They all closed borders and withdrew diplomatic delegations. Former President Fidel Castro ranted against US interference and genocidal policies in Latin America. Not to be outdone, Senator John McCain, acting 'presidential,' committed the United States to another jungle war of impossible solution if Colombia was attacked.

In the end, Latin America's worst diplomatic crisis since the brief Cenepa War in 1995 came to an abrupt and swift end at a summit of the Organization of the American States, with all of the dignitaries involved shaking hands, hugging, and exchanging jokes, back pats, and apologies. In what can be described as one of the most unscripted moments in the history of televised diplomatic meetings -Khruschev's shoe banging at the Security Council was scripted-, Daniel Ortega managed to force Uribe to commit to withdraw a Colombian warship from Nicaragua's coast. President Chavez could hardly contain his smile.

The rapid escalation and de-escalation of this border crisis, initiated with the assassination of the FARC's second-in-command during a raid in Ecuador, provides a new case study for IR theory classrooms. What defused the crisis? Realists might say that Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia were merely saber-rattling and bluffing, and that their weak military forces hardly stood a chance against one of the biggest recipients of American military aid in the world. Confident of Washington's support, Colombia had achieved its goal and was happy to offer an apology. Liberals might say that Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela are major trading partners, and a regional war would have no winners and many losers. Institutionalists might chalk this one up to multilateralism. The fact that the OAS had a summit scheduled for that week, forcing the leaders to seat at the same table and talk it off in front of their peers, highlights the benefits of these institutions of cooperation. Finally, culturalists of Hungtingtonian persuasion would say that countries that speak the same language and belong to the same cultural space and civilization do not go to war with each other nowadays. Absent an ethnic or religious cleavage, the crisis could only qualify as a family argument.

But could this truly be a happy win-win? I suspect some stand more to gain than others. Washington's persona-non-grata du jour, Hugo Chávez, effectively solidified his leadership in the region, exacerbating the isolation of the United States' biggest regional ally. Chávez has got Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba firmly in his sphere of influence. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina all came down on his side. For most Latin Americans, his recent successes mediating the release of hostages held for years by the FARC surely matters more than his embarrassing performances at the UN General Assembly or the last Summit of the Americas. And President Uribe knows that, with oil and cocaine yielding such high profits, neither the FARC nor President Chávez are likely to go anywhere.

Political Dynasties

2008-03-07T15:11:00.001-08:00

After tipping the scale in primaries and caucuses in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and others, it is now commonly known that Latinos support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming margin. No one really knows why. After all, the brown-skinned candidate with an immigrant story and a different-sounding name is Barack Obama, and his campaign has poured untold sums of money into courting the Latino vote. Senator Clinton is not Latina, does not speak Spanish, and never fails to mispronounce the names of her Latino endorsers. Her biggest connections with the Latino community were her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, and her husband's appointment of Bill Richardson for two cabinet posts. Solis Doyle resigned early in the race after being singled out as main culprit of Clinton's campaign woes, and Richardson has all but endorsed Senator Obama.

Among those that flat-out reject the idea of a rift between the Latino and the African-American communities, some maintain that Latinos are much more comfortable with political dynasties, and this explains their support for the Clintons. This is always backed by a handful of examples that includes the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Pastranas in Colombia, and the Perón and Kirchner families in Argentina. However, this alleged Latino affinity with political dynasties is nothing but another example in a long list of unsubstantiated myths involving anything south of the Río Grande.

It has been a centuries-old game in the United States to depict Latin America as a disorderly riotocracy where lazy drunk men and receptive women indulge their childlike impulses; a sort of Roger Rabbit’s Toontown to be entered at one’s peril and that stands in stark contrast with the order and reason that prevail in the north; a chaotic amalgam of banana republics ruled by populist ideologues or iron-fisted caudillos. These stereotypes can be more or less fair, but the assertion that Latinos are favorably predisposed towards political families does not stand scrutiny. Comparatively speaking, dynasties in Latin America are a rare exception, rather than the norm. In fact, Latin America’s tumultuous history has worked against political dynasties. That Juán Perón or Néstor Kirchner were followed by their wives surely has little to do with the political culture of a Latino community that has few and thin ties to Argentina.

Latin America is not like the Middle East, where monarchies still prevail. Ruhollah Khomeini, after bringing down one of the world’s most famous dynasties, the Pahlavis, used to speak derisively of Saudi Arabia for being founded by, ruled by, and named after one single family. It is also clearly different from South Asia, where the Gandhis and the Bhuttos are only better known than a string of political families in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia or Malaysia. If there is one country in the American continent that has proved, again and again, that it is perfectly comfortable, if not enthusiastic, with dynasties, that is the United States. Everyone is familiar with the Clintons, the Bushes, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the Daleys, the Bakers, the Cuomos, the Doles, the Gores, the Tafts, the Rockefellers, the Jacksons, the Fords, the Romneys, and other dynasties in the making, such as the Bidens and the Carters. That is in the last century alone, leaving out the time of John and John Quincy Adams, when a cluster of political families controlled politics and wealth. According to Stephen Hess, there have been 700 families with two or more members of Congress. Currently, ten percent of Congress has a close relative who has also served in the House or Senate. The Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, for example, have put four senators and two representatives in Congress. Name recognition surely counts for something.

Latinos are not bringing their love for dynasties across the border. If anything, their desire to assimilate to the new environment is overriding their natural impulse to be wary of families that hold on to power for too long.

An ancient people insulted

2008-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

In the midst of all that has occured and caught notice in the last week or so we have overlooked yet another shot across the bow in a centuries-old struggle between ancient peoples with a twined history. As I recently noted in another space, I think that when considering what it is that makes a nation we would do well to also weigh an idea put forward by the humorously paranoiac author Thomas Pynchon in his last novel: "maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again."

fp

As Fidel Stands Down, Others Stand Up

2008-02-24T16:09:00.000-08:00

Today, the world's attention turned to Cuba, where Fidel Castro retired and was succeeded by his younger -at seventy-six years of age- brother, Raúl. Castro's enemies have a good reason to rejoice. Or maybe not. After all, Fidel outlasted ten American presidents and the collapse of the regime's main ally, the Soviet Union; survived the longest economic embargo in history, several assassination plots, one invasion attempt, and thirteen days of a nuclear missile crisis; and he is willingly stepping down while making sure that power stays in the family and the ideological contours of his revolution are not blurred.

With time, it is likely that his heirs will toy with the free market in a gradual and centrally-planned manner, à la China or Vietnam. But I suspect that it will continue to be safer to criticize Cuba's appalling lack of political freedom than its economic under-performance. After noting that Cuba is outranked in the UN's Human Development Index by Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, the editors of The Economist wrote, characteristically: "Forget the cigars and the posters: Cubans have had a rotten deal from a miserable regime -and they know it." The statement is incomplete. In the Americas, Cuba is also outranked by the United States, Canada, Barbados, and the Bahamas. And yes, according to the same index, Cuba is better off than the remaining 26 countries in the Americas, including NAFTA's Mexico and Brazil; better off than two EU countries, Romania and Bulgaria; better off than all the other communist, single-party regimes, such as China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, and than every non-EU offshoot of the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine; better off, in sum, than 126 countries listed in this ranking.

On the same day but a different island, another Communist was elected president of his country. In Cyprus, Demetris Christophias made history by becoming the first Communist in the history of the European Union to reach the presidency in one of its states. Christophias is the Secretary-General of AKEL, a Marxist-Leninist party, and was labeled by his opponents as the Castro of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, Soviet-educated (Ph.D. in History at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences), and maintains ties with the Kremlin. The party, AKEL (formerly KKK, or Communist Party of Cyprus), had never before fielded a candidate for presidential elections. No one in Europe seems, however, too worried. Demetris Christophias may do to the 'communist' label what Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done to the 'Islamist' label. If anything, some hope that Christophias will be successful in addressing one of the world's most intractable problems: the division of the island among Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. Christophias' rejection of the UN's 2004 reunification plan was merely tactical, and his party is more inclined to a federal solution to the island's partition. It will be a hard sell and an improbable journey, but so is everything else.

What a surprise...

2008-02-21T22:00:00.000-08:00

It is clearly noticeable that some contributors on this blog feel disappointed by what happened in Serbia today. I am honestly surprised by their reactions considering how deeply the Serbian society is divided on fundamental socio-political issues which date back long before Milosevic came to power. This partition on backward nationalists elements on one side and democratic oriented citizens on the other was further magnified during the last 20 years of political turbulence in the Balkans.

I believe such actions were actually secretly celebrated by those parties who recently lost elections in Serbia. Their argument is that aggression against Western companies and embassies will entail a sharp response from abroad which would further alienate the people in Serbia from the West. In addition, Kosovo’s crisis, evocation of the Kosovo's mythology, and calls for national unity are actually going to serve the purpose of diverting attention from more important domestic issues such as war crimes, economic issues, and origins of “dirty money” for a period to come.

On the other hand, there is an obvious responsibility of the West for the situation in Serbia. The ultimate questions that most of the Serbs would ask their counterparts in the West are: "How would you feel if 15% of your territory is forceably taken away from your country by breaking the international law (U.N. resolution 1244)? How would you feel if your country is bombed for three months because of the so-called humanitarian crisis? How would you feel if every nationality except yours has rights to self-determination?"

Additionally, the E.U., represented by the E.U. High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Mr. Javier Solana, actually put pressure on the Democratic Party to accept Mr. Vojislav Kostunica as the prime minister of Serbia even though he got only 13% of votes on the last parliamentary elections held last year in Serbia. This move kept the common and secret police under the control of nationalists. Moreover, due to a strong U.S. pro-Albanian stand, the so-called talks between the Kosovo and the Serbian leaders were condemned even before they started. Not to mention the U.S. claim of Mr. Milosevic as a "factor of stability and the main peacekeeper in the Balkans" in the mid-1990's as well as the role of the former U.S. ambassador in Serbia, Mr. William Montgomery, in defaming the reputation of the former pro-liberal prime minister of Serbia Mr. Zoran Djindjic.

Finally, I would like to address to Americans who found themselves hurt by seeing the pictures of the U.S. embassy on fire. At the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador, said he was “outraged” by the attack on the Embassy and would be seeking a unanimous statement today from the 15-member Security Council condemning it. “The government of Serbia has the responsibility under international law to protect diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies.” Now, I would like to quote my friend’s response, a graduate student of the New School at New York, Mr. Rados Piletich to Mr. Khalilzad’s demand. “Responsibility under international law, huh? Like the kind of responsibility when we invaded Iraq without UN Security Council approval? Or maybe the kind of responsibility we took when we decided not to pay Nicaragua one penny of the $17 billion in reparations that the International Court of Justice ordered it to pay for arming, training, and supporting the Contras, and mining the coast off of Nicaragua to prevent international trade? Or, perhaps the same kind of responsibility exhibited by the country that bombed Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, leading to the deaths of scores of thousands of civilians in that country, and preparing the way for the genocidal Khmer Rouge?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall... eyes wide shut."

The Pitiable Serbs

2008-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

Such an outrageous display of virulent nationalism as we have seen today makes me ashamed for every time I defended the Serbs going all the way back 1991. While I have been careful to balance my position on Kosovo’s independence over the past week, I can no longer hold my tongue. The Serbs who have attacked the US embassy in Belgrade are manifesting a form of nationalism which I can only describe as pitiable.

This once proud nation has fallen behind the curve of history. Such chest-thumping nationalism in the Europe of Regions smacks of medieval backwardness. Let the Kosovars and their lignite mines go. Serbia has other more precious resources to protect. Why preserve the Field of Kosovo? To remember the loss to the Turk? Again, such backward-looking nationalism not befitting the once and future great power of the Balkans.

Why do the Serbs blame America for their loss of Kosovo? Thousands of cascading decisions led the country to this point—no small number of which were made in Belgrade, Brussels, London, and Berlin. Burning the US embassy will do nothing to reverse that long trend line.

I take back my defense of Serbia as more ready to join the EU than Croatia. I take back my defense of Serbia as the victim of a neo-liberal war of attrition in the 1990s. I take back my defense of Serbia as a misunderstood and wronged nation. Those rioters have made it clear that we in the West have often understood Serbia and sometimes Serbia is simply wrong.

Happiness: Location, location, location

2008-02-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

“It is time we admitted that there is more to life than money, and it is time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB, that is, general well-being.” These words came not from a hippie throwback or a leftist intellectual, but from David Cameron, leader of the Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition and of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party. Of all the things David Cameron has said in the last years, no one has met as much public approval as this one. Measuring and explaining the happiness of nations is not anymore just the subject of social science research and journalistic interest. It has entered the realm of policy. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher that argued that the purpose of politics should be about bringing the most happiness to the greatest number of people, would be proud. The United States may be the only country -that I know of- with a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness, but in Bhutan they take it seriously enough for the king to proclaim Gross National Happiness as the prism that should guide rulings and policy.

It may appear to some as epistemologically flawed, if not utterly bogus, but thousands of psychologists, sociologists, economists and political scientists are in the business of finding the happiness quotient of a given country, comparing it, and unbundling it in search of explanations and, possibly, policy prescriptions. The World Database of Happiness lists almost 8,000 names in its Directory of Happiness Investigators. Apart from a database of happiness research, there is a map of global happiness, competing surveys and indexes ranking the happiness of nations, and passionate debate over their findings.

Interestingly, most try to prove the old adage that money does not buy happiness. The World Values Survey made headlines when it established that the countries with the greatest percentage of people satisfied with their lives were Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Although counter-intuitive, this seemed to reinforce conventional wisdom, which long ago accepted that warmer countries are poorer but happier. Scandinavian countries top almost every ranking that matters, uniquely excelling at both creating wealth and distributing it, and finding the balance between efficiency and fairness that big-government advocates long for. But one also associates those societies with alcoholism, wife battery, weather-induced depression, and suicide. Tropical countries, despite poverty and malaria, are often thought of as happy places where people dance and mate on empty stomachs. Other studies point out that the happiness quotient of industrialized countries has not varied much since World War Two, despite a dramatic rise in income. Western nations do not get happier as they get richer. This has important policy implications. If better education, health care, and prosperity do not contribute to the overall level of well-being, why should governments even bother? Why should rich, sad countries help poor, happy countries?

The truth is that most surveys indicate that Swedes, Danes, Swiss, Norwegians, Austrians and Icelanders actually top the overwhelming majority of the happiness rankings. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, despite the bad reputation of its gastronomy and climate, do quite well too. In studies that measure SWB (subjective well-being), the effect of poverty and conflict is immediately apparent. Allowing for exceptions, the map of global happiness correlates very strongly with UN data on health and wealth. Whether one looks at happiness surveys or at the United Nations' Human Development Index -which combines GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, life expectancy at birth, and rates of literacy and enrollment in higher education- you will find almost the same countries at the top of the list, and the same countries at the bottom. Romania, Moldova, and other legendary sad places in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, are only rock bottom when poorer, African countries are left out of the picture. Italy is romanticized by tourists and movies as an ideal place, with ideal weather, food, and people, but Italians, appalled by economic under-performance and third-worldly levels of government corruption and instability, are reportedly very gloomy these days. Suicide is not just something that happens to Japanese or Scandinavians for whom material well-being is not enough. It happens, in much larger numbers, to poor cotton farmers in India unable to pay back loans used to buy pesticide.

The happiness debate is not immune to the geography versus culture dilemma. And one can quibble endlessly over how to define and measure well-being or satisfaction, or how to distinguish correlation from causation, but those Scandinavians, at sub-zero temperatures and taxation above fifty percent of income, are actually very happy people after all. I suspect good governance has something to do with it. It has to be either that or the alcohol.

Superdelegates: Waiting for the Un-Democratic Convention

2008-02-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

A modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosing the health of American democracy would probably criticize the outsize influence of special interests and powerful lobbies. He might rant against an apathetic and uninformed public, and scorn the 80 million people of voting age that decided to stay at home in the last presidential election. He would probably write about the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds raised to buy 30-second television ads, and how money has become a better indicator of electoral success than a well-reasoned argument or a good debate. The media, the military-industrial complex, the electoral college, the Florida recount, the butterfly ballot, would all be included along with the usual suspects to be blamed for the bad shape of the world's first modern liberal democracy. And yet the now famous superdelegates, which will supposedly decide the Democratic primary this summer, could become the last straw for many, and the most embarrassing chapter for most.

Superdelegates, which account for one-fifth of the Democratic Party Convention, are members of Congress, governors, former presidents and vice presidents, party insiders, and members of the Democratic National Committee, including city council members and union leaders. These are not chosen by primary voters, nor are obligated to give their vote to the candidate preferred by a majority of the people. Thus, as it is often mentioned these days, one could envision a scenario where Barack Obama ends up winning twice as many state primaries and caucuses as its opponent, obtains more delegates and more votes, and still loses the nomination because party insiders prefer Hillary Clinton. Until now, very few knew those superdelegates even existed. As a matter of fact, most people that volunteered their time, donated their money, spent hours in a caucus somewhere, or simply went to the voting booth, believed they were participating in a beautiful exercise of democracy at its finest.

The party's primaries were a largely undemocratic affair for most of its history, and were dominated by big-city bosses and party machines. After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, in passionate contest for primaries with Eugene McCarthy, the DNC gave the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam war and had not won a single primary. As a reaction to the public outrage -the convention itself was mobbed by protesters who were tear-gassed-, the party revised the primary process to make it more democratic and ensure that the will of the people decided the nominee. However, after the consecutive nomination of mavericks like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter, the party introduced the superdelegates to control the fervor of activists and the momentum of insurgent campaigns and non-establishment candidates. Party insiders and elected officials, or so it was argued, would be better judges of a candidate's potential electoral success. They did not, however, get off to a good start. Superdelegates propelled the nomination of Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Reagan in the 1984 general election. Since then, people forgot about them. Each time, a clear front-runner emerged early in the race, and superdelegates simply crowned him en masse at the convention. Over the last years, the closest thing to a brokered convention took place in a fictional election, in the last season of the American television serial drama The West Wing.

It is not at all clear that Clinton would get a majority of superdelegates, or that Obama will reach the convention with a lead in states, delegates, and votes. It should also be noted that many Obama supporters welcomed the idea of a brokered convention when they thought Clinton would lead in votes and delegates. They knew the rules of the game. But most voters didn't, and many will feel understandably disillusioned, if not enraged. Watching so many of these party insiders relish at their role as king makers and boast about receiving calls from Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and the Obama campaign is unsettling enough. The political system of the United States allows for someone to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college and the presidency, and for thirteen state legislatures in the smallest states representing 4 percent of the population to block any amendment to the constitution, among other notoriously anti-democratic features. But you can chalk these up to the federal structure of the United States. The power of superdelegates in the Democratic party, however, has no other explanation than the desire to control and tame democracy. After getting so many people involved and excited, breaking records of political participation in each contest, the will of the majority should determine the nominee, whether this is Hillary or Barack. Otherwise, they should skip the balloons, the confetti, and all the happy talk about the power of democracy at work.

Obama's Foreign Policy Experience

2008-02-11T01:44:00.001-08:00

After twenty wins in coast-to-coast state primaries and caucuses, record-breaking turnout in most contests, and a level of national enthusiasm that threatens to alter the political map of the United States, Barack Obama is still asked in interviews, almost without exception, how can a candidate with such "little foreign-policy experience" be viable or electable in a presidential race. Other candidates receive different treatment. That affirmation, for example, never made it to any question posed to the former front-runner for the Republican nomination, Rudolph Giuliani. Before the collapse of his campaign, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Rudy was favored by national-security conservatives, who imagined that only America's mayor could beat radical Islam worldwide. And yet Joe Biden, who called Giuliani "the most uninformed person on foreign policy now running for president" was correct, if only a bit unfair. He forgot Mike Huckabee, but then again, no one bothered to say anything at all, good or bad, about Mike Huckabee those days. Huckabee and Giuliani never got the "little foreign-policy experience" bit from interviewers or debate moderators. Obama has to deal with that assumption as a given.

Of course, he handily rejects that notion by reminding his audience that no one had more experience than Cheney or Rumsfeld, or that judgment can be more important than experience. Others point to the Kenyan or Indonesian chapters of his life story. And very few elected officials had the foresight and the courage to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, which would become the biggest strategic blunder of US foreign policy in the last decades. Less noticed is the fact that, before he began plugging his second best-selling book, before he was rumored as a presidential candidate and only C-Span junkies paid attention, Obama spent most of his time in the Senate talking about issues related to foreign policy, and doing so with the command and nuance that one associates with more seasoned legislators. Whether on the Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Homeland Security, or Veterans' Affairs, at Darfur rallies, or in conversations about the embargo on Cuba, Obama was at his best when he spoke about foreign policy.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of being naive and inexperienced on foreign policy when he stated that the United States should strike against selected targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan, provided actionable intelligence and Musharraf's inability to take action himself. Yet Clinton did not protest when a CIA airstrike in Pakistan killed one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives earlier this month, or back in 2005 when a CIA drone took a similar action against another leader of the network, also within Pakistani territory. She did not protest when Ethiopia bombed the Islamists out of Mogadishu a year ago, with help from the United States, or when Turkey repeatedly violated Iraq's northern border to stamp out PKK targets in its Kurdish region. Last September, Israel bombed Syria, unprovoked, in another cross-border attack that did not draw Hillary Clinton's opposition or condemnation. Fortunately, some people have begun to catch up and turn the argument on its head. After another flawed attempt at justifying her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion, Wolf Blitzer, in a rare display of inspiration, asked Senator Clinton: "Are you telling us that you were too naive in believing that George Bush would do the right thing?" She laughed, nervously, and replied without countering: "Nice try, Wolf, nice try." Indeed.

Tunnel Vision in the Strait of Hormuz

2008-01-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

Trying to persuade an audience in Nashville, Tennessee, that Saddam Hussein had already fooled the world once about his intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush issued one of his most memorable malapropisms:

"Fool me once, shame... shame on... you (long, uncomfortable silence). Fool me... can't get fooled again!"

Maybe so, but the American public has shown a surprisingly high tolerance for being fooled repeatedly, as if it were impossible for the Bush Administration to cry wolf too many times. Even though the United States had just invaded Iraq on the false premise that its weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the region and the world, resulting in one of the worst foreign policy mistakes of this generation, the US government has spent the last three years building a case against neighboring Iran based on (you guessed correctly) its threatening nuclear weapons program. The American public and, most importantly, the chattering classes and the foreign policy "experts," believed them once again. The only real disagreement, given the damaged state of national hubris in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, was whether anything at all could be done about it.

Last December, the National Intelligence Estimate stated "with high confidence" that Iran had halted its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons' program back in 2003. Bush had been notified of this for some months, but nevertheless dialed up his anti-Iran rhetoric. Perhaps he put the report in the same to-read-later pile as the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" memo.

One month later, some Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz allegedly brought us to the brink of World War Three. Five Iranian patrol boats had approached three US Navy warships. In one of the radio transmissions, a threatening message was picked up: "We are coming at you. You will explode in a few minutes." The US ships said they were about to fire when the patrol boats retreated. Both the United States and Iran decided to broadcast their own version of the event, with the Iranian government saying that it had been a routine mission of reconnaissance and that there had not been any hostility. Asked yesterday which propaganda he believed most, Fareed Zakaria, one of the better-reputed foreign policy pundits, repeated his own past mistakes by acknowledging he believed the American version, but that the Iranians had a reason to be jumpy and aggressive. In an attempt to justify the decision to get ready to fire on the small speedboats, which typically are only crewed by 2-3 people and should pose no threat to US warships, mentions of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole abounded. Many sources within the Pentagon have now begun to retract, venturing that the hostile message was probably issued by a locally famous radio heckler known as the Filipino Monkey. The sound and tone of the voice sounds different than that of the Iranian officer, and lacks a Persian accent. According to the Navy Times, these kinds of things happen frequently, and especially in the Strait of Hormuz.

For Americans, this incident evoked memories of the USS Cole and the death of 17 American sailors. This attack was allegedly carried out by Al Qaeda -although a recent judicial ruling in the US makes the Sudanese government responsible- and took place in a Yemeni port. Iranians and others in the Muslim world, however, are likely to draw different comparisons and historical analogies. They will probably say -and they are right- that the Strait of Hormuz is within territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and that the US warships have been patrolling it for decades. They might remember that a year ago, a US nuclear submarine accidentally struck a huge Japanese oil tanker, risking disaster. They will surely point out, and this incident is almost never brought up in the US media, that in 1988 a US warship mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers over Iranian territorial waters. The US government said that an inexperienced crew mistook the Airbus 300 for an F-14 Tomcat fighter, but I doubt anyone in Iran believes that. After all, only three months before that, the United States had sank two Iranian warships and six speedboats in what was called Operation Praying Mantis.

And it all happened in the Strait of Hormuz, involving US warships. Remember the USS Cole? How about remembering Gulf of Tonkin?

The Pastor's Dangerous Missive

2008-01-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

First of all I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. The holidays, of course, pose a difficult hurdle for bloggers of my ilk. But now I'm back.

I, unlike some of my friends, have been diligently reading the foreign policy statements which had been put forth by the presidential candidates in Foreign Affairs magazine. While I have been stultified by the banal writings of the Democratic candidates, I have been incensed by the small-mindedness and, in some cases, radicalism of the Republican candidates. Obviously, my agita has not been so acute as a prompt me to write something about. However, after getting back from Florida, I was welcomed by the most recent copy of Foreign Affairs. In it was an essay by Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and fellow son of Hope (along with former President Bill Clinton). Now I have to admit that Huckabee makes me laugh on occasion. Growing up in the South, his soft-spoken ways and his pastoral (literal and figuartive) approach to politics speak to me, despite all my cerebrally-informed attempts for them not to. However after reading just a few paragraphs of his essay, the veil has been ripped from eyes. Now, I never thought he knew anything about international politics, but I was surprised to see that Chuck Norris’ candidate knows nothing about politics. Let me say it again: Huckabee knows nothing about politics.

The reason for this unqualified judgment is as follows: he says, "The first rule of war is know your enemy, and most Americans do not know theirs." He of course is talking about Islamic terrorists, and I agree with him there. Here comes the rub. Just a few sentences before he states that "they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it." This nonsense -- this Fox News, Ann Coulter, Kristol family nonsense -- cannot stand.

Osama bin Laden understands politics perfectly well. His decision in the late 1990s to abandon local wars in corrupt Arab states (the near enemy) and begin a focus on the global war against the United States (the far enemy) and its proxy in the region, Israel, shows calculation and an understanding of the way the world works, especially the postmodern, mass-mediated world in which live. Osama bin Laden has no desire to kill every last American. Only the greenest recruit in the Al Qaeda organization has the notion that they can actually rewrite the rules of civilization. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's mentor, has studied some of the greatest revolutionaries, including a Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. Al Qaeda's actions are carefully orchestrated to achieve tangible, concrete outcomes. If just killing Americans was their goal, there would be a lot more dead Americans.

Huckabee, while talking about Sayyid Qutb and other important aspects of violent global Islamism in his essay, fails to grasp even the most basic notions of political science. His embrace of this ideal of "Islamo-fascism" shows that his views of the outside world are just as paranoid and muddled as those of Rudolph Giuliani, who is currently under the tutelage of some of the most aggressive neo-conservatives. In Andrew Sullivan's recent article about Barack Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, discusses how having an American president whose father was born in Kenya, grandmother is a Muslim, and studied in a Muslim-majority school as a youth might actually deter some angry young Muslim youth somewhere in Pakistan at sometime in the future from sacrificing his entire life to kill Westerners. While I'm not sure I buy Sullivan's argument completely, a Baptist preacher from a Red state who sincerely believes that all Muslims want us dead will -- if elected to the presidency -- ensure that there will be at least a few more of those young men who choose the route of violence over pursuit of their own self-interest.

2007-11-30T15:47:00.000-08:00

On Nov 30, 2007 I think it might be worthwhile to take just a switch of time and make some note of the fact that this is the 100th birthday of Jacques Barzun. There are few historians and cultural critics who can publish a (massive "Summa") work in 2000 that included memories and recollections of the German bombardment of Paris in WWI - who can make piquant and erudite proclamations on the decline of culture from his sitting room while under the watchful gaze of a cubist portrait of his mother done by Albert Gleizes (only the third cubist portrait, not the third cubist picture, but the third cubist portrait he is determined to make clear); a man who can do so after having played about in Duchamp's studio as a child and attending an orchestral performance of Stravinsky's "Le Sacre duPrintemps." Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage remains the only work of his 37 published books (he is currently at work on his 38th apparently) that I have read in its entirety and I am forced to admit that I did that so long ago I can barely recall its contours to say anything more than that the tone of polemic that runs through the bio-synopsis of all three men in the title have informed the way(s) in which I have formed my own opinions. It is a work that long ago took a hazy place in the upper-bookshelf of my mind as the small and scattered handful that pushed me down the path that I ultimately took. That noted, like the near ubiquitous line in almost every preface to every academic book published wherein the author thanks friends and colleagues for their support and influence while making mention of any errors being their's alone, let me add that neither I, nor those around me, nor any of my students, should hold Monsieur Barzun responsible for my track.

On an aligned, if not parallel, note, I am moved to think that those many (and increasing and too many legislators thank you very much) folks who insist that the teachers of history -- those first-line historians among whom I am (occasionally) proud to admit my place -- teach just the "facts" should be made to read almost anything byBarzun. For those interested, here is a nice piece from last month's New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal

Somehow it also seems appropriate that Evel Knievel died today.

fp

And now for something not entirely different

2007-11-28T19:41:00.000-08:00

I am sure we are all by now well aware that as the transit strike drew to a close - and leaving the university students who took to the streets just as that was happening without an interested audience (though I am sure there remain a few knots of Sorbonne-ers out and about) - the north-of-Paris banilieue, Villiers-le-Bel has been gripped by riots for the last couple of days/nights since the death on Sunday of two teenagers - deaths caused by an accident between the youths' motorbike and (of all things) a police cruiser. Thus far, the worst of it occurred on Monday night when clashes between young rioters and a platoon of riot officers reached a near unprecedented level of violence that saw more than a hundred officers wounded - some quite severely. In its most in-depth piece on the situation thus far, the New York Times on Wednesday insisted that while reference to the riots of late 2005 were common, two things set the latest skirmish apart: the riots have been localized largely to Villiers-le-Bel (though there were apparently some dust-ups outside of Toulouse on Tuesday night) and the "new tactics" being used by the rioters. Unfortunately, while the NYTs piece was nicely well-rounded with a scope that reached towards "the underlying causes of frustration and anger — particularly among unemployed, undereducated youths, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants — remain[ing] the same" as those that motivated the 2005 riots, the catch of the work - and the new tactics they seemed focused on - was the use of firearms on the part of the rioters Monday night.

Indeed, that is a troubling development - more than 30 officers were wounded by shotgun pellets, with at least one losing an eye, while another had his body armor pierced and his shoulder nearly destroyed by a high-powered hunting rifle. Nonetheless, the concentration on weaponry beyond paving stones and brick bats is actually unfortunate and I suspect it was not (entirely at least) the reason for police spokesman, Patrice Ribeiro, insisting that “This is a real guerrilla war,” - though he did caution that the police (who have shown a fair measure of restraint thus far) will not be fired upon indefinitely without responding. Rather the real point of interest and concern should instead be the level of coordination that the rioters apparently exhibited through the night. According to eyewitness reports, kids as young as 10 or so acted as scouts and lookouts for the main "force" which was made up of youths from (roughly) 15 to early/mid-twenties who were, in turn, coordinated and directed by older men (apparently with some training) who focused efforts in specific places and towards specific actions with Le Monde reporting on the sighting of at least one "strapping man in a black track suit" wearing a walkie-talkie tuned to the police frequency and guiding teams of rioters. As opposed to the riots of 2005, headless hydra that they were with both random violence and lootings, those involved this past Monday were focused - rioters were stopped from burning the cars or looting the stores of "family" though a symbol of the state, the library, was gutted by molotov cocktails - and the brunt of their actions were directed specifically at the police with the "event" nearly culminating in riot forces being hemmed into an open intersection by coordinated "pincer" movements of the rioters where the bulk of the police injuries were suffered.

From the reports I have read, the level of organization was indeed quite high, waves and rough formations of the young rioters moved in concert, dodging and parrying the efforts of the police as they funneled them into the area they wished to truly engage them. The rioters wore scarves around their mouths and noses to not only obscure their identities but lessen the effects of the tear-gas that was fired to disperse them - and in what was likely an act of spontaneous support, from the surrounding apartment towers women screamed warnings down to their "sons" as they threw pails of water to wash the tear-gas from them and dampen the noxious clouds. To put it mildly, if this is to be the face of riots to come, Paris, if not all of France, is in for quite a time. I suspect things will get worse before they get better.

All of that noted, I actually see something of a Les Miserables silver lining in all of this. After the 2005 riots much was made of the occasional (if loud) shriek of "Allahu Akbar" that was to be heard among the rioters; but during this (more) violent skirmish, calls to the greatness of God were missing. Instead, it was, as was reported in Le Monde, invective hurled at the police as "pigs" and commands to stay grouped. In other words this was a call to arms, a manning of the barricades. Frankly, it was notice that for all else that has occurred, be it institutional neglect on the part of the state or "square-peg in a round hole" on the part banlieusards, this was a reaction française to a situation that for myriad reasons has been an issue since the end of WWII; one that was only covered over by Les trente glorieuses and that had the curtains pulled back on it by its end. In other words, the rioters were only and simply behaving as Frenchmen and in many regards, whether it be the unfortunate deaths of two teenagers that acted as the lighted wick, it is entirely appropriate that it came full on the heels of the transit strike - where the issue was of undoubtedly (with the wrinkled nose of Barthes when he discussed what was "natural" in France) French men and women striking in defense of their own slice of the welfare state pie - as here it was a matter of it is time that they in the banilieues get to taste the berries of said pie.

fp

La grève in the grave? Some thoughts on the French transit strike

2007-11-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the long absence. I was finishing my manuscript, attending a conference on multiculturalism, and vacationing in France. It is the last of the pretentious items that I wish to write about.

Our family vacation to Paris almost perfectly coincided with a nine-day transit strike which crippled France’s transit system. As a result, I failed to put on any weight (a usual outcome of my trips to Paris) because I was pushing a 50lb five-year old in a pram across the vast urban terrain of the City of Lights. I also think I pulled something in my back.

While the strike personally inconvenienced me, it also cost France about $592 million a day and chipped away at Sarko the American’s image as untouchable. While Sarkozy’s current popularity ratings are down, he is most certainly not out. Nearly a third of Frenchmen still support him (and by extension, his attempts to reform the bloated French state). His decline in popularity saw a measly five-point drop, something I am sure the cocksure president can live with.

Some have rushed to declare his presidency over, reform at an end, and a return to the “good ol’ days” of the welfare state, however, let me set you straight. Most Parisians condemned the strikes vehemently, while not even mentioning the government. I only met one gentleman who supported la grève, but he did so only on principle, suggesting that the government had signed a contract which they were now trying to reneg on. All others wanted the strikers to go back to work.

President Nicholas Sarkozy was quiet during most of the storm—only speaking out a day or so before the strikes were suspended. Once he opened his mouth, the strikers backed away. The French seem to have reconciled themselves to the realities of globalization and their important place within the process. Rather than let the future pass them by, they are willing take a leadership role. With Bush flailing in his self-created morass and Putin orchestrating the rapid creation of a postmodern police state, the world needs France now more than ever. And that also means they need Sarko. He has the capacity to get the French to realize that abandoning certain aspects of the welfare state is a good thing. No one expects France to become the predatory, capitalist free-for-all that is America (nor would any thinking person want that). However, it’s time move beyond the 1970s. The global economy is an incontrovertible reality. France cannot continue to act like it did when China was a third world country, and the existence of the USSR kept the world from facing the impossibility of socialist utopias.

I love France, and the French. But they—like us—are going to have to adjust to the realities of the current era. France gave the world the strike—now it’s time for them to give us something else. I, for one, am looking forward to their contribution.

Come to France for the objet d'arts, stay for the . . .

2007-11-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

Of course, with all else that has emerged from France in the last weeks - presidential divorces, new museums, personality diplomacy in Chad and Libya, etc. - this struck me as the most "wow" inducing. James Lipton, host of "Inside Actors' Studio" once made his way in Paris as a pimp!

l'enfer, c'est les autres – part deux

2007-11-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

There is a manner in which the whole project might be read as a particularly fuzzy French attempt at Guliani's "broken-window" policy, combined with aforementioned basketball league. Give the rambunctious young'uns someplace else to break the windows and commit the vandalism of "tagging" (a vaguely protected piece of urban cultural production since Jack Lang in the 1980s) - and wouldn't it be an interesting twist if this box that apparently no one wants/uses became a contested territory between rival groups. But it also seems to reduce the problem of juvenile delinquency to an issue of place; and “place” has been an issue among the French for sometime, committed as they are to the construction of what Pierre Nora has called “sites of memory.” Though there is also the wary speculation of Michel Foucault who, in his Discipline and Punish, offered the “Panopticon.” A “site” which should not be “understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form . . . polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.”

The question now becomes what the “distribution of individuals in relation to one another,” means when the space allotted is not really a space at all but the recreation of an entry-way – when the passage from the external world to the ostensibly internal becomes an end in itself? Mies van der Rohe once declared that the role of the architect and modern architecture was to “express the will of the epoch . . . For the meaning and justification of each epoch, even the new one, lie only in providing the conditions under which the spirit can exist.” What “will” is being expressed and whose “spirit can exist” in an architectural equivalent of purgatory? Considering all this, it is only the most fortuitous expression of ironic convenience that the “faux hall” is made of a shipping container – somehow it doesn’t seem as if its economic role in the transport of things away and out of sight has changed all that much, it has only become a social one.

fp

l'enfer, c'est les autres

2007-10-31T20:01:00.000-07:00

If the "resistance" bona fides of Sartre's Occupation-era work has been called into question (I am often prone to paraphrase the historian Julian Jackson and argue that if you have to parse out the meaning and intent and even then it is still available only to a discreet few then I wonder what is meant by "resistance" or member thereof - in more cynical moments I fall to the postion of Merleau-Ponty and say that all resisters were killed) there remains no doubt about the cultural legacy of said work. Particularly the premier piece of insouciant, though incessant, dread - or at least the life-looping, shoulder-shrugging, make of it what you will static maze - No Exit. The "aura" of this work (to steal from Walter Benjamin) - if not simply France's 20thC Voltaire, as de Gaulle was wont to call the wobbly walleyed philosopher - and the more than faint residual draw that existentialism generally has left in the land of the champions of ennui, still marks much of the most frequently (and vociferously) lauded cultural products. Despite its relative age (being just over a decade old), I admit that I think most here of Kassovitz's 1995 "La Haine." True, the frowsy interior of a Second Empire parlor has been replaced by the more expansive (but equally entrapping) confines of the banlieue and the conversation has changed from discussions of the inappropriateness of a man presenting himself to a woman in his shirt-sleeves to any manner of dress in a space of decidedly fractured social scapes, but the general dynamic of three characters interacting in a setting besotted by a very Sartrean utterance "tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie" (you are nothing else but your life) remains tightly to type.

Of course it's hardly a secret that the banlieues have (overtly?) re-entered the French political and social scene in the last couple of years; and given Sarkozy's use of the inflammatory "racaille" during the 2005 riots they were an important part of the presidential election this spring. Even with all this being said, I was still caught by how perfectly and peculiarly "French" the recent attempt to manage urban deliquency in the port city of Le Havre was. Anyone familiar with Luc Besson's 2006 parkour vehicle knows that the entry-ways of the modernist blocks of apartments that make up the banieues are frequent hang-out spots for local toughs with little other place to go. According to Jean-Pierre Noit, Director General of the Public Housing Authority, this has become a serious issue in the port city's housing projects. "Entry-halls should be places of conviviality," he insisted, "but the reality is that they become the focus for social tensions, and many tenants find them unbearable." To that end, a daringly existential experiment has been undertaken that once again reduces the outlines of the social experiment called life to the confines of a single space - this time not a drawing room but a "faux hall" intended to create the illusion of a foyer to an apartment building - complete with door and windows, interphone, entry code-pad, mail/letter boxes, fake elevator door, and a stairway to the roof of what is actually a former 12 meter long shipping container - some 30 meters away from an apartment block of 400 "real" apartments. The results, and discussion, of the experiment have been mixed. Nathalie Nail, of the PFC, has called it a "total failure" and another example of how the youth of France are "made fun of" rather than listened to. One of the local youths has insisted that no one ever goes to it while another, Kevin, testily called it a joke; "They're trying to pack us in like sardines in tins."

Given the awkward way in which the French are only beginning to address the role and place of immigrants in the country - beyond futbol of course - there is something about this that does stike uneasily. Though is it much different than a midnight basketball league, just with a little more ennui? Whatever else might be the case according to Noit, given Le Havre's place as a port city, it would take no more time to bring in the crane and remove the box than it did to place it in the first place - and as an experiment in social organization, "the object was to empty the halls of the buildings to make life more pleasant for the tenants, for the moment it has worked." And if there is something that might mark the experiment at least a temporary success, lending it some of its own gritty authenticity - the faux hall was recently vandalized.

Fear of the Other in Campaign 2008

2007-10-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Maybe it’s just me reading too much into it, but I am currently aghast at the level of fear mongering vis-à-vis the "Other" that going on right now in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Case in point: Mitt Romney’s recent quote, “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”

In this gaffe (or Freudian slip—call it what you like), Romney’s fear of the Other is laid bare. The Democrats—personified by a black man and a woman—are bent on destroying America from the inside (the internal other) while the jihadists target America from the outside (the external other). The irony is that even if this was a mistake (I am sure it was), it is not a departure from the general tone of the Republican discourse as the candidates prepare for January in Iowa.

I listened to Sunday’s Republican debate in its entirety only to hear former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani “softly” threaten Putin with his “big stick” (the phallic undertones need not be explored here) to thunderous applause. This while Ron Paul was booed for suggesting that the PKK terrorism is a Turkish issue and should be left to Ankara to solve (after the Hispanophobe Tancredo eviscerated Speaker Pelosi over the Armenian resolution).

To believe the Republicans, Iran is bent on world domination and capable of projecting its imaginary missiles at Finland (thus the universal approval of magical missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” wherever—or should I say whenever—that is). China and India were both held up as nefarious economic and demographic bogeys lurking on the other side of the globe, but insidiously near in the deterritorialized world of call centers and cheap shipping containers. Even the generally even-handed Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threatened America with the specter of a bunch of “old hippies” (the late 1960s internal other) finding out their drugs are free under “HilaryCare.”

Let’s hope this frightfest is simply part of an “October surprise” by the Republicans, and that after Halloween, the politics of the real rather that politics of the preposterous seeps back in to the Red campaign.

Scam Czars to the West: “You are getting what you deserve.”

2007-10-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

The NYTimes website has an interesting article—Scam Czars: What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’? (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/weekinreview/21levy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp )

Here are some quotes from that article:
Russia has become a leading source of Internet ills, home to legions of high-tech rogues who operate with seeming impunity from the anonymous living rooms of Novosibirsk or the shadowy cybercafes of St. Petersburg… The security firms have not received much assistance from the Russian government, which seems to show little interest in a crackdown, as if officials privately take some pleasure in knowing that their compatriots are tormenting millions of people in the West. In fact, Russian hackers became something akin to national heroes last spring when a wave of Internet attacks was launched from Russia against Web sites in Estonia, the former Soviet republic. The incidents began after the Estonians angered the Kremlin by moving a Soviet-era war monument… Of course, Russia is not the only generator of Internet havoc... Internet security experts say that only the United States and China rival Russia in hacker activity. But Russia has only 28 million Internet users, according to rough estimates, compared with 210 million in the United States and 150 million in China, meaning that Russia has a higher percentage of scammers…. Even so, there remains a sense here that Russian hackers afflict the West far more than Russia, so why bother with them. On a Livejournal Russian forum last week, The New York Times asked participants why Russians have a reputation for Internet crime. “I don’t see in this a big tragedy,” said a respondent who used the name Lightwatch. “Western countries played not the smallest role in the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Russians have a very amusing feature — they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions or under any circumstances.” As for the West? “You are getting what you deserve.”

What a “bravo” way of constructing an online nationalism course from a new generation of IT-equipped Russians! Indeed, it is a totally Putin-style “Saying NO to the West!”

from sign and sight

2007-10-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Our negroes, our enemies"
Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijevic outlines the calamitous relationship of his compatriots to the Albanians.
For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply "our negroes." Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia's arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.

The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian "melting pot." In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito's death the country's diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.

At the top of this vertical, in the far north on the border with Austria, was the economically most advanced republic Slovenia. In a certain sense Slovenia stood for the permanent "high" in what was then the common homeland. You then moved on down through Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia in the centre to Montenegro and Macedonia in the far south, the chronic "low" of our former country. "The further south, the more deplorable" ("Sto juznije to tuznije") was the popular saying used to describe the ladder along which a specifically Yugoslavian brand of racism was always directed at those who were on the next rung down geographically and economically. Hence the Slovenians showed the contempt they felt for the country bumpkins, idlers or failures of the other republics most clearly towards the Croatians; the Croatians for their part passed it on to the Serbs; and the latter, in turn, took pleasure in making fun of the Macedonians or Montenegrins. The Bosnians, on the other hand, as the people who inhabited the centre of the Republic of Yugoslavia, were the object of mockery from all sides.

But right at the very bottom came the Albanians who lived in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Their language wasn't a Slavic language. They were poorer than the rest of us. Their culture was pretty alien. In the motley collection of different kinds of Yugoslavs they, as the southernmost ethnic group, were condemned to play the role of the absolute outsiders.

Anything that the rest of us in former Yugoslavia claimed to know about the Albanians was put together from a hodgepodge of offensive cliches. They were generally referred to derisively as the Siptari or the shiptars. If we didn't hate them openly, it was only because we did not consider them worthy of our hatred. Even at the best of times there was never any dialogue between "them" and "us."

The Kosovo Albanians were for us just a bunch of primitive, at most sometimes comical golliwogs, our Uncle Toms. In other words, they were our negroes. Yet just as the existence of the despised Albanians scarcely penetrated the consciousness of the average Yugoslav of the Tito era, so the casual cultural racism of that time seems, from today's perspective, rather harmless compared with the violent, murderous hatred of the "shiptars" that seized the Serbs following the death of Tito and after the first wave of "unrest" in Kosovo at the end of the twentieth century. This resentment became particularly intense throughout the phase of burgeoning nationalism in all the republics, during the brutal tyranny perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic, who set out to ruthlessly tear apart the common state. During the 1990s politicians and the media also began using the colloquial and derogatory term "shiptars," a label that increasingly stuck to make them the object of our paranoia. More and more often people began to speak of them as though the only reason they existed was to crush and annihilate "us Serbs".

One of the legends that did the rounds in Milosevic's version of the news was a historical myth that went roughly like this: "Once there were far fewer Albanians than Serbs in Kosovo. But over the years (by means of a miracle that has never been fully explained! V.A.) they came to Kosovo across the Albanian border and just settled here in our country, before our very eyes, without so much as a 'by your leave'." Equipped with what in our eyes were positively animal-like qualities, they developed the collective determination of termites and, what is more, bred like rabbits. Their uncontrollable virility and high birth rates made us shiver, indeed we shuddered with disgust. At the same time the Serbs were constantly being publicly entreated to profess their hatred of the "shiptars." No Serb was considered worth his salt unless he cherished this hatred. Thus official propaganda during the Milosevic era, supported unerringly by the media, declared the "shiptars" to be the Serbs' archetypal enemy; indeed, without this enemy the Serbs' own existence would have been practically unthinkable. For where would Batman be without his Joker? Now the "shiptars" were no longer pathetic Uncle Toms. On the contrary, they had transformed themselves into terrifying, dangerous demons, intractable and persistent in their mission to take over our historic territory, to snatch away from us the Kosovo Polje, the Kosovo Field, "the cradle or our culture," to steal our myths, to rob us of that which belonged to us by "historic right". (More here)

Determined to settle scores with these "shiptars" once and for all, our President Milosevic conceived a fantastic plan. In his murky empire of evil, poverty, ethnic hatred and hyperinflation, the army and the police aided by the mass media were to be allowed to discriminate against and humiliate the Kosovo Albanians without incurring sanctions. The Albanians would be able to be arbitrarily dismissed or arrested, their property plundered, their families and villages destroyed. Absolved of any responsibility and encouraged by popular support, the president for many years painstakingly put his plan into action, bringing violence and destruction first to Kosovo and then to the whole territory of Yugoslavia. Following the Dayton Agreement in December 1995 there was a brief ceasefire, but in 1999 the spiral of violence finally led Milosevic back to where it had all started, back to Kosovo.

Yet Kosovo was also the place that was to seal Milosevic's fate after thirteen years of his destructive rule. When NATO began bombing the main culprit, Serbia-Montenegro, at the end of March 1999, it destroyed some more of the infrastructure and claimed hundreds of civilian victims. Yet what followed was the end of Serbian state power in the province of Kosovo. At the same time the roles of perpetrator and victim were once more reversed in this hapless place. There was an exodus of thousands of Serbs and Roma and a rampage of revenge by the victors; and once again the victims were almost exclusively innocent civilians. The hope of any normality between ordinary Serbs and Albanians, of them being able to live side by side in the foreseeable future, was gone.

Milosevic had played his game so cunningly that only one kind of epilogue was possible: the UN war crimes tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nevertheless, even then, Milosevic managed to escape the place where justice might have been done, if only by suffering a heart attack. By eluding justice he left us with the question of blame. Not least for this reason the citizens of Serbia are burdened with guilt and shame, whether we accept it or not.

A few years ago the Serbian media reported for months on end on mass graves whose dead had been identified by forensic experts as Kosovo Albanians. One of the most horrific images was that of a refrigerated lorry out of which murdered Kosovo Albanian women, children and old people were disposed in Lake Perucac, near the mouth of the river Derventa. On our screens we saw half-decayed, clothed corpses being pulled out of the water, we heard the shocking confession of the driver, who had been told to transport the dead out of Kosovo in order to cover up the crime. At the time a Belgrade television station broadcast an interview with a man bathing untroubled in this beautiful lake from whose green waters the corpses had just been pulled. When the reporter asked whether this bothered him the simpleton stood there shaking his head as the water dripped off him. Blinking innocently and smiling laconically, he looked at the camera and said without turning a hair: "To be honest, I don't believe all that," and dived defiantly back into the water.

The guy is mad, you might think. But actually the opposite is the case. His reaction is absolutely understandable. Serbian citizens have a decade of brainwashing by politicians and the media behind them, a decade of lessons in how continuous lying can eventually make people believe their own lies. The bathing man was simply using that acquired skill.

Denial is one of the central new Serbian qualities. It is so new that we don't even have a proper word for it, and those who realize what is happening simply use the English word instead. Denial. This denial, coldness in the face of human suffering, an inability to show the most rudimentary empathy, shows that we as a society are in a no-man's land. Sometimes it seems as if we did not want to escape the maelstrom of the past. The question of the status of Kosovo, and at least as important, of our future relationship with the Kosovo Albanians, are among the most decisive questions of all, and they could be used as a measure of our political maturity. The reasons why we don't take a constructive approach to them are more profound. Today's Serbian society is tired of politics. It is tired of lost wars, exhausted by chronic poverty and the feeling that the Serbs must see themselves either as victims or as the guilty party. It fears change and shirks responsibility.

In other words, events have ensured that our view of the Kosovo Albanians will remain unchanged for a long time to come. To the traditional resentment there has simply been added the subliminal rage of the loser, which is vented in self-pity and may be coupled with the mystical idea of being inherently in the right. Indeed, the unavoidable loss of the former southern Serbian province of Kosovo is in certain circles of our society perceived as tantamount to an apocalypse. Not long ago the centre of Belgrade was plastered with posters designed to fool us: "There is no Serbia without Kosovo!" But whoever says that is lying, and many people fundamentally know this – for despite everything it is becoming increasingly evident that the status of Kosovo is becoming marginal in the everyday life and concerns of the Serbs. In fact many citizens – our young particularly – disappointed by all sides, seem to have decided that they don't believe in anything any more, like that simpleton bathing in the lake.

But what can one expect from a generation that has been raised amid war and destruction, fed with a policy of overt hatred, and that can't get a visa to become acquainted with other countries and cultures? Unfortunately, probably not very much. Our young people have begun to hate again, without inhibitions, with a frivolous delight. Surveys of school students are enough to make your hair stand on end – and they confirm the impression one gains from everyday life. More than 30 percent of the pupils at Serbian middle schools believe that one "should neither become friends with Albanians nor visit them." Almost a third of young people believe that the Chinese – the only relatively large group of foreigners in our country – should have their residence permits removed, even if they obey the law. Every third teenage boy and every second teenage girl is looking down on homosexuals and people infected with HIV.

The thought of the ghastly success with which contemporary Serbian society has deformed the thoughts and emotions of young people makes one shudder. Maybe the solution is simply to wait stoically and be patient. Maybe one only needs to hope that a new generation will grow up under more peaceful and healthier circumstances. Perhaps the only thing left for us is to believe that our grandchildren will be our real children.

*

Vladimir Arsenijevic was born in 1965 in Pula/Croatia. His prize-winning novels have been translated into many languages. He lives in Belgrade.

This article orignally appeared in German in Die Zeit on 20 September, 2007.

Translation: Melanie

Accountability or Royalties

2007-10-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Ricardo Sanchez said a few days ago that the war had been conducted with criminal negligence from its conception to the surge, and that the American people should hold their civilian leaders accountable for their actions. Bravo, Lieutenant General. Of course, Ricardo Sanchez was the military leader of Coalition forces in Iraq in the first years of the invasion, eluded being court-martialed for Abu Ghraib, and is now retired and planning to write a tell-all book. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show juxtaposed the general's "unbelievable progress" comments when he was in charge, with his recent "nightmare-with-no-end-in-sight" statement. The segment was appropriately called "Now You Tell Us."

Sanchez is only the last one in a too long list of shameless has-beens rushing for the publishing house. George Tenet, former chief of the CIA, tried in vain to absolve himself and blame others in his book. When he was an enthusiastic participant, it was all "slam dunk." Now that he's teaching at Georgetown and selling books, he maintains that his bosses manipulated him and the American people. Remember Colin Powell -the Secretary of State who believed Curveball and lied to the world on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly- and his book "Soldier"? General Richard Myers was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005, and now that he's retired claims that the strategy that the United States has adopted in the war on terror is wrong and ineffective. He was supposed to be the top dog, the main military adviser to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. They all had the ear of the emperor, but from their accounts they'd have you think that they were merely government clerks.

And it is not just about praetorian subordination. My favorite intellectual contortionists are the neo-conservatives, like Richard Perle or David Frum, who wrote the Axis of Evil speech. Hans Blix himself went from timid and ambiguous reports and statements when he directed the UN inspections team in Iraq, to blunt and fiery criticism when he became a published author. Plugging his book at an event in New York at the end of 2003, where he was received with standing ovations by an anti-war crowd, the only question he left unanswered was posed by a Syrian that asked: "Why didn't you say all this before?" Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has already had some run-ins with angry Americans at book-signings. Why? He says now that the Iraq war is all about oil, and that Bush's tax cuts are atrocious. When he was running the show, he testified in Congress supporting Bush's economic policy. Even the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times did a one-eighty on their opinion of the war as soon as they found neither WMDs nor smiles and flowers from grateful Iraqis, and went from war cheerleaders to fierce opponents.

In this tragedy, there are two kinds of criminals: those that were wrong, don't admit it, and stay the course, and those that were wrong, didn't say anything when it mattered, and now can't stop chattering to seek absolution and book deals. They have one thing in common: neither the former nor the latter have had the trial they deserve.

The Politics of Eurovision

2007-10-09T18:16:00.001-07:00

This debate is a few months old, but I thought the roster and content of this blog was perfect to revive a topic that in the United States gets the attention that it truly deserves: zero.

Last May, Columbia University's Duncan J. Watts wrote this interesting Op-Ed on political bloc-voting in the annual Eurovision contest. Serbia had just won the contest, receiving most of its votes from Former Yugoslavia republics. And England got trounced, in another supposed demonstration of anti-British sentiment and the buoyancy of ethnonationalism in Europe in the 21st century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/opinion/22watts.html

I wrote this in response: Mr. Watts is not alone in suggesting a political bias in the Eurovision contest. British and German tabloids also cried foul, and the British Parliament debated (!) this question. They couldn't be more wrong. It is true that voting patterns over the years show some recognizable voting blocs, but this is more due to geographic proximity and cultural affinities -similar languages, similar tastes- than the reflection of political alignments within Europe. There is no anti-Western or anti-British bias. Contrary to Mr. Watt's assertion that "no one votes for Britain," the United Kingdom is the country that has received the most votes overall in the history of this contest. The politics of Eurovision have more to do with other issues, such as the exclusion of Serbia for several years or the reaction in Arab countries to the inclusion of Israel, than with Western European countries having one bad year.

Having said this, did Marija Serifovic ever explain what she meant by giving the three-fingered salute to the cameras when she received 12 points from Bosnia?

Who is their real target behind their call for boycott Beijing Olympic Games?

2007-10-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

I am sick of Beijing’s “friendship” with Khartoum and Yangon. Should Beijing be condemned for these cold-blooded “friendships”? Yes.

But I am also sick of those so-called international human rights activists’ political prejudice and shallowness. Who is the real target behind their call for boycott Beijing Olympic Games? Not Khartoum! Not Yangon!

They naively believe that genocide cannot be stopped in Darfur because Beijing has resisted international pressure to bring peace to Darfur. They believe that the Burmese junta would not have cracked down on the monks’ protests without a tacit signal from Beijing that it would veto any sanctions bill at the UN. They may be naïve, but their governments which back them up are not stupid.

Behind the Western criticisms of Beijing over Khartoum and Yangon, there is a new round of great power politics is unfolding. This time, it is in a different way. Like the “hard” arms race in the Cold War which ended the USSR, the “soft” bullets in such “morals race” (wrapped with human rights banners) can also drag the rising dragon down.

Angela Merkel has met the Dalai Lama in her office. Canada will follow up. Who is next, India, Japan, or even the US? If Yangon collapses, Aung San Su Kyi will drive the Dalai Lama back to his palace in Tibet via the plain of Burma. The 72-year old man doesn’t need climb over Himalaya Mountains.

Excluded from the Western-dominated “legitimate” energy sources, Beijing has to look to those “illegitimate” energy sources. With democratic-styled regime change in the places like Khartoum, Beijing’s “illegitimate” oil supply will be cut off. China’s GDP growth will slow down. In the case of China, a 10% GDP growth is not an economic miracle, but a basic requirement for political stability. Even a 1% drop in GDP growth would create several million new unemployed who would become the driving force for the regime change in China.

The Communist Party of China is only one of many giant monsters in China’s history. This country has always been governed by various authoritarian monsters during its 5,000 year history. If China's communist monster collapses, who will replace it? Who can replace it? Will it ever be replaced?

If China collapses, what then for this world?

The Fourth Wave of Newly Independent States

2007-10-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

[Note: This is in part a reply to Miodrag Kapor’s earlier post on Kosovo, but due to its length, I have decided to make it a separate post rather than a comment.]

You are right to worry about the cascade effect of Kosovo’s independence. As we have discussed previously, I believe the province’s independence is a fait accompli and cannot be avoided at this point. While some commentators have said Russia will block it out of ideology and not use it a bargaining chit, I disagree. I have watched the Putin administration closely for almost a decade and have yet to see ideology rear its ugly head. He is a pragmatism to the core and will ultimately sell out the Serbs (an outcome which, I believe, would be in the nation's long-term interests) to get his way with Abkhazia (though I still not see an independent South Ossetia in the cards).

Given this, I believe that the international community needs to begin addressing the implications of the “fourth wave” of newly independent states within and on the borders of the European Union. The first and most important wave (1918-1922) resulted from the breakup of the Romanov, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Hohenzollern empires after the Great War, creating Cazecholovakia & the Baltics and reviving Poland and Albania. While the second wave (1945-1969) which was associated with decolonization did little to redraw borders in Europe, the loss of colonial possessions did much to change the face of the Continent. The third wave (1989-1993) again remade the map of Eastern Europe, as the federal states of Yugoslavia and the USSR disintegrated. Today, we sit in the liminal space between waves three and four. In addition to Kosovo, Republika Srpska, Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia, Flanders, Wallonia, Euskadi (Basque Country), Catalunya, Padania, Corsica, and various ethno-republics of the Russian Federation are clamoring for absolute autonomy or outright independence. The devolution of power to regional and ethnic areas which the EU has facilitated over the years is a powerful catalyst for these polities. Kosovo’s independence will encourage them even more.

Inside the European Union (especially within the Euro- and Schengen-zones), granting independence is a bureaucratic nightmare, but will have little effect on peace and stability. Outside its borders, things are much stickier—especially where Russian troops might have a say in territorial transfers. Regardless, the lawless statelets which have proliferated since 1989 are a major problem and must be addressed soon. Forcing breakaway republics to adopt parts of the acquis communautaire could possibly function as tool to reduce crime, trafficking, etc. However, to get to that point, the EU needs a policy. In post-Soviet space, it will be Russia that rewards and punishes behavior, and so the Kremlin will need to do its part as well. The question is: how comfortable is the international community with the fracturing of the current state system? Is a 300-member UN anathema or could it be accommodated?

A unified position is the only way forward. Back in the early 1990s, Bush the Elder told Croatia and Slovenia not to jump ship, but there were back channel signals which contradicted this official position, and, of course, the Germans did not hide their feelings about Croatian and Slovene independence. Currently, such mixed messages again proliferate. As Miodrag pointed out in his earlier post, a common EU position on Kosovo itself is almost unimaginable, much less a concerted agreement on the general trend towards splinter states. This situation is likely to emerge as an important shibboleth in years to come. Angela Merkel has shown an amazing propensity for ostrich-like behavior on tough issues, so don’t look to Germany to provide answers. I suspect it instead be Nicholas Sarkozy that decides the future of the European map.

Kosovo's case - consequences and implications

2007-09-29T23:12:00.000-07:00

In a recent visit to Albania, President Bush received a much needed warm welcome by local officials, as well as by the local population. The reason was very simple: in contradiction with international law, Mr. Bush promised Albanians that Kosovo would be recognized as an independent country in a reasonable time period, thus rewarding the region that has the highest level of the organized crime in Europe. He looked very satisfied knowing that there exists a single European nation that actually likes him.

On the other side, the Russian president Vladimir Putin is very satisfied that the current political situation in Serbia corresponds to Russian interests in that part of Europe. Not long ago, the current prime minister of Serbia Vojislav Kostunica declared himself a big follower of the Western ideas in politics. Unfortunately, he did not take into account that he would sacrifice most of his former principles just to stay in power. From making a political union with former Milosevic and Arkan allies to the recent change of the party's status (Democratic Party of Serbia, not to be confused with Democratic Party in Serbia) which explicitly says that the party is against joining the NATO alliance in the future.

Taking into account the strongly entrenched views between the U.S. and Kosovo on one side and the Russian Federation and Serbia on the other, it seams that the (unified?) view of the European Union will have a decisive impact on the future solution of the breakaway region. But again, will it be there a unified EU view regarding Kosovo's future status? It is hard to confirm, particularly since there are many regions in Europe that have similar problems (including a recent widening chasm of distrust between Belgium's two main language communities). The long-run worst case scenario would be a possible recognition of Kosovo's independence without the resolution of the U.N. Security Council, which is unfortunately the most likely scenario considering the current situation.

What impact will it have on world politics? Will other problematic regions in the world take Kosovo's case as a prime example for their ultimate political goals (just to mention the cases of Abhkazia and Taiwan)? I would not be able to give a conclusive answer right now because there is, I believe, currently none.

In the case of the Balkan peninsula, there would be a long term animosity, not only between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, but also between Bosnia (why the Republic of Srpska should not have the same rights as Kosovo?) and Serbia; not to mention a most likely scenario of Serb's rebellion in the northern part of Kosovo (where Serbs make up the majority of the population) against a unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence. Depending on the general political relations between the Russian Federation and the U.S., Serbia actually might go more quickly into political and economic reforms than it would otherwise do with the region that is economically underdeveloped and has two million insubordinate people.

Yet, by accepting this fact, Serbia would have to give up its highly valued national pride which plays a huge role among the majority of Serbs.

Pre-emption is the only way….says the EU?

2007-09-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

In an article entitled, “Brussels Rules OK,” in the September 20th issue of The Economist, readers were told that the European Union has become the global trendsetter in economic regulations regarding everything from trade practices to quality to ethics. The author goes on to suggest that the EU’s “precautionary principle” (which refers to the ways in which EU regulations preempt the behavior, production, and distribution of many global goods), has been more successful than its counterpart, the American style, cost-benefit analysis, (which relies more heavily on market forces and post-production lawsuits) at attracting a global audience for regulatory behavior.

Those supporting its merits value its ability to test potentially harmful products before they hit the marketplace. Supporters see it as the best way to ensure the safety of both the business community and consumers. They argue that by forcing the business community into compliance with harsher environmental and safety issues, the business community as a whole will gain a competitive edge (with the exception of Microsoft, recently ruled as an illegal monopoly in Europe) and consumers will have access to better products.

Those arguing against such “preemption” see things differently. Take for example an article appearing in Stratfor, entitled, “Precautionary Policy: Leaving the Precautionary Principle Behind.” Bart Mongoven argues that for all of its “apparent” benefits and common sense, the precautionary principle is not being employed as a policy prescription, but one that is shrouded in protectionism, stifles innovation, and wastes millions of dollars/euros.

“In early attempts to apply the principle to regulatory decision-making the tendency was to argue that an activity or product should not be allowed until it had been proven not to cause harm. The problem was that despite centuries of careful thought and study, proving a negative remains impossible, so applying this strict standard was never a credible approach. And parsing the issue—for instance, defining whether a practice or substance gave rise to “concerns”—proved too vague for the precautionary principle to withstand scrutiny from legislators and regulators” (Stratfor, May 25, 2006).

So why has the world embraced this European policy; a policy that seems to be utterly counterproductive? Well, it appears that these protectionist policies (let’s face it, that’s what the precautionary policy is) have given a great deal of authority back to the state; a power that many critics have claimed it had been losing for quite some time. Also, the EU has proven to be more powerful than the mighty Microsoft, the face of the American corporation; finding Gates and Co. guilty of illegally dominating European competition and stifling homegrown talent.

In short, many countries/regional organizations around the world (especially those in the throes of industrialization) applaud the measures created in Brussels because it keeps the money in state hands and allows home-grown businesses the opportunity to compete against more powerful multinational corporations. Is this the solution to woes of globalization? I am not too convinced that it is. What I am convinced of is that it will allow Europe to perform two necessary short term tasks: 1.) maintain its position as the standard bearer for global ethics and 2.) keep the United States and its business interests at arms length.

Why Bush and Ahmadinejad Deserve Each Other

2007-09-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

Today, I watched Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance on 60 Minutes with awe. In an interview with Scott Pelley, the Iranian president refused to provide a single straightforward answer to any of the questions posed to him (at least the ones aired on Sunday night’s broadcast). When faced with such queries as “Can you tell me that you are not sending to weapons to Iraq?” and “Will you pledge not to test a nuclear weapon?,” Ahmadinejad purposefully refused to make himself understood. He responded to “yes” or “no” questions with elaborate—even floral—musings about human nature, world history, et cetera. (He was similarly vague, evasive, and obtuse at Columbia University on Monday).

As the interview progressed, I realized how similar Ahmadinejad and US President George W. Bush are in their political styles and personal habits. Both craft elaborate parallel universes where they are defenders of freedom, peace, and morality. Both refuse to answer questions they do not like. Such refusals similarly take the form of fatuous counter-questions which provide neither context nor content to important issues. (My favorite is when Bush responds to reporters’ questions with “The question I thought you were going ask me was…” and then he answers that question). Both engage in mind-numbing discursive manipulation to frame issues and attack their critics.

Both are so convinced of their own righteousness that fail to see that their respective worlds are falling down around them. Their faith blinds them to problems of their own making. Both men lack any sort of intellectual curiosity (this is born out by their refusal to deal with difficult issues directly and their proclivities towards instant answers without even a millisecond for reflection). Both laugh and smile at inappropriate times, even when talking about death and destruction. Both hide behind affected piety (Ahmadinejad curiously affirmed "I am a Muslim. I cannot tell a lie." in the interview) and accuse the other of apostasy (Ahmadinejad vociferously denied that Bush was a Christian because of his policies in Iraq). When things get tough, they blame others because they have God on their side so obviously they have done nothing wrong.

Do these two deserve each other? Most definitely. But my question is, what have we, the American people, and the Iranians done to deserve them?

Let's Not Forget to Not Remember

2007-09-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

A new movie (set for release in August 2008) that chronicles the failed assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler by a German military officer has faced harsh criticism in the court of German public opinion. Valkyrie, starring Hollywood leading man and scientology couch dancer, Tom Cruise, follows the last days of Colonial Claus von Stauffenberg and his plan to destroy the Third Reich from within; an act that demonstrated rather boldly the fact that not all Germans living under Hitler were arm-band wearing, swastika-waving, Nazis. Yet apparently in contemporary Germany, the past, even when it is portrayed heroically, is still very much a part of the guilty present.

In this age of globalization, humanity tends to think about tomorrow much more than today, let alone sixty years ago. But in Germany, and in particular Berlin, it seems that the past is omnipresent. Take for example the Holocaust Museum. Not only is its content designed to serve as a constant reminder of the final solution, but so too is its location. Sitting across the street from the Bundestag, the Holocaust Museum was intentionally placed there to serve as a physical reminder to each and every member of the German political establishment.

Yet memories and memorials and are one thing, what about the Cruise film? Well, it turns out that Mr. Cruise has apparently broken two of the most sacred social and political taboos in Germany: a deadly cocktail of Nazi symbolism and scientology. In Germany, the law stipulates that both the Church of Scientology and any representation of Nazi symbolism are against the fundamental features of democracy and are therefore, against the law. In fact, the German criminal code is clear to indicate that any representation of Nazi symbolism whether it’s in the form of a political party, a swastika, or a verbal or written denial of the Holocaust can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

So what has Cruise done? Well, actually nothing; that is by American standards, a standard that will judge Tom Cruise by his shortcomings as an actor. To Germans however, their troubled past, complete with swastikas and armbands will be brought to life for the world to see by a member of the Church of L. Ron Hubbard. For Mr. Cruise’s sake, I hope he has left enough room on the mother-ship.

Austria Doesn’t Fear Bruno…Why It Should

2007-09-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

Sacha Baron Cohen is on the verge of unleashing his third motion picture Frankenstein: the Nazi-fetishizing Austrian fashionista Bruno. While the Cambridge-educated comedian’s other creations—Ali G and Borat—enraged the black identity police and the Kazakh government respectively, Bruno does not even register on Vienna’s radar. When confronted with a question about Baron Cohen’s next movie project, an Austrian Foreign Ministry official responded, “Bruno who?”

Despite being the birthplace of Hitler, the Austrians seem to have moved on from worrying about historical stereotypes, especially in light of media attention surrounding the government’s recent imprisonment of the British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving. While Viennese diplomats may not be taking much notice of the faux reporter who argues that the fashion-illiterati should be "put on trains and shipped off tocamps," the same cannot be said for the country’s tourism industry. According to one report:

"Panic is now spreading among Austria’s tourism marketers, who fear that the gay fashionista, Bruno, will trigger images of a country brimful of Nazis instead of the advertised mountains, blue lakes and pretty girls in Dirndl folk costumes. If Borat’s success is indicative, they are justifiably terrified. Bruno’s air-headed adoration of Adolf Hitler could well remind prospective visitors that Austria still has a number of unresolved issues with its Nazi past, not to mention an active and rather successful rightist party."

Perhaps the tour marketers understand the mass-mediated global environment a bit better than Viennese policymakers. In today’s world of over-stimulated, under-educated, culturally-confused Western youth, your country is only as good its last pop-cult reference. Austrians wrongly assume that the average American 20-year old knows much more about their country than they know about Kazakhstan. I would be willing to bet that they would wrong at least half of the time. I am not saying that American youth are brimming with facts about Nauryz, kumiss, Kashagan field, the Nazarbayev clan, etc., but that they know very little about Austria. If you polled one on the street, I think you would be lucky to pry a single viable factoid from their brain. Given such unhappy realities, the country’s governmental image-makers would be wise not to ignore Baron Cohen.

Kazakhstan’s diplomatic legions made the best of a bad situation when Borat shoved their country into the spotlight. They worked hard to counter Baron Cohen because they knew that he had more power than they did among certain sections of the general public. Over time, they tamed their out-of-control national brand. The Austrians have a false sense of confidence about the resonance and content of their country’s image. This comes from being the descendent of one of Europe’s largest empires, Austria’s special role in the Cold War as a neutral meeting ground for East and West, and most recently from EU insulation. Austria is situated completely within Europe—mentally and physically. Of course Brits, Slovaks, and Swedes know something about Austria because the trains run through there. But what about the Americans?

It’s time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. If Vienna’s Scheißendummführeren do not counter Bruno, there will be a generation of American youths that think all Austrians are gay, fascistoid Schantineux.

Local Policy, Global Cities

2007-09-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

Local controversies around particular proposals from Mayor Bloomberg's new long-term plan for New York City have emerged recently, ranging from congestion pricing to zoning, and others. These proposals would entail immediate local repercussions if enacted and, therefore, should obviously be of concern to residents and other local stakeholders. However, what I think has been missing from the debate is the following: how does New York's long-term development affects its standing as a significant node in the network of global cities? Should the global economy be concerned about the specifics of New York's development?

Particular constellations of cultural, transportation, educational, and other infrastructures in New York attract and sustain the global components within the city that connect directly to global flows; examples of those global components being the finance industry, corporate headquarters, and such. In other words, many of the individuals who have chosen to live in New York in order to work in Wall Street do so in large part because of the cultural vibrancy, excellent transit options, and related amenities the city offers, and, in the same token, many of the institutions headquartered in Wall Street have done so in large part because of the communications and transportation infrastructures, and the cadre of highly educated individuals concentrated in the city. In recognition of this point, Hong Kong's chief executive said recently of New York and London:

"It’s not only merchant bankers and the Financial Times. You need art, you need the West End, you need Wimbledon. They all need the Yankee Stadium and Broadway – that’s all in the make-up of a good city.”

The policy decisions that made possible these city amenities, like "the Yankee Stadium and Broadway," were taken at the local level, yet their implications have outgrown the local and national scale to become enmeshed in a global scale. The growing significance in global affairs of cities has entailed the increasing globalization of urban policy, as urban policy has global repercussions and global trends influence the direction of urban policy. So, debates surrounding congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan should matter not only to New Yorkers, but to all concerned about the global economy.

Cognoscenti of the world, procreate

2007-09-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

Idiocracy, a little-known American movie from 2006, depicts a frightening dystopia: in the year 2505, we are all idiots. Generation after generation, educated, intelligent, and career-oriented couples continue to have less kids, if any at all, and later in life. Meanwhile their less enlightened peers happily outbreed them. The cumulative effect of this particular kind of dysgenics is a dumbing-down of human society that has less to do with the evils of television than with demographics and the gradual deterioration of our gene pool. Heady subject for a silly comedy.

Idiocracy speaks to the well-attested fact that poorer, less educated people are having larger progenies, while the rich and/or educated choose career or leisure in detriment of the reproduction of the species. This demographic time bomb is old news for many Lebanese, Israelis, or Serbs in their respective backyards, but has planetary consequences. Most of the billions of people to be added to the total of human population in the coming years will be born in the developing world. In the developed world, immigrant families gift their ungrateful hosts with both cheap labor and breeders. Most young Westerners today are empty-nesters that either can´t or don´t want to procreate to ensure that their kin doesn´t die out. In a recent Pew Research Center survey in the United States, the category "having children" ranked second to last among nine conditions for a succesful and happy marriage, taking a whooping 24-point-drop from 1990. "Sharing household chores", "adequate income", "good housing", "shared tastes", and "shared religious beliefs" were all deemed more important than children ("Agreement on politics" was the only one that scored worse than children, some forty points away from similar categories, such as shared tastes or shared religious beliefs. It spooks me that arguments about the removal of your toddler´s foreskin, which movie should win the Oscars, or which curtains look good in the living room, could be more important than the politics of your significant other. But that´s a whole other post).

Demographics and genes are also the subject of one of the most original books published this year. In Farewell to Alms, economist historian Gregory Clarks argues that the cultural and genetic transmission of capitalist values among the British population over centuries allowed it to escape the Malthusian trap and jumpstart the Industrial Revolution that moved some societies from poverty and underpopulation to relative affluence and drastic population growth. With a controversial thesis, Clark will now feature prominently in the academic debate over the rise of the West, which ranges from David Landes´emphasis on cultural values to Jared Diamond´s emphasis on environmental happenstance. And its title, a modified version of Hemingway´s famous novel, surely aims at putting it at the center of the development debate as well -more aid, says Sachs, less aid, says Easterly. To me at least, the most thought-provoking part is that these capitalist values (nonviolence, literacy, and a willingness to save and work long hours) spread and prevail due to a change in the nature of human population. In England, during the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes bred more effectively than the lower classes, whose infants died in massive numbers. This resulted in downward social mobility, as the progeny of the rich and educated, moving away from privilege and idleness, gradually took over their occupations. As Clark puts it, "the modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages." The Samurai in Japan or the Qing in China, however, were strikingly unfertile.

If you are reading this and a torrent of objections to Clark streams through your thoughts, don´t rush to reply this post with your comments. First, find a mate. Be fruitful. Multiply.

French Politics as Unusual

2007-09-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

That crushing sound you hear is the death of French politics as usual. On the left and the right, the old guard is making a mockery of themselves as the enfants terribles Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal remake the French political landscape.

Jacques Chirac—now thankfully ensconced in obscurity—did what he could to hand the Left a victory earlier this year, but despite his poor governance and attempts to undermine his own party (the ridiculously named Union for a Popular Movement or UPM), the people of France gave the son of a Hungarian aristocrat a chance. It seems, at face value, to have been the right choice.

Sarkozy, who is not afraid of hard work (or telling anybody he’s working hard), may come across to the uncareful observer as both Bush-like and liking Bush. While there may be something to the latter, the former analogy is far off the mark. While George W. Bush spent his first few months in office tapping cronies for key jobs before retiring to the ranch to cut brush, Sarkozy boldly built a cabinet of the old and the young from the left and the right. In his government, familiar faces like Bernard Kouchner (Foreign Minister), the left-wing founder of Medicins sans Frontieres, have been joined by an unfamiliar, but astoundingly adept, coterie of political operators, most notably Rachida Dati (Justice Minister). He has reorganized ministries, begun a reform process, plastered over the divisiveness of the presidential election, brought the Bulgarian nurses home, and hammered out a new vision for the country in one short summer. The only valid criticism leveled against him by the socialists is that he “steals our best people” (Kouchner, Jack Lang, etc.).

Despite this success he has brought the right, his arch-nemesis and UPM rival Dominique de Villepin still continues to heap derision on Sarkozy even as he faces a damaging inquiry his own role in a smear campaign against Sarkozy. De Villepin is a product of the old French right with its grandes ecoles, recondite networks, and disdain for the average citizen of the republic. Sarkozy—though seemingly an ideologue—has proven himself beyond ideology, a French Putin if you will, less the secret police background. Of course, he makes the old guard nervous. He has no use for them. He hit the ground running and did not pause to make sure he was scratching the right backs.

This brings us to the Left. Segolene Royal has intimated that the Socialist Party (PS) leadership undermined her campaign. She understates the matter. They wanted her to lose to show that new is bad. But she handled herself wonderfully against the obviously better situated Sarkozy. I believe she emerged from defeat with a mandate for change—not for France, but for the PS. Her post-election split with longtime companion Francoise Hollande, who is currently the head of the PS, was both appropriate and overdue. He had slowly transmogrified into her primary political stumbling block—a frenemy of the most dangerous sort.

He and the other “elephants” (as the old leadership of the PS are known) are loathe to tinker with the party, fearing that such re-engineering will delay their return to power. What they fail to grasp is that continuing to propagate 1970s-style socialism will prevent them ever returning to power (unless they are pitted directly against Le Pen’s forces of darkness). In Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere, the socialists have adapted to the realities of globalization and the fact that Big Business is not the Devil. However, France’s socialist party has spun itself warm but suffocating cocoon—and when Royal made some missteps early in the campaign (countenancing the statocide of Israel, supporting an independent Quebec, etc.) she allowed herself to get trapped in that cocoon. But judging from her recent invective against the party’s leadership, she has learned her lesson. When you see her speak now you realize that Royal mad as hell and she’s not going to take it anymore. I wish her luck, but reform—like revolution—is a messy business. I hope she has the staying power to see her new project through. With Sarkozy dazzling the masses and the media, she might just have the cover she needs to get the job done.

Now if only we in America could hope for such an embarrassment of riches as the French enjoyed in the most recent presidential elections.

New PM for Russia, But Does It Matter?

2007-09-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

An unexpected shake-up within the Russian government has the wonks all atwitter. The media have prematurely crowned a man whose name they don't even utter as the next Russian president. But does it really matter?

Today, Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of the Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and nominated the hitherto low-profile Leningrader Victor Zubkov to fill the spot. It seems like 1999 all over again when Putin himself emerged from the shadows to become the heir-apparent to Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically-elected president of the second Russian republic. However, something is different here. Yeltsin was ill, unpopular, tired, and beaten. Putin is hale (judo-chop!), adored (in the words of Borat, "Like Stalin!"), invigorated (by America's Iraqi morass), and indefatigable (maybe because he's a teetotaler). In other words, he's not going anywhere. Yes, yes--we all know Putin is stepping down at the end of his second term to make way for a new Russian president--ostensibly Zubkov. However, Putin only promised to step down from the presidency. Unlike Mr. Bush who is already salivating about "replenishing the ol' coffers" after leaving office and whose administration is on auto-pilot, Putin is stepping up the political stakes and bringing his "A-game."

As Hans and Franz used to say--or was it Gov. Schwarzenegger--"hear me now and listen to me later:" Putin is going to Ukrainianize the Russian political system at the last minute by making the head of government more powerful than the head of state. However, unlike Ukraine where a Westernizing president was hamstrung by a pro-Russian PM, Putin will find nothing by pliant (if not supine) acquiescence to his electoral legerdemain. Using that tried-and-true Russian system known as "government-by-telephone," Putin will emasculate the office of the presidency in his final hours in office by transferring power to the office of Prime Minister. But before that, he will then utilize Russia's spectral political party structure to ensure his party-of-the-month (name suggestions for the upcoming election: Russia Rocks and You Suck! and Putin or Die) wins election thus enabling him to be appointed PM at his leisure. Voila, the master of political prestidigitation (see my chapter in George Kassimeris' Playing Politics with Terrorism) will have done it again. All legal and keeping with letter if not spirit of his previous declarations.

Now the bigger picture. Is this good or bad for Russia? Definitely good. Russians can expect better healthcare, a more reliable economic system, and certainly more respect internationally than was the case during the chaotic Yeltsin era. Is it good for the rest of us? If you are Polish, Latvian, or Georgian, then a chill is probably going through your spine right now. But what about the Chinese, Indians, Western Europeans, and Americans? The forecast is mixed.

As a PM with more power than Blair could have ever dreamed, Putin will undoubtedly continue to make Russia stronger. A strong Russia is not only desirable, it is a must for the security of Eurasia. But there is a price to pay, and we've already seen the preview: petro-politics where the losers freeze to death; American college students unable to leave Russia because they bought some Soviet baubles from a babushka; long-range Russian bomber flights in the Atlantic and Pacific; the "father of all bombs" tested publicly yesterday; etc.

With these tidbits in mind, we all need to start preparing ourselves for Putin version 2.o.

Kazakhs Eyeing the Latin Alphabet

2007-09-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Last week, EurasiaNet reported that Kazakhstan is officially investigating the cost of switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The openness with which this question is being addressed tells us much about global culture, decolonization, Russian influence in its "near abroad," and international political economy.

While there have long been advocates amongst the Kazakhs for a change to the Latin alphabet, it only recently that the country's powerful nigh omnipotent president Nursultan Nazarbayev has officially back such a move. The change would lead to the use of two alphabets in the country where Russian-speakers still outnumber those whose primary language is the Turkic tongue Kazakh. The Azeris, Uzbeks, and Turkmen--all Turkic cousins of the Kazakhs--rapidly adopted the Roman alphabet after independence from the Soviet Union. However, the Kazakh government was reticent to do so. On the one hand, remaining within the Cyrillic orthographic space aided relations with its neighbor to the north (Russia). The neutrality-loving Turkmen, the Americanophile Azerbaijani, and the anti-Yeltsinite Uzbek governments all happily distanced themselves from the Russian linguistic, cultural, and political space in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991. Language politics was simply a cultural extension of a larger set of policies. We saw this boldly underscored as Uzbekistan's paranoid president Islam Karimov backed a return to Russian-language education after being cold-shouldered by the Americans in the wake of his bloody crackdown on political protest in Andijon a couple of years ago.

Closer to home, keeping Cyrillic enabled Russophones (Russian, Ukrainian, German, Uzbek, Chechens, Koreans, Uyghurs, and others) to more easily adapt to the new "state language," i.e., Kazakh. Keeping a lid on the brain drain of Russian technocrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople was a major factor in preserving both Russian's role a "language of inter-ethnic communication" and a Cyrillicized form of Kazakh. After a decade of Russian emigration, the trend has stopped. Many Russian emigrants from Kazakhstan have actually decided to return to the country realizing they have better opportunities as a "national minority" (although they loathe this term) under the Kazakhs than as an "immigrant" in Russia (where they are treated no better than other economic migrants from the old southern tier of the Soviet Union.

This is not the first time an alphabet change has been influenced by international politics. Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) literally outlawed the adapted Arabic script that Ottoman Turkish had long employed. While it took a generation of surreptitious Arabic scribblers to die off for his vision to be fulfilled, the decision to embrace the Roman alphabet proved seminal. Turkey started a slow gravitational shift towards the Latin world, and now sits on the doorway of Europe (both physically, legally, and mentally). Within Soviet space, script choices have long been shaping politics. After the Bolshevik revolution, many of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia were forced to adopt a Latin script (and abandon their Arabic writing systems), but fearing the spread of pan-Turkism from Anatolia, Stalin quickly ordered these language to adopt Cyrillic creating a generation of schizophrenic writers and readers. The Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--existed outside this orthographic madness. After their incorporation into the USSR after WWII, the Balts preserved their alphabets which made learning other European languages much easier. The Belorussians, Ukrainians, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz (along with the Kazakhs and others) were locked into a Cyrillic-informed (and policed) mindset which was a subset of the Soviet world (with the exception of anti-Soviet Yugoslavia, albeit still a communist country).

In today's globalized world, the Kazakhs along with Russian Kazakhstanis (i.e., ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan) are extremely cognizant of the power of the Internet, the English language, and neo-liberal norms of international business. Crafting a a Latinized form of Kazakh will undoubtedly add to the Kazakh people ability to better interface with the outside world, but especially in developing their nation into a vibrant information economy (buoyed by wisely invested petro-dollars). Kazakhs are enthusiastic about their nation resuming an important place in the global chain of commerce. A "new" Silk Road is indeed possible, but it will take openness and engagement on the part of the Kazakhstanis (Kazakh, Russian, and others) to accomplish this. The Latin alphabet is part of this transition. And unlike the Cyrillic, it lacks the overtones of imperialism which characterize the usage of so many writing systems around the globe, simply because the Kazakhs are choosing it of their own free will. [Note: The Kazakhs have no deeply emotional ties to their current script--it is a slightly altered version of the Russian alphabet which ill-fits the manifold Turkic vowels of Kazakhs. Prior to the adoption of a Cyrillicized standard Kazakh written language, Kazakh educated elites worked in the Russian, Persian, or Arabic languages. This makes any change much easier to swallow.]

Now to the bigger picture. Both Russia and Kazakhstan see their state coffers filling up with oil money. This enables Almaty to easily bankroll the expensive switch to Latin lettering, while simultaneously endowing Russia with the confidence to bid farewell to Kazakhstan as a Cyrillic-only space (besides, the Kazakh elite continue speaking Russian at home even if they ponitificate in Kazakh in public while their kids watch Russian MTV and read Russian glossy lad's mags or fashion rags). A few years ago, the Kremlin might have balked at such a move taking it as a sign of Western intrusion, but today Putin no longer worries about American meddling in his backyard. Washington is so distracted by Iraq that the country cannot even manage affairs in its own backyard, i.e., Latin America.

To the Kazakhs, I say "Welcome." To the Russians, I say "We'll see you in about 25 years."