Up That Cragged Hill...

The Russia Question

2006-03-14T01:10:00.000-08:00

Submitted to The Script, the LSE's Student Journal

In a February speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, US Senator John McCain called on world leaders to boycott July’s G8 meeting in Russia. McCain, an odds-on bet to be America’s next President, argued that “The Kremlin seems to prefer the pursuit of autocracy at home and abroad, to prefer blocking concerted action against rogue states, to prefer weakening what it views as democratic adversaries. This is a Soviet mindset, not a post-Cold War one…Under Mr. Putin, Russia today is neither a democracy nor one of the world's leading economies, and I seriously question whether the G8 leaders should attend the St Petersburg summit.” The speech drew a strong response from Russian representatives, who accused McCain of playing Cold War politics.

The spat does not yet represent modern Russian-American relations. The Kremlin’s ties with the United States remain cooperative on the Iranian nuclear crisis, they work together on energy policy (despite recent events), and they share similar goals in international economic and security forums. Their relationship bears no practical relation to the ideological dogma that shaped the Cold War.

And yet the controversy that McCain’s comments provoked is revealing. American attitudes toward Russia have changed dramatically in the last few years, with resigned disillusionment replacing the hopes of a decade ago. In its concern about Russia’s future America is revealing a historical continuity to its diplomacy. American foreign policy has been here before, and the policies it adopted sixty years ago solidified the Cold War. Should it decide that a policy of alienating Russia is the best answer to the perception of Putin’s autocratic rule, it will succeed only in strengthening Russia’s authoritarian direction.

In the aftermath to World War II most Americans saw the Soviet Union as a loyal ally. Wartime propaganda promoted a kindred “Uncle Joe” Stalin presiding over a courageous and amiable Russian people. That the American government had gone to war against the Bolshevik regime and had then suspended diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union was subtly discarded.

Within just a few years, however, the popular image of the Soviet Union changed from reliable friend to an expansive threat focused on global communist infiltration. By 1950, America was embarking upon a national paranoia that found its roots in Moscow’s perceived ambitions. McCarthyism was a consequence of the wider American tendency to misunderstand the Soviet threat. To the American establishment, it seemed that if the Soviet Union was not a loyal ally it was a profound and dangerous threat.

American actions did not cause the Cold War, that conflict’s roots were deeper and probably unavoidable. American policy did, however, make the conflict more dangerous. The United States’ inclination to universal doctrine limited the effectiveness of its policy. For example, its decision to provide support to anti-communist forces in Greek and Turkey, a rather specific episode, was soon clothed in the wider conventions of the Truman Doctrine. Truman explained that it would be “the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” wherever this occurred. Suddenly the response to a crisis at the South-Eastern tip of Europe was an element of a global strategy against communism that held no stated regard to specific circumstance. The Truman Doctrine, like McCarthyism, was rooted in America’s tendency to sweeping universalist policy that placed only a secondary regard to actual fact. That inclination is again being seen in the increasingly influential view of Vladimir Putin as a burgeoning tyrant.

Throughout the 1990s Boris Yeltsin was seen in America as a generally liberal (if lush) leader, presiding over a Russia that was becoming a prosperous, democratic, and constructive actor in world affairs. That optimism has largely disappeared. Putin, in particular, is now seen as a sort of dictator in disguise, steadily rolling back democratic reforms, restricting the independent media, interfering in neighbor’s affairs, intruding upon the nominally independent judicial system and generally ensuring his prolonged and dictatorial rule over Russia.

The widely Western perception of a Russian shift from burgeoning democracy to dictatorship is simplistic. Yeltsin was never the leader the Western establishment hoped him to be, far too many of his actions were far from being either liberal or democratic for that. In 1993 he illegally disbanded the Russian parliament by decree, then shelled the legislative supporters who barricaded themselves within the Russian White House. Yeltsin initiated the first of the vicious Chechnyan wars and illegally promoted close friends to senior government positions (his daughter, a computer programmer, became a presidential advisor). At the close of his term Yeltsin obeyed the constitution and resigned, but not before all but ensuring the election of his hand-picked successor Putin.

Despite it all, Yeltsin was given the benefit of the doubt by the Western establishment. Putin’s contrasting sly demeanor has received no such warmth. When George W. Bush said he was able to get a sense of Putin’s soul, it enforced the image of a simple-minded US President much more than it promoted his Russian counterpart as honest. The later disclosure that Putin had won Bush over with stories of personal faith only increased the cynicism.

Like the simplistic view of Yeltsin, most American opinions of Putin are inaccurate. He is not a tyrant but a leader in the classic Russian mold, whose emphasis is on order, consensus, and stability. He leads a government that pays lip service to Western ideals of democratic principles but pursues what the Russia scholar Bobo Lo has termed a “managed democracy”. Putin’s position is, in fact, better understood as one of relative weakness, not excessive power. He is popular, but largely incapable of wielding effective control over Russia’s bureaucracy and its chaotic and ineffectual borders. As a result many of his actions seek to consolidate executive power, which in the West is perceived as a creeping authoritarianism.

Nor does the image of Putin persecuting a liberal opposition hold under close scrutiny. His most influential and troubling opponents are not liberal democrats but a loose alliance of communists and nationalists who oppose reform more than he does. The mass of Russian voters are reform-averse; the word itself is pejorative in today’s Russia, a reminder of the difficult post-Soviet era. This is important, because Western alienation of Putin’s regime will likely help only in consolidating the success of the conservative old guard.

The point here is not that Putin is a more or less democratic or liberal leader than Yeltsin. Both have sought to extend the executive’s power in response to the chaotic environment over which they govern, and both have used anti-democratic means in doing so. Of more importance is how the West can best push Russia in a more liberal democratic direction. Using the lack of immediate success in that effort to conclude that the Kremlin is dictatorial will be counter-productive.

In diplomacy, perception is more important than reality. As America acts on its perceptions and begins to hold Russia at a diplomatic arms-length because of what it perceives as increasingly anti-democratic trends, Russian leaders will have no choice but to resume an anti-Western policy.

American leaders should adopt more substance than form in dealing with Russia. They must resist the temptation to approach Russian affairs in broad terms of shared values and common futures and other essentially meaningless platitudes. Constructive US-Russian relations will place an accurate focus on how things are in Russia, not how the West would like them to be.

The most effective policy will be one of constructive engagement, cooperating on areas of shared concern and leaning on Putin to adopt a more democratic domestic agenda when appropriate. McCain’s idea of a boycott is a particularly bad idea, one that is likely directed more to his own domestic agenda than it is at serious debate.

Russia’s history is separate from the West as much as it is a part of it, and it will not become a strict copy of the Western democratic mold. Internal Russian disorder ensures that its system of “managed democracy” will not be reversed in the short term. The US has a much greater chance of influencing its development in the long term by exercising patience and better understanding in its diplomacy. It should focus on issues in which there is room for positive cooperation instead of broad and misplaced doctrine. If it imagines Putin to be a leader with dictatorial ambition, America will only push him further in that direction.

The Uncertainty of Human Rights

2006-02-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

A rather straight piece of reporting on Louise Arbour's February 16 address at the LSE

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour addressed an LSE audience on the topic of “Human Rights in an Age of Uncertainty” in the Old Theatre on Thursday.

In a speech that touched on the variety of challenges that face her field, Arbour urged for the reformulation of the idea that human rights and security are engaged in an absolute trade-off. “Human rights do not impede the protection of national security” she argued, “the most profound insecurity does not rest from foreign threats, but from internal fear.”

Arbour possesses a distinctive career as an international jurist. As a Canadian national she has held positions on the Supreme Court of Ontario and the Supreme Court of Canada. In the late 1990s Arbour joined the United Nations as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, where she led the indictment against former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. She was appointed to her current position as High Commissioner in July of 2004.

Arbour opened with a recognition of the challenge posed by international terrorism. She argued that when faced with a clear threat, governments are responsible for the protection of their citizens. This recognition was central to the United Nations’ adoption last year of an international “responsibility to protect”, which encodes the duties national governments hold toward their citizens and legitimizes the international community’s responsibility to protect threatened populations.

The danger, Arbour stressed, is that commitments to security can be self-defeating. She pointed out that in limiting human rights as a part of their quest to increase security governments may foster an anger that promotes further terrorism. The most profound strength of Western society is the human rights they are founded upon, Arbour argued, and these must not be compromised.

On a global scale, however, terrorism is dwarfed by other challenges. Poverty, hunger, dramatic levels of inequality, inequities in the provision of education and disease each pose a profound challenge to human rights. Arbour stressed a renewed response to these broader threats. “We must possess a more holistic understanding of the right to life” she said, “and the indivisibility of that right from all others.”

An appropriate response should not be based on what Arbour termed a “charitable disposition or embarrassment.” Development is instead the legal duty of the international community, she argued, and an important first step is ceasing to categorise human rights along social, civil, and economic lines. Arbour called instead for the recognition of a holistic view of rights that recognizes what she called the “inextricable link between social and economic development and human rights.”

Arbour was impressed by the range of questions directed at her in the question and answer period that followed her speech: “Each of these is an excellent masters or doctoral topic” she said, “I hope they will be published so that I can read them!”

The Value of Democracy

2006-02-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

Published in The Beaver on 14 February 2006

Democracy, in the West, is often viewed as a stage very near to the end in the evolution of liberty. In that idea lies the public justification of contemporary American foreign policy. George Bush has repeatedly invoked the belief that the United States’ role in the world is centered on an almost messianic duty to spread liberty, the primary means of which is the imposition of democracy. There is, of course, a rather large gap between the White House’s rhetoric and its accomplishments. The question is whether the rhetoric hold in its own right. Is the forceful spread of democracy worthwhile, or might it do more harm than good?

Democracy as a promoter of tolerance has certainly taken a hit in recent weeks. The success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian elections, the strong showing of an Iranian inspired Shia religious list in Iraq and Hamas’ victory in Palestine have each represented a move away from peaceful accommodations of diversity. George Bush is left in the untenable position of justifying his appeals to democracy while refusing to deal with those who enjoy democratic support, unless of course they behave a little more like the parties they defeated.

There is an important need in this debate to distinguish between qualitative levels of democracy. The American commentator Fareed Zakaria stands as one of the more articulate critics of George Bush’s foreign policy. Zakaria has advanced the concept of “illiberal” democracy, rightfully arguing that democracy on its own accord is not a value label. Holding elections is instead value-neutral, revealing the health of the societies instead of working to improve them. Elections can even be harmful when they lead to the radicalization of ethnic and religious divisions in countries that lack a national consensus. This type of balkanization of societal lines was a feature of the electoral process in countries as different as Nigeria, Colombia and Algeria. In short, if citizens feel a stronger identity with their tribe or faith than with their country, political parties will promote narrow communal interests and sharpen ethnic grievances instead of contributing to the national good.

What really matters are those elements beyond elections that contribute to liberal democracy. Foremost is a national consensus that offers an incentive for the minority to accept majority rule. Relatively homogeneous populations make this easier, but that does not mean diverse nations are doomed to tyranny. India has fostered a vibrant democracy with more ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences than anywhere else. Its success has lay in the institutional support of basic freedoms that promote a generally peaceful outlet for the expression of differences. Those institutions were imposed from outside but, vitally, the democratic movement itself was a product of an endogenous leadership.

An institutional commitment to rights and freedoms and sound domestic leadership are therefore as important to healthy democracy as elections. As such, Western policy should focus on supporting opposition movements in authoritarian countries and building stable institutions in those that are newly democratized. Current events prove that the violent imposition of democracy succeeds in little more than radicalizing local and regional divisions. George Bush may be on the side of history in his pursuit of democratic ends, but he has been very wrong in his choice of means.

Swann's Way

2006-02-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is a tremendously long book. 300 pages of the first volume alone are dedicated to the description of Swann’s initial love for Odette. The book is bound to drag at times. And yet there’s those moments of incredible insight. The novel’s message is conveyed in its flashes of brilliance.

Proust’s goal was similar to Joyce’s. They sought to create a piece of art that accurately reflected the life of the mind. There are few (if any) objective truths in Swann’s Way. All that occurs is through the prism of the individual and his emotions and his beliefs. Nothing else matters. Truth is not to be found in external reality. Instead, it only exists in the filter of memory, in the remembrance of particular times and scenes and all their corresponding smells and sounds and sights and emotions. It does not seem to much matter whether these memories were even rooted in an objective reality (a concept whose disproval may be one of the objectives of the book).

Proust was an aesthete. He places an incredible amount of effort in the description of a scene’s artistic quality, both in nature and in fashion. I was at times lost in his portrayals of the beauty of a spring morning in the Bois de Boulogne or the elegant gown of a debutante at a Paris ball. More than normal, I found myself lost in my own memories: wandering through the woods of northern Ontario as a child or spending an evening at the Pre-Catelan (mentioned in the book) during my time in Paris last year. These types of memories are radiant when approached in the right manner. I’ve spoken at times of their more detrimental side, of their tendency to hinder one’s enjoyment of the present by being overly focused on a slightly mythical past. Proust proves a memory’s wonder. A single moment is a world unto itself, irretrievable and beautiful. For him, it would seem, little else matters. At the end of my life, I may agree to a greater extent. For now, I am more focused on the continual creation of more memories at which to look back upon.

In any case, a life’s goal is to eventually finish all of the Search. I have a feeling that the first volume only hinted at the full extent of Proust’s philosophy.

Europe's Modernity

2006-02-04T04:00:00.000-08:00

Published in The Beaver on 7 February 2006

Rarely has the question of European identity been so contentious. In an era of suddenly obvious heterogeneous populations, European societies are being forced to redefine themselved in a manner that is inclusive to all citizens. Salman Rushdie, in a December letter to the Times, appealed to the necessity of defining who Europeans are in a positive form: "No society," he argued, "no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its citizens don’t prize what their citizenship means — if, when asked what they stand for as Frenchmen, as Indians, as Britons, they cannot give clear replies."

What, then, is a Frenchman? Who is a Briton? In Europe, the answer has relied on history, on the national historical idea of the Western European state that is almost exclusively white and Christian. European peoples, in this view, are the descendants of a storied and unique national population, and therefore possess a distinct tie to the land. "France for the French!" goes the old nationalist cry, "Germany for the Germans!". Contrast this with North America, where the state was, in fact, constructed by immigrants. As Ronald Reagan once argued in his paternalistic tone: "You can't become a Frenchman by going to live in France, but every immigrant makes America more American."

This simplistic conception of a European national identity does not, however, hold up to close scrutiny. An extension of history to its grander scale reveals early Britain as a nation of Saxon and Scandinavian migrants. The arrival of successive groups of European refugees to the United Kingdom proved a source of almost as much creativity as they have to the United States. London's status as a mosaic of national cultures is not new. Modern Indians and Bangladeshis and Jamaicans are but the recent inheritors of a long line of immigrant groups than enriched the city before them. On the continent much of the the same logic applies. The great Greek story-teller Aesop was born a slave of African descent. Napoleone Buonaparte is not the most francophone of names. Marie Curie was from Poland. The Moors controlled a large part of modern Spain for almost 800 years. For much of that period they were among Europe's more tolerant rulers.

The point here is in the importance of historical construction. Identity is anything but simple. The notion of who anyone "is" is open to interpretion upon re-interpretation. We are almost unnervingly multi-faceted: products of a family, a community, a city, a region, a state, a country, and a continent. At the same time, we are atheists or agnostics, Christians, Muslims or Jews, Zoroastrians or Bahai. The idea of a Muslim or a Catholic does not entail ethnicity. A Jew or a Sikh, on the other hand, is a matter of race as well as of belief. A hundred years ago, a Frenchman would quite clearly have been Christian. There is little point in the reminder that this no longer holds true today. Finally, there is the conception of any individual as the product of their own individual experience, constantly shifting and fluid and never easily categorized.

Despite its difficulties, however, identity is clearly important. There is a powerful need for a construction of who and what a citizen of a given state is. To flourish, state populations require some form of common bond; a mild and positive form of nationalism that provides legitimacy to public goods. There is some relief in complexity here, because it ensures that Europe is not doomed to inevitable conflict between the more rooted occupants of its nations and their more recent arrivals. History matters, and a correct interpretation of European history reveals its status as continually changing place. Races, ethnicities, and religions have shifted back and forth over the centuries in a constant state of flux. In that, modern levels of migration, while perhaps unprecedented in volume, are not new.

The answer that is increasingly being turned to is the importance of a national creed, a “British Dream” (to use the American term) that can sustain the national bond among groups of widely disparate orgins. Here lies the roots of Gordon Brown’s recent call for a “Britain Day” and his desire to increase the visibility of the Union Jack. Britain, as a country built on immigration, will have an easier time than the rest of Europe in this. Not that France, the Netherlands, and the rest have a choice. The era of homogeneous populations is over. So is, for that matter, the confusion of multiculturalism for what Amartya Sen has labeled a plural-monoculturalism. The answer to diverse populations is not the relativistic idea that “you have your ideas, I have mine, and we agree to disagree.” Multiculturalism should represent instead the sustained interplay of ideas, the mixing of religious creeds and political beliefs in a sustained dialogue of what differs and what unites. That invitation to dialogue, that core freedom to discuss and debate is what we as the West should stand for.

There remains, of course, the core question of what to do when a group of citizens within an open state explicitly reject the values that sustain that openness. The current firestorm over images of Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper (and by now, several others throughout Europe) is a case in point. Freedom of expression should not be confused with deliberate provocation, but heeding to calls for the banning of such images and the sacking of the editors who printed them are a line which cannot be crossed. Appealing to ideals of liberty is not worth much when they are abandoned at the first hint of controversy.

There is of course a key role for security forces in targeting those small minorities who seek to challenge those values, but this should be vigilantly guarded from spreading into the wider arenas of freedom that we stand for. The defeat of Blair’s bill banning the incitement to religious hatred is a welcome development.

The fundamental ideas that can sustain a heterogeneous Europe are, therefore, political. The Enlightenment beliefs of tolerance, of justice and due trial and of freedom of expression and faith have sustained the West for two centuries and will continue to do so. They entail a welcoming of complexity, and they require their own defenders.

It is, ultimately, all too easy to sink into the pit of very simple forms of individuality as an answer to difficult questions. The idea of us versus them is the repository of small minds. Modern Europe was built on the fruits of a wide diversity. Overcoming fundamentalist ideas requires a sustained exposition of the compexity of what Europe is to counter the simplicity of what its opponents (both domestic and foreign) would have it be.

Night of the Iguana

2006-02-04T03:58:00.000-08:00

The overriding theme of his plays, Tennessee Williams argued, was the negative impact that society will inevitably visit upon the “sensitive nonconformist individual”. That sense of destiny mixed with a light touch drives the Lyric Theatre’s current production of Williams’ play “Night of the Iguana”, starring Woody Harrelson as the defrocked Episcopalian minister T. Lawrence Shannon.

Producer Bill Kenwright and his crew have constructed a gorgeous set and the play runs well, even if Williams’ eccentric American characters do feel somewhat out of place in London’s West End. Harrelson’s star power does not overpower other performances. As lead, he breathes life and a rhythmic pace into Shannon’s moral confusion. The portrayal of his character’s sense of helpless rage is particularly strong, though it was somewhat difficult (for this reviewer, at least) to imagine a Harrelson character ever possessing the piety necessary to turn one’s life to God.
Williams was one of American drama’s most provocative playwrights. Night of the Iguana, his last commercial success, is no exception. The play holds powerful themes of lost faith, sexual tensions, and the contrast between what the playwright terms life’s realistic and fantastic elements.

Shannon, now a tour guide in Mexico, has stopped his group at a rundown hotel to see an old friend who, it turns out, has recently died. The play’s development then revolves around the conflict between the three women who vie for his affection: Maxine, the widowed and lustful manager of the hotel, Hannah, an aging spinster who represents the type of companion a wiser Shannon would pursue, and Charlotte, the 17 year old whose passionate night with the former minister deepened his moral quandary. All is made more complex by the “spook”, Shannon’s apparent tendency to fall prey to fits of temporary lunacy.

Night of the Iguana was the most personal of Williams’ plays. His closest childhood companion was his sister Ruth, who spent all of her life in and out of mental institutions. Williams feared that he was slipping into madness himself throughout his life. His homosexuality was, in turn, the source of the challenging of sexual convention that is so present throughout the play.

At its conclusion, “Night of the Iguana” offers no clear moral lessons. It does, instead, point to the complex and unfulfilled outcomes that pervade human relations. Social convention to Williams is a sort of looming beast that will break those who do not conform. Unfortunately, when left to our own devices, we as individuals may not fare much better.

Economics as a Discipline

2006-01-26T14:45:00.000-08:00

I listened to Amartya Sen give a lecture entitled ‘Economics as a Discipline’ at the School tonight. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until the very end of the lecture, as he was receiving a loud ovation, that I fully realized that here before me was unquestionably one of the finest minds of out time. Count me among those who so greatly admire both Sen and his work. He is an academic who understands and makes use of the human element in any of the great questions he addresses.

That humanity breathed through his lecture. I’ll be honest and admit that my background in economic and social choice theory is not developed enough to make full sense of his address. That said, I could relate with his desire to address the extent to which economics must at times broaden its approach into other disciplines to capture a sense of reality.

I’ve given much thought lately to the value of approaching economics as essentially a branch of applied mathematics, as it seems to be taught in so many of the straight economics courses at the LSE. There is, of course, some worth to this. As a friend put it recently, math can express a thought in much clearer terms than can language. And yet, I’m left with the feeling that as a field economics has become all too removed from the reality of the problems it seeks to address, namely those of production and distribution especially geared toward those living in poverty and destitution. It’s important, when saying this, not to confuse an excessive focus on modelling and mathematics with intellectual complexity in general, because Sen combined both a strenuous intellectual approach with some very practical discussions of his discipline tonight. The core of his talk lay in the his belief that ultimate value of the field lies in the twin processes of simplifying and combining. Some simplification is necessary if we’re going to make sense of anything at all, whereas no field, be it economics or anthropology or history, can hope to explain a given phenomenon in its full depth without an at least basic reliance on often disparate (if connecting) disciplines.

There’s some very important epistemological issues to all this. They’re tied to the modern obsession with specializing oneself early on to carve out a niche, at which point one can begin to branch out, as Sen himself has. The problem is that the increasing search to focus on a particular problem may be leading academics down more and more obscure paths, making it that much harder to connect one’s specialization with that which is more general. Not everyone has the intellectual capacity of an Amartya Sen, who can combine the highly specific with the very general so effectively. Perhaps what is needed are a balancing number of academics who focus explicitly on the general, and who can then plug in the gaps, so to speak.

Walmart is not the question

2006-01-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Walmart’s business practices have been the target of several attacks in recent months. Criticism has focused on the extent to which Walmart's perceived obsession with price gouging has contributed to the movement of manufacturing jobs to low-wage nations like China.

Walmart's status as a controversial market leader ensures that there is benefit in attacking its business model. It is, however, the messenger in this debate. It is unfair (and ultimately impractical) to blame a company for a model that is legally reducing prices and saving consumers' money. Walmart's success has lay in exploiting the dominant current trends in the global economy. Advanced information technology and outsourcing combined with ruthless cost-cutting at the margins ensure that it is now able to undercut its rivals on almost everything it sells. This broader picture should be the issue of debate.

A recent documentary focused on a Thomson television manufacturing company in Circleville, Ohio. The plant had employed 1300 people until Thomson was forced to move the jobs to China so that it could afford to remain a supplier to Walmart. The story here is nothing new; it was a dominant issue of the last American presidential campaign, and it is a feature of political debates in all Western countries.

Economists are rarely consistent, but they have been close to unified in arguing the merits of free trade. According to theory, the money that is saved by consumers when they buy cheaper goods at Walmart will be spent elsewhere, and new jobs will be created in those suddenly flush sectors to replace those that have been lost. There has been growth in the service sector, for example, and western economies have seen net increases in jobs in the years since China and India have come onto the scene as outsourcing havens. Unfortunately, the solid empirical evidence of where these gains have occurred has been lacking. We're bound to hear more from those who lose out in the new economy than those who gain. In the end though, perhaps the anectodal evidence is most important in this debate. The question of how to respond to so many communities losing bread and butter jobs requires a better answer than statistics.

The trends that Walmart has exploited so effectively are good for the global economy. There are losers though, and they are an increasingly vocal segment of Western voters. Setting up effective policies to protect those who are losing jobs to the rest of the world will ensure that the positive benefits to free trade are not stopped cold. Modernized unions have a role to play, for example, in promoting re-education as a condition of being laid off. Western economies retain a manufacturing edge in more specialized products. Left wing parties should therefore better serve the cause of their supporters by arguing for policies geared toward small business and innovation. Ironically, perhaps, the left's modernization can now be best served by some of the right's traditional means.

East and West

2005-12-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

Orhan Pamuk's recent arrest in Turkey has invigorated a debate on that country's commitment to civil liberties. Pamuk stands accused of "publicly denigrating the Turkish state" because of his comments on Turkey's Armenian genocide in an interview in Switzerland earlier this year. His country's status as a candidate for EU membership has ensured that the debate has not been confined to within Turkey's borders.

Indeed, the Pamuk trial has become symbolic of a wider international phenomenon. In a letter written to the New Yorker magazine, the author himself describes the trial as representing the response of the new elite in nations outside the West to some of the very forces that have brought them to power, but which may now be reducing their legitimacy. It is worth quoting Pamuk himself on this point:

"The Westernizing elite...feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism."

The idea is fascinating. It argues that the intrusion of Western culture and ideas into a given nation can act to promote a new, more Western-oriented leadership who may in turn act against Western ideals. It finds a subtle parallel in the argument that promoting democracy abroad will encourage the election of a leadership that will in turn act against Western values. Both arguments, though, may be but components of the wider phenomena that characterize modern international relations.

Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilizations stands among the more durable of the grand theories of international affairs advanced in recent decades. What Pamuk's insight reveals, however, is more complex than a mere clash. He is instead referring to what happens when belief systems interact, when within a single community there are diverse and countervailing pressures pulling in opposite directions. Beneath all this lies the idea that one set of values can provoke the evolution of a set of ideas and outcomes that heavily rely upon the original but are completely opposed to them.

In their short but hugely informative book "Occidentalism", Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit explore this very concept. Their work portrays the motivations of modern Islamist terrorists as part a wider historical narrative based upon the de-humanization of the West as a whole. Further originality is lent by the argument that occidentalist thought actually finds its inspiration in values and ideas formulated within the West.

The book begins in 1942 Kyoto, at a conference held among Japanese intellectuals arguing about “how to overcome the modern.” As so often occurs today, "modern" in this sense was but an alias for Western. Japanese nationalism was indeed highly occidentalist, because it was first and foremost a reaction to Japan’s radical copying of Western methods and values that began during the Meiji Restoration. The roots of the idea run further. Occidentalism is as old as the story of Babel and the portrayal of Babylonians as soulless idolaters. Elements of it are found in the writings of Eliot and Dostoyevski, the latter of whom argued the worth of the pure Russian soul as a response to the West’s focus on cold reason. Sayyid Qutb was the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, likely the most influential early Islamist organization. In his youth he was actively interested in English literature, and he became addicted to occidentalist ideas only after he spent two years being disgusted by Western social values in the United States. Qutb relied heavily upon the writings of the Pakistani journalist Abu-l-A'la Maududi, who had borrowed many of his organizational ideas from Leninism. Occidentalism is, therefore, the characterization of the West as a monolithic, dehumanized, Other, itself bred through an experience with things Western.

Ideas have long histories. Since Eastern and Western societies began to interact there has been a tendency on the part of one to dehumanize the other. The Bengali novelist Rabindranath Tagore, in an essay penned in 1922, spoke of the danger of misinterpretation between the two worlds. He recognized the double-edged sword of Western progress. On the one hand was "the spirit of service devoted to the welfare of man" that he viewed as the source of Western greatness. Alongside this, however, lay the West’s excessive reliance upon reason and its machine-like obsession with rigid hierarchical colonial organization and material accumulation. Though Tagore himself was an articulate critic of the West’s blessings alongside its ills, the negative component of his vision holds strong echoes in Osama bin Laden's characterization of Western civilization as inherently corrupt and soulless. This latter view is quintessentially occidentalist.

The tendency to dehumanize runs both ways. The term occidentalism is, of course, an obvious reference to Edward Said's orientalism, which explored the West's own tendency to treat non-Western peoples as less than completely human. Orientalism was the fundamental (if unconscious) intellectual justification for colonialism, which certainly worked to promote the view of the West as a unthinking machine. Even more inflential in provoking radical anti-Western reactionism was, however, those domestic actors in non-Western societies that advocated the need for modernization along Western lines. Japan is a strong example, as is Egypt. Because of its active military, Turkey has generally stayed the Western course. The extent to which it continues along the Western path will be one of the main geopolitical issues of the next decate.

The unfortunate consequence to the idea that terrorist motivations are not original is the sense that nor will they be temporary. Experience would maintain that even as Al-Qeada and its affiliates fall away, they will be replaced by others advocating the destruction of the dehumanized other. The only response lies in a loud and sustained defense of the world’s complexity by those who refuse to fall prey to such simplification.

In Memory of George Kennan

2005-12-26T21:25:00.000-08:00

2005 marked the passing of George F. Kennan, one of my personal heroes. What follows is the personal tribute I wrote on the day of his death.

March 18, 2005

George F. Kennan, one of the great diplomats and intellectuals in American history, died today at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 101.

Destined to be remembered for his role in constructing the American Cold War policy of containment, Kennan was far more than a diplomat. He represents one of the grand American minds of the Twentieth century. Civilized and sensible, he sought to make sense of the human condition.

Amid his long career in the Foreign Service, Kennan held several posts throughout Europe. In 1944, as the charge d’affaires of the US Embassy in Moscow, Kennan responded to a State Department request for help in understanding the Soviet Union. He dispatched the now-famous “Long Telegram”; 8,000 words describing the political, social, and intellectual structure of the Soviet Union. Kennan argued that “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigorous application of counterforce”. Importantly, he added that this force should take the form of a diverse set of diplomatic and covert actions—not war.

Kennan was confident of the fundamental superiority of the Western political system. He believed that America and her allies would prove successful in the ideological conflict if they maintained open societies while offering a positive and constructivist picture of the sort of world they sought. He was instrumental in the development of the Marshall plan, which offered financial and political help to all the countries of Europe (it was refused by the Soviets) in their post-war reconstruction.

By his own admission, Kennan’s telegram was vague. It did not offer specific proposals on how and when to respond to Soviet expansionism. Combined with Washington’s inability to conceptualize policy beyond a broad framework, the paper’s vagueness ensured an outcome that was distant from the author’s original conception. Kennan would be strongly opposed to the Vietnam war, for example, even though containment was often offered as the guiding force behind that war’s rationale.

His post-World War II service therefore ensured Kennan widespread fame for a policy he would never fully support. He was to spend many of the subsequent years of life striving to clarify his thought. The difficulty in marrying ideas to concrete policy can be seen as typical of the intellectual’s role in politics. George Kennan was nothing if not an intellectual.

Nor was he a typical government official. All his life, Kennan saw himself as a literary figure. By the time of his death, he had written 17 books on history and politics, two of which won Pulitzer prizes. An avid diarist, Kennan’s journals were published in 1989 under the title “Sketches From a Life”. There is little of politics in the entries. Instead, they are portraits of the inner life of the mind, one which strove to make sense of life beyond partisanship and ideology. He can describe his goals far better than I, when speaking of his early motives in keeping a journal:

“What I thought I learned…was that there was nothing wholly meaningless in life, and that in all scenes observed in remote places, and hence with the freshness of first impression, there was normally and quite literally “more than met the eye”—a deeper reality seldom visible on the surface but there to be sensed, if not seen, with the requisite intuition and effort.”

On a personal level, these lines encouraged me to see the world in a new way, and as much as possible, to put it down in writing. It is not a stretch to say that Kennan’s book altered and enlarged my view of the world. Mundane occurrences were now glimpses into humanity. Many of my subsequent happiest moments—those that have occurred when I have been struck by the incredible depth of the world, by the beauty of its simultaneous simplicity and complexity—would not have been as full had I not read Kennan.

In his later works, especially “Around that Cragged Hill”, the author seems to be losing his faith in the world. He complains of mankind’s follies, of the incessant automobile, of the population explosion, of nuclear weapons and of foolish foreign policies. I sense that in Kennan’s final days he may have felt somewhat depressed amid the complexity of a world that will at best misunderstand him in posterity. He was, after all, an intensely serious man.

And yet, Kennan’s message breathes through. Many mourn his passing. In his professional writings he structured an intellectual approach to foreign policy whose adherents will continue in his tradition. In his journals, he displayed a wisdom that marks the mind’s path to the heart. His was a profound life, of profound insight. I salute him.

links

2005-12-13T13:56:00.000-08:00

Interesting articles by Orhan Pamuk here:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051219ta_talk_pamuk

and by Salman Rushdie here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-355-1918306-355,00.html

A Canadian visit

2005-12-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

I returned yesterday from five days in Canada. The purpose of the trip was obviously not ideal, but given the circumstances it was a very pleasant and fulfilling time. After a brief visit to Nana and FF upon my arrival, Dad and I drove over to the funeral home where the final viewing was taking place. I was alone when I first saw Grandpapa’s body. It was a very strange feeling, looking at the still and barely recognizable figure of someone I knew so well. The fact that he didn’t look himself was helpful, in a way. Hariette and my mom had put together a beautiful collection of photos of his life throughout the room, and there was much more perspective in those than in the body itself. I enjoyed the photos of his youth and middle age most; Grandpapa really did live a very good and happy life.

It was a trip of early mornings throughout. My personal highlight was our trip to Ottawa on Friday for the burial. The Flemings are buried in Cantley, a rural community in Quebec about a forty minute drive north of the capital. We arrived to a small group of extended family and were left to keeping ourselves warm in the bus while we awaited the fashionably late arrival of Grandpapa himself.

During the ceremony, the priest (who was fittingly Irish) spoke of the mystery of life. It was said amid one of those incredibly raw and beautiful and truly powerful Canadian scenes; very snowy and white with a sky that is only found in the North. It casts an ethereal sort of light, a pale shade of white that the sun creeps through and makes pink toward the end of the day. Never do you feel so distant and timeless and expansive as under a sky like that. Nearby was the grave of one of my first ancestors to arrive from Ireland in the nineteenth century...how to put such a feeling of timelessness? For one of the first times in my life I felt the sense of continuity that is perhaps a little rarer among Canadian families than European. A sense that there is, indeed, a history to us, and that it is an ongoing project built upon the foundations of a group of individuals who carved a life from some of the least compromising of lands. My grandfather would have been very, very, proud of that sort of sentiment. It breeds a sense of satisfaction and perspective. Neither life nor death must entail complete solitude.

A much more relaxing weekend followed before we all left Ontario on Sunday. I met a friend of mine on campus last night, who asked how I was doing and was a little surprised, I think, at the good mood I was in. For a moment I wondered whether I shouldn’t still be grieving, but only for a moment. I will instead continue on in the finer elements of Grandpapa’s character. To enjoy life is the goal…to live it to its fullest.

A eulogy to my Grandfather:

2005-12-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

We are, quite fortunately, not overly experienced in funerals. Our family has been blessedly free of too much tragedy. Our presence here today, however, is a reminder of the inevitability of loss; of how death is indeed very much a part of life. There are too many mad roads to death in our modern world. The manner in which my grandfather passed must certainly be one of the more dignified and humane. He died as we would all wish: painlessly and in his sleep. The unexpectedness was a shock, but there is comfort in the knowledge that his last days were lucid and comfortable.

In these past few days, there have been many reminders of how proud Grandpapa was of his family. That is touching at a moment like this. I believe I speak for all of us, however, in saying that we were also all so very proud of him.

I, for one, am so happy to comment on how positive mood our meetings were in his last years. He was perhaps a little more comfortable in the type of humor he could initiate once his grandchildren were older. A few months ago I called him from South Korea to speak of my plans. In response to one of his questions about life there, I commented on the beauty of Korean women. “Marc”, he said, “At my age…they’re all beautiful!”

My last memory is of him helping Timmy into a taxi indowntown Toronto, looking very distinguished in a suit and Scottish cap. We had had a lovely dinner, complete with Grandpapa’s light-hearted observation that Red Lobster did not have a truly high quality bottle of Italian wine. It captured Grandpapa. He was a man who loved the good life. His favorite stories were of his travels, whether it was visiting London with his father as a child, or keeping a promise by calling a good friend in Haileybury from a bar in Singapore. Grandpapa at his best was a wonderful combination of high class and local humor.

Only a few months ago many of those here today gathered to celebrate Grandpapa’s 80th birthday. It was 80 years of life amid the fullest of centuries. Those who survive Grandpapa are a testament to the success of his life. We remember the fun he had, we remember that smile, we remember those slightly irreverent and mischievous eyes.

His death is a loss. His was, however, a life well-lived. There is much to celebrate in that. Grandpapa would have hoped for little sorrow. Let us therefore find cheer in the life of a man who touched us all.

He was always fiercely proud of his Irish heritage, and of his father, Patrick. I can only sense that they are walking there now, in the old country, in those towns of County Mayo whose names the poet Paul Durcan called “magic passwords into eternity:”

“Kilcock, Kinnegad, Strokestown, Elphin,Tarmonbarry, Tulsk, Ballaghaderreen, Ballavarry;Now we were in Mayo and the next stop was Turlough,The village of Turlough in the heartland of Mayo…”

Farewell, Grandpapa. Until we meet again.