Americans tend to have a very simplistic view of the world. For example: we are opposed to Evil Dictatorship. You are opposed to Evil Dictatorship. We are Liberal Democrats. Therefore you must be Liberal Democrats, too. I suspect that we are not alone in this tendency, but it has frequently gotten us into trouble. We should be careful not to assume that all those who oppose Dictatorships are George Washingtons.
Foreign Policy's Passport blog has an excellent example of this fallacy at work. When I read Der Spiegel's interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I was not surprised to see him praise Vladimir Putin. After all, Solzhenitsyn is a Russian nationalist who regards the Communist period as an aberration (Communism is not a native Russian ideology). In his view, Russia must become strong and reassume its proper place on the world stage. So why are the bloggers at Passport surprised to see that Solzhenitsyn approves of the Putin's leadership of Russia? Although he may be indeed be one of the greatest (and most famous) dissidents, his opposition to the Soviet regime does not make him into a liberal democrat.
Ironically, they note that Solzhenitsyn has been a critic of Putin in the past and link to a BBC article from 2000...but the blogger didn't read very carefully.
So, in 2000, for what did Solzhenitsyn criticize Putin?
For being too "Western" (the Beeb notes his commitment to free markets and human rights) and for an overly conciliatory foreign policy that is insufficiently committed to a vision of renewed Russian greatness.
Apparently Putin has done quite well at dispelling Solzhenitsyn's doubts in the last seven years.
Monday, July 30, 2007
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my ideological match
Friday, July 27, 2007
What Harry Potter inherits from Star Wars
For members of generation X like myself, Star Wars is one of the constitutive myths of our childhoods. The Force, lightsaber duels, the Millennium Falcon, "I am your father," "he's my brother," "I've got a bad feeling about this," and so on . . . this is what we grew up with. And because Star Wars was such a mega-hit, the characters and tropes and themes spawned a whole slew of allusions and invocations that continue to infiltrate popular public discussions of all kinds of things. Few pop culture artifacts achieve that level of saturation; few artists are able to shape the common cultural vernacular in such a profound way; few packages of commonplaces become that widely shared, widely enough that a non-obscure Star Wars reference like "use the Force" or the image of Darth Vader [a gargoyle of which adorns the National Cathedral as an iconic contemporary representation of Evil] is extremely likely to make sense even to people who haven't even seen the films!
For members of the next generation, the "millennial" generation, I'd wager that a principal constitutive myth is the Harry Potter series. I say this not just because of the mega-blockbuster character of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon, although that helps something become a constitutive myth out of which large numbers of people are empowered to construct their senses of self; the more widespread the recognition of the symbols and tropes, the easier it is to gain social affirmation for one's use of them in constructing one's own story, after all. But I also think that one of the striking things about the Harry Potter series is how similar the story is to the constitutive myth it succeeds, how many of the same elements recur in lightly shuffled and reorganized form, albeit updated in a way that makes contemporary sense for the present world. Of course, this should not be too surprising, since both Harry Potter and Star Wars are mythological works, and mythology always works by re-telling some version of an old, old story -- by recombining traditional elements so as to reaffirm and reinforce certain basic motifs and themes that are strangely familiar to the audience even as the specifics of the plot and the characters are anything but familiar.
Harry Potter thus inherits two things from Star Wars: a set of cultural commonplaces on which it draws for much of its evocative power, and the mantle of serving as a root experience for massive numbers of people -- especially for younger people, into whose cultural lifeworld notions like "muggle" and the Ministry of Magic have now been firmly implanted. Just as much of cultural life in the industrialized parts of Europe and North America (and quite a ways beyond it) was decisively shaped or colored by the way that Star Wars updated and transmitted the cultural commonplaces that it deployed and utilized, so too will cultural life be divisible into pre- and post-Potter eras, with a "Potterian" flavor going forward.
Fortunately for us, the post-Potter world contains much of what the pre-Potter world contained, because the Harry Potter story -- as mythology -- is an old, old story. What is new here are the details and specifics, not the basic themes and tropes. I can't substantiate this point without spoilers, which I have kept below the fold -- you have been warned.
First, a little analytical history.
One of the most important things that George Lucas did in the opening moments of Star Wars was to insert a simple text-card on the screen before the opening title crawl and the main theme music begins: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . ." it reads, and it's a very important little clue to how the read and appreciate what's about to happen on screen. Lucas' brief intro serves the same function as "Once upon a time . . ." and similar phrases, signaling that we're about to enter an alternate reality that is connected to our own thematically rather than literally or plausibly. A phrase like this announces a fairy tale, a bit of myth, and implicitly warns us that the story to come shouldn't be evaluated for its representative accuracy or for its analytical incisiveness or whatever -- instead, we're in the realm of allegory, symbol, dream, and fantasy.
It's important that Lucas puts this over the head of each of the Star Wars films, because the conventional cultural code seems to dictate that stories involving spaceships and laser swords should be read as "science fiction" rather than as mythology. It makes a difference: virtually all science fiction has a burden of appearing scientifically plausible, of providing some way for the scientifically literate reader to come to terms with things like faster-than-light travel and teleportation and the like. Star Wars has none of this: nowhere in any of the films is there even a half-hearted attempt to explain how hyperdrive works, and the attempt to demystify the Force by introducing "midi-chlorians" in Episode I falls so flat that we never hear another word about them after that film. This makes sense because Star Wars is more fantasy than science fiction, more mythology than systematic exploration of how technological changes and alien encounter affect human beings -- after all, Star Wars (unlike, say, Star Trek) isn't about Earth-native humans at all, making it somewhat absurd to try to connect our present science or present social order to that of Star Wars in any systematic way.
But what we can do -- what I'd wager that Lucas wants us to do -- is to read Star Wars as a fictional realm wherein very current themes and issues, specifically philosophical and moral/ethical themes and issues, are played out. After all, that's what mythology is for: it's a purer exemplar of such themes and issues than the often-messy examples provided in the "real world," and as such offers the reader/viewer a chance to experience and explore those issues and themes more or less directly. Mythology, unlike the real world or unlike "realistic fiction" which strives to tell it like it is (more or less), has a "moral of the story" -- a set of lessons we're supposed to take away, even if those lessons are somewhat ambiguous.
The Harry Potter series is like Star Wars in this respect -- it's mythology rather than literature or social commentary or any other genre of writing that you might care to mention. As such, it deserves to be interpreted as mythology, which makes complaints about (say) the "nonideological evil" in the series somewhat beside the point. No, neither Vader nor Voldemort have fully-fleshed-out ideological programs, but they're not supposed to: these are less depictions of actual people than archetypal symbols, and their movements or organizations are just generically Evil in intent, bent on the usual Evil Overlord goals: power, domination, supremacy, immortality, and so forth. And the fact that there are disillusioned followers of both Evil Overlords who turn out to have a variety of reasons for turning away from their former masters should not, I'd argue, be read as some kind of commentary on leadership styles or whatever; instead, it's the introduction of another archetype, the Remorseful Former Bad Guy who generally turns out to just be misunderstood and in need of a little community affirmation. In Star Wars, part of the twist is that the Remorseful Former Bad Guy is also the main exemplar of Evil: Vader, it turns out, is redeemable. In Harry Potter, it's Snape who (contrary to my expectations) falls into Evil, sees the error of his ways [more or less -- I still think that Snape is hedging his bets at least until after he kills Dumbledore in book 6, and he almost defects from Dumbledore's plan once he learns what Harry is being prepared for . . . but that's material for another post, I think] fulfills this role. The point is that these are archetypes, and shouldn't be read as examples of some governance strategy failing; they present occasions for ethical reflection, not case studies for empirical dissection.
But the genetic connection between the two constitutive mythological works is a lot stronger than this. The parallel is most obvious between the original three Star Wars films (i.e., not the prequels) and the Harry Potter sequence: a young boy (Luke/Harry), orphaned, discovers that he has a Mysterious Destiny, goes into training, makes some close friends (Leia/Hermione and Han/Ron), is cultivated and shaped by a mysterious older wizard (Obi-Wan/Dumbledore) who has a history with the current Embodiment Of Evil, ends up confronting that Evil and defeating it by not fighting -- indeed, by throwing away his weapon and allowing himself to be a noble sacrifice, but doesn't end up really dead because of the intervention of some form of human affection. By not fighting, by simply presenting himself as the archetypal peaceful warrior (fight to disarm and no further, which is what both Luke and Harry do during their respective epic final battles -- how perfectly appropriate is it that in the end Harry defeats the Dark Lord with a well-cast Expelliarmus spell, despite Lupin's criticism of him for just that tactic earlier in the book?), the hero triumphs over Evil.
Of course this is a familiar story. The noble sacrifice motif, especially the noble sacrifice that ends up conquering or mastering death, goes back into antiquity, and in the "Western world" one can't help but reference Jesus Christ as an exemplar. The spirit guide helping to engineer the epic confrontation has numerous precedents. The hero journey to mastery over death is what Hamlet undertakes, what grail seekers do in Arthurian legends, what C. S. Lewis' characters do when visiting Narnia, etc. etc.
If we start looking at the Star Wars prequels, we find a further parallel in that both Dumbledore and Anakin start off as idealists, but Anakin ends up going into politics and trying to impose his ideas by force while Dumbledore resists that temptation and remains an academic. But both have their Citizen Kane moments -- they just take different directions in response to that challenge.
And further: both Harry Potter and Star Wars feature an intriguing double moral message structure in which a second teaching contradicts the first, more obvious teaching. At the most obvious level, both myth cycles celebrate the individual and her or his choices; self-actualization seems central, and individual empowerment against a faceless overwhelming mass seems to be the name of the game. Choice over capacity seems central: Luke has to choose between Dark and Light, and even the Sorting Hat listens to Harry's (and Hermione's!) preferences about which house he wants to be placed into, and Dumbledore highlights this choice as an essential difference between Harry and Voldemort. But on closer examination, neither mythology actually ends up with this kind of liberal individualist decisionism: Harry's most important moments are those in which he just acts in the way that he feels that he is supposed to be acting, and just knows what he is supposed to do, much like Luke when he gets better acquainted with the Force. And the choice situations that we see are engineered and enabled by a lot of prior social action, both by individual mentors and by the broader community: Harry can't confront Voldemort, and Luke can't confront Vader, absent the actions of a multitude of people whose effort makes the confrontation possible. No one is an isolated individual, and people get in trouble in both mythologies when they try to act alone, without friends and colleagues supporting them.
In the end these are communal mythologies rather than individualistic ones, affirming the conceptual priority of the intersubjective over the subjective and of the cultural context over the bearer of aspects of that context. They're not collectivist; call them "post-individualist," since we still have valuable and worthy individuals floating around and individuals do matter; they just don't matter as Lockeian or neoliberal atoms out of which societal polymers are constructed. Shades here of Heidegger, I think: individual people are the occasions for existence to exist in a self-conscious or reflexive way, the moments for the Force or the deeper magic of love (which is the Force-analogue in the Harry Potter books) to manifest and triumph.
So: they're old, old stories. I'm not completely sure what to make of the fact that the new mythology (Harry Potter) is more archaic-fantasy while the older mythology (Star Wars) is techno-futuristic in flavor; maybe this says something about the way we view ourselves now? Magic rather than spaceships. Hmm. I wonder if that's a post-Challenger thing, a general diminishing of the excitement of space exploration -- Star Wars was only a few years removed from the moon landings, after all, so some of the romance of space travel was still around to be drawn upon. But I'm not confident about that, and I'd be curious to hear other people's ideas.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Why Harry Potter beats football as a topic of conversation
I was going to reply to Peter's comment on my last post about Harry Potter in the comments section, but it started to get too long and I thought I'd better make an actual post out of it. I am also going to try to do this without revealing anything of great significance from the plot of the seventh book (which I finished yesterday), but I can't guarantee that I won't let something slip.
Also, at this point I am just going to be replying to Peter's contention that "Harry Potter is nothing more than an 'intellectually more acceptable' activity than football," suitable for the same kind of "water cooler chatting" and Monday-morning quarterbacking characteristic of causal football fans. I am not going to talk about my overall reactions to the seventh book and the now-concluded HP series; I'm not sure that such a discussion is really all that appropriate for Duck, so I'll be reactivating my long-dormant personal blog tomorrow or the next day and posting some reflections there, in case anyone's interested. [Teaser: when I get around to doing that post or those posts I'm going to argue that HP is myth, not literature, and needs to be evaluated accordingly -- and in fact it's largely the same myth as Star Wars and Hamlet and a bunch of other prominent components of the "Western tradition," which is certainly part of the reason for its global success.]
Okay, here goes.
Even if there are some similarities between being a fan of HP and being a fan of football (or any other professional sport), there is one important difference in that the object of fandom has a different -- oh, let's call it conceptual range -- and as such makes possible different kinds of conversational exchanges. Putting this bluntly, football fans can basically talk together only about football, but HP fans can talk about a lot of other things through HP, because the vocabulary provided by the common experience of reading the HP novels and participating in other elements of HP fandom is a richer and more mythic vocabulary with a much broader range of applicability. Talking about game-playing strategy does not allow one to raise the kind of ethical and philosophical issues that talking about HP does -- at any rate, not as easily. And I for one would rather have people talking about HP than football, as it makes for better conversations.
Let me elaborate. When we spectators talk about a professional sporting competition, we talk from our vantage-point as outsiders -- we watch, we read, we know things about the game and the players. So that gives us a shared basis from which to discuss plays that might have been made, excellent and dismal playing performances, chances for success and failure in future games, and so on. But our conversation is limited to the game and its playing; we are, as it were, constrained by the social fact of a manifest performance (the game) and the institutionalization of future performances (the rest of the season, the structure of the post-season, and so forth). Yes, we can talk about that structure too, but we are still talking about the game.
I like talking about games of which I am a fan. I also like using those games and sports as examples of other things -- using football to talk about war, using baseball to talk about politics, etc. Useful pedagogically, for one thing. But notice that in this case we are not really talking about the game as much as we are instrumentally deploying our shared knowledge of the game to talk about something else -- and that instrumental deployment is limited, and sharply limited, by the existing structure of the game and the way that it is played. As such, "war is like football" is and can only ever be an analogy, and a somewhat artificial one at that because one can always see the manifest differences between the two domains.
So we have two kinds of conversations made possible by shared sports fandom: conversations about the sport itself, and conversations using knowledge about the sport as a basis to make analogies. But what it is much much harder to do from a shared basis of watching a sport is to start talking about moral and political issues, because those issues are by and large already solved in the very structure of the sport itself! Issues concerning, say, the moral dilemmas of having both an ideal and the power to implement that ideal in the face of opposition simply do not arise in the performance of your average game of baseball or football. Nor do we get to talk about appropriate action in the face of overwhelming evil, or the balance between liberty and security, or the proper response to death…In short, we don't get to talk about most of the issues that interest social theorists and intellectuals and political commentators and people who read blogs like this one. [Yes, yes, we can pull a George Will and attempt to extract some moral lessons from baseball, but those parts of Will's book ring the most hollow and the most strained -- he's better as a straight-up baseball analyst.]
But in talking about HP, we can't help but talk about those issues. This is because HP, as a story, covers a lot more ground -- and as a richly detailed alternative world but one that remains recognizable to us Muggles, it can't help but present us with situations that are both strangely familiar and distant enough to permit them to be discussed in a relatively non-partisan way. Being a HP fan, getting caught up in the excitement to the point where you learn to speak the language, provides us with a new way to examine those pressing and perennial issues. Dumbledore's explanation, for instance, of why he refused to take the position of Minister of Magic, is quite Weberian, and it presents an opportunity to discuss whether his rationale for remaining a teacher and not becoming a politician makes sense. While discussing Dumbledore, though, we would be simultaneously discussing the whole panoply of issues involved in the tension between science and politics, and discussing them in such a way that other HP fans, who have also wrapped themselves in the language and the trappings of that fictional world, would be drawn into the discussion.
Sports are not mythic. Sports stories might be mythic, but then we wouldn't be talking about the sport as much as we'd be talking about the story. HP is mythic. It might not be literary genius -- it's not, but then again, neither was Star Wars -- but it is a rich source of a common moral vocabulary. And that's why it's a better conversational topic than football.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The almost war with Iran
Apparently, I wasn't the only person who thought that this might be when it happened...
Blame to go around
Today's IHT has possibly one of the most idiotic commentaries about US-Russian relations that I've read in a long time. In this column, [sorry, it's behind the pay wall] John Vinocur essentially places all the blame for the current deterioration in US-Russian relations squarely on Russia's shoulders.
He writes:Does anybody out there remember Dick Cheney's harangue in Lithuania last year, the growlingly bellicose one that the Russians regard as heralding a new Cold War?
No where in this column does he mention Russia's sense of encirclement as NATO expands to its borders, the plan to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in Eastern Europe, or the US's expressed lack of interest in renewing the START arms control treaty. Nor does he mention the American go-it-alone, we-don't-need-your-stinking-input attitude that has alienated plenty of countries besides Russia.
Here's how that dreadful man, who is 800 percent responsible for the Russians suspending the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, threatening to target European Union members with new missiles, and even talking the possibility of an America versus Russia shooting war within the next decade, got it all started:
In a speech in May 2006 to a group of new democracies at the edges of the old Soviet Union, Cheney said, "None of us believe that Russia is fated to become an enemy."
"A Russia that increasingly shares the values of this community can be a strategic partner and a trusted friend as we work toward common goals," he said.
The Wild Man from the White House also asserted - although just in passing, a re-read of the speech shows - that there were opponents of reform in Russia trying to reverse its movement toward a lawful, civil society, and that "no legitimate interest is served" when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail.
For at-your-throat shock and provocation challenging peace among nations and good sense, that's it.
Fourteen months later, we have a remarkable situation. The Russians, insisting they face a vast, American-led Western menace, move almost weekly from new outburst to new provocation.
Instead, he quotes one speech by Dick Cheney--and in his deep grasp of the nuances of Russian politics, completely misses what seemed provocative: Cheney praises the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and then moves on to criticize Russia. He says: The freedom movement is far from over, and far from tired. And we still live in a time of heroes. From Freedom Square in Tbilisi, to Independence Square in Kiev, and beyond, patriots have stepped forward to claim their just inheritance of liberty and independence.
Later he adds, in case it wasn't clear that "you're next": The spread of democracy is an unfolding of history; it is a benefit to all, and a threat to none. The best neighbor a country can have is a democracy -- stable, peaceful, and open to relations of commerce and cooperation instead of suspicion and fear. The nations of the West have produced the most prosperous, tolerant system ever known. And because that system embraces the hopes and dreams of all humanity, it has changed our world for the better. We can and should build upon that successful record. The system that has brought such great hope to the shores of the Baltic can bring the same hope to the far shores of the Black Sea, and beyond. What is true in Vilnius is also true in Tbilisi and Kiev, and true in Minsk, and true in Moscow.
Perhaps it seems completely harmless to you, but if you know that the Kremlin fears that the opposition might attempt to launch a color revolution in Russia, it starts to look like a veiled threat. Russians already widely believe that both the Rose and Orange Revolution were US-supported plots (some even go so far as to claim that they were CIA-lead coups). Did Cheney mean his remarks to be provocative, or was he simply praising the march of democracy without realizing how it would be read in Russia? That's unclear to me. Surely there are diplomats who vet speeches, but as we've recently seen Cheney pretty much operates as a law unto himself, so both possibilities seem equally plausible.
Vinocur, however, seems to display nothing but ignorance. He willfully disregards the actual provocative part of Cheney's speech, while quoting a few platitudes about cooperation. But if you really want to understand Russia's perspective on the deterioration of relations with the US, you have to look beyond a few nice words and look at the US's deeds.
The truth is, we don't treat Russia like a partner, despite Cheney's platitutes--we treat them like they don't matter. Russia wants desperately to matter. Like the middle child who's jealous of all the attention received by the over-achieving eldest and the cute baby of the family, Russia consistently acts out in attempt to have their concerns taken seriously. One thing that Vinocur does get right: Russia seems to be off the radar screen for US policy makers, and Russia don't like it that way. They want to be treated like a great power (or at the very least, a regional power). So they throw these unbecoming temper tantrums and throw their weight around where they can. Russia's recent oil-fueled growth both emboldens them and makes them all the more frustrated with their apparent second class status. So they do the only thing they know how.
So, yes, there's plenty of blame to throw Russia's way for the current state of Russian-US relations. But let's not try to make out the US to be a wounded innocent, standing there in confusion, saying "What did I do?" That won't fly in any relationship.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Toward a neo-neo-Reaganite foreign policy
Donald Douglas points me at Robert Kagan's new piece in Policy Review, "End of Dreams, Return of History." (Read Douglas' own commentary on the piece at his blog, Burkean Reflections.)
Kagan's piece nicely summarizes a number of important trends that academics and policy-makers have started to recognize over the last few years--ones that have formed the backdrop of some of my past (PDF)--also available here (PDF)--and future research projects:
• We're seen a rise of deliberate counter-hegemonic activity by a number of autocratic and quasi-autocratic states, most notably Russia, China, and Venezuela. This counter-hegemonic activity involves direct attempts to limit the US sphere of influence--such as Chavez's activities in Latin America and doings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization--and actions that indirectly cut against American political leverage, such as the Chinese pursuit of markets, lower-wage workers, and factories in Africa.
• The increasing availability of alternative partners to the US and Europe for Third World states, in fact, puts the United States and Europe at a disadvantage, particularly when dealing with autocratic and quasi-autocratic regimes. Because the US links its support to democracy promotion in a variety of ways, autocratic states will, all things being equal, prefer to deal with China, Russia, and other patrons that make no such demands.
• This new "great game" will, in the long run, be more important for the shape of international politics than the "War on Terror."
I'll have more to say about the essay at some point over the next few days, but my initial reaction includes the following points:
(1) Kagan spends far too much time fighting a rearguard action to the effect that neither Bush nor neo-conservative intellectuals (e.g., Kagan) have anything to do with the weakened American ability to handle these trends. Kagan's argument here is particularly weak; it amounts to a claim that Bush's pursuit of a regime change was not a major departure from American foreign policy, particularly after Eisenhower administration gave the CIA the "green light" to overthrow foreign governments. But this is all really besides the point; the Iraq War stands out as an ill-conceived and poorly exeucted attempt to implement a vacuous "democratic domino" theory in the Middle East. It greatly weakened American prestige, foreign perceptions of American power, and the ability of the US to project force to other trouble spots.
Moreover, the way the Bush administration conceptualized the War on Terror helped generate some of the contemporary competition for clients that we now see. The US decision to restructure its basing and access priorities--whatever the military merits of the policy--de-emphasized many long-term, reliable allies in favor of unstable new democracies and autocratic regimes. At the same time, authoritarian governments have used--with varying degrees of success--the War on Terror to enhance their influence and access to US patronage.
(2) Bush foreign policy, for that matter, contributed to the plausibility of the current War on Terror as a civilizational struggle between Islam and the West. Kagan rightly notes that it is no such thing. But there's also nothing inevitable about a coming struggle between authoritarian and democratic states. There will be, however, if we adopt Kagan's neo-Leninist approach to heightening the contradictions in autocratic regimes:The Russian regime is also vulnerable to pressures from within and without, for unlike China, Russia still maintains the trappings of democracy. It would not be easy for a Russian leader simply to abandon all pretense and assume the role of tsar. Elections must still be held, even if they are unfair or are merely referendums on the selection of the leadership. This provides an opportunity for dissidents within and liberals on the outside to preserve the possibility of a return to democratic governance in Russia. It certainly would be a strategic error to allow Putin and any possible successor to strengthen their grip on power without outside pressures for reform, for the consolidation of autocracy at home will free the Russian leadership to pursue greater nationalist ambitions abroad. In these and other autocracies, including Iran, promoting democracy and human rights exacerbates internal political contradictions and can have the effect of blunting external ambitions as leaders tend to more dangerous threats from within.
Kagan here displays a shocking ignorance of the difference between current tensions and those of the US-Soviet struggle. American support for Soviet-era dissidents might have enhanced their position but it has the opposite effect in modern Russia, where the population has had quite enough of foreign attempts to meddle in their political system. The new authoritarianism, at least in Russia, is about national greatness and national sovereignty against the last fifteen years of humiliations at the hands of the Americans--and, increasingly, the Europeans.
Put differently, if Kagan is right that we're entering a world of classic realpolitik struggles for power, why does he recommend we pursue policies designed to polarize many of the players into two opposing blocks? As he rightly points out, the great powers share a variety of common interests: in fighting non-state threats, in securing a stable international economic order, and so forth. Many of the factors that divide Russia and China, for example, may be swamped by a threat created by Kagan's neo-neo-conservativism.
(3) The kinds of tensions I allude to above are nicely represented by Kagan's other fighting-the-last-war example: The main questions, then, are really a matter of tactics and timing. But no matter whether one prefers faster or slower, harder or softer, there will always be the risk that pressure of any kind will produce a victory for radical Islamists. Is that a risk worth taking? A similar question arose constantly during the Cold War, when American liberals called on the United States to stop supporting Third World dictators and American conservatives and neoconservatives warned that the dictators would be replaced by pro-Soviet communists. Sometimes this proved true. But other times such efforts produced moderate democratic governments that were pro-American. The lesson of the Reagan years, when pro-American and reasonably democratic governments replaced right-wing dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Korea, to name just a few, was that the risk was, on balance, worth taking.
The place of these four clients in the US hegemonic system bears little resemblance to that of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Moreover, in all four of the transitions facilitated by the Regan administration, the US enjoyed alternative partners to the departed autocrats. While I agree that the costs of current tensions in US policy between democratization and the strategic necessities of the war on terror require sustained assessment (they've produced downright schizophrenic policies in Central Asia, for example), Kagan provides no real solution to them nor any clear recognition of how Bush foreign policy made them worse.
It may be worth taking again in the Middle East, and not only as a strategy of democracy promotion but as part of a larger effort to address the issue of Islamic radicalism by accelerating and intensifying its confrontation with the modern, globalized world.
(4) Kagan's discussion of offshore balancing--which I am not much of a fan off--and alternative grand strategies ranges from superficial to misleading. I don't have time to elaborate this point now, but I think it should be clear to any reader familiar with current debates in IR theory and in American Grand Strategy.
Gotta run. I'll correct any grammatical and syntactical errors later.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Lukashenka shakes things up
I've been meaning to write something about the tit-for-tat between the UK and Russia and the strange and unfolding saga of Boris Berezovsky, but things keep changing before I get anything coherent written.
So, let's take a quick look to Russia's neighbor to the west: Belarus.
Belarus gets little attention in the western media. They haven't had an exciting people's revolution to cover. The president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, keeps a pretty tight handle on the media and on the opposition, which tends to be disorganized and ineffective, fighting amongst themselves instead of uniting in the common cause. Lukashenka is a pretty savvy politico, as well. When he was first elected president in 1994, he was a bit of dark horse. He positioned himself as a political outsider: a man of the people and an anti-corruption crusader. Once elected, he triangulated his opponents and eliminated them one by one (sometimes literally--more than one opponent has simply vanished). But Lukashenka didn't just target the political opposition--during his time in office, not even his inner circle has been secure. He's careful to make sure that no one has the opportunity build an independent power base--he keeps the regional governors moving around and has been perfectly willing to sic the legal system on insiders who grow too powerful. Since Belarus is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, it's easy to charge enemies with corruption: the charges are almost certainly true...it's the application that is politically motivated.
Now it looks like Lukashenka is going to sack his prime minister, Sergei Sidorsky. Sidorsky has been in office now for about 3 1/2 years, so he's due to be replaced, kind of like the timing belt in your car--it's not broken yet, but you'd better do it with that mileage. Kommersant seems downright pleased by this story: the Russians have been trying to break into the Belarusian petrochemicals markets for a couple of years now and they seem to be hoping that this will be their big break.
Kommersant also predicts that Lukashenka will tap a particularly unsavory figure as Sidorsky's replacement: Vladimir Naumov. Currently Interior Minister, Naumov is allegedly linked to the disappearance of numerous opposition figures and is banned from traveling to the United States and western Europe.
All media, good and bad....
That highbrow publication, USA Weekend Magazine:
Scores of absurdtie-ins include "If Harry Potter Ran General Electric," "Looking for God in Harry Potter" and our personal favorite, "Harry Potter and International Relations," in which the boy wizard is linked to real-life globalization and geopolitical issues.The bizarre thing here is actually not the criticism-based-on-title of our book (for redux, see Scott McLemee writing at Inside Higher Ed), but the accusation that Looking for God in Harry Potter is nothing more than an attempt to cash in on Potter's success.
It seems that Jeffrey Resner knows little about the religious controversy surrounding Harry Potter and why so many Christians have felt compelled to weigh in on the phenomenon. The debate over Harry Potter in the U.S. Christian community was, for a time, pretty intense; Conservative Christians remain divided over the books.
Given Potter's enormous penetration into American--and global--culture, "what to do about Potter" amounts to serious business for conservative Christians. I'd be tempted to dismiss Resner's mistake as a result of elite media detachment, but I've talked to plenty of reporters and critics over the last week who are sufficiently knowledgeable not to embarrass themselves like that.
I, on the other hand, am honored to make Resner's "personal favorite" for "absurdtie-ins." After all, who would be crazy enough to think that Harry Potter has anything to do with globalization?
Anyway, I have a piece in The New Republic Online called "How Harry Potter Explains the Word." (free resistration required.) Check it out, if so inclined.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Going through the motions
Welp, we know that a new Harry Potter book is about to come out, because the Washington Post has featured the obligatory piece on Christian reactions to Harry Potter, along with a side-helping of wonderment at the rise of explicitly Christian publishing.
Too bad this is so not new.
The article points out that some Christians are uncomfortable with the depiction of magic in the series, and notes that literature marketed as Christian in content (as opposed to the previous thousand years or so of Christian literature which was, well, just literature) is becoming a large and important market segment.
As Dan and I have argued elsewhere, for Christians who genuinely believe that magic is 1) real; and 2) derived from demonic forces, it is perfectly logical and consistent within their worldview to object to Harry Potter, the popularity of which encourages children to play at being wizards themselves, putting them at risk of contacting those demonic forces. That the heroes use magic for good is irrelevant, since magic is per se evil and dangerous. The article, unfortunately, doesn't really explain the basis for the objection. Although to many of us on the secular left (as well as the very large number of Christians who also don't believe in magic), their claims are patently ridiculous, there is a nearly unbroken chain of cultural imagination concerning witchcraft and satanism going all the way back to the middle ages, and possibly beyond. (If you want to know more, you need to buy the book.
Then there's the breathless discovery of Christian literature, complete with OMIGOD! They. Have. Romance. Novels. With. No. Sex. Scenes. Although Christian publishing continues to be a rapidly expanding market, the writer makes the forays of the major trade houses in Christian publishing sound like they happened yesterday. Unfortunately, this has been going on now for over 10 years. Sure, it's a trend, but it didn't start yesterday.
Update: Here's an example of the kind of thinking I mentioned above, concerning the promotion of magic by Harry Potter.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Expelliarmus!
It's always fascinating to me to see certain traditional arguments, arguments that I would have liked to think were long dead and buried, resurface in slightly altered form. Highbrow intellectual critics whom I would like to think have been suitably disarmed as a result of their prior encounters with their opponents seem to reincorporate and revivify as if by magic when a target at all similar to the prior object of their criticism emerges; out they spring, wand in hand, ready to cast a hex or three and ruin everyone else's fun.
That's what Ron Charles seems to have in mind with his anti-Potter editorial in this weekend's Washington Post. All the traditional pieces of the elitist dismissal of any and all elements of popular culture are present: Rowling isn't a good writer, the Potter books are intellectually thin, people aren't reading really serious (which means: "unpopular") novels but are instead submerging themselves and being taken in by the "orgy of marketing hysteria" surrounding the Potter books, and so on. My favorite bit, though, is the sanctimonious self-congratulation the author pours on himself for having read and enjoyed an obscure novel last year:
My favorite was "The Law of Dreams," a first novel by a 56-year-old writer named Peter Behrens. It's the story of an orphaned boy who doesn't know why he survived the evil force that killed his parents -- and left him scarred. Set during the Irish potato famine of 1847, it's not a fantasy, and it's not for children, but there are plenty of monsters here, and Behrens writes in a style that's pure magic. As of this writing, it has sold 8,367 copies in the United States. It's enough to make a book critic snap his broom in two.
Oh, bully for you, you read a book that didn't sell very many copies. Big deal. I am not sure where the nobility is supposed to lie in the mere act of reading (or watching, or listening to) something obscure, especially since that sentiment is conjoined with the notion that there is nothing of real value to be found in more popular works.
This kind of intellectual snobbery has been going on at least since Plato.
. . . a rational and quiet character, which always remains pretty well the same, is neither easy to imitate nor easy to understand when imitated, especially not by a crowd consisting of all sorts of people gathered together at a theater festival, for the experience being imitated is alien to them . . . an imitative poet isn't by nature related to the
part of the soul that rules in such a character, and, if he's to attain a good reputation with the majority of people, his cleverness isn't directed to pleasing it. Instead, he's related to the excitable and multicolored character, since it is easy to imitate. (Republic 604e-605a)
Sound familiar? The popular works can't have enduring value, since they appeal to the baser emotions; real value is to be found in those obscure things that the majority of people can't understand. That litany has pretty much been the staple curse of the intellectual snob for millennia; Charles isn't adding anything even particularly novel to it. Nor does Charles seem at all concerned about, say, Nietzsche's critique of this kind of intellectual asceticism, a critique which fairly clearly unveils the dismissal of the popular and the public as a kind of "weapon of the weak" directed against most of humanity by those who would deny their own commonality with the human condition.
Of course, Nietzsche also says that this is a sickness like pregnancy is a sickness -- something good may come out of it in the end, but it is not an end in itself. What good, you ask? I can see two goods from where I sit. First, the dismissal of popular works might impel someone who is pissed off by that dismissal to defend those works more clearly, rising to perform the disarming charm that can render the snobs powerless. Second, that defense might promote a clearer and more profound understanding of those popular works.
Let me briefly endeavor to mount such a defense of the Harry Potter phenomenon.
I don't want to try to claim that reading the Potter novels is some kind of a gateway to the reading of other novels; statistical data on that seems mixed, and my own anecdotal observations suggest that some people use Potter as a springboard while others start and stop their reading of novels with Rowling's series. I also don't want to claim that the Potter books belong on a list of "books that you should read before you die"; I can perfectly well imagine that people can get through their lives just fine without reading any of the Potter novels. (It's much harder for me to imagine people going through life not having read, say, Tolkien or Shakespeare.) From just about any technical perspective, the Potter novels are not masterpieces, and I wouldn't want to point to them as exemplars of the novelistic craft.
Nor is the universe that Rowling has created all that alien of a place to visit -- indeed, that's part of the secret of the Potter books' success, since the world that they sketch is basically our ordinary world plus magic rather than something entirely different. There is very little displacement involved in reading the Potter books, and basically no aspects of the wizarding world that don't map pretty precisely onto categories that are already familiar to us: classes, exams, pranks, jealousy, ambition, and so on. In this sense, the Potter novels are not demanding reads; this is not like reading Kafka or Joyce, or like reading Sheri S. Tepper or Iain M. Banks, all authors whose fictional worlds are not perfectly translatable into the categories of our own. Rather, the Potter novels are a pretty seamless reading experience, and the reader doesn't have to continually work to make sense of them the way she or he has to with more disruptive novels.
Instead, let me defend the Potter phenomenon by saying that the key thing about it is its communal character. Like other mass media products, the experience of reading a Harry Potter book is less about the solitary encounter with the text and more about the public performance of being a Harry Potter fan: yes, the costumes and the toys and the like, but also and perhaps especially the conversations about the novels, the characters, the situations, the future. There's something sociologically important about the existence of this kind of cultural commonplace (and let's not kid ourselves about that -- the existence of "Republicans for Voldemort" merchandise should be proof enough that we've entered that territory), and there's something profound about participating in it. Profound, and literally inexpressible, since what we're dealing with here is a communal experience that goes beyond mere spoken or written language and into what Wittgenstein would have called a "form of life." Participating in such a form of life transforms the participant by making them a part of a collective effort to wrestle with or perform something; we become parts of a community of fans, able to interact in novel ways because of the novel possibilities afforded by the novel commonplaces presented by the mass media product. We literally construct ourselves differently through these experiences. As such, the "literary" merits of the Potter novels are quite beside the point; what matters is that they serve as rallying-points around which sense-making experiences coalesce.
Take that, Ron Charles.
[Oh, and for the record, I do not think that Snape is a good guy acting as a deep cover agent and only appering to cooperate with Voldemort; I think it's more likely that Snape is trying to engineer a showdown between Harry and Voldemort in which they eliminate one another, so that Snape can assume Voldemort's place. This weekend we shall see if I am correct or not!]
The State, Surveillance, and El Pollo Rico's Pretty Good Chicken
On Thursday, ICE agents raided El Pollo Rico, a very, very popular Wheaton area pollo a la brasa restaurant, charging the owners with money laundering and hiring illegal immigrants.
Now, as it happens, I live really close to this place, and I often (used to) go there for chicken. It is perhaps the best chicken one can get anywhere--in the DC area Zagat guide, they usually had a top 10 finish for food, up there with all the fancy restaurants, and they were a decidedly cheap eats venue. For $13.50, I could feed my whole family on a whole chicken, cooked to perfection, with a side of fries, cole slaw, and plantains.
Now the local blogosphere is all over this, with predictably mixed reaction. On the one hand, the law and order, close the border types are applauding the government while fans of the fantastic chicken are quite annoyed that a hard-working community icon they frequent is being shut down.
Aside from serving as yet another flash-point on the ongoing immigration debate in this country, I think that this story is indicative of yet another long-term trend in Political Science that often is under appreciated and under-noticed. That is: in the techno-globalized-capitalist marketplace, the state grows ever more powerful, and many of the things supposedly responsible for the retreat of the state, the eclipse of the state, actually are enabling the state to become significantly more powerful.
As the story goes, the heyday of the sovereign state was several decades ago, when the State controlled all the interesting and relevant levers of power in the international realm. With the rise of the global economy, globalization, and the Internet, there emerged a realm of significant international activity outside the purview of the state. Indeed, it was possible to have a complete existence outside the state, and in some cases, these global forces were powerful enough to even discipline the state into complying with global or market norms. Unfettered flow of capital, movement of people, and the exchange of ideas all beyond, across and through borders seemed to render the state irrelevant. The State is Dead.
And yet, Long Live the State. One tends to forget that many of these so called global institutions and structures that permit individuals and businesses to move beyond the state (the upside of globalization) also permit a seamy underside of globalization, but both are still dependent on structures formed, maintained, and monitored by the State. Moreover, the very same technology available to those challenging the state is also available to the State itself.
Most tend to look at this the other way--that which the state has is now available to the common NGO, business, or individual. But, in this case, its the state making use of powerful surveillance equipment to know more about what is going on in and around its borders than ever before. In the supposed heyday of the state, how much did the state really "know" about its citizens? Yet today, it can monitor each and every one of them and track scads of data in ways that were previously unfathomable. According to the Post report of the story, the key charges against the family that owned El Pollo Rico were financial:The restaurant, at 2541 Ennalls Ave., accepted only cash. The Solanos paid employees who were in the county illegally in cash and wrote checks to those who were here legally, prosecutors said.
NBC4 (WRC) reported:
Federal agents say the Solanos deposited more than $6.6 million into a business account between June 2002 and September 2006 in increments of $7,000 to $9,000, which authorities say was done to avoid filing currency transaction reports that must be submitted with deposits that exceed $10,000.
The Solanos deposited checks from the business account into their personal accounts and used the proceeds to purchase residences, vehicles, loan and life insurance policies, and retirement accounts, according to the affidavit. Federal agents seized more than $2 million in cash and jewelry from the Solanos' residences and vehicles, authorities said.Officials said their investigation began about a year ago because of suspicious banking activity such as a quick succession of high-volume deposits and withdrawals. Officials said the underlying immigration violations were revealed over the course of the investigation.
In other words, El Pollo Rico was done in by the high-tech surveillance of the state attracted by its financial transactions. FinCEN has primary responsibility in the US for catching money laundering criminals, and the primary way they do that is with transaction reports by banks and other institutions that distribute cash (like Casinos). Every cash transaction over $10,000 must be reported to FinCEN, as well as any suspicious financial activity. As one might expect, they receive thousands of reports per year, so they rely on sophisticated technology and computer surveillance equipment to sort through all of that and identify questionable activities (as opposed to cash-heavy legitimate businesses).
20 or 40 years ago, it was next to impossible for a State operating in such a free market to really know all that much about what was going on inside or across its borders. Transactions like those at El Pollo Rico would have gone unnoticed until someone spilled the beans. Like Al Capone, you had to know who the bad guys were in order to finally find the financial crimes to put them away. Now, however, the state can survey financial flows, identify suspicious activity, and use that as a springboard to larger investigations.
That's some power for the state.
And, it means I now need to find a new Chicken joint.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
The Politics of the DH
Today, I read an interesting article linking baseball and political science -- "The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule," (warning: pdf) by Christopher Zorn and Jeff Gill, published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Despite the jargon, the piece is quite readable.
Zorn and Gill report evidence that baseball fans are far more likely to embrace the designated hitter (DH) if they are Democrats:
Most important, and consistent with our expectations, we find that self-identified Democratic Party members are more likely to support the DH rule than are either independents or Republicans; the odds ratio of 1.90 suggests that, on average, Democrats are 90 percent more likely to support the rule than are independents. This implies (we think) that the values that draw the respondents to the Democrats are linked to those associated with supporting the rule. At the same time, the reverse is not true: Republicans are no more or less likely to support the DH rule than are political independents.Their explanation for this finding makes intuitive sense.
As Zorn and Gill explain, the DH is arguably the greatest rules change in the history of baseball -- and Democrats are more accepting of "socio-political" changes.
Younger fans like the DH a bit more -- each year of age decreases support for the DH by 1.3%.
The also find a gender gap. Women are three times as likely to support the DH as men. All respondents were self-identified baseball fans, included in a larger CBS News survey taken in 1997.
Interleague play did not engender the same sort of socio-political division.
I know that Peter (Indians), Patrick (Yankees) and I (Royals) all grew up as fans of American League teams, which the authors hypothesize makes us more accepting of the DH. They could not fully test this relationship because of limits in the data (i.e., the pollsters didn't ask the right questions).
Note to Zorn and Gill in regard to footnote 18: There may not be data showing an increased Japanese-American fan base, but there is evidence of increased interest in American baseball in Japan -- thanks to the U.S. success of Nomo, Ichiro, Matsui, et al.
Hat tip: I learned about Zorn and Gill from my colleague who works with quantitative data about American public opinion and political behavior, Jason Gainous.
On 21 July 2007 I will return to total obscurity...
Another media appearance, this time in print.
The books, whose sales total 325 million worldwide, have clearly moved well beyond the kiddy realm. At the conference – held from Aug. 2 to 5 at the Sheraton Centre – Potter books are referenced in subjects as diverse as law, terrorism and international relations. Harry Potter has even cropped up in U.S. politics – Cheney-Voldemort '08 is a popular bumper sticker, with bloggers referring to the Vice President as "He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named." As Oscar Wilde once said, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." Rowlings' books are among the most controversial in U.S. public libraries, with some on the Christian right complaining they encourage Satanism and witchcraft. "A number of Christian conservatives believe that demonic powers are real, and magic is a demonic force," says Daniel Nexon, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, and [co-editor] of Harry Potter and International RelationsThe article covers some additional ground. Indeed, I was very disappointed that I couldn't find someone to write about connections between Harry Potter and the war on terror for the volume, so I enjoyed being able to talk about it with the Star's reporter:. "They believe that if kids engage in divination, even if they are play acting, they could accidentally contact Satan. This is a very real threat. It means that Harry Potter could seduce someone into occult practices."
See, for example, the role of terrorism in the books. The Death Eaters are essentially a terrorist organization, Nexon says. They assassinate their enemies, and spread fear throughout society. They use tactics to demobilize the population. "There are parallels with the War on Terror and the failure of the CIA to pick up on the warning signs before 9/11," he says. "In Rowling's world, much like real life, the bureaucracy of the state has been very slow to react to the dangers of terrorism."I should mention that I may be appearing on Canadian television again, may have a piece on Harry Potter on a well-known website, and have been quoted a few more times in the press. I guess I better enjoy my remaining week of
Another parallel from war on terror is the role of the wizard prison, Azkaban. As at Guantanamo Bay, most prisoners seem to be kept there indefinitely, Nexon says. The prison is inhuman and soul-destroying – the Dementors render inmates incapable of happiness. Characters such as Rubeus Hagrid, are sent to Azkaban for crimes they did not commit. Some of the saner wizards, such as Dumbledore, object to torture and voice their concerns. With race, Harry Potter's universe is more complicated, says Debra Thompson, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Toronto, and speaker at the upcoming Toronto conference. Rowling portrays a multicultural world, where a hierarchy based on blood exists, but only villains believe in its worth.
Out.
After months of threats, Russia announced this morning that it is officially suspending its obligations under the Cold War-era Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. From a military point of view, this probably isn't all that significant: I haven't seen any one making a serious claim that the Russian Army has the genuine capacity to present a conventional threat NATO and the US.
From a diplomatic point of view, though, it represents a new low in the relationship between the US and Russia. Although you wouldn't know it from the NY Times story, this decision seems to have been precipitated by an amendment added to the defense authorization bill currently wending its way through the Senate, which makes the missile defense system official US policy. The Kommersant article jumps the gun a bit--the vote on the amendment does not yet make it US law (it could get dropped in conference, though it seems unlikely)--but it is not a Good Thing.
I'm also very disappointed in the NYT's coverage, which fails to make clear the mutual responsibility for the current state of affairs. I am not a Putin booster, but the relationship has also been grossly mishandled from the US side.
Update: A good discussion of the issues involved here.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Russia vs. Georgia
The now independent states that once made up the Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are often referred to in Russia as the "near-abroad". The meaning of near-abroad, depending on how broadly you want to interpret it, can range from "those areas that used to be part of Russia in our imperial past" to "those areas that really ought to be within our sphere of influence" to "those areas where we have the right to meddle at will". Relations between Russia and the near-abroad range from "let us celebrate our Slavic brotherhood" (Belarus, the gas price kerfuffle of late 2006 notwithstanding) to downright nasty.
Bad blood between Estonia and Russia received a lot of western press attention this spring, after Estonian plans to relocate a Soviet-era World War II memorial that contained soldiers' remains from a prominent location in central Talinn to a cemetery outside the city resulted in a wave of violent protests by ethnic Russians in Estonia and in anti-Estonian protests and attacks within Russia, followed by an apparent cyber-attack on Estonian government websites.
The Russia-Estonia conflict, though, will likely remain no more than sturm und drang. Estonia is, after all, a NATO member, and there is little reason to think that despite all the hype, the conflict will ever go hot.
No, if you want to put money on a hot war somewhere in the near-abroad, I'd advise you to give considerably more attention to relations between Russia and Georgia.
Relations between Georgia and Russia have been less than cordial ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with disputes over the status of the so-called break-away regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia fueling the flames. The situation deteriorated significantly after the Rose Revolution of 2003, in which the corrupt government of Eduard Shevardnadze (better known in the US for his role as Gorbachev's foreign minister) was forced out in favor of Mikhail Saakashvili. Saakashvili, who lived for a time in the United States in the early 1990s, took an unabashedly pro-western stance, going so far as to suggest that Georgia be considered a candidate for eventual NATO membership. Russia, naturally, did not take kindly to Georgia's new orientation, and in the four years hence, there have been numerous incidents that have escalated tensions between Russia and Georgia. Here's a few highlights for your consideration:
Perhaps most disturbing, though, are claims that Russian military helicopters participated in an attack on a Georgian government building in Abkhazia, in an attempt to disrupt efforts by the Georgian government to build a stronger presence in the breakaway region. According to the Wall Street Journal, a UN report, due out as early as next week, will provide a detailed account of this incident, which occurred on March 11 of this year (the article is behind the WSJ pay wall, but can be read here). The dispensation of Kosovo also has important implications for Russian-Georgian relations, as many expect that if Kosovo is granted independence, then Russia may recognize both Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent.
The upshot is that while cyber-war may make for sexy headlines, it's the potential for an old-fashioned hot war that should most concern us. On the other hand, observers have been sounding the warning about the potential for a hot war between Russia and Georgia for years now. Who knows whether anything will ever come of it? Still, it's plenty worth keeping an eye on.