Jack Shafer at Slate draws our attention to an advertising section included in yesterday's Washington Post: Russia Beyond the Headlines.
Most people I know with an interest in Russia are also fascinated by Soviet propaganda, and Shafer, I think, correctly identifies this as a particularly amusing, if less effective, example of the genre.
It also provides an interesting window into the psyche of the Russian government, though. Take this piece on the position of the Russian language in post-Soviet space. During Soviet times, Great Russian nationalism may have been denounced as a bourgeois deviation, but the New Soviet Man was always presumed to be educated in Russian, because, after all, that was the language of International Communism.
Now that the Soviet Union has vanished, there are still plenty of Russian speakers within the former boundaries of the Soviet (and tsarist) empire. Russian remains an available lingua franca, though many of the post-Soviet states have worked very hard to develop a modern vocabulary in their official languages (this has been a particular issue for some of the Central Asian states). Still, it seems, Russia wants to maintain its position as the imperial culture, except now it's framed as "convenience" rather than domination. I remember how at an international conference on post-Soviet space, held in Riga, people scrambled to express themselves in English during the panel discussions, but switched to Russian in the cafeteria. “I am also a Russian-speaker,” a local journalist from Latvia’s Diena newspaper said sourly, mocking Moscow’s attempts to protect Russian speakers in Latvia from discrimination. “Does the Russian government think I need protection?”
But the value of Russian is dependent on the degree to which post-Soviet space is genuinely intertwined. If the near-abroad views its future as lying elsewhere (say, to the west, or even to the east), then the value of Russian is diminished. Or, perhaps, maintaining the position of the Russian language as the lingua franca is an important strategy in maintaining the position of Russia itself. Either way, the ghost of the Russian empire lives on.
Indeed, it does. Because this person, whether he wants it or not, is a part of the Russian world. If his children do not speak the language that can make them feel at home from Kaliningrad to Mongolia, this will be a loss for them. So, a journalist from Diena indeed needs protection - from forgetting. In the same way we need protection against forgetting Latvian music and cinema, which used to be highly popular in Soviet times.
Friday, August 31, 2007
An empire of language
War with Iran?
Dan Plesch, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, and international security consultant Martin Butcher have recently authored and released "Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East." The pre-publication paper was embargoed until August 28 and is dated September 2007. Here is the central finding:
The study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days, if not hours, of President George Bush giving the orderIn other words, given what the US has already been doing for some time, Plesch and Butcher do not think that a major attack on Iran will require much new US preparation for war.
It may not require much public debate either:
The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely.The ongoing resource quagmire that is the war in Iraq does not preclude American attack. Indeed, the authors conclude that the prospect of war basically depends upon the whim of Bush, Dick Cheney and their White House colleagues:
The United States retains the ability – despite difficulties in Iraq – to undertake major military operations against Iran. Whether the political will exists to follow such a course of action is known only to a few senior figures in the Bush administration.The authors then offer three conclusions about international life before and after such an attack -- and none are particularly optimistic.
First, the reaction in the region:
it is unimaginable that it would not cause far greater spurs to anger than already exist in the region.Second, such a war would greatly increase the likelihood of regional instability and escalated war.
Their third and final conclusion is that all the parties to the ongoing dispute need to pursue negotiated outcomes -- and perhaps a WMD free zone in the Middle East. Virtually no attention is given over to this prospect.
More here.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Jacksonian baseball
Do you remember Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonians? A few years ago, Mead wrote a very good book, Special Providence, which described four major visions of American foreign policy. Of the four, the Jacksonian tradition is perhaps the most interesting and important -- but also the most obscure to the chattering classes.
Jacksonian tradition is populist, principled, and often quick-tempered. As Mead explained:
Those who like to cast American foreign policy as an unhealthy mix of ignorance, isolationism and trigger-happy cowboy diplomacy are often thinking about the Jacksonian populist tradition.As Mead explains, Jacksonians populate the armed services partly because they are ready to defend the dignity and honor of America. It is an honor culture.
Professor Thomas Timmerman of Tennessee Tech recently found that Jacksonian honor culture also permeates major league baseball:
Timmerman looked at MLB data on the 27,667 hit-by-pitch events that took place from 1960 to 2004. He found that pitchers were most likely to hit batters when the batter had hit a home run during their last at-bat, when the previous batter had hit a home run and when a pitch in the previous half-inning hit the pitcher's teammate.I guess this explains why Senator Jim Bunning is #8 in career hit batsmen, even though he's 53rd in career innings pitched.
Yet, at the regional level,Timmerman also found that, in all three of these situations, white pitchers born in states typically defined as Southern by the U.S. Census were 40 percent more likely to hit a batter than non-Southerners. This trend may be due to a Southern inclination to act aggressively when their honor is challenged, he says.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Hayward Alker
First Steve Poe; now this. From the same International Studies Association e-mail listserv as before:
Dear Colleagues,
It is my very sad responsibility to notify you that Hayward Alker, past President of ISA, a wonderful friend, and an esteemed and internationally recognized scholar, passed away suddenly last week.
If you are interested in a remembrance, you can do so with a donation either to:The e-mail goes on to talk about memorial services and the like. I reproduced the addresses for donations here because I can't seem to find any kind of obituary online; maybe people looking for those addresses can find them here.
Middle East Peace Education Program
American Friends Service Committee
Attn. Selma Plascencia
934 S. Spring St. 3rd Fl.
Los Angeles California 90014
memo line: Hayward Alker Memorial: LA Middle East Peace
Or
Block Island Conservancy
PO Box 84
Block Island, RI 02807
Memo line: Hayward Alker
I'm kind of in mild shock about this. I can't say that I knew Hayward well, but he was someone I regarded as a professional mentor and an intellectual trailblazer for some of my own work. Hayward wrote letters for me, read and commented on several of my papers and on my book when it was in the manuscript stage, and participated in a workshop on "civilization and civilizations in world politics" I helped organize at an ISA meeting a few years ago. In fact, the piece that he wrote for the volume that came out of that workshop -- a volume that is scheduled to be published later this year -- will almost certainly be among the last things he wrote and saw through to publication. And we were going to be on a panel on ontology and IR together at the next ISA convention. So while I wasn't close to him, he was certainly someone I counted as a part of my intellectual circle (as I'm sure that many people did) -- and he's the first person occupying such a position for me who has died. It leaves a hole.
I'm sure that Hayward's students will be filling the 'Net and some of the IR journals with tributes over the next few months. But I'll offer my own remembrances here, because they seem to me to capture one of the most important things about Hayward as a scholar: his enormous generosity. I didn't study with Hayward, I didn't really do the same kind of work on language that he did (although there was a family resemblance), and I wasn't doing "world order studies" the way that he was -- in other words, there was no reason in the world why he should have spent time reading my stuff and mentoring me professionally. But he did, for several years, and it made me wish that I hadn't followed the first piece of advice he ever gave me, so that I could have actually been his student.
I first met Hayward in the autumn of 1993, when he as ISA President was making the rounds of the regional ISA conferences. That year's ISA-Midwest conference was held at Michigan State, which is where I was studying as an undergraduate student. I knoew of Hayward Alker, of course; I was a big fan of his marvelously-titled article "Rescuing Reason from the Rationalists," which had given me some hope that one could do interesting, conceptually rich work in IR despite the ever-increasing popularity of relatively thin forms of rational choice theory. (I was a precocious undergrad; I knew a few things about the intellectual contours of the field from a rather young age, thanks in large measure to my undergraduate advisors and professors.) And then I learned that Alker had requested a separate session to meet with graduate students: just students and the ISA President, in a room, chatting about things. I lobbied for my inclusion in that session -- after all, I'd taken the Ph.D. intro IR course the year before -- and obtained permission from the local authorities. So it was me and a bunch of quantitatively-inclined Michigan State Ph.D. students, and Hayward wanted to hear from us what we were interested in. Then he started talking about how the field had changed, the importance of methodological innovation, and how vital it was for us all to know the histories of our subfields and the course that debates had taken to bring us to where we were today. He didn't know any of us at all, and here he was conducting a professional mentorship session for a bunch of grad students who were almost certain never to do the kind of work that he found interesting!
After his presidential address, during which he shared the stage with Cynthia Enloe and got into an amazing back-and-forth debate with J. David Singer during which they stopped speaking English and just started speaking math to one another, there was a reception. I made my way over to Hayward and asked him whether, given my interests, I ought to apply to MIT for a Ph.D. He told me no, I shouldn't, because he might not be there long and there wasn't anyone else there who would be appropriate for me to work with given what I wanted to work on. I took his advice and didn't apply to MIT, and then in 1995 he and his wife Ann Tickner (an amazing IR scholar in her own right -- the two of them are the only husband-and-wife pair to ever both serve as Presidents of the International Studies Association) departed for the University of Southern California. So if I'd applied to MIT and gone there, I would only have had a year before he left -- but part of me wishes that I had done it anyway.
In 2001 I e-mailed Hayward after reading his ISA paper on reflective resolutions of Prisoner's Dilemma games, a perennial favorite subject of his. I asked him about essentialism and Chomskian grammar, and a question about causation; he replied, and sent me what I later came to know as the "Alker 101" packet of typescripts, unpublished papers, and research reports -- brilliant stuff he'd done decades before that spoke to the kinds of concerns I was just then developing. We kept in touch; he read drafts of papers I was working on and offered feedback, and he sent me some of his own recent work (including a marvelous piece on Karl Deutsch that as far as I know was never published, but should have been).
Most importantly he treated me like a scholar, taking my arguments seriously and pressing me where I needed to be pressed. Hearing him say -- or reading him say, since most of our contact was through e-mail -- that he enjoyed one of my pieces was a wonderful boost of confidence for me, especially at a time when I wasn't having much luck placing my book with a publisher. And if he criticized some point, I knew I'd better spend some time addressing the criticism in a subsequent draft, because he invariably brought up central issues. He was a thoughtful reader even of the work of a young scholar who had not been one of his students, or even one of his grandstudents. I find that attitude somewhat rare in academia these days. Hayward set a standard for scholarly generosity that I aspire to in my own professional practice. And his enthusiasm -- for methodological pluralism, for humanistic-but-rigorous IR scholarship, for ideas -- was contagious!
He will be missed. The field of international studies is richer for his many scholarly and professional contributions over the years; it is a poorer place now that he has passed on.
Monday, August 27, 2007
You can't make this stuff up...
How much more excitement can the Senate handle? With prospect of a confirmation hearing heating up the Hill, this crosses the web-page of the Washington Post: Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested back in June and plead guilty to disorderly conduct.
First, how on earth does this not come out until now? He's a sitting Senator pleading guilty to a criminal offense. A misdemeanor, yes, but still a crime. And he's now on probation. A sitting Senator, on probation. And no one knew.
Second, what on earth was Craig doing in the bathroom of the Minnesota airport when arrested???Roll Call, citing a copy of a report by the airport's police, said that officers had been conducting a sting operation inside the men's room because of complaints of sexual activity there.
When officially asked about this incident:
According to the police report, the undercover officer was monitoring the restroom at noon on June 11. A few minutes later, Craig entered and sat in the stall next to him. Craig began tapping his right foot, touched his right foot to the left foot of the officer in the stall next to him and brushed his hand beneath the partition between them. He was then arrested.
While he was interviewed about the incident, Craig gave police a business card showing he was a U.S. senator. "What do you think about that?" Craig asked the officer, according to the report obtained by Roll Call.Craig issued a statement confirming his arrest and guilty plea, which was first reported in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call. But the Idaho Republican maintained that he had not engaged in any "inappropriate conduct" and that the airport police misunderstood his behavior.
Misunderstood? So, what exactly were you doing tapping the foot of an under-cover cop in the next stall over in a men's room in the airport? Exactly what part of that is not inappropriate?
"At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions. I was not involved in any inappropriate conduct,"
Gonzales Resigns
The NY Times is reporting that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has tendered his resignation.
This is a pretty big deal, I think-- Gonzales was under fire for all kinds of activities, many stemming from a secret intelligence program that includes spying on American targets without a warrant. He had lost a lot of credibility and ability to function effectiviely as the nation's highest law enforcement officer. However, one thing that sticks in the back of my mind--when Rove resigned, he mentioned that White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said that anyone leaving should leave by Labor Day, otherwise, all folks would be expected to stick it out for the duration. Could it be as simple as that?
The big deal, though, is the fact that Bush now has to name a successor and that person has to pass through Sen. Leahy's Judiciary Committee. The nominee, whoever he or she is, will have some very difficult questions to answer. Attorney General is a rather important cabinet post, so I'd imagine a successor will be named soon, and those hearings will serve as a site for all kinds of pent-up frustration with the Bush Administration.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
And some people wonder why I don't assign anything by Thomas Friedman
Duncan Black posts what should be the final nail, but won't be, in Friedman's credibility:
I hold out some vague hope that this is out of context.
But if it isn't: there you have it, Friedman's underlying rational for the war was an incoherent revenge fantasy based on the "paper tiger" theory of coercive diplomacy. Afghanistan wasn't enough to prick "their bubble," so we had to find another example. Could have been Saudi Arabia, could have been Pakistan... doesn't really matter. All that matters is that we toppled a second Islamic country.
I think Thomas Friedman needs to take a remedial "Introduction to International Relations" course before he's allowed anywhere near his word processor. What's even more disturbing is that he continues to win awards for "I'm with stupid" theories of international politics.
Anyway, what follows is an attempt to communicate, in letters alone, my experience as I dissolve into a quivering mass of annoyance while I beat what's left of my gelatinous head against the floorboards....
BHAUYWGDYUGAAUYWGDUYXVGVXAFTFDSRTWDS%^R^%AAERT@TFEVEGHVAG@FDTYF@TEFIUYEGRYOUDGYT@FVE
TYAFC@DTYV#TDVTFTY@FADRT@FAIT@DDDVGATUY@DFGTYV!!!!12rtfVGIVWDVIWYT@fytf4tyr4fbodjhbv
1uy2gver7tfegvqdihgqvwdgvdfgyv2iytf4976rf43tvedg2v^^*!%!!! Phfft. Thbp. Slup.
Be careful what you wish for
Several days ago, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) returned from a visit to Iraq and called for the ouster of Prime Minister Maliki, calling him "non-functional."
On the one hand, Levin makes a critical point. The main problem in Iraq is political, not military, and the dysfunction of the Iraqi government is not really helping to solve the problem. Indeed, the Iraqi parliament is indicative of the sectarian and political conflict that continues to plague the country.
On the other hand, be careful what you wish for. In the on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again,
its not but it is comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, (this debate and policy reversal is so rich, it could and probably should be the subject of a separate post, but my syllabus isn't done yet and classes start Monday. So maybe someone else will do it or it will just have to wait....) I wanted to bring up one historical lesson that seems somewhat relevant and foreboding in this instance.In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground...
No, wait, wrong Vietnam parallel....
In 1963, a crack commando unit of the ARVN Army overthrew and subsequently murdered South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in a coup sanctioned by the US Government. The Kennedy Administration was frustrated with Diem's government as they were not making sufficient progress in the fight against communism, autocratic, ineffective, and such. To make a long story short, what they failed to appreciate was that sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. The successive Vietnamese governments after Diem were no more effective in fighting the communists, while US participation in the coup gave the US a deeper responsibility and commitment to the successive Vietnamese governments. Indeed, many historians see the 1963 coup as the moment when Vietnam went from bad to disaster for the the US.
So, perhaps in this instance, the Bush administration's backing of the Maliki government isn't such a bad idea. Its a problematic government, to be sure, but Maliki is the devil we know, and we might want to be wary of engineering a transition to the devil we don't know, especially when any alternative to Maliki seems no better at 'solving' Iraq's current political crisis.
UPDATE I: It seems that Intel Dump has similar reservations.
UPDATE II: It seems that the Intel community has added some fuel to the anti-Maliki fire with the release of its latest NIE (.pdf of the NIE).
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Quick, fetch the smelling salts
I'm back in town after having been blissfully detached from the news cycle for two weeks. I seem to have missed quite a lot: resumption of long-range bomber flights, the bombing of the Nevsky Express, yet another (alleged) Russian incursion into Georgian airspace.
I'm still working on catching up with everything. In the meantime, here's something for your viewing pleasure: manly man Vladimir Putin goes shirtless in the Siberian forest. Note the crucifix perched on his well-defined pecs. Oo-la-la.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Steve Poe
I am shocked and very sad to learn that Steve Poe, an international-relations specialist at the University of North Texas and the editor of International Studies Quarterly, has died. The following email just went out over the International Studies Association mailing list:
Dear Colleagues,I only met Steve once or twice, but I had extensive communication with him in his capacity as editor of ISQ, and I want to echo Tom Volgy's comments. Steve had done a wonderful job with the journal. Moreover, he comported himself with the kind of professionalism, honesty, and thoughtfulness that should stand as a model for all journal editors. I've heard about the way in which he touched many students' lives. His fellow scholars would do well to leave such a legacy.
It is my extremely sad duty to inform you that Steve Poe, our editor in chief of ISQ, a friend, and a major contributor to our profession, passed away last week.
Visitation is being held today in Denton Texas and he will be buried tomorrow. His family asked that instead of sending flowers people could make a donation to either the U of North Texas Peace Studies Program, or the William Penn Peace Studies Program.
Steve nurtured ISQ as if it was his own. And when we asked him for myriad "favors" to assist with other journals and publication issues he did it with great grace and professionalism. He was fun to chat with, and great pleasure to have as a colleague, and he died ever so young. I will miss him very much as I'm sure you will as well.
Thank you.
Tom Volgy
Let me encourage all our academic readers to make a donation to either of the aforementioned programs.
A full obituary can be found in the Denton Record-Chronicle (scroll down). And a eulogy, of sorts, at UNT's In House, which also includes the addresses for donations.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Missing the Invasion
Kenneth Turan, movie critic for NPR and the Los Angeles Times, weighs in today with a review of the latest remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Having not seen this newest version yet, I can't speak to the quality or accuracy of his review (and I probably won't be able to until the DVD comes out -- hard to get out to non-G-rated movies with young children, sigh). But I would like to call attention to one rather striking omission from Turan's comments: he characterizes the original film as "a B movie about zombies" and declares that all subsequent remakes adhere to this "pulp premise."
True enough -- but characterizing the story in this way misses the social context of the core plot. All versions of this tale, from the original book to the various filmed versions, revolve around the idea of aliens invading and replacing ordinary people with emotionless lookalikes; invariably someone figures this out and tries to warn others, encounters Peril, and has to Go On The Run. Zombies? Maybe. But this is also about a particular kind of anxiety about a foreign infiltration, and the film resonates with and shapes those fears in particular ways.
To be more specific, the core plot of the "invasion" story is a kind of narrative translation of a sense of threat from an enemy that is both invisible and insidious. Bad guys, who hail from somewhere Outside of the safe borders of the community, sneak in and start being able to "pass" as normal upstanding citizens. And they do so both by impersonating "normal" people and by converting/brainwashing/seducing other citizens, and doing so by magical means -- i.e. means that aren't readily explainable in a rational fashion, in part because normal citizens (including us, the readers and viewers) can't rationally fathom why anyone would willingly and rationally consent to compromise their individuality in this way. So the narrative obliges our sensibilities by providing some science-fictional bit of technobabble to cover the gap between reason and outcome, which also serves to increase our anxiety: we don't understand how these invaders are making converts, even though we can see the results of their doing so.
The fact that this sounds familiar -- or at last, it should sound familiar -- is not an accident. The original Jack Finney novel, published in 1954, summed up a series of fears about how Communism was thought likely to spread. There's a whole cultural apparatus about being watchful for the expected Communist agitators who would be taking advantage of holes and gaps in American society (including the quality of toilet paper) to create sympathizers; Finney's novel riffs on that cultural apparatus, and the 1956 film does so even more explicitly.
Fast-forward to 2007, where most people in the United States and Europe (the likely primary markets for this film) aren't worried about Communism any more -- instead, they are worried about terrorism. And at least some of them are worried about terrorism in strikingly similar ways, using strikingly similar "contagion" metaphors. Indeed, some analysts go further, and actually propose the use of epidemiological principles to study terrorism. We're worried now, just like we were then, about becoming "infected" by alien infiltrators, and we're worried about the possibility of ordinary people "catching" the terrorism bug. Indeed, that was one of the major points in the report just issued by the New York City Police Department:Their 90-page report highlighted how ordinary people in Western nations, with unremarkable jobs and with little or no criminal histories, sometimes come to adopt a terrorist ideology.
In other words: ordinary people get infected by alien invaders, and end up participating in a nefarious plot to overthrow all that is good and holy in our normal lives.
There's something quite fascinating about the persistence of these disease/infection metaphors for dealing with threats. It's not as simple as saying that Communism and terrorism "really are" diseases or disease-like, since there are clearly other useful ways of characterizing these phenomena: as criminal activities, for example, or as geopolitical state-sponsored activity. And these aren't completely incompatible metaphors, either, which further complicates the issue. But there is something quite striking about the resurgence of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers story in the era of homeland security and vigilance against suspected terrorists -- something that might help to explain the persistence of these metaphors over time.
At the very least, it's something that should be kept in mind when reviewing the film.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
When do we get to call it "balancing"?
I've expressed skepticism in the past about the idea that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization represents counterbalancing against the United States. And I still believe that the primary purpose of the organization isn't to function as a NATO-like block, but more as an alternative or "exit" option for public goods provided by the US.
But The rhetoric certainly sounds an awful lot like, if not balancing, then some sort of proto-balancing.
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - The leaders of Russia, China and Iran said Thursday that Central Asia should be left alone to manage its stability and security — an apparent warning to the United States to avoid interfering in the strategic, resource-rich region.Even if we reject the full notion of "soft balancing", we still might consider attempts to substitute for the US--and therefore to erode its influence--as something akin to balancing.
The veiled warning came at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and on the eve of major war games between Russia and China.
The SCO was created 11 years ago to address religious extremism and border security in Central Asia, but in recent years, with countries such as Iran signing on as observers, it has grown into a bloc aimed at defying U.S. interests in the region.
"Stability and security in Central Asia are best ensured primarily through efforts taken by the nations of the region on the basis of the existing regional associations," the leaders said in a statement at the end of the organization's summit in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attending the summit for the second consecutive year, criticized U.S. plans to put parts of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe as a threat to the entire region.
"These intentions go beyond just one country. They are of concern for much of the continent, Asia and SCO members," he said.
Washington has said the system would help protect against potential Iranian missiles.
Russian President Vladimir Putin didn't mention the United States in his speech, but he said that "any attempts to solve global and regional problems unilaterally are hopeless."
He also called for "strengthening a multi-polar international system that would ensure equal security and opportunities for all countries" — comments echoing Russia's frequent complaints that the United States dominates world affairs.
So, here's the question: at what point would we declare that the SCO, and related policies, amount to counter-balancing, and what's the justification for your particular threshold?
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Cooperation_Organization
Monday, August 13, 2007
Harry Potter: from hero to global commonplace
For those who might be interested, my lecture notes from my address at Prophecy 2007 follow.
Keep in mind that I departed a great deal from the text, particularly when talking about nationalism and not all of my notes add up to coherent sentences.
Also, the notes I've reproduced below constituted prompts rather than text to be read verbatim. I may clean it up one day, but I don't really have the energy to do so right now.The clever subtitle of Prophecy 2007, "From Hero to Legend," raises an interesting question: has Harry Potter passed, in one way or another, into the realm of legend? Or, to put it in broader terms, what are the various relationships between the category of “legend” and Harry Potter, both within the confines of the series and in terms of the Harry Potter phenomenon writ large?
It seems appropriate to begin with some “textbook” definitions of three categories relevant to my discussion: myth, legend, and folklore. These definitions have their own problems, and experts in these fields will rightfully question my use of them, yet they provide good benchmarks for the claims I will make later on.
1. Myth, in the first definition offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, embodies
A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces or creatures , which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.
Myths often refer to events “out of time”: the origins of gods, the primordial mist from which a society springs, and so forth.
In popular and some scholarly usages, myth refers to stories that are uncommonly believed to be false. “That’s just a myth.”
2. Legends, in contrast, operate in “human time.” They take place in “our world” and describe people and events that, while at least one element may be of ambiguous veracity, have some plausibility to them. We can argue about whether or not legends really happened in the precise manner described, but they, unlike myths, are in principle verifiable. While Arthur may not have established a “round table” or may not be lying in Avalon to await a new threat to Britain, there may have been a historical figure to which the legends of King Arthur refer—if only in some distant and distorted way.
3. Finally, contemporary understandings of folklore originate in nineteenth-century Romantic Nationalism. For those concerned with the apparently pernicious effects of what we would now term “modernization,” recording and interrogating the “folktales” of rural society became a way of capturing the essence of national character. Folklorists, of course, did not merely record “national culture,” they produced it by enshrining local variations in European peasant culture as exemplars of national difference. Hence the joke that all European “national folk dances” are basically variations on the same theme with a few different moves and shifts in styles of dress.
Regardless, when we speak of folklore we refer to common cultural currency—much of it mythological or legendary in character—that informs and enables communication between members of a community. In doing so, it defines social and cultural communities through shared referents, themes, and narratives.
I am no expert in literature or the analysis of genre, but even to a luddite such as myself it seems that the fantasy genre has a complicated relationship with myth, legend, and folklore. J.R.R. Tolkein, whose work for many defines modern fantasy, built a fully realized world out of an analysis of myth, legend, folklore, and linguistics. His world was more than simply borrowed from these elements, but presented a theory of them.
Consider, also, the late Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. Alexander bases his world in the myths, legends, and folklore of premodern Britain—specifically its Celtic inheritance. But while he lifts elements, he radically reinterprets many of them. Thus the Castle of Llyr bears only some resemblance to the lore surrounding the Children of Llyr from which he borrows the name. The Black Cauldrun is the Cauldrun of Mabinogi, but its narrative role in the Prydain Chronicles is quite different from that of the Second Portion of the Mabinogi. Here legend, transformed into folklore, provides the “source material” for a different story.
The last paragraph of the Prydain Chronciles—of the High King—holds special interest for us. After his costly victory over Arawan, Taran forsakes voyage to the Summer Lands—and hence immortality—in order to set about the hard task of bringing to fruition the many small and large works of those who have perished in the conflict. His love-interest, Eilonwy, forsakes immortality as well:And they lived many happy years, and the promised tasks were accomplished. Yet long afterward, when all had passed away into distant memory, there were many who wondered whether King Taran, Queen Eilonwy, and their companions had indeed walked the earth, or whether they had been no more than dreams in a tale set down to beguile children. And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.
What Alexander describes here, of course, is the passage of “real events” into the realm of legend and even, ultimately, myth. This serves a double purpose. First, as with the Harry Potter series—and so many of the best works of children’s fantasy, such as LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy—the acceptance of death reflects an acceptance of one’s humanity, and thus of one’s interconnectedness with other human beings. But death claims more than self—it ultimately effaces memory of deeds. Second, it locates the Prydain Chronicles in the realm of myth and legend. We might, if we so choose, view them as accounts of “real events” that have been transformed into traces of folktales.
In contrast, Evangeline Walton’s classic Mabinogian Tetrology is a straightforward adaptation of what would once have been legend, but now we think of as folklore. She adapts the narrative elements and introduces mid-20th century interpretations of the transition from pre-Indo European to Indo-European societies, but her work stands as a modern retelling of folkloric source material.
Now these are all examples of so-called “high fantasy,” and some have suggested that Harry Potter is best thought of as “low fantasy.” I think this is wrong, but I’ll return to this later.
So, between such disparate re-workings of legend-cum-folklore we can identify some basic functions of contemporary fantastical fiction. A great deal of fantasy literature might be understood in terms of the disenchantment of the modern world. Reading fantasy provides many with an opportunity to “suspend disbelief” and enter into a re-enchanted world; many examples of fantastical fiction thus mimic the structures of legends. Without confidence in the legendary—that is to say, somewhat true—character of folklore, we produce and read explicitly fictional legends.
In “high fantasy”, much of it derivative of Tolkein, authors invent entire worlds with their own myths, legends, and even folklore. But even in other examples of the fantasy genre, a problem emerges: how to give the constructed world sufficient resonance for it to seem “plausible” or “grounded”? The answer, for many (and here again we see Tolkein’s influence), is to fill the world with real or pseudo-tropes from existing folkloric traditions. This lowers, if you will, the barriers to entry for readers and provides short-cuts for writers.
But regardless of the particular genre of fantasy, any fictional narrative that re-enchants the world creates interesting possibilities: folklore may be, and often proves to be, real. Plots often hinge on how the deeds of great heroes, wizards, or what-have-you—sometimes viewed by characters as suspect—turn out to be, at least to some degree, factual. Separating the “real” from the legendary and folkloric drives plot development. Heroes themselves often are inserted into an ongoing flow of legend and must, if good is to triumph, take up their appointed roles. Perhaps one of the most straightforward—and interesting—examples of this kind of narrative can be found in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Finnovar Tapestry.
So a great deal of fantastical fiction is structured as myth or legend—with various borrowings from our own folklore—with internal myths, legends and folklore in an often unstable conceptual relationship.
How, then, might we cut into the question of “Prophecy… from Hero to Legend” in Harry Potter? Here let me make four arguments: First, as is often the case in fantasy, the shifting relationship between myth—and particularly legend and folklore—is often important to the plot of Harry Potter. Second, Harry’s journey is not from hero to legend, but from legend to hero to legend. Third, Harry Potter is structured as “legend” in a way that helps to explain its tremendous appeal. And, fourth, and I think most important, the Harry Potter phenomenon involves not the translation of hero into legend, but the emergence of a “global commonplace” akin to the conceptual category of folklore.
Myth, Legend, and Folkore in HP
Folkloric elements; legend and myth. Status of certain things as myth/legend/folklore crucial. Characters discuss or dismiss the Chamber of Secrets, for example, as a “legend.” The Deathly Hallows may or may not be a “fairy tale.” But it is particularly interesting that characters in the Harry Potter universe—unlike in many other examples of fantasy—discuss these issues with a “modern” vocabulary. As the Lovegoods’ various obsessions make clear, the Wizarding world is full of fairytales and mythical animals that do not refer to anything real. Within the universe of Harry Potter.
Myth, Legend, and Folklore: HP himself
It encapsulates Harry Potter’s own story. When Harry arrives at Hogwarts he is, after all, something of a legend in the Wizarding World; “the boy who lived”: the only person ever to survive Voldemort’s Avada Kedavra curse. For most of the Wizarding World, and for Harry himself, his survival is the stuff of legend. How he survived, and why he survived, remain—for most of the novels—cloaked in mystery. For Harry to find his place in the world, and to triumph over Voldemort, he must travel a specific kind of hero’s journey in which he transforms himself from a legend into a hero. But having defeated Voldemort, Harry’s heroism will inevitably transition back into the realm of Wizarding legend.
Harry Potter has, from our perspective, the architecture of “legend.”
Harry Potter demands very little “ontological displacement.” Harry exists in our world, in our time, and at least partly in our geography. The fantastic elements of the Wizarding World are almost entirely drawn from European folklore—from the magical creatures, to the language of spells which is either Latin or Latin-esque, to the practice of witchcraft and wizardry which mirrors medieval and early modern accounts. In many ways, the Wizarding world is quite mundane. Magic functions as an alternative technology, bureaucrats bumble, reporters twist the facts, the Ministry regulates international trade, and we even have a World Cup.
Harry Potter does not, therefore, take place “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away” or on a parallel world with its own geography, history, myth, legend, and folklore. Harry is not LeGuin’s Ged, Nix’s Sabriel, or one of the countless heroes and heroines of fantasy who step through a magic portal and find themselves in a cosmological struggle between good and evil. He is a boy who discovers, on his birthday, that he is part of a “secret society” with its own—mostly familiar—rules, practices, and struggles—ones that bleed seamlessly into 20th and 21st century Britain. Harry Potter is, as some people say, “low fantasy.” But unlike many examples of “low fantasy,” the Wizarding World looks more like that of “high fantasy” with its clear-cut distinctions between “good” and “evil” (even if individual characters face moral struggles) and its menagerie of elves, goblins, phoenixes, centaurs, and so forth.
But this has certain implications. First, all bets are off about which of our own legends and folklore are “true” and which are merely myth or fairy tales. We know that some stories in the Wizard World are in fact nothing more than folklore, and that some magical creatures do not exist. We must, as I suggested above, reorient the lines to draw when we “suspend disbelief.” Second, it gives Potter the architecture of a successful Muggle legend.
Because Potter’s world intermixes seamlessly with our own—our world of Playstations and early modern witchcrazes and prime ministers—it has the infrastructure of plausibility associated with “legend.”
Now, much fantastical fiction apes the structure of legend. After all, they provide us with an escape into a re-enchanted world of swords, sorcery, and magical creatures that once seemed quite real to every human being. A protagonist enters into an unfolding legend; he or she fulfills the prophecy and therefore both acts out and produces the legendary arc of the fantasy world. But the Harry Potter novels go further, by presenting us with—at least in its structure—a “plausible” legend of our own world.
This helps explain, I think, the wild success of the novels. Because they present themselves as a legend rooted in our—and the stress should be on “our” as in those of us in this room—time and space, they bring with them a familiarity—the lack of a demand for strong ontological displacement—which makes the books accessible to people who might otherwise never read works of fantasy, let alone children’s fantasy
Of course, and this brings me to my final “riff,” only a very young child or a crank would read this literary architecture as imply that Potter’s story is—or could in fact be—true. Thus, I think that “legend” is the wrong way to think about the nature of the Potter phenomenon.
Harry Potter isn’t actually becoming the “stuff of legend,” but rather the stuff of folklore.
What do I mean by this? As many people much better informed on these matters than I have noted, the “commercialization” of folklore is a major staple of the last century or so. In its most basic sense, we have Disney and other appropriations of folklore as mass media. But in a more profound sense, the narratives, myths, legends, themes, and figures that used to provide common currency and structure community through oral tradition—as public property—now disseminate through mass, commercial media. Our “folklore,” in fact, is found in television dramas, movies, and novels.
This is actually a very significant development, one with precedents that date back at least until the 19th century. The famous scholar of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, argues that “the nation” is an “imagined community.” In a “real” community, people know one another and interact directly with one another. But, in his account, nineteenth century newspapers and state propaganda played a key role in creating the social fact of “nations”: the sense that members of a national community are, in fact, connected to one another through common experiences and orientations. The experience of temporal “simultaneity” plays an essential role in our ability to “imagine” communities. (And here we should think about the simultaneous worldwide release of the English-language editions of Deathly Hallows, and the experience we had of reading the book knowing that millions of others were doing the same thing. The academic blogsphere, to take one example, basicall stopped in its tracks in the hours after the book was released.) Now, newspapers are now less important than this sense of an “imagined community” than television, film, and even the experience of, say, going to any mall in the US and seeing the same stores.
So Harry Potter is not merely a reinterpretation of folklore, it is a, functionally speaking, contemporary folklore. And more than that, it is folklore on a global scale. Or, as I’ve argued in various settings, Harry Potter is cultural globalization: it is part of the creation of transnational common currency of narratives, personages, themes, and other circulating commonplaces.
Let me illustrate this through the history of the volume I edited. Put together a panel—which was packed (albeit in a small room) and sparked lots of conversation. I met scholars from France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and India who got easily and enthusiastically discuss Harry Potter.
But we’re talking about a peculiar stratum here. There’s significant evidence that Harry Potter has become transnational cultural currency. Over 350 million books sold worldwide; over 3.8b in international revenue, 66+ translations. But what we want to see even more than that is evidence of Potter showing up “outside” of the text, in, for example, political settings.
And we have some evidence for this. As I recently argued, Harry Potter, in fact, functions something like a Rorschach Blot: In countries around the world, it captures various national anxieties about contemporary culture and international affairs. French intellectuals, for example, debate whether or not Harry Potter indoctrinates youngsters into the orthodoxy of unfettered market capitalism. Some Swedish commentators decry what they perceive as Harry Potter’s Anglo-American vision of bourgeoisie conformity and its affirmation of class and gender inequality. In Turkey, we find a significant discussion of Harry Potter that pivots around issues of Turkish civilizational identity: whether Turkey is part of the West, the East, or a bridge between the two.
A few Turkish writers have even asserted that controversies over Harry Potter in the United States demonstrate how Turks are more “Western” than Americans. And in Russia, a country whose concern over international status and prestige becomes more apparent each day, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta created a minor firestorm when it claimed that the film visage of Dobby the House-Elf was a deliberate insult to President Vladimir Putin.
We also have other indicators of Potter’s status of global folklore. Folklore, of course, involves common themes that are adapted and translated into local contexts, that evolve over time in particular settings. The Cinderella story, for example, has variants across Eurasia. We see this in fanfiction, but also in the official and unofficial—read, unauthorized—“translations” of Potter. India. China.
I don’t know how long this will last. What, HP’s “half life” will be. A generation? More? But Harry Potter is one of the most recent, and most profound, examples of commercial folklore achieving transnational status. Of creating a commonplace for people speaking different languages, living in different countries, and with otherwise distinctive cultural settings. And I think that’s pretty interesting, and pretty exciting.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
No, they can't walk and chew gum at the same time
Remember when critics of the impending Iraq War argued that it would divert our attention from Afghanistan... and received a thunderstorm of mockery?
Remember when an unprecedented number of international-relations specialists raised red flags about the conduct of the Iraq War, pointed out that we were headed for real problems in Afghanistan, and got dismissed in the national media with a quotation from conservative think-tanker Joshua Moravscik? Well, probably not, because the only national outlet to even run the story was the Boston Globe.
Well, if you haven't already realized who was right, and who was wrong, David Rhode and David E. Sanger have a depressing account that should make things very, very clear:
But that skepticism never took hold in Washington. Assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency circulating at the same time reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports. The American sense of victory was so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan were packing their guns and preparing for the next war, in Iraq.How many times can one administration screw up the whole "Mission Accomplished" thing?
They continue:
Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.I don't have anything profound to add. This kind of gross incompetence--in which policy is one part wishful thinking and one part laboratory experiment in half-baked ideas dreamed up over lunch at the American Enterprise Institute--has reaped a bitter harvest at home and abroad.
Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.
They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care and education, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”
President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.
Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator drone spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.
I think it is about time we tried handing the reigns back to professionals, technocrats, and, heck, maybe even academics. And, no, pumping ideological iron in right-wing think tanks for eight years does not qualify anyone as a "technocrat" or "academic."
Image source: wikipeda
Friday, August 10, 2007
Concert of democracies: The liberal internationalist case
Ivo Daalder's and Robert Kagan's "Concert of Democracies" opinion-editorial has been generating waves of derision from the left coast of blogland.
I've already argued that Kagan's 'Cold War II' outlook on the liberal-authoritarian divide amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy--although the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's activities suggest that we're already heading in that general direction. So I'm certainly not going to defend every aspect of the proposal. But I have been a bit frustrated with some of the criticisms coming from the left. In brief, while Kagan's case for a Concert of Democracies certainly stems from neoconservative ideology, or what I've termed "Exceptionalist Internationalism", there is an "Exemplarist Internationalist" case for a Concert of Democracies. Consider the Princeton Project on National Security's endorsement of the Concert of Democracies idea (PDF):While pushing for reform of the United Nations and other major global institutions, the United States should work with its friends and allies to develop a global “Concert of Democracies” – a new institution designed to strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies. This Concert would institutionalize and ratify the “democratic peace.” If the United Nations cannot be reformed, the Concert would provide an alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorize collective action, including the use of force, by a supermajority vote. Its membership would be selective, but self-selected.
And:
Members would have to pledge not to use or plan to use force against one another; commit to holding multiparty, free-and-fair elections at regular intervals; guarantee civil and political rights for their citizens enforceable by an independentjudiciary; and accept the responsibility to protect.Neither America nor the world can wait forever for U.N. reform, no matter how desirable it is. The United States must take the lead and invest the time, energy, and resources to accomplish significant reform, on the principle of “mend it, don’t end it.” At the same time, however, we should work with our allies to develop a new global institution dedicated to the principles underpinning liberal democracy, both as a vehicle to spur and support the reform of the United Nations and other global institutions and as a possible alternative to them.
This is basically a proposal for Kant's "League of Nations." Note that the Concert of Democracies proposal is intended, in this context, to accomplish a number of things:
This alternative body would be a global “Concert of Democracies.” Its purpose would be to strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies and to provide a framework in which they can work together to effectively tackle common challenges – ideally within existing regional and global institutions, but if those institutions fail, then independently, functioning as a focal point for efforts to strengthen liberty under law around the world. It would also serve as the institutional embodiment and ratification of the “democratic peace.”
First, to put pressure on the UN to abandon the Security Council veto and implement other reforms. The Concert of Democracies functions as a graduated exit option for the US and other democratic states.
Second, to provide a more robust constitutional order to bind the US to strategic restraint and provide enhanced voice opportunities for other powers. In theory, at least, a Concert of Democracies would be more difficult for US policymakers to ignore; a supra-majority system would make it more attractive to small powers and also diminish the ability of the US to revert to Bush-style unilateralism, e.g., adventures like Iraq.
Third, to increase the prestige and benefits of democratization in world politics.
I'm not endorsing a Concert of Democracies. My point is merely this: arguing for a Concert of Democracies does not require endorsing neoconservative foreign-policy principles.
UPDATE: James Poulus has a good--and critical--discussion of the issues raised here.
Image source: Freedom House
Late-night musings
Will we look back on all those arguments about how unipolarity is stable, American primacy is secure, and traditional balance-of-power politics don't work in hegemonic systems as quaint artifacts of the late 1990s?
Will we conclude that US primacy died in the sands of Mesopotamia, or that secular economic and technological trends ended hyperpower?
Or will we see, in retrospect, that Russian assertiveness, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Sino-US balance of financial terror, European defense plans, and all that jazz, were merely noise?
Image source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/getaways/destinations/Rome/images/rome_forum.jpg