Author Archives: Robert E Kelly

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About Robert E Kelly

I am a professor of political science at Pusan National University. I write mostly on international relations in East Asia.

Another Too-Realistic War Video Game: We Need a Book on this Topic…

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I guess bloodbaths are fun…

 

A few months ago, after endless referrals by my students that it was ‘totally awesome’ and ‘the real war on terrorism,’ I finally played the controversial Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. While much of it is entertaining to be sure, it is also disturbingly realistic and sadistic.  In fact, parts of it aren’t really ‘enjoyable’ at all, particularly the notorious airport massacre, where they expect you to mow down (yes, mow) civilians as a terrorist. (What psycho put that sequence in?) At the time, I said we really need a serious treatment of video games in IR. (I admit to being a fan of the Halo series, but in part because the aliens are silly non-human targets, so the ethical questions raised by ‘playing’ Modern Warfare are muted.)

Here we are again. I haven’t played this game, but who are these guys at Activision that come up with this stuff? A hat-tip here must go to Jon Westen for sheer stupefaction on this. There is so much wrong here, yet it is so obviously campy, I don’t know what to think. The best part has to be 0.14, with the smiling, chunky pre-teen blowing down the door for an Iraq-style house-to-house sweep. I know we are supposed to laugh (one can’t help it; check 0.44 when the fat guy falls over from the RPG back-blast), but isn’t it supremely immoral to laugh at realistically portrayed combat, especially when the military of the game’s target audience is involved in exactly this sort of urban combat? (The commercial is clearly modeled on Black Hawk Down.) I asked a similar question once before: is it moral to laugh at North Korea?

This raises a million good questions for a dissertation, although an interdisciplinary one, because the writer needs training in both communications and ethics to really get a handle on these issues. Here are just a few thoughts:

1. Without advocating censorship, is it ethically proper to take entertainment pleasure from direct, first-person involvement in realistic war scenarios? This strikes me as different from watching a war film that is realistic. No one would say that Saving Private Ryan or Platoon are enjoyable in the same way that these sorts of games are intended to be. The former are exposes that are tragic, and learning experiences for the audience on the horror of violence while nonetheless recognizing the moral necessity of force sometimes. In that sense they are good, and I recommend them in class. By contrast, games like this entertain through adrenaline rush: war is exciting not tragic, in the vein of the film 300 or Starship Troopers.

2. In defense of the games, the literature on battlefield stress does in fact identify the thrill of combat as one possible reaction. This theme was (badly) explored in the Hurt Locker last year. And in the far better Generation Kill, this is a topic of regular conversation among the soldiers, and the colonel in the last episode openly admits that he enjoyed the combat. (Patton said the same thing, that ‘war is hell,’ but he ‘would miss it so.’) And I imagine that in a dim way, that is what the game makers had in mind above when they made this commercial, particularly when they show the ‘combatants’ smiling as they blow stuff up. So we are all tempted by the thrill of killing? But aren’t these the sorts of Freudian, primordial, bloodlust instincts we want to tamp down? I think that is the ultimate moral problem of the commercial. War is supposed to be something awful and tragic; isn’t it political incorrect to show it as a kick-a– high like Hurt Locker or Ernst Juenger suggested? But if it really is that kind of high, are the Activision game designers just showing us our true nature? Tough…

Whoever writes this dissertation/book faces the obvious credibility problem that the field might laugh at it. That is an unfortunate by-product of IR’s stubborn determination to be as irrelevant as possible. But here are a couple possible tropes:

1. Our students, and many others, play these games a lot more than they read the world politics textbooks we assign them. They function, however badly, to communicate information about international relations to the public, and ignoring that out of professional hauteur is just arrogance. This is one reason why ‘IR and film’ courses have taken off in the last decade or so: so many people watch them. So the gap in literature, however silly it might initially appear, is there.

2. A distinction can be drawn between strategy games and first-person shooters (FPS). In grad school, I knew lots of fellow students who enjoyed the Civilization video game series, and just about anyone with an interest in history played Risk or Axis and Allies as a kid. (Risk taught me where Kamchatka was when I was 11.) These sorts of games focus on cost-benefit analyses, resource mobilization, probability estimations, etc. – i.e., game theory. The blood and death of war disappears behind primitive plastic representations, and the challenge is really bureaucratic not adrenal. By contrast, the ‘fun’ of the FPS is precisely the bloodbath, which is why they sell so much better and provoke so much more discussion.

3. The moral discomfort lies in the evolution of games from identifiably unreal entertainment into real-life simulations. Barnett makes the astute observation that unmanned drones used in combat are miniaturizing in such a way that they increasingly resemble the model planes people can build in their backyards. Gaming is similarly blurring these sorts of lines. I recall reading that race car drivers were practicing on the Gran Turismo video game, as were pilots on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game. When I visited Ft. Jackson, SC once on an educator’s tour, they showed us how FPS video game technology was adapted for training simulations, and, of course, the Army has come in for all kinds of criticism with its America’s Army game, which, its detractors claim, is a shameless recruitment tool that militarizes high school. My point is that the more video games are like virtual reality, rather than a playful pause or break from reality, the more criticism will grow of disturbing content. It is the simulation of reality, not the violence itself, that so worries people (that is why Halo-style alien-invasion games are never so controversial).

So if you are a closet video junky, here is your excuse to intellectualize your couch-potato-ness. It could be a very interesting book.

That Hysterical ‘Chinese Professor’ Ad from the 2010 Election Campaign

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China’s own Heinrich von Treitschke!

 

This is a great ad. Anyone with an interest in Asian security should see it. Not only is it a great inside joke if you are in this area, it also does a great job capturing the American public’s angst about China’s rise. And quite honestly, it’s basically correct. We are spending our way into oblivion, and the Chinese are (deservedly) laughing as we fall into the abyss of our own making. We are doing this to ourselves – and Chinese elites are studying past hegemonies – so the scenario presented in the ad is, in fact, credible. Plus, it’s nice to see a professor presented in the US media who actually looks serious and authoritative instead of the usual Fox Network tropes that we’re pointy-headed, irrelevant Marxists who have affairs with our students. Now if only that professor image could include Americans…

There is some grumbling that the ad is racist. A friend in the field suggested it replaces the bogus Japanese threat 20 years ago with a Chinese one today. But I don’t really see that myself. The concern of the ad is not the ‘yellow-peril,’ but American foolishness, and the Chinese are presented rather well actually. The students look serious, civil, and healthy, while the prof behaves and talks like he actually knows wth he is talking about. Contrast that with typically condescending or idiotic portraits of academics in the US media – think about the ridiculous professor sequence from last year’s Transformers 2, e.g. At least this guy actually moves and speaks the way we really do in class. Ok, well, maybe he is a little more like Heinrich von Treitschke than most of us are, but still, he looks like a pretty good lecturer. Think of him as the Chinese Leo Strauss or something. LOL. I imagine that his class would be pretty fun to take. Fallows’ treatment of the ad is worth a look too.

More seriously, the ad is right on target actually in its basic claim. American errors and profligacy are the makers’ real targets; it is not ‘Asia-baiting,’ although it may feel that way initially. If it gets Americans to think more seriously about the looming debt crisis and the seriousness of the Chinese challenge, so much the better. Certainly the Tea Party, for all its sturm and drang, has neither the guts nor focus to say anything meaningful about the US response to Asia – another one of its many failures of seriousness. Nor does anyone in official Washington really know how to rein the $1.3 T budget deficit – funded, incidentally, by massive borrowing from China – without huge tax increases and spending cuts. (Quick note: It’s mathematically impossible!, which is why no one has any idea.) So if we must scare Americans into budgetary seriousness by noting that China is breathing down our neck (which they are starting to), then so much the better.

Finally, it is worth noting that China is a much more serious long-term threat than Japan ever was. China is 10 times larger in population (and 4 times larger than the US), and it is not democratic. So while I wouldn’t want yellow-baiting, ads like this that prick America’s unipolar daydream are useful actually.

The Tea-Partiers and US Foreign Policy, post-2010 election

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tea-party-signs

So Obama took the ‘thumpin’’ that W got back in 2006. I find this unfortunate generally, because I believe the GOP is still unreconstructed from the dark days of George W Bush. Yes, the Democrats are protectionists tied to rapacious public sector unions, but the anti-science, jingoistic GOP is worse. I worked for the GOP on-off throughout the 1990s and cast a heartfelt vote for Bob Dole. But when Bush said Jesus was his favorite political philosopher in 2000, he lost my vote, and things went downhill fast – Iraq, torture, ‘big government conservatism’ (ie, debt), Katrina, Rumsfeld, etc. Yet astonishingly, the GOP learned nothing in the wilderness and got even worse after W – which still confounds me – with the rise of Sarah Palin. She and the Fox News set of Hannity and such strike me as astonishingly unserious; I recall reading that McCain’s people had to explain to Palin why there are two Koreas! With their capacious, uncompromising rhetoric of freedom or American power and awesomeness, I just can’t image them actually doing the hard, compromising business of government.

So on their big day of triumph, that is my ultimate question about the Tea Partiers – American exceptionalists in the extreme – about foreign policy. Consider:

1. Tea Partiers worry about debt, but nothing bloats out government like defense. The combined budget for national security is around $1 trillion, if one includes intelligence, veterans affairs, some relevant homeland security spending, and the Department of Energy’s control of US nukes with the traditional DoD budget. I just saw Rand Paul on CNN. In his acceptance speech he talked about freedom from socialism and crushing debt, but as Andrew Sullivan identified months ago about the movement generally, Paul did not mention what he will cut. And none of them seem prepared to say that Defense really needs to go on a big diet, unless you want to start cutting Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.

Defense plus M/M/SS are 80%+ of the budget, so something’s got to give. Is the Tea Party ready to chop defense as the Brits just finally admitted was necessary? I don’t see this, given how super-nationalist the Tea Partiers are. Their rallies were filled with endless paeans to the uniformed soldier. But Americans love M/M/SS entitlements too; no one wants grandma to lose her check either, regardless of their feelings about ‘socialism.’ I would love to see a serious debate inside the GOP, like just happened among Britain’s Tories this fall, on how to square guns-and-butter. That the Tea Party simply will not go into the details and grit on this is why I just don’t believe they’re serious. (Try here for ideas on DoD’s needed diet.)  Obama may a ‘socialist’ to them, but I don’t see them proposing what parts of the government to close to save the money. Even WR Mead admits this about the movement.

2. What do the Tea Partiers say about the rise of Asia and the BRICs? Phillip Stephens really nails this, IMO. Obama has tried to push the US to adjust to a world where US power is imperiled by overstretch (from huge debt and two wars) and simultaneously confronted by the ‘rise of the rest,’ ie, the growing wealth and social mobilization of much of the former third world. I don’t mean just China and India either. Lots of places are closing the gap with the US as they get wealthier. Smaller countries too like Turkey, Indonesia, S Korea, South Africa, etc. are all getting wealthier and so more capable of resisting US pressure, forging deals and agreements beyond the US, etc. As I’ve said before, this not the end of American power – only intra-US foolishness like the Iraq War and the debt can do that. But the social and economic modernization of much of the planet through globalization does slowly reduce the US room to maneuver. Hence we have the G-20 now.

Yet I see no recognition of this in the Tea Party, only endlessly repeated neocon/theocon narcissism about America as the greatest country on earth. I really do wish American conservatives would travel more to grasp that they are limits, that God is not an American, that foreigners find this sort of rhetoric deeply insulting, etc. This partly what I meant about the Tea Party simply not being serious. The Tea Parties, so far as I heard and read their stuff, are militant in insisting on Henry Luce-style US exceptionalism. This may make good politics against Obama the non-citizen Muslim, but in the real world, it is is poor training for the serious trade-offs the US faces in a crowded, ‘post-Atlantic’ world, where the US fractions of global GDP and global population are in decline and many foreigners don’t trust us after W.

Shallow, narcissistic talk about how awesome the US is, how it is the greatest force for freedom in the world, or the most amazing place in history is not actually real geopolitical analysis at all. It does nothing to prepare the US electorate for challenges like the Chinese juggernaut, a looming defeat in Afghanistan, a NATO unable and unwilling to fight with the US much at all anymore, climate change, etc. The irony of course is that earlier Republicans did in fact talk seriously about foreign policy. Nixon, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Bush 1 – all spoke realistically about America’s reach. This is exactly what the US needs now given the debt and dysfunction of the GWoT. Hence I like Obama’s more restrained style, such as the Cairo speech. But neoconservatism seems to have replaced realism as the dominant foreign policy ideology of the GOP, and too much of it is easily politicized fantasy to stroke the American ego about our ‘special role.’

Japan is an EU Country Trapped in Asia

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japan_us_flag

The Council of Foreign Relations blog, Asia Unbound, is quite good. If you don’t read it, you probably should before you read my stuff. To be sure, CFR is establishment; indeed, it is the very definition of the foreign policy establishment in the US. So it is not exactly the font of challenging new ideas. But still, they are linked into power in way that lonely academic bloggers will never be. And this week’s bit on Japan really got me thinking about how Japan is basically stuck with the American alliance indefinitely, whether they like it or not.

Recall a year ago when the LDP got whipped in the election, that there was lots of talk about how Hatoyama was going to create distance between Japan and the US, how this was a new dawn in the relationship, how the Japanese left would be so much more prickly with the US than the old boys network of the LDP. I was fairly skeptical of this at the time, and I think the recent flap with China over the islands has done a lot to confirm that skepticism.

Japan really has nowhere else to go but the US. It is stuck with us, primarily because it is geographically fixed in a neighborhood where it has no friends. And this opens all sorts of room for the US to push and bully Japan, which leads to regular Japanese outbursts that Japan needs to be independent of the US. (For the most famous, read this.) In fact, Japan is like a post-modern EU country in the wrong place. It should be comfortably ensconced in a post-national intergovernmental framework like the EU, where it could promptly forget about history and defense spending, and worry about how to care for its rapidly aging population – like Germany is morphing into ‘Greater Switzerland.’ But it’s not. Instead, Japan is trapped in modernist-nationalist-historical Asia, surrounded by states that don’t trust it and who want a lot from it that it doesn’t really want to give (historical apologies, imports, engagement, development aid, territorial compromises).

Consider that Japan, like China or Russia, has no friends or allies (save the US), and lots of semi-hostile neighbors:

Russia: Neither side has much interest in the other. There is an island dispute that has blocked normalization for decades. And, of course, Russia has been an erratic partner for just about everyone, not just Japan, since the end of the Cold War. So there is nothing to gain there.

Korea: There is also an island dispute with South Korea, over which even North Korea (!) has supported the SK position. NK kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 70s, and this has remained a permanent fixture in Japanese politics. For the North, Japan is high-up on the hit list; the North has launched missiles over it. Relations with the South are possibly even worse. S Koreans are intensely japanophic. The island dispute (Dokdo) rouses extraordinary passions here. Finally, of course, both Koreas are furious with Japan over its invasion and colonization from 1910-1945 and feel that Japan has never properly apologized.  Given how much S Korea and Japan share – democracy, concern over China’s rise, a US alliance, fear of NK, Confucian-Buddhist culture – they should should be natural allies, but Koreans will tell you with a straight face that Japan wants to invade it again. So forget that.

China: Yet another island dispute plagues the relationship from the start. And like Korea, so does history. The Japanese were even harsher in China than they were in Korea. The Rape of Nanking was brutality on par with the Nazis, and the Japanese used biological warfare against the Chinese as well. As the CFR post linked above notes, anti-Japanese street protests are becoming a regular part of Chinese politics now. A Sino-Japanese reconciliation would require astonishing, Willy Brandt-style statesmanship that the immobilist Japanese political system is wholly incapable of delivering.

Southeast Asia/India: Things get a little easier here, if only because it is further afield. But the ASEAN states too suffered under Japan in WWII, and like China and Korea, don’t feel that Japan has engaged in the appropriate historical reckoning. Only India is a possible serious Asian ally of the future because of mutual concern for China and the lack of historical-territorial problems.

Bonus problem – Economic Decline: As if this unhappy neighborhood weren’t trouble enough, add in Japan’s bizarre economic malaise. When China, Korea and the Soviet Union/Russia were a mess a generation ago, Japan could strut in Asia, but now these competitors are closing the gap while Japan stagnates. That just makes all the frictions that much harder to manage. China is so big, it can afford to miff the neighbors, but Japan no longer has this luxury.

In short, a weakening Japan so infuriates it neighborhood, that the US is all its got left. Given Japan’s paucity of options, the US has lots of room to bully and push Japan. But it must ultimately give in, because it’s position in Asia alone would be terrible – isolated, suspected, friendless. So bad is Japan’s position, that the US could effectively bring down the Hatoyama administration over something as minor as Futenma.

This is not meant to be an endorsement of US wedge politics against Japan. But it should certainly explain why its 20-year old complaint about US dominance has led to nothing, just like Gaulle’s petulant withdrawal from NATO ended in ignominy when the French finally gave up on ‘expectionalism’ and rejoined last year. It’s nice to be two oceans away from the competitions of Eurasia…

Is there Halloween in Korea? Alas, no…

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I still love Charlie Brown 30 years later…

 

It’s Halloween, so here is something semi-serious – if US holidays show up in Asia, is that proof of cultural Americanization?

One of the things I miss most in Korea as an expat is the US holiday season. In terms of fun, parties, color and festivities, nothing beats the three-month run of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Interculturally then, it is always interesting to see how much of this washes into other countries, given the endless debate about Americanization, globalization as cultural American imperialism, and all that.

In that vein, readers from the left might be glad to hear that little of that occurs in Korea. US holidays are generally un-celebrated here. While Korea is christianizing rapidly, Christmas has not even come close to the annual fun-time blow-out it has become in the US. It is still a religious holiday, not the cultural and shopping event it has evolved into in the US. (Ironically, religious conservatives who disdain the commercialization of the holidays might like the Korean attitude.) And Halloween has come mostly as an odd American event that is seen as somewhat fun, but kind of strange. When I explain Halloween to Koreans – Hallow’s Eve as the last night for evil spirits’ rampage in old Christian tradition – most Koreans find it fairly ridiculous. And all those new Korean Protestants don’t seem to know that story either.

Because of the big US presence in Korea for decades – first political-military, then commercial, increasingly now religious (American Protestantisms are pretty successful here) – you do have an awareness of US holidays, and some celebrations. But interest in this among Koreans generally serves Koreans’ interest to demark themselves from their fellows as cosmopolitan, worldly, and traveled. Ie, if you’re a Korean who celebrates Halloween with some resident expats, then you are ‘linked-in’ to the US culture in a way other Koreans are not, and that is a mark of social prestige. It is ‘cool’ to be able to say you celebrated Halloween with some white guy, kinda like it was to own a pair of blue jeans in the USSR.

In practice, then there is no trick-or-treating at all. Koreans mostly live in high-rises anyway, so trick-or-treating would be a weird, vertical affair requiring constant one-floor trips in the elevator. Horizontal neighborhoods filled with lights and people ambling about don’t really exist here. There are Halloween parties though. Korean clubs have them, but I have heard they are pretty strange events – just like a regular night at a club, only with some people in weird make-up. (Technically, there is no race-line for club attendance, but there are Korean clubs where foreigners would just never go in practice.) Ultimately though, it is the expat bars that try the hardest. They have costume contests and catch the spirit pretty well. The best expat bars are mixed; ie, Koreans come too. My impression though at these has always been that Koreans in attendance find the whole thing pretty bizarre and don’t get it at all.

So enjoy your Halloween. You are lucky to have the real deal…

When to Just Give Up on Territory Disputes: Palestine, Kashmir, Dokdo?

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imagesCA5GWV6N

One of the most basic tenets of almost all IR theorizing is that states are territorial, literally, and obsessed with holding, if not expanding what space they have. Even if you aren’t Alexander the Great or Napoleon, out to conquer whatever is there, you still want to hold on to at least what you have. Territory is a fundamental requirement of statehood (ask the Kurds), and more is better given land’s inherent scarcity. The logic for this is simple. There is only so much real estate in the world. Barring extreme scenarios like suddenly easier land reclamation (from the sea) or interplanetary colonization, space on earth is finite. So the race to control space is by definition a zero-sum game (the Scramble for Africa). If I have it, then you don’t. The more you have, the more secure you are from others (the further away they are), the more people you probably have, the more resources you are likely to find under the ground, etc.

And this logic is backed up by loads of empirical evidence. The Japanese fight individually with Russia, Korea, and China about islands. The USSR and China fought a border war, as did the PRC and Vietnam. The US Union invaded the Southern Confederacy. The Israelis and Palestinians seem ready to kill each other over inches of barren desert. I recall reading somewhere that after the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, Egypt sued Israel in the World Court over several hundred feet of extra space Israel wanted to hold for a hotel or something. (Egypt won.) And the above map makes clear just how severe the territorial dilemma can be for micro-states like Israel. (Do not take the source of the map as my endorsement of Israeli policy in the occupied territories; I chose it just because it makes my point well.) No state wants to be dismembered, and lots of blood in history has been spilt trying to expand one’s land space (imperialism).

But Israel’s endless troubles holding the Palestinians, much less converting the Palestinian space and people into exploitable resources rather than manpower and money sinks, or India’s endless quest to quell and hold Kashmir, raise a good IR theory question: when is it time to just give up and take less? I am not sure if this question has been researched much because we worry, obviously, more about expansionism and irredentism than voluntary cession. But there are some good examples of this also. This article got my thinking how Sudan’s Arab elite has simply decided to throw in the towel after 25 of years of civil war with the south. 15 years ago, Ethiopia’s government decided to do the same with Eritrea. And Britain, I think, secretly hopes the Northern Irish Catholics will outbirth the local Protestants and vote for republican unification, hence ridding Britain of the endless Irish question. In Korea, I frequently argue that Korea needs Japan more than Japan needs Korea, because NK is so scary, unification with it will be so expensive, China is so big, and the US is in relative decline in Asia. Hence, it would make national security sense for Korea to try to come to some kind of deal on its island dispute with Japan (the Liancourt rocks [Dokdo]). Better relations with Japan would help Korea prepare for the Chinese challenge and bolster it in the stand-off with NK. Nor is there anything of value on Dokdo (it’s a bunch of rocks, like most of the West Bank too) and because it is uninhabitable, control of Dokdo has no implications for division of the sea or seabed. In short, the benefits of a deal are high.

So there is a cost-benefit analysis at work here. At some point, an enduring, costly stalemate may just not be worth it. I can see a few reasons why:

1. Your country is already pretty huge, or the land disputed is comparatively tiny. If I were India, I think I would be pretty close to giving in on Kashmir. India is huge, both geographically and demographically already. How much does Kashmir really matter when you already have 1.3 billion people ? For Israel though, the problem is much more acute. The IDF has argued for years that the West Bank adds ‘strategic depth’ to little Israel, which, disregarding the  moral dimension, is accurate. By this dimension, the Eritrean succession surprises me, because it land-locked Ethiopia. I would have thought that would be a national interest worth toughing it out for…

2. There are no natural resources or other immediate, tangible national interests. Dokdo’s control does not alter any material element in the Korea-Japan relationship. If anything, it wastes Korean money to artificially keep people and services stationed there that would not otherwise exist but for this dispute. This is no ‘resource war.’ So what great benefit do you get beyond that patriotic tingle in your chest?

3. The disputed territory is not ‘holy ground.’ I think this is the most tricky condition, because these sorts of disputes, zero-sum in nature and frequently rooted in long-standing neighborhood grudges, are exactly the sort of thing that get layered in over-heated nationalist rhetoric about holy struggles, national identity, God-given missions and all that sort of metaphysical talk. Witness the Jewish right in Israel talking about biblical claims from Moses to the West Bank, or Hamas’ reverse claim (also made up) of the centrality of Jerusalem to Mohammed’s revelation (it was just a sideshow in the big Arabian picture). For a hysterical and mawkish Korean version of Dokdo as holy ground, try here (be sure to listen to the song). I think there is a good dissertation here.

Post-Western Global Governance?

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bric

These two articles really got me thinking recently about the the complexity of global governance (GG), and whether it can realistically absorb new powers, much less define itself meaningfully to policy-makers. In fact, sometime I wonder, because I teach international organization (IO), if GG even exists at all. Randy Schweller, one of my grad school profs, says basically GG is a mash-up of rules, institutions, norms, and everything else that is so complex that is effectively unanalysable. And Thomas Weiss, quite the opposite paradigmatically of Schweller, basically says the same, and that we should go back to looking at world government (hear, hear!).

I wrote my dissertation on the IMF and World Bank in the (ever-so-quaint 1990s, pre-9/11) belief that global governance was a meaningful idea, that rules could slowly creep up on the world, that most of those rules would come from liberal internationalist thinking primarily rooted in the West, and that all this was a good thing. Even belonged to the UN Association of the USA before 9/11. Yet after years of struggling to make this an analytically coherent idea (and subscribing to the excellent journal), I have given up mostly. My own research has turned back to states instead of the tortured mix of NGOs, IO, MNCS, rules, norms, regimes, etc, etc, that are somehow supposed to interrelate into multilateral, multilayered, multisectoral, networked, transnational, social constructed, complex, I-don’t-know-which-way-is-up-anymore GG. When I teach IOs, after I go through all this with the students, and they ask me for the one-liner on GG (because all good ideas can ultimately be expressed simply), I say GG is (dysfunctional) world government-light. Hence Schweller’s piece caught my attention. GG is so complex and such a confusing notion, that it obscures as much as it clarifies. And Weiss is wonderful in his frustration that no one really knows wth GG is, and that the world government discussions of the past (after the two world wars) were much more understandable and analytically useful.

Beyond the confusion though, is my growing sense that as the non-western world gets its act together slowly in the coming decades, all this GG talk will just look like preening academic liberal internationalism, our hubris in trying to extend a system basically built for the West (plus Japan) to everyone else. But everyone else (Huntington’s famous ‘the rest’) probably don’t really want to live by the rules that we have set up. In the same way that Japan never really liked its semi-membership in the Concert of Europe and never really followed its norms (it stormed around Korea and China regardless of what Bismarck or Earl Grey thought), I think the emerging powers of the world will probably be more inclined to truculence and grievance than assimilation.

Walt calls this the end of the Atlantic Era; Mead says it is the death-throes of liberal internationalism. Increasingly, sadly to be sure, I think this is right, and increasingly my own IR thinking has drifted from optimistic liberalism to fearful realism. It makes me miss the 1990s so much. Before 9/11, the US was strong enough that we could indulge in Eurocentric intellectual flights of fancy that everyone wanted to live like us (the Washington Consensus of the indispensible nation), and that if only they followed the rules (GG), they could. But the rest of the world has been ‘rising’ (ie, modernizing, ie, it getting its act together) for several decades now, and there are a lot more of them (the Rest) than of us (the West), so inevitably as the BRICs (above map) and such come on-line, they are going to change the implementation of the rules, if not the rules themselves, if only because of their sheer bulk. China and India each have 1.3+ billion people. How can they not impact just about everything? I once heard the president of the World Bank say there would be 20 billion more people born by 2050, and 90% of them would be born outside the West. There is your one-liner for the future, not some academic tinkering about NGO access to UN specialized agencies.

Compounding these structural de-westernization trends, is the massive sinkhole of western power and strategy that the GWoT has become. The US would be declining relatively to the new risers anyway, but the $3 trillion spent on Iraq vastly accelerated this process. Does anyone remember predictions just a decade ago that China would rise so fast? Of course not, because no expected the US to shoot itself in the foot (if not the head) so badly since 9/11.

So my question then is how do we put together rules for the new post-western era. The UN, built to fail by sovereignty-obsessed nation-states, has therefore failed. It reflects a simpler world, where much of the world’s population was unsocialized, unmobilized peasantry under imperial or semi-feudal rule. So, as Schweller notes, GG was easier. There were fewer players, and they were all pretty culturally close. Today it is running the other way as previous marginalized peoples around the globe get richer, get to TVs and the Internet, complain more (especially about the US), vote their grievances, and otherwise make the liberal rules harder to enforce.

Finally, this doesn’t mean the US will be poorer or weaker, but it does mean the US will have less room to maneuver and that it will be harder to bully others into doing what we think is right for them (even if it is good for them). It’s not the decline of the US or the West, unless you equate unipolarity and Western cultural hegemony with the ‘normal’ status of the world.

Post-Unification De-population of North Korea?

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PNU’s Institute of Social Science Research had a good speaker this week, demographer Berhard Koppen of Landau-Koblenz University in Germany. His talk, “Demographic Change and Immigration in Germany since Unification,” focused on the population impacts of German unification. As you can imagine, the Koreans study the German model (although not as much as you’d think), because they wonder what unification will look like – how much, how long, how disruptive, etc.

Koppen laid out a lot of good demographic data on just how extreme the population shifts from east to west inside Germany have been. I don’t have all the numbers in front of me, but it was pretty striking. In the most underdeveloped parts of the old German Democratic Republic (GDR), the population drop was more than 40% in two decades! In toto, the old GDR is 20% below its old population, despite the move of the capital to Berlin. So bad is it, that many east German communities have had to bulldoze housing, because it has simply sat unused for more than a decade (this, in country with one of the highest population densities in the world).

I have written about the geopolitics of Korean unification before. In short, they are not good, because China is much stronger than the USSR was in the German case. SK is weaker than was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The US is also relatively weaker. And NK is far worse off than the GDR, which was regularly touted as the most advanced socialist state. All this forebodes that China’s role in unification will be much greater than the Soviet Union’s. As Koppen put it, the wealthy FRG could effectively ‘buy’ unification from the bankrupt USSR. China today though is ‘rising,’ and given the NK borders China, its interest and influence in the issue are correspondingly greater. As I wrote a year, China will structure any final status Korean deal much more than most people think right now (and the Chinese were sure to tell me that in Beijing earlier this year).

If this doesn’t scare South Koreans enough, Koppen’s data quieted the room. When I asked about the comparison with Korea, and what Koreans should expect, he could only foresee that a sudden border opening would lead to a huge southward flow – maybe 6 million people in the first few years. The differences between east and west Germany were much smaller than NK-SK, yet look at how much population flight has been happened there. One can only imagine how bad it would be here – a 40% depopulation of NK (9 out of 23 million), perhaps? Where would they be housed, how would they be supported, what would they do all day? The questions are endless.

Koppen closed by arguing that a slow federation of North and South would be better than the lightning unification of a sudden border opening as in the German case. Koppen used the EU as a model for Korean unification (an interesting parallel I never considered). As the EU is gradually federating in stages, so might Korea. I have heard this line of reasoning before using a more Asian model – Hong Kong and mainland China. Like that arrangement, perhaps Korea can go through a ‘one country, two systems’ stage. So North Koreans would get temporary work and living permits in the South, while Southern business would be encouraged to go North, with the North reconceived as something like a massive enterprise zone.

I am skeptical for a number of reasons:

1. North Koreans are vastly poorer than not only east Germans, but any of the eastern EU members. The moral pressure to do more faster would be enormous. Paced unification would look like Southern niggardliness in the face of desperation and poverty. Note also, that Hong Kong is quite wealthy, as is surrounding Guangdong province. This helps mitigates the border pressure; the opposite would be the case in a united Korea.

2. The nationalism factor would make holding the North at arms length difficult and distasteful. If the Koreans are one minjoek, as they never cease to tell us expats here, then how can you justify, save unashamed selfishness, keeping Northerners out? It looks bad, and it would certainly encourage populist North Korean politicians to complain about Southern cheapness, etc.

3. Keeping the North in some kind of semi-national limbo would encourage Chinese meddling. Indeed, the slower the unification process goes, the more likely China and others are to stick their noses into it. Conversely, if unification speeds along as a chaotic mess, then even China will likely say, we want nothing to do with the catastrophe-in-the-making; you South Koreans figure it out. This sounds unfortunate – the more anarchic the reunification, the more likely it will be a Korean-only affair, but I think it is so.

4. And in fact, Korean unification is almost certainly going to be messy, rapid, and chaotic if not downright anarchic. If one looks at Germany, once the communist lid was removed, the desire for unification on the part of the east especially, but also the west, exploded and became like a freight train accelerating downhill. It was just unstoppable. Yes, there were all sorts of GDR intellectuals who wanted east Germany to become a unique space, neither capitalist nor communist, but somehow ‘more humane,’ and all that. But the huge bulk of the population wanted nothing to do with such academic airiness, a luxury for elites. Average east Germans wanted nationalism, unity, wholeness, an end to an awful, artificial historical division, and an immediate improvement in living standards. They just pushed aside all those both internally and externally (Thatcher and Mitterand especially) who wanted a paced process. Helmut Kohl led reunification as much as he was led by it. And even though the GDR was supposedly ‘advanced’,’ it turned out not to be at all. The state collapsed almost immediately, and realistically, there was no one to pick up the many, many pieces expect West Germany. I think this is by far the most likely scenario here too. Once North Korea slips, it will go lightning fast. It will be chaotic, unpredictable, with huge national emotions at play and populations on the move, and near anarchy in the North, given how thoroughly illegitimate the state there is. The only realistic way to get control over this nation-wide meltdown will be the immediate extension of SK constitutional authority across the whole peninsula. It will be messy, hugely expensive, and involve the dramatic depopulation of the North, but realistically, I don’t see serious alternatives given how much worse off NK is than Hong Kong, the GDR, or eastern Europe.

It’s the 1930s All Over Again…

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The increasing drift toward a ‘currency war’ should worry just about everyone. And it is remarkable given that we already went through this in the 1930s – a collective disaster for all involved, and which everyone realized afterwards was a huge error. Yet here are on the cusp of another round of beggar-thy-neighbor devaluation rounds as everyone seeks to export their way out of the recession.

In case you don’t know the history, start here. Just about everyone learns this story in Econ 101, but here is the quick version: The Great Depression struck in 1929, and everyone panicked. In that sort of adverse environment, everyone starts to save. This is individually rational, as savings represent a hedge against suddenly increased uncertainty about the future. You see that same thing today in the US as Americans are suddenly saving again to pay off their housing and credit card debt in order to get financially sounder. Unfortunately, as people save, they are not spending, and their spending ultimately creates jobs. When you buy stuff at Walmart, a whole slew of people got their jobs to bring you whatever it is that you just bought. This is the well-known paradox of thrift: while it is rational for you the individual to save ask a hedge against the future, if everyone does that, then our collective future gets that much worse because all that missing consumer spending (demand) eventually creates unemployment (less need for supply). Again, this is what is happening today in the US. As Americans retrench on their spending very suddenly and sharply (household savings rates have jumped something like 5% in 24 months), you get a consequent drop in the need for supply. That in turn means you don’t need so many workers to make that supply anymore, so people get fired. US unemployment has therefore suddenly spiked as savings rates spiked.

One good way out of this recessionary trap (high savings –> high unemployment –> worsening economy –> even more fear about the future –> more savings) is to export to others. If others buy your stuff, then you keep all the employment (to supply the foreigners’ demand), but your own consumer can still continue to save. It is a tempting way out that squares the mathematical circle in which, in a closed economy, savings must equal unemployment. But with exports, you can have your cake and eat it too; ie, the economists’ expression ‘export your way out of a recession.’ Now, a good way to make your exports cheaper is for your currency to be cheap against other currencies. Then your stuff is cheaper for foreigners to buy. It is therefore tempting for governments in recession to intervene artificially in currency markets to keep their currencies cheap, indeed maybe even undervalued (China today). Because a cheaper currency means cheaper exports means a quicker route out of recession. And in the 1930s, everybody tried to do this. But just like the paradox of thrift, if everyone tries to cheapen their currency, then no one’s currency becomes cheaper, and very quickly you can get a cycle of government-forced exchange rate devaluations across the board as everyone tries to get a price advantage over everyone else. We call this ‘beggar-thy-neighbor.’

It is now universally acknowledged by just about everyone (except Marxists I suppose) that this was a disaster that lengthened the Great Depression considerably. This intellectual consensus lies behind the creation of the IMF, and the IMF museum (next to the lobby in the Fund building) walks the visitor through this in excellent detail.

And now we are doing it all over again.

So much for learning from history and all that…

This time it is mostly Asians to blame. China, SK, and Japan all intervene regularly (‘fine-tuning’ they call it in SK) to keep their currencies lower than the market would otherwise say. China of course is the worst, and it is leading to some genuinely desperate policy ideas on what to do.

This leads me to two conclusions. First, it is evidence that global governance (GG) continues to fail. The G-20 squabbling over exchange rates so perfectly fits what we know states shouldn’t do, yet they are doing it anyway. This – along with the astonishing, ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn-what-the-world-thinks’ Bush unilateralism – tells me that GG was a dream of the 1990s that is fading fast. Second it tells me that the only answer is cultural change in Asian attitudes toward imports. For decades, a trade surplus (and if necessary, an undervalued currency) were not just natural outcomes of market processes, but an explicit statist-developmental goal wrapped in nationalism. A trade surplus is a mark of national pride and success in the world, and if Asian consumers must be punished with high prices and higher savings to get it, then so be it. In Korea, I see this ‘imports-are-bad’ everyday; contrast that with the American love of cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart. Given that barrier to Asian rebalancing is a cultural one – getting Asians to accept imports without mercantilist-nationalist distaste – that rebalancing is likely to take a long time. Culture changes slowly.

On the Kim Family Succession in North Korea

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Kim Jong-Un (right), the now annointed successor to Jong Il (left)

As usual, Scott Snyder and Ruediger Frank have the best commentary on the succession and it importance for all Korea. Start with them before me.

I would just add a few points.

1. Much of the discussion about NK focuses on its supposed irrationality and unpredictability. I remember reading somewhere that Paul Wolfowitz was once asked which country on earth he feared the most, and he answered NK, because it operated so far outside international norms on just about everything – besides its regular asymmetric strikes against SK (like the Cheonan sinking, KAL 1987 bombing, or the bombing of the SK cabinet in 1983), it also engages in proliferation, drug-trafficking, insurance fraud (as a gimmick to raise money), and dollar counterfeiting. And of course, George Bush put NK on the Axis of Evil, even though it has no connection to Islamic radicalism at all, precisely because of the fear of irrationality linked to WMD. Increasingly though, I don’t buy this, and I think the succession demonstrates that NK is in fact somewhat predictable. I argued this a few weeks ago in Seoul, and the recent family succession, I believe, reinforces this.

While it is true that NK is nasty and does seem to cheat on all sorts of norms, they do this so regularly now, that its cheating is in fact predictable. This feels rather strange of course. Cheating is supposed to indicate unpredictability; but what if you cheat all the time? That too is regularity, right? As I argued in the link above, the Cheonan sinking does actually fit a pattern of asymmetric outbursts from NK in past, so it shouldn’t be a huge surprise, however awful it was. Similarly, the succession happened much as the last one did – from father to son – and lots of analysts, both Asian and Western predicted it, both then and again this time. And then those predications came true. So while it is unfortunate for the long-suffering North Koreans, and its does not bode well for better NK behavior in future, it was not unexpected. I am not fully convinced by this position myself; erratic and weird still seem to be the best words to describe NK. But its also not the case that we can’t make fairly educated guesses about NK’s future.

2. In line with point 1 is the likelihood that Kim III probably won’t change much. Indeed, he sent a huge signal to the whole world by his dress in last week’s coming out party-parade that he is not a Gorbachev. Just about everyone noticed that he looks strikingly like Kim Il Sung (Kim I). Note the hair style, NK lapel pin, Mao outfit, and, quite honestly, the obesity (presumably to signal stolidity and robustness, although it is a good bet too that he is party-boy like his dad). The speculation is endless that he might actually change stuff, but if NK is more predictable than we think (point 1 above), and if he is consciously cloning himself on Kim I, then it is a good bet that business as usual will roll on. In fact, given his youth and, hence, possible longevity, he could give the NK system a new lease on life, just as Bashar al Assad did when he took over Syria. Like NK, Syria is corrupt, isolated and broke, but the sheer energy of a younger dictator has helped hold Syria together and forestall the endless speculation, endemic to any dictatorship, of palace coups and such. If Kim III can hang on through the early years, which will be the toughest, as factions maneuver for influence in the nouveau regime, then we might be looking at a semi-stable NK for another few decades.

3. Finally, I can’t pass up noting the sheer ideological ridiculousness of a communist monarchy. Nothing demonstrates the ideological bankruptcy of NK as much as a family succession. That is a feudal practice, of course, which is exactly the type of thing communism was supposed to eliminate as backward and repressive. Marx and Lenin, we all know, were bitingly harsh in their critiques of feudalism. One of Marx’ most mean-spirited comments was his famous complaint of the ‘idiocy of the peasantry,’ meaning that they stood outside of history as passive, uninformed spectators mired in ignorance. And of course, the primary historical claim of just about every Marxist theorist and leader was that history moved in stages and the communism was the next one after capitalism. When Khrushchev said ‘we will bury you’,’ he meant exactly that these large Marxist-metaphysical forces of History were working against capitalism, no matter what it did to stop, and that communism was the inevitable future. This is why leaders like Stlin and Pol Pot were so harsh on their feudal-agricultural communities; they were ‘behind’ in the marxist historical mechanic. Even Mao had the sense to avoid the ‘familiazation’ of the CCP (his wife didn’t last too long) and famously criticized Confucius as a feudal reactionary. Yet here we have a communist regime openly going back to a pre-capitalist mode, not moving forward into the post-capitalist era as its own ideology says it should. One wonders how in god’s name NK ideologues must work to square this blatant neo-feudalism with regime ideology. It just baffles the mind.