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.

Global Security in 7 Minutes! (2. The Bad)

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Part 1 (the good) is here. Part 3 (solutions) is here.

The following were my comments to a global ‘freedom and democracy’ group last week. After arguing that the world is slowly getting safer especially as viewed from 1945 or even 1990, here is the 7-minute list of the big ‘new’ problems:

1. Proliferation. This has been slow-boiling for awhile now, but 9/11 threw the hysteria into overdrive. W was right when he argued that the nexus of WMD and fanaticism is the single biggest threat to global security today. I tend to think that this a problem we have to live with, rather than something we can solve. But regardless, it would probably be better if fewer states had WMD (although deterrence theory says maybe not). But we really don’t have good tools for addressing this. No one wants to invade every nuclearizing state (more Iraqs anyone?).  The Non-Proliferation Treaty regime doesn’t work too well, primarily because the nuclear-haves have reneged on their end of the deal. (They are supposed to give up WMD eventually in exchange for others not going for them, but the allure of nuclear discrimination is too much to resist.) AQ Khan-types will try and try to hawk this stuff, and they only need to succeed once for WMD to find their way to terrorists. And the Proliferation Security Initiative is only just be tested now, and honestly, makes me kinda nervous. I heard a nuclear theorist argue a few weeks ago that the PSI is a neo-con/John Bolton idea cooked up to provoke incidents on the high seas with rogues in order to justify the use of force. Finally, I think the biggest proliferation issue, that no one ever talks about, is actually small arms. The AK-47 has killed more people than all the high-tech toys you see in the Transformers. If you really want to reduce global killing rapidly, how about a small arms embargo on much of Africa?

2. China’s gangster pals. This too is a growing issue. My thinking on China is in flux. I still think that a conflict with the democracies is likely, but China is so variegated now, its foreign policy language and behavior so mixed, it is d— hard to make an educated guess. But we do know that China is looking the other way on some of the world’s worst nasties, whether for geopolitical interest (thwarting the US in NK and Iran) or for its neo-mercantilist resource scramble (Sudan, Zimbabwe). FP had a good essay on this recently. It will only make global security problems worse if the world’s rogue states feel that they have a new backer (the old one being the East bloc), who will bail them out and block UN votes. But then the US sorta has this coming by enabling Israel’s worst instincts too.

3. Pushy middle powers. A clutch of ‘rising’ middle powers are increasingly defining their interests as poking a finger in the eye of the leadership of the liberal trading order. Mead has nice piece on this; here is the book-length version. No one minds if others get rich. So much the better. Many of these ‘second world’ powers had terrible poverty in the past, so their rise is a net good. Many people are wealthier, healthier, better educated, etc. as Brazil, South Africa, etc, get their act together. But prestige is a big driver in IR, far bigger than our research indicates. The primary interest of these states, newly brought to the top table as a part of the G-20, is to gain stature acceptance from the older, more prestigious states. Wealth and military power are nice, but they are getting those now, so their real interest is getting attention – getting their diplomats interviewed on CNNi, photographs with Obama at the White House, posturing at Davos about the ‘power shift away from the West,’ etc. The best way to get this sort of attention is to provoke the hegemon. Hence a truculence toward the US and the world order it backstops will be a growing problem. In going from the G-7 to the G-20, you increase the number of players at the top table, so it will become that much harder to organize efficient, coherent action to security threats like civil war in Africa, terrorism, piracy, trafficking, etc. Game theory predicts ever greater coordination problems as the number of players rises, contrary to Obama’s belief that the G7-to-G20 shift will bring greater burden-sharing. Unipolarity was safe and easy (even if it was unjust), and it is starting to look like the game theorists were right.

Global Security in 7 Minutes! (1. The World is Getting Safer)

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 Part 2 (the bad) is here. Part 3 (solutions) is here.

So last week, I went off to speak at a soft right-wing regional INGO in Asia. The World League for Freedom and Democracy gave me seven minutes to summarize major successes and threats to global security. You gotta love conference organizers for such hurculean demands, especially in the afternoon panels when everyone’s sleepy from lunch and the weak A/C. So here goes:

Good:

1. The Long Peace. We are now in the 65th year of systemic peace, ie, no general war that pulls in all the main global players into an ‘us-vs-them’ planetary bloodbath. No one really expected this in 40s and 50s. Everyone thought another war – most likely between the US and USSR – would happen rather soon. The depressing familiarity of inter-state war showed no signs of abating. Consider the following missing wars (from the perspective of 1950): US-USSR, US-China, USSR-China, Germany-France, Germany-Russia, Japan-China. Anyone of these would have been a reasonable prediction in 1950 for the next 60 years. Yes, things like Rwanda or Bosnia were brutal, but there were ‘better’ than WWII with its 70 M casualties.

2. Nuclear Pacification. Here again is something wholly unanticipated in the early Cold War when ‘the bomb’ lead to paranoia from Bertrand Russell and Stanley Kubrick about the end of civilization. In fact, quite the opposite has happened. Nukes have had a wholly unanticipated pacifying, status-quo preserving effect. Instead of Mad Max (love the shoulder pads), we got the Nuclear Peace. Why? Because nukes make the costs of war extraordinarily high. There is no possible benefit to be gotten from invading someone else that would outweigh just a few nuclear detonations in your cities (although one or two might be acceptable). In other words, nukes drive up the cost side of the cost-benefit war ledger so high, that it no longer pays to war.

3. Democratic Peace. Here is yet another wholly unanticipated outcome. Policy-makers only lately picked up on this, and it underlay W’s argument for the ‘regime change’ in the Middle East. But it is a pretty robust finding now that democracies don’t war on each other. This is generally thought because liberals don’t believe in using war against other liberals (the normative explanation). Or because democracies’ institutions are slow to war and very transparent, so it is much easier for democracies to credibly manage security problems between each other (the institutional argument). This idea also underlay Clinton’s argument for slowly expanding the ‘democratic zone’ of the world. (It’s too bad that Clinton’s idea got tied to W’s ‘democratization by force,’ because I think it should be western strategy to slowly widen the democratic space in the world.)

4. We’re winning the GWoT, slowly. For as difficult and controversial as the war formally known as the GWoT is, I do think we are winning. Consider the following non-events: There has not been another 9/11 scale attack. There has been no WMD attack. (Given what we thought in 2002, Madrid 2004 should have been a gas or radiological attack, but it wasn’t.) Islamism has not spread to Southeast Asian Islam, a hugely underremarked success of the GWoT. Iraq has not turned into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which we all feared in, say, 2005). Consider the following progress: Middle Eastern states have slowly begun to turn against the radicals. In the past, these guys were seen as useful ways to hit back at the West, modernity, capitalism, etc., but this tiger has increasingly turned on its master too. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have all begun to realize what happens if you look the other way on the salafis. Iran is now the primary sponsor of the ideology, but this is awkward alliance of convenience, because your standard issue binladenist is a Sunnite reactionary, who thinks that the Shiites are schismatics who should face the inquisition.

5. East Asia is its most peaceful since the Opium Wars (1839-41). The arrival of western power in Asia brought all sorts of trouble. It ended the Confucian peace, and deeply divided Asians against themselves. It introduced ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty and decentered the traditional Chinese order. Most importantly, it opened the door for Japanese revisionism and Russian meddling. China was lain prostrate and the land/privileges grab began. The next century and a half was brutal. Japan and China competed viciously. The Japanese committed biological atrocities on Chinese civilians. Mao oversaw 25 million deaths and decades of chaos and self-destruction. Nuclear weapons were used. The Khmer Rouge killed 1/3 of Cambodia’s population. Yet today, most of this has faded. NK is still a huge threat, and Asian nationalism is deep, exclusivist, and sometimes racist. But the traditional Sino-Japanese competition is the coolest it has been in a long time. Both basically accept Korean independence, a huge tension-reducer. The worst excesses in SE Asia of the 60s and 70s are over. China and Taiwan are getting along reasonably well. Consider that in 1950, it would have been another easy prediction to foresee in Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the next 60 years. But it hasn’t happened. Democracies in the regions (India, Japan, SK, Taiwan) are strong and lasting. Democracy can no longer be castigated as a white or western import (as it can be in the ME).

So despite the GWoT and the continuing dysfunction in the Middle East and Africa particularly, I think one can say the world is slowing becoming a safer, less violent place, certainly by the benchmarks of 1945 or 1990.

The World to the American Right: PLEASE TRAVEL!!!

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You have to feel bad for so many of the highest officials of the Bush years. Iraq, torture, Katrina, Rovism, etc.  permanently damaged some of the finest resumes in country, including Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and most especially Powell (who should have been the GOP prez instead of the boy-king). For some, like Powell, this is a genuine tragedy, a dirtying of his high reputation to serve coarse politicization. I admire Powell’s willingness to take his punishment and retreat from public life, and his rectitude in the face of Bush’s cold-blooded exploitation of his credibility highlights Rovism’s deviousness even more.

But that must be hard for so many…so what to do when you are an ex-Bush flack, once respected for quality pre-Bush work, but now a known defender/obfsucator of torture? How about writing cloying op-eds, sheltering yourself under the banner of military courage, while insulting the rest of the planet by reciting that most nationalistic, exceptionalist, and self-serving of Lincoln’s comments: ‘America is the last best hope of mankind.’ Mukasey could slide right into the hack neo-con universe of all-too-easy American exceptionalism that flatters rather than challenges the reader.

Like so many other Bush figures, Mukasey was a respected, serious operator. The temptation to reach for power must be so great, the belief that you could change things so high… but in the end, Rove-world corrupted so many of them. Consider that none of Bush’s national security officials have the reputation that Cyrus Vance does. Vance had the courage to resign out of conviction (regardless of one’s opinion of it), and this principled stand has served him well in history. I can’t imagine many Bush officials will enjoy this; speaking truth to power was never a virtue of the W years, and that sullied several, like Wolfowitz or Rice, who could have been truly historic public servants in a Powell administration.

How nice and easy it must be to write for the Wall Street Journal when the simplistic invocation of mawkish Americana plus a Bush-era vita get you op-ed space. I think the right-wing think-tank industrial complex has a machine that simply recombines expressions like ‘America,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘hero,’ ‘greatest,’ ‘unique,’ ‘freedom,’ etc. into ever-changing combinations of pro-American blather. It’s like the music-machines boy bands use, only with hawkish Americana the output instead of junk-pop. I used to read the Journal, because I thought it was a firewall against the populist nonsense of Hannity & co. I figured that the readership – presumably serious, money-making, educated broker-types – had little time for the flat-earthism of the Palin wing. You’d think a journal so insistent on the virtues of international trade would actually care more for the rest of the world than the populist GOP types…

I guess not.

I have said this before, but WILL US CONSERVATIVES PLEASE LIVE OUTSIDE THE US FOR A LITTLE WHILE BEFORE THEY TALK THIS WAY! You have no idea how insulting it is to the rest of the world, when America’s claim the mantle of World Historical Amazing Awesomess so easily and consign the rest of the planet to the ‘Old World.’ All that does it tell you how extreme American nationalism can become, and how little the writer knows about the world beyond the US. Pluralism is an American value too, and that means seeing the rest of the world as more than just a cipher for tired banalities of Americana. Please travel!!!!

South Koreans are not Neo-cons

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Neocon Ideology vs Korean reality: Modern SK is a commercial trading state with zero interest in a war with the North. More than anything, they just want it to go away so that they can get back to more important things like K-pop (above). The social values on display above in no way connect to the constructed ‘axis of evil’ reality neo-cons want South Koreans to live in.

Rodger Payne, at the IR theory blog Duck of Minerva, had a good post on the all-too-predictable ramp-up on neo-con rage on NK regarding the Cheonan. But the South Koreans are not neo-cons. It is cloying, self-serving cultural hubris for Cheney, the Wall Street Journal, John Bolton, the Kagans, Max Boot, Brookings, and all the rest of the usual suspects to speak so sanctimoniously on SK’s behalf. South Koreans do not see NK the way Americans do and do not even know the tenor of the American debate on NK. The US right uses its all-too-convenient sympathy for SK and NK’s oppressed to push for policies that South Koreans do not want, and, worse, for neo-con ideological reasons that South Koreans do not understand at all. I have tried, believe me, to explain the Bush/Fox News view of the war on terrorism here, and Korean students don’t get it at all. They think W was a loopy, rogue Christian imperialist.

Koreans are far less casual about recommending the use of force or even sanctions. A sizeable minority do not accept that the Cheonan was sunk by NK. The majority think the sinking demonstrates the incompetence of the current Lee government more than NK’s belligerence. North Koreans are ethnic brothers (against whom the use of force is a problem), while simultaneously, South Korean interest in reunification is fading (it is not worth fighting for). As the above video should make clear, this is not a militaristic society itching for a fight. Koreans don’t like and don’t understand ‘axis of evil’ talk, and they certainly won’t accept patronizing US analysysts telling them that’s how they should think.

For all these reasons, there is no surge in neo-con anger as manufactured at AEI or the WSJ. The ease with which this faux-anger and one-size-fits-all ‘axis of evil’ schtick emanates from the Washington-based think tank-industrial complex disgusts me. US political language regarding NK fits neither the mindset nor changing interests of SK. Given that South Koreans must carry the costs of neo-con truculence, how about asking them how they see it? Because you wouldn’t get answer that fit the American frame of NK, so it’s best to just ignore. This is the best English-language article I have seen yet that actually tells you how South Koreans themselves see their interests in this mess.

My point is not to say that the neo-con analysis is  philosophically wrong. Maybe Koreans should be neo-cons prepared to risk war for regime change. But that is not my point. Instead, I am disturbed at how quickly the standard issue Washington attitude toward NK circulated with no examination of Korean public opinion. Nobody bothered to think about that, because the think-tank industrial complex of US foreign policy already knows the answer. Maybe South Koreans should be neo-cons, but they aren’t; Koreans neither understand nor accept that analysis. So it is terribly wrong for the neo-con set to invoke the moral weight of Korean nationalism and NK tyranny without ‘permission’ from Korean public opinion. I’m sure the neo-cons would say that South Koreans should be outraged by the Cheonan and ready to risk war for regime change. But they aren’t, and trying to manipulate SK by cloyingly invoking its own tragedies is extreme bad faith.

For my previous thoughts on the Cheonan, click here.

Off to China… 4) Impressions

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So last weekend was my first trip to China. As I said a few days ago, actually being there did change my mind a bit. I was pushed a little from the ‘China threat’ to the ‘peaceful rise’ school. I imagine this is natural. Travel humanizes other people and makes one less suspicious…

So here some relevant observations:

1. Tiananmen Square has a  Mao mausoleum, just like Red Square has the Lenin mausoleum. I have visited both, and I can genuinely say they are some of the strangest, creepiest political artefacts I have ever seen. You go in well-dressed and walk in silence around the embalmed body kept under glass. (What must they do to preserve it one wonders.) It is like visiting the Vatican for commies. As communist ‘holy relics,’ they are conceptual oxymorons. Russians used to tell me that Stalin killed God, so he took him out of heaven and put him in Red Square mausoleum as Lenin. Communism could destroy individuals religions like Christianity, but not the religious impulse – which of course was a central point in Marxism. These mausoleums, in deifying communist founders, betray a central principle of the movement. On top of that irony, they sell red kitsch of Mao inside the mausoleum. So after you see the Great Helmsman and think Great Thoughts about China, you can buy Mao cufflinks and playing cards in the on-site giftshop. Hah! If that doesn’t make a mockery of the whole point of the mausoleum… Mao is now a tourist attraction, not a communist patron.

2. The Great Wall really spurs the imagination about big, Will Durant-style topics like ‘Civilization vs barbarism.’ It is hard not to be swept away by the romanticism of it all. You can easily picture some Ming guard pacing in the cold night suddenly looking out at some vast swarthy horde like the Teutons from the beginning of Gladiator. The Great Wall is built along dramatic mountain ridges, so it grips the imagination as Hadrian’s Wall does not. It is also more intact and much larger than Hadrian’s.

3. The Forbidden City, like the Winter Palace or Versailles, explains why republican and communist revolutions happen. The opulence is just astonishing. Wow. I was just blow away by how big it was. As you go through, you keep thinking that this court or that room will be the last one, but no, it keeps going and going. The emperor even got his own individual tunnel to exit and enter. (Ie, the place is so huge, that there are multiple giant tunnels through the walls, not just one, and the emperor got one all to himself.) I visited Versailles and Winter Palace as well, and every time I see these megalomaniacal monuments to a ‘sun-king,’ it is easy to see why these guys get tipped at some point and frequently executed. I also think that is terribly hard for moderns raised in a democracy to feel the moral weight of such places. To us, they look more like criminal waste of national resources than the necessary glorification of the unity of man, state, and god in the sung-king’s person, which contemporaries must have seen.

4. The Mao portrait on the Forbidden City is a symbol of communist modernity’s defeat of feudalism. This did not really hit me until I went there. Once you see the size of the Forbidden City, and then the huge portrait placed right on top of it, you get the idea. How ironic then that China is now digging around in its history for its post-communist nationalist identity. Chinese language institutes are called the ‘Confucius Institute,’ even though Mao loathed Confucius as a reactionary. Communist modernity failed, so now China’s feudal past is being reworked as a tourist attraction and cause for nationalism.

5. You can see the two Chinas phenomenon everywhere. Any rapidly developing state is going to have this kind of social fracture, as the young and globalized pull away from the older and traditional. This is happening in India right now also. You can see the older parents – smaller, worse teeth and skin, plain clothing – and the increasingly US teenager-looking kids in bluejeans and t-shirts. This must be quite a culture clash in the home, and it makes me wonder if that is the reason China emphasizes harmony so much. The social cleavage is wide, and both sides have strong claims. The young represent the future and wealth of China; the old built the place (however mixed that accolade might be) and are deeply vested in the party-state that ended the ‘national humiliation.’

6. China’s scholars are reveling in big talk about the changing balance of power. At the conference I attended at the China Foreign Affairs University, speaker after speaker made sure to tell us how China was rising and the US needed to make room for China’s ‘legitimate interests.’ I heard this a lot last year too, but this time I was on the home-turf, so it was even more self-congratulatory than before. At one point, I just couldn’t take it anymore, and got into a major scrap over the Cheonan. I told them everyone in SK knows that China is propping up NK. The response was more obfuscation – maybe the ship hit a rock, we need ‘calm’ on the peninsular. Bleh…

Off to China… 3) There was a Confucian Peace After All…

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About 8 months ago, I wrote that the notion of a ‘Confucian Peace’ was probably wrong. I thought that usually common cultures inspire competition for dominance. Like envies like. We save our greatest passion for inquisitions not crusades. We would rather punish errant insiders in the name of purity than hazy outsiders we can easily classify as ‘barbarians’ and forget about it. I figured Christians massacred each other for centuries over tedious doctrinal issues despite a New Testament ethic to turn the other cheek. So I figured the Confucian Asians (Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam) would be the same way.

But when I actually did the research it really turned out wrong for Confucians. While it is correct that Christians were hypocrites regarding ‘Christendom,’ Confucians generally were not among themselves. This does mean that Confucians states did not war. Like the Democratic Peace, a Confucian Peace posits only that Confucians don’t war on each other, not that they forgo war altogether. Below is the abstract and two of the graphs. If you want the whole paper, please email me. What is most important is the Confucian ‘peace score’ in the bottom table: one two-month war in 195 years of Confucian diplomatic history. That is quite striking compared to 92/151 war years for Christendom.

“International relations theory about East Asia has increasingly argued that East Asia before Western penetration enjoyed a protracted peace. As explanations, a Chinese military hegemony would fit IR theory fairly well, while a cultural peace based on shared Confucian norms would be a significant anomaly. A Confucian long peace challenges widely-held, albeit Eurocentric, IR presumptions including the perils of anarchy, the arms-racing and misperception of the security dilemma, and the regularity of power balancing. This paper therefore investigates, first, whether such peace did in fact exist, and, second, whether this might be attributed to Confucianism. A cultural peace theory requires a strong anti-war cultural norm and a shared sense of community. Skepticism is established by examining 3 comparative cultural spaces that nonetheless did not enjoy a culturally informed peace: the classical Greek city-state system, early modern Christendom, and the contemporary Arab state system. All were deeply riven and competitive. Nevertheless, empirical investigation of the last Chinese (Ching) dynasty before the Western arrival (1644-1839) demonstrates that it was remarkable peaceful toward its Confucian neighbors, while more ‘normally’ exploiting its power asymmetry against non-Confucian ones. Process-tracing specialized Chinese practices toward fellow Confucians suggests the low Confucian war finding emanates from cultural restraint.”

Model of a Politically-divided Cultural Community

Polities

                                           Japan

China

Korea

Vietnam

Cultural Base or Substratum

                                                                         Confucianism

 

Empirical Summary of Cultural Peace Cases

 

Classical Greece

Western Christendom

Modern Arab State System

Pre-Western Confucian-Ching System

Anti-War Ethic

No

Yes

No

Yes

Society of States

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Total War Years / Total System Years

73/141

92/151

8/55

(15/55)[1]

1/195

Percentage of ‘Cultural Peace’ Years

48.22%

39.07%

85.45%

(72.72%)

99.48%

[1] This second figure includes the Libyan 1980-87 invasion of Chad.

Off to China… 2) The ‘Peaceful Rise’ Thesis

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Part one of this post is here. I found this very provocative map here. For the official claim that China’s rise to global power is to be peaceful, read this. For the best academic argument for China’s peaceful rise, try this.

Hawks and realists tend to see China through the lense of history. Lots of other powers have risen in the past to challenge established powers, and usually conflict ensued. Everyone says that peace is preferred and war unnecessary, but in the end, jealous, bitterness, and the ideological pleasures of domination take hold. Minor conflicts grow and worsen; at some point, a hot war or protracted cold war begins. You could throw this model onto Germany (twice), the Punic-Roman competition, Japan’s 19th century rise at China’s expense, the USSR’s rise in the 40s and 50s, etc.

By contrast liberals and especially constructivists  look more at China specifically. Instead of seeing her as just one more hegemon with the same characteristics as others, China’s unique features because a causal possibility for peace. Here is a quick-and-dirty summary:

1. China is getting rich in the current world economic order (epitomized by its membership in the WTO), so why would she rock the boat? Right now she is gaining wealth and prestige, while dumping public goods/security provision on the US military (especially in Afghanistan, which war helps her more than us). Given this great benefit, a peaceful rise makes sense.

2. China has a history in the Sinocentric world order of treating the smaller peoples around it with some generosity. (I actually disagree with this empirically, but so be it.) The idea here is that the Chinese tributary system, especially of the Ming and Ching, only relied on violence when absolutely necessary. Much of Chinese pre-modern hegemony was based in ritual and moral suasion. So future Chinese hegemony in Asia will look back to this model rather than the Nazi or Roman ones in Europe.

3. Globalization has made a collision less feasible and valuable to the riser. This is a Thomas Friedman argument, rather similar to the one made before WWI by Norman Angell. The idea here is that globalization makes war less useful as a tool to pursue national interest and may in fact be remaking the idea of national interest altogether. In this new flat world, war is an anachronism of the nation-state era. The costs of war in the interconnected era are higher, because wars break all these international trade and financial connections that have made China so rich. Also, the benefits of war have declined, because in net-world, holding territory is not really a valuable economic commodity anymore.

4. Globalization and modernization are changing China into a status quo power, possibly prepared to accept US leadership. This is the cultural variant of the argument above. Here the idea is that as China joins the world to get rich, she will also learn from the world to be nicer. This was basically the gamble of the Clinton administration – economic modernization would entrain political liberalization – when it agreed to PMFN 15 years ago.

5. The Chinese elite have seen what happens to other, aggressive risers, and they have learned. This is a Ned Lebow learning argument, and the one I find most persuasive (probably because Ned was on my comps committee in grad school). The idea here is that the rise and fall of powers need not be some mechanical process, as if these states are robots. Instead, later hegemons and risers can learn from earlier ones. Ideally, they learn to avoid the mistakes of the past risers who collided and provoked wars.

6. Chinese made a policy choice to rise peacefully, and we should believe them. Call this the naive argument. One would accept at face value what the Chinese say. Words have meaning; pacta sunt servanda. So if the Chinese say they will rise peacefully, we should take them at their word and not fall back on pre-set notions of realism that permit blithe ignorance of anything the Chinese have to say.

7. The Chinese are nice. This is the most cultural and sino-specific of all the arguments I have heard. It is the one I heard the most last weekend in Beijing. Basically it says ‘we Chinese are different. We are nice and not belligerent. If you see us as a threat, that is your problem, in your head. Instead of telling us we will be mean and nasty someday soon, why don’t you come to China now and see how nice we are.’ As ridiculous as it sounds, I find this one somewhat persuasive. I have generally tilted against the peaceful rise school, but my time in China really gave me pause…

Off to China… 1) The ‘China Threat’ Thesis

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Here is part 2, on China as a ‘peaceful riser.’

I am in China right now for the first time for a conference on Asian security (what else?) at the Chinese Foreign Affairs University. I will post impressions on my return. A standard methodological quip in the social sciences is that you should never generalize about a country until you at least flew over it, so I guess I am paying my dues.

So I thought it might be useful to lay out the big running debate about China: whether it will be nasty as it gets more powerful, or will it play in the established global rules of things like the WTO? This is the ‘China threat’ vs the ‘peaceful rise’ school. I lean toward the former, but maybe going there will change my mind…

1. China’s internal politics are repressive: Falun Gong, democracy dissidents, Muslim Uighurs, Tibet. Why would you expect a regime that treats its own people that way to be nicer to the ‘foreign devils’ (the 19th century mandarin term for western traders) ? Why would you trust a regime that shoots its own people? When Iran and Zimbabwe do it, we worry. Why not with China? China is not a democracy.

2. While China is rising, it is vulnerable. It is benefitting enormously from the US/WTO-lead trading order. So of course they will say they want to rise peacefully. They won’t shoot themselves in the foot. They see how Germany’s belligerent rise in the late 19th century got it encircled and crushed in WWI. They aren’t stupid enough to say they want changes, but we shouldn’t be stupid enough to believe them either, especially given point 1 above.

3. China has a historical legacy of xenophobia and cultural supremacism. You can overcome history of course; the Germans did. But the Chinese aren’t there at all, and its historical reservoir of national myths clashes badly with just being ‘one more country.’

4. As countries grow and get wealthier, their perceptions of their national interests change, ie, grow. So yes, today, the Chinese do want to rise peacefully, and maybe they are sincere. But eventually, as its sense of its global role grows, and as the scope of its interests grow, it will become pushier and probably more belligerent. This usually happens when countries grow to new prominence. Britain in the 19th century intervened all over Asia. The US got more involved in Latin America and the Pacific. The USSR dabbled in all over the place during the Cold War. Maybe China is different, but the historical record of big states developing new ‘needs’ and ‘appetites’ is pretty clear. Expect it here.

5. What will they want after they get rich? James Fallows’ work at the Atlantic suggests that China just wants to get rich, and that’s true, but what happens after they get there? As states become richer and more influential, their perceptions of their national interests expand – particularly as states trade more and import resources more (as most rising states must). It is all but inevitable that China’s global footprint will expand as it already has in Central Asia, Africa, and the South China Sea. This does not mean it must be belligerent, but it does mean that there are more possible loci of conflict. The sheer size of China and its reach will insure friction and collisions – just as it did with the British Empire, the USSR, and the US.

Add to this China’s rather toxic internal politics. China is hypernationalist (the replacement ideology after Tiannamen), mercantilist, and repressive. I see nothing benign in that mix. If you were China, wouldn’t you be chafing at the bit, having to listen to Bush or Hillary lecture you about human rights and your exchange rate? And once the first missile lands on Tibet, all the talk of peaceful China will fly out the window. My first-cut schtick on the US and China is in galleys at Geopolitics for publication this fall; here it is in brief. For China’s muscle in the Northeast Asia, try here and here.

In short, I lean toward the view that China is a rising power likely to collide with the US, because its range of interests will expand as its power expands. In 20 years, when China has a bigger navy, it will suddenly ‘discover’ national interests in the South Pacific or Indian Ocean. Rome, Britain, the US, the USSR all went down this path. It is worse, because China has the Sinocentric history of informally dominating its Confucian neighbors. And the regime ideology is still fairly illiberal – mercantilism, hypernationalism, internal repression.

A ‘Diabetic Peace’ and the Militarization of Obesity

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So it’s come to this… God, we’re pathetic.

Two former chairmen of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have now stated that US obesity constitutes a national security crisis, and that dietary changes are a matter of military necessity. This scares me in so many ways, I am not even sure where to start. But it’s also darkly hysterical…

1. If you needed confirmation that the US is sliding into decline, here you go. Last year, on return to the US after a long break, I remember being stunned at just how fat so many Americans were. I asked, “How can you lead when half your people struggle to get off the sofa?” That was meant partially in jest, but it turns out the Chiefs agree with me. How creepy is that? If you want to see US exceptionalism, maybe it’s in the fact that we are fattest hegemon in the history of the great powers! Hah! But maybe if we can open up more MacDonald’s in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), we can enjoy a global DIABETIC PEACE in place of a Democratic Peace. When we’re all as big as this woman, why worry about war?

2. Militarizing issues is not a healthy way for democracies to grapple with social problems. It suggests that a our political system is so broken that even something as serious as 40% obesity in the US (with 70% total overweight) can’t spur meaningful political action by the elected civilian leadership. Instead we need militarization to add a sheen of both crisis – the US Right especially will listen whenever the officer corps says something – and legitimacy – our politicians may be impossibly idiotic, but our military is still a respected institution. Think about the signals that that sends about fixing other big problems in America’s future, like debt reduction, financial reform, immigration reform, our response to Asia’s rise? Do all these problems need to be militarized before we will move on them? Must it always be a man in uniform who kicks us into action and shames politicians into compromise?

3. It is not good at all for liberalism and democracy that the military creep into increasing areas of domestic life, like diet and nutrition. This is not really the military’s fault. Although Rumsfeld was a genuine empire-builder, Gates has tried hard to reduce the sprawl. But frequently deficient public and private actors want to dump problems on the military, because it seems so efficient and commands such respect. Consider that Bush said after Katrina that the military will be used more in national disasters and that BP wants to buck the oil spill clean-up to the military. Do we want military-style regimentation of these sorts of non-military issues? Do we really want generals telling parents about food choices? But…

4. Are we really this lame and sallow and lazy, that we need our generals to tell us to control ourselves in this most basic manner of adulthood? And you wonder why rising Asia thinks Americans are ridiculous and childish. We can’t control our budget, we can’t even control our diet. Embarrassing…

More on Asian Multiculturalism: 5 Masters Theses to be Written

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rman6645l 

 

If you don’t know anything about this topic, start here.  This is outside my normal area of interest – foreign relations – but I double majored in political theory in grad school, and PNU just had this big multiculturalism (MC)conference, so its on my mind. On MC specifically in Korea, my previous thoughts are here and here.

1. Northeast Asians (NEA – Chinese, Koreans, Japanese) strike me as quite nationalistic, and nationalism up here is still tied up in right-Hegelian, 19th century notions of blood and soil. In China, the Han race is the focus of the government’s newfound, post-communist nationalism. In Korea, it is only the racial unity of minjeok that has helped keep Korea independent all these centuries. In Japan, the Yamato race is so important that even ethnic Koreans living there for generations can’t get citizenship and there’s no immigration despite a contracting population. MC in NEA faces huge political opposition that the already existing multiculturalism of South and Southeast Asia (SEA) don’t face.

2. SEA is where the real action is on this question, and it is not all clear to me that it has been really successful. In the discussion of last week’s conference, I warned the other participants to look at the ethnic conflict that can come from multiculturalism – Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines. Japan saw this and decided to risk a general social decline from ageing and low births, rather than to chance renewal through immigration, because it might lead to ethnic conflict. Really successful MC is rare outside the 4 classic immigration countries (US, Canada, Australia, NZ), and SEA’s MC is more often associated with separatism and ethnic violence than with growth and social harmony.

3. I wonder sometimes how much MC is just an academic fad that Asian countries are mimicking, because they feel like it shows how modern they are if they worry about the same things that western intellectuals and societies do. I have a very deep suspicion that emulation from a desire for foreign respect plays a big role, because the central foreign policy goal for Asian elites is to be accepted by Western elites as equals. In order to be equals, they have to look like and act like equals. As the post-modernists would say, equality with the West will be created by performing as the West does. So Asian mimicry of the MC discourse of western political has nothing to do with functional utility of MC in Asia, and everything to do with capturing respect by acting as already respected  actors do. Besides the cloned MC discourse in Asia, here are two other examples of this emulation phenomenon:

3.a. Western clothes and music, for example, carry much of their cachet in Asia, because they signal modernity in cultures with long, old, highly conservative patriarchal traditions: in the New York and LA Asians see on TV, white people wear designer clothes and go to clubs (think Sex and the City or Friends). Hence if Asians do that too, they are also modern.

3.b. The Asian regionalism discourse in Asian IR is wholly abjured from the empirical reality of persistent Asian nationalism and talk-shop regional organizations. Asian organizations are many but shallow; they don’t actually integrate their members. Yet Asian elites talk about the integration of Asia, even though there is really no evidence for that. ASEAN is 2/3 the age of the EU, but has done maybe 10% of the integration work that the EU has done. Instead, the real explanation for the Asian regionalism discourse in Asian IR is mimicry out a desire to look modern: if the Europeans are regionalizing, and they keep telling us about it, then this is an important ‘modern’ or ‘civilized’ discourse we need to elaborate too, even if it is wholly fanciful and unempirical. (The same thing happened in Africa; the African Union cloned the EU explicitly to make Africa look more like European and hence ‘modern’ or ‘civilized.’ But like Asian regionalism, the AU has gone nowhere, because African citizens don’t actually want it.)

4. I am not convinced that Asians, especially in NEA, really want this. NEA states are in an interesting pre-MC position. That is, Japan, Korea and China (less so) have essentially ethnically homogenous populations that feel that they are a unique people represented by their own national states. MC, by contrast, assumes a universal-generic, non-ethnic state which umpires among different cultures doing their own thing; Canada is the best model of this. So a good question is whether NE Asians want that. The academic discourse may say they should (otherwise they are racist), or that it will happen whether they want it to or not. But that is scholasticism and elitist arrogance. There is a critical democratic choice question that MC routinely avoids in claiming, simply, that MC is inevitable. The better question is whether citizens want their countries to multiculturalize. And I think the answer to that is pretty obviously ‘no’ in most places. I dare say most French would – if offered the choice strictly on its own merits – prefer a France without its Muslim population; Americans would likely say the same thing about the illegal Hispanic population. Hence for ‘pure’ Asian states, the question is whether their demos actually want to open the doors when so many other countries have come to regret it.

5. The big difference between the US debate on immigration and the of Asia (and Europe) is over legality. The US shows its far greater willingness to multiculturalize insofar as it willingly accepts lots of legal immigrants ever year. It strikes me as amazing that resistance to illegal immigration would be read as racism, but that is how far along the US is on the MC route. By contrast Asians are still debating the value of legal immigration. Illegal immigration is not tolerated and punished swiftly with uncontroversial, widely-accepted deportation.