Author Archives: Robert E Kelly

Unknown's avatar

About Robert E Kelly

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

Tiananmen +20: Tank Man will be a National Hero One day

Posted on by
5

The Tiananmen Square Massacre was 20 years ago this week. It hardly needs repeating but this is one of the great moments in the long battle for human freedom against tyranny. One can only hope that the Tank Man below wasn’t (as probably happened) tortured or beaten to death.

Tank Man

What can we learn from the survival of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ?

1. I think just about everyone is surprised the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and PRC are still around. Given how rapidly other communist tyrannies were collapsing, just about everybody thought China should be next to go. Why it didn’t happen:

a. Learning: The CCP watched the USSR and decided not risk the same opening. This is theoretically important, because it suggests how directed human action can up-end foggy notions of the ‘zeitgeist.’ Everybody thought the times were against the CCP,  it was ripe to fall, the historical pressures were enormous, the democratic dominoes were falling. And that was all correct. But the party still held out anyway. This is a salutary warning against seeing history as Hegelian History, with large tectonic philosophical shifts pushing states and leaders this way or that. The contrast here is striking. The CCP set its face against the wind, held tough, and now is considered a model for a new, globalization-savvy autocracy.

b. Culture: For all the sound and fury of communism since Mao, the real ‘ideology’ of the Chinese masses is traditional confucian agrarian conservatism. And it is not democratic. It deeply stresses social harmony and one-ness (recall the 2008 Olympics), unlike democracy and pluralism, which admit and try to manage conflict. It is the subculture of Asian, social harmony-demanding confucianism that is the real block on democratization out here. It is arguably the single biggest problem for democracy in Korea. In the North, the Kim monarchy regularly manipulates deeply rooted Korean symbols, where the Southern democracy has struggled with a foreign philosophical implant lacking local historical and cultural resonance. This argument holds for most of the confucian Asian space, including China. In 1989, the CCP monopolized political discourse, positioning itself as a defender, not of the shallow communist artifice just a few decades old, but long traditionalist confucian Chinese culture. By contrast, the students were promoting alien foreign concepts in a country where xenophobia has been a regime ideology for centuries.

A great irony of communist systems is how traditionalist-nationalist rather than communist they actually are. Without the communist ideology, most of them might have been considered semi-fascist, like the clerical fascism of Latin America. NK is arguably as much a fascist as stalinist state, with its hereditary kingship, focus on blood and soil (Korean uniqueness and unification), its plumbing of Korean history (rather than Marxist ideology) to justify the party’s rule. In China, communism is highly xenophobic, with foreign powers playing a critical, regime-justifying role (Japan, the US, the USSR). And nationalism has exploded since the ‘patriotic education campaign’ began in 1991. In the USSR, when Stalin was in real trouble in WWII, he mobilized Russian nationalism for the ‘Great Patriotic War.’ In Vietnam, the communists were as nationalist as they were socialist. In other words, communist ideology frequently overlays the real values rooted in the society – generally traditionalist and nationalist. These values at the bottom cannot be rooted out quickly, and indeed frequently popular nationalism replaced elitist abstract communism as the real ideology of communist regimes.

This is important in China, because the Confucian peasant subculture was as much a block on the turn toward democracy as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Eastern Europeans knew what democracy and the West was. They had had some exposure in the centuries before 1989, and they knew they wanted to rejoin European modernity. They wanted Starbucks and McDonald’s as much as democracy. In China, that was not the case. The student elites certainly wanted democracy and liberalization, but there was little popular sympathy and interest across the wide agrarian peasantry. Who knew want democracy or liberalism meant in the thousands of villages which most Chinese peasants have never left? This is why the CCP brought in rural PLA units to crush the protestors.

In the short, most of the Chinese population had and are living a traditional Confucian peasant lifestyle, the rhythms of which only change slowly. The CCP might try wild, extreme social experimentation on this hapless population, but unless such pressure is directed for long, long years, it was bound to fail. For all the awfulness of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, the basic cultural tropes – confucian, agrarian, traditional – changed little. Such radical shifts in attitudes take far longer, no matter how murderous the Marxist regime; Cambodia survived even the Khmer Rouge. This was and is the subculture, the real culture, below the artifices of ideology. And this subculture provided no democratic resources to the students – no myths, no past experiments, no heroes, etc. Instead, the popular culture favored/had accepted for centuries a confucian, traditionalist-nationalist blend of closed rule. And that is pretty much what the CCP is today.

2. The late 80s was a heady time of ‘democracy domino effect.’ This is ironic, insofar as the domino effect of the Cold War was to be a communist one. The idea of a democratic domino effect has not been researched much, although democratic expansion around the globe does seem to come in waves.

3. The endurance and success of the CCP continues to fire the argument that democracy and development are trade-offs. So long as Indian growth lags behind China’s, the ‘late developer’ argument that developing states cannot afford democracy will live on: democracy, with all its transaction costs, logrolling, side payments, distracting social and partisan conflicts, etc., is too expensive when growth is the real priority. Basically this is Berthold Brecht’s argument that bread is more important than freedom. I used to reject the idea that democracy is an opportunity cost of development, because it feels so illiberal. But of course, if it accurately reflects development patterns, i.e., if it is empirically accurate, then my moral discomfort is irrelevant. My suspicion is growing that the CCP and others like Lee Kwan Yoo or Park Chun-hee who make the same argument are (sadly) correct.

I am quite surprised (and disappointed) at how stable China seems to be. Like most Liberals, I like to hope that all good things go together. So for years after Tiananmen, I agreed with all those liberal progressive prognosticators (T Friedman, B Clinton, the Economist), that eventually China would open up, that all this market exposure would spur liberalization and then democracy. That just does not seem to be the case, at least in the medium term. How sad…

4. Prediction: For all the pessimism of this post, I will guess that China will still encounter a democratic transition in the long-term (before 2050). I still think democracies’ have major economic advantages over autocracies (more transparency, better rule of law, free journalism that will point out failure, less corruption). If the implicit deal between the CCP and the Chinese is high growth in exchange for political quiescence, then if growth slows, the CCP is in trouble. And autocracy’s economic inefficiencies do place a ceiling on growth. Like Indonesia and SK, I still suspect the Chinese economy will hit a plateau beyond which it cannot rise without political reform. And I do metaphysically agree with George W Bush that people want to be free, make their own choices, and have a say in their government. One day, the Tank Man will be a national hero.

Why is NK Suddenly so Belligerent? My kremlinological Guess

Posted on by
5

NK kremlinology is even harder than the real thing was, but here is my guess about what is going on now, and I have been kicking this around with my PNU political science colleagues. The hyper-belligerence of the regime in the last year reflects an inner split at the top over the impending succession to Kim. (Lots of others have interpreted similarly, so this is not a great insight. But there are other possibilities, so I will plant my flag here.) We know from previous experience with communist systems that they tend to move from a stalinistic cult of personality toward ‘interest group pluralism’ within the politiburo. This happened after Stalin, Mao, and now with Kim. The interest groups in communist systems are quite a different breed of course from the NRA or AIPAC. Usually post-stalinist communist states have a balance of power among institutional-bureaucratic interests: the party (the ideologues usually bent on continuing the stand-off with the West and defending the ‘utopia’), the secret services (whatever the local version of the KGB is called, mostly focused on informally blackmailing the rest with personal secrets to insure a good budget and nice western goodies), the military (clamoring for ever more armor, artillery, and nukes, but also more realistic and less reckless about western power than the party), industry (groaning under the weight of the military’s demands, desperate to avoid the introduction of market reform, or if so, to control it for themselves), and the state bureaucracy (terrified of the secret police, cowed and browbeaten for falling to meet mythical quotas and keep the electricity on).

As these groups jockey for control of the ever-diminishing budget, the conflict can get pretty sharp, complete with purges, external belligerence, and biting ideological pronouncements. The general will is lost as no one can aggregate these parochial interests into a leadership that can serve the country as a whole. As Brezhnev declined, the Soviet ‘interest groups’ overwhelmed the state, leading to the disastrous excesses of the military-industrial complex – the roll-out of new MRBMs (the SS-20) and the invasion of Afghanistan. These short-term interests of the military undermined the whole Soviet project, as they re-galvanized NATO, turned Jimmy Carter into a hawk, and paved the way for Reagan. This is my read of current belligerence from NK. Kim is like Brezhnev, the declining central representative of the general will, slowly losing control as factional conflict rises.

Kim Jong-Il’s biggest fear today has to be his own bodily integrity. He is sick and weak, and were NK to collapse, SK conservatives would be out for blood, and he knows it. Indeed much of the regime elite (party, military, everybody)  would probably suffer (deservedly) harsh treatment in post-unification courts because of man-made famine of the 1990s. The blood of somewhere between 500k and 3m North Koreans is on the hands of the Korean Workers Party, who wouldn’t even accept food aid when rural people were eating dirt and tree-bark. Capital punishment is legal in SK.

Kim is sick, so is his country. He knows this. He also knows that his third son, the newly anointed successor, doesn’t have nearly the charisma of his grandfather or the regime connections of his father. Kim Jong-Un looks like he will be a figurehead, much like Andropov and Chernyenko, in the early 80s, covered increasing factional infighting in the USSR.

Prediction: An external strike on SK or Japan is unlikely. The regime knows it will lose a war with the ROK and US, plus Japan on the side. My guess is the handoff will occur as Kim slowly expires; the son will slowly move into dad’s shoes. After his death, the real infighting will begin, but again, I don’t think it will spillover into an external strike. The regime elite is not that stupid. If we are lucky, in a few years a military coup will occur, with Kim III replaced by a general or junta along the lines of that ruling Burma. Generals would be more likely to deal and almost certainly less brutal. This is hardly ideal, but in NK, a military, rather than party, dictatorship would be progress.

Remember the Russians on D-Day

Posted on by
27

Every five years, D-Day celebrations unnerve me a bit. The heroism and gallantry are unquestioned, but the historical significance for the course of WWII and scale of sacrifice are always exaggerated. I feel like we overcelebreate this war, because we are somewhat uncomfortable with the morality of so many others we have fought – not just Vietnam of course, but the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, or Iraq 2. Indeed I bet Americans know more about Hitler than George III. For a good examination, try here. Consider also:

1. The staggering size of the Eastern Front is too often overlooked by Americans. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 20 million Soviet citizens died fighting (or otherwise being butchered by) the Nazis. That is about 14% of the Soviet population of the time. By contrast about 200 thousand Americans died in Europe, about .15% of the US population at the time. That means 100 times as many Soviets died fighting the Nazis as Americans. Something like 70 thousand Soviet villages were torched or otherwise eradicated as the Nazis conquered around 20% of the Soviet land mass. Consider that in a one month battle at Kiev in 1941, over 600,000 Soviet soldiers were killed or captured; had anything like this happened to American ground forces in North Africa or Western Europe, the domestic cry for a separate peace would have been irresistible. Conflict on a such as scale hadn’t been seen since the high days of the Golden Horde, and the US was a late and minor participant. It dwarfs even the one US experience of massive combat on US territory – the civil war.

2. The USSR had essentially stopped the Nazi drive by the fall of 1943. Stalingrad, the turning point, was over by February of 1943 (as was El Alamein, a British victory, in late 1942). The last major German offensive around Kursk in the summer of 1943 was halted. The enormous Soviet offensive of 1944 dwarfed anything the Western allies could put on the continent that same year. This event would have proceeded without the Allied invasion. To be sure, an unknown counterfactual is how the USSR would have fared if the Wehrmacht had not been forced to prepare for a western landing. Furthermore, allied bombing obviously took its toll. But nonetheless, the FDR administration was quite content to allow the Nazi and Soviet totalitarians to exhaust each other.

3. The anglophone leadership (Canada, Britain and the US) realized by 1943, that this war, as Stalin famously said, was unlike any other in that the victor’s political ideology would imposed as far as his tanks could get. Patton knew this, which is why he wanted to drive on Berlin in 1945 and agitated to provoke a postwar conflict with the USSR while it was still exhausted. Hence, the allies waited to land. Stalin wanted a second front as early as 1942, but the English-speaking powers were content to play off-shore balancer – allowing the USSR to exhaust itself (so its postwar power would be that much weaker) and the Nazis to exhaust themselves too (so that the eventual Allied landing and eastward push would be that much easier).

This was excellent strategy. It husbanded Allied resources and allowed to two potential opponents to weaken each other. Churchill, Ike, Bradley and others were under no illusions about the brutality of Soviet governance and were willing to allow the Nazis to bleed the Soviets white. It also kept American casualties low, insuring a continued US domestic consensus to stay in the war. But this intelligent realpolitik clashes badly with the moral imperative of fighting fascism and the overtly moral way we celebrate US involvement against the Nazis. Watch Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, and contrast that with the strategic logic of waiting to land until mid-1944 so that the western land war war would be easier and Stalin wouldn’t be able to march to the Atlantic.

4. I didn’t really realize this much until I went to Russia to learn the language and travelled around. The legacy of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is everywhere. Everyone lost someone, and frequently in brutal circumstances Americans can’t imagine. Every Russian guide you get will tell you how Americans don’t know much about war, because we were never invaded, occupied, and exterminated. The first time I heard that, I just didn’t know what to say. You can only listen in silent horror as the guides tell you about how the SS massacred everyone with more than a grammar school degree in some village you never heard of before, or how tens of thousands of those Kiev PoWs starved or froze to death because the Wehrmacht was unprepared for such numbers and the Nazi leadership just didn’t care. Just because Stalin was awful, that does not mitigate the enormity of Soviet suffering or their contribution. Remember that the next time you hear about how America saved Europe from itself, or watch some movie lionizing the average GI, or play a video game depicting the relatively minor Battle of the Bulge as a turning point. If Speilberg really wants to make a great WWII epic, how about one about the eastern front?

Obama’s Grand Slam in Cairo also Illustrates the Lack of Secular Politics in the Middle East

Posted on by
3

He certainly is talented! I have been in Korea since August 2008, so I have not seen many Obama speeches. I am just floored by the difference with W. No wonder the press is swooning. Unlike the faux-authority projected by Cheney’s crossed hands and low voice (he was just too wrong too many times), Obama has the magic in that imperious, super well-educated look when he lifts his chin, creases his brow, and narrows his eyes. He must have been a great lawyer to see in court; he reminds me of my best grad school teachers.

1. I am intellectually pleased at how well my predictions of the speech fared. I got most everything right, both in the topics he selected and how he treated them. He did engage in lots of praise of Islam that will make Bushies, neo-cons, and evangelicals squirm. As I suspected he threw in the PBUH and references to Islamic scientific achievements. This laid the groundwork for the criticisms, so it was necessary, and thankfully there were no real eye-rolling sycophancies. But I do think calling the Koran ‘holy’ all the time did not project the political secularism needed to encourage religious pluralism in the ME, and the line about ‘battling negative stereotypes of Islam’ was a lame multicultural sop to the Muslim identity politics that lead to Durban II and the bogus, free speech-squelching notion of ‘islamophobia.’ I expect the Fox News-set will harp on that one. On the up side, Obama added a few extra themes: women’s rights, democracy, and development.

2. Just about all his comments were right.

As I argued, but hardly expected in the speech, Obama referenced Japan and Korea as examples of modernization without cultural loss.

He identified the war of necessity in South Asia and admitted that Iraq was a war of choice, while also noting that Iraqis are better of without Saddam. He didn’t apologize for Iraq, which would have set off a national-conservative backlash at home, but he seemed to imply it was an error. Very smooth.

He noted the concerns over women’s rights and modernization, but rightfully blew threw that reactionary posture pretty fast to say what needed to be said: that the ME is falling behind the rest of the world and that this feeds both poverty and radicalism.

He basically dumped ME peace back in their hands by saying we can’t do it for them. He said lots of right things about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He attacked Muslim anti-semitism and Holocaust denial and openly declared the illegitimacy of the Israeli West Bank settlement to an Arab audience. Nice! And he backed that with a subtle and correct shot that too many Arab regimes don’t really care to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Also correct.

He even had the courage to touch on religious tolerance in the Muslim ME, which I think is a critical breakpoint with the West. The defense of the Copts was an important gesture, particularly to western Christians who think the Islam demands wide latitude for its practitioners in the West while denying it in the ME (basically accurate).

He also went to bat for the freedom agenda – important because it signals a continuity of US commitment to democracy across quite different administrations. Unfortunately he passed on singling out his host Mubarak, exactly the sort of US-supported ME despot that fires al Qaeda.

Finally, did you catch the subtle end of Bush-era grand strategy: “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other”? That is pretty much the end of regime change and preemption.

3. I can’t say he really missed much. But for the PC bit about stereotypes and the missed swipe at Mubarak, this was pretty much a grand slam.

4. I was pleased with the audience reaction. At no point did it get nationalist, islamist or otherwise jingoistic. They applauded not only at the complements, but also the criticisms. Very good.

5. But there is an important and deep political theory insight to be gleaned from the language of the talk. It was not intentional but should be revelatory to secular westerners unaccustomed to ME political discourse. Obama’s constant reference to Islam and his use of religious quotations and invocation of Islamic and religious values was a deep indication of the cultural cleft between the West and Islam, albeit more between secular Europe and the religious ME. And I suspect that an upper class secular Democrat like O found it somewhat uncomfortable to be constantly referring to ‘faith.’ To this day, I admire Howard Dean’s response to G Stephanopoulos’ mandatory and obnoxious question about the role of religion in his politics. Dean simply said there was no role.

Yet Obama can’t talk that way in the ME for two reasons. First, Islamism as a social movement has exploded in the ME since 1967. The ME is alive with religion in the way of Massachusetts Bay Colony or the Amish. Islam is in the middle of a ‘great awakening’ period, and the language of religion is spilling into all areas. Hence the upsurge of Muslim identity politics and discovery of something called ‘islamophobia,’ which here is defined so broadly as to include just about any criticism. So Islam must be genuflected to and wrapped into any serious socio-political discussion in the ME. For contrast, look at Southeast Asia where is Islam is more secular.

Second, Islam has become the shield for opposition in the ME, just like Orthodoxy was in the USSR. Islam has become the channel for political resistance to atrocious government of the ME, and so it has become increasingly politicized. Politicized religion is almost always apocalyptic and absolutist, and the contemporary ME is no different. New ideas, policy proposals, criticism must invariably cite koranic verse and treat it as font of authority – as O did last yesterday. (For parallels, think about how the US right uses the writings of the Founders and Framers as touchstones for just about everything, or the way the Soviets and Chinese used to comb through Marx for quotations to support whatever new policy they wanted to pursue.)

This more than anything else betrays the bankruptcy of politics in the ME. It badly lacks a public-spirited, nondenominational language of citizenship. It is trapped in the religious and chronological parochialism of a 1400 year old revelation. This both cripples and exacerbates politics. Cripples, because the Koran (and the hadith) hardly fit the needs of social phenomena like the discovery of the New World, industrialization, space travel, or globalization. (Think of the ridiculous anti-modern intransigence of the Haredim.) And it exacerbates politics by injecting religion at every turn and so constantly raises political difference to the level of religious confrontation. Part of this is inevitably parochialism. If the Koran is the basis of wisdom and the good life, then how to deal with non-Muslims? As an example of all these problems cumulated, look at Saudi Arabia. It has no constitution, because it claims the Koran is that, and hence has all sorts of ‘religious’ problems over what should be simple technical issues questions like women drivers or proper license plates. By contrast political theory in the West has long strived to build a public-spirited universalist language (Habermas and Rawls spring to mind). This helps western democracies build citizenship across religious cleavages and also ties them internationally to each other better than any other ‘family of nations.’

Obama In Cairo

Posted on by
1

Just about everybody has an idea for what the Great O should say. So here’s my run down:

1. Propaganda: One of the basic elements to successfully criticizing someone is to build up them before you tear them down. This is pretty simple psychology. Teachers use it all the time in trying to break it to students that their work is actually pretty bad.

Expect this from Obama, because Arab/Muslim prestige is such a big factor in Middle East politics. The ME has made it clear it would rather be right and poor than admit mistakes, flex, and get wealthy. Thomas Friedman (as well as B Lewis, F Zakaria, F Ajami, and countless others) has argued for years about just how deeply Arabs and Muslims want to fight to hang on to their ‘olive trees,’ regardless what it does to their economy, relations with the West, and overall ME power in world politics. And now, but for Africa, the Middle East is the worst governed region on earth. Yet the ME remains downright recalcitrant when it comes to learning from the West (Khomeini’s classic ‘westoxification’).

This is folly of course. One need only look at China, Japan and Korea to see how well emulation can work, and that it does not mean cultural Americanization, religious betrayal/Christianization, or wild Khomeinist Jewish conspiracy theories. Instead it it is the route to growth and weight in the international system. So 50 years ago, Nasser was more important than Mao, but today China is forging the future, and globalization is passing the ME by.

Nevertheless Obama must cater to this sensibility. He must throw out multicultural softballs about how Americans respect Islam, see it as one of the world’s great religions, value its past cultural achievements in areas like mathematics, etc. The irony of course is that none of this is true. Islam makes the West pretty nervous; its theology is radically simpler than Christianity, much less the western philosophical tradition serious thinkers must engage (and that helped make Christianity so much intellectually richer), so its unlikely most educated westerners ‘respect’ it; and who really cares about Islamic scientific progress several centuries ago? Who cares if Americans invited the lightbulb years ago? You don’t see the Chinese telling the West to respect it because of gunpowder, but rather because it is a growth dynamo, and we desperately need their savers.

2. Truth: Somehow Obama needs to say the same stuff W did about democracy, freedom, rights for women, open markets, and the US commitment to reduce terrorism. Thankfully Obama is a vastly better salesman for the ‘freedom agenda.’ 1. He is not an evangelical, but only mildly religious and mostly secular. 2. He is a Democrat, the party generally associated with multilateralism and internationalism in US foreign policy. 3. He is an intellectual and so probably understands what the freedom agenda actually is (unlike W who repeated it mantra-like, even as his administration undermined it at home). 4. His personal history speaks volumes.

So when Muslims hear a black secular liberal Democrat with the middle name Hussein who lived in Indonesia still say the same thing W did, then hopefully they will know we mean it. Just because Obama is new, young, black, more secular, whatever, doesn’t mean the region’s religious fanatics (including zionist settlers), autocrats, and terrorists should get a pass.

If Obama welches on this, if he avoids criticizing Mubarak, or if he looks a like he is accommodating Muslim supremacist thinking in order to end the GWoT, he will face crushing conservative criticism at home, and deservedly so.

3. Really Tough Truth: If Obama really has guts, he will talk about religious pluralism. To my mind, this is central cultural breakpoint between the West and Islam today. Islam as practiced today in the Middle East does not meaningful embrace religious pluralism or politically accept it. (Note: It does in Indonesia and SE Asia, which is exactly why the Saudi clerical establishment has funded the building of schools and mosques there.) ME Islam particularly seems unwilling to admit the equality of all religions before a neutral secular state. Parts of the world are still designated ‘Muslim lands;’ apostasy is still a crime in at least 8 Muslim-majority states; and even Iraq’s constitution declares it a Muslim state in which the Koran can be a source of law. So long as the supremacy of Islam is a defining feature of politics in the region, it will be hard for non-Muslims to ‘respect’ or feel comfortable with the ME. No other part of the world mixes religion and politics like this anymore. In the West, secular politics dates to the Enlightenment, if not the Reformation. When Westerners look at politicized religion in the ME, they see their own dangerous past of the religious wars of the 16th C.

4. Payoff: 2 and 3 would be pretty tough to swallow for the Islamic ME, so here is a great payoff that is good for the US (and Israel in the long-run) anyway: serious pressue on the Israelis to finally exit the West Bank and get the two-state solution rolling. The debate on this has changed enormously. For the first time since the first Bush administration, we have an adminisration ready to take on the Israel lobby at home and the Israeli government. The intellectual center of gravity has really shifted, so Obama and Clinton are now well-grounded in an emerging consensus in the US. Thanks for this most especially to Stephen Walt‘s tireless, much-derided but actually quite even-handed writing on this. You may have hated his book, but it did a lot to make clear how the the Israel lobby in the US has abetted the worst imperialist instincts of the settler movement and so made a meaning two-state deal impossible for decades. It is now clear to everybody but the most recalcitrant that Israel needs to get out. US pressure to this end will help the ME swallow points 2 and 3 at no cost to the US, because a two-state solution is now clearly in American’s interest anyway.

5. Prediction: Obama will overdose on the propaganda (watch especially, if he mentions Muhammad, if next he says ‘PBUH’ or ‘praise by upon Him’), ride gently with the truth, talk moderately but firmly in support of the two-state solution, and slide by the tough pluralist part. The reason, I think, is his desire to end the GWoT or at least tone it down, to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as possible, and then do what he really wants to do and spend where he really wants the US budget to go – on the US welfare state. If he can pull us out of the wars, draw a cool peace with the ME, and then add universal health care and green energy to the New Deal and Great Society, he will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever.

What I Learned at a Buddhist Temple Stay

Posted on by
Reply

About 6% of the world is Buddhist, and about 20% of South Koreans. Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand,as well as Japan (sort of) are the big Buddhist countries. Of course China and NK would be heavily Buddhist too if they permitted freedom of religion.

Buddhism is, thankfully, not that important for IR or world conflicts. Buddhism is not focused a deity and so lacks the ‘my-god-is-the-right-one’ theistic furor that sets Islam, Judaism, and Christianity against each other. When Huntington argued for an East Asian civilization grounded in Buddhism and Confucianism, Asians yawned, but for the dictators who wanted to use ‘Confucian values’ as a legitimizing prop. Monotheists will slaughter each other over doctrine, but Buddhists rarely do (possible exception). They seem to find it bizarre that monotheists would war over catechistic mythologies like Muhammad’s flight to Jerusalem or which way to make the sign of the cross. I find this terribly liberating. This is another of the great benefits of living outside your own culture. The locals see things you never would, in this case, the idiocy of monotheistic absolutism. I always tell my students when I teach the GWoT how nice it is to live in a place where religion is not a fraught contentious social division one must tip-toe around. Buddhists seem far more open to criticism than Muslims or Protestant evangelicals particularly, with their bitter insistence on the literalism of the Bible or Koran, creationism, female sexual restriction, or deitical supremacy. And I find it disappointing that exactly this sort of burning Protestantism is making inroads into Korea. Charismatic evangelicalism is a big wave here. The nocturnal skylines of Seoul and Busan are filled with (rather creepy) neon red crosses. Every time I go to the Busan train station I get harangued by protestant ideologues at the escalator telling me I am going to hell if I don’t embrace Jesus. Ah, how nice to be reminded of Jesus Camp and the Bush years even here so far away…

So off I went last weekend to a ‘temple stay’ at the big Buddhist temple in southeast Korea – Beomeosa. Basically you live like a Buddhist monk for 24 hours. Here a few thoughts.

1. Religion as an endurance test! If you thought Catholic weddings or praying 5 times a day were rough, then try Buddhist bowing. A full Buddhist bow (to images of the Buddha and other major monks, as well as important monks you meet in person) requires great dexterity, particularly ankle and knee strength, and you do it a lot. About half the participants in temple stay were curious westerners like me. We really struggled, as the full bow requires you to go down to the floor and then back up without supporting your body weight with your arms. You could hear knees cracking all over the place. My girlfriend laughed at my pathetic ability and pain. On top of that we had to get up at 3 am for morning prayers and then hiked up a mountain to a shrine. Koreans like to hike up, not across. I think I lost weight by the end of it.

2. Metaphysics instead of theology. We didn’t learn too much theology, and then I remembered of course, that Buddhism doesn’t really have a logic of a god. So instead, it was a lot of (fairly soft, I thought) metaphysics about self-abnegation and finding oneself within. The best account of this I read for a westerner is Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, but I have to say I find it a little depressing. I asked our monk leader if he didn’t miss having a nice glass of wine looking at the sunset or eating a delicious well-cooked meal. Didn’t he find life kind of dry and flat without these experiences (much less sex, rock’n’roll, nicotine, scotch, etc)? He just laughed at me.

3. Formalism. Chris Rock once said in a stand-up routine that he doubts God will make his decision to allow one into heaven based on what one eats. I must say I agree. I have never understood things like kosher or halal. Our monk leader told us that they don’t even eat garlic or onions, least they ‘stimulate’ the body too much. And then of course, came all the other ritual as well, so common in established religions. There were a great many rules about dress, the arrangement of bowls at dinner time, the manner in which to walk (double file line with right hand on top of the left in front of you), when to talk, etc. It seems to me that rules that start functionally (don’t eat pork because you might get trichinosis), over time solidify into precepts irrespective of other change, and then become central doctrinal tenets that determine to whether or not you get to heaven or nirvana. Will Haredim really make it into heaven because they wear those hats? Do I need to shave my head to achieve nirvana? Really? Do they even believe that?

4. Social science vs meditation. I found my social science training collided badly with quietude of mind the monks told us to cultivate. I am one of those people who can’t even watch dumb movies without analyzing them to death. So when we went on our meditation walk in the forest, all I could do is observe and think instead of clearing my mind as we were told to do. I drifted: What is the importance of this particular shrine? What kind of tree is that? Why are the pathways so uneven? I was supposed to be thinking of inner peace and calming my mind. Instead, I found myself wondering if Korea has liability laws, because on the dark, uneven path, you could easily trip and break your legs badly.

So I guess I am not cut out to be a Buddhist, but it was good exposure.

What President Roh’s Death Tell Us about South Korea

Posted on by
1

It is hard to not be astonished at the sheer scale of the South Korean grief over the death of former president Roh Moo-Hyun. TV networks estimated some 5 million people paid their respects publicly – at his home, in Busan, or in Seoul – in the last week. That is over 10% of the population. The western press response has been confusion and lack of coverage; westerners don’t really know quite what to make of it. Our chief executives pass away all the time, and even though it was a suicide, I can’t imagine anything like this social outburst happening in the West. Yet it was the top new here all last week, despite another NK nuclear blast. It was on the news all day long, and the country basically shut down on Friday for the funeral.

Something important has been unleashed, but even Koreans don’t really know, as the opposition is already trying to ride the wave as a political tool. So here are a few preliminary thoughts:

1. The FT fingered the most important insights. The connections between business and government at the top in SK are a textbook example of the problems new or transitional democracies confront in managing the economy, especially a growing one. One president after another in Korea has been investigated, usually with good cause. That Roh lamentably killed himself does not invalidate the possibility that he was corrupted by the kickbacks common in the revolving door between Korea’s political and economic elites. Business-family oligarchs corrupting politics is common practice in Asia. Growth plus elitist politics quickly breeds an informal corporatist system whereby ‘national champions’ – selected not for their prowess but their crony connections – receive subsidies and other preferential access to the budget in exchange for all sorts of election support and other sleaze. They become ‘too big to fail’ – with all the terrible inefficiencies that come with such a privileged status – and their success is easily frequently identified with that of the country. What is good for Samsung is good for Korea is still a common mindset, and this gives all sorts of leeway to the chaebol to escape market punishment by dumping costs on taxpayers. The IMF crisis helped reduce concentrated corporate power in Korea, but Koreans usually bristle when I say the crisis was good for their political economy in the medium- and long-term.

2. SK however should be congratulated for the diligence with which it investigates this corruption. Common practice of course is to sweep this stuff under the rug and pass of the costs to taxpayers. Weakly organized interests distant from power – ie, the voters – usually suffer while ensconced, politically influential interests set the national budget or business regulations. Think of Indonesia under Suharto, or China or Russia today. The IMF crisis revealed to Koreans the price of corrupt oligarchic corporatism, and these investigations, as nasty and political as they may become, at least suggest Koreans want accountability and take it seriously. This is another step in Korea’s democratization, and a necessary one. It is an awful irony on top of an awful irony that Roh stood for such accountability, then came under the light himself, and now might still be alive if the government was not so diligent in pursuing corruption.

3. The size of the outpouring of grief is the bigger story than Roh’s death itself. As I watched millions of Koreans publicly crying, even shrieking, I was increasingly reminded of the outpouring over Princess Diana. The grief process itself was a bigger story than the death. In the case of Diana, I must say it was embarrassing at first, but then increasingly disturbing. Her death was tragic of course, but a relic of a corrupt monarchy who enjoyed an unearned lifestyle of skiing and affairs enjoyed a mawkish sentimentality that suggested a shallow, celebrity-obsessed culture. There was a History Channel special top 100 people of the millennium two years later. Viewers could vote for candidates, and Diana beat out Stalin.

In Roh’s case the grief says two things. First, Koreans know how corrupt their politics is and don’t like it. That is a huge plus. That insures ongoing democratization – of great importance here in East Asia especially. The explosion of grief suggest there is a strong grassroots desire for better, cleaner governance. Koreans want their democracy to be vibrant; NK and China will take note, and that is good. By contrast, the grief over Diana was disturbing, because it suggested an unhealthy celebrity obsession, especially over royalty in a democracy.

Second, Koreans genuinely want their politics to be more open to popular participation and social mobility. Roh represented both of these trends, whereas President Lee seems to be drifting the other way. SK has a political culture dominated by a local version of French enarques. Pareto’s circulating elites are the Korean revolving door between business and politics – particularly the weak independence of Korea’s parties from the state. Roh had none of the usual enarque-style connections in the political class, and his education and career suggested that regular Koreans could aspire to the presidency. My students always giggle about Governor Schwarzenegger, and I have mixed feelings myself on his career track to such high office. But people like him or Jesse Ventura show how open the US political system is, and how social mobility is real in the US. The grief over Roh suggests Koreans want this too.

4. Finally, the outpouring reflects a feudalist, pre-modern tendency to see leaders as ‘fathers of the nation’ – an expression I have heard a few times about Roh this past week. This will fade as Korea has more and more presidents over time. Time – specifically more presidents over more time – will make the president’s office more institutional and less personalized. This too will be healthy, as the last thing Asia and developing states generally need is such ‘national fathers.’ That mindset gives you the identification of the body politic with one man – so obvious in NK, Suharto’s Indonesia, or China under Mao.

Give the IMF a Break Already

Posted on by
4

A week ago, I attended a talk by a Hungarian academic on Eastern European countries’ particular problems with the financial crisis. It was sponsored by the PNU EU Center and the Korea-EU Forum – good outfits both.

Ostensibly titled “A Hungarian Perspective on the Future of European Integration,” the talk quickly turned into a list of complaints about IMF conditionality during the current crisis. The audience was receptive; Korea went through an IMF bailout as well that turned the country upside down. The speaker heavily stressed that creditors must share with borrowers the costs of debt crises. She ended with a call for a ‘restructuring of the global financial architecture’ for this purpose. I heard Jeffrey Sachs once at Ohio State say basically the same thing. I am struck by how similar the left’s complaints have been about the global economy since the 70s. A couple of points are in order.

1. I’ve grown tired of the constant use of large-sounding IR jargon to obscure either unlikely leftist proposals (global taxes) or a lack of concrete ideas and notions (rich countries should be nicer). You sound a lot more important if you talk about the need for ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘new global structures,’ than if you actually say rather mundane things like the IMF should ease up on its inflation targets or Obama should push for global cap-and-trade in carbon.

2. The IMF is world’s financial paramedic. You only call it when the wheels come off your economy, and you’re careening off the bridge. It is bad faith to criticize the Fund when you yourself have caused the crisis – in Hungary’s case by a consumer spending splurge financed by borrowing. Nobody ever calls the Fund when times are good. Nobody ever thanks it for providing resources when no one else will.

3. The IMF does not in fact insist on brutal, one-size-fits-all conditionality, and the Fund has given one program after another to many countries, creating in effect a long-term development relationship rather than a short-term patch. (Read the work of Randall Stone and Ngaire Woods on this generally.) Frequently states welch on the IMF conditions, back-sliding or cheating. The real determinant of the details of conditionality is the conflict between great power interest in the borrower and Fund technocracy.

4. Debt relief has been around for a long-time. and creditors, shareholders, and rich-country taxpayers have carried the costs of LDC profligacy and wasted investment. Institutionalizing or regularizing debt relief would be disastrous, as it would immediate be discounted by private borrowers and likely reduce available development financing and raise its interest rates. More generally, it strikes me as dangerous fantasy to argue against the sanctity of contract, especially in such a high-handed way. This bites the hand that feeds you. If a ‘new international financial architecture’ really means making it easier to get debt relief, than creditors won’t lend to begin with. The moral hazard problems are quite obvious; as much as possible contract must be maintained and borrowers must carry the costs.

5. IMF reforms are usually necessary. Economies don’t just explode overnight. Usually the IMF gets involved because you ran your country off the road yourself. Structural problems pile up and lead to an meltdown. Korea’s economy is dominated by a corporatist oligarchy who sought to unload their costs on taxpayers when the easy money dried up in the Asian crisis. The Fund had nothing to do with this, and the crisis was useful for partially cracking the corporatist-familial lock on the economy that is so common in emerging markets. The Fund’s medicine was good for Korea.

6. You don’t have to borrow from the Fund if you don’t want to. Again, it seems like the height of hubris to bite the hand that feeds you. Some states found dealing with the Fund so disagreeable, they simply won’t do it again. If that is what you want, fine. That’s exactly the right attitude. My own sense is that that is risky, but ultimately that is up to you.

7. Can we stop implying that somehow creditors force borrowers to borrow? If your parents give you a credit card and you buy a car with it inside of paying for your college classes, that is hardly their fault. We are seeing the same logic today about the financial crisis. The Chinese made it so easy to borrow, it was irresistible for Americans to splurge. Gimme a break. Show some basic responsibility. Countries dig their own holes, and lenders only become ‘predatory’ when the mistakes pile up.

And remember the inverse counterfactual. If rich countries and their banks did not lend, then they would be accused of racism, neo-imperialism, coldness to suffering and poverty, and ‘not seeing the people behind the statistics (the credit rating)’. (That last is my all time favorite anti-social science banality.) Recall that this was exactly the logic behind extending credit to the riskiest in the US, which then lead to the financial crisis. Red-lining was racism; cruel bankers saw only credit ratings, not the young under-privileged family struggling for a home. It turns out actually that those credit ratings did have meaning, and ignoring them with implicit government backing has resulted in taxpayers paying the cost of anti-credit rating ‘social justice lending.’ It is a great irony that the World Social Forum wants to eliminate subprime mortgages.

IN short, if you want developing financing, then accept the strings that come with it; if not, then accept international red-ling (as Cuba and NK do). You can’t have both; money isn’t free. And the poor record of official development assistance suggests that free money for LDCs is not a good idea anyway. If you borrow from international finance, expect an IMF stricture if you blow the cash. That is how the game is played. Contracts are contracts, and the IMF is the closest thing we have to insuring their international viability. Try to imagine for a moment how much development finance would disappear without its backstop role. That is a far scarier thought.

The Deficit Matters After All…

Posted on by
14

Sometimes the dark or quirky side of me misses the Bush administration. Who can forget those ‘great’ Rumsfeld press conferences where he would attack the media (‘back off,’ ‘freedom is messy’)? Or Bush for his mind-blowing sillinesses (‘heckuva job,’ the ‘moo-lahs’ of Iran) and catastrophic English. Or Cheney (‘no doubt Iraq has nuclear weapons, ‘ deficits don’t matter’)? The political scientist in me can’t help, a little bit, but miss the sheer fun provoked by the endless stream of foolishness from the bad old days. R Gates is vastly superior SecDef, but for sheer entertainment value, you could always count on Rumsfeld to say something ridiculous on TV or Capital Hill and to provoke you. My top three ballonhead moments for W are:

1. When he ran in 2000, he was asked to name his favorite political philosopher and he said Jesus. For a nanosecond, the academic in me thought of Thomas Pangle. The moderate centrist citizen in me gaped in astonishment. To this day I remember that that line sealed my decision to vote for Gore.

2. In 2004 (I think), W was asked in a press conference what mistakes he had made. He said nothing for 15 seconds, before ducking the question. I remember exactly where I was when that happened, it stunned me so much.

3. In one of the State of the Union addresses, Bush said we could balance the budget without raising taxes. I was playing a SotU drinking game with a friend. I think I just about fell off the sofa laughing when I heard that one, and then again when I had to drill my whole cocktail in payment.

So now that reality has returned a little under the great O, another fine Bush era fantasy has just proven to be the illusion serious people always knew it was. It turns out the deficit does matter. How nice to learn once again what my freshmen learn in basic IR when we cover IPE and American power.

When W became POTUS, the deficit was under $6T. When he left, it was over $9T. Even while the economy was growing, we couldn’t balance the budget – which is a basic requirement if you want to borrow during the hard times (Clinton did this in his second term). Now the not-so-great-after-all O will give us trillion dollar plus deficits every year! Gah! I tell my Asian students this (gasp!) and then remind them who we expect to buy all those T-bills (GASP!). If Obama thinks they will just buy, buy, buy, he’s wrong. They may be great savers out here, but they’re not stupid.

Just in case you needed another W-era failure to reinforce your scope of what Obama has to fix, this is probably W’s worst pedestrian, everyday failure. It does not have the media glare and awful human toll of Katrina or Iraq, but this will effect the average American much more than those ‘highlights.’ And it is worse, because so few people understand it. You can see the awfulness of Iraq or Guantanamo on TV or when you travel and meet foreigners who loathe W and you have to tell them you come from Canada. But the deficit and the staggering debt have the kind of micro-effects only someone trained in economics can see in detail. This is not an argument for social science intellectual superiority; I mean only that it takes weeks of classtime for me to explain budgeting to my undergraduates, whereas they could grasp the Iraq mess pretty easily. The budget trainwreck is a complex topic. It is a failure that is easy to hide, dissemble about, or just ignore, as Cheney’s locution makes clear. But in myriad little ways, we must pay for this everyday. It sucks money from the budget to pay for interest on the debt (so we can keep a AAA credit rating in order to borrow MORE); it threatens higher interest rates and inflation should we lose the ability to finance it; it weakens US superpowerdom by placing vast dollar reserves in the hands of foreigners, especially China, who may not share our values. Consider, if China and Taiwan get in a shooting war, how hard it will be for the US to help Taiwan if China threatens to dump all its dollars abruptly.

So at least these people are out of government and some measure of sanity has returned. At least the Republicans can now be the voice of fiscal sanity in opposition they failed to be when in power. The irony is rich – an inverse of the ‘only Nixon can go to China’ notion. Only Clinton would try to balance the budget, because Dems are open and sensitive to the charge they tax and spend. The GOP under W went wild with the fiscus, because the usual voices for spending restraint (the Wall Street Journal, e.g.) were quiet.

Perhaps the larger problem though is we the taxpayers. It increasingly seems like the dominant problem is that Americans want government, but don’t want to pay for it. And ‘deficits don’t matter’ fits perfectly with such an attitude.

Guantanamo Recidivism

Posted on by
Reply

The Pentagon seems ready to assert that 1 in 7 Guantanamo inmates return to terrorism. It seems likely that this will encourage the recent backtracking on Guantanamo’s closure. Once again, we will hear about how the inmates are hardened killers who hate America, threaten it, do not deserve due process, deserve to rot in a hole, etc. Clearly some of them do. But it must also be admitted that 1 in 7 is not such a bad recidivism rate. 14.28% is actually not that exceptional; compared to US rates it even seems low. It is also not clear just what kind of terrorism they return to.

The knee-jerk response is to say that even 1 in 7 is unacceptable, so W was right that we should just ‘lock ‘em up.’ This is an overreaction I think. There is a political choice here to be made, unless we adopt Cheney’s 1% doctrine that even 1 in 100 is too much. But by this logic, just about anyone we pick up in the GWoT should wind up in a hole, because who knows what he might do if we let him out.

But think more politically about it. 1 in 7 is bad, but it could be a lot worse. 1 in 7 is a ‘reasonable’ or ‘manageable’ number unless we assert that the goal of the GWoT is to kill every terrorist on the planet. This is impossible and would require such extreme means that it would create more problems that it would solve. As we learned in Iraq, we cannot kill (or imprison, torture, etc.) our way to victory. We don’t want the cure to kill the patient. And clearly, the side costs of Guantanamo have been enormous – the reduction of trust in the US, prestige loss, the temptation to torture, hedging by traditional allies, etc. The reasons to close Guantanamo are obvious. Idealistically, it violates core American beliefs of due process, civil liberties, human treatment of prisoners, etc. Realistically, Guantanamo’s damage to America’s reputation and its use in inspiring moderate Moslems that extremists are right about the US, almost certainly outweighs its value. In short, if we learn good intel at Guantanamo, but inspire new terrorists and betray our values in doing so, is it worth it? Is it worth 1 in 7?

Probably not. The answer to 1 in 7 is not the 1% doctrine. Instead it suggests what the lawyers and centrists have sought all along – some kind of investigative and legal process for these people. It is amazing that almost 8 years after 9/11, there is still no proper legal framework for detainees. In the place of ‘lock ‘em all up,’ we need a method to investigate, rules of evidence & appeal, punishment guidelines, special courts if necessary, etc. This process may be different for terrorist suspects and illegal combatants, but the framework must be open for public debate, authorized by congressional statute, constitutional consonant (i.e., acceptable to the Supreme Court), and with proper oversight mechanisms. Problems like this will continue arise as the GWoT rolls on, and the executive branch ad hocery of the last 8 years is both legally confused and insufficient for the burden of people to be processed.

In short, we need to create a legal framework that will allow us to investigate, and if warranted, prosecute and punish these people. This is what we normally do with other lawbreakers. Let’s adapt it to these new circumstances. Clearly some of these people are threats, but also 6 in 7 are not. That is a pretty sizeable number. Instead of absolutist positions like the 1% doctrine, we need a more nuanced, professional and sustainable approach that tries to discriminate the redeemable from the truly awful. This is what courts and investigations do everyday. The requirement to do that here is no different, even if the method will be. And we must be prepared for some recidivism nonetheless. This is the price we pay for being a liberal democracy. We can do as much as we can, within limits, to reduce our exposure, but the 1% doctrine betrays the very openness, generosity, and liberality of our society that we are trying to protect.