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.

A Simple Palestinian-Israeli Peace Deal

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The outlines of a peace deal between Israel and Palestine are well-known. Political obstacles notwithstanding, the sketch of the final status agreement, whenever it might happen, will include some measure of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (WB) and sovereignty for the Palestinian in the WB and Gaza – the occupied territories (OT).

This deal is necessary for Israel in the long run, because there are nearly four million Palestinians in Gaza (1.1 M) , the WB (1.6 M) , and Israel proper (1.1 M) to Israel’s six million Jews. They are angry, unreconciled, and outbirthing Jews. If Israel is to remain Jewish-majority and democratic, the Palestinians in the territories will have to be cut loose at some point Originally (in the 70s), the Israeli leadership hoped that the OT Palestinians would emigrate or simply demographically disappear, permitting an slow integration of the OT into Israel through settlement (as happened in the new territory taken in 1948). This simply has not happened. Instead, Palestinian numbers are increasing, nationalism and Islamism are strong, and the dominant political concern of Palestinians everywhere is statehood. 40+ years of occupation has not integrated the OT; if anything the Palestinians are angrier than ever and increasingly given to radical measures. Israel cannot simultaneously remain liberal-democratic, Jewish-majority, and pursue ‘greater Israel’ by annexing the OT. Only two choices of this trilemma are achievable.

The semi-fascistic outcome would be annexation and Jewish-majoritarianism by harsh means – permanent reduction of the Palestinians to something akin to blacks in apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South, forced ‘israelization’ (whatever that would mean), demographic constraints on the Palestinians akin to China’s one-child policy, coerced emigration, etc. This is the reality of a maximalist Zionist interpretation and would likely perpetuate conflict with neighbors, drive Israel deeper into pariah status by forfeiture of Israel’s liberal democratic moral superiority to its despotic neighbors, and severe it from the modern democratic capitalist world so many Israelis desperately want to join.

The second alternative would forfeit Israel’s Jewish identity in the so-called (post-apartheid) ‘South Africa solution’ – liberal democracy in greater Israel. The OT would be annexed into a ‘multicultural’ greater Israel, and its demographics would simply unfold naturally. The current Jewish-Palestinian ratio in this greater Israel would be 5:3, with fertility rates favoring the Palestinians. The likely outcome would be a dissolution of Israel’s particular Jewish character.

Neither the maximalist nor the multicultural outcomes are appealing to most Jews. Indeed, most Jewish opinion in the US and Israel wants some fair deal for the Palestinians and dislikes the current regime of occupation and unceasing Palestinian/Arab resentment. So here are the elements of a deal the left, center, and some on the right – in Israel, the US, and the OT – could live with:

1. Jerusalem would be an open city under some manner of international governance (on the model of Kosovo or East Timor). The issue is simply too emotional, and both sides insist on a zero-sum outcome – a unified Jerusalem as the capital of its state. Clearly impossible, an easier answer would be Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital, and Ramallah as the Palestinians’. Separate east and west Jerusalems as mutual capitals would encourage revanchism, emotional rhetoric, and terrorism. Better that both be denied the prize.

2. Most of the settlements, particularly the wild-cat outposts, in the WB would be withdrawn. The largest settlements (around the ‘three fingers’) could be retained in exchange for land-swaps elsewhere. But these swaps must not simply be empty Negev desert near Gaza or the south WB.

3. The Palestinians would surrender the right of return to Israel proper and would not be permitted to maintain a national army in the WB for at least 20 years. Israel’s primary military fear of Palestinian independence is an Arab army west of the Jordan river. NATO membership for Israel would also help to ease Israel’s security fears.

4. With these borders in place, a large, nearly impenetrable fence would be constructed monitored by professional peacekeepers with no stakes in the game (South Korea or Australia, e.g.). Given so many years of enmity, the best mid-term solution is ‘good fences make good neighbors.’ Both sides need a break from each other, and physical separation will give each time and space to find its own way. Afterwards, discussion of economic integration may begin, but to start, strict separation will allow temperatures to cool.

Other issues remain – a Gaza-WB access corridor, the rules for exploiting the WB aquifer, the inevitable economic aid to the poor Palestinian microstate. But these are far more practicable – a heavily guarded, enclosed bridge and a dedicated air corridor between Gaza and the WB, plus water rights for Israel in exchange for economic aid to the Palestinians. And the entire package could be slathered over with US aid to buy just about off everyone.

This basic deal solves the conflict through mutual denial, ironically the best possible way to appease hardliners on both sides. No one gets Jerusalem. The Israelis lose the settlements and the dream of greater Israel; the Palestinians lose the dream of return and their military, a central element of sovereignty.

To be sure, no one will like this arrangement. Particularly, conservatives on all sides will bewail the loss of religious claims, but these serve more to fire the conflict than resolve it. In the place of ‘victory,’ this division allows a cold peace – but better than none at all.

Is It Cheaper for the US to Lose in Iraq/Afghanistan?: Costs and Benefits of Hegemonic Retrenchment

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This was originally written in the fall of 2007, but it applies to Afghanistan today as well.

Douglas MacArthur famously suggested, ‘there is no substitute for victory.’ War involves high costs, and victory is to redeem those costs. In rationalist terms, war should pay. Victory implies that payoff, and states should invest in success to achieve it. The benefits need not be material, such as territory or resources; they may be ideological, ideational, or in prestige. Hegemons and great powers particularly place great stock in victory because of perceived credibility and stature threats.

But the populist logic of MacArthur’s statement misses the shifting ground of costs and benefits in wartime. Sunk costs in lives and treasure expand; perceived benefits may wither; perceived costs to defeat may decline. In the history of US foreign policy, the rise and closure of the Vietnam War illustrates these shifting sands of costs and benefits. The domestic costs of lives lost, money spent, inflation, and domestic unrest rose dramatically. The benefits of victory became increasingly ethereal; South Vietnam was clearly a weak ally with little to offer for increasing high American costs. Conversely, the costs of defeat sank as US foreign policy makers realized that Vietnam’s loss would not in fact knock over many dominoes. Australia, Indonesia, and Japan would not ‘finlandize.’ The USSR’s experience in Afghanistan is similar. At some point, it simply is cheaper to lose.

Now apply this model to the current Iraq War. The cost-benefit analysis is (probably) turning against US involvement:

1. The costs of victory are skyrocketing. Estimates of the war range from one to two trillion dollars. Claims of a ‘broken’ army feed fears of imperial overstretch. A steady stream of American casualties from an unwanted nation-building mission has deeply divided and soured American public opinion. America’s global reputation and legitimacy are at record lows.

2. The benefits of victory are increasingly insubstantial. Iraq is back in OPEC. Maliki and the Iraqi religious leadership are no accommodating more of Israel than other regional states. No MWD were found. Iraq will likely be a failed/quasi-state, hardly a reliable or durable ally in the war on terror. Long-term US bases there would be controversial and attacked constantly.

3. The costs of defeat are lower than the US leadership believes. None of Iraq’s neighbors wants Iraq to become an Qaeda sanctuary; it is unlikely to be another Afghanistan. Small cross-border raids with drones and gunships (as in Somalia or Pakistan) will be possible should al Qaeda persist. The US has no clear national interest in the outcome of the Sunni-Shia civil war. Regardless of the outcome, the regional American alliance network will not likely change. Where else can the gulf emirs, Israel, Egypt, etc. realistically go for support beyond the US?

Yet hegemonic states figure in credibility as a cost particular to their status. US prestige concerns likely lengthened the Vietnam war by several years through the Nixon administration, as Soviet fears prolonged the Afghan conflict through the Gorbachev presidency. Both Nixon and Gorbachev promised to end the war but took years to do so. The current Iraq War again suggests that the hegemons will carry punishing cost/benefit equations for prestige. The question I propose to investigate is at what point do the non-prestige costs overwhelm hoped-for, yet hard to calculate, credibility gain.

Al Qaeda as an NGO

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Research Note

1. Argument

Since 9/11, the United States has implicitly treated its terrorist opponents as if they were states. It has deployed traditional assets of hard power against countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush speaks of a global ‘war’ on terror (GWoT) and listed only states in the ‘axis of evil.’ Yet terrorist groups themselves are structurally similar to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). While they may receive state-sponsorship, they frequently are an organizational embodiment of indigenous social movements. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamist groups emanate from the Islamic revival or wave since the 1970s, just as Greenpeace did from the environmental movement. That some of these NGOs or social movement organizations deploy violence distinguishes them tactically, but not structurally. Indeed at least one environmental NGO, the Earth Liberation Front, has slowly drifted into terrorism. Hence, warfighting counterterrorism strategies mischaracterize the opponent. This essay will first, map the structural similarities between terrorist organizations and NGOs through a comparison of Greenpeace and al Qaeda, and second, deduce counter-insurgency rather than warfighting policy implications for the GWoT.

As social movements arise – feminism, Islamism, Irish nationalism – they kick up non-state entities – NGOs – that agitate for new goals. Traditionally the literature on NGOs and social movements has implied that they are leftist or ‘progressive.’ From rising environmental concern emanates Greenpeace or the World Wild Life Fund; civil rights concerns generate the NAACP. Yet this logic does not preclude nationalist, religious, or ‘regressive’ social movements. Rising Irish nationalism in the environment of decolonization generated the IRA, as well as peaceful groups agitating for change. Similarly, an Islamic revival has gripped the Muslim world since the 1970s and created non-state, civil society groups to renew Muslim piety, some of which have reached to terrorism. That some, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, so blur the boundaries between NGO-style aid and charity work and terrorism, intellectually motivates my comparison of the two concepts.

2. Research

Several decades of research on social movements and NGOs has generated a general set of structural attributes of NGOs. For comparison, I choose Greenpeace, because it is a ‘classic,’ well-researched NGO case, and al Qaeda, because it is the best known terrorist group emanant from the Islamic revivalist movement. The following structured, focused comparison will be expanded in the full essay: Both are non-state and transnational. They are networked across borders through national chapters. These chapters have formal memberships, complete with selection criteria and bureaucratic jockeying over advancement, projects, and internal governance. National chapters are complemented by a wider but softer constituency of partially mobilizable sympathizers. Leadership is oligarchic and personalistic; charismatic founders tend to dominate, with limited circulation at the top. Both engage in fund-raising and recruitment within the relevant social movement. They are principled advocates; they seek deep ideational change in world politics. But the ‘deep politics’ of norm entrepreneurship is slow, and both are given to bouts of extraparliamentary direct action for immediate policy change. Neither seeks to enter traditional politics or morph into a political party. Both are media-savvy and engage extensively in public relations campaigns. They heavily use the non-nationalized, deterritorial space of the internet to organize, mobilize and fundraise at a global level for global change. Finally, like many NGOs, both share a general ideological disdain for US-led capitalist modernity.

3. Policy Implications/Results

The policy implications of this analysis, particularly for the current US WoT are significant. Islamism will continue to kick up groups like Al Qaeda or Hamas until the fervor behind the revival fades. As such, militarized strategies that target failed states are unlikely to reduce Islamic terrorism. Indeed, as the National Intelligence Estimates argue, the Iraq war has likely created more jihadists, because it plays to the most extreme variants of the Muslim revival. Warfighting counter-terrorism strategies significantly overrate the relevance of rickety, postcolonial states of the Middle East and Central Asia; they mischaracterize the opponent as a traditional state which can be reduced by traditional means.

If the opponent is primarily ideational – an inspirational social movement – channeled through violent NGOs, then a ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, complemented by containment and counterinsurgency, is likely a more efficacious approach. The model for future Western action in the GWoT would be not Iraq but the Malayan emergency of the 1950s. The norm entrepreneurship of Islamic radicals would be met by a contrasting, liberal campaign for hearts and minds. Where unsuccessful, Islamist regimes like Iran would face containment, and violent NGOs like al Qaeda would face counter-insurgency in fine-grained, patient, well-intelligenced, culturally-literate, small-footprint operations.

4. Method

The method is historical and cross-comparative. I will follow Alexander George’s prescription of structured, focused comparison. Along a series of generalized vectors, I will compare these two cases. The attributes listed above (section 2) are the general markers against which the two cases will be measured. The actual research will only involve reading. The relevant information is already in the public sphere. Because I wrote my dissertation on NGOs, I will likely circulate drafts among my NGO acquaintances; I will make a particular effort to solicit Greenpeace. I will also consult with associates from the CIA, homeland security, the military, and the other terrorism scholars in my professional network.

5. Literature/Contribution

This project contributes creatively to the international relations literatures on terrorism and social movements. To my knowledge, they have never been brought together before. Traditionally, social movement and NGO scholars focus on left-‘progressive’ groups like the anti-globalizers around the IMF and World Bank, or indigenous third world development groups. In Power in Movement, Sidney Tarrow noted that almost no one applies the tools of this work to rightist social movements. By contrast, the counterterrorism literature is dominated by Iraq, tactical considerations of how democracies should respond to terrorism, and state-sponsorship of terror. The structure of terrorist networks is simply taken for granted; they are like brigands or pirates or militias. But the operations of al Qaeda, Hamas and others suggest far greater sophistication.

So I believe I am creatively fusing two previously unaffiliated literatures. Applying our tools, as Tarrow suggests, to a conservative social movement and its emanant NGOs should yield theoretically interesting and policy-relevant results.

Globalization of Pluralism – Again

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Here is part 1 of this argument.

MNCs and NGOs are re-creating at the global level, what interest groups have long created at the domestic level. Where political interest groups emerged from domestic civil society and the economy to lobby government, the same is happening in the albeit less well integrated, global first and third sectors.

The global level has no public authority as integrated as a state. Yet it does, increasingly have policy processes that generate outcomes that apply to many states across many issues. There is neither global sovereignty, nor world government, but there is increasingly global governance. The pressures of globalization, particularly economic, but also social and environmental, have raised supra-state policy issues – human right, global warming, bank reserve ratios. States are not forced to submerge their will to supra-state policy answers – there is no world government – but rather strong functional and humanitarian pressures for coordinated policy responses. Globalization is not unstoppable, but increasingly states have gone along with its pressures to address problems at the global level. First and third sector organizations in states frequently demand such actions. Global governance, however, ramshackle and inefficient is the answer.

Globalization is the real-world driver of GG. As it elevates issues to a level of global concern, it creates strong incentives for global policy answers. But this does not explain the participation of nonstate actors in global policy making processes. In a strict inter-state model of world politics, GG would simply be regime building. But increasing actors from the for- and non-profit sector are joining the game. States could conceivably lock them out, and the most repressive do – the only voice from North Korea in world politics is the DPRK. But for an increasing number of states, preventing private actors from engaging in world politics, at least trying, is ideologically impossible. Democratization has driven up the costs of such repression. Surely Donald Rumsfeld would like to quiet Amnesty International’s harsh criticism of the Guantanamo detention facility, but to do so would violate clear norms, and in many democratic cases, written constitutional protections, of free speech. As more states democratize and liberalize, the most their internal private actors are allowed to make international connections, join the global economy and other global social movements. While GG has no formal charter to insure that is pluralistic, its most powerful state members, and an increasing number of the rest are liberal. Democratization has opened the floodgates, particularly for NGOs to spill into world politics.

Does the US Really Control the Bretton Woods Institutions?

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Research Note: TESTING REALIST INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION THEORY

A basic tenet of realism is that IGOs will reflect the distribution of power in their governance. Great powers will run the institutions and get more of what they want. The classic example of this in current world politics is the division of veto-wielding power in the UN.

Yet in my previous empirical work, interviewing within the IMF and Bank suggested that this is not always the case. In-house managers and institutional leaders had varying amounts of discretion. Day-to-day operations appeared almost exclusively beyond the direction of the GPs. Even some large policy issues seemed to swing in directions other than the apparent preferences of the GPs.

There is a transmission belt effect at work. The balance of power does not exist as a tangible empirical reality. It is reflected within the institutions; it must travel to them from national capitals. This creates room for slippage. Rather than simply suggesting, as neoliberal institutionalists do, that institutions can become sticky or gain self-confidence, I propose some specific hypotheses to explain why and how IGOs can in fact attain enough institutional autonomy to skirt if not openly contravene GP wishes.

H1. The role of GPs in IGOs will be reduced, if the IGO is primarily technocratic. It is not clear at all how America’s wishes differed from even the Soviet Union’s of Nazi Germany’s on the existence of time zones or postal details, for example.

H2. IGOs that can generate revenue internally can reduce their vulnerability to GP interference. The World Bank raises funds through the IBRD on its own. This provides it with some institutional autonomy.

H3. Presidential/managerial entrepreneurship can reshape GPs’ interests to align with the organizations. James Wolfensohn has dramatically reshaped the great power’s sense of the importance of development. A flamboyant, jet-setting advocate of poverty reduction, he oversaw a major expansion of the Bank’s resources, activities and prestige. Even the Bush administration agreed the poverty and AIDS in Africa were challenges it was simply inhumane to ignore.

H4. Great power stalemates create substantial institutional discretion. The split between large borrowing states such as China and Brazil, and donors like Great Britain, in the Bank and Fund over the role of NGOs, has created a stalemate at the Board level of the BWI on this question. The leaves management room to push around on its own, experimenting with how much change the member-state owners can absorb.

H5. Great powers translation of their global stature in policy clout within IGOs requires sustained commitment of resources and interest. It is not clear that many provide that. Even the United States’ Treasury Department only devotes, at most, 50 staff to monitoring the World Bank – an institution of 10,000 staff that turns over $20B per annum in new loans and generates enormous reams of reports. Without devotion to oversight, the reality of military and economic strength does not necessarily entail dominance or control.

H6. Epistemic communities and highly consensual knowledge may overrule the raw national interest of the great powers. The best example of this is the Bank and Fund’s continuing negative statements on OECD states’ agricultural subsidies. The powerful, deeply consensual global norms of poverty alleviation, and free trade seem to have overwhelmed the GPs’ interest in keeping the agricultural subsidies out of IFI discussions. Such ‘speaking truth to power’ requires deeply held and deeply consensual norms, but clearly the intellectual/normative hegemony of the rectitude of free trade and poverty reduction have placed agricultural subsidies regularly now on the IFI/world trade agenda.

H7. Great power indecision creates room for institutional experimentation and pathbreaking. While the logic of a high-profile bail-out to South Korea or Russia may be clear to the US, in many of the places where the Bank and Fund work, it is simply unclear what the GPs’ national interests are. IGO autonomy represents a manner of benign neglect. Does the US really care if Bourkina Fasso receives a dam project? Probably not. And even if it did, one can easily imagine countervailing interests (environmental NGOs vs construction conglomerates) who might undermine the unitary actor assumption.

None of this is not to say that the GPs do not get what they want. Where they are in agreement and show the requisite interest in a topic, they get what they want. As Dave Hunter of CIEL said to me, “if the US really wants something out of the Bank or Fund, it usually gets it.” But there are power translation questions on the transmission belt from the overall distribution of power to IGO outputs.

Little actual work testing the empirics of GP control of IGOs

Does it happen and what are the mechanisms?

Do splits among the GPs create room for IGOs to act autonomously?

Do IGO have some autonomy because without it they would be deserted by others?

So there is a trade-off between control and efficacy?

The US gets a lot of what it wants (in large terms of values, and in small terms of preferred loans or programs) in exchange for a minimal amount of autonomy. Miller Adams says the Bank is a good investment for the US – costs us little and gets us a lot

Process Tracing the Actual Dynamics of GP control of the IOs

Who in the US Treasury, State Department, White House, Congress?

What connection do they have to the Board and management?

How far down into the institution does US flow?

Does it influence on macro-policies and lending picks, or does it influence staffing and staff practices?

“The intense interest of the United States in the IMF sometimes borders on a proprietary interest. More than any other member, the United States has viewed the IMF as an instrument of its foreign policy” (Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 42)

The US is so important to the functioning of the BWI that external review of the IMF’s external relations strategy recommended specific liaison with the US Congress (2000 annual report 154) had a section specifically on outreach to the US Congress, and the Bank has had separate meeting with the Congress (and the Bundestag) as well, outside of its normal accountability channels (The World Bank: Its First Half Century, Vol.I, ch.7 & Vol.II, 653ff)

What is the transmission belt of US preferences into BWI policy and does it work?

Interview the US EDs at the Bank and Fund.

Find the number and positions of influence of US nationals in the BWI

Is there a correlation between the US percentage vote at Boards and its influence?

Does the US have more than 17.14% influence? Probably

Why can the US punch above its weight?

How do the Great Powers Control IGOs?

1. GDP-indexed voting

Both BWI have weighted voting which is maintained despite the formalities of sovereign equality through the leverage granted by their status as creditors to the poor. The choice for the developing world is between an IMF and MDBs mostly dominated by the GPs or no IFIs, at all, and NOT as NGOs would have them

think, between the current voting structure and a more democratic one

2. Thorough staffing of the Boards of, and missions to, IOs

See interview with Keith Kozloff and Leo Van Houten, “Governace of the IMF,” 2002, IMF pamphlet 53, p. 15. The GPs have the money and trained staff to fill out their national missions and offices at the IO, as well as build responsible offices within their own executive and legislative bureaucracies. There are offices and staff in the various responsible ministerial department, EBAs and legislative committees overseeing the actions of the IGO. Developing countries frequently cannot compete with this level of oversight. Hence the miss important information and are unable to participate meaningfully in decision-making.

3. Culture of IOs, especially IFIs

All of the major IFIs have their HQs in the North, are financed heavily by the North, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-nationals, are staffed disproportionately by Northern-educated professionals, and have internal codes of conduct that reflect Northern modes of professionalism and business conduct. The IMF feels like another organization in Washington, and is a part of the larger Washington ‘theater of politics’ – including external protests, media attention and close alignment with the Washington political calendar, especially the American budget cycle

Superpowerdom on the Cheap

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Reasearch Note

A typical notion in the history of hegemonic states is note the roots of their eventual decline in what Paul Kenneday called imperial overstretch. Large powers dissipate their forces in distant peripheral commitments and conflicts. These outstrip available resources. As the domestic economy struggles to create the requisite surplus for the military, investment and technology growth slump. Eventually, the hegemon must either retrench (Britain) or collapse (Soviet Union, Rome).

The United States is therefore an aberration. Far from overstretch, America’s ‘informal empire’ appears underfunded. A wide range of critics have argued that the greatest threat to American foreign policy goals is poor resourcing (Nye, Brzenski). A standard critique of US troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan concern the low commitment of US manpower and reconstruction funding. Before September 11, 2001, the Bush administration toyed with the idea of eliminating one of the ten standing Army divisions (Kurt Campbell and Celeste Ward, “New Battle Stations?” Foreign Affairs September/October 2003). And even today the Bush administration is adamant in its refusal to expand the number of Americans in uniform or raises taxes to close a budget deficit roughly equal to the size of the US defense budget.

Superpowerdom on the cheap is unprecedented. The result is a bizarre, by the standards of past empires, reach for influence without resources. The US appears to be attempting to learn the lessons of history before they are taught. Rather than end in the ‘inevitable’ predicament of imperial overstretch that has bedeviled hegemons from Athens to the Soviet Union (Kelly and Rowe 2003), the US seems to consciously trying to avoid it.

This is therefore an astonishing experiment for international relations. In the 1980s, historians of imperial decline like Walter LaFeber and Paul Kennedy were already writing of American decline. The Vietnam quagmire, the military retrenchment and economic malaise of the 70s suggested the US was going the way of other would be hegemons, only faster. The rise and fall of imperial states seemed like a law (or as close to a law as we can get in IR), and already ‘declinism’ was writing obituaries. Yet the boom of the 1990s suggests the 1970s were a slip dip, but not a serious reduction in American power.

The US’ current effort therefore should fascinate IR theory for two reasons. First, we must evaluate how successfully the US manages its balance sheet of resources vis commitments. This question is particularly relevant as America’s commitments are expanding in the wake of 9/11. Particularly, we must examine how the US strives to meet its commitments with minimal resources.

Second, we must examine whether US policy makers have in fact learned from the social research on imperial decline and are using that as a guide of what to do or to avoid. Professional IR theory and diplomatic history have provided a large body of work on hegemony. Almost all of it ends in generic predictions that hegemony is unsustainable over the long-term. Even Rome fell at some point. In dissecting the causes of imperial decline, important lessons on economic management, resources extension, ideological commitment, and domestic mobilization have been elucidated. It bears investigating then whether the knowledge actually changes the behavior of the current hegemon.

This discussion is particularly important for the philosophy of social science. There are tough debates within IR over the policy relevance of our work and over the learning capacity of statesmen. The (non-)use of the hegemony literature by US decision-makers has important implications for these debates. Were IR debates exploited within decision-circles to improve policy judgments, then this is evidence of IR’s policy-relevance, even if unattended. It would also suggest that learning is real. This is a sharp point of contention between realists and constructivists. Randall Schweller quipped once that learning is when policy makers do what academics want. Ned Lebow responded that is we don’t learn from social science, what is the point. American hegemony and its management is an important case for this argument in IR, as American unipolarity is the dominant feature of international politics today (Kapstein and Mastanduno, Unipolar Politics).

METHODOLOGY

Keynes famously quipped that self-described practical men are usually unconscious disciples of some dead economist. In the same way, evidence that US policy-makers need not be tied directly to a reading of ‘declinist’ historian or hegemony theorists. Abstract theoretical work often filters in larger debates through second and third had treatments in the media or praxis-oriented journals, like Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy in the United States. So we are looking for tropes and expressions that suggest an awareness of the declinist and hegemonic literatures.

Sources:

2001 National Security Strategy

2001 Quadrennial Defense Review

2002 Nuclear Posture Review

Interviews in the State and Defense Departments

The Prestige Dilemma of States

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Thucydides argued that states fight for glory, gain, and fear. This suggests that scarcity is a driving motive of interstate conflict.

However, gain is not scarce over time. Growth is not zero-sum. Although Grieco has suggested that scarcity competition will apply somewhat in a concern for relative gains, this is disputed.

But the case is clearer for security and prestige. Jervis has famously described a security dilemma in which an improvement for A automatically means a decrease for B. Security is a zero-sum game.

The same should be said of prestige, but there is little literature on this. The role of prestige is undertheorized in IR. Perhaps because it feels too ideational, it does not seems to appeal to the materialist/empirical bent of realism especially.

But the emergence of peace studies, a normative sub-branch of IR, has made this gap problematic. Peace studies frequently asserts that prestige and questions of political will are the driving force behind conflict (Barash and Webel, 166). Peace researchers are posting, implicitly, a prestige dilemma. Not all states may be equally esteemed, so prestige, like security, is zero-sum. Hence states may use compellance and coercion to advance in the status hierarchy.

A turn toward to prestige as a cause of war would serve the field. It emanates from the second image, and this serves the general move by the field away from structural explanations. As Schweller and Priess have noted (1997), Waltz’ work has become something of a straightjacket now on IR. They argue for nuanced explanations that draw from the state level. A focus on prestige answers that call.

Global Pluralism: States, NGOs and MNCs Around International Organizations

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Research Note: Global Governance as Interest Group Pluralism for the World

States, nongovernmental organizations and multinational corporations now circle international organizations and international regimes in pursuit of their interests in reasonably coherent global public policy process. To be sure, that process is still dominated by large and powerful states, but democratization and instantaneous communication have opened the process other actors – small states, as well as private and non-profit actors.

Realism has no account of non-state actors. To do so, would threaten its sense of identity. State-centricity is such fundamental assumption, that it has nothing really to say about my project.

Constructivism overreads NGOs as successful norm entrepreneurs. While they are norm or identitarian entrepreneurs, this does not mean they succeed in that entrepreneurship. It is a major flaw in the literature on NGOs and affiliated social movements, that it focuses so heavily on the conditions necessary for the successful impact on world politics. This selects on the dependent variable and ‘overprivileges’ constructivist readings of NGOs.

A far simpler explanation of NGOs’ role comes from liberal, or more precisely, rationalist institutionalism. Here NGOs are separate discrete actors, pursuing their goals against IGOs, and deploying various resources against them in rather standard bargaining environments and negotiating tactics. So NGOs protest on the street, write op-ed pieces in the press, attend conferences with representatives of the institutions, hire researchers and consultants to generate position papers, etc.

Hence it is far easier to understand NGO activity around IGOs as a global analogue to that of national interest groups around national governments. Much of the literature on NGOs is from a constructivist vein that focuses on them as ideational actors transforming the world order, compelling states, MNCs, and IGOs to ‘re-think’ themselves, or potential democratizers of an elite-dominated global governance. These large order claims are not wrong in that NGOs like to see themselves in these ways, but the empirical evidence to support a successful prosecution of these strategies is thin. In my work, liberal rationalist explanations of inter-organizational conflict and negotiation explain far more NGO-driven change at the BWI, than any expansive, macro-level claim that the NGOs have successful gotten the BWI to ‘re-think’ themselves.

Therefore, liberals need to intervene more here. I want to build a theory of global pluralism that scales up domestic theories of interest group pluralism. As globalization is increasing the need and efficacy of global governance, NGOs and other private actors are following the power. So as the WTO and BWI have gained in influence and authority in recent decades, so they have increasingly attracted NGOs and other private actors to them. In the same way we think of interest groups swirling about state governments in image of moons around a planet, so the same satellite model can explain the clutch of private actors now revolving around instances of GG.

INGOs as Transnational Interest Groups: After Social Movement Theory

INGOs are settling into a comfortable bureaucratic life around IGOs and International Regimes. As Weber noted, movements that began as charismatic, flamboyant, and spontaneous calcify into structures and institutions over time. NGOs are maturing in this vein. They are leaving the realm of social movement and becoming full institutionalized, expected, participants in global governance. Indeed, the regularity and ‘expectedness’ of NGO participation in global governance is strong evidence that GG exists. But the exciting, street-protesting days of social movements are passing. The fringe of dangerous anarchists de-legitimized the AG movement in the eyes of many in the major IOs of global governance, and more mature, cooperative, and better informed NGOs are stepping into the global non-profit space. While this heralds a more expertise-driven dialogue between NGOs, and states and IOs, it also foresees the ‘bureaucratization’ of NGOs into world politics.’ As the free-spiritedness of NGOs at the UN has been drained by the tedium of ECOSOC bureaucracy, so the World Bank, WTO and IMF are doing as well. Gone are the open ended parallel conferences of the 1990s. Now NGO participants at the BWI Annual Meetings register with the BWI to attend proto-typical policy seminars inside the buildings.

Can Global Governance Survive the Resurgence of US Sovereignty?

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Research Note

Thesis: The resurgence of American hegemonic pretensions threatens the GG project. It suggests a return to a strictly power-driven process informing bargaining outcomes. However the US will not wholly reject GG schemes for three reasons. 1. There are high costs to be carried by going it alone. Cooperation, even with NGOs, has real benefits to the US it will not be anxious to forego. 2. The US controls power domestically through process and law. It is proud of this achievement. This creates internal popular pressures for American power to wielded internationally through processes rather than naked or arbitraty displays of force which would be unacceptable in domestic politcs. 3. The US is pluralist. With a strong civil society tradition at home including its access direct to the public policy process, there would be high domestic reputation and ideology costs were we to seek to exclude civil society and NGOs from the international public policy process.

Why are these relevant?

Realism suggests to us that the distribution of military capabilities and economic capacity among states is the pre-eminent measure of power and ‘outcome-determination’ in world politics. By such a measure, we need not examine ‘global get-togethers’ like the UN mega-conferences or the smaller BWI meetings. The important decisions are made in the capitals of the state-system’s poles, and in unipolarity, there is only one capital that is truly relevant for shaping world political outcomes.

GG scholars respond to this critique in 2 ways.

1. GG theory understands the world political system more sociologically. World politics is a community exercise in administration and management. Few would dispute that states are the most relevant actor, however they move in a world of other actors as well as norms. There is a ‘constitutional architecture’ in which World politics is more communal than neorealism admits.

2. These many actors include IGOs, MNCs and GCS/NGOs. States are more powerful, by realism’s hard indicators on military and economic might. However GG suggests that hard power is not wholly efficacious for the outcomes states seek, and that power is more diffuse than states realize. States ability to win contests of national might are simply not relevant in most dealings in IR. It may be the ultima ratio in the high politics of security, but as Graham suggested in his models 2 and 3, much of most of world politics is low politics – bargaining, arranging, coordinating, sharing on mundane or highly technical issues. Issues such as the environment, trafficking (drugs, human, weapons), development, tracking terrorism and others are simply not amenable to national power traditionally conceived. In lieue of world conquest, even hegemons will come to the table anf bargain and deal with other states and other actors.

Global Governance

GG is the large web of rules and institutions that generate outcomes in world politics. It is the “constitutional architecture” (Reus-Smit) of the world political system and the beginnings of an international public policy process (Commission on Global Governance). Traditionally realists IR scholarship speak of global governance as the provision of a hegemon or k-group. Yet we have learned that much of what states seek to achieve is impossible or far more costly without cooperative global governance. To be more precise, global governance could be raw hegemony to the exclusion of other actors, enforced on the world by the unipole. But even in this era of unrivalled American national might, it hasn’t the power to govern by such diktat. In lieu of global conquest, GG is “complex multilateralism” (O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte and Williams) rather the unipolar fiat. We talk of GG rather than hegemony because the architecture includes more than the superpower and the great powers.

There is much that states cannot do for themselves. Many issues, such as trafficking, the environment or terrorism are not amenable to ‘hard power.’ They require cooperation. Power, the ability to achieve one’s desired outcomes, is diffuse in the world political system, not nearly as concentrated as realists would have us believe. Different actors have different capabilities. Even superpowers like the United States has use for NGOs (for information on human rights, treaty monitoring, or development aid delivery) and IGOs (for coordination and lower transaction costs) and private firms (for impartial credit ratings, e.g.) As Rosenau and many others have observed power cascades through the systems where there is social complexity. New centers of authority, specifically, authoritative knowledge arise. This is not the fall of the state, but the rise in the importance of other actors.

These points bear restating in an era of description of the United States as a colossus that bestrides the world (Economist). Despite the unrivalled might of the United States by the realist measures of military capability and economic capacity, unipolarity does not translate into omnipotence. Even the United States will pay attention to the smallest NGOs which have definitive knowledge in some area of interest. This understanding lies behind the continuing international architecture to which the United States belongs and whose conferences it attends.

1. The resurgence of hard power in international politics has once again proven the centrality of the state. Luck was right.

2. The traditional indices of power – military capability and economic capacity – were never irrelevant. Rather so concentrated in one state were they, that seemed to recess in ‘daily IR’ because almost everyone was bandwagoning or hedging. If everyone signs up for the hegemon’s project, unipolarity can be pleasant (Wohlforth, Stability). Because there was no balancing, in the 1990s the topical debates became did not concern national power. Other concerns like GG and NGOs arose, but only in the shadow of Unipolar power.

3. GG only arose because the unipole was liberal, plural and deomcratic. It is premised on liberal unipolarity. Had the SU won the Cold War, or were China to usurp hegeomic leadership, the cooperative, inclusive bargaining of GG would disappear. Because the hegemon is liberal, it would carry high domestic political costs and world reputational costs if it openly sought to exclude NGOs, MNCs and IOs from relevance. Yet illiberal states with no tradition of openness would hardly permit “complex multilateralism.” They would exploit their hard power advantages to leverage outcomes as they saw fit with little regard for non-state and weak state actors.

3a. There is a polict prescriptive element to the liberal hegemonic basis to GG. NGOs particularly should be more forgiving of the US. The only reason the unipole listens to it and forces some changes in the IFA, is because it is a liberal. If poor states think they are getting a bad deal under the US, imagine the other picks – China, Russia. Even liberal France should be expected to its unipolarity more exploitative than the US as it is an ex-imperial power.

4. However, global governance does try to include the role of the state in its ‘constitutional archiecture’ of world politics (Reus-Smit). “Complex multilateralism” does not debunk the state’s role, but rather seeks to accentuate the role of other actors. Hence the question is whether GG can survive in an environment when one of those actors is vastly more powerful than all the others (even combined). Luck has counseled IO elites not try to makes deals with NGOs around the backs of state decision-makers, because such a 2 vs 1 scheme will backfire due to power inequalities. The result will be state elites’ distrust of both NGOs and IOs and greater state supervision of IOs. (And this ultimately runs counter to NGO goals. NGOs endorse neoliberal institutionalism. They want autonomous IOs. They can be lobbied far more easily than greatpowers.)

Literature:

Peter Spiro, “The New Sovereigntists” Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2000

Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Present Danger” The National Interest spring 2000

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, “The Rocky Shoals of International Law” The National Interest winter 2000

Jesse Helms, “American Sovereignty and the UN” The National Interest winter 2000

John Bolton, “Should We Take Global Governance Seriously?” Chicago Journal of International Law, Fall 2000

Kal Rustia, “Trends in Global Governance: Do They Threaten American Sovereignty?” hicago Journal of International Law fall 2000

Commentary January 2000 Symposium on American Power

Stop Obsessing over Campus Academic Freedom

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This was originally written in 2005.

David Horowitz and a state senator in Ohio have pushed hard for an academic bill of rights for students who feel ideologically oppressed by faculty. And they are correct that universities are overrun with lefty faculty.

But I don’t really have the sense that there is an intellectual repression occurring. I know this is an article of faith on the right, but I am a conservative in my (unnamed) department. If there was some conspiracy, I think I would be on the receiving end of it. I just don’t see any evidence of what Horowitz is saying. He writes "The abuse of students and university classrooms for political purposes is widespread both in Ohio and nationally." Widespread? Nationally? I can’t speak for Ohio, but nationally too? Come on. I just don’t see anything to substantiate that.
But I will go one step further and sound openly naive to the right-wing blogosphere-types. I think lefty academics care pretty passionately about freedom of speech. Yes, they may think their rural students are benighted, or that the market is exploitative, or that W is an imperialist. And they are wrong on all 3 counts. But they are liberals mostly, not stalinists. They are more committed to pluralism than indoctrination. You sorta have to be a liberal – skeptical, intellectually open, critical of the status-quo – to be an academic. Conservatives hate that kinda talk. Smart conservatives are also open and self-critical – I try to be one of them – but that is not the general ethos of conservatism, with its trust in established social matrices and institutions.

The real answers to the ideological diversity in academia that conservatives want are:

1. Find a way to make academia more attractive to conservatives as a profession. The problem is not the persecution of conservatives on campus, but their poor interest in academia. I have never felt persecuted for my views, but I do notice how few other ‘righties’ there are around among the grad students and faculty. But when conservatives do come and they are serious, they can be comfortable. Look at the University of Chicago. Strauss and Hayek have lots of disciples there who are respected. The real problem is that conservatives go into the market and make money. They don’t come to campus to research. If I had to guess why, I would say it is the low esteem accorded college professors in the US. The right seems to think we are eggheads; Democrats have been far more welcoming of the professoriate and social science in general.

2. Crack down on politically protected departments/agencies/centers/etc. The snap between Cornel West and Larry Summers is an excellent example of this. I think there is a deep sense among academics that politically correct or ideologically preferred scholarship is protected/assisted/rewarded. Multiculturalism is ensconced in academia more than anywhere else in America, and I think it drives away conservatives who see it, correctly, as soft and politicized. If state legislatures really want to do something useful for America’s universities, they should look at ethnic and women’s studies departments’ scholarship, and the racial re-balkanization of student bodies. The post-modern departments too should deploy method and rigor, produce politically neutral investigations, and be measured by their ability to publish in serious, peer-reviewed journals. Normative ‘calls to justice’ or ‘expressions of rage’ are not what we are to produce. That’s for advocates and interest groups. Scholarship means data collection and dispassionate analysis, not poetry or homilies.

Unfortunately, partisan conservatives, like Horowtiz, and the GOP broadly speaking, loathe experts and social scientists. George Will has been saying for decades that we just dress up out lefty predilections in the language of objectivity. So I imagine there is little interest in my suggestions. O’Reilly would presumably scoff when I say that academic liberals are more committed to professionalism than ideology. But many years of experience with colleagues who reject my opinions say otherwise. And without a rigorous empirical study to demonstrate ‘nationwide’ oppression, I am hesitant to hand students another tool to make my life difficult. It’s already hard enough to get them to come, take the material seriously, be polite to me and each other, accept poor grades without seeing dislike or ill-will, etc. Now we are telling them that I am an ideologue too.

I think the right has won so much within government that they are starting to turn on other institutions where the left is still dominant – universities and public TV.