Category Archives: International Organizations

Korea and the G-20: An Exercise in Koreaphoria

Posted on by
21

P101025001

A street near my house got festooned with G-20 flags for a week.

There has been lots about the G-20 in the major financial press, but little on the way in which Korea has rewritten the meeting, at least to itself, as a global homage to Korea’s arrival. Most Koreans haven’t the slightest clue what the G-20 is. Nor do they really care much for OECD trading norms – which, of course, is the whole point of the G-20. In fact, they flagrantly violate those norms (as just about every western businessman I have met in Korea reminds me at every conference I go to). The ROK is irritatingly mercantilist, and Americans are right to think Korea cheats on trade. So if Koreans actually wanted the G-2o to be a success, how about dialing down the protectionism and currency ‘fine-tuning’ (i.e., sterilization of inflows to favor big exporters like the ship builders)? I am hardly one to defend the US auto industry for making cars that no wants to drive and that wreck the environment, but Ford nails it with this write-up. So the Chosun Ilbo says Korea should be a good global citizen, but that’s not what Korea really cares about in the G-20.  In Korea-land, the G-20 is an opportunity to preen, not what it actually is suppsed to be – a global economic coordinating body. In the words of no less than the SK president, the G-20 in Seoul means, “Koreans are great and that the world is now recognizing that fact.” Somehow I doubt that is what Medvedev, Singh, Kirchener, and all the rest had in mind. *Sigh*

The Korean press is nothing if not unprofessional and arriviste, aggressively desperate for recognition that Korea is a ‘player’ or, in the locution most preferred by the jingoistic media here, an ‘advanced country‘ (with the obvious implication that other countries are therefore ‘below’ Korea – ask Koreans what they know about Africa, e.g.) Start here and here, in order to learn that the G-20 in Seoul means that the whole world is watching Korea, that Koreans should be proud, that Korea is a global player, a powerhouse, a model, blah, blah, blah. Among other narcisisstic disinformation was the media line that Korea was the ‘first’ non-G-7 state ‘ever’ to host the G-20 leaders. Technically this is so, but the G-20 leaders have only met 4 times before, so it’s hardly as unique as it sounds. (This is preceisely the kind of faux statistic the ROKG and media love to create in lieu of something meaningful; try here for a simliarly desperate non-category – that Korean is a ‘top five food.’) But nothing could stem the self-congratulation. For the three weeks previous, there was a media countdown to ‘D-Day’ – yes, that’s what they called it. Literally, in the top left corner of the major TV networks’ broadcasts, there was a permanent ‘D-15’ (day minus 15) or ‘D-3’ graphic counting down to the big day the whole world would swoon over Korea. Perhaps my favorite moment in this bathos of self-absorption was the televised message on ‘D-1,’ by no less than the mayor of Seoul, that Koreans should be nice to visiting foreigners if they meet them on the street. Hah! How about the rest of the time for those of us who live here, huh? The last thing already hyper-nationalistic Koreans need is to be told that they should be even more proud.

I have said it lots of times before, but Korea is a really nice place to live actually – a lot better than the Central Valley – but then Koreans insist on spoiling that with over-the-top insistence that Korea is unbelievably awesome, and using almost anything to argue that Korea’s ‘brand’ – whatever that means – is on the rise. If all this sounds like the Tea-Party’s hysterical American exceptionalism it should.

For a more serious take on the G-20, one that actually recognizes Korea’s small size and its consequent limits, try this piece by a friend of mine at the Korea Times. Cho admits what Koreans know in their hearts, but adamantly refuse to admit to foreigners: that Korea is a bit-player, that it faces severe constraints in the future, and that Korea’s super-growth days are over. In short, Korea is a middle power, will remain one, and Koreans should accustom themselves to this rather than demanding, Uncle-Tom style, that resident foreigners recite a mawkish Koreaphoria.

Post-Western Global Governance?

Posted on by
4

bric

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asia 21, or the IMF Comes Crawling Back to Asia…

Posted on by
4

md_lee

1. For an organization regularly accused of wrecking the world, the July IMF-Korea get-together was a lark. 13 years ago in the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), the Fund pummeled emerging Asia with all sorts of tough but necessary reforms. And Korea, for an OECD economy, took a hell of beating at the time and never forgave the Fund. Never ones to admit they were wrong, Korean elites steadfastly refuse to recognize that the Fund’s advice was necessary and was the reason Korea bounced back so fast from what at the time observers thought was going to be a regional meltdown. And now, as the world’s money flows into Asia in the coming decades, the IMF has had to come crawling back. The irony of course is that Fund advice why the AFC lasted so briefly and why Asia returned to growth so quickly.

But no one EVER thanks the Fund, and now, with the Western powers traditionally supporting the Fund all bankrupt, the Fund desperately needs Asia. So after a 13 year mexican stand-off over the Fund’s AFC advice, the Fund has finally blinked. It has come back to ask to be let back in. For Korea this was a moment of triumph. Not one Korean speaker missed the opportunity to dredge up the old grievances, and not one IMF speaker had the professional courage to defend the Fund. Even Managing Director Strauss-Kahn (right above) didn’t have the backbone to defend the rescue package that saved Korea from default and an Argentine-style depression. Instead the MD told sob-stories about how the IMF refused to loan money to countries which included cuts in children’s services in their programs. See how nice the IMF is now! 15 years ago they were killing babies, now they are saving them from faceless bureaucrats. Make sure to blast-fax that to all the NGOs and the New York Times. Bleh. Strauss-Kahn has otherwise been a good MD after the last two forgettables. But he sounded so craven it was embarrassing.

But I suppose he had no choice. Asians so loathe the Fund that they are brink of building their own local version of it – the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI). 13 years ago the IMF was able to sink this idea, because Asia was broke and the US was the ‘indispensible nation.’ Now, the world’s cash is in Asia, and its debtors are in the West. The Fund can’t play so hard, and CMI represents a genuine threat to institutional relevance. Hence the peace offering at Asia 21.

2. The conference didn’t say too much you wouldn’t already know from reading the (required) FT and Economist, but at least Asians seem to be realizing the West won’t import as it did before and that the US stimulus was essentially sterilized by cuts in local, state, and consumer spending. This is progress. Two years ago, when the crisis started, the first instinct was to ignore the depth of the crisis in Asia’s major export markets and just wait for things to return to the 2000s status quo: massive overconsumption (and debt) in the US and much of the EU, coupled with a huge run-up in dollars reserves in Asia. Smart observers like Martin Wolf have been arguing since the start that an Asian buying binge is the fastest, safest way out of the crisis, but Asian elites would have none of that. Now at least, I had the impression that they realizing that the wild imbalances of the post-AFC pseudo-expansion are risky to even to them. But I still didn’t see a commitment to reverse the current account surpluses, only to lessen them somewhat. Not even this Great Recession can dent the Asian reflex for mercantilism.

3. There was a great deal of fear that Greece might spiral into a sovereign debt crisis throughout the OECD, and much hand-wringing about how the West could be moved toward structurally lower fiscal deficits. As a political scientist though, I found the answers to the latter curiously technocratic and formal. None of the speakers note what seems to me the obvious, cultural, answer – generational expectations. In the EU, the biggest problem for balance is not corruption, better tax-collecing, the Common Agricultural Program; it is the mindset that the work is ‘oppressive’ beyond 35 hours a week and 55 years of age. It is cultural or socio-political expectations that are the real limits on fiscal seriousness. A ‘social-democratized’ population taught that generous government is a right has made it all but impossible to get Europeans to live within their means. In the US, the primary problem with balance is analogous: an anti-tax commitment on the right that borders on paranoia. I can’t think of any serious economist who believes the US can balance its budget in the medium-term without tax increases – the deficit is now $1 trillion, so please tell me how to fix that without more tax revenue? – but taxes have achieved a totemic significance on the right that makes them nearly impossible to raise despite the obvious mathematical case for them.

By contrast, it seems that Asian populations are willing to pay their taxes and accept less social welfare redistribution. We say that the West needs to learn to live within its means, Asia has some good examples of that. South Koreans want low taxes and lots of goodies like anyone else, but I have never seen, in the press or my students or colleagues here, the suicidal drive to spend without taxing that has become the curse of the contemporary West.

4. A quick tip to the IMF guys at these big conferences: maybe you shouldn’t clique up so much and be unfriendly to everyone else; that is why people think you are a big conspiracy. I defend the IMF all the time, but really, the IMF does bring some of the conspiracy thinking on itself. A little people skills would go a long way – how about not giving the impression that the rest of us are wasting your time? I have been to many conferences with IMF types (I wrote my dissertation on the Fund), and again and again I have seen them tie-up together in little knots, where they whisper (yes, whisper) among themselves, and generally not talk with the others as much. Not only is it the royal blow-off to the rest of us, it creates among the suspicious the perception of a disinterested priesthood. I guess global domination means they don’t have time to talk with some lowly political scientist. Hah!

The Chiang-Mai Initiative is Freaking Out the IMF

Posted on by
8

 imf-logo

For some basic details on the IMF’s relevance in this post-Great Recession world, try here. Or read the IMF’s own publication, Finance & Development, which obsessively navel-gazes over the IMF’s own role.

So last month, I was a selectee for an internal IMF research project on its continuing relevance in Asia. Yikes! That should set off alarm bells. Neither the cover letter nor the interviewer mentioned the Chiang-Mai Initiative (CMI), but it was clear as day if you know about Asian attitudes toward the IMF. In short they loathe it. In fact, they loathe it so much, they want to build their own local version. After the Asian financial crisis (AFC), Japan proposed an “Asian Monetary Fund” (AMF), which the US shot down. At the time, the US was the indispensible nation at the end of history. What all that ‘America-is-awesome’ rhetoric really meant was that we were the uncontested hegemon with our fiscus in order, so we could push the Washington Consensus pretty hard. Today though, the US is a mess, and Asia is feeling its oats. So here we are again.

It was pretty easy to see from the questions that the IMF is really nervous about this. CMI is basically the AMF warmed over, although no one wants to come out and say so. Asians want it, because when the AFC hit, the IMF conditions on the bail-outs were tough. But unsurprisingly they were necessary – really necessary actually. Asian economies are far too export-dependent, mercantilist, corrupt, and oligarchic, and the Fund helped somewhat loosen the death-grip of politically-connected conglomerates on the economies out here. As usual, the Fund was demonized for providing good advice that was necessary. One reason why the AFC was so short, and the region’s economies bounced back so fast, was the IMF’s necessary pain. But no one ever thanks the Fund. It’s far easier to blame it for domestic political point-scoring.

So this time, the Asians are going to create their own currency pool, with their own Asian rules – whatever that means. In a way, one could see as part of the Great Recession-inspired fantasy of ‘de-coupling.’ (Tell me how you decouple from globalization and not fall behind lightning fast?) But they say, Asia should look inward, with its own rules and such. The irony, of course, is that conflict has already erupted between the likely lenders (China and Japan) and the likely borrowers (ASEAN) over what the rules over the loans should be. It’s the clash over conditionality all over again – except far more demur and behind-closed-doors, because of ‘ASEAN Way’ sensitivities that Asian countries should not publically criticize each other (lest that open the door for Western lecturing and preening). Asian leaders love the CMI for the distance it creates from the West and the Fund, but the fight over rules-set will mirror those of the Fund. The other big benefit for Asia, or rather for its elites, is that an neo-AMF/CMI will be far kinder toward ‘state-capitalism’ – all the rage now, as it is supposedly superior to liberal economics. The CMI will provide bail-outs and conditionality which push Southeast ASEAN borrowers to modernize as Northeast Asian donors have – directed state investment, aggressive mercantilism, (semi-)closed politics.

This is unfortunate to my mind for two reasons:

1. Obviously, propping up authoritarians capitalism has an anti-democratic ring to it. The last thing, politically, that Southeast Asia needs is more cheerleading to concentrate political-economic power in a small, almost-closed elite. Insofar as the Fund promotes economic neoliberalism, there has always been an oblique pressure to openly politically therefore as well. This will now be lost, as the CMI is certain to follow the ‘ASEAN Way’ of no political commentary.

2. If you bracket this political concerns, there are clear economic worries. A CMI fractures the global financial system, just as the proliferation of free trade areas in Asia is fracturing the WTO universal trade system, and Chinese pressure increasingly threatens to regionalize the Internet. This year’s ‘multilateralization’ of the CMI means it is now a genuine systemic-institutional threat to the Fund. This is almost certainly the proximate cause of the worried IMF survey on its relevance.

So I felt bad for the Fund (who EVER says that?) All the questions from the interviewer were about the Fund’s continuing relevance, what its role in Asia should be, and perhaps most telling, should it have a role? That inspired real discomfort.  I can only imagine what interviewer heard from Koreans – who feel they were turned upside down by the IMF even though the bail-out probably prevented street rioting – and Indonesians- where the AFC did end in street rioting and government collapse. The prime minister of Malaysia at the time even said the AFC was caused by ‘Jewish speculators.’

I should only add in the Fund’s defense that when I talk with Koreans and other Asians, most have no good sense of what the IMF should do differently, because most have no grasp of what it actually does. All will tell you that it should reform, but like most of the anti-globalization protestors, their ideas are vague or indicate that they don’t understand the, albeit highly technical, IMF. (I even wrote my dissertation on this topic.) Most seem to think that the bailouts should come cost- and change-free, but all that does it move the costs somewhere else – to the OECD taxpayers providing the Fund’s bailout resources – nor does it help clear up the problems that created the crisis in the first place. The great irony is that although Asians loathe the Fund, they actually learned the appropriate lessons from it in 1997 and were much better able to withstand the next crisis in 2008, the Great Recession. Pity the Fund. It does its job pretty well, but everyone hates it anyway…

Under-Institutionalization in Asia

Posted on by
4

Asean

This is an article proposal for the Asian Studies Conference Japan. A friend works there; its a good outfit. You should take a look.

Proposal: “It is a commonplace in research on international security and economics in Asia to call for greater, thicker institutionalization similar to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the European Union. Not just East Asia, but most of the continent is comparatively poorly institutionalized. The Six Party talks on North Korea collapsed rather than evolve into a hoped-for ‘Northeast Asian Concert.’ The Association of South East Asian Nations is weak, having failed to coordinate well against either the Asian Financial Crisis or the Great Recession. ASEAN spin-offs like the ASEAN Regional Forum or Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) have done little. In South Asia, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has essentially been sidelined by, rather than help to alleviate, the Indo-Pakistan competition. In the Middle East, the Gulf Cooperation Council is a self-protection club for monarchs, not a multilateral forum for dispute resolution or integration. This paper investigates today why even Africa is today even more institutionalized than Asia, especially East Asia. Repeated calls for thicker institutions fail for reasons local elites are loathe to admit. Deep divisions over territory, religion, ideology, and memory divide states across Asia. Territorial issues like Dokdo/Takeshima, Kashmir, or the West Bank are similar across the continent. Historical issues like the conflicts over Japanese colonialism or Israeli behavior are similar as well.  Accelerating democratization will only worsen these divides as entrepreneurial politicians fire populism for electoral and legitimacy gain. Despite regular academic calls to institutionalize Asian security, this – much less security communities as we see in Europe and the Western Hemisphere – is unlikely.”

I could cut out the bit on SE Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East, and only focus on NE Asia. But it strikes me that security institutionalization across ALL of Asia is pretty bad.

I am pretty pessimistic on institutionalization out here. Those who say that Asia’s future is Europe’s past seem right to me. East Asians just don’t seem ready to really build a serious multilateral forum. They just don’t like each other enough. It is pretty politically incorrect to say that, but things like the EU, NAFTA, or the OSCE require a modicum of good will and shared values among the participants. Simply trading for greater profit is not enough. SK and Japan, and Taiwan and China trade, but they still loathe each other. As long as my Korean students tell me they are ready to go to war over Dokdo (!) and they watch Japanobic movies like this, then you can forget an Asian or East Asian Union. South Asia too isn’t ready; the Indo-Pakistan conflict – including its talibanic addendum in Afghanistan – paralyzes everything. And it hardly needs to be said that regional integration is utopian in the ME.

It took the Europeans 3-4 centuries of bloody brutal conflict before they agreed to seek security through integration and cooperation rather than domination. You’d think after Asia’s violent 20th century, they would have learned that too. I guess not. As another western scholar out here said to me in extreme irony, ‘they’re just one more good war away.’ Sad but true, perhaps?

Tell Fox News that Gordon Brown Has Joined the Global Conspiracy

Posted on by
15

anti-united-nations The prime minister of Britain says a lot of good things about global coordination to overcome shared, global problems in his recent op-ed. But I am pretty stunned at his concluding remark that we should ‘create the first truly global society.’

The idea of course has a lot to recommend it. The global scale of some problems (global warming, terrorism, drugs) suggests we need globally-scaled solutions, and a global society, or ideally a world government (WG), would be able to coordinate that a lot more easily than the messy, choppy circus of multilateral meetings that passes as ‘global governance’ today. When I teach International Organization, I spend a week or two on the counterfactual of WG. We talk about what the benefits might be, why it has not happened, what its prospects are, how it might be organized, etc. (If you are curious about some detailed ideas, try here.) The economies of scale and efficiency benefits of WG are basically the same as those of any integration scheme – NAFTA, the EU, ASEAN, etc. And there is a great logic question in why human political organization has risen to the level of the sovereign state, but no further. In other words, we progressed from families to tribes to city-states to nation-states, and some of our nation-states are continental-sized. But we have not moved to WG. Why not?

The best answer I can think of is nationalism. And this is why Brown’s remark shocked me so much. The big reason we don’t have a ‘global society,’ much less WG, is because no one wants it. People remained deeply psychologically wedded to their nation, even if those nations are recent, artificial, rickety, etc. Look at how much the Iraqis want the US to leave even though the Iraqi ‘nation’ feels like a myth. Or consider how hard European integration has been. Yes, there are organizational problems with the EU that hamper more integration. The EU is a bureaucratic morass that only specialized academics fully grasp, but this is a second-order reason. The EU would work better if the EU’s citizens really wanted it to, if they really felt like ‘Europeans,’ not Irish, French, Poles, etc. Then they would vote to give it real constitutional and organizational clarity. But the Eurobarometer evidence does not suggest that Europeans are shifting their cultural-national allegiance and identification from their national community to the European one.

If the postmodern, ‘we’don’t-have-militaries-anymore’ Euros can’t forge a continental identity, then how can the rest of us possibly build a ‘global society’? And certainly, the US, the audience of the Brown op-ed, is dead-set against this. The American Right thinks state health care is the beginning of socialist tyranny, and before 9/11 John Bolton called global governance the greatest threat to the United States. The American Right is deeply committed to American exceptionalism. Serious talk of a ‘global society,’ much less a WG, would provoke a huge backlash. To the US right, Kyoto was a major breach of US sovereignty, and even NAFTA may be a bridge too far. I can only imagine American conservatives flipping out on reading that line by Brown. Can you picture the Fox News hysteria if an American official actually concurred with the leader of our most important ally? Glenn Beck would be in tears again, and there’d be rioting in the streets…

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.

Reweighting the IMF Vote

Posted on by
Reply

A friend wrote to me:

"I am all for readjusting the world institutions to reflect new balance of power. the problem is are these countries ready to lead and other ready to follow. yes India and China and Brazil have big economies but will they contribute to the fund on focus on their daunting domestic problems? Do they have a viable plan or are they just interested in rejecting the US plan to show their muscle? Can their marshal the world behind them – is the world ready to follow the Indian or Chinese plan for development?"

My thinking:

They are ready to free-ride and play spoiler – just like the EU and most of NATO. Why do anything else? Why not ride a declining hegemon – if that is what we are – right into the ground? That is what we did with the Brits from 1914-45, that is what the euros did in the 70s (when folks like Kissinger said the world had become multipolar after Vietnam and they euros still walked away from burden-sharing), and the Japanese did in the 70s-80s even after they hardly needed preferential US market access anymore. I expect nothing from the Chinese and Indians in terms of world order provision. Hell, the euros can’t even find a few combat brigades and helicopters for Afghanistan, and they’re allies.

Thankfully, any reweighting in the IMF toward Asia will occur at Europe’s expense, not ours. Ironically, the US vote in Bank and Fund is smaller than the US percentage of global GDP. It’s the EU vote that is way oversized. So let the Europeans and Asians fight it out. Its not our concern.

Al Qaeda as an NGO

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.