5 Things I Like about Korea

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I guess it was inevitable that I post this sort of list. Just about every expat blogger in Korea does. Frequently this degenerates into blather and mawkish navel gazing, but then I have found that Koreans seem to like this sort of ‘tell us what you think about us, foreigner?’ stuff more than we do. Yakking about Korean culture is a cottage industry for Koreans, and the breadth of the cultural gap means the westerners here usually have lots to say too.

As for my qualifications to pass judgment, they are – of course – pathetic. I have only been in country 7 months. I don’t speak Korean. Most of my time has been spent in Busan, Seoul, and Pyongtaek (where Korean friends live). On the upside, I have a Korean girlfriend, and I work with and teach Koreans regularly.

1. The Food

This was pretty unexpected. Like most Americans, I think, my sense of Asian food was Chinese (mediocre take-out usually) and Japanese (cool steakhouses and sushi). I had a sense that Vietnamese food was distinct, but not Korean. I don’t think I ever saw a Korean restaurant in Ohio, where I lived most of my life in the US. What a surprise when I got here and learned that Korean food is pretty unique. Given how culturally close Korea is to China, this surprised me. And the food is quite good too. But like most westerners here, I think I have begun to overdose on rice and kimchi with every meal.

2. Bustling Cities/Nightlife

Too many American cities lack a good street life because of crime, suburbanization, bad downtown parking, whatever. But Korean residence patterns (ie, the lack wide sprawling suburbs) insure that large numbers of people live in close urban contact. Korean communitarianism (IMO, see point 5) keeps crime down and the streets safe (see point 3). Finally, Koreans seem to love hanging out after work in bars, clubs, salon rooms (bangs), etc., so there is always a mass of people to go mix and move with. Its fun.

3. Safety

I find Korea mercifully, blessedly safe. I have seen 8 year old girls prancing down the street alone (although aren’t parents worried about accidents?), or young women alone at 2 am in short skirts and heels walk by me on a darkened street without even throwing a glance. Also, I told friend how nice I found the lack of a serious drug problem in Korea. He asked me if I meant marijuana. Of course, I had in mind the meth explosion in the US, ecstasy which is all over American campuses, the heroin and coke problems that are driving Mexico to disaster, but if Koreans think marijuana is hard drug, that’s fine with me.

4. Quality Public Transportation

Like the Europeans, Koreans have got the bug for good public transportation (even if they promptly waste it by buying so many large cars and causing traffic jams all over the place). And the intercity fast trains (KTX) are better than the French TGV or DB ICE. In another experience of ‘why-can’t-this-stuff-work-so-well-at-home?,’ I find Korean urban transportation safe, clean, cheap, and timely. Nice.

5. Communitarianism

Contrary to America’s usual individualist leaning on the communitarian-liberal split, I must say I like Korea’s community cohesiveness. Koreans I know who dislike it, say that Korean is collectivist. I think that is an exaggeration. It is disturbing that this seems based mostly in shared ethnic-linguistic tradition. It makes it tough for outsiders to join, and Koreans seem to overreact to minor foreign crime. But still, it is admirable to watch Koreans think more collectively about national welfare than we do.

Bonus Banalities I Refuse List:

I tried to be concrete in this list, because usually these exercises degenerate into third-rate sociological bathos. So here is the usual trite cultural mawkishness we all know shouldn’t pass as insight. The usual banalities offered to foreigners on arrival anywhere include: We are very friendly, warm, and hospitable. Our culture is great, unique, old, rich. Our heritage is respected worldwide (cue UNESCO). Our grandmothers are the pillar of our culture and the repository of social wisdom. We are multilateralists and global citizens who love foreign guests. Our technology is cutting edge and that means we are modern and building bridges to the world. We are a regional cultural/economic ‘hub.’ Bonus snarky potshot if you are lucky and a US foreigner: we are nicer than you because George Bush ruined the world.

None of this flim-flam applies to Korea (nor anywhere else, as it is just cheesy pop multiculturalism). Every state community is unique of course, but usually in ways that aren’t that mind-blowing. So yes, Korean grandmothers are salt of the earth, but so are Russian babushkas. I don’t think Koreans are anymore friendly or charming (or rude) than any of the other non-Americans I have met. That doesn’t mean they aren’t nice, but that there is nothing particular about Korean hospitality that sets them aside. Nor do Koreans seem to possess any more gnostic wisdom on the secrets of the good life than any other culture I have experienced. Nor are they any more globalized and less nationalized. In short, their ‘culture’,’ like everyone else’s, is malleable and differentiated enough that these mindless ‘culture studies’ generalizations are just propaganda easily turned to fit your likes/dislikes. All in all, I find Korea a good place to live – a pleasant, (farirly) green/clean, wealthy, liberal democracy tolerant of social pluralism while trying to maintain a national integrity. That should be enough for anybody.

Russian Paranoia Update: Stalin Saved the Earth from Alien Invasion

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This video takes the cake for sheer goofiness and bizarreness as a cultural marker of Russia’s decline from superpowerdom to paranoia and dysfunction. Sure American videogames have used the USSR in similarly ridiculous ways (especially the uber-campy Red Alert series), but Russia is a far more controlled society than the US. It seems reasonable to assume that video games, as media, are informally censored along with the serious press. So why not make a video game lionizing Stalin!

Just make sure you watch the trailer. Watching Stalin dance to vanilla techno will be the surreal moment of your day. Enjoy!

Medvedev & Russia’s Hankering to be a ‘Player’

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s WaPo on the so-called reset on relations with Russia. It wasn’t ground-breaking but at least he tried. As best I can remember, Putin never even bothered to try to solicit western opinion with something like this.

Most of it is boilerplate, but a few remarks stood out.

1. Medvedev is, rightfully, worried about American treaty behavior. Thank W for this unhelpful legacy. One quick and easy change Obama could make would be to firm up the US general commitment to abide by its treaty obligations and to generally look to make such deals where they work in the national interest and accord with our values. Differently put, the Constitution requires that treaty obligations supercede US law. Everyone knows this. So let’s get back to honoring the required commitments already. Further, there are a number of easy treaties to clinch with the Russians, especially on conventional forces in Europe and nukes. Let’s get to it already.

2. The op-ed smacks of a hankering for the US to take Russia seriously. Perhaps the most important line in the piece was the oblique reference to lost status by invoking concern for ‘all influential players’ to help on Afghanistan. Like France, Russia seems obsessed with lost ‘relevance.’ The importance of prestige and stature is know in IR theory, but not as well researched as it probably should be. (Maybe because it seems more about psychology than interest.) It is tough to be a power in decline, or otherwise demoted from great to middle power status. It must be humiliating to hope that the US, China, India, the EU, and other states we look to for the future of the global economy, increasingly ignore Russian opinion, unless the Russians make a fuss. So hijinks like the Georgian war, gas-shut-offs, and nose-tweaking on Iran steal the stage from more constructive Russia foreign policy needs – like peace with its Muslim periphery,  WTO membership and more FDI, export markets beyond oil and weapons, etc. Like the Soviet Union, Russia would rather be poor and relevant than rich and normalized. Korea is a good contrast. Koreans for the most part seem to realize that, even after unification, they will never be more than a middle power, and they have made their peace with that. China too seems to realize that being ‘a player’ means growth, prosperity, some seriousness in foreign policy (although the Chinese are likely to free-ride as long as they can – see below), etc. But Medvedev made sure to include a pointless reference to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – a club of dictators like the old OAU – to suggest Russian weight on Afghanistan. There is a dark irony in the loser of the last Afghan war counseling others how to win there. And he must know that no one in the US really cares much about or thinks much of the SCO. Even the Chinese hardly mention it. And for good measure, he threw in remarks about a new reserve currency and the even stranger “diplomatic support provided by Russia to the United States at critical points of America’s development.” I must say I haven’t the slightest clue what that means. Did some czar once say something nice about the US, or does he mean the turnover of Alaska?

3. The flap over the Chinese interest in another reserve currency is echoed here. Medvedev even talks about regional reserve currencies. But again, who takes this seriously from Russians? The ruble is far too unstable to play such a role, even regionally. It is not counted in the SDR basket, and Russia is a partially dollarized economy anyway. When they Chinese say such things, people will listen, but the Russians? And, by the way, what is a regional reserve currency anyway? The whole idea of a reserve currency is its role as a shadow global currency. Regional reserve currencies would be nearly impossible in a thickening global economy. Inevitably, global trade would push toward one standard. So serious regional currencies really would mean regionalization of the global economy. Maybe that is a route to the multipolarity the French and Russians seem to want to so much.

Recommendation: Missile defense is a white-elephant that doesn’t work. Trade it for something we need – help with Iran would best. But on a lot of the rest of the portfolio, the Russians want to play old-style great power politics that Obama should eschew. Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states are desperate for western interest and protection against Russian neo-imperialism. It would be a great shame if the west sold out Ukraine over gas contracts, and there will be blowback when eventually those areas claw their way out from under Russian power.

Prediction: The re-set will go nowhere. The Russians will overplay their hand by pushing the US all over EEurope and the Middle East – human rights, Ukraine, Iran, Georgia. Call it a redux of Kruschev’s contempt for Kennedy. Obama will get annoyed and push-back. US-Russian relations will return to the stalemate of the Bush years. And this is not such a bad thing actually. The Putin regime in charge has made it pretty clear they aren’t interested in liberalism and democracy, so right now there isn’t to much middle ground that doesn’t seriously compromise western values.

Reweighting the IMF Vote

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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.

Korea – First Impressions – Politics

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I have been in Korea 6 months. I thought it wise to wait a bit before listing impressions. I will try to focus on politics, but inevitably personalisms will creep in.

1. Foreign Policy

a. Getting Used to North Korea

When I was in grad school (Ohio State), we focused on lot on North Korea as an interesting case for deterrence theories, prolieferation, terrorist support & other rogue state activities. But here you just don’t see that stress. As several of my colleagues put it, we have been living next to NK for so long, we just don’t pay that much attention any more. Even now, with all the recent threats of war and escalation. What a surprise that was when I came here. I thought NK was the most important issue in Korean politics – and it is at a macro/abstract level – but the average South Korean seems to know more about the iceskater Yuna Kim or some celebrity scandal that Kim Jong-Il.

b. Japan

I saw one of those joke emails – ‘you know you’ve been in Korea too long when…’ One of the responses was, when you have a strange, inexplicable loathing for Japan. The IR scholar in me sees Japan as a critical democratic bulwark for SK, given its difficult neighborhood: NK, Russia and China. Yet this argument does not seem to move my students or friends much. Of much greater interest is the territorial saquabble over the Dokdo islands, and more than one person here has told me with a straight face that Japan will probably invade Korea again sometime. I can’t help but think of postwar France – restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and nuclear weapons pointed as much at Germany as the Soviet Union. Until Japan really apologizes – like the Germans did – historical memory will play a poisonous role.

2. Domestic Politics:

a. Restrained Presidentialization

Korean politics seems far less focused on the person of the president than ours. Korea is a semi-presidential system, so perhaps that accounts for it somewhat. But conversely, the National Assembly is far weaker than the Congress. So insitutionally, Korea does not seem more or less presidentialized than the US, but the media scrutiny of the daily schedule of the president is far less. I find that nice actually. It reduces the celebrity-rock star factor that can make US politics a little silly sometimes.

b.  Those Parliament Brawls

Asian parliaments are known in the West for their brawls, but I never realized how serious they can get. Wow. You Tube has some of these videos. Look for the recent ones involving fire extinguishers and the invasion of a committee room by physically removing the doors.

c. NK & the SK Right

NK really polarizes the domestic politics here. Conservative opinion particularly is staunchly anti-communist. It really does feel like a time warp back the first Reagan administration. The right is widely convinced that the Sunshine policy was a huge error. The right has also done a good job using North Korean human rights as a powerful political tool against the domestic left. In this the left is in a terrible quandry. Like Western European social democrats during the Cold War, the Korean left wants some kind of detente and Nordpolitik, but NK is simply so nasty to its people, it is hard to gain political traction. The right can easily attack the left for betraying the human rights of their ethnic brothers in the North.

3. Economics:

a. Conglomerates

Another lesson of grad school was how different Asian political economy was – particularly the role of the large conglomerates (kereitsu in Japan and chaebol in Korea). This is another one of those things I didn’t really grasp until I saw it. The logos of the largest chaebols are ubiquitous, and the western neoliberal will be disturbed to find a wide, seemingly unconnected horizontal integration. For example, SK, one the very biggest, is my cell phone provider, the owner of my apartment building, and a major gas station chain. Or Samsung – to Americans an electronics retailer. Yet here they are also in the grocery store business (?!), and they build cars as well. It is hard to imagine that successful cell phone providers somehow have a competitive advantage in gas stations too. Most western scholarship says this cross-sector agglormeration is politically protected, and when you see just how unrelated the sectors under the same logo are, its hard to disagree.

b. Imports

I must be a product of Walmart and Target. Where are rapcious, exploitative Chinese producers when you need them? So much that is cheap in the US is so expensive here. There is a very noticeable difference in the prices of imports here. In any large store, you will see the Korean brand item next to an import brand (frequently European or American), with a very noticeable price differential. A 6-pack of Miller Genuine Draft costs $10(!), and a regular dispenser and roll of Scotch tape costs $3.50. The protectionism is so obvious and expensive, I dearly hope the recently negotiated FTA gets through. And of course, the car industry is ridiculously protected. Korean cars account for the vast majority of cars driven. I don’t think I have seen a single Honda or Toyota yet. Yet Japanese cars are perfect for Korean streets – they are small, green, and fuel efficient.

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