Blog Posts - Steve Harris

Forever Wars

5/14/2021

The recent announcement that US troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 has brought forth the predictable spate of hand-wringing about military futility and “sending American boys [and, now, girls] to die in far-off, foreign lands.” Without entering the debate about the specific opportunities and costs faced by the US in this decision, it struck me as indicative of the common fallacy faced by military strategists and planners for centuries, i.e., fighting (or, in this case, not fighting) the “last war.” Curiously, this over-sensitivity to history is paired with the US’ usual lack of awareness of military history generally and our sense of entitlement as to what kind of wars we should be engaged with.

The nature of war has changed pretty dramatically over the years, often driven by new technologies (e.g., stirrups, rifling, motors, computers), tactics, logistics, and national cultures (e.g., the levee en masse during the French Revolution brought about the era of mass armies and total national participation in the war effort). In (some of) our own lifetimes, we have seen the rise of highly mobile and mechanized forces and planes and missiles projecting force at distance: the stretch from WWII to Vietnam to Desert Storm.

How well military thinkers have adapted to these changes in the 21C is a topic for another day. My concern here is with how the general population perceives and understands how wars work and their resulting expectations. Taking down Saddam Hussein (2003-2010) was, from a military perspective, pretty comparable to prior actions. The war in Afghanistan was another kettle of fish entirely. No lines, no fronts, embedded guerilla opponents, weakly maintained government in “controlled” areas; all a la Vietnam, only more so. The difference with Vietnam is that the earlier conflict was all about territorial control and stabilizing our local proxy government. In Afghanistan, the goal was global terrorism suppression: eliminating one country as a hub of radical Islamic terrorism. It’s not clear, even if we had “won” in Afghanistan, that we would have accomplished our goal.

It’s really hard for an organized state army to defeat motivated and well-supported guerillas. In Vietnam we finally realized that we couldn’t and quit (as did the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the British in the 19C). As we found lately in Iraq (and Libya) nation-building is also really hard and requires at least a couple of generations. It’s taken us much longer to come to terms with this in Afghanistan, but to the same result, because nation building was only a means to a global end.

From a domestic perspective, the US left Vietnam because of military frustration and difficult PR undermined popular support for the massive number of troops necessary to fight and even have a shot at winning. The war in Afghanistan avoided that problem by keeping US troop levels (under 30K, except for the Obama “surge” from 2009-13, and only briefly hitting 100k) and casualties (under 2500 deaths) relatively small. But this was not sufficient to withstand the rising weariness with the war (even if domestic protests were proportional to the US casualties, compared to Vietnam).

So, what was the problem? I think we just got bored with the “Global War on Terrorism.” Any war that we couldn’t win reasonably quickly wasn’t worth fighting. This attitude comes from our 20C experience of wars (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm) in which victory parameters were clear and—win-or-lose—resolvable at some sort of peace conference. 21C war against non-state actors, principally anti-terrorist/guerilla in nature, requires changing (as they said in Vietnam) “hearts-and-minds.” Its slow and arduous work. It also requires thinking non-spatially. Maps (at least at the strategic level) aren’t much use; it’s not about controlling territory, but changing people. It’s a different kind of war and we don’t have the patience for it.

US attitudes are also colored by the fact that most of us don’t know what war is actually like. There hasn’t been a sustained war on US territory in over 150 years (and the only one in the last 200 was a domestic war). The last “all-in” mobilization was over 75 years ago (16 M served, over 10% of the total population; for Vietnam, it was 2.7M or only 1.3%, Afghanistan, even if twice as long, is even less). Vietnam was unique visible because of TV coverage, but the war in Afghanistan gets only a tiny fraction of media attention compared to Vietnam.

As a result, we face the political issue of maintaining a war that is unwinnable in the short-to-medium term, without the support of people who aren’t so much opposed to it as bored or mystified by it. The esprit de corps which might have animated us if the war were on our territory, visible or clear-cut is lacking. The (potentially dire) consequences of giving the Taliban a breather seem too distant as a motivation either. Domino theory rationalizations for sending US troops half-way around the world went out of style fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, established states and societies remain at risk from asymmetric disruptive forces which take advantage of our complacency and our unwillingness to deal with a mode of warfare in which don’t fit into neat military tactics and John Wayne-style denouements. The story of military technology over the past 500 years has been the dispersal of power, not its concentration in formal state organizations. This has not only heightened the risk from biological/cyber/nuclear attacks but enabled a wider range of those dissatisfied with the existing global political order to support disruption for longer and for less money than ever before.

The era of relatively short, well-defined wars is not over, but it’s no longer the only game in town. If those—on both the left and the right—don’t have the attention span to recognize that a much more determined, strategic, stance is necessary to fight a quasi-permanent form of warfare, then things will get messier, sooner.

Flunking out of the Electoral College

5/7/2021

As part of my intermittent series on US Constitutional issues, today I am taking on the venerable Electoral College component of the US election system. In prior discussions, I have touched on the undemocratic distortions in the US Senate (10/09/20), the need for a fourth branch of government (12/11/20), reforming federalism (02/19/21), and the general need for a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution (02/05/21). In an upcoming posting, I will take on the composition of the US House of Representatives. Compared to these, the Electoral College seems like easy pickings.

Recent discussions of the Electoral College have pointed out that the Democrats have won the popular vote for President seven times in the last eight elections, only to be “robbed” by the anachronistic electoral college on two of those occasions. Most then jump to a call for moving to a national election by total popular vote. In so doing, they combine their critiques of several aspects of the Electoral College and thus skip over an intermediate solution (which, given our deep propensity for incremental change) may well be more likely.

To be specific, there are three problems with the current structure.
1. Voting by states – Our current (since 1787) system is based on a union of independent states, each casting its own votes on its own terms.
2. Small states bonus – Since the Electoral College provides that each state have a number of votes equal to the sum of its House and Senate seats, small states have a disproportionate share of the vote. This is comparable to the problem with the Senate’s democratic deficit.
3. Winner-take-all – Each state casts all its votes for the candidate who won a plurality of the popular vote in its election.

There are other issues, such as the problem of “faithless” electors, but, as with fraudulent popular voting, this is talked about far more than the actual practice.

One could design a revised approach that solves one, two, or all three of these concerns (in several combinations).

Before getting to potential solutions, it is worth noting that very few (none?) other countries have similar problems. Many use a parliamentary system (even if they have a ceremonial President) which, by definition depend on multiple parties/individuals having a share of power, unlike a Presidential system in which there is only one person at the top. Prime ministers usually must win their own seats and then are elected to head up the government by the collective vote of the other parliamentarians. Countries with the presidential system (e.g. France, Russia, and many of the countries established in the 20C) are unitary, not federal, systems; so there are no sub-units whose representatives would choose a national president. Finally, the vast majority of countries were established in the 20C or sufficiently late in the 19C so that their democracy assumes an informed, widespread popular electorate; unlike our system which was created in the 18C when literacy was low and most ordinary citizens (e.g. a farmer in Pennsylvania) had little means of knowing anything about a Governor/Senator from other state who might be a contender for national leadership.
The “winner-takes-all” mode seems to be the biggest problem. It has pernicious effects, particularly the effective disregarding of ‘minority’ voters in states with a substantial party majority (e.g. California or Wyoming). Of course, since it is likely that a fair number of Californians or Wyomingites know how their state will vote in any presidential election; they don’t think it’s worth their time to vote and we can only guess how close a vote would be if all votes counted. The other problem is that all media and campaign attention gets focused on the “battleground” states which distorts coverage, understanding, and political positions. (The benefit is that those of us in those states are spared unceasing advertising and get-out-the-vote phonebanks/robocalls).

However, the “winner-take-all” mode is NOT a constitutional issue. It’s up to each state to determine how to allocate their electoral college votes. Many have joined together to enact conditional laws shifting to some form of allocation based on majority national popular vote, once other states with a majority of electoral college votes do so (currently states representing 193 votes out of the necessary 270 are signed up).

This effort, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, is not a bad patch on a broken system, but it’s definitely a ‘work-around’ for the absence of more basic constitutional change. It is a voluntary surrender of state sovereignty in favor of a national political coherence. It would likely address much of the general popular concern with the current electoral college system. However, for die-hard originalists, any change risks opening the flood-gates of constitutional modernization and is to be resisted, even if to no substantive purpose (analyses show no long-term partisan effect of getting rid of the “winner-take-all” mode or other aspects of the current system).

Still, a constitutional amendment would be preferable as part of a more comprehensive solution; particularly one that addressed the other two failings.

As I argued previously, we should remove federalism from all aspects of the national electoral process and reserve it to questions of governmental jurisdiction and operations. We are no longer a country made up of states; we have a national political culture and state boundaries play no role in how we should address questions of national policy.

Similarly, the small state bonus—a remnant of the 1787 compromise to protect small states and southern states (and their slavery laws)—should go by the board. I could even see small states agreeing to give up their rights here in return for preserving some extra clout in the Senate; should it come to that.

The downside is the need to go through the arduous amendment process; which is difficult in ordinary circumstances (38 states required), and much more challenging in our fraught political environment. Of course that same set of atmospherics makes the Compact route almost as difficult. So, the Electoral College in its current form is likely to be with us for a while until there is a sea change in our political culture.

Avocational Education

4/30/2021

Among the many challenges facing higher education in the US (even pre-COVID) is coming to terms with the changing nature of college students and figuring out how to be effective institutions in our society. (I should emphasize that the points made here are quite generalized and not tied to any individual or particular groups.)

Most colleges, for all their reputation as hotbeds of political liberalism are, in terms of institutional culture, quite conservative. There are many causes of this (perhaps the subject of another post), but the effect is that changing their educational mission/philosophy/approach is extremely difficult.

Back in ‘the day,’ colleges were seen as sites for adolescent socialization and for what I might call “avocational” education. There was no straight line from studying the liberal arts to a job on Wall Street or main street. As with many cultural artifacts, the popular, embedded image of college is tied to the “liberal arts.” Many of us had a background and outlook that encompassed this approach. So, too, did most of those in college faculties and administrations.

In the 21C, many things have changed: much broader enrollment, much more diverse faculty and student body, and an expansive public culture around the correlation between a college degree and lifetime earnings/American Dream. This campaign has generally been successful in increasing percentages of young adults going to college, but that very success has contributed to the dilution of the economic benefit of a college education itself.

Simultaneously (causal relationships are not clear), educational demands on the workforce have increased and the percentage of high-end jobs (previously the implicit right of a college graduate) has gone down. The result is that college is becoming principally a matter of educating a middle-to-lower middle sector of the work force, as well as training “better” students for the post-graduate education which is increasingly required for the top-level jobs.

The “flip-side” of this has been the oft-noted “hollowing-out” of the “middle class” in the US.

The upshot is that all jobs require more education; at least a “college education,” even if the resulting status and average earnings of college graduates is not what it used to be. However, most colleges (by which I focus on large public universities and smaller, non-elite private schools) haven’t re-thought their purpose and offerings. Student demand for job-focused courses, often egged on by anxious parents, has increased. Demand for apparently “irrelevant” liberal arts/humanities courses has been steadily dropping. Well-rounded education to foster new generations of adults/citizens is giving way to vocational education for a relatively less-well-off sector of the rising generation.

Even more troubling are the relatively weak educational foundations the average college student brings upon matriculation, both in terms of substantive knowledge and, more importantly, basic writing and analytic skills. This pressures colleges to back-fill for high school education, making it even more difficult to move students towards knowledge and skill levels previously expected.

At one level, traditional elites can easily bemoan the decline of the humanities and the breadth of education as a dilution of the way college “should be.” At another level, however, while the percentages of college students taking such courses are down, it’s not clear that the percentage of 25-year-olds in general who ever took more than a couple of college liberal arts courses is declining. It’s just that a significant number of them are now taking vocationally-oriented courses in college, whereas before they either went into the workforce after high school, community college, or some other training.

This presents a host of problems around rethinking the nature of college education (still run by administrators and faculty with a liberal arts bias) as well as a challenge to how we think about the education of citizens. National governments are ill-equipped to deal with the increased integration of the global labor market and rise of automation; leading to anti-democratic (Trumpian?) pressures. We may soon learn the degree to which democracy is a long-term human teleology supported by principle and rational, thoughtful citizens or just a phenomenon that is historically contingent upon the presence of a middle-class (educated, reasonably well-off economically).

Beyond the civic aspects, it also seems that parental pressures and other short-term thinking (unsurprising for young people) is leading them astray by pushing them away from liberal arts and educational breadth. The labor market will only get more dynamic over the coming decades (both within and across “careers”), at least in those sectors to which college graduates aspire. There is little chance of colleges providing adequate long-term vocational education, so such graduates will be on their own. A vocational focus in college also limits their exposure to critical thinking and communications skills which are already sought by employers and will be essential to adapt to the long-term labor market.

There are no “magic wands” to resolve these concerns. Institutional sclerosis is widespread both at the collegiate level and more broadly in the educational system. Our society has underfunded education for decades, and the cultural infrastructure of family/community support for study necessary to ensure social and substantive foundations for well-educated adults will take a couple of generations to repair, even if we start promptly.

Of course, it may well be that replicating the past is impossible and foolish; even focusing on “correcting” for past deficits may be just “fighting the last war.” We need some broad and radical rethinking here; precisely the kind of thinking for which our graduates are increasingly ill-prepared.

Global Democracy

4/23/2021

While Americans are agitated by debates over voting rights/suppression and global surveys bemoan democratic decline in a widening group of countries; now may not seem like an opportune moment to consider whether and how we might move towards a fully-integrated global democracy. Domestic democracy is a global norm and the nominal form of virtual every government. International organizations have proliferated in recognition of the trans-national nature of many routine governmental functions and upcoming challenges (e.g. pandemics or climate). Is there a route to either a fully proportional world government or even a direct democracy (one-global person=one vote)? I think we’re a long way off, but not for reasons tied to recent developments.

In 2016, while criticizing Israel’s intransigence in dealing with local Muslims, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic — it cannot be both.” It was an acute observation that neatly captured the security dilemma of a state that combines a staunchly-defended identity with liberal/cosmopolitan aspirations. The same concern, writ large, also faces the incumbent Western dominated global power structure and explains why global democracy is a (very) long term prospect. In other words, the world can be Western/liberal/progressive/ Enlightened or it can be democratic—it cannot be both.

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, where the “Concert” of (European) Great Powers agreed to work together and, along the way, kept the dozens of smaller fry out in the anteroom while they sorted out what we would call “geopolitical” issues. This was the first effort at on-going international cooperation which spawned, in the 20C and on a now-global stage, the League of Nations and, later, the UN. In both cases, the “Great Powers” preserved a distinctive status and power, the better to protect themselves against the mass of smaller states who might out-vote them if everything was a ‘one-state, one-vote’ system.

We can see similar concerns in the structure of both the US government and the European Union, where balances were struck between the “equality of states” claims of smaller members and heft of the potentially dominant larger states. In the US, we have a Senate with equal representation of the states and a House where California has 50+ times the weight of Wyoming. In the EU, a more complex, weighted-voting system was adopted.

On a global scale, the “Western” countries total well less than 1B people, a bit over 10% of the total world population, even while their share of global GDP is about 50% and their share of military power (as measured by spending) is over 2/3. While long-term development trends will ameliorate these discrepancies, the mis-match over the next fifty years is clear. Territorially-organized nations states will remain the fundamental mode of global political organization, both on a domestic basis and in terms of international organizations. Barring the arrival of extra-terrestrials or a global climate or pandemic cataclysm, the chances of the moving towards global democracy—i.e. population-weighted voting at the international level (much less direct democracy based on the model of one global person=one vote)—will remain a distant idealistic dream.

As I noted in my piece on Sci-Fi governments, the only other models on offer depend on the elimination of the nation-state as the central premise of global political organization. Current political leaders (whether of the Trump/Bolsonaro/Orban/Xi variety or of a more liberal bent) are unlikely to crack this essential epistemological component of the modern world.

Still, it will be interesting to see if and how India and China, as the two largest (by far) countries in terms of population start making noises about “majoritarian” mind-sets. We might also see some movement in that direction from countries whose population is set to put them in the top group over the next few decades (e.g. Indonesia (currently #4) , Brazil, Nigeria (perhaps overtaking the US for #3 in 25 years), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia). This trend will be exacerbated by the long-term decline in Western birthrates, of which Japan is the leading example.

How the “democratic” countries of the West react to being hoist on the petard of their own liberal, one-person, one-vote rhetoric and domestic structures will be fascinating. Certainly there will be carping about the democratic defects of these parvenues (or at least those defects to which non-Western states uniquely susceptible). Shortcomings in the US (Georgia voting rules and electoral college), the EU (toothless parliament), UK (monarchy and House of Lords) will be bandied about in return.

Even disregarding these democratic defects, the working assumption of the liberal/progressive/Enlightened/cosmopolitan elites has been comparable to the standard of “civilization” which European empires applied in the 19/20C to determine who was worthy of recognition and inclusion in the “family of nations.” The current version, there is a belief (hope?) that the laggards will catch up (India has been key here) and join the club of already “enlightened/civilized” societies, thereby enabling and justifying a semi-utopian world government in which the global management of democratic norms could be safely entrusted to the now-adult countries who had emerged from their tutelage (with a nod to the echoes of Greece-->Rome and Britain-->US). But just as Rome and the US went their own (respective) ways, so, too the shape of global governance in the 21/22C will be determined more by India/China/Nigeria/Indonesia/Brazil than Europe (and perhaps even than the US). Indeed, it must if the one-person: one-vote standard is to be achieved.

So, the incumbent powers face a dilemma: whether to honor their own mythologies and rhetoric or to retain power (UN vetoes, IMF appointments) until they are confident that the late-comers are sufficiently aligned (co-opted/indoctrinated?) so that things can be safely handed-off to them to preserve these aspirations. Recent developments (nationalistic/nativistic governments, repression of democratic mechanisms, apathy) make this more difficult; but the fundamental issue is that global power (economic/military) will trump democracy and demographics for a long time to come.

Pop. Culture

4/16/2021

Concerns with the pace of global population growth have been circulating even before Malthus (1798) made them coherent which led to a new science of demographics in the 19C. These concerns made a great revival fifty years ago with Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. All this was before the huge uptick in the global growth rate which began in the late 20C.

Year               Global Population (M)         Annual Growth Rate
1000 (est.)                268                                       .1%
1820                      1,042                                       .2%
1950                      2,524                                       .7%
2000                      6,149                                     1.8%
2050 (proj.)           9,640                                        .9%

Malthus was concerned about the adequacy of food supplies and argued that our species’ proclivity to procreate would consistently outstrip our ability to produce food. Agricultural improvements, including the “green revolution” of the mid-20C more than outstripped those fears, even factoring in longer life expectancies that have come from better health and sanitation. However, recently, the anxiety has been based on our greater awareness of the impact on the environment and the various ways of looking at the planet’s “carrying capacity.”

Future projections of global population growth (as to which there is a wide variation) must contend with a couple of apparent trends: 1) declining birth rates associated with increased urbanization, wealth, and education, especially as relatively poor countries (often characterized by the suppression of women) become more “modern,” and 2) disturbingly high continued growth projections for sub-Saharan Africa.

If the latter concern can be resolved (perhaps by the former), then the chances of total exhaustion of global resources (especially in light of emerging technologies) appear to be receding. The caveat here is continued inequality of global wealth. Stated simply: poor people use less. Global GDP per capita is about $16,000; for the (relatively rich) OECD countries as a group, it’s about $40,000 (& $62,000 for the US). If everyone in the world started living at OECD rates (not at all likely), then the strain on the planet would be overwhelming. And the alternative of everyone moving to the global average of $16,000 is even more difficult to imagine.

So, let’s assume that current levels of income inequality are only slightly trimmed and turn back to the population growth story. If there really is something to the decline of birth rates with increased urbanization, wealth, and education, as is borne out by all the economically advanced countries (esp. Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy), then could we see a time at which the global population actually went down. Certainly, even by UN projections for later in the century, this is a real possibility.

I recently read a somewhat breathless and generally-mediocre treatment of this scenario (Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet (2019)). There are some real concerns about its implications: labor-market adjustments, the burdens from a reduced number of workers supporting a relatively high number of retirees, and (according to a more recent and considerably more cogent economic analysis by Charles Jones) reduced innovation, and human knowledge.

I’m not going to critique either of these works, but I do have a problem with some of their implicit assumptions, particularly the widespread and deeply embedded belief that “growth is good.” First, traditional measures of economic growth, almost by definition, ignore/externalize environmental effects. So, the cost of global economic growth, especially since the industrial “revolution,” has assuredly been significantly understated.

Second, the case for growth is usually made by those who benefit from long-term economic inequality. It’s much easier to tamp down the political risks of poverty by holding out the possibility of “growing out of it” than by structuring a more equal society; in other words, the generic growth argument is premised in part on a version of “trickle-down” economics.

Third, much of the growth mantra (both economic and demographic) has come from national discourses which are based on inter-national competitiveness. France, for example, was seized in the later 19C with dread at “falling behind” Germany (it turned out that they were right about their fears, though its much less clear that another 10M Frenchmen in 1914 or 1940 would have changed the course of either war). This kind of competitive mind-set may be morphing as the concept of global democracy gains a bit of traction in the 21C (of which more next week).

Finally, while there is certainly something to be said for the benefits of innovation and technology, there is also something to be noted in terms of its costs, even beyond the environmental. Modernity is all about change and later modernity has been all about accelerating change. At the same time, we can look at the profound psychological and societal dislocations that have resulted (including well-established tropes about alienation, disconnection, ennui, loss of community/context). The balance is not so clear.

It would be interesting, at least as a thought exercise, to consider what the world would be like with a lot fewer people, slower economic growth (&greater income equality), even with some slowdown in the rate of technology development.

The recent spike in global population would take a while to work off and reverse, but what would a world with 2.5B people look like, even if it took another 100-150 years? That would take us back to the levels of 1950.

It’s hard to get our heads around that kind of scenario and guess what aspects would continue and what would be reversed. There was plenty of growth and optimism back in 1950; technology developed at a robust pace. What if we went back to a US with 150M people, but now most lived in cities (more ecologically efficient); with extensive renewable power systems (much less traffic), and in an economic context that didn’t demand greater soul-sucking productivity?

What if we took economic gains currently envisioned and deployed them to a more equitable distribution, both domestically and globally?

Our culture’s fixation on growth (for reasons noted above) is not the only way to live. Maybe a drop in global population could spur a very different type of thinking, who knows where we might end up….?

Bhutan

4/9/2021

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to lots of obscure corners of the world, far beyond European Capitals and famous sites of natural beauty. But one place to which I have returned over the years is the mountain kingdom of Bhutan and there’s a good chance I will go back again pretty soon (post-Pandemic).

There was certainly some component of exoticism in my decision to go for the first time, 23 years ago this month. Recently married, I was eager to get back to my earlier pattern of wanderings. I prevailed on my bride to join me in this exploration (although the itinerary’s delight in announcing the availability of hot-and-cold running water almost put her off). Six years later, we went again and, while I went off with most of the group on a trek in the mountains, she stayed in “town” and we arranged for her to teach a decorative arts workshop in the local middle school. Ten years after that (2014), I went for a third visit, this time introducing three dear friends of long-standing to the place and people they had heard me talk about for many years.

One of the main draws for me has been to witness and learn from Bhutan as one of the few places which is connected to the global sprawl of modernity, but which is trying to consciously manage its own encounter with that epistemology. Western imperialism and the sparkly lures of capitalism and technology have swamped most parts of the world; most local cultures didn’t stand a chance. Plastic shoes and T-shirts with knock-off logos can be found in the most startling locations on earth. This is not to say the Bhutanese are wholly averse to the things we take for granted, but they do so (if I may overgeneralize a bit) thoughtfully and with a commitment to maintaining their culture while they interface with the wider world.

Part of this is due to the profound resonance of Buddhism. Bhutan is part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (the name Bhut-an actually means the “end of Ti-bet”). It is the only country that has Buddhism as a state religion. The country’s isolation until the later 20C has enabled the religion’s continued vibrancy and the reverence of the people makes it stunningly different from the noise and bustle of e.g., Bangkok or the sensation in nearby Nepal of being overrun with tourists. Buddhism is embedded in Bhutan in a way hard for those of us from a “modern” Christian-rooted, secular-trending culture to fully grasp.

Bhutan has become (relatively) famous for its concept of “gross national happiness,” which was articulated by the 4th King (the now-retired father of the current King) in 1972. GNH has since been adopted as the government’s foundational policy goal. It symbolizes a priority for the qualitative over the quantitative, for social and cultural harmony over economic development. This is a laudable aspiration, but one should not confuse Bhutan with Shangri-La. By Western development standards, Bhutan is a poor country and there are serious issues about its treatment of Nepali and other Hindus.

Nor is Bhutan immune from modernity (nor COVID (although it was well-managed)). During our second trip (2004) we visited the first (only?) disco in the country. By 2014, electrification had reached a considerably majority of villages and I had to remind our local trip leader that extended conversations with his friends on his mobile phone disrupted the purpose of our trek. Some of the ills of modernity (medical and moral) have come along with internet access.

These developments are important reminders that the Bhutanese are not there for our touristic pleasure, like the re-enactors in Colonial Williamsburg. We might wish to see the way life “used to be,” but the Bhutanese are no less entitled to electrification and inoculations than are Texans or Turks. At the same time, while the colorful festivals and quiet temples continue to exist for the people, not for tourists; they are amazing at several levels.

Beyond the culture at a broad level, Gina and I have been fortunate to connect to individuals who have shown us immense kindness and generosity. These experiences, on walks, in homes, or in more formal settings are worth at least as much as the sites and public events. These sorts of things do happen in travels to Australia or other parts of Asia, etc. but there seem to have been more of them in Bhutan than the time we have spent there would predict.

Yes, London is different than New York, and San Francisco is different from Shanghai, but Bhutan’s different-ness is different. It is not primitive (a la tribes in New Guinea or the Amazon), but it is not-so-modern. Therein lies its ability, for those of us from the “West” to open doors of serenity and perspective. To be sure, its different-ness has lessened some over the years that I have been going; but watching the process (progress?) has been rewarding on its own terms.

I have been working with the Bhutan Foundation on some projects relating to democracy education and tree planting; and lately, we’ve talked about me making a fourth visit (perhaps next year) to check them out. Something to look forward to….

Who Lost Hong Kong?

4/2/2021

The fate of Hong Kong has been a continuing lesson in geopolitical history. A small fishing village in the early 19C was settled by British and other Europeans in the course of opening up the “China trade,” a more-or-less organized British colonial administration began in 1841. China was forced to formally cede the island (and allow British drug pushing across its country) as part of the resolution of the First Opium War in 1843. The Fourth Governor of the colony, Sir John Bowring, is generally assigned responsibility for launching the Second Opium War with China in 1856 which further enhanced British imperialist designs in East Asia. As the Chinese Empire decayed across the 19C, European powers seized increasing chunks of territory and trading rights and, in 1898, China was “convinced” to lease a chunk of the mainland across from Hong Kong Island to the British for 99 years.

British control (except when ousted by the Japanese for four years) remained even through the decades of revolutionary turmoil in China and the consolidation of power by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. However, when the lease on the “New Territories” expired in 1997, a much-reduced British Empire faced facts and ceded the island back to China under a complex arrangement that promised the maintenance of Hong Kong’s quasi-democracy for fifty years. (I’ve always been slightly amused that the British Imperial government was a champion of democracy for a colony.)

Now, China is cracking down on the small components of democracy preserved under the deal with the UK in 1997. Given British global power, and Chinese aggressiveness in a variety of international contexts, the limiting factor is not the threat of Prince Charles and the Royal Navy bombarding Shanghai, but rather the risk of undermining the important role Hong Kong capital markets have played in financing Chinese domestic growth, international trade, and investments outside of China; in other words, international capital markets. A second significant concern for the Chinese is reinforcing those in Taiwan who will insist that China would never peaceably re-integrate that island, thus leaving China with few non-military options for re-asserting formal control over that erstwhile province.

We will hear a robust lip-service favoring democracy from banks, investors, and their entourages, but they remain focused on preserving the access to the giant profit potential controlled by the China. So, it falls to the “Western powers,” various NGOs and the commentariat to defend democratic ideals and practices and it’s not clear how high up their priority list Hong Kong lies. Brexit has ensured that, history notwithstanding, Britain can’t be any more effective than Poland in altering Beijing’s behavior. As a result, there’s little reason to be optimistic about Hong Kong’s fate.

China may continue to move aggressively to enforce its recent “Security Law,” restricting eligibility for democratic groups on Hong Kong’s Legislative Council or cracking down further on dissidents and protestors. Hong Kong’s status as a “Special Administrative Region” may remain, but become increasingly superficial and nominal.

In contemplating this likelihood, I was reminded of another political implication of Chinese history: the impact on US domestic politics of the triumph of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. At that time, in the height of the early Cold War paranoia, the issue of “Who Lost China?” was a fearsome cudgel used to attack the Truman Administration and other designated targets who were “soft on communism.”

This episode was a typical manifestation of the right-wing delusion that America controls the world and our power and will are sufficient to determine the fates of other nations (i.e., that we could have prevented the Chinese Communists from winning). Rather than face the limits of American power, it’s much easier to blame domestic political opponents for adverse geopolitical results.

I expect we will see a similar situation once Hong Kong is returned to its pre-1843 status as a normal part of China. Since there is a good chance this will happen while we have a Democratic administration, I rather suspect Biden/Harris/Blinken et al. will be blamed for “losing” Hong Kong.

As if.

* As if the US had sufficient power and political will to prevent it from happening.
* As if the Trump administration’s
o Gratuitous trade war with China didn’t make it harder for us to press China on other issues (including Hong Kong).
o undermining of American international standing and alliances did not make it much easier for China to extend its influence and power in the region.
o mishandling of COVID didn’t weaken the US economy and global stature.

None of this will prevent Trump and Trumpians from blaming Democrats, Socialists, (did I hear the word “pinkos’?). Hell, Kevin McCarthy may reconvene a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities.

As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, the rise of China is a long-term phenomenon with a lot of momentum behind it. Hong Kong, as the British recognized in 1997, is too small to stand alone next to such a giant neighbor. So, the fifty-year promise of autonomy that the British negotiated at that time was always aspirational rather than likely.

Still, history is full of surprises and it would have been interesting to see a more robust/irritating Hong Kong political culture for a few more decades. It might have made a real difference, especially if China were to change in surprising ways in the future.

As it is, we can only watch and wait (with pro forma protestations). Dominoes are falling; Taiwan may be next, but don’t blame Joe (or Barack).

Reparations

3/26/2021

I’m not quite sure what to make of the effort, active in recent years, to secure “reparations” for slavery and related bad acts which are a essential and problematic part of American history. The scale of these evil deeds has been so widespread and profound as to demand some extraordinary recognition.

Perhaps it is my legal training that recoils a bit at the thought of “reparations” in the sense of writing a check to individuals who were not the direct subjects of slavery. Or the thought that a Korean businessman, whose family has been in the US for 65 years, should be responsible for a portion of the payment. And if the reparations are for the larger, more amorphous set of “racist” actions which encompass formal slavery and so much more, down to and including the present (by myself included, I’m afraid), then I get tripped up over the question of who is deserving of recompense and who should be responsible. And how to calculate “damages.” And where to draw the line as between the actions taken against Black Americans and those taken against ____-Americans, of which there is a lengthy list. There are dozens of other questions and complications which would need to be thrashed out.

Indeed, a second level of concern lies in the easily envisioned litigatory morass over eligibility and a second set over liability that would take decades to work out (at no small administrative cost and no small enrichment of the bar). I’m afraid our society would be consumed with the process and, as a result, the meaning of both the underlying deeds and the compensatory societal gesture would be lost. To what end?

Finally, as a historian, it seems that those who find reparations due for the nation’s “original sin,” embodied in the Constitution since 1787, are playing fast-and-loose with alternate history. If the Founding Fathers had not agreed to allow slavery to continue, then there’s a high likelihood that the US of A would never have gotten off the ground. Reparations advocates seem to want to assume that we have our current country and everything else that happened was the same, but for that one grave error. Stated differently, would it have been better if the Northern states set themselves as a slavery-free country and a set of Southern states had gone their own way, preserving the “peculiar institution?” Who then would be responsible for what might have happened? Moreover, I’m wary of taking the moral standards of one era/culture and applying them to another. It’s too easy to be smug and, at least implicitly, argue that “we” have it all figured out and are in a position to judge others from another time.

I’m more inclined to leave the monetary issue aside. Part of my concern with “reparations” is that it could easily turn the events and attitudes of race and power into a variety of tort, a “class action” for something like securities fraud or product liability. If Hannah Arendt assailed Nazism for its “banality of evil,” then what is more banal than litigating claims and “solving” the problem of slavery with a check. How easy to “wash our hands and walk away” after the money has changed hands.

Pointing fingers is also a great means of avoiding looking hard at our own behavior. The debate has already started to turn into a distraction from the more fundamental and important work of remedying the embedded racism in our (and other Western) societies and improving our common future.

What is left to be done then? Our media-saturated, legal-formality-obsessed society has wrung the meaning and pain out of “apologies.” As Richard Nixon said: “I accept the responsibility, but not the blame.”

Nor does it quite make sense for us in the 21C to apologize for actions taken by those (long-dead) in the 17C-19C. We need to own our own issue somehow, to recognize the evil from our own perspective and use our recognition of history as a starting point (or, rather, a re-starting point) for ourselves. We need to own it simply, without too much qualification or counterpoint. We need to ground it in our core values (historical and, hopefully, current). We need to make it hard to deny.

So, here’s my take:

We believe that all persons are created equal and that they are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the premise and aspiration of our society and of the government of the United States of America which is the expression and instrument of our society. As we look back over the past 250 years, we have not lived up to this aspiration and have harmed millions of people in dozens of categories as a result. We have harmed ourselves as a society as a result.

Three groups: Blacks, women, and native Americans (as measured by the duration, depth, and extent of our shortcomings) have suffered the most; many others were harmed as well. For a society that claims to value hard work and the individual, we have far too often used categorization as a substitute for close consideration and applied simplistic characterizations; in a word, we have been lazy.

We are ashamed of these acts and omissions which have demonstrated our shortcomings, including the enslavement, murder, theft, oppression, discrimination, abuses of law and power, hatred, and infliction of harms to the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of our fellows.

It is the policy of the United States of America to treat all persons with respect, to write and enforce laws which treat everyone fairly, and to afford citizens and others the rights to which they are entitled under our laws and our principles.

I don’t have illusions about Congress passing such a resolution (certainly without inserting enough caveats, qualifiers, and exceptions to eviscerate its spirit and triple its length); but I believe this statement is one to which we can all aspire. Then, let’s get to work to make it real.

Sci-Fi Governments

3/19/2021

I read science fiction…a lot; and I have since I was a kid. Sometimes for the wonder of it, sometimes for the excitement of a good space opera, but mostly because, like History, it’s a good way to get perspectives on myself and our society/world. I will touch on this sci-fi theme from time to time, but today I want to talk about a couple of ideas about government.

I actually don’t see much insight in the construction of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, or the Imperial Senate in Star Wars. They are part of the furniture, as it were, much less interesting than the Vulcan mind-meld or droids. Almost everybody else uses some slight variant on the US, the UN, warring empires, or some other historical model. It’s not surprising that most SF writers treat governing structures as an afterthought. They are mostly about the technology or non-human cultures or human stories in an extra-terrestrial setting.

So I was intrigued to find a couple of stories in which the governing structure of the world actually plays a significant part. Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn (the first of four volumes in the “Fractured Europe” series) and Malka Older’s Infomacracy (the first of three volumes in the “Centenal Cycle”).

Hutchinson posits a world in which Europe is fractured into scores of small states, with varying sizes and relationships, which set the backdrop for a half spy thriller, half sci-fi, half fantasy (yes, that’s three halfs!). It’s a sort of anti-EU. He doesn’t really wrestle with the issues of coordination on commerce or climate, or constant border crossings (by physical or semi-magical means), but the dynamics of international relations are more fluid, which complicates things nicely.

In Infomacracy, (almost) the entire world is divided up into cells of 100,000 people. Each “centenal” has its own local government and representation in a global federation. However, there is a parallel structure: the “Information” which is responsible not for global day-to-day government, but is charged with ensuring the integrity of the system as well as providing objective information to all centenals and their citizens. There’s plenty of fun tech twists and spy/thriller aspects, as well.

In both cases, I enjoyed the usual literary aspects of the books, but what stuck with me was each author’s willingness to tackle the question of how will groups of people organize themselves in the future. I was interested in the multi-national systems each offered, and the often-elided issue of bureaucratic coordination, but principally in the idea of localizing government. I touched on this point in my recent posting on democratic federalism.

Both Hutchinson and Malka propose systems based not on the nation-state, but on smaller groupings. We see hints of this in the centrifugal force spinning up in the soon-to-be-disunited-Kingdom, as well as a wide range of separatists movements around the world. Scotland may not be viable as a fully independent country, but if some portion of governmental functions are delegated upwards to the EU, it could be feasible. Most separatist movements are doomed to failure. First, because they are nationalist in vision (on a smaller scale than their home countries) and merely replicating the problems of legitimacy which they attack in their current larger home state. Second, because there is no governmental structure to provide an umbrella for the non-local and scale-dependent functions which are necessary in the modern world.

If we don’t assume that the nation-state is the default mode of organization of human societies, then we can look back on the 300+ components that comprised the Holy Roman Empire where the Emperor had limited powers and the operative power in many statelets was localized. We can remember that China, France, India, and most other older (pre-1800) states were composites of different sized components, amalgamated at different times and means (conquest, dynastic marriage, etc.), who integrated into a more-or-less coherent whole over decades or centuries, melding customs, languages, money, and ideas. For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church offered another model of social organization, with a separation of an over-arching ideological regime, combined with small temporal (&, by the way, feudal) organizations.

As we look forward, neither the US nor the EU are very useful models. The building blocks of the former were states that were pretty darn similar in outlook and culture; not a great starting point for the current global diversity. For the EU, the embedded diversity of its members cultures insisted on veto power and incrementalism, despite the shock of two world wars that might have sent Europe down a more integrated path.

The charm of the global structure in Infomacracy is that none of the 10,000+/- centenals has much clout on the global level. Their interests (historical, ethnic, commercial, ideological, geographical) are too diverse to allow for too much consolidation and bloc-voting. In both books, local political entities are sufficiently small to enable individuals to disconnect freely from their home base and land elsewhere.

Of course, for both these newer models, as with the bulk of historical examples, the idea of geography remains central. Rules are determined by a bunch of people on a particular piece of land. It’s easy to understand why this approach has been common, but less easy to see its relevance in an internet-dominated world which has “destroyed distance” and where many of the facets of human life are determined far away (whether by corporate organizations in work, or Amazon-delivered commerce). Why is geographical neighborhood the best rationale for political organization in the 21C?

These two books push at some new ideas, but we need some governmental thinking that “boldly goes where no one has gone before….”

Royal Families

3/12/2021

The recent kerfuffle over the Harry/Meghan interview demonstrates that the fascination with monarchy continues well into the 21C, even in a country that started a war rather than remain under the rule of a single man/family. It’s both bizarre and entirely natural at the same time.

After all, monarchies have been the predominant form of human socio-political organization over the past five thousand years, even after the size of these groupings got sufficiently large to require a fair amount of bureaucracy and infrastructure. As far as we can tell, the alternatives, usually oligarchies, with (very) occasional popular republics have been few on the ground until the last 100 years. The American experiment was not repeated outside the Western Hemisphere to any significant degree until the French completed their 82-year (1789-1871) revolution and settled down.

While the British (and later other second-tier European countries) maintained the monarchical form, they gradually transferred effective political power to (more-or-less) democratically elected governments. It wasn’t until a whole raft of monarchies blew themselves up in the second decade of the 20C (China, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottomans) that the republican form really took hold globally. Indeed, by 1920, there were hardly any real monarchies left of any size.

The monarchical form remained in many places and has only occasionally been ejected since then (Iraq, Iran, Greece, Albania, Spain (for a while), Cambodia). In most places, royal powers have been almost entirely eliminated and the primary function of the royal family is best interpreted, in the words of one observer, as a piece of “performance art.” In most countries, the family has “performed” their “art” pretty well, eliding the occasional scandal (Juan Carlos of Spain being the most recent exemplar). Encore performances by former royals continue to the amusement of aficionados of the obscure:
* Three claimants to the French throne (a Bourbon, an Orleans, and a Buonaparte) are still mucking about.
* The head of the House of Osman (who never lived in Turkey) “ruled” from 2009-2017, but his day job was as a librarian in New York City.
* The Tsarevich George Romanov just got engaged in January and it was thought appropriate to note that his fiancée (a nice Italian girl), was a “hereditary noblewoman.”

Outside of Europe, there are hereditary Rajas or Sultans in Malaysia, Kings and Emirs in various Arab states, the Emperor of Japan and a smattering of others (Bhutan, Lesotho, and Morocco). The Arab states are mostly dominated family oligarchies. Most keep a pretty low profile, but he current King of Thailand lives mostly in Germany and appears to be a fine example of a dissolute martinet.

In terms of other dynastic rulers (leaving the Bush family aside), we have the sui generis case of the Kim family of Pyongyang.

And then there is the British royal family, whose pomp, wealth, and column-inches matches all the others families combined (excepting the Sultan of Brunei). Without getting into the current set of personalities or heraldic quirks, the incumbent is currently Queen of sixteen commonwealth countries. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Victoria, who had more German than English blood (since diluted and polished with a couple of name changes). This highlights one of the great mysteries of monarchy: the significance of bloodlines. Here we are in the 21C, long past any adherence to the “divine right” of kings, yet multiple websites will give you the rank order of the 1200 or so current potential inheritors of the British crown (of whom, I’m sure, several are within six degrees of Kevin Bacon). As if. When covered with uniforms, slathered about with titles and medals, they have little to differ from the Masons or Scientology, cult-wise.

Other than the fact that they put on the best show in town (in terms of both ceremonies and tabloids).

One could argue that the British are the world champions of nostalgia and have carried on supporting the family even after their last great propagandist: Winston Churchill invoked their 1000+ year imperial continuity in 1940. One could argue that the Mountbatten-Windsor family is even more important, now that Britain is bereft of both empire and European integration. As a national symbol, with immense brand value (take that McDonalds!) they may well be worth the not inconsiderable sums paid by the taxpayers every year to support their operations.

However, if you include the amassed wealth held by the family (which is in addition to that held by the state (Buckingham Palace, Windsor Palace, etc.)), most of which was taken so long ago (by conquest, confiscation, and other exercises of royal power) that it has been effectively “laundered,” it is another story. A story that is hard to justify in the real world of hunger and unemployment that is daily life for many of Her Majesty’s subjects. No wonder that they have been quite good at eviscerating socialism.

There are certainly larger problems in the world, more glaring defects from common sense and morality than grasping after the evanescent remnants of royal and imperial glory. North Korean tanks, Thai elephants, the trooping of the Queen’s color guard—they’re all of a piece. Evidence of a widespread yearning for family and tribe (even as a spear-carrier), and for a connection to history. Royal families give their nations that not inconsiderable comfort of mythos in the face of a cold, rational, republican, bureaucratic world.

They don’t make any sense. Ah, well….

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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