Posts Tagged ‘political science’
“Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward anyone, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves…”*
The United States’ strategy towards China is premised on an unending rivalry. Yet history tells us that strategic competitions do end– and America needs, Mike Mazarr argues, to imagine how its conflict with China might one day do so…
The American rivalry with China continues to deepen, characterised on both sides by zero-sum expectations and paranoia. Tensions are rising over Taiwan and the South China Sea. There is an increasingly bitter contest for the commanding heights of science and technology, disputes over economic and cyber strategies, and much else. More concerning may be that neither side appears to have any vision of a world beyond their rivalry. America’s strategy seems predicated on relentless, unending competition; its definition of success is getting and staying ahead of China in a dozen areas. There is no concept, in other words, of how this rivalry might end.
Yet most rivalries do end. In 1805 the leaders of Britain and France could hardly have imagined that within a few decades they would transcend their age-old hostility to become geopolitical partners. Not every rivalry produces such comprehensive reversals, but even the most intractable stand-offs can evolve into something less volatile. In How Rivalries End, Karen Rasler, William Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly explain that, of all great power rivalries since 1816, only three endured for a century. On average, they lasted about 60 years. If we take the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 as the starting point, the current US-China contest has already lasted longer than that. Even using the more recent intensification of the rivalry of around 2010 as a starting point, we’re almost a quarter of the way through the average length.
It is a mistake, therefore, to approach this rivalry without any theory of how it might conclude. The case for competing vigorously to deny certain Chinese ambitions is self-evident, and the US-China relationship has distinct features – such as stark cultural differences – that will complicate any effort to transcend the rivalry. Adding a conception of an endgame would strengthen the US hand in the ongoing competition and help steer the contest in ways that prevent disaster.
American strategy today focuses on progressively outperforming China in a series of ongoing competitions: military, economic, technological and diplomatic. Endgames are left mostly unstated, out of a belief that too much focus on outcomes is pointless and may even be counterproductive.
Current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell laid out a version of this approach in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs. ‘Rather than relying on assumptions about China’s trajectory’, they wrote, ‘American strategy should be durable whatever the future brings for the Chinese system. It should seek to achieve not a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion but a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to US interests and values.’
A steady state of clear-eyed coexistence – this is the long-term vision, an endless struggle for predominance with elements of self-interested cooperation mixed in. Coexistence, they concluded, ‘means accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved’.
The same concept has cropped up in multiple administration statements and speeches and arguments by outside analysts. Rush Doshi, until recently the senior China official at the National Security Council, explained that current policy embodies a rejection of the idea that ‘the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did’. Rather than seeking to transform China, ‘the United States can compete intensely by blunting Chinese activities that undermine US interests and building a coalition of forces that will help the United States secure its priorities – all while managing the risks of escalation’. Analysts David Santoro and Brad Glosserman have argued that ‘for now, pursuing a specific endgame with China is pointless and problematic’. American strategy should aim to ‘keep the United States in and ahead of the game, i.e., in a competitive and dominant position vis-à-vis its strategic rival’.
Much of this view is clearly correct. There is no way to know how the rivalry will end or how China’s ideology or character will evolve. American actions can’t force ideological or behavioural change onto China, and talking up a future that assumes such change can imply existential threats to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It might take decades for all this to play out; discussions about endgames today are mostly theoretical. It makes sense to focus on competing as a persistent challenge, adjust as the situation changes, and let the endgame define itself.
Yet a strategy of open-ended competition without a clear endgame has many downsides. For one thing, it magnifies the risk of getting caught in an endless cycle of competing for competition’s sake on almost every issue. The lack of a clear picture of a world beyond the rivalry leaves American officials at a loss to prioritise: because they can’t be sure what factors are likely to determine the favoured outcome, every square mile of the competitive landscape has to be contested…
… The problem with American strategy today is not that the United States should not compete. It is that persistent contestation alone is an incomplete recipe for success. Unmoored from any concept of an endgame, American competitive instincts can run out of control and guide US grand strategy rather than serving it…
[Mazarr considers options and suggest a framework for thinking about an endgame…]
… The United States can’t know precisely when or why the rivalry will mellow, but it can have a strong sense of how it will happen: a mutual decision that both countries’ interests are best served by winding down the confrontation. Such a development isn’t likely soon – but history suggests that it is inevitable at some point. Managing the trajectory to that point is the great challenge for America’s China strategy – and embracing the idea of an endgame would inject new energy into the American approach to its most potent competitor…
On the importance of ends, not just means: “Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry,” from @MMazarr in @EngelsbergIdeas.
* Herman Melville
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As we take the long(er) view, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the IRA) called an end to its thirty-year-long armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
“Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love”*…
Gertrude Himmelfarb begs to differ: “The footnote would seem to be the smallest detail in a work of history. Yet it carries a large burden of responsibility, testifying to the validity of the work, the integrity (and the humility) of the historian, and to the dignity of the discipline.”
Matthew Wills channels the estimable Anthony Grafton in defense of the oft-maligned marginalia…
“The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.
“Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern” practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim.
“The text persuades, the note proves,” he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also “persuade as well as prove” and open up the work to a multitude of voices.
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the founder of source-based history, is usually credited with the “invention” of the scholarly footnote in the European tradition. Grafton describes von Ranke’s theory as sharper than his practice: his footnoting was much too sloppy to be a model for scholars today. But various forms of footnotes were used long before von Ranke. Sources were of vital importance to both Roman lawyers and Christian theologians in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as they strove to back up their own arguments with the weight and gravitas of others…
The history– and importance– of annotation: “History’s Footnotes,” @scaliger via @JSTOR_Daily.
* Noel Coward
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As we check our references, we might spare a thought for James MacGregor Burns; he died on this date in 2014. A historian and political scientist, he is best known for his biographies of American Presidents; his work on America’s 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1971.
His work was influential in the field of leadership studies, shifting its focus from the traits and actions of “great men” to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit.
“The good of man must be the end of the science of politics”*…
Democracy is an easy ideal to embrace (at least for most). But the devil’s in the details. Mohamed Kheir Omer and Parselelo Kantai review the history of democracy in post-colonial Africa and wonder if it’s not time to revisit some of those “details”…
The first peaceful transfer of power in post-colonial Africa was in Somalia in 1967 when Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke defeated incumbent President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar. The second would only follow a quarter of a century later, when in November 1991 trade union leader, Frederick Chiluba defeated incumbent Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda in the country’s first multiparty election since 1972 when single party rule had been introduced.
For Africa’s Big Men, news of Kaunda’s defeat was yet another signal of what threatened to become Africa’s second Wind of Change after the one that had swept away colonial rule and brought them into power at the end of the 1950s. In the streets of the capitals, the people were in revolt. Dakar, Abidjan, Cotonou, Kinshasa, Yaounde, Nairobi, Harare and several others – all rocked by youth demanding the end of single-party rule and the return of pluralism. Having previously only worried about coups sanctioned and financed in Western metropolises, the dawning realisation that they now had to fear popular revolts – both in the street and at the ballot box – suggested, even to the least paranoid of them, that their former patrons were abandoning them.
[Those Cold War-era autocrats had been] agents of the neocolonial system that had guaranteed the expropriation of Africa’s resources since the moment of flag independence; for them, ‘democracy’ was the ultimate betrayal. Since it was their friends in Washington, London and Paris who had won the Cold War, why were they abandoning their faithful clients? Why was a new dispensation being organised without their participation?…
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African governments were forced into accepting political liberalisation – that is, the re-introduction of opposition parties – as part of a set of conditions on balance of payments support, itself necessitated by the structural adjustment austerity programmes initiated in the mid-1980s following the debt crisis of circa 1982. With the Cold War over, a vernacular of “good governance”, “transparency” and “accountability” became the mediating language of relations between the rich OECD countries and their aid recipients in Africa. In many African countries, the adoption of multiparty democracy was mandated by Western creditors as a precondition for continued assistance.
Democracy, therefore, was more a creature of the market than of popular citizen aspirations. Western media commentators referred to the package of conditional aid as “market democracy”. In many cases across the continent, the original campaigners for pluralism found themselves side-lined in favour of a new set of actors with closer links to Western embassies and who espoused reformist visions in line with neoliberal orthodoxy. In time, it would dawn on even the more radical political actors that unless they toed the new line, they would lose their place on the donor gravy train…
[The authors review the history and offer some observations that point in the direction of moving from an inherited one-size-fits-all democracy towards a set of culturally-specific applications of the democratic principle…]
… Consider the Gada system, a traditional socio-political system practiced by the Oromo people in Ethiopia and parts of northern Kenya. It is a complex form of social organisation that governs the political, social, economic, and religious life of the community. This indigenous institution predates many modern forms of governance and democracy, showcasing elements of direct democracy, checks and balances, and the peaceful transition of power. Leaders are elected through a democratic process which includes term limits. It also includes a legislative assembly and mechanism for conflict resolution. It has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
A number of countries in Africa such as Rwanda, Senegal, Madagascar, Lesotho and Morocco employ a mixed electoral system, blending elements of proportional representation with majoritarian or plural systems, which highlight the diversity of electoral systems across Africa, with each country tailoring the mixed electoral model to its specific political, social, and historical context.
Somalia currently uses the 4.5 model, based on a power-sharing model among the four major clans, while giving minority clans a half share to improve inclusivity. Some argue the move killed the possibility of a national identity. The system got corrupted, failed to reform and with foreign regional interference, is struggling to perform. These mixed electoral systems offer a means to promote inclusivity and representation while striving for effective governance. However, the specific design and implementation of these systems can significantly impact their effectiveness and the extent to which they achieve these goals.
Other indigenous systems include the philosophy of Ubuntu (consensus building) in Southern Africa where its cultural and philosophical ethos indirectly influences the values foundational to democratic processes in societies where it’s integral to cultural heritage. Its emphasis on inclusivity, communal conflict resolution, collective participation, and ethical conduct shapes the spirit and objectives of governance and elections, impacting not the technical aspects of how votes are cast and counted, but the overarching principles guiding democratic engagement and policymaking.
These traditional models, which often involve direct democracy and community consensus, might offer valuable insights for creating more effective governance structures in Africa.
30 years since electoral democracy was re-introduced, a re-evaluation of election strategies is required – one that considers a mixed approach that incorporates local traditions with modern electoral processes. This approach may better serve the interests of the African populace, addressing the endemic issues of violence, corruption, and inefficacy plaguing the current system.
This would necessitate recognition and legitimation of both systems within African cultural, historical, and political contexts. Key to this approach is engaging a broad spectrum of stakeholders to ensure the model accurately reflects Africa’s diverse societies. Utilising traditional networks for voter education and mobilization can enhance participation and reduce costs. Forming electoral committees composed of both contemporary officials and traditional leaders will ensure the electoral process is transparent, fair, and locally relevant. Incorporating traditional elements into state ceremonies related to elections can also deepen the process’s legitimacy and cultural resonance. Promoting decentralization through local governance structures that combine traditional and elected authority is crucial. Continuous dialogue for model refinement and the necessity of legal and constitutional adjustments to support this hybrid model are essential for its success. Implementing this model demands careful planning, extensive consultation, and phased introduction, aligning it legally and functionally within each country’s governance framework…
Learning from our mistakes: “Africa’s democratic dividend,” from @africaarguments.
While there are lessons here we can apply to more “mature” democracies, we should remember that getting democracy “right,” in the various ways that might be accomplished, across Africa is the primary point. See, for example, “This Will Finish Us” (“How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland”).
* Aristotle
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As we ponder political process, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Puntland inaugurated its constitution, 14 years after declaring itself an autonomous region within the Somalia federation. The constitution established the Puntland Electoral Commission, which has been guiding the region’s gradual shift from a parliament-based vote system to multi-party elections.
“We all live in each other’s shadow”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post, Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine, on a new book by Children of a Modest Star, “A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences” by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman…
Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat. That, in a nutshell, is the core thesis of a new paradigm-shifting book by Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman titled “Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for the Age of Crises.”
The concept of planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.
“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.
As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”
The open question is how, and if, human governance in the late-stage Anthropocene can align with the knowledge we are now attaining.
Paradoxically, planetary-scale connectivity is also what divides us. Convergence entails divergence because the universalizing and rationalizing logic of technology and economics that ties the world together operates in a wholly different dimension than the ethos of politics and culture, rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind.
While the emergent world-spanning cognitive apparatus may be sprouting the synapses of a synchronized planetary intelligence, it clashes with the tribal ingathering of nations and civilizations that remain anchored in their historical and spatial identity.
Consequently, this new domain of encompassing awareness is — so far — as much the terrain of contestation as of common ground…
[ Gardel unpacks Blake’s and Gilman’s proposition, which would devolve some decision-making on some issues, even as it globalized others. By way of addressing the Herculean challenge of creating the equitable, workable global system for addressing global challenges they [propose– a task made the more difficult by the divergence in values discussed yesterday— he invokes an episode from American history…]
… At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, America was morphing from an agricultural, largely rural society into an urban and industrial one. Cultural norms and familiar ways of living were in upheaval. Political institutions that had become dysfunctional were challenged — not so unlike the disruptive transition to digital society and planetarity we are experiencing at present.
The turmoil of transition in those days gave birth to what became known as the Progressive Era. Its progenitors sought to address the new social concerns of a more complex society — working hours and safety conditions in newfangled factories, women’s suffrage, public health exposure from mass food processing, poor urban infrastructure from housing to water and electricity, the concentration of power in the railroad and banking trusts as well as exploitative private utility companies.
The Progressive Era response in the American states was to move in two directions at once. The movement promoted direct democracy whereby citizens could make laws and enforce accountability directly, skirting the corrupt and bought-off legislators of the patronage machines, through the citizens’ ballot initiative, the referendum and the recall of elected officials. At the same time, elected Progressive governors delegated authority to nonpartisan experts for commissions that regulated commerce, banking, railroads and electric utilities on behalf of the public interest. Professional city managers, unelected but accountable to direct democracy and the elected officials who appointed them, came into being for the first time to competently administer ever more complex urban environments.
In time, the reforms that resulted from this pairing of citizen engagement and technocracy percolated up to the national level into institutions such as the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Food and Drug Administration and led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour working day and women’s right to vote.
The point of this brief detour into American history is not to suggest the unworkable proposition of direct democracy at a planetary scale, but simply to say that it is well within the capacity of the political imagination to marry modes of consent with delegated authority in a way that confers legitimacy.
The paradigm shift and governing innovations Blake and Gilman propose in “Children of a Modest Star” are no less realizable over time than what has come before because, now just as then, changing circumstances demand it…
A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance? “The Third Great Decentering,” @NoemaMag @JonathanSBlake @nils_gilman.
* Irish proverb (in Gaelic, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine”), quoted by Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin
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As we think systemically, we might recall that on this date in 1998 The Price Is Right aired its milestone 5,000th episode (the longest-running game show in history, it’s over 10,000 episodes to date, and still chugging along). Every prize given away on that episode was a car.
“Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one”*…
From the new series, “Conjectures,” in the invaluable Public Domain Review, a piece by Octavian Esanu…
What do we want from “school”? Knowledge, surely. But other things too. Experience, perhaps? — the vibrating sense of having been present as new thinking happened, of having been affected by an encounter with ideas? Certain kinds of teaching and learning, anyway, privilege that vaunted nexus of knowing and being. Early in the first session of his seminar on Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the American Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson asserts, here below, that “aesthetics” can be thought of as precisely a project that lies “halfway between the cognitive and the artistic” — which is to say, it is the enterprise of trying to understand (conceptually) that which seems to elude reduction to concepts (because we are, somehow, there in aesthetic experiences; and we are not conceptual!). By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, the artist and scholar (and former Jameson student) Octavian Esanu doubles down, playfully and tenderly, on this deep problem. Pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?
Series editor D. Graham Burnett‘s introduction
An experiment with historical form and method: “[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory,” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we investigate the ineffable, we might send absolutist birthday greetings to Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; he was born on this date in 1588. A father of political philosophy and political science, Hobbes developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be “representative” and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid– all this, though Hobbes was, on rational grounds, a champion of absolutism for the sovereign. It was that, Hobbes reasoned, or the bloody chaos of a “war of all against all.” His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.
Indeed, it was in some large measure Hobbes (and his legacy) that Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleagues Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse (et al.) were working to revise.
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