E-Notes: Sovereignty Or Submission: Liberal Democracy or Global Governance? – FPRI

Ever wonder what a smart “domestic” critic of the UN sounds like?  Here’s one from a small but notable New York-based think tank on the perils of global governance and why diminishing sovereignty can be problematic:

If the forces of global governance are able to establish some form of global authority as they envision it, liberal democracy would be replaced by post-democracy. But, it is highly unlikely that such a utopian vision would succeed on its own terms, particularly since there is little support for “sharing sovereignty” among rising Asian states (China, India) and among other nations such as Russia, Brazil and Turkey. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that globalist ideology and material interests could obtain a critical mass of influence among opinion makers and statesmen in the West (particularly the United States).

If this happens (the globalists achieve ideological hegemony), the result would likely be not the triumph of global governance, but the suicide of liberal democracy, both in the realm of domestic self-government and in the arena of self-defense from undemocratic foes. Thus the global governance project unable to achieve success on its own terms would essentially disable and disarm the democratic state, internally and externally. The suicide process would proceed slowly, almost imperceptibly, much as the democratic states of Europe gradually, over decades, lost more and more sovereignty to the unaccountable institutions of the European Union.

In the final analysis the conflict between global governance and the liberal democratic nation-state is a moral conflict, and the side that seizes and holds the moral high ground will prevail. The conflict raises the oldest issue of politics: Who should govern? The fundamental question beneath this global struggle is: Do Americans (and other free peoples) have the moral right to rule themselves? The globalists say no, sovereignty must be “pooled.” Like the Founding Fathers yesterday, the Philadelphia sovereigntists today, say yes. It is time to prepare for the long struggle ahead.

via E-Notes: Sovereignty Or Submission: Liberal Democracy or Global Governance? – FPRI.

Why We Need Realists, Idealists and … Marxists

Does it ever feel like too much–dueling theories, unsatisfying answers about war and peace?  Why can’t we call get along (inside the academic bubble)?

Professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard illustrates why  we need a variety of disagreeing–and sometimes, disproved–ideas in social sciences, and how it benefits the discipline, policymakers, and our society.  But first, the research:

In this piece, Snyder and Borghard challenge a well-known argument in the field of IR and foreign policy: namely, the idea that “domestic audience costs” give democratic states certain bargaining advantages in international disputes. The idea originated in a brief comment in one of Thomas Schelling’s books, but the seminal treatment is a widely-cited 1994 article by Jim Fearon (then at Chicago, now at Stanford). Fearon argued that democratic leaders who issued threats toward an adversary and then backed down risked paying “audience costs” (i.e., their publics would punish them for making the threat and then retreating). By contrast, authoritarian leaders did not face similar audience costs (because they were not accountable to public opinion), so they could retreat without fear of domestic electoral punishment. Paradoxically, this situation could give democratic leaders a bargaining advantage in crises: because democratic leaders would worry in advance about the dangers of bluffing and then being forced to retreat, they would only issue public threats if they were serious and not going to back down.

Fearon’s argument had considerable prima facie plausibility, and the basic idea has been used to explain a variety of international phenomena, including the so-called democratic peace. But Fearon did not provide systematic evidence to support his argument, and subsequent attempts to conduct empirical tests of the idea have yielded mixed results.

via Stephen M. Walt | FOREIGN POLICY.

Current Research: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning

How do metaphors shape and frame issues, particular in hidden or “covert” ways?  This NSF-funded study by Thibodeau and Boroditsky in 2011 reveals the important role that they play in shaping extremely divergent views, particularly when dealing with complex or abstract issues:

We find that metaphors can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve complex problems and how they gather more information to make “well-informed” decisions. Our findings shed further light on the mechanisms through which metaphors exert their influence, by instantiating frame-consistent knowledge structures, and inviting structurally-consistent inferences. Interestingly, the influence of the metaphorical framing is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as an influential aspect in their decisions. Finally, the influence of metaphor we find is strong: different metaphorical frames created differences in opinion as big or bigger than those between Democrats and Republicans.

via PLoS ONE: Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning.

Booklist | Fukuyama’s Complex History of Political Development

Did you like Guns, Germs and Steel?  Here’s the next book to read–a biological-based and broad sweep of social history, human interaction ,and institutions from “The End of History” guy:

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it. “You have to be bowled over by the extraordinary breadth of approach,” said Arthur Melzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University who invited Dr. Fukuyama to give lectures on the book. “It’s definitely a magnum opus.”

Dr. Melzer praised Dr. Fukuyama’s view that societies develop politically in several different ways, followed by selection of the more successful, rather than marching along a single road to political development. “It’s the kind of theory situated between the hyper-theory of Marx or Hegel and the thick description that certain anthropologists and historians aim at,” he said.

via Francis Fukuyama’s New History of Human Social Structures – NYTimes.com.

 

And there’s more….don’t miss the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Affairs that recaps Fukuyama side-by-side with Huntington and Mearshiemer, asking that great IR question of all time… “Conflict or Cooperation?”

Booklist – The Violence of Peace by Stephen L. Carter

I was surprised to discover a few years ago that we don’t have a class at Brigham Young University on “just war theory,” so we invited Jean Bethke Elshtain to campus to restart that conversation.  (Since then her book has started other conversations in academic halls, as you might imagine).  Stephen Carter has moved from a prolific row of novels back to social commentary–focusing on the moral dimensions of war, but applying these theories and ideas to President Obama.

Carter is no hard-headed realist, though he sometimes sounds like one. Deeply grounded in the Christian tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, he observes that since the true goal of the state is to advance justice, the doctrine of just war calls on the sovereign to use force to prevent harm, to strangers as well as to ourselves. He calls on the president to make good his vows to use force to stop atrocities in Darfur and elsewhere, and concludes that there is something “morally scary” in the proposition “that we are more willing to fight for ourselves than for others.”

Carter has positioned himself at a very unusual place: the intersection between the high ideals of Christian and secular moral philosophy and the exigencies of a very grim war. Most of us would rather ignore both the pull of those ideals and the ugly reality of that war. We want satisfying answers. Carter has no such answers to offer — only difficult questions which, once posed, can no longer be ignored.

via Book Review – The Violence of Peace – By Stephen L. Carter – NYTimes.com.

This makes sense, since in 2004 Carter delivered the Rosenthal Lectures at Northwestern University where he noted that he came to this subject not as a lawyer but “as a Christian.”

Egypt and the Unknowns

Everybody knows that things are more complicated that we can see–but our better impulses can lead to slogans, ideals, and policies that don’t work. Douthat makes the case for humility in foreign policy–at least that’s my takeaway–and important to keep in mind as we in the West think about what’s happening both in Egypt and across the Middle East.

The memory of Nasser is a reminder that even if post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t descend into religious dictatorship, it’s still likely to lurch in a more anti-American direction. The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

via Weighing the Unknowns in Egypt – NYTimes.com.

Another way to think about it in this weeks’ headlines owing to his new book comes from “The poetry of Donald Rumsfeld” and his famed “unknown unknowns”

Louis Henkin, Leader in Field of Human Rights Law, Dies at 92 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

 

 

Louis Henkin, a foundational key scholar of contemporary human rights law passed away this week.  He was unhappy :

“In the cathedral of human rights,” he wrote in a well-known passage in a 1979 article, “the United States is more like a flying buttress than a pillar — choosing to stand outside the international structure supporting the international human rights system, but without being willing to subject its own conduct to the scrutiny of that system.”

His books focused on the intersection of U.S. Constitutional Law and international law–making a unique contribution at the time.

He returned to the subject in 1990 with “Constitutionalism, Democracy and Foreign Affairs,” a much more impassioned book, that warned of the dangers of an imperial presidency and insisted on the importance of human rights as a cornerstone of American foreign policy. Professor Henkin waged a multifront struggle to extend universalist ideas of human rights and the reach of the law. “He pushed back forcefully against the Roman observation that in war — and perhaps in foreign relations generally — the law is silent,” Sarah H. Cleveland, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview with the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in 2007.

In his books, he took on such issues as compliance with international law (“How Nations Behave,” 1968) and the underlying principles of human rights (“The Rights of Man Today,” 1978).

via Louis Henkin, Leader in Field of Human Rights Law, Dies at 92 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

Kissinger’s Swan Song for World Order | Atlantic Council

This is what we expect from Kissinger:

Long ago, Kissinger made his reputation as a foreign policy “realist” whose worldview rested upon the articulate and confident combination of strategic truths with tactical legerdemain.

This address flipped that combination on its head. It called into question the basis for world order in the near future. Kissinger wondered why it is proving so elusive.

He cited the explanation popular among realists since the 1980s: the West is in decline; power is shifting to Asia; yet Asia sees the world differently, or at least differently from the way the West does today, but not so differently from the way the Europeans saw the world in the mid-late 19th century. Thus, Asia rises as a train of rivalrous nation-states and quasi-empires while Europe, and perhaps someday the United States, fall as geriatric former great powers. Collective security so appears as a luxury—or as a necessity—of decline.

But this is what we got–something new, something sprinkled with idealism?

Kissinger sounded unwilling to accept so deterministic a view, at least with regard to the future. There are still choices. Yet he also dismissed the optimism that sees in today’s Asia the kernel of something like a regional security community, similar in spirit but different in scope to what was built in Europe in the latter 20th century. The world is too messy and interconnected for suchregionalism to work.

As an alternative, Kissinger suggested a modest, “functional” approach to problems that lies somewhere between regionalism and globalism. Belgium in 1830, he said, provides one model, Afghanistan today potentially another.

via Kissinger’s Swan Song for World Order | Atlantic Council.

Night of the Living Wonks – By Daniel W. Drezner | Foreign Policy

I am definitely going to incorporate zombies into my lecture on IR theory for this coming fall semester.

If it is true that “popular culture makes world politics what it currently is,” as a recent article in Politics argued, then the international relations community needs to think about armies of the undead in a more urgent manner.

via Night of the Living Wonks – By Daniel W. Drezner | Foreign Policy.

Books of The Times – ‘Being Wrong,’ by Kathryn Schulz – ‘Wrong,’ by David H. Freedman – NYTimes.com

The implications of being wrong–for foreign policy as well as leadership–are huge.  (Think Iraq?  How about Iran, now?)  So this is a welcome diversion–a thoughtful, philosophical meditation and approach to the nature of error.

The idea that error can be eradicated, she writes, can lead to frightening and reactionary impulses. (Gulags, purges.) She charts the three stages of our disbelief at other people’s ideas when they differ from our own. (We first assume that they are ignorant, then idiotic, finally evil.) She observes how much we adore being right, and how we blithely assume that we nearly always are. Then she pulls the rug out, noting that being wrong, because we’re blithely unaware of it, “feels like being right.”

She is epigrammatic. (“No one plans to end up on the wrong side of history.”) She has gobbled books and culture like Ms. Pac-Man. She’s comfortable with everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Heidegger, and from Pliny the Elder to Beyoncé.

I don’t bring this up because it’s rare to find a range of reference in a work of popular philosophy. I bring it up because when she takes a detour into, say, “Hamlet,” it’s time not to groan but time to sit up. She’s thought about the play and has alert, persuasive and counterintuitive things to say about it.

Ms. Schulz notes how many of our beliefs are accidents of fate, hinging on things like our places of birth. She is pro argument, pro talking it out. She quotes the comedian Penn Jillette as saying, “One of the quickest ways to find out if you are wrong is to state what you believe.”

via Books of The Times – ‘Being Wrong,’ by Kathryn Schulz – ‘Wrong,’ by David H. Freedman – NYTimes.com.