I have known Peter Rodman for so many years that I cannot remember when I met him. Peter and I were in email contact just last week (I asked him to write something for the next issue of The American Interest.), and he was reluctant to do it because he wanted to first finish the book he was writing since leaving government, a book on Presidential styles and Executive authority. When we had lunch a few weeks earlier at the Cosmos Club he told me about his illness and the chemotherapy he was undergoing but said he was feeling okay and getting better. When I saw his wife Veronique just about two weeks ago, I asked after Peter and she said everything seemed to be going well. So I am totally shocked by his death on Saturday, and very deeply saddened.
We worked together most closely in 2000-01 on the Hart-Rudman Commission. I was the chief writer of the three reports, and Peter was the study group director for the second phase of the project, the strategy phase. His work was superb, as it was before and after: thoughtful, shrewd, lucid and always on point. Peter was an excellent writer, an indefatigable worker who always put the mission first, and possessed of a wit so dry it could cut glass. He was unfailingly civil and genuinely interested in the search for truth. I can barely believe he’s gone.
Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kagan discuss mostly China upon Bob’s return from Belgium.
The following is a transcript of a commencement address by Francis Fukuyama, delivered at the Pardee Rand Graduate School, Santa Monica, CA, June 21, 2008.
I’m really deeply honored to be asked to be the commencement speaker for Pardee Rand Graduate School this year, and to able to serve on the boards of both the PRGS and now the RAND Corporation.
I’d like to extend my congratulations to all of those receiving degrees today. I’ve been there before, I know what a struggle it is to make it this far. I’d like to congratulate the families, the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, spouses, children, because without their support, it really is not possible to achieve this educational level. And I’d also like to congratulate Frank Carlucci and Alain Enthoven who are getting honorary degrees today. I can’t imagine two people more deserving of this honor for their lifetime of public service to get honorary degrees. And finally, I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of the faculty and staff at PRGS.
I attended my son’s high school graduation last week, and at that event, people say the usual things about how you’re just starting on a long road in life, and you’ve got your futures ahead of you. Those of you, particularly those of you getting PhDs today, aren’t really in that position. I would say that you have already committed yourselves to a certain road. I don’t think there’re many of you who are going to become architects, or accountants, or stand-up comedians; maybe that’s in your future. But I suspect that having invested this amount of time in the serious study of public policy you are committed really to that way of life. And so, you are now in the business of helping your country, whatever country that is, make better choices in the public realm. And so, in a sense, this is less of a commencement than a rededication to a path that you have chosen some time ago. The only difference is that now, perhaps, you’ll be able to earn some money in the process of doing it.
Now, the subject that I want to address today, is how the world has changed. I think that the period from when I started at RAND as a summer intern in 1978 to the present is an amazing period in history, during which we’ve gone through three distinct phases.
In 1978, we were in the midst of the cold war, and at that time I was one of about a dozen full-time people here at RAND who studied the former Soviet Union. People overstate how simple and predictable the world was back then, but, the Cold War did in fact provide a very recognizable framework that all of us operated in. When I left RAND, or at least when I left Santa Monica, we entered a post-war world, one that was characterized by American hegemony. I think in that respect both the Clinton and the Bush presidencies, despite their political differences, shared a common assumption, that the United States was absolutely the predominant power in the world and that American power would be sufficient to shape outcomes all over the world. I think the Clinton administration tended to emphasize this in the area of economic policy, and the Bush administration in the area of security, but, in that respect, they both were the beneficiaries and practitioners of American hegemony.
Today, we are evidently entering a very different kind of world. The Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has labeled this a “post-American world”. I’m not sure he’s right about this, but I do get a very strong sense that as we speak, conditions in the global economy are changing in very dramatic ways, and I don’t think that the assumptions that undergirded either the cold war world, or this extended period of American hegemony, are going to be sufficient to guide us in the world that is emerging.
Let me go over some of the ways in which the world is changing. The first obviously has to do with the emergence of a multi-polar world. This is not a story about American decline. The United States remains the dominant power in the world, but what is happening is the rest of the world is catching up. The power shift in terms of economic earnings is very dramatic. Russia, China, India, the states of the Persian Gulf are all growing while America is sinking into a recession; something that underlines the stark differences in a way the rest of the world has become decoupled from the American economy.
In the Clinton years and in the Bush years, the United States was used to lecturing the rest of the world about how to get it’s economic house in order, but it seems to me that those kinds of lectures tend to ring a bit more hollow now that we have suffered the kind of financial crisis that we’ve experienced in the past year. The most dramatic evidence of this shift in power is the simple facts about the endebtedness of the United States, and the accumulating reserves on the part of a lot of countries in the rest of the world. The People’s Republic of China has something like one and a half trillion dollars in reserves; Russia $550 billion, Korea $260 billion, Thailand $110 billion, Algeria $120 billion. The little states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, collectively have about 300 billion in reserves. Saudi Arabia just by itself is saving money at the rate of approximately 15 billion dollars every single month, as a result of energy exports.
Obviously this kind of accumulation of reserves is a phenomenon that in the short run doesn’t signal a shift in power because money of this sort doesn’t obviously translate into military or other kinds of power. On the other hand, a few hundred billion dollars here, a few trillion dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I suspect that as time goes on, this kind of earning power is going to be translated into important shifts in the way that countries interact. Down the road, I think it is inevitable that we are going to be facing a world in which American options are much more constrained. This may be due to shifts in the military balance of power down the road, but it’s also in terms of soft power. Today, the Chinese and Indians export movies, there are Korean pop stars that are popular all over Asia; the Japanese produce anime and manga; there are, in short, other sources of cultural creativity besides the sort that comes out of this particular city, Los Angeles. One particularly worrying trend is the growing reluctance of foreign students to study in American Universities due to the obstacles we ourselves have put up to their coming here. I’m glad to see that in the PRGS class, non-Americans are extremely well represented, but over the past few years, students from around the world have been finding other alternatives than going to American universities.
The emergence of this economic multi-polar world has been much commented on. But there’s a second important respect in which the world has changed, which has to do with the very character of international relations today. If you look at the part of the world that extends from North Africa through the Middle East into the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, all the way to the borders of the Indian sub-continent, you are dealing with a world that I think is quite different from the classical world that is taught in international relations theory courses, or that characterized the world of the 20th century.
That world was dominated by strong, centralized states, and international politics was the story about the interaction of these strong, centralized states—Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, and the like. What is different about today’s international world is that it is dominated not by strong states, but by weak and sometimes failing states where the usual instruments of power, in particular, hard military power, don’t work that well.
The characteristics of the weak state world were noted after the Lebanon war in 2006 by Henry Kissinger, who said that Hezbollah “is in fact a metastasization of the Al Qaeda pattern, it acts openly as a state within a state, a non-state entity on the soil of a state with all the attributes of a state and backed by the major regional powers, is something new in international relations.”
Well, unfortunately, it’s not simply new, and it’s not simply characteristic of Lebanon, it is true of many countries throughout that part of the world. Why does this weak state world exist? I think it has to do with a lot of different factors. It has to do with the fact that around the world as development occurs, we have the mobilization of new social actors and groups that were formally excluded from power, like the Shiites in Lebanon, but, it extends to our continent as well. We’ve had tremendous turmoil in the Andean region of Latin America because of the fact you have indigenous peoples in places like Bolivia and Ecuador who were largely cut out of power, and who are now demanding their share of it, and are consequently destabilizing the democratic institutions that are in place there.
There is furthermore a dark side to globalization. We have gotten used to celebrating globalization as a source of international trade, investment, and therefore, economic growth. Countries like China and India have benefited enormously from globalization. But globalization means a reduction in the barriers to things crossing international borders, and sometimes those things are bad things—they can be things like drugs or international gangs. They can be laundered money, they can be blood diamonds, or they can be militias and political parties that act fluidly across international boundaries using the Internet. We have a big trade in international gangs between Los Angeles and Central America.
And there is a strange world that is now appearing in which national development is intimately connected with international affairs. Today in sub-Saharan Africa, a region widely recognized as the poorest part of the world, some 10% of the GDP of that entire region comes from international donors. The international community both helps countries there develop, but also makes if difficult for states to consolidate themselves in ways that European states did in the 400 years after the Reformation. For all of these reasons, this weak state world I think is here to stay for some time.
This weak state world has a lot of implications for American power. We need to consider this very perplexing fact: The United States spends as much on its military as virtually, the entire rest of the world combined, and yet, when you look at Iraq, a country of some 24 million people, it is now five years and counting since the United States invaded and occupied that country, and to this day we have not succeeded in pacifying it fully. And the reasons for that I think really have to do with the nature of power itself, because we are trying to use an instrument—hard military power—that we used in the 20th century world of great powers and centralized states in a weak state world, and that instrument does not work as well. You cannot use hard power to create legitimate institutions to build nations, to consolidate politics and all of the other things that are necessary for political stability in this part of the world.
There are other things afoot in international politics because of American dominance over the last two decades: other countries are mobilizing against the United States. You have alliances like the Shanghai Cooperation Council that had organized themselves to push the United States out of Asia, after our post September 11 entry into that region. We cannot call on our democratic allies to the extent that we used to be able to. This was obviously true in Iraq, but even in a country like Afghanistan, where our allies in principle agree with the legitimacy of the intervention, we have had tremendous difficulties in getting them to pony up the necessary resources, troops and support. Even a country like Korea that has been a traditional American ally has been convulsed with anti-American demonstrations over the past couple of months because of the controversy over imports of American beef.
And so, we face a world in which we need a very different set of skills. We need to be able to deploy and use hard power, but there are a lot of other aspects of projecting American values and institutions that need to underlie a continuing leadership role for the United States in the world. Let me give you one illustration. Back in the early 1990s, my colleague at Johns Hopkins, Michael Mandelbaum, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs. It was a critique of American foreign policy as social work, in particular of the Clinton administration’s efforts in the Balkans and Somalia and Haiti to do nation building. His message was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.
But in fact, American foreign policy has to be preoccupied with a certain kind of social work today. If you look at the opponents of American power around the world, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hammas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mr. Ahmadinejad in Iran, as well as populist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, or Evo Morales, all of them have succeeded in coming to power because they can offer social services directly to poor people in their countries. The United States, by contrast, has really had relatively little to offer in this regard over the past generation. We can offer free trade, and we can offer democracy, these are very good and important things, the basis for growth and political order. But they tend not to appeal to poor populations that are the real constituents of this struggle for power and influence in the world.
So the requirements of an American leadership role are quite different and the question that arises; “Is America really ready to deal with a world in which it cannot assume its own hegemony?” Now, I want to make one thing very clear at the outset. I do not believe in inevitable American decline, and this is not going to be a talk about how we are declining. The United States has enormous assets in technology, in competitiveness, in entrepreneurship, flexible labor markets, and financial institutions that are in principle strong (laughter), but are having a little bit of difficulty at the present moment.
I think one of America’s greatest advantages is its ability to absorb people from other countries and cultures. Virtually all developed countries are experiencing the severe demographic crisis. They are getting smaller with every passing year, because of falling birthrates of native-born people. Any successful developed country in the future is going to have to accommodate immigrants and people from different cultures, and I believe the United States is unique in its ability to do so.
I think that the problems that the United States faces are really ones that are of our own creating. None of the problems and challenges that the United States faces are insoluble. The problems are really political and institutional ones.
First, we face a number of long term fiscal challenges. I don’t have to explain to anyone at RAND about the long term health care liabilities that we are creating for ourselves. A single program, Medicare, is going to punch this enormous hole in the federal budget if we do not act to do something about it. Social Security is similarly a long term time bomb, and there are long deferred investments in infrastructure that have not been made over the past few years. But, in principal, all of these problems are soluble.
I would identify three particular areas of weakness that we must remedy if we are to get through this particular set of challenges. These three are, first, the diminishing capacity of our public sector; secondly, a certain complacency on the part of Americans about understanding the world from a perspective other than that of the United States; and third, our polarized political system that is incapable of even discussing solutions to these problems.
Let me go over each of these. Let’s begin with the problem of the declining capacity of the public sector. We have seen in the past few years a depressing number of policy failures due to the inability of our public officials to actually carry out, plan and implement policies that we agree on. The most obvious case of this was the failure to adequately plan for the occupation and subsequent counter-insurgency war that broke out in Iraq. Part of that was the result of a political miscalculation as to how the United States would be received, but even after it was clear that the United States was in Iraq for the long haul, it took an extraordinary amount of time to adjust to those conditions and move to move to a counter-insurgency strategy. Indeed, it took President Bush longer to find a good general, General Patraeus, than it took Lincoln to find Grant in the Civil War. There are many other examples where we have actually agreed on policies, and have not been able to follow through.
We’ve engaged in two major reorganizations of the federal government in Washington over the last few years; the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and reorganization of the intelligence community. I would say that as a result of these reorganizations, we are less capable in both of those areas than we were, had we not done the reorganizations in the first place. The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to enable the United States to respond to major urban disasters, and yet, the response to Hurricane Katrina was a total fiasco.
Let me site one further case that some of you here at RAND may know about, the Freedom, which is a new class of littorall combat ships, was recently launched by the US navy. Now, this program has been repeatedly delayed and is more than twice over budget as a result of some major design flaws. RAND knows a lot about military procurement, and I’m sure that long time observers of the procurement process will say that this is nothing new. We’ve had a lot of similar fiascos like this in the past. What caught my eye though was a comment by our Navy Secretary about this case that was quoted in the New York Times. He “lamented the Pentagon’s eroding expertise in systems engineering—managing complex new projects to ensure that goals are achievable and affordable—and faulted the notion that industry could best manage ambitious development projects.” Now, this one procurement case is not in itself too significant, but I do not think there is a single agency across the entire federal government where you could not tell the similar story, where the capacity of the public sector to adequately manage the contractors and to retain within itself the capacity to carry out complex projects has not eroded over the last thirty years.
The causes of this erosion are complex. Some people blame it on politicization of senior offices. That may be the case, but, I’m afraid there may be a deeper problem in our public sector. It is very hard to attract bright young people to go into public service today. It’s partly because there are a lot of competitive jobs in the private sector that offer better pay. It’s also because in public service, we have managed to tie ourselves into knots where people in public service end up dealing more with process than with substance. Since the late 1990s, the US State Department by statute has been forced to dedicate itself to protecting its own personnel as its primary job, not representing the United States to foreign governments, and as a result, diplomats spend their time holed up in massive concrete bunkers, rather than going out and dealing with people in other countries. Stories like this, I think, are spread across the American public sector.
The second issue has to do with complacency about the outside world. After Sputnik in the late 1950s, the United States responded to the Soviet challenge by making massive investments in basic science and technology. This proved to be a very successful set of investments that reaffirmed American technological leadership. After September 11th, we could have reacted in a similar way, by making large investments in our ability to understand complex parts of the world that we did not understand very well like the Middle East. It is a scandal that in this monstrous new embassy we’ve created in Baghdad, we only have a handful of fluent Arabic speakers. As I was driving to work the other morning, I was listening to an NPR radio program in which they were praising their own coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and of China in general. They said “We have a reporter on staff in Beijing, and he actually can speak Chinese!” I’ve heard that there are some reporters in the Chinese press agency Xinhua in Washington who can in fact speak English.
The final issue I think really has to do with the political deadlock that we face with our political system. Again, this has been commented on a great deal. The polarization has put off the table serious discussion of how to solve some of these long term and very clear challenges that every public policy expert understands. It is not possible to talk about raising taxes to pay for badly needed public goods on the Right. It is not possible to talk about issues like privatizing social security, or raising the retirement age on the Left. Neither the Left nor the Right has had the political courage to suggest raising energy taxes, which has been the obvious way of dealing with foreign energy dependency and encouraging alternative sources of energy. And so the political culture that we have created as a result of this kind of politics is incapable of making the decisions that we need.
I’ve spoken a lot about the United States today. I realize that among our graduates, there are many people who are not Americans, and many of you will return to your countries and will pursue public policy analysis there. Everybody, I believe, will benefit from better policy analysis of the sort that a PRGS education provides. But I don’t think that anyone around the world will benefit from an America that is inward looking, incapable of executing policies, and too divided to make important decisions. That hurts not just Americans, but, I think, the rest of the world as well. Graduates should be very proud of their having spent the time and effort to dedicate themselves to learning how to make better public policy. This is a noble objective, and one that is sorely needed in both in this country, and abroad.
RAND is dedicated to objective non-partisan research, but I suspect that all of you who have pursued degrees at PRGS have done so because you have a certain passion, an individual passion for public issues, and you want to make those policies better. So, as you leave RAND, I think that it is important that you maintain your objectivity and your credibility in your mode of doing research, but that you safeguard that passion because that is what is going to drive you to do good things out in the world.
Thank you very much.
Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, long an astute commentator on matters involving Pakistan and South Asia security, wrote an important OpEd in the Washington Post this Sunday.
As I did in “Afghan Dilemmas – Staying Power”, Rashid highlights the pivotal role that the Pakistani Army must play in untangling the Gordian knot that has generated global sanctuary for al-Qaeda terrorists and regional sanctuary for the Taliban insurgency in the heart of western Pakistan over the past half decade.
In a piece that is very complementary to my American Interest essay, Rashid’s OpEd articulates well what I would argue needs to happen in Pakistan to fully neutralize the most dangerous terrorism sanctuary in the world. Facilitated by a strategic U.S. politico-military commitment to the region, the necessary approach in Pakistan is twofold, just as Rashid writes:
Anchored by a U.S. commitment to a lasting, stabilizing politico-military presence in South Asia via U.S. presence in Afghanistan, only such a two-pronged approach from Islamabad can enable western Pakistan to move beyond its present reality as a terrorist sanctuary and hotbed of radicalism, and toward an area that is tethered to a responsible central government and that is no longer the dominant threat to peace in Afghanistan nor the most likely genesis of a major terror strike elsewhere in the world.
The fiasco of the Olympic Torch Relay has focused attention on the condition of human rights in China. What is the source of human rights abuses in that country today? Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship, and that abuses occur because a strong centralized Chinese state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today’s China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese state is in certain ways too weak to defend the rights of its people.
The vast majority of abuses of the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens today—peasants who have their land taken away without just compensation, workers forced to labor under sweatshop conditions, or villagers poisoned by illegal dumping of pollutants—occurs at a level far below that of the government in Beijing. China’s peculiar road towards modernization after 1978 was powered by so-called “township and village enterprises” (TVEs), which were local government bodies that were given the freedom to establish businesses and enter into the emerging market economy. The TVEs were enormously successful, and many today have become extraordinarily rich and powerful. In cahoots with private developers and companies, it is they who are producing conditions resembling the “satanic mills” of early industrial England.
The central government, by all accounts, would like to crack down on these local government bodies, but finds itself unable to do so. It both lacks capacity, and depends on local governments and the private sector to produce jobs and revenue. The Chinese Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest.
Americans traditionally distrust strong central government, and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government, but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government, that is the true cradle of liberty.
The nineteenth century British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine in his book Early Law and Custom points to this very fact in a fine essay entitled “France and England.” He notes that the single most widespread complaint written in the cahiers produced on the eve of the French Revolution (which Tocqueville also refers to in The Old Regime and the French Revolution) were complaints by peasants over encroachments of their property rights by seigneurial courts. According to Maine, judicial power in France was decentralized and under control of the local aristocracy. By contrast, from the time of the Norman conquest, the English monarchy had succeeded in establishing a strong, uniform, and centralized system of justice. It was the King’s Courts that protected non-elite groups from depredations by the local aristocracy. The failure of the French monarchy to impose similar constraints on local elites was one of the reasons why the peasants who sacked manor houses during the Revolution went straight to the room containing the titres to property that they felt had been stolen from them over the preceding generations. In England, the legitimacy of existing property rights was much more broadly accepted.
State weakness can hurt the cause of liberty. The Polish and Hungarian aristocracies were able to impose their equivalents of the Magna Carta on their monarchs; those countries’ central governments, unlike their English counterpart, remained far too weak in subsequent generations to protect the peasantry from the local lords, not to speak of protecting their countries as a whole from outside invasion.
The same was of course true in the United States. “States’ Rights” and federalism was the banner under which local elites in the South could oppress African-Americans, both before and after the Civil War. American liberty is the product of decentralized government balanced by a strong central state, one that is capable, when necessary, of sending the National Guard to Little Rock to protect the right of black children to attend school.
It is hard to know if and when freedom will emerge in 21st century China. The latter may be the first country where demand for accountable government is driven primarily by concern over a poisoned environment. But it will come about only when popular demand for some form of downward accountability on the part of local governments and businesses is supported by a central government strong enough to force local elites to obey the country’s own rules.
I find myself greatly saddened by the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. I met her for the first time when we took a class together on Middle Eastern Politics at Harvard, while she was still an undergraduate. I saw her twice since then, both occasions on visits to Dehli in December 2003 and then again last March.
The event in March was an India Today conclave where she, along with the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, was a keynote speaker. She gave a real stemwinder of a speech, attacking Musharraf’s dictatorship for failing to crack down on al-Qaida and terrorism, and urging a return to democracy as the only way to deal with extremist Islam. She talked about wanting an open or “soft” border with India and broader economic cooperation between the two countries, and said that she was deeply embarrassed by the way that her country was associated with terrorism by the rest of the world. She said she wanted the United States to be consistent in its support for democracy, and to realize that its security interests were better served by a democratic government in Pakistan. After the dinner she called me over to her table and said she had read my latest book, and noted that the neocons wanted good things like democracy and human rights, and that it was important not to give up on those goals.
Benazir was a powerful speaker, and was most impressive handling questions. During the 2003 event the Indian audience was at times hostile, and at one point the former Chief of Staff of the Indian Army asked her point blank as to whether she had ever supported terrorism in Kashmir while she was Prime Minister. She swore that she had not, an assertion that met with skepticism by some of the Indians in the audience. But she was quite possibly telling the truth, since she as Prime Minister never fully controlled the Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization that was responsible for many of the attacks there and in Afghanistan. During the March event the Indian audience was completely won over by her; my host noted how courageous she was to be giving that kind of speech in Dehli. She obviously made a lot of enemies in her campaign to return to Pakistan, and has now paid with her life.
There was justifiable skepticism as to whether Benazir Bhutto’s return to political life in Pakistan would really mean a return of democracy. She came from the same narrow elite as many of Pakistan’s democratic politicians, an elite whose corruption tainted democracy and paved the way for Musharraf’s takeover. I think though that she was ultimately right that both Pakistan and the war on terrorism would have been better served by a return to democracy. It is Musharraf who has been responsible for undermining Pakistan’s already weak rule of law, for failing to get control over ISI and the Northwest Frontier, and for destabilizing the country in his effort to hang on to power. But her murder, and the manner in which she was killed (at a campaign rally), now throws the whole political process into chaos. There will obviously be charges that Musharraf, if not complicit in her killing, failed to do enough to protect her. Who can emerge at this point as the country’s legitimate leader is anyone’s guess.
I was in Warsaw, Poland, and Aarhus, Denmark last week on the heels of recent elections in both countries. The victory of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party over the incumbent Law and Justice party in the Polish case was genuinely uplifting.
Poland has been ruled for the past two years by a pair of identical twins, Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who served as President and Prime Minister, respectively. (A number of Poles asked whether it shouldn’t be a principle of constitutional law that two branches of government cannot be held by monozygotic twins, since that would violate the principle of separation of powers.) The Kaczynskis’ Law and Justice Party was nationalistic, anti-European, narrow-minded, and populist, picking an unnecessary historical fight with neighboring Germany whose support they badly need. They started a lustration process against people who worked with the Communist secret police, eighteen years after the downfall of the old regime, while denouncing, like the old nomenklatura, those who had done well in the new market economy as cheats and opportunists. The resulting polarization of Polish society has led to cynicism about the state of democracy as such, part of a broader trend that has infected other parts of Eastern Europe in recent years.
Hard as it is for someone my age understand, the generation of Poles who have grown up since the fall of Communism have virtually no historical memory of what it represented; they take Poland’s contemporary democracy for granted and feel little emotional connection to the great struggles of their parents’ generation. Those who haven’t emigrated to other parts of the European Union are preoccupied with getting ahead in their daily lives and have been largely apathetic, if not downright cynical, about politics. Many were embarrassed by the Kaczynskis but felt they couldn’t do much about it—a passive attitude towards political leaders that some of my interlocutors in Warsaw felt harkened back to the days of Communism. Law and Justice by contrast appeals to less educated rural voters who turn out to vote in much higher numbers than their younger urban counterparts. Part of the reason that Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform won the election was that his party and a number of NGOs and political activists organized a massive get-out-the-vote campaign among younger Poles. The election was thus a very valuable lesson for them: participating in democratic politics can make a difference; democracy is something that can never be taken for granted.
Denmark has been governed in recent years by a coalition led by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party, together with the populist Danish People’s Party. The latter is a backlash party that has campaigned against refugees and immigrants coming into the country. What was interesting about this election was the launching of a new party, the New Alliance, led by a Syrian-born Muslim named Naser Khader. The party’s goal was to permit either the Liberals or the Social Democrats to form a coalition with it, thereby pushing the anti-immigrant People’s Party out of the government. Khader is an interesting character: he has positioned himself as a “moderate” Muslim, who supported the right of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s editor Flemming Rose to publish the satyrical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, but he doesn’t like the People’s Party’s intolerance of Muslims. The New Alliance was at one time expected to get as many as 20 seats in parliament, but they only got five, so the old coalition will remain in power.
Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberal Party is liberal in the classic sense of wanting smaller government, but that’s an uphill struggle in contemporary Denmark. The top marginal tax bracket is around 63%, and you reach this with an income of only about €70,000. His government hasn’t done much while in power to lower taxes or cut back the welfare state; unlike France, it’s not clear that it needs much trimming since the economy has been booming in recent years. To me this shows that the “laws” of economics can’t be as universal as they pretend to be, since what kills incentives and creates moral hazard in one society doesn’t necessarily have the same effect in another. Denmark has been quite supportive of the United States, sending troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan (they’re in a tough place, Helmand province); and yet foreign policy was scarcely an issue in the election. So unlike Poland, their recent vote does not seem to be likely to lead to much of a change.
Rabaul sits at the northern end of New Britain island, and is the capital of Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Physically, Rabaul looks like a South Pacific paradise. Its bay is actually the caldera of a volcano with subsidiary volcanos surrounding the water. They erupted last in 1994, destroying most of the town of Rabaul. A local seismologist told us that on the morning of the eruption, the peak of one of the volcanoes rose six meters in the course of just a few hours. The population fled into neighboring Gazelle province and towns like Kokopo further down the bay. The continuing threat of further eruptions forced the government to relocate the population in zones further away from the volcano, which was supported by a successful World Bank project.
Rabaul became famous during World War II because it was the main Japanese forward operating base for the southeastern Pacific. The Japanese dug 300 kilometers of tunnels into the volcanic soil around Rabaul and put barracks, clinics, maintenance facilities, and ammunition dumps underground. The entrances to these tunnels are clearly visible and have become a tourist attraction, especially now for elderly Japanese who want to visit the graves of their friends and relatives. There are wrecks of perhaps thirty or forty Japanese ships in the bay, and diving to see them is a popular tourist pastime.
Some of the most famous battles of the war were fought in this region. The Battle of Coral Sea, the first naval engagement between carrier battle groups that never appeared within visual range of one another, took place as the Japanese tried to come around the eastern side to Papua New Guinea to take Port Moresby. They dragged an infantry division across the 11,000 foot Owen Stanley range to approach Moresby from the north. The Japanese also tried to block the naval approaches to Australia by pushing southeastward into the Solomon Islands, leading to the prolonged and bloody battles the Marines fought on Guadalcanal and Bougainville.
Visting Rabaul over the summer inspired me to rent DVDs of the series Victory at Sea that was produced in 1952, the year I was born. The episodes were made by NBC in collaboration with the US Navy, and narrated by Leonard Graves. I remember watching the black-and-white series on television as a child, and still own a record of the stirring Richard Rogers soundtrack. It is a fascinating contrast to the Ken Burns series on World War II that has been airing recently on PBS (see the American Interest interview with him)—it is, I suppose, the kind of propagandistic celebration of the war that he deliberately wanted to avoid. Victory at Sea is also not always on the up-and-up, mixing clips from Hollywood movies in with documentary footage. But the series contains some of the most spectacular newsreel footage ever recorded. One of the most vivid shows a stricken Hornet landing on the deck of a carrier, crashing and exploding, with the deck crew then literally leaping into the flames to rescue the pilot. And while it sanitizes the war in many ways, it also contains some poignant scenes, like Japanese mothers being handed the ashes of their sons killed in battle.
What is most striking to me about the 1952 series is its unabashed celebration of collectivism. Americans have two completely divergent ways of seeing themselves, the first as a nation of individualists who fiercely resist authority and strike out for themselves, the second as a united and indivisible nation seeking a common objective. Victory at Sea’s episode about Guadalcanal talks about the long, heroic struggle of the Marines on the island once Japanese airpower cut them off from their sources of supply. But unlike the Ken Burns movie, it never presents the story from the standpoint of a single individual. At the height of the battle, the film rather strangely cuts away from the jungle to scenes of American economic might—wheat fields, steel mills, truck factories, warehouses overflowing with supplies, airplanes coming off the assembly line, and then crowds of faceless Americans in factories, offices, and farms, concluding with soldiers parading in lock step to Rogers’ memorable Guadalcanal March.
The series’ emphasis on the home front is particularly interesting: the humblest office clerk or assembly line worker was dignified by being part of a national project much larger than him or herself. Similar films could have been and were made in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. The collectivism of the war effort is something that has entered America’s national consciousness, and is one of the reasons for people still remembering this a “the good war.”
It goes without saying that none of America’s wars since then have inspired this degree of innocent championing of American unity and common purpose. Korea, Vietnam, and the current Iraq war have been far more divisive. There were celebratory films made about the 1991 Gulf War, but that was a war fought by professional soldiers cut off from a home front that neither participated nor was asked to sacrifice. The cynicism bred by Vietnam has returned in full force as a result of the current war in Iraq, and one wonders whether there will ever be a national struggle in the future that will be commemorated in the manner of Victory at Sea.
The Marines have lost a thousand men in Anbar province over the past few years. Their story is every bit as heroic as those who fought on Guadalcanal, but I suspect that they will be remembered more like their heroic compatriots in I Corps during Vietnam—not as typical representatives of a great and united people, but as individuals caught in a strange and incomprehensible struggle.
Conversation with Bob Wright on Russia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and other places visited over the summer.
I traveled around Papua New Guinea for two weeks earlier this summer. My interest in coming here was related to my interest in state-building. PNG did not have a state when it was first colonized by Britain and Germany late in the 19th century. The Australians, who took over the colonial mandate from after World War I up until the country became independent in 1975, superimposed a modern state on top of a society whose dominant form of social organization remained the clan or, in pidgin, wantok. Given that there are parts of the highlands that had no contact whatsoever with the outside world until the 1930s (which is why anthropologists like Jared Diamond love studying PNG), the post-independence state has faced enormous obstacles in establishing itself.
Downtown Goroka, Eastern Highlands
The capital Port Moresby, for example, is not connected by road to any of the other major population centers in the country. Many districts in the Highlands are only accessible by plane or on foot, because there are no roads. The country is fragmented to a much greater degree than developing countries in Africa, with over 800 separate linguistic groups. The purpose of the trip was to study the nature of sub-national government in PNG, and how the political system really operates. I visited Kokopo and Rabaul on East New Britain, Goroka and Asaro in the Eastern Highlands, and left the country by walking across the Indonesian border near Vanimo on the northern coast.
Election posters. Dauro District
I was privileged to get access to the electoral commission office in Goroka on one of the last days of the vote counting (the election started in June and by mid-July the count was not yet complete). This was the first national election in which a limited preferential voting system was introduced, modeled on the system used in Australia. It is first-past-the-post, but voters indicate second and third preferences, which are redistributed from losing candidates.
Ballot boxes
The purpose of the LPV system is to encourage broader alliances and get around the problem of “wasted” votes for marginal candidates. (Had the US employed an LPV system during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore would have been president because the bulk of Ralph Nader’s votes would have been redistributed to Gore.) In PNG, the process is fascinating, because in most districts 30-40 candidates run for a single seat. It thus requires a little less than 30-40 exclusions to produce a candidate with a majority of the votes: a very time consuming process.
Tally Sheet for Limited Preferential Voting
The counting was done in a sports stadium heavily guarded by police and the military, since physical intimidation of vote counters has taken place in previous Highlands elections. The photograph above shows the vote tally sheet during the exclusion process. At this point they were up to something like the 30th exclusion, but still didn’t expect to have the final tally until the following day. The whole process was incredibly well organized; each district had a separate room and a supervisor who directed the activity of perhaps thirty vote counters, along with “scrutineers” representing the different candidates who were to monitor the process. While we were there the chief elections official was able to announce the results of the first of the district races to be completed, something that was done with considerable ceremony.
Counting Ballots
One observer with long experience in PNG noted that it was remarkable how the government could organize an election with such great efficiency and professionalism, and yet could not deliver the most basic health and education services to the same constituents. The reason is, of course, that politicians really care about elections, not out of an abstract love of democracy, but because it is the route to being able to acquire and then distribute resources.
