It looks as if the military phase of the Iraq war is almost over, and with less bloodshed than appeared likely a week ago. Whatever our views about the war we can all be thankful for this.
Word for Wednesday: Sovereignty definition (s)
Both globalism and internationalism imply some sort of limits on national sovereignty. The main source on this topic is Stephen Krasner’s book Sovereignty: Organised Hypocrisy. Krasner distinguishes four different concepts of sovereignty. International legal sovereignty is the acceptance of a given state as a member of the international community, and is, in most cases, relatively uncontroversial. Westphalian sovereignty is based on the principle that one sovereign state should not interfere in the domestic arrangements of another (supposedly, this was the principle underlying the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648). Interdependence sovereignty is the capacity and willingness to control flows of people, goods and capital into and out of a country. Domestic sovereignty is the capacity of a state to choose and implement policies within its territory.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, the emerging literature on globalization focused primarily on the apparent erosion of interdependence sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty. Much of this literature was primarily concerned to criticize ‘realist’ models of international politics in which the Westphalian notion of the state as a unitary actor are taken as axiomatic.
During the 1990s, a neoliberal account of globalization came to the fore. The starting point of the neoliberal account of globalization is the observation that states have abandoned or lost much of the interdependence sovereignty they possessed for most of the 20th century. It is then argued that this loss of interdependence sovereignty entails a loss of domestic economic sovereignty, so that states are constrained by the pressures of international capital markets to follow the neoliberal policy agenda of deregulation, privatization and small government, regardless of the wishes of their domestic electorates
A similar view is implicit, though not always clearly argued, in postmodernist and ‘Third Way’ accounts of globalization, notably that of Giddens 1999. In addition, left-wing writers such as Panitch and Strange, while deploring convergence on a neoliberal policy agenda, broadly accept the claim that such convergence is the result of technologically-driven developments in the world economy.
The most effective criticism of the factual validity of the neoliberal story of the end of domestic economic sovereignty has come from writers with a social-democratic viewpoint. The crucial observation is that globalization is not fundamentally new, but is, in large measure, a reversion to the economic institutions of the 19th century. The experience of the late 19th century casts doubt on claims that the loss of interdependence sovereignty implies the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty. The claim that the loss of interdependence sovereignty entails the adoption of neoliberal domestic policies is similarly problematic.
New on the website
I’ve finally got around to posting my Fin Rev piece on blogging. Although I didn’t use the much-debated word ‘parasitic’, I think I contributed to this characterization with my concluding paras:
claims that blogging will displace traditional media are not merely premature but unsound. Bloggers are dependent on the public record, and that public record is largely created by traditional media. It’s only possible to unearth a 1983 Trent Lott speech if that speech has first been recorded.
The mass media have more deeply-rooted advantages arising from the simple fact that they are mass media. Despite the growth of ‘narrowcast’ media like blogs, it is clear that the vast majority of people want to see and read the same things their friends and workmates do, at least some of the time. The fact of a shared experience that can form a basis for discussions, a source of catchphrases and so on is at least as important as the actual content of the experience.
It is unlikely then, that weblogs will displace traditional newspapers any time soon. Nevertheless, the dream that anyone who wants to should be able to publish their own newspaper is closer to reality than at any time in history. The implications have yet to become fully apparent, but are sure to be profound.
Cold Duck
The war has fogged my vision to the extent that I missed an important post on the central focus of civilisation, namely coffee. Gummo Trotsky selects “Latte” for his word of the day and writes
I think we can forego the Macquarie Dictionary link on this one – we all know what latte is. It’s what the out of touch inner city elites drink to wash down their lunch-time foccaccias or croques-monsieur while their less pretentious suburban cousins are happy to settle for a cappucino and a toasted sanger.
If this item from yesterday’s Age is any indication, there’s a lot of people in the out-of-touch inner city elite. And the numbers are growing. According to a survey by BIS Shrapnel, latte consumption grew by 50% over two years with 225 million dollars worth of lattes sold last year. Assuming that the retail price of a cafe latte is $2.50, that’s a total of 90 million cafe lattes.
Gummo follows up with some extrapolations suggesting that in a few years, latte drinkers will be in the majority.
I would view this prospect with horror, but I think it will not come to pass. Latte is the Cold Duck of the 21st century, and like Cold Duck will be shaken off with a shudder as people realise what real coffee is about.
Junk science
A couple of months ago, I made the observation that
there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.
I didn’t extend this claim at the time to the Australian right, but looking at the most recent Quadrant, perhaps I should have. Quadrant has been the biggest backer of historical polemicist Keith Windschuttle (whose fabrications have just been exposed yet again) and a keen promoter of global warming ‘skepticism’.
But when writing the above, I assumed that creationism would not find any support on the Australian mainstream right. I was wrong. The April 2003 Quadrant has a piece by Jenny Teichmann attacking Darwinism and claiming that support for Darwinism arises from the fact that it promotes atheism. The piece is short (less than two pages) but very confused – not surprisingly given that it draws on Windschuttle’s massively confused mentor David Stove, also an opponent of evolution.
One article doesn’t define an editorial stance, and perhaps the next issue of Quadrant will contain a vigorous defence of evolutionary theory. But running a piece like Teichmann’s is yet another indication of the declining intellectual standards of what was once a major journal.
While I’m on this general topic, the same post noted that, having been caught in a piece of glaring dishonesty, the National Review Online covered it up by amending its Web Site without acknowledgement. This seems to be standard practice on the US right. Cato’s change of name from ‘Project on Social Security Privatisation’ to ‘Project on Social Security choice’ was similarly unheralded. And, more recently, Tim Lambert has caught the Independence Institute and the Heartland Institute amending or suppressing articles by John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute where he has been exposed making false claims about defensive gun use.
These people have read their Orwell of course, and seem to think of Websites as being like the memory hole, where the past can be erased. They don’t, however, seem to be aware of Google archives, let alone the Wayback Machine.
Of course, Orwell was talking about Stalinist rewriting of history. And, until recently, anti-scientific irrationalism was more common on the political left than on the right. But those days are gone, and it’s now advocates of truth and rationality on the political right who have to blush for the company they keep.
Update Professor Bunyip (permalinks not working) weighs in as assistant counsel for the defence in the Windschuttle case. As always with Windschuttle, the evidence of participants in the conflict who denied doing anything wrong is preferred to eyewitness evidence against them. By Windschuttle’s account, the fabrication of Aboriginal history is not the product of recent leftwing historians but a conspiracy stretching back to the beginnings of European settlement.
As I pointed out in an earlier piece on junk science, facts are inconvenient things. If you do science or history honestly, you will always come across facts that don’t suit your preconceptions, and will need to acknowledge this openly. Plenty of leftwingers have failed this test in the past. But Windschuttle fails it to an extent unparalleled outside the rigidly disciplined ranks of Marxism-Leninism from which he (and, I think, Bunyip) came.
Does this all matter? Well, yes. This is not an argument over old bones but part of an organised campaign to assure white Australians that if the Aboriginal population is suffering now, it is their own fault. In essence, the line is that, until they sort out their own problems (drink, violence etc), we (whites, that is) have no need to worry and no wrongs to atone for. This is even more false and dangerous than the mirror-image claim that, since problems like drink and violence are the result of oppression, Aboriginal communities cannot be expected to do anything about them.
Talking past each other
Ken Parish has posted on the depressing blog debate over the war, saying
Apparently thoughtful, rational people on both sides interpret exactly the same facts in diametrically opposed ways to fit their preconceived and immovable viewpoints, or choose to believe only those press reports that suit their ingrained prejudices.
Kevin Drum at Calpundit discusses the same issue, linking to Arthur Silber who says
Since the war began two weeks ago, I have noticed the following (it began well before then, but has become much more noticeable recently): almost every strongly prowar blog that I read references many stories which support the rosiest scenarios about how this war will play out, and what will happen in a post-war Iraq (and beyond). Similarly, most antiwar blogs I read link to many stories raising questions about the positive scenarios, stories which may show serious troubles arising, both now and in the future.
While there is some truth in this, the basic problem is more fundamental – the two sides are no longer interested in each others’ arguments.
Roughly speaking the prowar bloggers are concerned to argue that Bush was right in asserting that the US could and would crush its enemies. Their main concerns are that the Coalition should win quickly and suffer minimal casualties.
Conversely, summarising drastically, the antiwar bloggers are concerned to argue that Blair was wrong in presenting the war as an emergency exercise in international law enforcement. Their main concern is that the war has been justified on the basis of legal and political arguments that have now been exposed as largely spurious and on the basis of promises about the conduct of the war that have now been abandoned.
For a brief period, the Iraqi attacks on Coalition supply lines and resistance to the occupation of Southern cities produced an intersection of these two sets of concerns. Prowar bloggers mostly saw the question in more strictly military terms – was the Rumsfeld strategy being proved wrong? Antiwar bloggers saw this as evidence that both the war and the subsequent occupation would be bloodier and crueller than had been claimed and some hoped that an enforced pause in the US advance might lead to some sort of reconsideration.
The picture of mutual incomprehension was completed with the US military successes of the last week. From the prowar viewpoint these represented proof that the critics had been wrong all along. From the antiwar viewpoint, the relevant facts were the escalation in the number of civilian casualties, the further relaxation of restrictions on targeting, the use of weapons like cluster bombs and the massive death toll among Iraqi troops most of whom are conscripts.
In these circumstances, it’s scarcely surprising that the same facts are interpreted in diametrically opposite ways.
Monday Message Board
It’s time once again for your thoughts and comments on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language please). My suggested discussion starter – has the war killed blogging ?
All about oil?
While we wait for the fall of Baghdad, and hope that it is as quick and bloodless as possible, it’s hard to think about much else but war. However, I have no idea what will happen next and no capacity to influence it, so I’m going to try to stick to economic aspects of the war for the moment.
Quite a few people have asked me to respond to various scenarios involving the role of the US and euro as competing reserve currencies. Since all these scenarios involve oil, I thought I’d try to clear the ground a bit by discussing the question “Is it all about oil?”.
The crudest (I use the term advisedly) version of a war for oil would be one in which the US seized Iraq’s oilfields and took the oil without paying for it. A more standard imperialist procedure would be to impose a highly unfavorable contract on the defeated government or a puppet government imposed by the conquerors. I don’t think the invasion of Iraq is a war for oil in this sense.
A more subtle idea is that the aim of the war is to expand Iraqi production and thereby drive down the price of oil. This kind of thinking is certainly present among those who pushed the war, but it must be remembered that high oil prices are good for the US oil industry which is obviously influential. So again, I don’t think a plan to drive down oil prices is a major motive for war.
There are however, several senses in which it is ‘all about oil’. First, the idea that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) should have a big say in the way the Middle East is run is based on the assumption that oil reserves are crucial. There’s a nasty dictatorship in Burma, but don’t expect to see the Marines there any time soon.
Second, although the US oil industry as a whole has no interest in overthrowing Saddam, companies that supply oil industry services, like Halliburton and Brown and Root stand to do very well out of things, and have already grabbed the most lucrative jobs in the putative reconstruction.
Third, and most importantly, the logic of the postwar outcome ensures that it will be about oil to a large extent. It looks certain that the immediate outcome of the war will be US military rule which is illegal in terms of international law – having purportedly invaded to uphold UN resolutions, the US & UK have no grounds for resisting UN control of Iraq, but this is evidently unthinkable.
Hence, the only legal way to deal with the oil would be to leave all the earnings with the UN either to buy food and medicine or in trust for some democratically elected Iraqi government in the future. But that would leave the US footing the bill for reconstruction, and this is not going to happen – there is hardly money allocated for it and the US is deeply in deficit. Nor is there any serious prospect of internationally supervised democratic elections in the next year or two
Hence, sometime shortly after the war, either the US or a puppet government imposed by the US military will assert ownership of the oil by right of conquest and will use it to start paying the bills for reconstruction, most of which will go to US contractors. This isn’t exactly the same as pumping out the oil and shipping it back to the US without payment, but I don’t think that the difference will impress the rest of the world.
What I'm reading
I’m doing a review of Remaking New Zealand and Australian Economic Policy: Ideas, Institutions and Policy Communities by Shaun Goldfinch. In essence, the core purpose of the book is to ‘compare and contrast’ to help work out why the NZ free-market reformers got things so badly wrong. Wrinting in 2000, he observes:
Despite policymakers in New Zealand being able to achieve their policy aims to a remarkable extent and notwithstanding claims that New Zealand provides an exemplar of economic reform, the New Zealand economy has generally not performed well since 1984 as measured by commonly-used economic indicators.
Goldfinch gives a lot of evidence to support the standard critical view, that the New Zealand system with a unitary & unicameral government and a relatively small elite was open to capture by a small group of ideologues, what Brian Easton calls ‘market Leninists’, who then bypassed or over-rode any critical views. As Goldfinch says
there are good reasons to suppose that better policy can be made through compromise and negotiation
Since the election of a Labour government which raised the top rate of income tax and partially reversed the 1991 labour market ‘reforms’, there has been some recovery. A few hardy defenders of the reforms outside NZ have had the chutzpah to suggest that the credit is due to Roger Douglas and the Business Roundtable but within NZ, Rogernomics is discredited beyond all hope of revival. It’s been dumped by the Nationals and even the free-market ACT party relies mostly on law-and-order populism for its modest electoral appeal.
There they go again
Of course, truth is the first casualty in war. But the frequency with which good news has been reported by the Coalition, only to be retracted a day or two later is unparalleled in my memory. [At least on our side of wars – perhaps Saddam lies more than the Coalition, but does anyone really want that to be the test].
The latest and potentially the most serious case, relates to the fatwa (judgement) supposedly issued by Grand Ayatollah Sistani calling for non-resistance to the Coalition forces. This was announced on Thursday by the the US Central Command, a rather strange medium for Shi’ite fatwas. Today, the BBC is reporting that nobody associated with Sistani knows anything about the supposed fatwa. If it turns out to be a fabrication, the chances of a successful peace, already slim, will dwindle even further.
John Quiggin 